by Chris Abani
We watched her wander over to an outcrop of rock overlooking the river. She stood there awhile, the entranced smile on her face, and then without warning she leapt off. From that height the fast-flowing water below would be solid enough to knock her out and drag her under, delivering her into the ocean. For a moment though, it seemed like she was suspended in midair like a big black crow, her habit flapping like angry wings, before she disappeared, leaving behind a piercing scream.
Ijeoma shook her head. She was the first to speak: telepathy this time.
“The bird who made the world was like that. A big black thing with a white beak, and it flew over the face of the dark waters; it’s screeching the first sound in God’s memory, waking creation. Just like that.”
We lit cigarettes, the whole platoon in one synchronized but unrehearsed movement, twenty of us in those days, and we sighed in a collective out-breath of smoke before returning to scratching from the dirt.
This dirt will not wash off with water.
Not even in a river.
What kind of God makes a world like this?
“Not God,” Isaiah, our prophet, signed. “Man.”
Ijeoma smiled.
“You know people,” she said. Then she raised her forefinger to God and wiggled her body before bending down to pick up a pebble. Taking careful aim, she threw it at Nebu. We broke into play, throwing tiny pebbles at each other until we were a mass of small stings and lumpy bumps. We were flushed and breathing hard when we stopped, and grateful—for the pain that penetrated that skin of dirt.
On the outcrop of rock over the river, another nun prayed for the suicide. In the distance, John Wayne was expounding on his manual loudly to a group of bored officers.
I return.
Now, sitting here, I realize that was important because it reminds me that even if water won’t wash me clean, hope might.
A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.
Cowardice Is Spitting Once
A wind sets to howling in the flame tree and I shiver in fear. I know it is the wind but it might also be disembodied spirits, or ghosts, or demons. The amount of blood on my hands doesn’t grant me the luxury of complacence, and no amount of horror seems to have inured me to my own pain, or fear, or hunger, or desire. Only to that of others: war and its attendant deviance hasn’t made me braver, only more callous. If any of my men could see me now, they would spit at my feet. The sign for cowardice.
The wind is calling in a voice I remember. A man John Wayne chased down into a woman’s kitchen, a man unarmed and afraid, and John pulled him out and made him butcher his children in front of us. In that kitchen as though he would make a gory feast of them, as though he was a host and we his invited guests. And as that man chopped with the machete, blood spattering his face, I flinched from the greed in his eyes. The greed for living that made him do that, and then when he was done and panting from the effort, John Wayne put his revolver point blank to the man’s head and blew his brains across the kitchen wall.
Tonight he is howling in the wind.
But I can’t tell if it is anger, shame, or remorse.
Shit, I need to find my platoon. I cannot go on like this.
A Question Is a Palm Turning
Out from an Ear
If we are the great innocents in this war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice? I have seen rebel scouts cut off their enemies’ ears or fingers or toes and keep them in tin cans as souvenirs. Some collect teeth, which they thread painstakingly into necklaces. Who taught us this?
Who taught me to enjoy killing, a singular joy that is perhaps rivaled only by an orgasm? It doesn’t matter how the death is dealt—a bullet tearing through a body, the juicy suck of flesh around a bayonet, the grainy globular disintegration brought on by clubs—the joy is the same and requires only the complete focus on the moment, on the act.
Before the hate, before the war, I was in love with a little girl on my street, Aminatu, who gave me toffees from the jar on the counter in her mother’s shop. I loved those toffees, always half-melted from the heat of her clenched palm and smelling faintly of her sweat.
I have never been a boy. That was stolen from me and I will never be a man—not this way. I am some kind of chimera who knows only the dreadful intimacy of killing. If it would help, I would cry, but tears are useless here. Anyway, I can’t afford to lose any more fluids until I find clean drinking water. God, all this time and no water.
There are many ways to die in a war. Dehydration is one.
For the want of water.
Vision Is the Same As Dreaming
I am in the middle of a battlefield.
The Angelus rings and I stop and lower my head. Before me, Ijeoma does the same. Behind us and all around but invisible in the shadows are the sounds of wings, a host of unseen. Ijeoma and I mouth the prayer together, lips folding greedily around words we can never utter: The angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary … Hail Mary … the words burn in us, like the love we still share. I finish and look up smiling.
Ijeoma is not smiling. Instead, she aims her rifle straight at my chest. I flinch at the report; flinch as the bullet tears through me. I feel my chest. No blood, no wound, nothing. Maybe it’s a ghost bullet.
I look over at Ijeoma and now she is laughing. Silently, of course, but no less abandoned. I am in shock for a moment, then I drop my head back and howl at the moon. The hard convulsions of my throat, not the sound, wakes me.
I shiver in the dark. Something disturbs the fruit bats, maybe a python, and they scatter from their perches in the trees into the night, their wings like the sound of a hundred ghosts and their high-pitched squeals unbearable. It drives me to a deeper hysteria and I fire blind into the sound. Tonight the world is full of fallen angels.
A Train Is Forearms Back
and Forth Like Pistons
This village, nothing more than an old water stop for the train, is no more. All that I see is the rubble of some huts. There is only one standing—roofless, but humped there in the night, its protruding sticks and poles and crumbling earthen body give it the look of an elephant’s skeleton. I pause by it, leaning against a pole. This trek of mine is getting more and more ridiculous, I think. I am mostly moving from one scene of past trauma to another, the distances between them, though vast, have collapsed to the span of a thought, and my platoon is ever elusive. I am thoroughly confused, but my desire—which is larger than my need to find my platoon, yet wrapped into it—is relentless in propelling me forward. I look at my watch. Ten minutes, it says. Ten minutes to or after, I cannot tell. Nor the hour; still, there is reassurance in looking at it.
I came here from the river, from that gruesome scene of brimstone, because while making my way through the forest, I heard the whistle of a train. If I can hitch a ride it should make my progress faster. But now that I am here I wonder if it is the right decision. Around me, darkness covers everything in a thick blanket of peppercorns. Occasionally the wind moves a cloud and the moon spills silver over the black. That’s how I see the slow snake of the train approaching. By the time it reaches me, I am crouched by the track. The train moves slowly and it is easy to get a foothold and pull myself up. The cargo car I am now hunched in is empty, but I can smell straw and animals. Through the open door I can see more villages as we pass: huts crouching into the ground; orchards flowering in sweet scents; ponds; the river again; forests; more huts; a town with electricity, the neon somehow vulgar in light of the war, the music blaring in apologetic spurts; a straggly line of refugees walking, hugging the tree line, heading for some still distant hope.
The train begins to slow and pulls to a stop in a deserted station. Dawn is just ripping night’s fabric, stars dropping as dew. A flickering storm lantern sways gently from the station-master’s quarters, its light already diffused by the birthing sun. I know I have to get off here.
In the fragile sunlight, a woman is standing on the platform, scrutinizing the train. Her head jerks every time a door op
ens, but she turns away when she sees me and makes the sign of the cross. I cannot speak, and with her back turned she cannot see me sign, so I have no way of reassuring her. Something in the way she stands reminds me of myself, always searching for something.
I step from the platform onto the dusty road littered with tank carcasses like an elephant graveyard. When I turn back to look at the station, by some trick of the light the train has rusted over, the station fallen into ruin, and the bombed-out track coiled in on itself like spaghetti and covered in vegetation that crawls everywhere in a rush of green. I know it can’t be true though, I just came from there.
Mirages are common here, I think, shaking it off.
Light Is Jazz Hands and a Smile
Out of a nightmare sometimes a good dream is born. Twice since she died I have met Ijeoma in dreams. Perhaps the third time will be in the afterlife. Walking in this silence, the solitude of early morning that in a different time, a better time, would be full of the ritual of coffee, a time when even songbirds are still, I feel alone in the world. Yet it is not a sadness I feel. This morning, unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light.
I wipe my fingers across my eyes repeatedly, the equivalent of saying, I don’t believe it, if I could talk. The road before me suddenly sheers away, ending abruptly in a cliff. I come to a halt on the edge and stare into an impenetrable darkness. There is something sinister about this particular darkness, as though every childhood fear I have is woven into its very fiber. I sit on a log by the roadside. Behind me, in the distance, I can make out the disused station and the rusting vine-covered train. In front of me is the darkness. I do what I always do in moments of doubt, I light a cigarette. As I inhale, I think what a funny thing this habit has become. It is one I cannot do without and yet three years ago I didn’t smoke. My parents (even my hated step-father) would have gone berserk if they knew I was smoking. I remember a song I heard in boot camp, War! Huh! What is it good for … but instead of saying, Absolutely nothing, we’d add a phrase we like. I sing in my head. War! Huh! What is it good for? American cigarette companies! But it doesn’t distract me for long and my mind returns to the anomaly in front of me.
I don’t remember there being a cliff here. Not that I am sure I remember where I am, even though the sign at the train station was the same one I saw when I rode the train of death down from the north. Anyway, why would anyone build a road that leads to a dead end at a cliff edge? Apart from the obvious danger, it just doesn’t make sense. I know the road wasn’t bombed out because the darkness is too wide for any bomb we currently have. Only a nuclear bomb could do this much damage and I doubt either side has one, and even if we did and it had been used, the mushroom cloud would have been visible for miles, a tumor against the sky.
No, I decide, I am hallucinating. I must be. I scratch the cemetery on my arm and tell myself that if I put one foot into the darkness, it would disappear. I tell myself that this is only the shape of my guilt: guilt for all the lives I’ve lost or taken, guilt for letting my platoon down, guilt for losing my mother, for leaving her to die for me while I hid in the ceiling like a little coward.
I try to summon all the light that filled me moments ago. Light I need to cross the darkness. Still afraid and with no more light, I step over the edge of the cliff. The darkness vanishes and I am back on the road.
Ahead of me, a woman walks, a coffin balanced precariously on her head, her hips swaying with the effort, and yet poised, graceful even.
Mother?
Mother Is Crossed Arms Rocking a Baby
In thirty years, my mother’s dreams had never lied. Though I only knew her for twelve of those years, and though she probably didn’t mean them to, all her prophesies came true.
I know exactly when I began to think of her only in general terms. It was the morning of the day the imam died. Arising with dawn’s fragile mist, she walked into the living room, straight to the sideboard that held all our photographs, and draped the imam’s photograph with a black ribbon of mourning. I suppose you can say that my mother was a witch and in an older time, a rope around the neck would have tested her innocence.
This new prophesy came in the middle of the imam’s latest fast and he had been in the mosque for days. It was inconceivable to either of us to tell him, to disturb his communion with angels and jinn. That morning as she went about the making of breakfast, her tears fell freely, if silently, over-salting the eggs and making the milk turn rancid so that the eucalyptus tea became undrinkable. If we were back in the south, with Grandfather, mother might have been able to work some counterspell, but the imam’s faith forbade anything not of the one God, be it Christian or Muslim. For him, there was little difference, believing that both religions were brothers of the one father; a pair from the triplets— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—a weird kind of trinity. But here, mother was denied even the mercy of a dried chicken heart that when clutched in a cooling palm could be used to ward off demons, so she spent that day watching in silent terror their bald-headed approach. Now I wonder if she was crying also for the more distant future she saw coming. If I blamed her, blame her, I blame the imam equally for his own death. The seed of it was his greatest arrogance, the belief that he knew the will of the unknowable. Grandfather always said that believers are like unschooled children holding onto the essence of a truth merely because they have spoken it. But now that I have seen a soul all brittle and flaky like coughed-up biscuit crumbs leave a man, blame is not so easy to lay on another.
All that day and into the night, my mother knelt before her altar, before the icon of the Virgin, before the candles burning, and rolled her rosary between her hands, beating her chest and calling for mercy, for some intercession. As I watched her, I realized that she could see death, and I too, and it wasn’t some ugly skeleton with a scythe—death is a beautiful woman, eyes soft from morning dew, lips pulled back in the saddest smile, praying at an altar for her husband’s life.
When it grew dark and mother didn’t move from her vigil, I finally decided to do something, and headed to the mosque. Whatever the consequence of waking him, death must be more extreme, so I lit a candle and stepped out of the house. In the alley between the mosque and our house, my fear smothered the candle flame and the darkness crackled in the heat. It was early but the streets were deserted. I entered the mosque from the side door, walking quickly through the courtyard that housed the ablution fonts, the sand crunching under my shoes. Not bothering to take off my shoes, I ran across the mats to where the imam lay face-up in a trance. I shook him and shook him, but I couldn’t wake him. Then there were two shapes beside me, each holding a sword. As they raised them to strike, I ran, like a coward, I ran and hid in the courtyard, behind the farthest font. I heard the imam cry out, and then stumble out into the courtyard, chased by his assailants, who cut him repeatedly. When they fled, I came out to him. He smiled at me and touched my face, smearing his blood on my cheek. He tried to speak, but only blood came. I pushed back from him and he died in the sand like a dog.
Oh, how can my sin be so luminous!
I ran back to Mother. She was waiting with a bowl of water and a rag and she washed my face and said nothing. Instead, she just held me and rocked back and forth singing softly: “You Are My Luck.”
I scream, or try to, but the sound that comes from me is no more than a harsh gurgling like a wild animal dying. I fall to the ground. The woman ahead of me pauses, turns, and sees me. It is not my mother. She puts her coffin down and walks back. She squats beside me, and holding my head up she pours water from a canteen into my mouth.
As I struggle to drink through my choking, she strokes my forehead and whispers: “Son.”
Rest Is a Chin Held in a Palm
“Death is our burden to carry,” the woman says, when I point to the coff
in and raise my eyebrows. The water she gave me has revived me and I am sitting up, propped against the coffin, smoking another cigarette. I offer her one, but she shakes her head, reaching into her bra and pulling out a small round silver box with a mirror on its lid. She taps it a few times, twists the cap off, and dips a moistened forefinger into it. It comes out packed with snuff, which she rubs against her gums. She makes a satisfied sound, tears running from the harsh hit. She turns and gives me a watery smile. I look away. I have a persistent hunger, an appetite for something I can’t define. Above, the sky is becoming overcast.
“We should find shelter before it begins to rain,” she says.
I nod and get up. I look down the road. There is a bamboo grove not far. I guess the river winds back at that point. Bamboo clumps grow on the banks and droop like willows, rippling fingers through the dirty water. Grandfather said they were mermaids who while washing their hair didn’t notice the gaze of humans until too late. They became frozen, the bamboo all that was left of them, still vainly trying to wash their hair in the river. It should be easy to build a shelter there. I turn to the woman.
“What is your name, Mother?” I sign, using the respectful term for a woman old enough to be my mother. It is the way here. She likes it, she smiles.