by William Boyd
The planes came over again, higher and more slowly. I saw them clearly this time, silver Migs with teardrop pods under their wings. They banked and circled once over us and then flew away.
Ilideo said they deliberately came in low like that. It made people—children mainly—run instictively out of their houses. There were so many deserted villages in this region, he said, and the planes did not want to waste their bombs or cannons on empty houses.
We did not venture outside for the rest of the day. If the planes had come in from the opposite direction they would have seen us, lined up on the veranda waiting for dusk.
I thought of Usman, and wondered if he had been flying. What if I had run out, waving? I felt chilled and unhappy: for the first time the grimmer reality of Usman’s “job” was apparent to me.
Ian came into the room. Daily, he was more chipper and buoyant. He said that he had been talking to Ilideo and the others and it was clear to him that they were fighting some kind of fantasy war. They spoke, he said, as if the UNAMO heartland were impregnable, uninvadable.
“They’ve got no idea what’s going on,” he said, in almost outraged tones. “They talk about ‘the front’ but there is no front. There’s several hundred men marching up a road toward a town wondering if anyone’ll try to stop them. Tragic.”
He lowered his voice. “I think we’ve got to get out of here ourselves, Hope.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Listen, everything Amilcar’s talked about—you know, handing us over when we’re through the lines, flying us to Togo—it’s fantasy. We could just walk out of here tonight. The federal army’s on the doorstep…. We just have to walk down that road, heading south. We’re bound to find them.”
“I’m not walking down any road.”
“What’s going to happen then, for God’s sake?”
“We’ll wait till Amilcar gets back.”
He looked around the room, hands on his hips, an exasperated smile on his face.
“You don’t really, seriously, think he’s coming back, do you?” Ian looked at me, parodying incredulity, his eyebrows raised, his mouth open. The sore on his face had scabbed over and his pale beard was softening.
“Of course he’ll be back. This is his team.”
“You’re as bad as them. Jesus Christ.” He shook his head and chuckled. He looked at me intently. “Incorrigible Hope. I’d forgotten what you were like.”
I leaned back against the wall, closed my eyes and fanned my face with the lid from a cardboard box.
It was very hot that day in the mission school; the sun seemed to press down fiercely on the asbestos roof, cooking up the air inside. I thought of cutting my jeans off at the thigh to make some shorts, but I knew I would regret it: their protection was better than an hour or two’s comfort.
I walked slowly through the musty rooms of the mission school, waiting for dark. I tried to find a pace that required a minimum of exertion, but that at the same time might generate the sensation of a breeze, imparted by my motion through the air. The air in those rooms seemed to congeal around me, almost as something semi-solid, as if I were wading through a tank filled with a transparent jelly that yielded easily but was everywhere in clammy contact with my skin.
The boys sat and watched me as I glided to and fro through the empty rooms. They lounged at the angle of the walls and the floor, inert, backs hooped, knees bent, only their eyes moving, following me, their dark faces lacquered with sweat.
The coolness that came with the night was a sweet relief. Then a stiffish breeze developed out of the south. I stood in the center of the mission school clearing, feeling it tug gently at my clothes and stir my hair. I wondered if it might rain. Rain in Africa is always preceded by a sudden breeze. But tonight I could not smell the ferrous reek of an approaching storm, and up above my head the stars shone confidently, unobscured by clouds.
I strolled back to the school and cadged a few puffs of his cigarette from Ilideo. As we smoked, I asked him, innocently, when Amilcar was due back. He said the next day, definitely. It was time to move on, to pull back to the heartland, he said.
He gave me the cigarette stub to finish and I wandered back to our room. It was lit by a candle and Ian was there, lying on his blanket, palms clamped behind his head, legs crossed. I thought he looked at me a little oddly as I entered. I told him about Ilideo’s total confidence that Amilcar would return the next day.
“Not a shadow of doubt,” I said.
Ian rolled onto one elbow. “OK. But if—if—he doesn’t show up, then we have to make a move. We can’t hang around with these boys.”
I sighed. “So, we run off. They won’t come looking for us. We could wander around for weeks. Do you know where to go?”
“But the federal army—”
“Is where? You don’t know where we are. We step out of this clearing and we’re lost.”
That seemed to deflate him somewhat. He lay back again, frowning. I carefully stubbed out the cigarette butt; there was just enough left for a draw or two later, if I should need it. I unrolled my blanket. I had stuffed my canvas bag with grass to make a crude pillow. It helped me sleep a little better, but tonight I did not feel tired at all. I lay down out of a sense of boredom and obligation, not fatigue. My hair was beginning to itch again at the roots: I should have washed it today—if Amilcar came back tomorrow and we set off on our travels again, God knows when I’d have another chance. I sat up and scratched my head with both hands. Ian looked at me.
“You’re being very up and at ’em,” I said. “Why don’t we just wait? Amilcar’ll let us go in the end.”
It was as if I had given him a signal. He was on his feet at once, pacing about. He ran his hands through his hair, tugged at an ear lobe, hitched up his trousers several times.
“Listen, Hope,” he said seriously. “There’s something I’ve got to talk to you about.” He waved his hands. “It’s been on my mind for a while.”
“Spit it out,” I said, but I had no real desire to talk.
“When we were captured…my, my behavior those first few days. I feel very bad about it. I was useless.”
“Forget it. It’s not important.”
But he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to talk about it. He wanted to explain himself and apologize. He could not account for what had happened to him. A total collapse of his spirits, he said, something he had never experienced before. During those first days he had either felt completely numb, he said, or terrified. When his brain was working, all he could think about was death. Being killed or dying slowly. He was convinced we were both going to be shot. He kept imagining what it would be like, the sensation of a bullet entering his body….
He came and sat down beside me, leaning back against the wall, face raised to the ceiling. Now he started to compliment me, to praise my coolness and composure. I interrupted him to tell him I had felt just as strange; how it was as if I were participating in some kind of bizarre dream, and because of that had never faced up to what was really going on.
“I was fantasizing,” I said, trying to make him feel better. “At least you were aware of the risks. I felt I was on some magical mystery tour.”
But no, he wouldn’t accept that. If it hadn’t been for me, my example, my strength, God knows what would have happened to him. He carried on talking, analyzing the various stages of his decline and trying to pinpoint the moment when he had begun to recover.
My concentration began to waver as I realized he was not particularly interested in a dialogue. This was something he had to talk out of himself. I began to feel drowsy, my brain acknowledging only the occasional word in his apologia—“desperate”…“unthinkable”…“debt”…“emotional turmoil”…I moved my head slightly, and heard the drying grasses stuffed in my canvas bag crackle and shift. I let my right hand slip from my chest onto the blanket and, absentmindedly, with my left I raised the front of my shirt an inch or two and blew down into its warm interior, feeling for a moment th
e fleeting chill of my exhalation on my clammy breasts and stomach.
Then Ian’s hand was on my cheek and neck, and I felt the prickle of his beard on my forehead and the dry pucker of his lips as he began to peck at my face.
“Hope,” he said, softly, “God, Hope…”
And then he was lying on top of me, squirming and moaning, his wet mouth chewing at my throat, all the while muttering his stupid endearments: “Hope, I love you…you saved me…I couldn’t have got through without you….”
I felt drugged and slow, both arms pinioned by his weight. I felt his lips and tongue move across my jaw to squash on my tight, closed mouth. I heaved and bucked, twisting my torso violently sideways, freeing a hand and hitting out wildly at his head.
I threw him off and he rolled clear. He pushed himself up on his haunches, slowly, as if he were in great pain.
“Don’t cry,” he said, urgently. “Please don’t cry.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, harshly, composing my features. Something in my expression must have made me look as if I were about to burst into tears.
“Fucking stupid,” I said. “Stupid fool.”
I had a distressing vivid picture in my head of the two of us on the blanket, him between my spread legs, sweaty and grubby on the dirty gray blanket, the boys in the next rooms listening to our grunts and moans.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Stupid bastard.”
He crawled silently over to his blanket and lay down. I saw his hand reach to pinch out the candle flame. I lay there in the darkness, stiff with anger, railing at this man’s incorrigible vanity, his woeful ignorance. What did I have to do to make things any plainer?
I dreamed there was a knocking on the door, a dry and insistent rapping, and woke almost as my unconscious mind recognized it for what it really was.
Ian was already scrambling across the room to the window. I heard the bullets ripping into the asbestos roof, making a wild clattering noise. I hauled on my shoes and crawled over.
At the window with Ian I could see nothing, just the clearing, the bare circle of earth, still, empty under its soft gray wash of starlight, the surrounding forest opaque and dark. But my ears were loud with the toc-toc-toc of the gunfire and the ceramic clatter of shards of asbestos flying, as if someone were dropping bathroom tiles onto a concrete floor. Aiming too high, I thought, automatically. Something Amilcar had said pushed its way into my mind: all African soldiers aim too high.
“Jesus Christ. Jesus!” I heard Ian say. “They’re here.” He grabbed my hand. “Let’s go!”
We scurried to the door. Now there was a new sound. The boys were firing back. In the main room two boys—I couldn’t see who they were in the darkness—were firing blind out of the windows, leaning back, heads averted, Kalashnikovs propped jerking on the sill, as they emptied their magazines, willy nilly, into the night. Through the windows I saw for the first time the yellow lances of tracer, light spears hurled everywhere.
Crouching, we raced out of the back door. October-Five was there, flattened against a wall. To the right, the direction he was staring in, I saw the mud building that held the Land-Rover disintegrating, it seemed, in kicking clouds of dust, and I could hear the metallic thunk and clang as bullets punched through the tin sides of the vehicle.
October-Five waved us to the left. His eyes were wide. He shouted something, but I couldn’t hear what he said. We crawled across the veranda and slid off the end into a tangle of weeds that marked the old border of the kitchen garden. As one’s mind will, I started instantly to think of lesser dangers, snakes and scorpions.
Then the firing stopped for a second or two and, from all around the clearing’s perimeter, it seemed, I heard raucous, argumentative shouting. Then a boy fired from the school building and the shooting started again. Small chips of asbestos roofing began to fall down on top of us.
Ahead, we could see an empty third of the mission school clearing. The road in was at the other end and the road out was close by it too, angling off acutely. The two roads were like a bent arm, the clearing, the school and its outbuildings like a swollen growth at its elbow. Many forest paths led out of the clearing. A wide and well-worn one was no more than twenty yards away from us. I could see it now as I lay flinching and edgy in the weeds, its opening a darker patch of star shadow against the neutral gray-black of the perimeter trees.
“There,” I said to Ian, pointing.
I heard a noise behind me and twisted round. I saw three of the boys hurtle out of the back of the house and scamper through the maize and cassava plants of the kitchen garden to disappear into the black bush beyond.
“That way?” I said.
“No,” Ian said. “Come on.”
We stood up and, bent over, ran for the path opening. I was unaware of anyone shooting at us. All fire seemed to be concentrated on the mission school. We ran into the undergrowth, me leading, and on down the path, a pale stripe weaving in front of me. I kept running at full speed. I ran for as long as possible—two minutes, ten minutes?—before a cruel stitch in my side made me stop. I bent over, writhing. Something inside me seemed to be trying to prize my ribs apart. I sank to my knees. I could still hear the firing from the mission school.
“Come on,” Ian said, stepping past me and setting off again at a jog.
I hunched after him, limping, canted over to favor my stitch-wracked side. Through my blurry eyes and in the gloom of the forest, I sometimes lost sight of him up ahead and began to panic; then I would see his legs moving against the paler stripe of the path and I would push myself on again.
Sometimes the forest thinned and the night sky and a horizon would reveal itself to us. Sometimes we ran through groves of tall trees with long columns of silver trunks. The path was clear and wide. We would come to a village before too long, I was sure.
Then I ran into Ian, solid in the middle of the way, his elbow hitting me square on the left breast, a hot coin of pain.
“Shut up!” he whispered, as I gasped. “Listen.”
I could only hear my own noises. The suck of my lungs, the throb in my head, the ebb and flow of blood. I tried to stop breathing, to breathe slowly, shallowly, to pick up and sieve the other sounds of the night.
Voices.
Men’s voices arguing, not raised, but the sound of an urgent serious dispute.
“Amilcar?” I said stupidly. “Who is it?”
“Back,” Ian said. “Get back!”
Ahead, the path curved. I saw a torch beam through the intervening bushes. I heard many feet, the chink and swish of weapons on webbing.
We turned back and started to run again. We had gone ten paces when there was a shout and the torch beam whipped up to illuminate our fleeing backs and flying heels. I heard confused bellows of surprise behind, and shouted orders. The path swerved. The firing started. We were in darkness again. Somewhere to our left the sound of leaves and branches being shredded, ripped apart.
“Faster!” Ian screamed at me, close at my back.
On my right were trees. Trunks, slim, straight, evenly spaced. Planted out. I turned into them instinctively, Ian following. It was like being in an explosion. Beneath our feet was a deep layer of leaves, parchment dry, large as plates, crisp as water biscuits. I thought I heard Ian utter a sob of frustration, but I kept on running down the long aisle of tree trunks. I saw the torch beam playing over to my left, then it honed in on me.
Ian had jinked one aisle over, and was abreast of me, drawing farther ahead. I thought I heard the sound of gunfire above the reverberating crunch and shatter of our footsteps. Then I did hear the shouts and whoops of my pursuers as I ran for my life, my crazy jerking shadow silhouetted on the brittle leaves ahead.
I glanced over at Ian and saw him grab a tree trunk and wheel himself off diagonally. I did the same, thinking: how sensible. The firing was clear and loud now. I could hear the vicious axe-thunk of bullets hitting tree boles.
Our change of direction meant that the torch be
am had lost us. I could see it flicking around aimlessly. Too many trees in the way now. I stopped for a second, holding on to a trunk. Pounding, crunching feet behind, crazy shouts, crazy firing. I started running again. I could just make out Ian, laboring somewhat, about ten yards ahead of me. Somehow my stitch had gone and I seemed to have more strength. I started to gain on him.
Then I went over on my ankle and fell. As I tumbled and rolled I screamed his name. “IAN, STOP!” I looked up for him. My ankle felt wobbly and loose, as if the joint had gone and there was only water there. “HELP ME, IAN!” I think he stopped. I think he was coming back for me. But then the torch beam found him, and I saw only his blind, dazzled eyes for a second. As I screamed they started firing. I saw chips of tree trunk big as half bricks flying, then Ian ducked out of the beam and was gone. I heard his crunching footsteps disappear in the approaching crescendo of our pursuers’ running boots.
I hunched down, sliding beneath the layers of dead leaves like huge potato crisps, feeling for the cool soil beneath. They would not find me if I kept still, I knew. They would have to stand on me to find me.
My nose touched the earth, my nostrils filled with its musty, moldy smell. I sank my fingers into it as if I were on a cliff face, clinging on. I kept my head down and stayed absolutely still.
In seconds I heard them all around me, running and tramping, calling out to each other as they chased after Ian. I heard them firing and shouting, the noise gradually dying away. It was quiet, and soon my ears were filled with the sounds in the leaves themselves, the tiny rustlings and crepitations. I felt ants and grubs on my face, and something small and four-footed scampered by me. I started to count and had reached over two thousand before I heard them returning. But they were some way off and came nowhere near me. They were still shouting and calling to each other angrily. Did that mean they had caught Ian or that they had missed him? And if they had caught him, I wondered what they would do with him….