by Vamba Sherif
CHAPTER 20
The men were oiling their guns that night when the girl returned and joined the houseboy in the hut without greeting them. At a signal from William, the men formed a cordon around the hut and waited until Wologizi fell asleep. For the first time in his life William had held a gun. ‘Give me your gun,’ he had asked one of his men, after they had returned from pillaging the town. Corporal Gamla had handed him the rifle with a grin. The gun felt cold in his grasp, hard like the realisation that his only option was to see the case through to its very end. After being instructed in its mechanism, he decided he was ready. He positioned the gun chest-level, aimed it at a giant cotton tree standing proud and defiant on the edge of a mountain beyond the valley and then fired. The shot snatched a branch off the tree, and the gun-butt hit his chest, an impact that rewarded him with the feeling of invincibility. He was ready.
The night wore on slowly. Insects sang and animals called to each other in desolate, mating cries. The darkness enveloped Wologizi in a deep cloak, as if it was gradually strangling it. Occasionally, an owl would hoot, someone would cough, or the darkness would be disturbed by a distant light careering across the firmament. The men would exchange a joke or two. Though he was tired, William would not sleep. He moved about the hut every once in a while, sharing a few words of encouragement with his men, always reminding them of the prize that awaited them in the distant capital. Then he would return and take his place outside the hut, listening to the night.
They waited until the hen cracked the first egg of dawn, and until an ochre sunlight brightened their faces. The forces behind the auditory phenomenon had not revealed themselves.
Suddenly a cry sounded from the hut. The sight of the lanky girl bolting out of the hut froze whatever feeling that was left in William. She threw herself into his arms, sobbing. Her voice rent the dewy morning air, frightening the birds in the trees around them into flight. The militia tried to restrain her, but at a sign from William they let go of her. She shivered, she wriggled in his embrace, she pounded his chest with her hands and arched her back, as though an overwhelming force was tearing her asunder, violating her. William, who tried but failed miserably to quiet and reassure her, was forced to slap her into docility.
‘They’ve killed him,’ she finally said.
William fell on his knees. From deep down within him, he groped feverishly for the sorrow he felt was appropriate to the moment. However, what he retrieved was not the wish to shed tears, but a distilled and refined fury that dictated what he should do to survive that place.
‘I’ll make them pay,’ he assured the girl.
But how could they have reached the boy while he, William, had been awake and on guard all night? Had the girl seen the murderers? He tried to get an account of the incident from her. From snatches of her story he gathered that she’d been asleep when she’d felt the touch of a hand, which had awoken her. Staring at her in the dawn of the morning was a snake with distended cheeks and fierce, diamond eyes. The snake had been in search of the houseboy’s smell which had led it to the hut, and it had moved across the flat of the girl’s belly, a smooth touch that had made her moan, and it had bitten the young man. ‘They sent the snake, they sent the snake,’ was all she could say.
William entered the hut. In death the young man looked shrunken, the once serene forehead wrinkled, the mouth twisted, and the neck all bone. The eyes were shut, as if to shun a world that had been cruel to the youth. It required great effort from William not to vomit, and he waited long enough until it was not an affront to the dead or to tradition to leave the hut.
Meanwhile, a considerable crowd had gathered before the hut. The men were bearing their grief in practised silence. But the women broke into wailing so charged with sorrow that it attracted more people who in turn joined in the mourning. On seeing William, the women continued their dirge with unprecedented vigour. They touched him with clumsy hands, called him by exaggerated titles, and attributed qualities to him which he had never possessed. They flung themselves on the muddy ground before him, imploring him to alleviate their grief. ‘Let him be,’ the men commanded them. But the women held even more tightly to him. William was stunned. They are feigning it all, he told himself. All this exaggerated show of grief and sorrow is intended to fool me, to make me believe what I see. They are feigning sorrow for someone who was never one of them, someone shunned and rejected.
He managed with some difficulty to wrench himself free from their grasp, edged his way through the crowd, and then he turned.
‘What was his name?’ he asked.
‘Gaolo Koelor,’ was the answer.
The girl was standing on his left, her tense posture seeming to dictate what was required of him, and he felt every eye fixed on him, waiting for the storm in him to break. But it was the sky which broke first-hand with a distant rumbling of thunder. Rain was threatening to fall.
There was no sign of Corporal Gamla, and when William inquired about him he was told that he’d gone home. He dispatched a group of his men to bring him Old Kapu, the Lebanese, the carpenter, the father-in-law Boley, and all the town elders. Someone had to pay for that murder.
The dry season was yielding to the threat of rain. To William it seemed ages since he had left the capital, for that was what chaos did to a man – it shortened his days, compressing time by simply reducing it to a frenzied anticipation of what the next moment held in store. Remote was the capital now, the past a phantom. Only the present mattered. It incited him to take a firm decision: he would arrest the town’s elders, including Old Kapu, the father-in-law, the carpenter, the Lebanese and the corporal, because the crime was committed on the town’s behalf.
The militia broke into a song about a soldier who single- handedly wiped out a whole battalion of enemy forces. The men seemed pleased with William and were willing to obey him to the end. They walked along the main street, their gazes vacant, and their singing voices dominant. With them was the girl with a hard, vengeful gaze.
They met Corporal Gamla seated under an orange tree in front of his house, surrounded by a gaggle of noisy children. They were breakfasting. On William’s order, the militia fell on him. They deprived him of the only means of defence, his pistol. They pushed him against a brick wall, spread his legs apart and tore his uniform off him.
The corporal’s family went berserk, and William only managed to silence them by firing randomly in the air. This sent them scattering about for cover. William slowly approached the corporal and brought the muzzle of the rifle to rest on his mouth. ‘So, Corporal Gamla, tell me the truth. You are the one who informed on the houseboy.’
Corporal Gamla denied this.
‘I was with you all the while, Chief.’
‘You are a man of law, Gamla, but instead of keeping the law you chose to inform on an innocent boy.’ William pushed the gun harder against the soft flesh of the policeman’s mouth.
‘Someone lied to you, Chief.’
By then the family were hysterical, screaming and crying. William went into the house where they’d sought refuge, and he took Gamla along with him. The house had two rooms, each containing several beds placed next to each other. The remaining spaces were cramped full of pots, pans, cupboards and portmanteaus. On the wall, at the far end of the corridor, was the Old Man’s portrait. Unlike other portraits William had seen in Wologizi, the president was clad here in a colourful, traditional gown that made him look like an ancient king of a lost empire. The president was drawing on his pipe, his gaze resting like a benevolent patriarch on Corporal Gamla. On his part the corporal bowed his head subserviently, as if he was being honoured.
The corporal’s family, a mother and eight children, crowded inside, their faces contorted, their eyes dilated. With each step William took, the children clung closer to their mother. When he approached them, he saw, as he stood before them, tall and threatening, that his presence alone was enough to strike them dumb, to paralyse them, to mark them forever.
The
call of his men interrupted him. They had returned with but one person: the bald Lebanese.
‘Where are the rest of them?’ William asked.
‘They’ve all disappeared, Chief.’
William let this information slowly sink in.
‘Someone must have seen them,’ he said.
‘We’ve questioned many people,’ one of the men said, ‘but no one can tell us where they are.’
At that moment, William felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to stare into the face of the corporal.
‘I know where they are,’ Gamla said.
Corporal Gamla was visibly excited, as though he had stumbled upon a rare opportunity and could not wait to betray the townspeople.
‘They are all in the mountains, Chief.’
CHAPTER 21
The search for the men began on the edge of the valley at the rear of the mansion. William and his group, consisting of the bald Lebanese, the militia and Corporal Gamla, moved westward towards the mountains. A huge crowd gathered along the road, under the rusty roof of the gas station, and in front of the cinema and the Lebanese’s shop. They watched the group march solemnly through Wologizi, and on their faces William saw the tense expression of alert animals, ready to take to their heels at the slightest sign of peril.
William still hoped with all his heart to see Makemeh among them, because such an encounter might lead to some form of communication with her. But she was nowhere to be found.
The group skirted the high walls around the mansion and then faced the valley which separated them from the mountains. The bushes were thick here, and William saw that the dark green which in the distance had appeared dominating was, when seen closer up, a lush mixture of yellow, green and brown bushes. Corporal Gamla stepped into this panoply of colours, and the rest followed. It was a treacherous descent. At every step, the men held onto a tree or to a branch to prevent themselves from slipping. Some of the trees were thorny or crawled with insects that stung upon skin contact. The scuffling sounds of their footsteps through dead leaves broke the silence of the forest, and the air was pregnant with sharp odours. On collapsing into a bush which fired off needle sharp points, William went into a fit of sneezing. He saw a slight elevation which he took for a high ground, but on stepping on it, it turned out to be a heap of dead leaves. Suddenly the leaves slipped from under him and he glided downward to the foot of the valley.
The trees at that spot were taller, their overlapping branches blocking out the full glare of sunlight. There had to be a river nearby, because from where he lay he could hear its soft and enticing trickles, and it made him thirsty. Hunger twisted his stomach.
‘Chief, Chief, Chief. . . ’ the panicky voices of his men reached him. They rushed about in a frenzy; found him leaning against the colossal flank of a tree. Ignoring them, he approached the river that was roofed with cobwebs of branches. It had no sandy bank except dark-brown earth covered with dead leaves and branches. Because the banks were high and the water foreign to him, he refrained from going down into it. Being so close to the river but unable to reach it unsettled him. Further upward he happened upon a fallen tree which bridged the river, worn out by footsteps. So the corporal had chosen the wrong path, he thought. He covered a few paces on the tree, bowed and took a handful of water. Only then did he notice the sharp cuts in his palms – perhaps a result of the fall, he thought – but despite the pain he drank his fill.
They resumed their search, silent, overwhelmed by the imposing heights of the mountains and the razor-sharp bushes they encountered. The precipitous slopes hampered their progress. Their breathing, laboured as the ascent became more difficult, betrayed enormous fatigue. Each man seemed confined in his own world, each trudging on despite the scorching heat. Suddenly a wonderful sight greeted them – a huge expanse of fresh, green grasses. Here William stopped. From that height he could see the border town, the houses spread out haphazardly, the bright and rusty zinc roofs protruding from among trees, and the town itself so quiet it seemed to belie its ability to generate a force as frightening as the one he could not wait to unmask.
‘Why did you choose to ignore the path that goes through the river, Corporal?’ he asked the policeman.
‘The forest is full of many paths, Chief. I chose one of the shortest and the most convenient,’ he answered. ‘If anyone here knows a better route, come forward and tell us then.’
Since the onset of this search, William had been thinking about the mountains as more than just a hiding place. Perhaps it also had to do with the auditory phenomenon. Nothing he’d learned in the Poro had been of help to him during the past days. So he decided, hoping for a clue, to recall every phase of his initiation in the Poro. He began with his abduction in the dead of the night when he was just fourteen and being led with other initiates to a camp in a bush, where for weeks he was fed daily with succulent dishes. Occasionally, he was taught something basic, like solving riddles; his back and arms were disfigured with crude ritual scars, a process that had been painful and less rewarding. He was taught to believe throughout that period that he was being reborn, and that henceforth a new life awaited him. But in the end, when it was all over, he felt and saw no change, only a gain in weight.
There was a hut on that camp to which no initiate but only a selected few of the elders were allowed access. The hut was thought to hold the secret of secrets: the source. Some initiates thought that the hut contained a mask, the most fearsome of all the masks that ever existed. Could it be that somewhere in the mountains there was a similar sacred hut with such a secret?
‘Why did the elders choose the mountains, Corporal?’ William asked, when they’d paused once again, and the men had grouped under a tree, the only tree around that area large enough to offer some shade.
The bald Lebanese who’d been refused a place with them, sat further away on a bed of grass in the full glare of the sun.
‘Because there are no better hiding places than in the mountains, Chief,’ the policeman answered. ‘You have all those caves in which to hide, and you can see the enemy from far.’
Even though the answer was true, Corporal Gamla felt that William was not satisfied, and so he quickly added: ‘I know where they are, Chief, and they know that I know. We have to surprise them, and I know how. Just follow me and I’ll lead you there.’
‘You are one of them, Corporal, so why should I trust you? Why should you help me find them?’
‘Because you represent authority, Chief, and my whole life I’ve been in the service of authority,’ he said and turned to his men, who gazed at him with unusual solemnity. ‘It’s my task to maintain order and to obey my superior.’ He sounded as if he had rehearsed the words, and William realised that he was dealing with a man whose actions were dictated by circumstances. However, in this case, he had no choice but to rely on him.
‘Was it the same place people fled to when they were threatened by Tetese? Is there a sacred place?’
Corporal was slightly taken aback.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know about the source, Gamla.’
Corporal Gamla was astounded. Did William know about the source or was he bluffing? If the former was the case, then the stranger was much more courageous than he had thought. And he decided to tell him something, but not about the source, never about the source.
‘The place is here in the mountains, Chief.’
The men were suddenly uneasy, and more than ever William realised how close he had come to the truth. There in the mountains the answer to all his questions awaited him.
‘Take me to the source, corporal.’
If the source was an object, like a mask or a totem, or whatever it was that exercised such power over the forest region, William thought, then he would burn it. Then he would capture the town elders, including Old Kapu and carpenter Seleh, and bundle them all off to the capital where they would face trial and be sentenced. But before that, he would ask Makemeh for forgiveness, that woman he’d hurt s
o much. Perhaps later, when she realised how much danger he’d faced, she would forgive him and would see that he’d not meant to hurt her. So, with a wave of a hand, he ordered his men to move on.
The bald Lebanese lagged behind all the time, and whenever he caught up with them he would shed sharp tears of despair. He became the butt of jokes. At one point, he complained to William, who said he had only himself to blame. ‘If you had been honest with me, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble,’ William said.
It took a while for the bald Lebanese to compose himself, but even then his voice broke when he spoke: ‘I passed on only what I had heard, Mr Mawolo. I did what I could to survive, Chief.’
The little wind that now and then swept across their faces and which relieved the fatigue had ceased. Every step required great effort. On the crest of one of the mountains, perhaps the highest, the men discovered that they were lost. For hours they’d traced and retraced their steps in a hostile environment only to end up at a spot where they’d been hours before. Corporal Gamla owned to his mistake: it was the wrong place.
William was becoming increasingly distrustful of the policeman, so he brought the muzzle of his rifle to rest against his nape. ‘You are lying, Corporal,’ he boomed and slapped him. In response to this, the corporal told him that the source was at another place.
‘Don’t worry, Chief, I’ll lead you to it,’ he said, nodding to emphasise that he meant every word.
William attached little importance to what the policeman had said, but knowing that the man was entirely at his mercy – he had the gun and the militiamen would not hesitate to go against their commander – he poked him on.
The sun gradually waned. Nocturnal animals began to emerge from their daily slumber, their chattering and plaintive calls overwhelming the silence of the forest. The trees looked gigantic and terrible in their pervasive presence. The men were clearly exhausted, but William chose to concentrate on the task before him: the escapees had to be captured before nightfall. So they trudged on. The dark sky was pregnant with the promise of heavy rain. Corporal Gamla led them to a spot at the peak of a mountain south-east of the border town. He had not misguided them this time.