Tears of the Desert

by Halima Bashir

  Up ahead I could see the helicopters circling, turning for another attack run, and then there were further flashes and smoke, and bullets and rockets were tearing into the fleeing women and children, ripping bodies apart. Omer grabbed my hand and dragged my mother, my sister, and me to one side, out of the murderous path of their onslaught. We wove and dodged and raced ahead for the safety of the forest, passing bloodied heaps that had once been our village neighbors and our friends.

  Their bodies had been torn apart by the bullets from above. Some of them were still alive, crawling and staggering forward. They cried out to us, holding out their hands and pleading for help. But if we stopped, the Janjaweed would be upon us and we all would die. So we ran, abandoning the wounded and the old and the slow and the infants to the terror of the Janjaweed.

  My mother was slower than the rest of us, and I could tell that she was tiring. She urged us to leave her—she would run at her own pace and catch us up in the forest. But we refused to do so. Together with Mo and Omer I half carried and half dragged her forward. I cried out for God to help us, to help save us all.

  We ran and ran, each step taking us farther from the hell of the village. I was terrified for all of us, but half of my mind was back in the village with my father. With no weapon but his dagger he had chosen to stand and face this terrible onslaught. I knew why he had done so. Those who had chosen to stay and fight did so to stop the Janjaweed from reaching the women and children—to buy us some time. They stayed to save their families, not to defend the village. They did so to save us from the Janjaweed.

  Finally we reached the safety of the deep forest, where the helicopters could no longer hunt us down from the air. We hid among the cover of the trees. Everywhere I looked there were scattered groups of villagers. Mo, Omer, Asia, my mother, and I were breathless and fearful. We crouched in the shadows and listened to the noise of the battle raging on—trying to work out if it was coming closer, and whether we had to run once more.

  Finally, the noise of the helicopters faded into the distance. From the village I could hear gunfire and yelling and the booming echo of the odd explosion. All around me was the wailing of little children. Tiny voices were crying and crying. Why had these men attacked us and destroyed our village, they sobbed? What wrong had we done to them? Desperate mothers sought news of their children. Many had lost little ones in the mad rush of the flight from the village.

  Mothers began beating themselves and wailing hysterically, so guilty were they at having left little ones behind. We tried to quiet them, in case their cries betrayed our hiding place to the Janjaweed. Some wanted to return and search for their missing loved ones, but we had to hold them back—for to do so would mean death, of that we were certain.

  Hour upon terrible hour we waited. The atmosphere was hellish. Exhausted from weeping, women and children stared ahead of themselves, their faces blank with shock. Now and then the dull hush of the fearful quiet was torn by the crackle of gunfire. With each gunshot children jumped, wailed, eyes searching in terror for the enemy. Had they somehow found us, and were we all about to be killed? But mostly my mind was back in the village on my father. I prayed to God to protect him and to keep him alive.

  An hour or so before sunset the noise of battle died to a deathly quiet. A thick column of smoke rose in the distance, where the village was burning. No one had come to the forest to fetch us, and my father had ordered us to stay here until he did. But we just had to hope that he and the other men were busy in the village with the injured. If they were, it was my duty as a doctor to be there with them. Fearful eyes met fearful eyes, as we wondered what was best to do. Should we stay in the forest, or risk returning to the village?

  There was a murmur of fevered whispering. Could anyone hear anything? No, it was all quiet. What did that mean? Did it mean that the enemy had gone? Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, who could tell? Maybe the Janjaweed were hiding, ready to ambush us. The only way to find out was to sneak back to the village. Finally, a collective decision was reached. Slowly, carefully, stopping every minute to listen, we retraced our way through the darkening forest until we reached the outskirts of the village.

  As the first huts came into view, people couldn’t hold back any longer. They ran toward their homes to seek out their loved ones. I raced through the choking smoke, my mother and brothers and sisters at my side. Fires glowed red all around us, the crackle of the flames thick in the air. At every turn I could smell burning, and death. Bodies were everywhere. Somehow, I navigated my way through this scene from hell to our house. The fence had been smashed down and our possessions lay scattered all around. But I didn’t care. I cared only for one thing—my father. My father! Where was my father?

  I rushed to my neighbor’s house. Perhaps my father was there, helping one of Kadiga’s relatives? One of her sisters had just given birth to a little baby girl, and I had helped with the delivery. I pushed aside the door of her hut, only to find a body slumped on the floor, the ground around it soaked in blood. Beside the dead mother was a smoking fire, a tiny, charred body lying among the ashes. The Janjaweed had shot the mother in the stomach and thrown her baby daughter onto the fire. The smell in the hut was sickening.

  I turned away and sank to my knees, the nausea rising and gagging in my throat. As I bent to vomit, I heard a chorus of cries coming from the center of the village, a wailing crescendo of gut-wrenching grief. Women were screaming that they had found the men of the village! The men of the village were there! Together with my mother and my brothers I rushed toward the source of those grief-stricken cries. We reached the open area at the marketplace with the darkness of night settling over the burning village.

  The ground was littered with shadowy corpses, women kneeling and keening over their loved ones. They were crying out the names of the fallen, beating their heads on the bloodied ground in their grief. But among the dead were one or two who were still alive. I searched frantically, my mind screaming. Where was my father? Where was my father? My father? My father? My father!Where was he? God let him be alive. Let him be injured, but let him have lived. Let him be alive! Let him be alive! Let him be alive!

  I saw my brother Omer stop. His features collapsed in on themselves as he sank to his knees, his hands grasping at his head and tearing at his hair. He bent to embrace a fallen figure, his arms locking around the body, his face buried in the face and hair. He was sobbing and wailing and shaking like a wounded animal. I fell to the ground myself.

  I knew it was my father. I knew it was my father. I knew it was my father. I knew it was . . .

  I came to sometime later. I was lying on my back with my mother beside me. Her face was tearstained, her expression glazed and empty. I glanced about me at the crowd of wailing women, and suddenly I remembered the image of Omer bent low over my fallen father. My mother glanced down at me, her eyes pools of shock and loss. I went as if to question her, but she shook her head, and fresh tears began to fall. As she did so, I vented my pain and my loss in a guttural howl of agony and emptiness that went on and on and on. I would never stop crying for my fallen father, no matter how long I might live.

  There were many villagers who were injured but still alive. There were gunshot victims, burn victims, victims of shrapnel from the explosions, and victims of stabbings. I should have been trying to help them, but I was in such a state of shock that I could do nothing, absolutely nothing. The surviving women and children had gathered together in a group. The crying and wailing and the calling of the names of the dead would have been terrible to behold, had I not been so bound up in my own unspeakable loss.

  We were bundled heaps of misery, unable to comprehend what had happened to our lives. As we mourned, the men—my brothers included—went and checked on the fallen, trying to work out who was dead and who might be saved. The majority of the fallen were the men who had stayed to fight. And then there were those too slow to run and save themselves—the old people, children. Pregnant women had been cut down as they ran. Villa
ge elders had been burned alive in their huts. Babies had been flung into the fires.

  All through that dark, hellish night the men collected up the bodies of the dead. By dawn they were ready to bury them. The first of the donkey carts creaked out of the village, its load a pile of stiff, bloodied corpses. I was in such shock that I was living in the memory of my dead father, his face before me in my mind’s eye, still talking to me and hugging me and laughing and smiling. If I tried to drag myself back to the present all I could see was a film of red mist that obscured everything. It would take a new level of horror to shock me out of my stupor.

  A living woman had been mistaken for one of the dead. As the cart moved off toward the graveyard, someone noticed her arm twitching. They called out in alarm and the cart stopped. She was separated from the corpses and laid onto the ground. It was the sight of that dead woman living that dragged me back to my senses. The woman’s name was Miriam. She had lost her husband, her father, and two of her children. Her third child had survived, and he desperately needed his mother to live, for he had no one else in the world.

  I bent over her prostrate form. I felt for her pulse. It was faint and she was barely breathing. I checked for any sign of injury, but there was none that I could see. It must have been simply the shock and the trauma that was killing her. I put my head close to hers and started to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After each breath I pressed my weight hard onto her chest. I did this for half an hour or so, her little boy holding his mother’s hand and willing her to live. I had to save her! For his sake alone I had to . . .

  Suddenly, her eyes opened. She gazed around herself, as if she was coming back from the dead. As soon as she realized that she was still alive, she started to scream and scream and scream. She was screaming out the names of the dead. Why hadn’t death taken her, she wailed? Where was the sweet release of death? I tried showing her that her little boy was still alive, but she was beyond reason, in a place where no one could reach her. The one person whose life I had saved actually wished that she were dead.

  Sometime later that day three young Zaghawa men turned up in the village. They wore traditional white robes, and they had their heads swathed in a white headscarf, with only their eyes showing. Each carried a machine gun. They introduced themselves as being from the Sudan Liberation Army, the SLA—one of the main rebel groups. They had heard about the attack, and so they had left their secret base in the mountains and come to investigate. It was the first time that we had seen rebel fighters openly in the village.

  We gathered around and told them about the attack. As we talked, the surviving men of the village—my brothers included—were angry and tearful. All they wanted now was to fight. All other interests were gone. Mo and Omer were among the first to volunteer, but scores more followed. I tried to volunteer myself, but I was told that women were not allowed to fight. I tried to offer myself as a rebel doctor, but I was told that there was work enough for me here with the injured.

  We gathered as a family and tried to decide what we should do next. But there was an aching void where my father should have been. As the eldest child I knew that I had to take a lead now, alongside my mother. There was nothing in the village to stay for, I argued. Most of the livestock was gone. The crops had been burned, as the Janjaweed had turned our beautiful village into a place of scorched and bloodied earth. They had ridden over our fields smashing open the irrigation ditches. Even the fruit trees were blackened with fire.

  Mo and Omer’s minds were made up. The rebels would be leaving by nightfall, and they would be going with them. They would kill the Arabs and avenge my father’s death. Nothing else mattered. There was talk of fleeing to Chad, or of going to stay with relatives in the big towns. But many of the injured villagers were too sick to travel, and part of me felt as if it was my duty to stay with them. If I couldn’t be a rebel soldier, I could at least use my medical skills to try to save as many lives here in my dying village.

  “Perhaps we should stay,” I told my mother. “People in the village need us. We can stay until they are well again. Then, God-willing, we will leave this place.”

  My mother shook her head. “We should go to Chad. We have relatives there. We can go and stay with them. We can take our gold, so if anything happens on the way we have something to bargain with.”

  “We still have our gold?” I asked. I’d presumed it had all been stolen.

  “We do. Grandma had it hidden well. We could even try to hire some camels in a neighboring village. That might make it easier for us to find our relatives.”

  Grandma’s husband had taken a second wife in Chad, so her children were my mother’s halfbrothers and half sisters. My mother knew their names, although she had never met them. If their village had been attacked and they had come to us for help, we would have welcomed them in. My mother knew they would do the same for us. The problem was how to reach Chad safely. We might run into the Janjaweed en route, and then we would be finished.

  “It’s a long journey,” I remarked. “And we could be attacked on the way. I doubt if the enemy will return to the village. There’s nothing worth coming back for. So perhaps we’re safer staying here for now? Maybe it’s best to stay?”

  My mother shrugged. “Sooner or later we have to go. Everything’s gone. There’s nothing to eat. And this is a place of death now. What’s to stay for?”

  “There’s people here who have nothing. They’ve got no home, no money, and no relatives to go to. We can’t just abandon them. Plus there’s the injured. We should stay for a while, to help.”

  We finally decided to stay. In that way, my brothers would still know where to find us. Once they were trained as rebel fighters, they could return to protect us. At least that was the theory. That evening the men of fighting age prepared to leave. I bade farewell to Mo and Omer, but there were no tears left to cry, and little energy for real sadness. And then they were gone.

  All that now remained were the old, the women, and the children in our dying village.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Time of Fear

  This was the beginning of the time of fear. Every waking moment we tried to remain alert, keeping our eyes and ears open. And whenever we slept it was only ever a half sleep, in case they returned in the night to attack us. We were living like hunted animals, and like animals we feared the air above and the earth at our feet. And like frightened animals we herded together, as if there was safety in numbers.

  The huts in our compound had stayed largely intact. My mother, my sister, and I moved into the one, while our neighbors took the others. We pooled what little food and bedding we had left. Each evening we would call together the survivors in our area, and we would eat as one big family. As we ate we listened to each other’s stories, and lamented each other’s terrible loss. This was a process of collective mourning, as people shared their pain and their hurt with others who had suffered.

  Miriam—the woman that I had brought back from the dead—stayed with us, along with her little boy. Each evening she would cry and cry, and everyone would cry with her. Her pain forced us all to remember, to return to that terrible day again and again. But no one resented her for doing this. She was living inside her pain, and our greatest fear was how would she ever get out. She had to—for the sake of her little boy, if not for herself.

  As for me, I had changed overnight. Before the attack on our village I was still a victim, still a woman trying to come to terms with my own horrors. Now all that had been replaced by a burning rage. I wanted to fight. I longed to fight and to kill the Arabs—those who had done this evil. Those who had stolen my father away, my wonderful, wonderful father. Those who had burned and desecrated our village.

  The village had become a wasteland. What they couldn’t carry off the Janjaweed had smashed, burned, and destroyed. Even the village water pump had been torn to pieces. Corpses had been dumped into the well, to poison the water. We realized that they must have planned it this way. In this way, anyone le
ft alive after the attack would die from starvation or thirst. They came not only to kill us, but to destroy our ability to live.

  The little children kept asking why had the Janjaweed done this. Why did they want us all to die? How were we supposed to answer such questions? What could we possibly say? When the children were sleeping we talked among ourselves. The Arab tribes had always been poorer than us: They had no settled villages, no crops, and few animals. So where had they got the powerful weapons that they had used to attack us?

  We knew that there had to be the hand of the government in this. There had to be a driving force that had ordered them to do what they had done. If they had simply come to loot our homes, why destroy the village? It didn’t benefit them at all. They must have done this with orders from on high. As this realization set in even the simplest villager realized that this government of Arabs had decided to back their own and wipe us off the face of the earth.

  We knew now where the lines were drawn. We knew that this government was our bitter enemy. For me, this was hardly a blinding realization. I had long suspected this. I had witnessed the rape of the children of Mazkhabad. I had witnessed that horror, and then the soldiers had come for me. My eyes had been forcibly opened. Together with my father I had railed against the Arab government that kept us down in our own country. But many in our village had lived in naive hope until the very day of the attack.

  For three whole weeks we lived like this, suspended in a limbo somewhere between life and death. I spent my time either scavenging for food in the ruined village, or tending to people’s injuries: boiling water and binding up their wounds with whatever came to hand. I gathered the forest plants to make the burn ointment that Grandma had used. I burned the leaves to a fine ash and mixed that with sesame oil. Each day I would apply the paste afresh to people’s burns, and with many it did seem to help.

  But some of the little children had burns covering their entire body. It was a miracle that they were still alive. They had been thrown into burning huts, and somehow survived the inferno. But they were in total agony. Their skin blistered and peeled off, the burns becoming infected and pustulous. I had so much training and knowledge, but there was little that I could do without proper medical supplies. It broke my heart. It would have been better if they had died, and each day another passed into the merciful release of death.