by David Diop
The terrible thing is when, once I’ve caught my breath, I undress the enemy from the other side. When I unbutton the top of his uniform, that’s when I see the enemy’s blue eyes mist up. That’s when I sense that he fears the worst. Whether he’s stoic or distraught, brave or cowardly, at the moment I unbutton the jacket of his uniform, then the shirt, to expose his belly, bright white in the moonlight or in the rain or in the softly falling snow, that’s when I catch the eyes of the enemy from the other side starting to dim. They’re all the same, the tall ones, the short ones, the fat ones, the brave ones, the cowardly ones, the proud ones, when they see me looking at their trembling white bellies, their eyes go dim. All the same.
Then I pull back a little and I think about Mademba Diop. And each time I hear him in my head begging me to slit his throat and I think that I was inhuman enough to let him beg me three times. What I didn’t do for my friend I can do for my enemy. Out of humanity.
When they see me reach for my machete, the blue eyes of the enemy from the other side extinguish themselves for good. The first time, the enemy kicked me and tried to run away. Since then, I make sure to bind the ankles of the enemy from the other side. And that’s why, as soon as I have my machete in my right hand, the enemy starts to squirm like a madman, as if he thinks he can escape. It’s impossible. The enemy from the other side must know that he can no longer escape, being so tightly bound, but still he hopes. I can read it in his blue eyes the way I read it in Mademba Diop’s black eyes, the hope that I might alleviate his suffering.
His white belly is exposed, it rises and falls in jerks. The enemy from the other side gasps and screams, now in stark silence because of the gag I’ve cinched around his mouth. He screams in stark silence when I take all the insides of his belly and put them outside in the rain, in the wind, in the snow, or in the bright moonlight. If at this moment his blue eyes don’t dim forever, then I lie down next to him, I turn his face toward mine and I watch him die a little, then I slit his throat, cleanly, humanely. At night, all blood is black.
IV
GOD’S TRUTH, on the day of his death it took me no time to find Mademba Diop, disemboweled on the battlefield. I know, I understand what happened. Mademba told me, before his hands began trembling, while he was still asking me nicely, as a friend, to finish him off.
He was in the middle of a full-blown attack against the enemy on the other side, gun in his left hand and machete in his right, his performance was in full swing, he was fully playing the savage, when he fell upon an enemy from the other side who was pretending to be dead. Mademba Diop leaned in to look, casually, in passing, before moving on. He stopped to look at a dead enemy who was only pretending. He stared at him because, even still, he had his doubts. A brief instant. The face of the enemy from the other side wasn’t gray like the faces of dead people, white or black. This one looked like it was playing dead. Take no prisoners, finish him with the machete, Mademba thought. Don’t let down your guard. Kill this half-dead enemy from the other side a second time, just to be safe, so as never to have to feel bad about one of your brothers-in-arms, one of your friends, taking the same route and getting caught.
And while he is thinking about his brothers-in-arms, about his friends, whom he must protect from this half-dead enemy, while he pictures this half-dead enemy dealing a blow to someone other than himself, maybe to me, his more-than-brother, who may as well be him, while he’s telling himself that he must be vigilant for others, he’s not being vigilant for himself. Mademba told me, sweetly, as a friend, still smiling, that the enemy had opened his eyes wide before tearing open Mademba’s stomach from top to bottom in a single slash with the bayonet he’d held hidden in his right hand beneath a fold of his big coat. Mademba, still smiling about the half-dead enemy’s attack on him, told me calmly that there was nothing he could have done. He told me this at the beginning, when he wasn’t yet suffering so much, not long before his first plea to, as his friend, finish him off. His first plea addressed to me, his more-than-brother, Alfa Ndiaye, youngest son of the old man.
Before Mademba could react, before he could take revenge, the enemy, who still had some life in him, fled back to his line. Between his first and second pleas, I asked Mademba to describe the enemy from the other side who had disemboweled him. “He has blue eyes,” Mademba murmured, as I lay by his side looking at the sky crisscrossed with metal. I asked again. “God’s truth, all I can tell you is that he had blue eyes.” I asked again and again: “Is he tall, is he short? Is he good-looking, is he ugly?” And Mademba Diop, each time, responded that it wasn’t the enemy from the other side I should kill, that it was too late, that the enemy had had the good luck to survive. The person I now had to kill a second time, to finish off, was him, Mademba.
But, God’s truth, I didn’t really listen to Mademba, my childhood friend, my more-than-brother. God’s truth, I thought only of gutting the half-dead blue-eyed enemy. I thought only of disemboweling the enemy from the other side, and I neglected my own Mademba Diop. I listened to the voice of vengeance. I was inhuman from the moment of Mademba Diop’s second plea, when he said, “Forget the blue-eyed enemy. Kill me now because I’m suffering too much. We’re the same age, we were circumcised on the same day. You lived at my house, I watched you grow up and you watched me. Because of that, you can make fun of me, I can cry in front of you, I can ask you anything. We are more than brothers because we chose each other as brothers. Please, Alfa, don’t let me die like this, my guts in the air, my stomach devoured by a gnawing pain. I don’t know if the blue-eyed enemy is tall, if he’s short, if he’s good-looking, or if he’s ugly. I don’t know if he’s young like us or if he’s our fathers’ age. He was lucky, he saved himself. He is no longer important. If you are my brother, my childhood friend, if you are the one I have always known, the one I love like I love my mother and my father, then I beg you a second time to slit my throat. Do you enjoy hearing me moan like a little boy? Watching as my dignity is chased away by shame?”
But I refused. Ah! I refused. I’m sorry, Mademba Diop, I’m sorry, my friend, my more-than-brother, not to have listened to you with my heart. I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have turned my mind toward the blue-eyed enemy from the other side. I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have been thinking about the vengeance demanded by my brain, furrowed by your tears, seeded by your cries, when you weren’t even dead yet. But I heard a powerful and commanding voice that forced me to ignore your suffering. “Do not kill your best friend, your more-than-brother. It isn’t for you to take his life. Don’t mistake yourself for the hand of God. Don’t mistake yourself for the hand of the Devil. Alfa Ndiaye, could you stand before Mademba’s father and mother knowing that it was you who killed him, that it was you who finished the work of the blue-eyed enemy?”
No, I know, I understand, I shouldn’t have listened to the voice that exploded in my head. I should have shut it up while there was still time. I should already have been thinking for myself. I should, Mademba, have finished you off out of friendship so that you would stop weeping, writhing, contorting yourself in an effort to put back into your belly what had come out of it and was sucking at the air like a freshly caught fish.
V
GOD’S TRUTH, I WAS INHUMAN. I didn’t listen to my friend, I listened to my enemy. So when I capture the enemy from the other side, when I read in his blue eyes the screams his mouth can’t sling into the skies of war, when his open belly has become nothing more than a pulp of raw flesh, I turn back the clock, I finish off the enemy. As soon as he’s made a second plea with his eyes, I slit his throat like a sacrificial lamb. What I didn’t do for Mademba Diop, I do for my blue-eyed enemy. Out of my reclaimed humanity.
And then I take his rifle, after cutting off his right hand with my machete. It takes a long time and is very, very difficult. When I crawl home, slipping under barbed wire, between wooden posts rising from the viscous mud, when I come home to our trench that’s spread open like a woman facing the sky, I’m covered wi
th the blood of the enemy from the other side. I’m like a statue made of mud and blood mixed together and I stink so badly even the rats flee.
My stench is the stench of death. Death has the stench of the inside of the body turned outside its sacred vessel. In the open air, the inside of the body of any human being or animal becomes corrupted. From the richest man to the poorest, from the most beautiful woman to the ugliest, from the most feral animal to the most harmless, from the most powerful to the weakest. Death is the stench of the decomposed inside of the body, and even the rats are afraid when they smell me coming, crawling beneath the barbed wire. They dread the sight of death moving, advancing toward them, so they flee. They flee at home in the trench, too, even after I wash my body and my clothes, even when I think I’ve purified myself.
VI
MY TRENCH-MATES, my war brothers, began to fear me after the fourth hand. At first, they laughed with me heartily, they enjoyed watching me come home with a rifle and an enemy hand. They were so pleased with me, they even thought of giving me another medal. But after the fourth enemy hand, they no longer laughed so easily. The white soldiers were beginning to say—I could read it in their eyes—“This Chocolat is really strange.” The others, Chocolat soldiers from West Africa like me, began to say—and I also read it in their eyes—“This Alfa Ndiaye from the village of Gandiol near Saint-Louis in Senegal is strange. When did he become so strange?”
The Toubabs and the Chocolats, as the captain called them, continued to slap me on the shoulder, but their laughter and their smiles had changed. They began to be very, very, very afraid of me. They began to whisper, right after the fourth enemy hand.
For the first three hands I was a legend, they cheered me when I returned, they fed me delicacies, offered me tobacco, helped me rinse off with big buckets of water, helped me clean my uniform. I saw in their eyes that they understood. I was performing, in their place, the grotesque savage, the enlisted savage obeying orders. The enemy on the other side should be trembling in his boots and under his helmet.
In the beginning, my war brothers weren’t bothered by my stench of death, the stench of a butcher of human flesh, but beginning with the fourth hand they avoided smelling me. They continued to give me delicacies, to offer me bits of tobacco they’d collected from here or there, to lend me a blanket to warm myself, but with a fake smile plastered on their terrified soldiers’ faces. They no longer helped me rinse myself with big buckets. They let me clean my uniform myself. Suddenly, nobody was slapping me on the shoulder and laughing. God’s truth, I became untouchable.
So they set aside a bowl, a cup, a fork, and a spoon for me that they kept in a corner of our dugout. When I came home very late at night on battle days, long after the others, never mind the wind, rain, or snow, as the captain said, the cook would tell me to go get my things. When he served me soup, he was very, very careful that his ladle not touch the interior, the sides, or the rim of my bowl.
The rumor spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air. I didn’t notice it right away, I didn’t recognize the change, I didn’t know what she was plotting. Everyone had seen her but no one described her to me. I finally caught wind of the whispers and learned that my strangeness had been transformed into madness, and madness into witchcraft. Soldier sorcerer.
Don’t tell me that we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God’s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid. You’d have to be mad to obey Captain Armand when he whistles for the attack, knowing there’s almost no chance you’ll come home alive. God’s truth, you’d have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth. The bullets from the enemy on the other side, the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky, they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and to sever lives. Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.
But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers. And that’s when you stop being the brave one, the death-defier, and become instead the true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother.
VII
FOR EVERYONE, for the soldiers both black and white, I have become death. I know this, I understand. Whether Toubab soldiers or Chocolat soldiers like me, they think I’m a sorcerer, a devourer of people’s insides, a dëmm. They think I’ve always been one, but that the war has revealed it. The rumor, stark naked now, claimed I had eaten the insides of Mademba Diop, my more-than-brother, before he was even dead. The brazen rumor said that I should be feared. The rumor, spread-legged and ass in air, said that I devoured the insides of the enemies from the other side, but also the insides of friends. The obscene rumor said, “Beware, watch out. What does he do with the severed hands? He shows them to us and then they disappear. Beware, watch out.”
God’s truth, I, Alfa Ndiaye, youngest child of the old man, saw the rumor chase after me, half-naked, shameless, like a fallen woman. And yet the Toubabs and the Chocolats who watched the rumor chase me, who lifted her skirt as she passed, who pinched her ass, snickering, continued to smile at me, to talk to me as if nothing was wrong, friendly on the outside but terrorized on the inside, even the toughest, even the hardest, even the bravest.
When the captain whistled for us to surge out of the belly of the earth so that we could throw ourselves like savages, temporary madmen, on the enemy’s little iron seeds that were oblivious to our shrieks, nobody would take their place beside me. No one would dare rub shoulders with me anymore in the cacophony of war, leaping from the earth’s hot entrails. No one wanted to be next to me when they fell to the bullets from the other side. God’s truth, now I was in the war alone.
That’s how the enemy hands earned me my solitude, beginning with the fourth. Solitude in the midst of smiles, winks, encouragement from my trench-mates, black or white. God’s truth, nobody wanted to attract the evil eye of a soldier sorcerer, the shit luck of death’s best friend. I know this, I understand. They don’t think much, but when they think, they think in dualistic terms. I’ve read it in their eyes. They think devourers of human insides are good so long as they devour only the enemy’s insides. But devourers of souls are no good when they eat the insides of their trench-mates. With soldier sorcerers, you never know. My trench-mates believe they have to be very, very careful with soldier sorcerers, they have to manage them carefully, to smile, to be friendly, to talk casually to them about this and that, but from afar, never to approach them, touch them, brush against them, or it’s certain death, it’s the end.
It’s why, after the first few hands, whenever Captain Armand whistled for the attack, they kept themselves ten large steps away from either side of me. Some of them, just before they would leap screaming from the earth’s hot entrails, would avoid even looking at me, letting their eyes fall on me, glancing at me at all, as if to look at me was to touch the face, arms, hands, back, ears, legs of death. As if to look at me was to die.
Humans are always finding absurd explanations for things. I know this, I understand it, now that I’m able to think what I want. My brothers in combat, white or black, need to believe that it isn’t the war that will kill them, but the evil eye. They need to believe that it won’t be one of the thousands of bullets fired by the enemy from the other side that will randomly kill them. They don’t like randomness. Randomness is too absurd. They want someone to blame, they’d rather think that the enemy bullet that hits them was directed, guided by someone cruel, malevolent, with evil intent. They believe that this cruel, malevolent, evil-intentioned
one is me. God’s truth, their thinking is weak, flimsy. They think that if I’m alive after all these attacks, if no bullet has hit me, it’s because I’m a soldier sorcerer. They think the worst. They say that many of their trench-mates have been hit by bullets that were meant for me.
This is why some of them smiled hypocritically at me. It’s why others looked away when I appeared, why still others closed their eyes to keep them from falling on me, from grazing me. I became taboo, like a totem.
The totem of the Diops, of Mademba Diop, that egotist, is a peacock. He said “peacock” and I replied “crowned crane.” I said, “Your totem is a fowl, while mine is a wildcat. The Ndiayes’ totem is the lion, it’s nobler than the totem of the Diops.” I let myself repeat to my more-than-brother Mademba Diop that his totem was laughable.