in it almost. Not without cause of course: they did kill my mother in front of me, but still, it is for me, not her, this feeling, these acts. The downside of silence is that it makes self-delusion hard. I rub my eyes and spit dirt from my mouth along with a silent curse aimed at my absent comrades. If they’d checked they would have noticed that I wasn’t dead.
The first thing I do is search for Nebu’s body. That’s the way it is laid out in the manual (although of course none of us has ever seen the manual but Major Essien drummed it into us and we know it by heart): first locate and account for friendly casualties, then hostiles; in that order—friend, then foe. The funny thing is, though I search, I can’t find Nebu’s body. There are no other bodies either, which means the enemy hasn’t been around.
Let me explain something, which on the surface might sound illogical but isn’t. We all lay land mines, the rebels and the federal troops, us and the enemy, but we do it in such a hurry that no one bothers to map these land mine sites, no one remembers where they are. That and the fact that territory shifts between us faster than sand tracking a desert, ground daily gained and lost, makes it hard to keep up. Given that the mine diffusers and scouts are always the advance guards, it is easy to see how minefields are often places where we intersect. In this case however it seems like there was no enemy, that Nebu simply got careless; or unlucky.
My first instinct is always survival so I abandon the search as quickly as I can and get out of the open. I debate whether to head for the river, fifty yards to my left, or the tree cover, seventy yards or so to my right. I choose the river. Rivers are the best way to keep close to habitation as well as the fastest means of travel. I hug the banks in the shadows and carefully observe any developments, of which I must confess there are very little. So far I haven’t met anybody and I haven’t found any traces of my unit. It is not good to be alone in a war for long. It radically decreases your chances of survival.
But my grandfather always said, “Why put the ocean into a coconut?”
Night Is a Palm Pulled Down over the Eyes
It is dark: lampblack. The only points of light are flickering fireflies. Stupidly I fell asleep practically in the open, under a mango tree near the riverbank, amid the rotting fruit strewn everywhere. I lie still, waiting for all my senses to wake up to any possible danger, remembering how I came to be here, and realizing that I must have fallen asleep after feasting on too many mangoes. I strain and discern dim outlines to my left: the forest. Getting up, I walk across the dark spread of grass between the river and the forest, stopping at the edge of the tree line. The silence is absolute as though the forest has just sucked in its breath. Deciding I’m not harmful, it lets it out in the gentle noises of night. To ground myself, I run my fingers meditatively over the small crosses cut into my left forearm. The tiny bumps, more like a rash than anything, help me calm myself, center my breathing, return me to my body. In a strange way they are like a map of my consciousness, something that brings me back from the dark brink of war madness. My grandfather, a fisherman and storyteller, had a long rosary with bones, cowries, pieces of metal, feathers, pebbles, and twigs tied into it that he used to remember our genealogy. Mnemonic devices, he called things like this. These crosses are mine.
Filtering the dark into gray shadows, fingers still reading the Braille on my arm, I try to force my eyes to adjust, but my night vision is not very good. The forest isn’t familiar territory despite years of jungle and war, and the silence is disconcerting particularly because for the past three years I haven’t been alone at night.
I have been in a pack with the other mine diffusers. Even then, we all relied on Ijeoma to guide us. She always knew the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. God knows I miss her, love her. Loved her. But I can’t think about that now. I must move. I glance around me and sift my memory for ideas, guide points. I look up, thinking perhaps the stars will guide me, but there are hardly any and I have forgotten the names of the constellations and their relationships anyway. The only thing I can remember is the phrase, follow the big drinking gourd home. I try to make out the big dip of its shape, but clouds and treetops are occluding everything. Honing my fear to an edge, I step off, sinking into the depths of the forest.
I pause to light a cigarette, trying to make out the forest in the dying light: matches are too few and precious to be wasted solely for trying to see. I suck on the filter, singeing the tip into a red glow. In the distance I hear a nocturnal wood dove. I press on, crashing through the forest with the finesse of a buffalo. Bugs bite, sharp spear grass rip at my skin. It finally gives way to wetlands, the beginning of a swamp. The blood from my cuts attracts leechlike creatures that suck on my arms and feet as I splash deeper through what turns out to be a mangrove swamp. I must have traveled in a curve, following the forest back to where the river cut through it. I must have because that’s the only way I can be trudging through a mangrove swamp. It is not fun but we passed a mangrove swamp on the way in yesterday, so I must be retreating the right way. Into safe territory.
I hate mangroves though. The trees skate the water on roots like fingers, so human and yet so hauntingly bewitched they terrify me. The water levels aren’t uniform. Sometimes only ankle deep, sometimes thigh deep, sometimes the ground sheers away beneath my feet submerging me gasping in the chocolate thick brown water.
Exhausted, I find a tree with a few low-hanging branches and climb, high as I can, until the swamp and river below are no more than a black shimmer in the night. Building a nest of branches, something we learned from the monkeys, I tie myself carefully to the thickest one. We might have learned some tricks from the monkeys, but we aren’t monkeys. Sleep is a two-by-four catching me straight between the eyes and knocking me squarely into oblivion. Rest though is another matter. I haven’t rested since that night. There has been exhaustion; sleep even. But not rest. Not since my unit stumbled into a small village, or what was left of it, several huts falling apart at the edge of a bomb-pitted strip of tar. We saw a group of women sitting around a low fire, huddled like every fairy-tale witch we had been weaned on. Armed to the teeth with AK-47s and bags of ammo and grenades, mostly stolen from the better U.S. –armed enemy soldiers we had killed, but still wearing rags, we stood close together, watching the women, unsure what to do; or whether to approach. The women were eating and the smell of roasting meat drove us on.
“Good evening, mothers,” we said, respectfully.
The women paused and cackled, but didn’t reply, and why would they since they probably didn’t understand our crude sign language. We noted that one woman, not as old as the others, was lying on the ground. She was bleeding from a wound to her head and looked dazed.
“May we have some food?” I asked. I was the unspoken, unranked leader of the troop. “We are brave warriors fighting for your freedom.”
This time my gestures, pointing to the food and miming eating, seemed to be understood and the old women waved me over. I approached and reached down to the metal brazier with meat on it. I recoiled from the small arm ending in a tiny hand, and the tiny head still wearing its first down. It only took a minute for the women to calculate the cost of my alarm and revulsion, so that even as I was reaching for my AK-47, they were scattering in flight, not forgetting to grab onto bits of their gory feast. I emptied a clip into them, as my platoon cheered at the snapping of old bones and the sigh of tired flesh, even though they didn’t know why I was killing the women. The woman holding onto the head let go as she fell and it hit the ground and rolled back toward me.
It is that little face, maybe a few months old, that keeps me from rest.
Death Is Two Fingers Sliding across the Throat
Death is always the expectation here and when my throat was cut it was no different.
