Song for Night (12 page)
In the fragile sunlight, a woman is standing on the platform, scrutinizing the train. Her head jerks every time a door opens, but she turns away when she sees me and makes the sign of the cross. I cannot speak, and with her back turned she cannot see me sign, so I have no way of reassuring her. Something in the way she stands reminds me of myself, always searching for something.
I step from the platform onto the dusty road littered with tank carcasses like an elephant graveyard. When I turn back to look at the station, by some trick of the light the train has rusted over, the station fallen into ruin, and the bombed-out track coiled in on itself like spaghetti and covered in vegetation that crawls everywhere in a rush of green. I know it can’t be true though, I just came from there.
Mirages are common here, I think, shaking it off.
Light Is Jazz Hands and a Smile
Out of a nightmare sometimes a good dream is born. Twice since she died I have met Ijeoma in dreams. Perhaps the third time will be in the afterlife. Walking in this silence, the solitude of early morning that in a different time, a better time, would be full of the ritual of coffee, a time when even songbirds are still, I feel alone in the world. Yet it is not a sadness I feel. This morning, unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light.
I wipe my fingers across my eyes repeatedly, the equivalent of saying,
I don’t believe it
, if I could talk. The road before me suddenly sheers away, ending abruptly in a cliff. I come to a halt on the edge and stare into an impenetrable darkness. There is something sinister about this particular darkness, as though every childhood fear I have is woven into its very fiber. I sit on a log by the roadside. Behind me, in the distance, I can make out the disused station and the rusting vine-covered train. In front of me is the darkness. I do what I always do in moments of doubt, I light a cigarette. As I inhale, I think what a funny thing this habit has become. It is one I cannot do without and yet three years ago I didn’t smoke. My parents (even my hated step-father) would have gone berserk if they knew I was smoking. I remember a song I heard in boot camp,
War! Huh! What is it good for
… but instead of saying,
Absolutely nothing
, we’d add a phrase we like. I sing in my head.
War! Huh! What is it good for? American cigarette companies!
But it doesn’t distract me for long and my mind returns to the anomaly in front of me.
I don’t remember there being a cliff here. Not that I am sure I remember where I am, even though the sign at the train station was the same one I saw when I rode the train of death down from the north. Anyway, why would anyone build a road that leads to a dead end at a cliff edge? Apart from the obvious danger, it just doesn’t make sense. I know the road wasn’t bombed out because the darkness is too wide for any bomb we currently have. Only a nuclear bomb could do this much damage and I doubt either side has one, and even if we did and it had been used, the mushroom cloud would have been visible for miles, a tumor against the sky.
No, I decide, I am hallucinating. I must be. I scratch the cemetery on my arm and tell myself that if I put one foot into the darkness, it would disappear. I tell myself that this is only the shape of my guilt: guilt for all the lives I’ve lost or taken, guilt for letting my platoon down, guilt for losing my mother, for leaving her to die for me while I hid in the ceiling like a little coward.
I try to summon all the light that filled me moments ago. Light I need to cross the darkness. Still afraid and with no more light, I step over the edge of the cliff. The darkness vanishes and I am back on the road.
Ahead of me, a woman walks, a coffin balanced precariously on her head, her hips swaying with the effort, and yet poised, graceful even.
Mother?
Mother Is Crossed Arms Rocking a Baby
In thirty years, my mother’s dreams had never lied. Though I only knew her for twelve of those years, and though she probably didn’t mean them to, all her prophesies came true.
I know exactly when I began to think of her only in general terms. It was the morning of the day the imam died. Arising with dawn’s fragile mist, she walked into the living room, straight to the sideboard that held all our photographs, and draped the imam’s photograph with a black ribbon of mourning. I suppose you can say that my mother was a witch and in an older time, a rope around the neck would have tested her innocence.
This new prophesy came in the middle of the imam’s latest fast and he had been in the mosque for days. It was inconceivable to either of us to tell him, to disturb his communion with angels and jinn. That morning as she went about the making of breakfast, her tears fell freely, if silently, over-salting the eggs and making the milk turn rancid so that the eucalyptus tea became undrinkable. If we were back in the south, with Grandfather, mother might have been able to work some counterspell, but the imam’s faith forbade anything not of the one God, be it Christian or Muslim. For him, there was little difference, believing that both religions were brothers of the one father; a pair from the triplets— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—a weird kind of trinity. But here, mother was denied even the mercy of a dried chicken heart that when clutched in a cooling palm could be used to ward off demons, so she spent that day watching in silent terror their bald-headed approach. Now I wonder if she was crying also for the more distant future she saw coming. If I blamed her,
blame
her, I blame the imam equally for his own death. The seed of it was his greatest arrogance, the belief that he knew the will of the unknowable. Grandfather always said that believers are like unschooled children holding onto the essence of a truth merely because they have spoken it. But now that I have seen a soul all brittle and flaky like coughed-up biscuit crumbs leave a man, blame is not so easy to lay on another.
All that day and into the night, my mother knelt before her altar, before the icon of the Virgin, before the candles burning, and rolled her rosary between her hands, beating her chest and calling for mercy, for some intercession. As I watched her, I realized that she could see death, and I too, and it wasn’t some ugly skeleton with a scythe—death is a beautiful woman, eyes soft from morning dew, lips pulled back in the saddest smile, praying at an altar for her husband’s life.
When it grew dark and mother didn’t move from her vigil, I finally decided to do something, and headed to the mosque. Whatever the consequence of waking him, death must be more extreme, so I lit a candle and stepped out of the house. In the alley between the mosque and our house, my fear smothered the candle flame and the darkness crackled in the heat. It was early but the streets were deserted. I entered the mosque from the side door, walking quickly through the courtyard that housed the ablution fonts, the sand crunching under my shoes. Not bothering to take off my shoes, I ran across the mats to where the imam lay face-up in a trance. I shook him and shook him, but I couldn’t wake him. Then there were two shapes beside me, each holding a sword. As they raised them to strike, I ran, like a coward, I ran and hid in the courtyard, behind the farthest font. I heard the imam cry out, and then stumble out into the courtyard, chased by his assailants, who cut him repeatedly. When they fled, I came out to him. He smiled at me and touched my face, smearing his blood on my cheek. He tried to speak, but only blood came. I pushed back from him and he died in the sand like a dog.
Oh, how can my sin be so luminous!
I ran back to Mother. She was waiting with a bowl of water and a rag and she washed my face and said nothing. Instead, she just held me and rocked back and forth singing softly: “You Are My Luck.”
I scream, or try to, but the sound that comes from me is no more than a harsh gurgling like a wild animal dying. I fall to the ground. The woman ahead of me pauses, turns, and sees me. It is not my mother. She puts her coffin down and walks back. She squats beside me, and holding my head up she pours water from a canteen into my mouth.
As I struggle to drink through my choking, she strokes my forehead and whispers: “Son.”
“Death is our burden to carry,” the woman says, when I point to the coffin and raise my eyebrows. The water she gave me has revived me and I am sitting up, propped against the coffin, smoking another cigarette. I offer her one, but she shakes her head, reaching into her bra and pulling out a small round silver box with a mirror on its lid. She taps it a few times, twists the cap off, and dips a moistened forefinger into it. It comes out packed with snuff, which she rubs against her gums. She makes a satisfied sound, tears running from the harsh hit. She turns and gives me a watery smile. I look away. I have a persistent hunger, an appetite for something I can’t define. Above, the sky is becoming overcast.
“We should find shelter before it begins to rain,” she says.
I nod and get up. I look down the road. There is a bamboo grove not far. I guess the river winds back at that point. Bamboo clumps grow on the banks and droop like willows, rippling fingers through the dirty water. Grandfather said they were mermaids who while washing their hair didn’t notice the gaze of humans until too late. They became frozen, the bamboo all that was left of them, still vainly trying to wash their hair in the river. It should be easy to build a shelter there. I turn to the woman.
“What is your name, Mother?” I sign, using the respectful term for a woman old enough to be my mother. It is the way here. She likes it, she smiles.
“My name is Grace,” she says.
“Come, Mother,” I sign. “We can find shelter ahead.”
She helps me hoist the coffin onto my head and we move along. It is natural and fitting that I should take the coffin from the old woman. I am stronger and younger, yet I feel even closer to death with the infernal box on my head. Grace says nothing, just follows. When we get to the grove, I clear the ground shrub just away from the road, the blade of the machete fast against the hollow bamboo, sounding a song of steel and wood. In no time I have built a lean-to and roofed it with bamboo leaves woven into small squares; and just in time because I have barely hauled the coffin into the shelter when the sky opens up in a storm.
“Can you build a fire?” Grace asks.
If she thinks it is strange that I don’t speak, she has said nothing. I nod and gather kindling. It is easy—I just reach back into the grove. Soon there is a small but cheerful blaze going. Grace opens the coffin and pulls out a pot and some cooking ingredients. As she stands the pot in the rain to collect water, she asks: “Is that yam I see in your bag?”
I nod and offer it to her. She peels it quickly with my bayonet, her grip experienced, and then she holds it out in the rain to wash it clean. She chops it and puts it in the pot of water, adds the last of the oil from my bag, some herbs she has, and a piece of dry fish she has been clearly hoarding for some time. While we wait for the rain to abate and the yam pottage to cook, I smoke and she rubs snuff on her gums. She begins to talk.
“I’ve carried this coffin for so long; for such a long time. You see, we are nothing if we don’t know how to die right. That sums us up as a people. Not the manner we come into the world, but the manner in which we leave.”
After all that I have seen, it sounds a little self-indulgent, but it’s not like I can interrupt her, so I let her go on. It seems important to her to tell me this stuff, although I don’t know why. Why, even in moments like this, do people feel they have to explain their oddness? If no one felt that kind of shame, that kind of embarrassment, would there be no more war? It sounds silly. I guess this is what Grandfather meant when he would say I was acting my age.
“One day I will die and then my killers will be able to bury me easily.”
I want to laugh but it would be unkind.
“I even have a headstone in here,” Grace continues, pointing to the coffin. No wonder it is so bloody heavy, I think. But she isn’t too irritating and I am grateful for the company. Besides, the food smells great. She busies herself dishing it into earthenware bowls she digs out of the coffin. A right Pandora’s Box, I think. We eat in silence. I remember her taking the bowl from me, but nothing else.
When I wake, she is gone. Like the rain and the bamboo grove. In fact, I wake up in the coffin beside the river, quite a distance from the grove. I leap out. She must have moved me, but how, and why? What kind of sorcery is this?
Just then, across the river, I catch sight of Nebu and the rest of my platoon. They are resting on the opposite bank. I scream and wave but I think I am too far away because they don’t act like they’ve seen me. There is nothing else to do but cross the river. I have no boat, so I push the coffin into the water. Shuddering, I get in and begin paddling with my arms.
Fear Is an Open Hand
Beating over the Heart
There are many things about John Wayne that I despised, but this I admired: the man had no fear. It was almost as though the word, or the concept, was foreign to him. He was obviously too old and big to be a mine diffuser, but he was always up there at the front with us, risking his life, spraying the enemy with his weapon of choice, the squat ugly Israeli Uzi.
“The perfect weapon,” he would say. “Not much to look at, easy to handle, and deadlier than anything else out there. Like me.” This was followed with a big laugh, the kind of head-thrown-back, I-am-full-of-life laugh. Sometimes he would have a bottle of beer balanced precariously on his head and he would forget and throw his head back, sending the bottle crashing. These are the sounds that remind me of him: the high-pitched metallic spitting of his Uzi, the deep laugh, and the sound of breaking glass.
I remember one time a few weeks after we had just left camp; we were pinned down by heavy enemy fire from a gun we would later know as the M60. While all the other platoon leaders were hiding or taking cover, John Wayne spotted the gun encampment and, standing up, he ran straight for it, stopping less than ten yards from it to throw three grenades. As he hit the deck, the explosion sent bits of gun and men flying over him.