The Great Agony & Pure Laughter of the Gods (12 page)

Risto, with three other soldiers, led the way. They hung around in the cassava fields, watching for any movement from the huts of the village. The order went out among the militia; no one was to be allowed to enter or leave the village. As some of them surrounded the village, others went door to door, knocking them down. A group of soldiers went into the compound. Close by the cattle screamed.

‘Everyone out! Everyone out!’ an authoritarian voice shouted.

Minutes went by as women cried helplessly. Two female voices pierced the sleeping village. A male voice rose up in protest, and another one could be heard shouting, ‘Shut up! I will kill you!’

The first group of soldiers returned with cows and goats and made their way back up towards the forest. Another group took over the watch from Risto and his crew, and they rushed to the nearest compound. Here was a sight that was horrible to see. A girl who looked about thirteen was lying on the ground naked and shivering, swimming in what could only be her own blood. Another older woman, maybe her mother, was still in the hands of two soldiers. At first she tried in vain to release her naked body from one half-naked soldier as the other one watched with two guns in his hands, but now she lay barely moving and sobbing.

Risto’s companions seemed willing to take on the woman once the other two had finished. A man who seemed to be the father of the family was on the ground. His hands and legs were tied, and he lay still in a bath of blood. Risto rushed into the house. He snatched a bag hanging on the wall; there were clothes inside. From underneath the bed he took two pairs of shoes; he needed them badly. On a table stood a small radio and batteries. He picked everything up and left. As he went outside, the little girl was struggling to move; there was blood on her stomach and over her legs.

He left the compound and took a position outside, close to a path that led to the side of the forest. The second group of soldiers passed by with more cattle. Benny was among this group; he looked after the herd of cows and goats. He had a machete in his right hand and a stick in the left. They made their way towards the mountains.

‘Follow me, follow me, Kadogo!’ a soldier shouted at Risto.

‘And my bag?’ Risto asked.

‘Drop your dirty bag and follow me, I say!’ he screamed.

Risto followed him. They crossed three compounds and reached a fourth.

‘These bastards have run away from us, I will show them,’ muttered the angry soldier.

He went inside a big rectangular house, which was surrounded with huts. Then he came out again and went into a hut on the left. Smoke began issuing from the rectangular house and the hut. The soldier came to Risto with a twist of straw on fire.

‘Take it, quickly. Put it on that hut there.’ He gave the burning brand to Risto and pointed to the neighbouring compound. Risto did as he was told. He took the brand and lit the straw roof of the first hut, the second one and the big one in the middle. Then he ran from the compound as the whole place sparked with flames.

A rifle sounded from down near the business centre. Then people shouted. More shots followed. Trouble was in the air. Everyone was alert. The soldiers who were in the compound came running.

The General was already at the scene.

‘Get ready, we have to respond,’ he said. ‘We stay in our positions.’ He knew the enemy was the Mai-Mai.

The soldiers squatted down in the cassava fields close by the village while the General went to speak to another group that had positioned itself on a small hill. The shooting continued. The first bullet in response came from Risto’s neighbour, a soldier with a Kalashnikov who nearly deafened himself. Risto needed the toilet, but remembered he was in the front line of a battle. He felt dizzy. Little fires flared out in the direction the Kalashnikov noise had come from; these were enemy bullets. The moon shone, but he could still see the red tracers of the bullets as each side fired on the other. There were sometimes screams and hurrahs from down in the valley as the enemy fired their weapons.

Risto lay on his stomach, his eyes focused down where the shooting was resounding. A few soldiers came from the hills, crawling down and spreading all over the wide cassava fields. Risto was shivering, but kept his position while his gun watched the movements in the valley. He was thinking about the number of talismans, gri-gri and mystical spirits a single Mai-Mai would have, as well as the dozens of tattoos engraved on his body. He had even heard that some Mai-Mai left their bodies behind while their spirits went to fight. He kept quiet, shaking as he lay in the field.

The fighting intensified. The crackling got closer and closer. As the Mai-Mai fired, they sang and screamed. Risto’s
AK
-47 was ready, his finger on the trigger. He hadn’t yet fired a bullet. He was sweating. Suddenly, a huge noise erupted down the valley, followed by a lot of smoke. A fire appeared on a small hill. After a few minutes, the noise of bullets came from that direction. There must have been Mai-Mai positioned there. Risto imagined how they would scream ‘Mai’ meaning ‘water’; the place would burn to ashes, but they would walk out alive. They never died. More than thirty minutes had gone by. A group of his soldiers descended quickly, running in the fields, then throwing themselves to the ground. They shot as if it was the end of the world. Risto put his fingers in his ears to soften the noise.

The cassava bushes ahead of Risto were waving. They were fifty metres away from him. He stared, scrutinising each leaf as it moved. He sighted his firearm on the moving leaves. It seemed as though no other military eye saw the movement; the others were focused on what was happening in the valley. The cassava bushes kept waving. At a distance of about thirty metres, a head emerged, like a chameleon in slow motion. It was a man with a gun. Risto couldn’t wait – he pulled the trigger. Four bullets left. A scream. Each soldier’s gun now followed his eye. Risto breathed deeply as sweat dripped from his face. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The wounded man tried to move, and he fired again. This time he struck the man’s head.

Risto remained in his position, unable to move. The soldiers who were close by went towards the still body. One picked up the dead man’s gun and fired down the valley, but there were no answering shots. This caused vivid fear in each soldier’s mind. From their experiences of fighting with the Mai-Mai, they had learned that when a fight stopped abruptly like this, it was the time when the Mai-Mai would find their powers through rituals and sacrifices. The soldiers feared their return.

Risto pulled himself to his feet and went towards the path to regroup with the other soldiers. The chief said that they had to start moving: ‘We have to go back in the forest; their return will be fierce. This is the time of their satanic rituals!’

Three soldiers were losing blood. One from his right shoulder; he had covered the wound with a cloth. Another had a cloth that dripped blood wrapped around his right leg.

‘Look at that rat!’ screamed an angry voice.

Someone was running down the main path towards the valley. He was still within range. His movements seemed familiar to Risto. He moved his head from left to right as he ran, just like Benny did. It was indeed Benny. A soldier cursed and fired several shots at him. Benny fell down.

Risto wanted to run towards Benny, but he knew he would suffer the same fate. But how could he see someone killing his brother without intervening? How could he leave the body of his brother abandoned in a field? He had to do something, but what?

The crackling of guns erupted in the valley once again. Reinforcements had arrived, or maybe the Mai-Mai had reconnected with their world of spirits and power. The General ordered his men to leave some of the cattle to save time, and to return to the forest as fast as possible. Risto held his looted bag on his head while he carried his gun on his shoulder. They ran quickly.

Every step he took, his heart questioned his love for Benny. He had been his best friend. They had enjoyed happiness and pain together. They had thought they would die together. Now he couldn’t even fight to bury him! He couldn’t think of saving him! He thought of how many times he had betrayed his friends, his dearest friends. He remembered Néné, and now Benny, a brother who had showed him the mysteries and pleasures of life. He ran with his heart breaking.

Risto mourned Benny alone in his small hut. He was alone in a jungle of wild beasts. He imagined how he might take his revenge on the soldier who had killed his cousin. Maybe it would happen when the two of them were sent somewhere. Risto would let the man walk in front of him, then he would kill him the same way he had killed the Mai-Mai soldier; he would pull the trigger, force a few bullets into his head. He thought it would be a good idea to stalk Benny’s killer. To know his roster, which day he was on night watch, at which position, and with whom. Then he could hide and wait until the man started his shift. With his
AK
-47, he would open fire and blow off the man’s head. He would even shoot whomever the man was on shift with. Of course others would hear the shots, but it would take them time to work out what had happened. They would probably believe that it was the work of a Mai-Mai spy.

Many soldiers disturbed his mourning day with unneeded congratulations for being the hero of the mission; he had killed a Mai-Mai, one of the demons of the forest, as they were called. They praised him, called him a brave lion.

Risto thought about the Mai-Mai he had shot. He wasn’t supposed to die. They couldn’t die. Maybe he woke up after they left? Maybe he had violated the Mai-Mai rules – by robbing someone or eating the food of a woman. Maybe he had slept with a woman or forgotten his talisman, and that was why he died.

In his shack, he kept his fire going, mixing wet and dry wood to produce a smoke that prevented those who came to bother him with endless messages of felicitation from staying longer than a minute. His mouth and nose also became a chimney, but for cannabis smoke. He had not smoked it before, but now as he inhaled, he saw the world floating like a fallen leaf on a dancing river, and it made his pain float away. Soon he was smoking more than a camp of cannabis addicts could finish in a day.

He was no longer Risto; he began to believe that what the Kadogo had been taught during the training was true. Killing a man was easier than killing a goat. With just one bullet, a man was down, no matter the weight of his body or the strength of his talisman. Risto felt invincible with his gun; he became proud of his ability to use a single bullet to take away a life. He imagined a world that he would soon rule with his gun and his cannabis, how important he would be with his ability to kill with only one bullet, the respect he would earn as the strongest of all the Kadogo.

Already he had begun to forget what had happened only a few days earlier. He had forgotten his life. He had forgotten where he was and who he was with. He had forgotten his pain and his fear. He had forgotten his past and his future. He had forgotten with whom he had come, who was still with him, and who wasn’t. He lived in the present. He was neither happy nor sad. He was just there. He took his gun and his cannabis everywhere he went. These were now his only friends, the only ones he needed.

Bisi, his housemate, wanted to know where Benny was. Risto shouted, ‘Shut up! If you say his name again, I will shoot you! It’s none of your business where he is.’

Later, he threw the borrowed plastic shoes back to their owner; he had his own now, and they were leather. When the owner dared to complain about how dirty they were, Risto took a bayonet and threatened him. The Kadogo started complaining that since Risto had been given a gun, he had become too proud. Risto knew that he had earned his gun; he had proven his bravado, he was a favourite with the General.

They had already conquered the valley of Birava and the surrounding villages. Sometimes Risto was based in Birava for days. People feared him. It was what he wanted; he was not interested in games or jokes. He ran for his gun whenever he was upset. The others gave him the name ‘Buhanya’, a Mashi word meaning misfortune. That was what he had become: it was unfortunate to have a problem with Risto. If anyone said a bad thing against him, Risto would beat that person until he called to his ancestors.

Soon the chief and his entourage began to assign the cruel tasks to Risto. He was the one they called to carry out punishments, to beat whomever didn’t want to pay taxes. He was the one to burn a house if someone from that village had run to give news to the Mai-Mai or the main rebel movement.

Even among the Kadogo, he was the one to punish and to restore order when needed. Whenever he saw someone with a watch or nice clothes, he took them away. The chief praised his charisma and strong spirit, giving him a share of the loot from raids. It seemed as if Risto no longer cared about people, or their weeping and protests. When they cried, he smoked cannabis or drank beer, and then he became fiercer than before. But there was one thing he would not do: he would not take the little girls they captured and terrorised and use them. If anyone questioned this, he would wave his gun, and that would be the end of the matter.

One day Risto was sharing beer with his comrades at the Birava market. Two soldiers arrived dragging a man in his late thirties. He had refused to carry a fifty-kilogram sack of cassava powder that the soldiers had taken from the open market. The man had pills in his hands; he said his daughter was very ill, and he was in a hurry to give her the medicine he had bought her. The chief ordered Risto to handle the situation.

‘Rat, put the sack on your idiot head, or I will blow it up with one bullet!’ shouted Risto. He had taken to imitating the ferocious voice of the General despite his youth. His voice alerted people all around the market, and they watched. The man put the sack on his head, but after a few steps, he fell down. Risto took a stick and beat the man, but the General was not impressed. He wanted Risto to shoot the man so that other villagers would see and be afraid. For a moment, Risto pretended not to see the gestures the chief was making.