Pa Moiwa would often press the palms of his hands on the small bones and wait to hear the voice of one of his grandchildren, to feel something that reminded him of one of them, but nothing occurred. Only the faces of the children and the sound of the school bell that morning before the attack filled his memory. He was convinced that the bones communicated with him, even if generally. He used to walk his grandchildren to school every morning and greeted people at every household. He would sigh as this memory ached his entire being.
* * *
The two elders had been in town for almost a month and had managed to clean up quite well. Every morning, Pa Moiwa would rise earlier than Mama Kadie and go to the bush to check the traps he had set the previous evening. Whenever he went into different parts of the forest, he saw more remains. These he would hide under shrubs or bury so the animals would not find them. He returned with whatever animal had been caught in the traps—a porcupine, a guinea fowl—which he would cut into pieces and have Mama Kadie cook for them. He didn’t tell her about the skulls and chopped hands he had seen and how he had examined the ones that had bits of flesh for the birthmarks of his children or grandchildren.
She would go wandering around the old farms looking for potatoes, cassavas, anything edible that grew in the neglected plots to cook with the meat that he brought back. Mama Kadie also saw skeletons, hung in farmhouses with fracture marks from bullets or machetes on the bones. She did her best to set them down and find resting places for them. She said nothing of this to Pa Moiwa. They took care of each other during the day, but at night they went to the ruins of their own houses. Each had found a corner to sleep in shielded on one side by a wall and the other by sticks and thatch. They struggled to find sleep on the mats that separated their bodies from the earth. The tattered blankets couldn’t warm their old bones. But they were home, where they knew exactly which tree the first sunrays would pierce through, a signal for God to connect with humans, every day. They had to be in their homeland for that—one could, if possible, hear God only through the words of one’s own land.
* * *
One morning after the first month and while they were both gone to look for food, another elder, a man, arrived in town. He also had come by the path and saw the footprints around town. He didn’t know whether they were friendly ones, so he hid in the nearby bushes and waited. The war had ended, but the reflex of disbelieving in the kindness of a quiet town remained with him.
He had come from the capital city, where he had eventually ended up after searching every refugee camp for his family. At each of these camps he’d had to register as a refugee, so his pockets were filled with ID cards. He didn’t like the squalor and congestion in the camps and so had started making traditional baskets, which he sold for enough money to rent a one-bedroom in the western part of the city. His new neighbors felt sorry for him and gave him food every day, and their children took a liking to him, but the relationship hurt his heart. They made him remember his own grandchildren. Still, he would sometimes walk the children to school. The children thought he did it because he liked it, but in truth he had been going from school to school in search of his son, Bockarie, who was a teacher. Wherever he stayed, he would visit all the schools and observe all the teachers. There was no sign of his son. He knew that if he was to find some family members, if luck was to smile his way, he would have to get back home. Therefore, as soon as it was announced that the war had ended, he began making plans to return to Imperi.
* * *
When he got nearer to his town today, he began remembering the day he had run away, the day of “Operation No Living Thing.” He was at the mosque and the gunmen came inside and started shooting everyone. He fell and bodies piled on top of him. The soldiers fired some more at the bodies to make sure everyone was properly dead. He held his breath. He didn’t know how he lived through it. After they left, he waited, hearing the sounds of men, boys, girls, and women crying in pain as they were tortured and then killed outside. He knew most of the voices, and at some point his ears cut him off of their own accord. He stayed under the bodies until late at night when the operation had finished and there was no sound of any living thing, not even the cry of a chick. He pulled himself out and saw the bullet-ridden bodies, some hacked. He ran out of town covered in the blood and excrement of those killed on top of him. He could not feel or smell anything for days. He just ran and ran until his nose reminded him what he was covered in. It was then that he searched for a river and washed himself clean. But water wouldn’t clean the smell, sound, and feeling of that day.
* * *
As the sun was stretching the cold bones of morning with its warmth, Mama Kadie and Pa Moiwa returned to town. They both noticed footprints that weren’t theirs and became worried. As they whispered about what to do next, a voice spoke from a concealed position under the bushes: “The marks you see on the earth are traces of your friend Kainesi, whose words of greeting come from the coffee trees behind you.”
Meeting old friends had become strange. “I am now going to place myself in front of your eyes.” He pulled his thin body from under the bushes whose leaves had left pimples of water on his face. He was wearing a blue hat with the letters
NY
that young men wore in the city. He had found it on the ground somewhere and wore it to cover his head from the wrath of the sun and because the initials on the hat were the letters of his family name, Nyama Yagoi. He removed the hat to reveal his much-wrinkled face, the scars across it and his skull. A young boy had slashed lines on his face with a bayonet and tried to open his head with a dull machete, proclaiming that he was practicing to become a “brain surgeon.”
At first, Mama Kadie and Pa Moiwa didn’t want to look at their friend, but in each other’s faces they found courage to do so. They embraced him, squeezing him between them until he laughed, making the scars on his cheeks magnify, resembling a second grin.
“Well, you came out of that madness with an extra smile!” Pa Moiwa commented, and they shook hands, their old, warm fingers holding on to each other for a while, each man’s eyes fixed deeply on the other’s.
Mama Kadie wanted to ask,
How are you, your children and grandchildren, your wife, their health?
as greetings were in the old days, but she held her tongue. These days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another. She placed her hands on each of their shoulders, gently releasing her friends from the stupor of all that had come to pass. She thought,
We are here, alive, and we must go on living.
“Now I have two men to take care of me. Two old friends whose strength may equal a young man’s.” They all laughed.
“We still have laughter among us, my friends, and hopefully some of those we have shared it with so deeply will return and we will be waiting,” Pa Kainesi said.
And the three old friends walked into the ruins of their town, the air sailing a bit livelier, waking the trees from their slumber and making a small tornado of dust as though cleansing the air for the possibility of life again.
2
PEOPLE HAD BEEN AWAY
from Imperi for seven long years. During that time, the days became drawn out as they waited, restlessly, to start living again. They had seen the fire of war lick their town so viciously that even when the war was said to be over, it took them over a year, and more for some, before they started thinking about returning home. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to go back. Rather, war had taught them not to trust what they heard on radios, through rumors, and, for those who lived in the capital city, read in newspapers. They knew firsthand that the madness didn’t cease immediately just because someone signed a peace accord or some useless ceremony honored those who were not close to the realities they had just proclaimed to have stopped with a signature. It would take months for fighters in the deep countryside to get the message, and even longer to believe in it. Those who returned were coming from refugee camps in the outskirts of cities and in neighboring countries where they had waited all these years in tarpaulin houses to go home or start life somewhere else. The waiting had had no fixed end date. Every life seemed on hold. Nothing was sure in either direction; everything was temporary, and yet it went on for years, no one wanting to accept that it could become permanent.
“We are permanently waiting for the temporary war that is nearing ten years to end,” a musician had said in a popular song. Some people couldn’t wait in one place, so they wandered about, making themselves vulnerable to other exploitations—police brutality, or mistreatment by the employers, relatives, and friends for whom they worked in exchange for accommodation and meager earnings. Nothing had been easy for anyone. Children born toward the end of the war had no understanding of it; by the time they could form memories, the guns had silenced. And no one wanted to explain what had happened—because they didn’t want to remember and they couldn’t find the right words. There were other children, though, who had known only war, since they were born in it. No matter how, they were all returning to Imperi.
They began to arrive in groups when night gave birth to a day brighter than the previous ones. Mama Kadie, Pa Moiwa, and Pa Kainesi had woken earlier than usual, before the crow of the only cock that had begun to announce the life of another day. They were resting from their daily tasks, sitting on the logs at the edge of the older part of town, watching the road, summoning those who hesitated to return. Today, this morning, the road spat out people from refugee camps, towns, villages, hiding places deep in the forest that had become homes, from wandering and from many other places where the world now found their presence sour and where they could no longer see the growth of their shadows.
It began with about ten people carrying small bundles wrapped with tarp or cloth. Their children, about six of them, all no more than ten years old, walked beside them. They had been traveling for two days now, starting in a passenger vehicle for five hours and walking the rest of the way. Vehicles hadn’t resumed their routes to Imperi. As they entered town, their pace slowed while their eyes ran ahead, surveying the bullet holes in walls, the dark spots where fire had licked with its red tongue, the grasses that had grown in the remains of what used to be homes. Then their eyes would return to their children as an assurance to continue into the belly of their hometown. Their hesitations were in every part of their bodies, the way their arms were tightly tucked to their frames, their lips pulled in, their eyelids quickly closing and opening. But as they ventured into the town, they gradually relaxed, and one of the children, a young girl whose face was clearly filled with another story that she had heard of this place, asked her mother, “Where is the place you used to sit and hear stories and is that happening tonight?”
The mother’s smiling face looked down upon her child, her palm cupping the little girl’s face. She did not respond, but her arms began swinging freely to their natural rhythm, her body and stride now showing an ease that comforted the girl, who buried her sharp cheek in her mother’s palm. Others came with plastic bags that the wind almost knocked out of their hands, revealing the bags’ near emptiness. They had walked the entire way—three days’ journey for those who could walk fast—as they had no money to pay for transportation. They came two or more at a time. No one said much, even though they knew one another from before. There were only acknowledgments in their eyes, filled with fear, that held the tongue from saying more.
The majority of people walked into town with nothing. Some came with families and with children they had given birth to elsewhere. Other mothers arrived alone and stared anxiously at the faces of every child, every young person, to see if they could find their own. Sometimes they ran after a child and when he or she turned around, the mother would fall sluggishly to the ground, defeated. Most had searched for seven years, and this was their last chance to free the burden on their hearts.
Children and young people came by themselves with no parents. In the beginning they came one at a time, then in pairs, followed by four, six, or more in a group. They had been at various orphanages and households that had tried to adopt them. Some had even been at centers to learn how to be “normal children” again, a phrase they detested, so they had left and become inhabitants of rough streets in cities and towns. They were more intelligent than their years and had experienced so much hardship that each day of their lives was equal to three or more years; this showed in their fierce eyes. You had to look closely to see residues of their childhood. They knew where their parents were from and so they had returned to this place that they hoped would ease their suffering or grant them the possibility of reuniting with family. They had walked longer than everyone else who had arrived in Imperi. Among these children was a young girl no more than sixteen, who came with a child on her back, a boy, about two. She was taller than most her age, with a long face and narrow eyes. She walked with her lips tucked in as though to muster strength for every step she took. Her breasts told that the child was hers. Her eyes, especially when placed upon the child, held love and deep hatred. Mama Kadie rose to meet her, this daughter of her neighbor who no longer walked the earth in physical form.
“Mahawa, welcome home, my child. I am glad you remembered the way back. May I hold my grandchild?” Mahawa reluctantly removed the child from her back and gave him to the old woman while she continued to search her memory for something familiar.
She must have known me before, which is why she calls my name that I haven’t gone by in so long.
Her voice spoke inside her as she looked into the eyes of the woman whose delight for the young boy was instant. She was rubbing her nose on the child’s belly, making him laugh. She never asked who the father was. Mahawa was already dreading having to explain how this child had come to this world, a story she didn’t want to remember, not yet, perhaps not ever. She wanted people to make their own assumptions and leave her out of it.