Authors: David Park
âYes I will,' I said, as from somewhere beyond the compound I recognized a tune filtering into the night from Ahmed's flute. We sat listening to it until it vanished into the distance and then we were startled by the sudden stutter of bats as they swooped low then twisted away again.
That night I dreamed of a cafe, its awning the brightest yellow against a blue frieze of sky like the postcard I used to
have
of Van Gogh's cafe at Arles. Above me is a cold glitter of stars. I sit watching people passing by. But in my dream I am on my own and when I look around me I see only young girls with flowers in their hair and frightened eyes, and then I hear her song threading itself through my dream until I become part of it, my life rising and falling with its rhythm.
I found myself with Martine again when Charlie asked us to travel out to Baran, one of the small satellite camps that ring Bakalla. Baran was about twelve miles away and he wanted us to stay overnight with some local workers and find out what they needed. I left the school in the hands of Nadra and the women she had gathered as helpers. I thought he would send Veronica with Martine but he told us she was needed in Bakalla and that Aduma would go with us. And so we set off early one morning with the wispy smoke of the camp starting its slow climb skyward. Some miles out, we passed women and children from the camp, scavenging for wood. Some waved but to others it was as if we were invisible and they looked through us, indifferent to our passing.
Martine drove too quickly over the worn paths, and Aduma and I had to hold on with both hands as the jeep bucked and bounced along. Our journey was mostly through low scrub and bush â often the path was almost indistinguishable. The noise of the engine and our bumping motion made it difficult to talk, so mostly we travelled in silence, occasionally stopping for a drink of water and to allow Martine to wipe away some of the sweat that beaded her eyes and mouth. I pulled the ends of my scarf across my mouth, trying to keep out some of the dust. As we drove through the heat of the day the sun seemed to burst inside my head and made my light-bleached senses sharp and irritable. I thought of my drive into the estate, the rain falling across the windscreen, the feeling of fear, the young woman in a white dress emerging from the greyness. I wondered where she was, what had happened to her, if she was happy. And then
in
my hand I saw the piece of paper with his address and the rain bleeding the ink and suddenly it changed into the scrap of paper held by a mother looking for her child and as I heard her cries again, saw Daniel's mother standing at the window, the faces slowly merged until they were one. I drank from the canister and longed for the jeep to stop, to find some shade that would bring relief.
About three or four miles from Baran we saw a cluster of mud-bricked, tin-roofed houses, and we pulled off the road. A few hens grubbed in the dirt and there was a fire collapsed in on itself but no one in sight. We looked around and sounded the horn but there was only the slight stirring of the breeze disturbing the longer grass behind the houses. I touched one of the makeshift doors and as it swung open a tiny lizard sprinted out of a crack in the wood and across my hand. Inside, my eyes struggled to focus in the dust-dappled light and then gradually I distinguished the few spindly pieces of furniture and the meagre collection of possessions. Picking up a child's colouring book from the floor I flicked the pages and saw where someone had crayoned all the pictures a single colour. On a box table were four plastic plates and cups and a coarse grey blanket hung over the back of a chair. When I went back outside the light hurt my eyes and as I turned away to shade my face I glimpsed a young boy watching us from the grass. I raised a hand in greeting but he pulled back deeper into its slow waver. I signalled to the others and told them what I had seen but although Aduma called an invitation, explained who we were, no one emerged. We went into each of the huts and left small packages of B95s. Back in the jeep, the kick of the engine seemed even louder in the silence, and I kept my eyes on the break in the grass where I had seen the child. But if he was still watching us, his eyes were masked by its shiver, and we pulled back on to the narrow road that led to Baran.
About half a mile from the camp we found the first body. It was
the
sudden black clatter of wings as the vultures lifted their heavy bodies skywards that caught our attention. The bunched and rucked body of a young man lay face down in the scrub, about twenty yards from the road. Across his back we found a spray of bullet wounds. It looked like he had been running away when he had been shot, his arms stretched out as if in a final effort to pull himself forward. Black flies smeared his purple flesh and as Martine touched his head it lolled sideways, almost severed by a deep rust-coloured slash across the neck. I turned away and retched and then Martine and Aduma led me back to the jeep and we sat in it and tried to breathe some cleaner air, gulping like swimmers surfacing, and Martine and I held each other's hands, trying to steady our senses.
âWhat should we do?' she asked. âGo on or go back? He's probably been dead for a couple of days. What should we do?'
But we didn't know. Aduma huddled in the back of the jeep, his head between his legs, and I couldn't speak because I knew I would hear the fear in my voice and I was desperately trying to hold it in, control it. A phalanx of blue butterflies landed on the windscreen, fluttered against the warmth of the glass, then flew away again. I tasted the sickness in my throat, before drinking greedily from the canister of water and letting it splash and dribble on my face. Martine took it and also splashed some round her face, mopping the excess with the back of a hand that shook a little as she did so. Then she drove the jeep slowly forward, both hands clasping the wheel, her body tense and upright. As we moved away we caught the slow black glide of the returning vultures and the sudden break of their serrated wings as they dropped again on their prey.
A little distance on there were two more bodies â an old woman, her white headscarf soaked by the blood of a gaping wound, a young girl with her back kneaded and pulped by the puncture of bullets. Beside them the old woman's long-stemmed pipe and the girl's sandals, the yellow imprint of her toes and heels on the insteps. The brown stain of their blood
joined
them in the dust and both were covered by a black scree of flies. As we drove into the centre of the village we were met by the smell of decomposing flesh. At first, we stayed in the jeep and looked. There were a dozen other bodies visible, and probably the same number in the surrounding bush, those who had been pursued and executed or who had crawled away to die. We saw a mother and her baby, the child still enfolded in her arms, probably killed by the same bullets; an old man frozen on his knees like a toppled statue; two women, raped and mutilated, their clothes strewn around like rags. Martine and I walked together, unwilling and unable to let go of each other, before we turned away and were sick until nothing was left but a heaving emptiness.
Two of the huts had been burnt to the ground and a third half-destroyed. There was no one left to help, no little miracles of survival on which to cling to distract from what was all around us. There were only the bodies, swollen and bloated as if the life they once held was bursting its way out of their skin, distorting and distending their features. Only the smell. Burying them was beyond our capabilities but we couldn't leave them there, robbed of their lives and dignity, rotting like carrion. It was Aduma who decided and we nodded our heads as he took a bandage from Martine's case, tied it round his mouth and nose and began the slow job of trailing each of the bodies to the partically burnt hut. I wanted to help him but I couldn't, and when Martine tried she had to come back and sit in the jeep.
It took a long time, and when we didn't watch we could hear the heavy trail and brush of each body through the dust and Aduma's laboured breathing. At intervals he would come back to the jeep and drink some water, splash his face, and when we looked into his eyes we knew how hard it was for him to go back. It took about an hour and when it was done he stumbled towards us shaking his head and starting to cry out. We helped him into the back of the jeep and gave him a glucose drink, then
bathed
his face and hands. He held out his hands towards us again and again, scrubbing them desperately until he was satisfied they were clean. Then he turned his head away from us and closed his eyes. I took the metal canister of petrol and sprinkled it as best I could over the outside of the hut, the smell making me retch again. As I hesitated at the entrance Martine took the canister from me and went inside, out of sight for only a few seconds. Then she carefully made a torch from a bandage and a piece of wood, lit it and flung it on to the roof of the hut.
We waited only long enough to leave some food and basic medical supplies where they would be seen by anyone returning later to the village and then we drove off quickly, looking back only once as the hut crackled and buckled into flame. But as we followed the road back to Bakalla we carried the smell of the smoke with us, mile after mile. We could still smell it long after we had left the village behind. I wanted to drink more of the water but I knew that if I tried to drink it while we bounced over the uneven ground I would be sick and whatever my thirst I didn't want Martine to stop, to delay our return to Bakalla by even a minute. We glanced at each other constantly to see if we were all right, and once she stretched our her hand and touched my arm. The speed of the jeep was welcome now but as it careered along, the images jolted round my head like cargo loose in the hold of a ship, splitting open with every new collision. Martine's body was stiff but her arms shook with the vibration of the jeep as she sought to hold the road and avoid whatever potholes might suddenly appear. From time to time she mopped her brow with her hand and shook her head as if to clear it from sleep. Dark seams of sweat had opened on her shirt and I saw that she was crying. Making her stop, we all took turns to splash our faces with water and then she took off her shirt and quickly put on another from her bag, throwing the old one into the bush. She wanted to drive on but I got into the driver's seat and started the engine and as I drove I could hear Aduma's voice break into a kind of mumbling, the sound an
old
man makes when he's talking to himself. I didn't know if it was a prayer or some involuntary release of words but I wanted him to stop and then it grew slowly louder until it became a fragmented chant of lament.
I wanted Martine's voice but she huddled in the seat beside me, her knees pulled up on the seat and her head resting sideways on them so her face was turned away from me. As we approached Bakalla we passed families trudging along the side of the road, their progress slowed by the burdens they carried. When they turned their faces to us we didn't look at them, as if frightened that they might see through us to what we had seen. We felt the weight of what we would soon have to tell, and knew that words would drag into the open what everything inside us conspired to keep silent, that talking would taint us once again with the touch of those bodies rotting in the sun, push us back with sickened, faltering steps into that small clearing in the scrub.
As the first smoke of Bakalla rose in front of us I saw a young girl with a white shell in her hand, her foot trying to smoothe away the fear as she tells of a night when men came out of the darkness and killed a man. I hear her voice, see the tears about to come, and then in the silence as I drive the jeep through the shambling suburbs of the camp, I see her hand the shell to me. And all the children are staring at me, everyone staring at me, and Charlie, Rollins and Veronica are there too and at the edge of the ring my father, his eyes green and empty with the sea, and suddenly I see my own face in the broken glass of a mirror as they wait for me to speak.
Children ran alongside the jeep, their hands patting the engine as you would the flanks of a horse. In the mirror I saw Aduma lift his head and look about him as if he didn't know where he was. Beside me Martine also stirred, wiping her eyes and face with the palm of her hand, trying to smoothe away the sweat and tears. Her face was white, and although I touched her arm
she
didn't turn to look at me. I had become part of the reality she wanted to escape, a reminder of what she most wanted to forget. Soon she might even begin to hate me, and I knew in that moment that we would never sit together in that cafe watching the world pass by, that no boy would ever hold all of her in his arms. For already we were pulled deep into its undertow, carried along weightlessly, helplessly, to some place we did not wish to go. I called to her, and she turned and looked at me as if I were a stranger before she took my hand and held it tightly. She tried to light a cigarette but her hand was shaking too much and I did it for her, then had to go round and help her out of the jeep as she flicked her hair and smiled and said she was all right.
There was no one to be seen in the compound. Aduma had vanished without speaking, and Martine seemed unwilling to go any further. She sat on the steps outside the clinic smoking her cigarette. I pulled off my headscarf and felt my dry bundle of hair fall loose. There was no one in the clinic, no sound of music or sign of activity, but just as I was about to turn away I heard them. The voices came from the little back room where Charlie slept. Maybe it was Veronica's I heard first, maybe Charlie's, and as they grew louder there was the sound I recognized and turning slowly I went back out and sat on the step with Martine until they were finished.
We
have to get up very early, so early my mother has to come and sit beside me on the bed and talk me awake, and then she helps me wash and dress. My father sits in his jacket and shiny collar at the breakfast table and calls me sleepy-head, and it sounds so quiet in the kitchen because this morning there is no radio piping music and the only sounds come from the rush and bubble of water in the kettle and my father's spoon clinking the side of his dish. I am not hungry but they make me eat, telling me it is a long way and a long time before we will eat again. I have been the long way before; it means we are to travel south for my father to take the service in some other church where the minister is on holiday or there is some convention.