Gods and Soldiers (36 page)

Then the driver says, “Let's go get the food.”

 

After yet another cold shower, for which she is better prepared, Cambara comes down to ready the kitchen in time for the youths' imminent return from the errand to the open-air market. In her effort to do so, she opens the lower and upper cupboards, the storeroom, the pantry, and every drawer with functioning runners and, to her great dismay, finds the shelves not dusted as well as she might like. Moreover, she can see that although the youths have washed the cooking implements, they have not rinsed them in hot water, or properly. Not a single utensil or piece of crockery is of top quality. The wood of the cupboards is cracked, damaged, or warped; the soap too dry to be of use, or moldy. The more she gets to know of the state of disrepair of the kitchen and of the foul condition that it is in, despite the attempt on the part of the youths to clean it, the more she thinks of herself as a frontierswoman come to reclaim these men from their primitive condition. But she decides to keep her vow to the youths and cook for them in appreciation of their collaboration, certain that it will make a good impression on their thinking. She wants to leave the scene of their encounter in a more improved fettle than the one in which she has found it. Maybe then she may win over their hearts and minds—even if only briefly—to her triad of society: work, honest living, and peace. She is aware that in the views of someone like Zaak, she is being naive. So be it.

Like a rodent nosing an edible bit of food out of a spot difficult to access, she prises open the cupboards, the drawers, and the sideboards in order to ascertain what is in them. There is, overall, a basic lack: of cooking oil, of sharp knives or knife sharpeners, cutting boards, of butter that has not gone rancid, of sieves and swabs, of detergents, disinfectants, and serviceable sponges; of mops with enough pieces of string or cloth attached to the handle. Nor are there washing-up facilities, clean dishcloths, usable hand or paper towels, or wooden spoons and other implements necessary to provide a decent meal for a dozen persons. The pots are of the wrong shape or are of midget size, too small for her purposes. What there is in the way of cutlery points to the house's multiple occupancy through the years: comparable to the cutlery of variously married households, the plates not matching, the forks and the spoons likewise.

She tries to make do with what there is. She mixes soap powder with water, lathering it up, and eventually decides to use the facecloths as dishcloths. It takes her a long time to wash and then wipe the drain board, on which she plans to dry the pots and dishes.

Scarcely has she done that when she hears a sound, which, at first, she mistakes for a door with creaky hinges being forcibly opened. She is waiting for evidence of Zaak's presence nearby when she identifies the noise as being that of a chicken clucking. She cranes her head to have a glimpse of the scene before her and sees SilkHair carrying three live chickens, their heads down, their necks stretched and struggling, wings opening outward and wrestling, their legs tied together with string. Trailing behind him are a couple of the other youths, nerves strained. They are bearing baskets on their heads, their steps hesitant, slow, and exhausted.

She thinks disaster, remembering that she has never killed a chicken in all her years. Neither before she left the country, when there were servants who performed those chores, nor in Toronto, where she bought them ready to go into the oven. She wonders what she must do if the men are too untutored in the art of slaughtering chickens. After all, it does require some training or at least a type of guts to kill to eat. It will be no problem to boil their feathers off and then cook them, if someone hands them over, dead. Her mind is running fast through these and her other inadequacies when SilkHair joins her in the kitchen. He puts down the chickens in a corner on the floor and instructs the others to deposit their basket loads likewise. Just as the other youths make themselves scarce—returning, most likely, to their
qaat
-chewing—SilkHair crowns his sense of achievement by consulting a piece of paper, his tongue running off the price of potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, carrots, live chickens, washing-up liquid, metal brush, et cetera, first in Somali shillings, then in their dollar equivalent. Then he gives her wads of change in the local currency.

“Well done,” she says. “I am impressed.” Moved, she ruffles his silky hair, almost taking the liberty to hug him and then kiss him.

Expansive joy shines in his eyes. As he gazes into hers, her pupils are set ablaze with memories of her son. She turns her head away as though in obedience to a secret command that tells her not to weep but to rejoice.

Then something happens for which no one is ready. One of the birds kicks one leg free, and when SilkHair rushes to hold her, she kicks harder and harder until she releases her second leg and jumps out of his grasp, clucking, screeching, and crying, as chickens that know that their time has come, do. Cambara watches, determined not to intervene or help him in any way, because she wants to know what stuff he is made of, how patient and resourceful he is, and whether he will tire easily and give up, throwing his hands up in the air.

He makes a wise move. He stands in the doorway, blocking the exit, then bends down, almost crouching, clucking over the bird's attempts to flee, admonishing her for embarrassing him, now snapping his fingers to go to him, now keeping his hands ahead of him, in readiness to accept her into his grasp, if not to pounce on her and take a good hold of her. He is silent; everything still, everything serious. Cambara watches as SilkHair waits, the sound he is making putting her in mind of the noise that some of the men who ply water in plastic jerry cans on the backs of donkeys utter in part to encourage their beasts of burden to move at a faster speed. No sooner has he turned round, seeking Cambara's approval, than the hen slips past his outstretched hands, out of the kitchen, and through his splayed legs.

Whereupon he chases the chicken into the living room and out, then past the kitchen, the bird half flying, half trotting, body atilt because of half-folded wings. Suddenly the chicken stops to look over a shoulder, eyes alert, and he pursues her into a corner to trap her. The chicken lifts her scrawny body up in time to fly above his head, mischievously clucking but only after securing safe escape.

The footloose chicken and the clamor in the kitchen in addition to the hubbub created by the youths who join SilkHair in the chase draw the driver out of the toolshed and bring Zaak out of his sulk, or is it sleep—Cambara cannot tell when she sees him.

“Have you gone mad?” Zaak asks her.

She runs past Zaak without bothering to answer his question. She tells herself that the youths stalking their lunch is, to her mind, more of a welcome relief than the thought of them running after their human victims to shoot or kill them. Excited by the chase, SilkHair is shouting loudly as he continues to pursue the chicken. Once the din reaches the back garden, LongEars comes out of the shed, cheeks swollen with his chewing and gun at the ready. Cambara has the calm to notice what LongEars wants to do, and she shouts to him, “Don't shoot.”

The words have barely traveled the distance separating her from SilkHair and the chicken he is going after with fervor and is about to catch, having already bent down to do so, when she hears the gunshot, two bullets on the trot, the second one hitting its target and wounding it, feathers flying zigzag toward the ground. A hoarse cry emerges from the depth of SilkHair's viscera. Cambara has a tenuous comprehension of what it means to be powerless in the face of brute force. She stands stock still, feeling like someone opening her eyes to the engulfing darkness and coming to see an indescribable betrayal in the action of those around her. She goes over to where SilkHair is crouched, furiously weeping, as though mourning the death of a beloved pet. She lets him leave the chicken where it has fallen and walks past Zaak and the youths, who are all staring, into the kitchen—to prepare the other chickens.

Alone with SilkHair, she suggests that he swing each of the remaining birds as disc throwers do, making several full circles. Just when the first one has become disoriented and he is about to put it on the draining board in the kitchen, LongEars presents himself and offers to slaughter both birds, which he does with the efficiency of an assistant chef whose primary job it is to do so. One sudden swat, and the chicken is as good as dead and Cambara is ready to pour boiling water over it to help remove its feathers. She uses her Swiss penknife to quiet the thrashing of the second chicken, which is struggling animatedly. The rest proves to be as easy as one, two, three.

When she has prepared the meal and Zaak deigns to eat with them, Cambara requests that as soon as they have finished eating they ask the driver to take them in the truck so that Zaak can show her the family's expropriated property. To her great relief, he agrees to her demand.

 

 

 

HE'S THERE, EXHAUSTED. Silent. The wavering glow of a candle barely lights the carpenter's bedroom in this shelter for immigrant workers. This ethnically Swiss Caucasian speaks a Germanic dialect, and in this age of the jet and the Internet, claims he has fled violence and famine. Yet he still has all of the aura that fascinated our nurses and aid workers.

Let's call him Yacuba, first to protect his identity and second because he has an impossible family name. He was born outside Zurich in an unhealthy favela, where infant mortality and the rate of infection by the AIDS virus remain the highest in the world today. The figures are drawn from studies of the World Health Organization (WHO) based in our country in the fine peaceful city of Banjul, as everyone knows. AIDS first appeared some two decades ago in the shady underworld of prostitution, drugs and promiscuity in Greece and is now endemic worldwide, according to the high priests of world science at the Mascate meeting in the noble kingdom of Oman.

The cream of international diplomacy also meets in Banjul; they are supposedly settling the fate of millions of Caucasian refugees of various ethnic groups (Austrian, Canadian, American, Norwegian, Belgian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, British, Icelandic, Swedish, Portuguese . . .) not to mention the skeletal boat people from the northern Mediterranean, at the end of their rope from dodging all the mortar-shells and missiles that darken the unfortunate lands of Euramerica.

Some of them cut and run, wander around, get exhausted and then brusquely give up, until they are sucked into the void. Prostitutes of every sex, Monte Carlians or Vaticanians but others too, wash up on the Djerba beaches and the cobalt blue bay of Algiers. These poor devils are looking for the bread, rice or flour distributed by Afghan, Haitian, Laotian or Sahelian aid organizations. Ever since our world has been what it is, little French, Spanish, Batavian or Luxembourgian schoolchildren, hit hard by kwashiorkor, leprosy, glaucoma and poliomyelitis, only survive with food surpluses from Vietnamese, North Korean or Ethiopian farmers.

These warlike tribes with their barbaric customs and deceitful, uncontrollable moves keep raiding the scorched lands of the Auvergne, Tuscany or Flanders, when they're not shedding the blood of their atavistic enemies—Teutons, Gascons or backward Iberians—for the slightest little thing, for rifles or trifles, because they recognize a prisoner or because they don't. They're all waiting for a peace that has yet to come.

 

But let us return to the shack of our flea-ridden Germanic or Alemannic carpenter. Take a furtive look into the darkness of his dwelling. A mud floor scantily strewn with wood shavings, no furniture or utensils. No electricity or running water, of course. This individual, poor as Job on his dung heap, has never seen a trace of soap, cannot imagine the flavor of yogurt, has no conception of the sweetness of a fruit salad. He is a thousand miles from our most basic Sahelian conveniences. Which is further from us, the moon, polished by Malian and Liberian astronauts, or this creature?

Let us cross what we might call the threshold: swarms of flies block your view and a sour smell immediately grabs you by the throat. You try to move forward nonetheless, but you can't. You stand there, dumb-struck.

Your eyes are beginning to get used to the darkness. You can make out the contours of what seems to be a painting with crude patterns. One of those daubs called primitive: clueless tourists are crazy about them. Two crossed zebu horns and a Protestant sword decorate the other side of the wall, a sign of the religious zeal that pervades this shelter for foreign workers in our rich, dynamic Eritrean state.

Let us say in passing that our values of solidarity, conviviality and morality are now threatened by rapid social transformations and the violent unleashing of the unbridled free market, as the Afrigeltcard has replaced our ancestral traditions of mutual aid. The ancient country of Eritrea, governed for centuries by a long line of Muslim puritans, deeply influenced by the rigorism of the Senegalese Mourides, was able to prosper by combining good business sense with the virtues of parliamentary democracy. From its business center in Massawa or its online stock market on Lumumba Street, not to mention the very
high-tech Keren Valley Project
²⁰
and the military-industrial complexes in Assab, everything here works together for success and prosperity. This is what attracts the hundreds of thousands of wretched Euramericans subjected to a host of calamities and a deprivation of hope.