Terroir (23 page)

After Solomon betrayed them, that August day, they were rounded up and marched to the village and stood in a circle with their hands on their heads like kids in school. Then the rebel commander hacked Solomon's thumbs off on the chopping block where his mother killed chickens. It was a warning. Two soldiers held his mother back with their rifles, fencing her in. He was fifteen. He didn't feel anything at first. Just the thud and shock of the blade. Then sheared bone and flesh and thick, oozing blood. He remembered a day when his mother took a white hen and struck off its head with one blow, letting its blood spurt into dust. Flies darkened the severed head with its scarlet comb, the beak gaping, the eye shuttered by a white membrane. If you pulled the tendons that trailed from its neck, a dead hen's beak opened and closed in a silent cry.

The rebel soldiers left, driving the village children into exile. His mother bathed his hands, weeping, tearing an old
gomesi
to bind them. There was nothing to stay for. Even the soldiers at the barracks daren't return. Solomon and his mother set off for the trading centre where there was a dispensary, following the river to stay hidden, then finding the road. That's where he went to school, staying over, returning only at Christmas and Easter and for the long summer holiday. His mother hobbled with a stick for a crutch, a machete hanging from her waist. For two days they walked down the dirt road, eating cold cassava, sleeping under a coffee sack with nothing to keep the mosquitos away. They got to the school at dawn on the third day, watching it drift on the early mist like a mirage. The market stalls were deserted and the people had left. A starved white dog wandered in and out of the empty compounds. The head teacher, an Irish priest, cleaned up Solomon's wounds as his mother watched. Father Brian. His English was soft, liquid, like first rain when it patters against earth and darkens it.
Here is Solomon in all his glory.
That was his joke if he was late for Biology lessons. The other teachers had escaped, taking their pupils into the bush, making their way to the town.

They stayed with the priest for one night. He showed them the deserted schoolrooms, the empty dormitory where Solomon had slept with five other boys. There was a fish tank, green with algae, in which five dead goldfish floated belly up, stinking of slime and death. It had been Solomon's job to feed them from a special packet of food. It lay burst open on the floor and a line of ants was carrying it away, grain by grain.

In the dispensary, Father Brian soaked off the bloody bandages and dusted Solomon's wounds with antibiotic powder. They were black and swollen where his thumbs had been. He swabbed his thigh with alcohol and gave him an injection of ampicillin, patting his shoulder.
Good boy, good boy, now.
Solomon had never seen a white man cry before. He'd wanted to talk, the priest, telling them about the north of Ireland, where he'd grown up in a small village, before the seminary, before Africa. There were woods that he played in as a child, with trees that shed their leaves in winter then grew them again at another time. There was a flower called the bluebell that came in April or May, like faint mist covering everything, he said. Like morning mist, when roosters woke the village. He scratched at the grey stubble on his cheeks, leaving white track marks.

Father Brian shuttered the windows to hide the light of the paraffin lamp and then made them a meal. They sat at a table with a tablecloth and cutlery. They were served rice and beans and Solomon's mother fed him like a child with a metal fork. His hands throbbed with pain that was so constant he had to shut down his mind to close it out. He remembered those days as dull and grey and heavy with an underwater slowness, even though they were bright with sunlight.

The dog yelped in the night where Solomon lay awake on a mattress in an empty dormitory. His mother stayed at the priest's house, sleeping in the only bed. In the morning they were woken by pied crows calling. No voices or engines. The rebel soldiers had swept through days before, driving away goats, tying the legs of chickens and slinging them from their truck. If they caught you, they cut off your ears and lips. Children were forced to kill children. That way they could never leave.

His mother brought him black tea, holding the cup for him. They breakfasted on cold chapatti and leftover beans. Then Father Brian drove them south, the Toyota with its dusty windows rocking and creaking until they reached a metaled road. Then he paid a lorry driver to take them into the next town, away from the border. Father Brian gave Solomon's mother a tight roll of money, a packet of white tablets, a bible with a maroon cover. In the town they found every language. Solomon spoke in English to find a lorry that was going south. Then two days of driving, one night sleeping sitting upright in the cab like a row of dolls. The lorry driver was a tall Tanzanian who wore jeans and a torn vest. He spoke Swahili and was carrying sugar cane to the refinery built by the Chinese at the edge of the great lake.

Solomon had blanked out the pain in his memory. What he remembered was the traffic in the city, swirling in all directions.
Matatu
,
boda boda
, bicycles, cars, buses and trucks; the myriad blue windows of a tall concrete building winking in the sun; traffic lights that changed colour as a
matatu
driver took them to the University hospital. A small man with missing eyeteeth, he'd refused the money they offered, calling his mother
Sister
, showing them the kindness of strangers. At the hospital Solomon had two operations on his hands to cut away the damaged flesh and bone. Gradually they healed, leaving uneven stumps. His hands were like those of some human prototype. Unevolved. Primitive.

He remembered the smell of the hospital, the self
-
important voices of the doctors, the bright white tiles in the operating theatre. He remembered the surgeon who operated on him ruffling his hair and telling him how lucky he was. His mother was given ankle splints and a walking frame to heal her broken feet. She'd thrown the bible from the truck window on the first day, her face cut from stone. She never complained about what they had done to her. Whenever he woke at night, she seemed to be watching him, her eyes dissolving in the dimmed lights.

By the time Solomon had wheeled his mother down the high street and around to their flat on the brick built estate, a fierce little wind was whipping the litter down the pavements, shaking the neon sign above the off
-
licence that flickered at night like gunfire in a silent film. They shared a ground floor flat, part of a pebble
-
dashed terrace stuck with satellite dishes. Solomon helped his mother from the wheelchair in the hall, folding it under the stairs and unzipping her waterproof coat, making pliers with his first and second fingers. The heating had switched on and the flat was warm. He gave her his arm and supported her as she took tiny steps towards the living room. She lowered herself into an armchair and nodded at him.

– Thank you, son.

They spoke only English now. When he asked her to sing to him, to sing the old songs of their tribe, she refused.

– They would be bitter on my tongue.

When they had named him Solomon, they were hoping for great things. The way parents did, naming their children after kings or political leaders. The way all people hoped for better things for their children. But in the bible Solomon had been denied by God. Then his son Jeroboam took the throne, bringing slaughter, taxing his own people. Names were just foolishness. History itself was the scourge, curling around them like a whip – a scorpion's tail – to remind them of how little had changed or could.

Now Solomon's mother fumbled with the TV remote control to watch a gardening programme. A talkative woman with red hair and breasts half exposed was laying out a vegetable garden. Solomon watched from the doorway. He'd carried water for his mother from the river to the village, struggling to lift the weight of the cooking oil tin she'd threaded with rope to make a bucket. She'd shown him how to pour it at the base of each plant, how to water when the heat of the day was ebbing and the sun's fury was passing. He watched her now, yearning for a piece of land where she could grow tomatoes, beans, a little spinach. Back home she'd considered growing coffee as a cash crop now that the government was encouraging it. She wasn't too old, even if her feet were useless. Now their food came from the little supermarket down the road that had a green pine tree in a green circle as its symbol. It was special place, a shrine, with its neatly packaged food lying under white light in the fridges and freezers. It was clean, without the red dust that covered everything back home. Dust that his mother swept from the house every morning. Dust that had soaked up their blood and language and history and erased them.

Solomon set about making tea in the little kitchen. He'd been surprised at how difficult it was to do things without thumbs – dressing oneself, washing with soap, wiping himself after defecation, even urinating without splashing everywhere. In England, he had reconstructive surgery, the surgeons working with the remaining muscle and bone. They told him there would be some movement, but little sensitivity. He would have to use his eyes to gauge how and where to grip. He'd been helped by a physiotherapist who taught him to do these things. For a while he'd worn prosthetic thumbs that strapped to each hand with Velcro fasteners and helped him to hold things. They were the colour of white skin, as if that didn't matter. The rebel commander had been a man of imagination.

Solomon took teabags from the caddy, holding it against his stomach with one hand and pulling off the lid with the fingers of the other, then making the tea in the pot with milk already added. He had to hold the milk bottle with both hands. He could see his mother nodding in her chair in the adjoining room. The woman on the television was flicking out a length of hosepipe and watering a row of plants. Every now and then she looked up and forced a smile for the camera and said something he couldn't hear above the noise of the kettle. Solomon lifted the teapot and poured the tea, then placed the cups on a tin tray and carried it into the living room. His mother's eyes were hooded, as if she was almost asleep. Rain was dashing softly against the windows. He could hear music from upstairs where the Polish electrician lived. Sometimes they passed in the hallway, the electrician carrying his bag of tools and humming under his breath in a language where all the words seemed melodious, already joined together as song.

That night, Solomon lay in bed listening to his mother's breath in the next room. He thought of the sea ravaging the coastline, of Norse raiders in their longboats sculling to shore under the cliffs. As a child, the sea had been hard to imagine, though he'd been told about it, had read about it in books. When they left Africa, they'd flown over Lake Victoria, which had seemed endless, but even that didn't prepared him. On the lake there were small fishing boats and islands covered in palm trees, but the Mediterranean was truly huge, with an endless depth. Then this grey North Sea confronting them after they flew into Manchester and travelled by train to Newcastle. In the last world war, each nation had a navy and their sailors fought in steel ships. In Africa, they killed each other out in the open, under the sun. Here, there were even ships that sailed below the surface in the cold darkness. All that energy, all that human ingenuity gone into killing each other, the sea blazing with burning oil. Now submarines carried nuclear weapons, patrolling under the ice caps, watching and waiting. A Russian submarine, The Kursk, had become trapped on the seabed and all the sailors died. But not before they had time to write to their wives and sweethearts, feeling the oxygen become exhausted, holding each other's hands in the dark, dying for the Fatherland. Such thoughts carried him into sleep. He dreamed of the village where they'd played football, marking out goalposts on the barracks wall. He saw the river flowing like liquid metal, the crocodile lurch into its broken light.

When he woke, Solomon experienced a little spasm of surprise as he tried to close his hands around the sheets to throw them back. It was easier to think about the sea than to think about the future. The future should have run ahead of him like a road or a track clearing tangled bush. It was hard to walk that road when there seemed to be nothing there. The future, he'd realised, waking in the hospital with bandaged hands, his mother watching him from her chair beside the bed, was more than events that happened and days that dawned. The future was something you imagined in order to live. A promise you made to yourself against the curse the past had pronounced.

When the rebel soldiers came, he was with a group of younger boys in the centre of the village, playing under the jacaranda tree. Its purple flowers spilled onto the dirt. It was where the village elders held their meetings, where the government soldiers paraded to show the villagers how safe they were. It was where they had their primary school lessons – when the teacher wasn't drunk on
waragi
, or sleeping it off.
Education is light.
That's what he'd told them on his better days, smiling foolishly with perfect teeth, struggling to muster pencils and notebooks, propping up the blackboard in the decayed schoolhouse where termites ate the desks and floorboards and roof beams, where the rotted thatch let in snakes and rain.

Education? Light? That had been about the future. Solomon knew that now. Education was about acquiring wisdom. To know about the world was to know how the world had been and might be. History made the future.
Suffer the little children, to come unto me.
The rebel leader had quoted Jesus, gripping Solomon's arm, his eyes jumping like sparks, his uniform smelling of smoke, sweat and
ganja
. His fingers were hard and the vein on his forearm stood out, darkening the skin.