The Bite of the Mango (7 page)

One late afternoon, after begging in the streets, I rounded the corner to my tent to see Musa standing there, talking to Marie. I was heavy by now with the baby. My walk was a waddle, like the women I knew back in Magborou just before they gave birth. I walked down to the clock tower in Freetown, which was the busiest part of the city and a good place to beg, with my cousins each morning, but I couldn’t keep up with them on the journey home, often falling so far behind that Freetown was shrouded in darkness by the time I made it to the camp. Recently, I had started leaving the city as soon as Freetown became thick with afternoon haze.

When I saw Musa, I stopped in my tracks. I was paralyzed. A part of me wanted to run away. Another part of me wanted to fly into his arms.

Musa noticed me before I could make a decision. His face opened into a wide smile. “Hello, Mariatu. How are you?” he called out.

I stood quietly as Musa wrapped his arms around me. The scent of his warm body reminded me of our times together at the farm, holding hands under the hot noonday sun.
I despaired at the thought I’d never be able to hold his hand again.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Musa suggested, standing back.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

As we strolled around the camp, Musa told me about his life since we’d last seen each other. He and his mother had escaped their village before the rebels burned it down. They had made their way to Freetown and were living in the cramped apartment of relatives along with another family.

So many villagers were now streaming into Freetown to avoid the rebels that neighbors in the city often knew each other from the provinces. One of Musa’s neighbors had fled Manarma just before the attack. He told Musa that he’d heard afterwards that four cousins from Magborou had had their hands amputated there. Worrying that I was one of them, Musa had come immediately to the camp.

By the time we circled back to the tent, Mohamed, Ibrahim, and Adamsay were having their evening meal of rice and groundnut soup.

“Do you want to eat?” I asked Musa.

He shook his head, so I motioned for him to follow me inside. We sat side by side on my straw mat. “Tell me what happened to you, Mariatu,” he pleaded. He listened patiently as my story tumbled out.

Musa cried when I was finished. “If only I had stayed with you,” he said, “we could have escaped the rebels together. I love you.”

My body stiffened. His words echoed in my head. “I love
you, too,” I wanted to tell him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want Musa to love me anymore. My body slumped forward as I wrapped my arms underneath me.

“Musa,” I said in a voice drained of emotion. “I think you need to find someone else.”

“No,” Musa cried out. He pulled me into his arms, starting to rock me, but I pushed him away.

“Go,” I said to him. “Go, and don’t come back. I don’t want you to see me anymore, not like this.” I held up my arms, then rubbed my pregnant belly. “I want you to find a normal girl and have a normal life. And I want you to remember me for who I used to be, what I used to look like.”

“I want
you
, Mariatu.”

“Musa,” I shouted, “I’m telling you. Don’t love me anymore!”

“But I want to be with you,” he stammered. “I want you to name your baby Musa and come and be my wife one day, like we promised.”

I pushed him away from me. “It will never happen. I want you to go and never come back.”

Musa continued to protest, but with every word I withdrew further. I stopped listening. I lost interest in even arguing with him. I let him ramble on and on until he stopped.

When silence finally filled the tent, Musa kissed me on the forehead and slowly got up.

“I will come back,” he said. “I will make you see that we can still be together.”

I didn’t even look at him as he left the tent.

Musa came back twice before the baby was born. Both times it was just as the sun was setting for the night and I had returned from begging. Both times I said I was too tired to talk. I left him by the fire, conversing with Ibrahim and Mohamed, and went into the tent alone. I didn’t cry. Every time a thought of Musa popped into my head, I shook it away. Yet when I heard Musa call goodbye, I felt a great emptiness inside me.

On a morning not long after Musa’s third visit, I woke very early. It was still dark outside. My clothes were dripping wet from perspiration, and I felt cold and shaky despite the heat. As I rolled over to get up, pain surged through my abdomen and down my legs and arms.

“OUUUCH,” I yelled. “OUUUCH.” Writhing around on my mat, I screamed for Abibatu, Fatmata, and Marie.

Abibatu kept a small basket of clean white strips torn from sheets by the side of my mat. She intended to use them when she and the others helped deliver my baby, she said. Fatmata had been gathering secondhand clothes for the child, mostly from Father Maurizio, a bald-headed and almost always smiling Italian priest who worked at the camp.

Marie rushed into the room. She felt my stomach, then examined me. “There is something wrong,” she said. “You’re not dilating.”

Marie ran to get the camp nurse, who gave the same diagnosis. “Mariatu will have to deliver the baby at the hospital,” the nurse said. “I’ll call for the ambulance.”

We waited several hours for the ambulance, which was a Red Cross jeep, and it seemed to take just as long to navigate the busy Freetown streets. By the time we got to the maternity
hospital, it was noon. My contractions were coming fast and furiously.

A female doctor there explained that my birth canal was too small. “And the baby is big,” she said. “There’s no room for the baby to come out. You’ll need to have an operation called a C-section.” She ran her finger along my stomach to show me where she’d make the incision.

The last thing I recall is the doctor sticking a needle into my arm.

Many hours later, I woke in a bright room, light streaming in through a big open window. I felt listless as I watched some dust dancing in the sun’s rays. My eyelids were starting to close again when I suddenly remembered where I was, and why. As I tried to sit up, I was greeted with more pain. Pulling the sheet away, I saw that my stomach was taped and bandaged.

I started to cry, and the other girl in the room called out for help.

Abibatu hurried in to comfort me. After a moment Marie arrived, carrying my baby.

“It’s a boy,” said Abibatu, reaching over to take the child.

A boy, just as Salieu had predicted in my dream. The baby was swathed in a blue blanket. All I could see were his round face and matted black hair. He was cooing. With one look at that little face, all my anger disappeared. The baby looked like I imagined an angel would, with his soft, chubby cheeks. “I can take care of this baby,” I thought. “I can even love this child.”

“What do you want to name him?” Marie asked me.

“Abdul,” I blurted out.

I hadn’t thought about it in advance, but I knew instantly
that this baby would be named Abdul, after Fatmata’s Abdul, Mohamed’s uncle.

Abibatu held Abdul in one hand as she helped prop me up into a sitting position with pillows behind me. She shaped my arms into a cradle, then placed the baby in them.

I’d never felt such love in my heart.

Abdul made sucking sounds, puckering his lips like a fish.

“What’s he doing?” I giggled.

“I think he wants to be fed,” Abibatu replied.

“Come on, little mommy,” Marie joked. She held Abdul as Abibatu pulled up my top.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“You’re going to breast-feed your child,” Marie told me. She put Abdul back in my arms, pushed his face onto my breast, and fastened his mouth onto my nipple.

My sensations of love soured as anger washed over me.

“Can’t one of you feed him?” I asked Marie and Abibatu. No one had told me this would be my responsibility.

Marie laughed. “Mariatu,” she said, “my breasts are old. There is no milk left in them. And Abibatu has never had a child. She can’t give milk. Only you can.”

I stayed in the hospital for about two weeks. The doctors wanted to make sure that my stomach was healing properly and that I was breast-feeding Abdul before letting me return to Aberdeen.

“There are lots of diseases at the camp,” a nurse told me. “Malaria, dysentery, colds, and flus. You need to be healthy so that your milk will give Abdul a shot at surviving those bad conditions.”

“Food is scarce in the camp, so it’s important that you try to eat as much as you can while you’re here,” Abibatu added.

Some people at the camp were so thin that you could see their ribs through their T-shirts. They coughed and wheezed as they walked. Some of the amputees had died from their wounds, a few right in their tents. It was common at night to hear someone screaming in pain. But I had become used to the sounds. I hadn’t realized that many of the diseases at the camp could be passed from one person to another.

Abdul slept beside my bed in a small metal crib. Abibatu, Marie, and Fatmata felt that the baby and I would bond better if we were together all the time, but that never happened. Abdul would cry in that crib and I couldn’t move. I’d just stare at him until one of the women put him on my breast to feed. I didn’t rock Abdul in my arms. I didn’t sing lullabies to him. I didn’t talk to him. I don’t know why.

When I first saw the gaping scar on my stomach from the C-section, I felt like vomiting. All I could think was: “What else? What other deformity will befall my body?”

After the nurse removed my stitches, I headed straight to the washroom down the hall. In the privacy of a stall, I tried to rip off my bandages with my arms and teeth. My plan was to punch myself in the stomach until I bled to death. I couldn’t get the bandages off, though. Eventually I gave up and rested my head against the wall.

Since finding out I was pregnant, I’d endured serious bouts of depression, followed by moments of extreme happiness in which I forgot all about the war. Fatmata and Abdul’s marriage was one such occasion. I’d felt hopeful then. I dreamt
that one day it would be me wearing a beautiful Africana wedding dress. But as my gaze floated to the ceiling in that washroom stall, I wondered if I would ever have one of those happy moments again.

Ibrahim, Mohamed, and Adamsay were very nice to me when I returned to the camp, taking turns holding the baby and asking me what childbirth was like. “I was asleep for it all” was my answer. Everyone gave me extra food, particularly vegetables. Over dinner, I’d lose myself listening to my cousins talk about their day, kids they’d met on the street while begging or something funny that had happened, like someone getting beaten up for stealing a pineapple from one of the vendors. Then Abdul would start whimpering. My cousins would go elsewhere as Marie or Abibatu passed the baby to me. The shadows cast by the fire couldn’t conceal the frustration that showed on my face.

Begging was completely off-limits for me, even though I desperately wanted to go. I tried everything to get Marie to give me permission. “We need more food, because you’re giving me so much extra,” I’d plead.

“No.”

Mohamed made me feel worse by poking fun at my situation. “You’re a grown woman now, Mariatu,” he’d laugh. “Why would you want to hang out with us young kids? Stay home with the adults. Feed your baby and we’ll look after you.”

The longing to join my cousins became so strong that one morning, after I’d finished breast-feeding Abdul, I handed him back to Fatmata, stood up, and declared: “I’m going with the others tomorrow!”

“You can’t,” Marie protested. “Abdul needs you.”

Abibatu stepped in. “I’m worried. You and Abdul aren’t bonding like a mother and child should. He spends most of his time with us,” she said, pointing to herself, Marie, and Fatmata.

“I will go with Mariatu,” said a voice from the entranceway to our tent. Startled, we all turned to look. Standing there, her hands on her big hips, was Mabinty.

Mabinty was an older lady who lived in one of the other rooms. She hadn’t been injured in the war, but rebels had burned down her home. She’d walked to Freetown along with many others from her village. She missed her daughter, who lived in her husband’s village in the north of Sierra Leone. “If I could get to her village without fear that the rebels might ambush me,” Mabinty would moan, “I’d go tomorrow.”

The rebels were still invading villages, though not as often as they had in the past. The number of casualties reaching Freetown was diminishing. Still, ECOMOG forces warned Sierra Leoneans not to travel on the main roads or through the western regions of the country in case of sudden attacks.

Mabinty didn’t have much to do at the camp, so she occasionally helped care for Abdul by bathing him in one of the big plastic tubs or rocking him to sleep as she sang Temne songs.

“I will go with Mariatu,” Mabinty said again. “I’ll look after Abdul while she joins her friends. In my village, I cooked,
sewed, and helped look after lots of babies. I was a grandmother to many children. Now I do nothing but sit around and watch the younger women cook.”

I ran up to Mabinty and hugged her. “Thank you! Thank you!” I said over and over again.

Marie, Fatmata, and Abibatu threw up their arms at the same time.

“What are we going to do with you, Mariatu?” Marie exclaimed.

The next day, my begging routine started again. Adamsay would wake me in the mornings. If Abdul was still sleeping, I’d rush outside and brush my teeth before waking him. After I’d fed him, we all left the camp together, Adamsay, Ibrahim, Mohamed, Mabinty, Abdul, and me.

Adamsay and I often split off from the boys, as people in Freetown gave more money to girls. We’d ask people for leones all the way down to the clock tower in the middle of Freetown, and then all the way back to the camp. Mabinty, holding Abdul, remained close. When he was hungry, the three of us would go behind a market stall or down an alleyway, away from the other kids. I’d sit on the dirty ground and breast-feed; Mabinty stood in front of me, blocking any onlooker’s view. I’d give Abdul back to Mabinty for another hour or so of begging before he indicated he needed me again, by puckering his lips and softly crying.

Such were my days for a while. One afternoon, quite by chance, I was holding Abdul while Mabinty was off talking to another older woman. I was standing impatiently, pacing back and forth, when a man dropped 40,000 leones (about $12) into
my black plastic shopping bag. It was the most money I’d ever earned at one time.

“Poor child,” he said to me. He patted Abdul on the head before walking on.

“He took pity on you,” Mabinty said after I explained excitedly what had happened.

“Why?” I wondered.

“Because you have not only yourself to feed, but Abdul,” she said. “Watch. You start carrying that child and you’ll get more money than anybody.”

Indeed, passersby always singled me out when I held Abdul. From then on, I earned more money each day than all of my cousins combined.

When Abdul was several months old, a camp official came to our tent one night looking for me. He explained to me in Krio, which I now understood from hearing it all the time in Freetown, that some foreign journalists were coming to the camp the next day. They wanted to interview and take pictures of amputees from the war. Would I come the next morning, with Abdul, to the main part of the camp to meet them?

I was puzzled. “What is a journalist?” I asked.

“Someone who will tell your story to people in other countries,” the man replied.

“What do these people want with Mariatu?” Marie asked him. “She’s just a poor village girl.”

“Not anymore,” the official said. “Her village was ruined and the rebels hurt her badly. The world needs to know about the war in Sierra Leone.”

Abibatu pressed him further. “What will Mariatu get out of this?”

“Maybe someone will read about her and send her money, try to help her,” the man replied. Apparently several youth in the camp had people from foreign countries sending them money and supplies. “Some of the children are even going to live in the West, in wealthy countries where there are no wars, all because journalists are telling the world about our problems.”

At first I said no, thinking of all the money I’d be missing by not begging. But Marie and Fatmata encouraged me to go.

“Someone might hear about you, Mariatu, and give you money,” Fatmata said.

The next morning, I marched to the center of the camp with Abdul in my arms, a little angry at letting my cousins go off to Freetown without me. I sat down with a huff on a bench, well back from where I could see the camp official and the journalists talking.

When the official spotted me, he jogged over, smiling. He led me to a big table where four people were seated. For a moment I was speechless. For the first time in my life, I was looking at blue eyes and green eyes, yellow hair and brown hair, and these men and women had the lightest skin I had ever seen.

A woman with short red hair put her hand on my shoulder. “Hello,” she said in Krio. That impressed me, since Marie and Alie had told us that foreign people didn’t speak Temne, Krio, or Mende, the three main languages of Sierra Leone. The woman was pretty, and she made me feel at ease.

“Can you tell them about what happened to you?” the camp representative jumped right in.

I didn’t know where to begin, so I sat quietly, thinking. The lady with the red hair said something to the representative, who turned to me. “She wants to know if you are with your family?”

“Yes,” I replied. That was an easy question.

The representative translated another question from the woman. “Do you need anything?”

“Vegetables, clean water, soap, new clothes, dishes.” I don’t know where my answer came from, but I found myself reciting a long list of everything we didn’t have at the camp that we’d had back at Magborou.

I then broke into my story, or at least a small portion of it: “My name is Mariatu. I am a victim of the rebel attack on Manarma. Child soldiers held me hostage for ten hours and then cut off my hands. I now live at Aberdeen with my cousins Adamsay, Ibrahim, and Mohamed, who were also in the Manarma attack. They don’t have hands either.”

“How old is your baby?” the red-haired woman asked.

“His name is Abdul,” I replied. “He’s five months old.”

My first interview with the media lasted about 15 minutes. The representative then led the journalists on a tour of the camp, asking me to follow behind. At one point he directed me to stand still, with Abdul in my arms, so that the photographers could take pictures of me. I remember it well. My bare feet were caked in mud; a dog barked wildly in the background; behind me was a clothesline.

The camp official slipped a few leones into my arms and said he would call for me again.

It would be many years before I read the articles written about me that day and in the days to come. Every one of them
would come back to haunt me. The journalists all said the rebels had raped me and that I had conceived Abdul during the attack on Manarma.