The Devil Is a Black Dog (16 page)

The deer lay on its side. It kicked the air with its forelegs; it could no longer stand. The area was filled with the sound of its crying, its nostrils quivering and steamy, its eyes open wide. The young man held the rifle to his shoulder and was preparing to shoot when he remembered how much his father hated it when he wasted bullets. He took out his knife and used it to cut the artery on the deer’s neck. The crying was soon overtaken by a deep gasping, and in under ten seconds the deer expired. He wiped the knife clean with a handful of dry leaves.

Footsteps approached, and his father emerged from the thicket.

“That was beautiful, for not having shot in a year.”

“I didn’t hit it right.”

“It won’t be left out in the forest, that’s the main thing. Tomorrow we won’t have to go sniffing around for the rotting carcass. We can call it a day.”

The young man put the deer on his shoulder and they began back to the cabin. The clouds covered the moon. The forest was bathed in darkness, but they knew the path. The cabin was
modest and simply furnished, with a wood stove, three beds, a big rough table, and chairs with comfortable cushions. The hunters drank cold beer as they skillfully cleaned the deer. There was one month left in summer.

T
he mine had torn his left ankle apart. Because of the flies he took off his shirt and spread it over the stump, then wound his belt tightly around his leg where the artery was. He watched the bugs feast on the blood from the soaked-through material.

In Chad, in the area between Abéché and Gaga, there were hardly any villages. The road was impassable due to the season’s rain. The river, which dried up during the summer months, surged over almost everything, due to the two months of continual showers. When the rainy season finally ended, the riverbeds were full with drinking water and the country was covered in green. Flowers grew red by the riverside, and the desert was kinder to its inhabitants. The entire phenomenon, however, wouldn’t last longer than a month.

Adam Abdelkarim lay squinting in the knee-high grass. It was approaching noon. He was perhaps thirty miles from Abéché. If he strained to see, he could make out the Sudanese border. His phone buzzed with each passing minute, the device signaling that it was running out of power. Nor did he have enough credit
to make a call. He looked down at his leg and caught the smell of his own blood and flesh.

He had left the backpack that was stuffed full of children’s books behind him. He hadn’t tried to drag it with him to the road, because every movement brought unbelievable pain. He had already come close to fainting when he tied off the bleeding artery.

It’s true. I shouldn’t have come
, he thought.
But I am so close.
He closed his eyes.

When the white foreigners had been evacuated, they’d all gathered together in the canteen. A drunk Belgian was shouting at the top of his lungs that this was the “last supper,” but otherwise it was mostly quiet. People just ate and tried to use their phones. There hadn’t been a signal since early morning; the rebels had seen to that. The canteen’s black workers nervously circulated with water pitchers. There was speculation about what would happen next, but exactly what that was, nobody could say for sure.

In Chad there were eight different armies in constant battle. The two most prominent were the national army and the United Front for Democratic Change; the former was in government hands, the latter recruited from the smaller tribes along the Sudanese borderlands.

Fighting would break out at the end of each rainy season, with the rebels desperately trying to take the capital, N’Djamena. Nobody knew exactly why they were fighting; they had simply grown accustomed to the continual war that two generations had been raised with. Over time slogans like “Change,” “Democracy,” and “Unity” wore away in direct proportion with the amount of Chinese or Russian ammunition fired. Only the tribal affiliations and the appetite for wealth remained for those who took part in the fighting. Few could resist. Everything was worth dying for: manliness, honor, a woman, arable land, enemy tribes’ property;
or perhaps they just fought to do away with the creeping rot of boredom that came with the rainy season.

During the rainy season, however, there was no war, because the roads were impassible. The government and the rebels forged a fragile peace agreement, which grew stronger with the first storm’s raindrops. Everyone was of one mind in this respect: while the showers fell, the fighting ceased. But there hadn’t been a drop in a week. Military action was flaring up in the east of the country.

Adam thought of Susan, the Englishwoman, and her scent of lavender. He pictured her light blue scarf. Under his foot he felt the gravel of the humanitarian base. Adam tried to recall their last conversation. The woman was around twenty years older. The base wasn’t ready yet, and she had been the first white person to arrive.

They were sitting at one of the canteen’s plastic tables, the wind catching the woman’s hat.

“You speak English beautifully,” she said. Adam thanked her. He’d learned English from a Sudanese Christian missionary. His father had wanted that for him.

“Do you know what it means to be a humanitarian?” asked the woman.

“To teach English to refugee children.”

“No. To be a humanitarian you need only do things for other people.”

The wind blew the woman’s hat from her head. Adam didn’t remember how the conversation ended, but it didn’t matter.
I always note the important things
, he thought. He remembered that Susan had a son who was addicted to cocaine back in London. Adam had never been to London, but he knew that an awful lot of people lived there. “Cocaine addiction is a sickness,” Susan said. Along with it comes a lot of suffering.
Their suffering is obviously greater
than mine. Everything is greater with white people
, Adam thought and looked at his ankle. The shirt was already sutured to it with dried blood. Somebody was bound to come this way sooner or later. He stuck his head up from the grass and spied the road, but other than a few birds, he didn’t see a thing. Adam was sure that someone from the nearest town would herd their animals here to drink, by nightfall at the latest. He could stay alive that long, no problem. It was just a matter of having enough water. He reached out a hand for his plastic bottle. The water was warm, and ran down his chin.

“To be a humanitarian you need only do things for other people,” he had explained to Mireille in the village. They were sitting in their adobe hut. Mireille was seventeen when he paid a bride price of 200 dollars—enough to live on around there for two years—to her father. He wasn’t sorry. For him that was just two months’ pay, thanks to the whites. Mireille raised her eyebrows. She still didn’t understand the word’s meaning.

“Then in our village everybody is a humanitarian.”

“No, you have to work with people outside of the tribe. The whites have no tribes,” he tried to explain, before alighting on a better example. “Being a humanitarian means the same as being a good Muslim. Only that the whites don’t know this.”

The answer must have satisfied the girl, because she reached out and stroked his cheek. She offered him milk, but he didn’t want any. He just watched how the warm goat milk flowed into her mouth. He loved her, but he couldn’t say why. Perhaps because she was the first to offer him something to drink when he came across the border from Sudan. Perhaps it was because she had the lightest colored palms from among the village girls.

Adam heard a car engine and machine-gun fire. He sat up and saw that a United Front truck was coming up the road. Eight
passengers were riding in the back, all off to the fighting. At least three from the group were not yet fifteen years old. He could tell which army they belonged to from the robes they wore. Adam gritted his teeth and kept down. He knew what it would mean if they noticed him; not one of them was of his tribe. He shuddered for a moment, thinking they had seen him, because the truck slowed, then stopped. The soldiers went to the largest pool of water and filled their canteens. He watched as the younger ones kicked around a stone as if they were playing soccer.

He had watched the championship game with the rest of the humanitarian workers. Everybody was rooting for Cameroon; they were playing Egypt, and they won. On the base there was no difference between the whites and the blacks, at least that’s what Susan said. Only that the black canteen workers always served meals first to the whites, who gave them bigger tips than the local black employees.

He rarely went to the base. He had worked in Goz Beïda for five months. When the contract expired, he went to Abéché to pick up his pay. Lots of the Sudanese refugees lived in Goz Beïda. He taught their children the ABCs in English. By now they knew enough of the language to buy a hat.

In the refugee camps everybody loved the whites, because they knew they had them to thank for their flour. When SUVs arrived at night, children ran out alongside them, and women waved from the huts. The camps were bigger than any city in the country. And they had their own militias, so they could protect themselves from the smaller groups of raiding bandits. This, however, didn’t deter the larger armies, which did what they knew best. A refugee camp was the best place if an army wanted to replenish its ranks or indulge its soldiers’ sexual appetites. In a country where there are simply too many laws to possibly obey, a man with a rifle in his hand is God himself.

He knew the belt around his leg had come loose, because the shirt began to redden again. The soldiers had already departed and nobody was on the road. When he retied the belt, he felt dizzy. Slowly night was falling. Adam thought about how the cocaine users must suffer.

The first SUV had arrived at the base at ten. Confusion was already taking hold. The base’s administration—Susan among them—had placed guards at the blue-painted entrance. By the door they set up a table to check passports. Everybody stood in a line. It was very hot and the men were sweating through their shirts.

“Those with European passports go first,” said Susan as she packed. She had already placed the framed picture of her with the Sudanese children of the camp in her suitcase. Adam’s expression must have been one of abject fright, because the woman stopped packing when she saw his face.

“Wouldn’t it be possible for my wife and me to go?” he asked.

“Not now. First the Europeans need to go.”

“But I am also a humanitarian.”

“I know,” the woman said as she resumed packing. “Don’t be afraid; we’ll be back soon. Nothing will happen here like in Darfur. We won’t allow it.”

“And when are you coming back?”

“Within a few days. A week at the most.”

“Then I will go and tell my wife not to worry,” Adam said with a smile.

“You shouldn’t be on the road now. Wait until the fighting ends,” said Susan, and with her suitcase in hand headed off toward the entrance.

It was a clear starry sky, more so than usual. A chilly wind blew. Adam was about an hour’s walk from the village. He began to
shiver. He felt the belt cut into his flesh. He had already lost a lot of blood. Adam looked down at his leg, and thought it was so white it couldn’t have been his own. He peered into the darkness on the road, straining to see. No movement.
It’s possible that the townsfolk only come to water their animals in the morning
, he thought.
I am strong. I can last until then. I was always strong.

He thought about streetlights, how he would be able to see much better if only the road were lit with them. The topic had come up with Susan once. In London everything is lit up. In France too. At night all of Europe is flooded with light. Only Africa stays dark at night. Surely in Europe you’d be able to see the village lights.

The crackle of machine guns sounded along with grenade bursts. In the distance something began to glow. It lasted twenty minutes, then the weapons went quiet, and all he could hear were the bugs in the grass.
Probably the United Front was trading fire with the national army
, thought Adam.
The village wasn’t the target; because of the whites they wouldn’t dare. They must have lit a few houses from the outskirts on fire. The houses there burn easier.

He remembered that once, when he was a child, he had nearly set their hut alight after he’d stolen his father’s pipe to test it out. His father had lashed him with a belt for that. Adam had no idea where his father was now. Somewhere in Darfur, in a village, if there were still villages in Darfur.
This isn’t Darfur
, he thought, and shook off his worries. He never understood why, on the TV they watched in the canteen, the tribes’ names were never mentioned in news broadcasts. Otherwise, the information didn’t mean anything to anybody.

Adam looked at his leg. It wasn’t bleeding anymore. He determined that if he were to cut off the foot, he would be able to move. Perhaps he could drag himself to the village. He took out the knife and considered how to go about the job. To remove the
foot he would have to cut the remaining tendons. The bone had been blown in two by the shrapnel, so he wouldn’t need to contend with that. He had witnessed similar operations in Abéché, in the hospital. There were children who, while herding animals, had stepped on a mine or an unexploded grenade. The goal in every case was to keep the limb from turning gangrenous and stemming the spread of infection. These days, lots of kids in the village market square played soccer with one leg and a crutch.

It spooked him that the cutting didn’t hurt at all. But it was over fast. He tried to crawl to the road, but he was weaker than he’d thought. After a few yards he gave up and passed out.

He saw his wife before him, how they made love. Recalling how good her scent was, he saw flowers in front of him and felt the touch of her skin.

Adam slowly came to. People were moving on the road. Civilians. Men, women, and children were running into the field. He held out his hand. A man found him. The man leaned into the grass and whispered that the United Front had declared the villagers enemies and began to shoot everybody. They had shot at least ten people in the head in the village square and had rounded up the women. Those who were still alive were fleeing. Adam stayed quiet. He asked the man if he knew where the soldiers were heading. “West,” said the man, who ran onward. In the field, mines exploded, and the sound of moaning filled the morning air. Adam couldn’t see the other wounded, but he heard their voices.