The Memory of Love (39 page)

The man with the megaphone ordered everybody to sit down. As new people arrived in the square they were pushed down to the ground. By the end only the man with the megaphone and his men remained standing. He announced his name: Colonel JaJa, and began to speak. Binta listened. At first the talk sounded to her like a political speech, with words like ‘government’ and ‘elections’. He told them the government had betrayed the people, and he spoke a name that before she had only read in the newspapers.

And she realised who these people were and guessed everybody else did too.

Binta’s mouth went dry.

Colonel JaJa shouted an instruction and four of his men came forward bearing a pair of bamboo cages strung between poles. In these boxes were men, tightly huddled into the small space. One of the boxes was opened and the man brought out, an army soldier, Binta guessed, by what remained of his uniform. He struggled to stand and held his side where his uniform was darkly stained. A rope around his waist led to one of JaJa’s men, who pulled at it. The man on the end of the rope offered no resistance and only stumbled after him, his head lowered like a child playing bull. The commander lowered the megaphone from his lips and his words were lost to Binta. She couldn’t take her eyes off the soldier. She missed the motion of the hand to the belt, the drawing of the weapon, the way JaJa took lazy aim before he shot the army soldier in the head. She heard the sound of cheers and claps from JaJa’s men. Somebody near by said, ‘
O Kuru
.’ My God. The body lay in the dust; the legs thrashed and were still.

A second cage was opened, another man brought forward. He held his bound hands up and Binta could tell he was begging for his life. Seconds later he too crumpled to the ground. Fear surged through the crowd, people began to panic. The commander spoke into the megaphone and warned them to remain still. Men were brought forward and ordered to move the bodies. Binta recognised them as the workers from the nursery, Agnes’s husband among them. She heard Agnes’s gasp.

The report of the gun. JaJa’s voice. Agnes’s gasp. Other than these sounds it seemed to Binta everything she was watching happened in silence. Dark smoke drifted beyond the roofs of the houses and the dusty smell of burning brick reached the square, carrying with it the magnitude of what was happening that day.

In the middle of the square Agnes’s husband, the eldest of the men, was struggling under the weight of one of the corpses. He was recently out of hospital, where he’d had a hernia operation. Agnes had talked to Binta about it. He stumbled, was hit by one of the thin men, and fell to the ground. The other nursery workers stood still. Binta saw them turn open-handed to JaJa, remonstrating, the way people do when they are afraid. From where she stood she could sense the anger in JaJa, for Binta had known men like him in her life. Men who yearned to inspire fear in others, and yet were angered when they saw it for it reminded them of themselves. The nursery men, though, seemed not to understand and kept coming, their palms turned upwards. Agnes’s husband clambered to his knees, holding his stomach, and reached out his free hand to touch JaJa. No, thought Binta. Don’t touch him. The old man’s fingers grasped at the Colonel’s clothing. The young commander stepped out of reach, then turned and walked away. For several seconds he stood motionless with his back to them all. Binta stopped breathing. Suddenly JaJa swung around and returned to the old man with a swift, unbroken stride, raised his weapon and shot him in the chest. There were screams. The sound of more shots, this time into the air. Somebody held on to Agnes, but there was nobody to hold her younger daughter Yalie, who ran to her father where he lay. The thin men gathered around laughing until one of them pulled her away. JaJa snatched a mattock from one of his men. Binta saw again the certainty in his movements. The thin men stood back while he hacked at the nursery worker’s neck with the blade, picked up the head and tossed it to Yalie, who instinctively reached out to catch it. The thin men cheered again.

Agnes’s husband’s death was the first of many. Afterwards the thin men were unleashed upon the town. This was the advance party. Now the war is over she knows their name. G5. She has heard it broadcast on the radio. Responsible for ‘coordinating relations between the civilian population and the rebel movement’, according to the spokesman for the rebels. Some called it the Sensitisation Unit.

There Binta stops speaking. Her hands have remained in her lap, still and quiet, her palms flat on her thighs, long, tapered fingers.

The nursery was on the way into town, somebody explains to Kai. They took the men from there as they entered the town over the bridge.

Yes, Kai nods.

Eleven o’clock. In the chair is a woman in her fifties, cropped grey hair and a thin scar enfolded by the soft flesh of her cheeks. Isatta was in the refugee camps in Guinea with Agnes and with her two years later when they made the long journey by foot back to the town.

In the camp it seemed they faced more dangers than on the outward journey. In the forest the dangers were from snakes, buffalo and rebel soldiers. In the camps there was hunger, typhoid and cold. But the greatest threat of all came from their own kind, gangs of men who searched the weak out from among the rest: those without family, women without menfolk. The first day they arrived Isatta and Agnes saw a row of girls lying at the edge of the camp, blood leaking from between their open legs. And on many mornings to come the bodies of young women were found dumped behind the tents, their
lappas
bunched around their waists. During the day families came to collect the bodies of their daughters. Those girls without family remained where they lay. Agnes and her two daughters were alone without men. So Isatta invited Agnes, Yalie and Marian to share a tent with her and her son. Just fifteen, Hassan had run out of time to become a man.

They survived by clinging to order: queuing for food, washing their clothes in the river, fetching water, hunting for firewood and edible plants in pairs. Scrubbing down the sides of the tent became a daily routine. In the evenings they slept together and Isatta’s son lay across the entrance. Outside lean shadows stalked between the tents. They prayed nobody would notice they were four women, protected only by a young boy. The refugees lived in fear of rebel raids, but those never came. Instead two cholera epidemics arrived within the first year. The third took Yalie. Marian died six months later, poisoned by a cut on her foot.

The day after Marian’s death Agnes disappeared. Isatta and her son searched the camp until dusk drove them to their tent. All night Isatta lay awake, fearing for Agnes. For if age was a woman’s protection at home, it was no protection here. The next day she found Agnes sitting on the other side of the stream, unharmed. She guided her back to the tent. For days Agnes neither spoke, nor moved, nor ate. Isatta was not disturbed by Agnes, for many were the women who mourned in such a way.

Order. Isatta never lost her belief in it. After a few days she urged Agnes on through a rigid routine of her own devising. Every morning after bathing they went to the Red Cross tent to check the list of new arrivals. In nearly two years Agnes had had no news of Naasu. But they’d both heard of the sacking of the city where they thought Naasu must be living – living without a father, a mother or a husband.

The Red Cross tent was where people exchanged news of home. New arrivals were especially sought after, for the information they might bring with them. In this way they learned of the turn in events, the troops who had come from overseas, the regaining, mile by mile, of rebel-held territory. Now, after eighteen months of fighting, the government had almost reached the border and the camps. More and more of the new arrivals were people travelling from one refugee camp to another searching for loved ones. One day a Red Cross worker approached Agnes and asked her name. ‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘We are holding a message for you.’

The message had been there for a month. It was from Naasu, searching for her father, her mother and sisters.

Naasu travelled to the halfway point of their journey home to meet them. Agnes, Isatta and Hassan had walked the distance. Now there were vehicles on the roads and with Naasu’s money they were able to obtain transport the rest of the way.

In the back of the
poda poda
Naasu told her story. She had stayed in the city for almost a year, sheltering in the house of a workmate. After the arrival of the foreign troops she waited until she heard it was safe to return to her home town, fourteen months after the Friday when she had sat with her father and eaten doughnuts on the John Deere tractor. Agnes embraced Naasu and said her father and sisters were dead and in her choice of words let Naasu believe they had all died in the camps together. Naasu wept. Isatta stared at Naasu. So beautiful and healthy: there was flesh on her arms, her hair was black where theirs had turned dry and red. Such elegant clothes. Naasu explained that she had met a man who offered to take care of her and she had married him. She begged her mother’s forgiveness for marrying without her permission and Agnes gave it easily, for a good man was what she had prayed Naasu might find. That at least was God’s true work.

Then Naasu reached across, took her mother’s hand and placed it on her belly. Agnes felt the roundness of her daughter’s stomach and for the first time Isatta saw her friend cry.

In this way they made the journey home.

The marketplace was empty, they saw nobody. Many houses were abandoned, others destroyed. They reached Agnes’s home first and what she saw silenced Isatta. The house was neat and the plaster was new. Chairs stood on the verandah much as they had two years before. It was all her husband’s doing, Naasu told them as she ran up the stairs. It was nearly dark and she invited Isatta and her son to eat with them and to stay the night. Since the food they had brought with them was finished, Isatta accepted. The three waited while Naasu went to find her husband. Isatta thought of her own house and wondered what she would find the next morning. She was happy for Agnes and envied her, too. Soon Naasu returned, her new husband following behind. Naasu was smiling, a sheen of excitement upon her skin as she brought him forward to greet her mother. The man stepped out from under the eaves of the house and into what remained of the light.

The old woman stops speaking. She is no longer looking at Kai, but down at her own lap. He can hear her breathing. There is silence. Somebody in the room urges her to continue. It is Ishmail’s aunt. The old woman looks to her and then back down at her hands.

‘What did you see?’ asks Kai, speaking for the first time.

She swallows and her voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘I saw JaJa.’

They are driving through the dark. Abass wide awake in the passenger seat, buckled in by his seat belt. Kai drives at some speed, propelled by what lies behind him, slowing for the bright lights that come at him out of the darkness.

Ishmail had accompanied him as they made their way slowly down darkened streets back to Old Faithful. Kai unlocked the car and Abass climbed inside. He turned to Ishmail and put out his hand. Automatically, they clasped hands and clicked thumbs and fingers. Kai thanked him. Ishmail inclined his head. They stood awhile in silence until, as though in completion of some shared observation, Ishmail sighed and said, ‘So now you see us here. This is God’s wish.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘You ask me one day, I would answer no, I don’t believe it. You ask me the next day, after these things have occurred, I would not know how to answer you. Such things happened everywhere, for what reason I cannot tell you.’

‘No.’ Kai sighed and shook his head. ‘Nobody can.’

‘So what is there to do but pray?’

Kai hadn’t answered. Instead he embraced his cousin, slipped behind the wheel of the vehicle and drove out of the town.

He remembers now that they’ve eaten nothing since the chicken they bought in the marketplace. He pulls over at the next junction and buys four ears of roast corn. They drive on.

‘Better?’ he says to Abass.

The boy nods. He has been silent since they left the town. Instead he has been sitting, watchful and still, gazing at the darkness ahead of them, unblinking even in the face of the oncoming headlights.

‘So the man killed the lady’s husband and then he married her daughter,’ Abass says.

Kai doesn’t spare the child, but replies, ‘Yes.’

‘And now she has to live with him and keep quiet because her daughter doesn’t know what he did.’

He had been listening to every word spoken in the house.

‘That’s right,’ says Kai.

‘And everybody else keeps quiet, too.’

‘Yes.’

‘What about us?’

Kai turns briefly to look at Abass, who does not return his look but stares straight ahead. The darkness seems to hurtle at them, breaking apart on the windscreen and closing up again in their wake. Abass says, ‘Do we have to keep quiet?’

‘No,’ says Kai. ‘No, we don’t.’

‘What if we lived in that town? Would we have to be quiet then?’

In the silence all Kai can hear is the rush of air. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

The hospital is in darkness, save for the glow of security lights. Kai and Abass pass the wards. A door stands ajar; through the gap he can see a nurse at her station. Hushed footsteps, whispers, the slow squeak of wheels and of rubber on lino.