Radiance of Tomorrow, Page 2

  “I do hope the other towns will come alive soon. I am fond of wandering down the path to another village or town at midafternoon to sit with its elders.” Pa Moiwa surveyed the four paths that came in and out of the town.

  “Just as in the old days. You think all such simple things can become our lives again?” Mama Kadie asked. She didn’t want an answer and her friend gave none. They became quiet, each thinking of the day their lives had been shifted in another direction that they were still trying to return from.

  * * *

  Imperi was attacked on a Friday afternoon when everyone had returned from the market, from farms, and from schools, to rest at home and pray. It was that time of day when the sun came to a standstill and flexed the brightness of its muscles so intensely that even for those used to the dry season it became absolutely and unbearably hot. People sat on their verandas or under the shade of the mango trees in their backyards and drank hot tea or something cold, whispering to one another, as even their voices needed rest. The excited voices of children, however, didn’t need any respite. They came intermittently into town from the river, where they swam and played games, chasing after one another, their school uniforms strewn on the grasses at the riverbank.

  There were three primary schools in town and two secondary schools nearby. While they didn’t have sufficient school materials, there were a good number of benches and desks. And the buildings were solid, though they had no doors, windows, or roofs. They did have the openings where these “ornaments,” as the headmaster called them, were supposed to be and where sometimes patches of zinc hung on the rafters. The teachers used to joke, “Who needs things covering the roofs, doors, or windows when you need the breeze to blow through your classroom all day or the heat will teach you more of a lesson than what you had planned for your students!”

  The teachers were lively and the students were even livelier, in their colorful uniforms, so eager to learn that they would sit on the bare earth under mango trees or under the hot sun, excitedly reciting what was taught to them.

  The inhabitants of Imperi had heard of the war that was hundreds of miles away, but they didn’t think it would enter, let alone severely wound, their lives. But that afternoon it did.

  Several rocket-propelled grenades introduced the people of Imperi to war when they exploded in the chief’s compound, bringing down all the walls and killing many people, whose flesh sizzled from the explosions. These were followed by gunshots, and screaming and wailing, as people were gunned down in front of their children, mothers, fathers, grandparents. It was one of those operations that the fighters called “No Living Thing”—they would kill everything with life. Anyone who escaped such operations was extremely lucky, as the fighters would ambush towns and attack, shooting at will.

  Chaos had engulfed Imperi, and some people, especially the very old and children, were trampled on. The passing soldiers, mostly children and a good number of men, shot those who hadn’t died when they came upon them. They laughed at the fact that by creating a stampede, the civilians had helped to make their operation easier.

  Mama Kadie had watched the bullets tear into her two eldest sons and three daughters. They each hit the earth with eyes wide open, filled with surprise at what had just happened to them. Blood poured out of different parts of their bodies and then at last their teeth were covered with red saliva as life departed them. It had all happened so quickly, and she ran toward them not knowing exactly why, but her heart as a mother had been shattered and this was all she could do. She had no fear for her life. But someone seized her arms from behind and dragged her away from the bullets, away from the opening and near the bushes, where she was left to wake up from the shock and where her instincts to live emerged. In such circumstances, one has to abandon not only the feeling of pain but also sometimes even maternal instincts, and it must be done with immediacy.

  She thought about her grandchildren. What if they survived, since they were at the river? Even though the voices of the children had ceased coming through the wind since the gunshots started, she wanted to go to the river, but sounds of heavy firing were coming from that direction. She deliberately turned to see her home one last time before she took up all the speed her age could bear, with bullets flying and catching people around her as she ran out of Imperi.

  * * *

  Pa Moiwa woke her from her thoughts with a deliberate coughing fit. Her face, the slouching of her cheekbones in particular, had given away that difficult memories consumed her just now.

  “I was here on that day, at the mosque,” he said, “and I ran away from the prayer mat. I think God understood because he let me live through that day.” With a stick, he drew some lines on the ground, a way to distract himself somehow so that the thoughts of that day didn’t get a complete hold of him. They knew they had to put off for a while speaking about this part of the past. But their thoughts diverged. Pa Moiwa’s mind dwelled on the fire that had burnt his house that afternoon. His wife had been at home in bed recovering from a small illness and his twenty-year-old granddaughter had been tending to her. When he saw them run out of the house, slapping the fire off their bodies with all of the remaining might they had left, he thought they would live. But two children, a boy and a girl, had gunned them down and carried on shooting at other people and laughing. He knew he had to go before the children saw him.

  “Well.” Mama Kadie’s voice waited for strength.

  “The spider sometimes runs out of webs to spin, so it waits in the one it has spun.” Pa Moiwa used the old saying to assure his friend that more words would come to her and she might be able to dwell on things other than the horrors of the past. They were still holding on to old times, to old things, to an old world that didn’t exist anymore. Fragments of it worked every now and then, though. She regained her voice.

  “Well, I eventually ended up on a small island near Bonthe. A fishing village that had nothing but fishermen, their families, and huts that the wind tossed into the air and set back down every other evening as though searching for something.” Mama Kadie leaned against the guava tree under which they sat.

  “I just wandered everywhere for years, sleeping wherever night found me,” Pa Moiwa said. “My old age became a blessing many times on those days when everyone wished that their youthful qualities were behind them.” He said nothing more for a while and Mama Kadie didn’t ask. He was thinking again about the war, specifically about the numerous times he had escaped death. About the time the soldiers decided instead to chase after the young people, saying, “He is old, so don’t waste the ammunition on him. He can’t go far, so we will catch him and use the knives when we get back.” A group of boys who could have been his grandchildren had run after more agile folks, shooting at them.

  But when Pa Moiwa spoke next, he described something different from what had possessed his mind just then. “The bones and muscles in my feet never felt tired of wandering; in fact, they felt restless. It was only when I set foot here—” He placed his palms on the ground and rubbed the dirt with his eyes closed for a few seconds before continuing. “It was only here that my feet and spirit suddenly felt tired.” He let his tongue rest for the passing wind to speak.

  The only time they allowed whatever was inside of them to take hold of their faces, driving away their shiny wrinkles even in the presence of the sun, was when they came across bones of children, especially when there were too many of them in one area. They both had several grandchildren; Mama Kadie had five and Pa Moiwa counted six. Mama Kadie would sometimes look at certain piles of bones so intensely that her eyes watered. She hoped that she would recognize something on the bones that might reveal to her that it was one of her grandchildren. After a long period of separation, not knowing whether they were alive or dead, it was sometimes easier to want to bury them; the pain of unknowing was severe and never ending.

  “This is truthfully of a girl,” she whispered to herself while examining a pelvic bone. “And these are of boys.” Three of her grandc
hildren were always together, so she wanted these bones to be them. “If only the clothes on them didn’t rot.”

  Pa Moiwa would often press the palms of his hands on the small bones and wait to hear the voice of one of his grandchildren, to feel something that reminded him of one of them, but nothing occurred. Only the faces of the children and the sound of the school bell that morning before the attack filled his memory. He was convinced that the bones communicated with him, even if generally. He used to walk his grandchildren to school every morning and greeted people at every household. He would sigh as this memory ached his entire being.

  * * *

  The two elders had been in town for almost a month and had managed to clean up quite well. Every morning, Pa Moiwa would rise earlier than Mama Kadie and go to the bush to check the traps he had set the previous evening. Whenever he went into different parts of the forest, he saw more remains. These he would hide under shrubs or bury so the animals would not find them. He returned with whatever animal had been caught in the traps—a porcupine, a guinea fowl—which he would cut into pieces and have Mama Kadie cook for them. He didn’t tell her about the skulls and chopped hands he had seen and how he had examined the ones that had bits of flesh for the birthmarks of his children or grandchildren.

  She would go wandering around the old farms looking for potatoes, cassavas, anything edible that grew in the neglected plots to cook with the meat that he brought back. Mama Kadie also saw skeletons, hung in farmhouses with fracture marks from bullets or machetes on the bones. She did her best to set them down and find resting places for them. She said nothing of this to Pa Moiwa. They took care of each other during the day, but at night they went to the ruins of their own houses. Each had found a corner to sleep in shielded on one side by a wall and the other by sticks and thatch. They struggled to find sleep on the mats that separated their bodies from the earth. The tattered blankets couldn’t warm their old bones. But they were home, where they knew exactly which tree the first sunrays would pierce through, a signal for God to connect with humans, every day. They had to be in their homeland for that—one could, if possible, hear God only through the words of one’s own land.

  * * *

  One morning after the first month and while they were both gone to look for food, another elder, a man, arrived in town. He also had come by the path and saw the footprints around town. He didn’t know whether they were friendly ones, so he hid in the nearby bushes and waited. The war had ended, but the reflex of disbelieving in the kindness of a quiet town remained with him.

  He had come from the capital city, where he had eventually ended up after searching every refugee camp for his family. At each of these camps he’d had to register as a refugee, so his pockets were filled with ID cards. He didn’t like the squalor and congestion in the camps and so had started making traditional baskets, which he sold for enough money to rent a one-bedroom in the western part of the city. His new neighbors felt sorry for him and gave him food every day, and their children took a liking to him, but the relationship hurt his heart. They made him remember his own grandchildren. Still, he would sometimes walk the children to school. The children thought he did it because he liked it, but in truth he had been going from school to school in search of his son, Bockarie, who was a teacher. Wherever he stayed, he would visit all the schools and observe all the teachers. There was no sign of his son. He knew that if he was to find some family members, if luck was to smile his way, he would have to get back home. Therefore, as soon as it was announced that the war had ended, he began making plans to return to Imperi.

  * * *

  When he got nearer to his town today, he began remembering the day he had run away, the day of “Operation No Living Thing.” He was at the mosque and the gunmen came inside and started shooting everyone. He fell and bodies piled on top of him. The soldiers fired some more at the bodies to make sure everyone was properly dead. He held his breath. He didn’t know how he lived through it. After they left, he waited, hearing the sounds of men, boys, girls, and women crying in pain as they were tortured and then killed outside. He knew most of the voices, and at some point his ears cut him off of their own accord. He stayed under the bodies until late at night when the operation had finished and there was no sound of any living thing, not even the cry of a chick. He pulled himself out and saw the bullet-ridden bodies, some hacked. He ran out of town covered in the blood and excrement of those killed on top of him. He could not feel or smell anything for days. He just ran and ran until his nose reminded him what he was covered in. It was then that he searched for a river and washed himself clean. But water wouldn’t clean the smell, sound, and feeling of that day.

  * * *

  As the sun was stretching the cold bones of morning with its warmth, Mama Kadie and Pa Moiwa returned to town. They both noticed footprints that weren’t theirs and became worried. As they whispered about what to do next, a voice spoke from a concealed position under the bushes: “The marks you see on the earth are traces of your friend Kainesi, whose words of greeting come from the coffee trees behind you.”

  Meeting old friends had become strange. “I am now going to place myself in front of your eyes.” He pulled his thin body from under the bushes whose leaves had left pimples of water on his face. He was wearing a blue hat with the letters NY that young men wore in the city. He had found it on the ground somewhere and wore it to cover his head from the wrath of the sun and because the initials on the hat were the letters of his family name, Nyama Yagoi. He removed the hat to reveal his much-wrinkled face, the scars across it and his skull. A young boy had slashed lines on his face with a bayonet and tried to open his head with a dull machete, proclaiming that he was practicing to become a “brain surgeon.”

  At first, Mama Kadie and Pa Moiwa didn’t want to look at their friend, but in each other’s faces they found courage to do so. They embraced him, squeezing him between them until he laughed, making the scars on his cheeks magnify, resembling a second grin.

  “Well, you came out of that madness with an extra smile!” Pa Moiwa commented, and they shook hands, their old, warm fingers holding on to each other for a while, each man’s eyes fixed deeply on the other’s.

  Mama Kadie wanted to ask, How are you, your children and grandchildren, your wife, their health? as greetings were in the old days, but she held her tongue. These days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another. She placed her hands on each of their shoulders, gently releasing her friends from the stupor of all that had come to pass. She thought, We are here, alive, and we must go on living.

  “Now I have two men to take care of me. Two old friends whose strength may equal a young man’s.” They all laughed.

  “We still have laughter among us, my friends, and hopefully some of those we have shared it with so deeply will return and we will be waiting,” Pa Kainesi said.

  And the three old friends walked into the ruins of their town, the air sailing a bit livelier, waking the trees from their slumber and making a small tornado of dust as though cleansing the air for the possibility of life again.

  2

  PEOPLE HAD BEEN AWAY from Imperi for seven long years. During that time, the days became drawn out as they waited, restlessly, to start living again. They had seen the fire of war lick their town so viciously that even when the war was said to be over, it took them over a year, and more for some, before they started thinking about returning home. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to go back. Rather, war had taught them not to trust what they heard on radios, through rumors, and, for those who lived in the capital city, read in newspapers. They knew firsthand that the madness didn’t cease immediately just because someone signed a peace accord or some useless ceremony honored those who were not close to the realities they had just proclaimed to have stopped with a signature. It would take months for fighters in the deep countryside to get the message, and even longer to believe in it. Those who returned were coming from refugee camps in the outskirts of cities and in neighborin
g countries where they had waited all these years in tarpaulin houses to go home or start life somewhere else. The waiting had had no fixed end date. Every life seemed on hold. Nothing was sure in either direction; everything was temporary, and yet it went on for years, no one wanting to accept that it could become permanent.

  “We are permanently waiting for the temporary war that is nearing ten years to end,” a musician had said in a popular song. Some people couldn’t wait in one place, so they wandered about, making themselves vulnerable to other exploitations—police brutality, or mistreatment by the employers, relatives, and friends for whom they worked in exchange for accommodation and meager earnings. Nothing had been easy for anyone. Children born toward the end of the war had no understanding of it; by the time they could form memories, the guns had silenced. And no one wanted to explain what had happened—because they didn’t want to remember and they couldn’t find the right words. There were other children, though, who had known only war, since they were born in it. No matter how, they were all returning to Imperi.

  They began to arrive in groups when night gave birth to a day brighter than the previous ones. Mama Kadie, Pa Moiwa, and Pa Kainesi had woken earlier than usual, before the crow of the only cock that had begun to announce the life of another day. They were resting from their daily tasks, sitting on the logs at the edge of the older part of town, watching the road, summoning those who hesitated to return. Today, this morning, the road spat out people from refugee camps, towns, villages, hiding places deep in the forest that had become homes, from wandering and from many other places where the world now found their presence sour and where they could no longer see the growth of their shadows.