by Ishmael Beah
“How?”
“You always wash yourself with the grass that smells like lemon.”
And just as Khoudi heard Namsa sniffing, trying to catch the scent of her own body, she came into view at the bend. The two of them lit up at the sight of each other. Then Namsa placed her arm around the waist of the older girl and looked up at her, her pointed little face not yet even at the height of Khoudi’s shoulders. They walked the rest of the way like that, Namsa sometimes skipping, their bodies brushing the branches on either side.
The path came to an end in a clearing enclosed by palm and baobab trees. In the middle, the skeleton of a medium-size plane lay on its belly. Vines had wrapped themselves around most of the exterior, giving it a natural camouflage. Nearly all of the windows in the front were intact, and toward the back, where more were missing, they had been covered with cardboard, plastic, and tarpaulin to prevent snakes and other animals from entering. The faded Air Lyoa insignia could be made out against a background of green, white, and blue. In the clearing in front of the plane, a battered old aluminum refrigerator lay on its side. Khoudiemata placed her raffia bag on top of it, and she and Namsa dragged two upended plastic buckets alongside. The two of them sat facing each other, Namsa playing with her fingers, Khoudi’s eyes on the path. The wind gusted up under the bushes and grasses and lifted the nearby heaps of rubbish. A sheet of newspaper took flight in front of one wing, and for a moment, it was possible to imagine that one of the propellers was spinning and the old airplane was going to start its missing engine and take off.
Now Ndevui appeared, from another hidden path that led to the beach. He went for a run every morning, with a white towel around his neck and his earphones deep inside his ears, as if he were afraid of hearing the promises that the new day offered for some. He kept the cord of the earphones tucked under his shirt and into his football shorts, so that no one could see what it was connected to. The truth was that it was connected to nothing, but that did not stop him from singing to himself the songs he had heard on the streets and in the music shops. Who needed a device when you had a mind that could record songs and play them back for free?
“How far did you go today?” asked Khoudi, folding the sleeves of the oversize sweatshirt she wore when she went out into the world, to mask the contours of her body and keep herself safe. But Ndevui was singing whatever his memory was playing, and he didn’t answer immediately. He wiped the sweat off his broad forehead and cracked his fingers. Then he removed the earphones and turned back toward her.
“Is your music off now?” asked Khoudi, deferring to his ingenuity. “How long was your run?”
“More than two hours today, without stopping.” He pointed with his long fingers beyond the trees and wiped his forehead again with the towel around his neck. He was wearing a TP Mazembe jersey and Kaizer Chiefs shorts—African football clubs, not the European ones most kids flaunted, which were easier to come by. When the others teased him about his choice, he said, “I get to choose the kind of fool I want to be.” He had a pair of new cleats too, which he sometimes, like today, strung around his neck as well.
“Are you ever going to play in those shoes, or even run in them?” Namsa teased, a daily ritual.
“I will wear them when I get to play in a game that can get me recognized. They will only add to my natural abilities.” He picked up a split-open tennis ball with the sides of his bare feet and began to juggle it.
At this very moment, Kpindi shot into the clearing and deftly intercepted the ball. Some days they used a plastic bottle, an inedible orange or mango, or a bundle of rags. No matter what the day’s ball was made of, Kpindi always managed to surprise Ndevui by changing direction at the last split second and stealing it from Ndevui’s feet.
“Ha, you have to be alert, big brother.” Kpindi snapped his fingers. “It isn’t all about stamina and strength.” He squeezed Ndevui’s biceps, measured and compared them to his bony arms. Though Ndevui was a year older and stronger, Kpindi was taller by a head. He ran circles around Ndevui, juggling the pretend ball. “It is also about using your medium-size head.” He laughed and gave Ndevui a shove, then Ndevui shoved him back, the two of them like real brothers, always straddling the line between confrontation and joke. When they had exhausted themselves, they dragged two more plastic buckets hard against the earth and took a seat at the makeshift table.
Kpindi rubbed his long belly. “I am always excited when it’s big sister who comes back with food, because I know she has the taste of tastes.” Whenever he and Ndevui argued about height, which was often, Kpindi said he was taller because he had drunk more cow’s milk, while Ndevui ate only rice and cassava.
“Where is Monsieur La Tête?” asked Kpindi. It was their joke name for Elimane, who was always somewhere reading or writing. Elimane read not with the visible discipline of someone who had acquired the skill later in life but with a kind of effortlessness, a second nature that suggested he had come from privilege. But Elimane never spoke about his earlier life, any more than the rest of them did. They knew only that, of the twenty years of his life, he had spent four living in the plane, the first year all alone. Kpindi had arrived next, then Khoudi, then Ndevui, and last of all little Namsa, only six months before.
“His big head is probably inside one of those rusty books.” Ndevui whistled loudly in the direction of the plane, but there was no response.
“I will get him.” Khoudiemata stood up and went toward the door of the plane, beside which the painted head of a lion was visible, its eyes vibrant among the painted foliage. She climbed the stairs that they could pull up when they needed to, with a strong tug on thick ropes they had attached to the rails.
Inside, almost all the seats had disappeared, save for seven at the front of the craft, near the cockpit. The seats resembled the cots at the boarding school where the little family had once gone to help themselves to sheets and pillows during a holiday when the guards slept through their shifts. Why would a plane carry little beds, they had wondered. Who could have slept in the belly of this iron bird?
There sat Elimane, scribbling something in one of his many notebooks as usual, every inch of the page crammed with words. He always made an attempt to look well dressed, turning up his faded and tattered sleeves, combing his hair, and shining his black shoes every night as he read a propped-open book by flashlight, if he had a battery, or by moonlight when the moon was bright. Never mind that the soles of the shoes were almost completely gone, so that when Elimane put them on, he was almost walking on bare feet. Poverty has a great appetite for eating one’s dignity, but Elimane was one of those people who fought to keep his, even when that was the only battle he was winning.
Now he looked up at Khoudi, his big head heavy on his lanky frame.
“Your body isn’t going to survive with only those books for food. So come out and eat, Mr. Serious Gentleman.” Khoudi took his hand and pulled him away from his book. He laughed his deep laugh, got to his feet, and followed her out.
Outside, the others had already started apportioning the food from Khoudiemata’s bag. They always shared equally, even if all they had was a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit. Today she had brought back fried fish and stewed onions with bread and other things that you would not put together if you had the luxury of considering the pleasure of the mouth.
Elimane went to join the others, but Khoudi remained standing. She looked at each of them in turn, these faces so hidden in the canvas of humanity. All too soon it would be time for them to discuss where they would find the next meal, and what they needed to do to guard their safety while they got it.
Ndevui waved her to the table. He was not one for sentiment, which he regarded as a luxury that made him weak, but he treasured moments of simple enjoyment, like these meals they ate together under the open sky, even though they ate less for enjoyment than simply to stay alive. He knew that there were not only kiosks where you argued with the food seller to
add more sauce to your rice or more butter to your bread, determined to get your hard-earned money’s worth, but also places where you didn’t even see the cook, just some people coming out of a room with your food. And he had seen that people at those kinds of places were always smiling and laughing as they ate. But for this little family too, meals were a time when their faces relaxed—when they looked as they might have if they were as fortunate as some other youngsters, whose faces were always smooth. Ndevui valued even the mealtimes without food, when they sat together before they took up fear and caution again and went out to forage. At such moments of unguarded togetherness, he could stop thinking about all that was against him, against them. It almost qualified as happiness.
“Khoudiemata, please come and sit down before my appetite dies with the morning.” Ndevui refused to call her Khoudi as the rest did, saying that her full name suited her best.
“She is memorizing the moment. Give her a minute,” Elimane interjected softly.
Khoudiemata sat down, and they all began to eat. If you watched her, you would see that she was eating her bread slowly, her eyes secretively checking to see which of the others remained hungry. She wasn’t smiling, but something pleasant and soft had slipped into her face. She had taken off her beanie and let her beautiful dark curls fall free, and now she rested her head on her hand. In this position, even though her eyes were on the others, it seemed her mind had slipped away to somewhere they couldn’t follow. But wherever she was, she looked for a moment almost like one of those schoolgirls they sometimes saw chattering like birds during breaks from their classrooms.
Ndevui finished eating quickly, but he pretended to be chewing on something, so that Khoudiemata wouldn’t give him the remainder of her food. He was hoping she would hand it to Namsa, the “little one,” as he called her. She was licking her fingers like they were sticks of honey. The little one was the only person Ndevui knew who actively smiled while eating. She had told him that she did so to make sure that the food was happy in her belly and would not give her a stomachache. As he had hoped, Khoudiemata gave the last two bites of her bread to the little one, who laughed with pleasure as she brought the food to her mouth.
The wind returned, whispering, and laughter wafted among them too, because Kpindi, their jokester, was smacking his mouth with each bite as though this was the best meal he had ever tasted. Then he began to hum “Dem Belly Full,” as he always did. When they had nothing to eat, he sang the lyrics out loud and danced, the words themselves seeming to give him stamina: Dem belly full but we hungry, a hungry man is an angry man. But today they had food, and so he hummed, and they laughed and ate and littered the ground with bones that the stray dogs would come for later.
And a strong breeze carried their voices out to the airfield and left them floating in the vast open space.
3
Do not let me fall too far behind,” Namsa whispered, looking up at the sky as she followed the others. She believed that whoever was responsible for the fate of human beings lived somewhere up there, even after Khoudi had challenged her to think more deeply about it. Why up in the sky? Why not in the river, in the forest, among them, within them? Namsa liked to be in harmony with Khoudi, whom she secretly thought of as her big sister. But she could not let go of this belief in a presence-in-the-sky.
They had found Namsa, shivering and alone, in an open field not far from their home. They tried saying “Hello, please don’t be afraid” in the fifteen languages and three dialects that they collectively knew, but it was weeks before she did more than nod or shake her head in response. Even when she began to speak, she seemed unable to tell them anything about where she had come from, though she did, as it turned out, understand seven of the languages, including a lingua franca and some English. In any case, they had an unspoken understanding not to press one another about the past and its pain, but to keep trying to live in the present, offering silent understanding and respect.
They had guessed that Namsa was about ten or eleven, though as her playful spirit began to reassert itself, she came to seem perhaps younger. Initially this had been an argument in favor of keeping her—there were times when having such an innocent-looking accomplice could be useful in allowing them to elude notice or suspicion. But as they began to teach her the way of their little world, they had become attached to her for her own sake, and she had completed the sense of them as a family. When Elimane discovered she could not read, he began to give her lessons, in the mornings or in the evenings. Unlike Khoudi, he was always serious with her, even strict, but he spoke to her gently, in a way that she imagined a real brother would. He began to teach Kpindi and Ndevui as well, writing in the dirt with a twig, then erasing the letters with his feet when they had answered to his satisfaction. “Now the words are in there forever, if you choose to keep them,” he’d say, pointing to their heads and hearts. He made them feel that the lessons were not for each of them alone, but would make them more useful to the others, and so they paid attention and worked hard.
This morning there would be no lessons, however. After they ate, they debated where to go look for food next. They tried to vary their rounds each day, so as not to create a predictable pattern that might get them caught.
“Not to the airport,” Ndevui said. “We were there yesterday.” On his run he had noted that things were not so lively at the bars along the beach either, so he thought the ferry landing at the wharf, just past the market, might be a better choice. They had not been there for more than a week, and today was a big day for the arrival of new goods. They could get work carrying loads to various shops or could steal some things and sell them. One of the two was bound to happen—or both. Circumstances would decide, and they would take advantage in the ways they knew.
Reluctantly, they raised themselves to their feet and retraced the hidden path to rejoin the outer world. When they arrived at the wall, Ndevui stopped to listen, to ascertain that no one was on the other side. Then he gave the go-ahead, and one after the other they passed through the opening. Ndevui stepped through last, stopping to camouflage the break with branches so that the opening disappeared behind them.
Disappeared as well was the relaxed mood of mealtime. In the outside world, they walked and spoke with quiet urgency. Gone were the smiles and laughter. They spoke less gently to Namsa as well. Keep up, they commanded her. Unspoken were the other commands: Do not betray emotions. Do not show weakness. Be attentive.
Namsa still found the transition jarring, and with her shorter legs, she was once again struggling to keep up. She had created a little game that helped. She pretended that whoever was at the front of the group was calling her name, wanting to speak with her, and that she must hurry to catch up with them. Although she never got all the way to the head of the line, she also never got left behind. She preferred it when Khoudi led the group, like yesterday, because even though Khoudi never turned around, she somehow knew when Namsa was beginning to tire, and contrived to slow the group down.
Today, Elimane was in the lead. By tacit agreement, the leader determined where they went and what they did, and no one questioned those decisions unless things were really not going well. Elimane never slowed down, so Namsa said to herself, Elimane is calling me. She whispered back, I am coming, Elimane, and gave her legs a burst of speed.
The group paused at the edge of the bushes. From here they could see the rutted dirt road with patches of tar here and there. Elimane sighed. “Almost everything in this country is on its way to losing itself.” He said something about the road every morning, whether he was leading or not. Namsa didn’t always understand what he meant, or why he cared. The road was used mostly by walkers like them, who, like them, took it to town solely to search for something to eat for the day. Most people Namsa had known in her small lifetime seemed to be doing only that each and every day, looking for something to eat.
The five of them didn’t all go out onto the road at the same time. The
y never did anything all at the same time in view of others, in order to avoid notice or suspicion. Elimane looked at Namsa, the newcomer, to be sure she remembered. Namsa returned his stern gaze, nodding slightly to let him know she did indeed remember. Only then did he turn his attention back to the road and, having made sure no one was watching, step onto the road, hitching up his trousers as if he had stopped only to urinate in the bushes before proceeding on his way. One by one, the others followed suit, waiting to step onto the road until he gave the signal, which was to turn around and walk backward a few paces, but without looking at them. Each of them went to a different part of the road, away from the others but within view and earshot. Namsa skipped ahead of all of them but Elimane, as she had been instructed, so that the others could keep an eye on her. She kept her eyes on Elimane’s shadow, so it wasn’t obvious that she was following him. And just like that, they became part of the road.
It was a brisk fifteen-minute walk to the ferry landing. They passed few other people, mostly men and boys. The air was hot, and the quiet was disrupted only when a van or truck passed, filled with tired faces. These were the faces of people with jobs, but the kinds of jobs that reminded them that their lives would remain a struggle. After a few minutes, a brand-new luxury car came along, weaving from side to side as the driver struggled to find safe passage for his delicate vehicle on the dilapidated road. He could not prevent the tires from landing from time to time in potholes filled with muddy water, which sometimes made the belly of the car drag briefly along the red soil of the road. Just behind the painful passage of this car came a caravan of yellow dump trucks filled with red rocks. This was bauxite from a nearby mining site, the little family knew, en route to the docks, where it would be loaded onto barges.
As soon as the sound of the engines began to fade in the distance, Elimane let out a whistle, without looking in anyone’s direction, then broke into a sprint. Namsa was at a loss about what he was reacting to, but she understood that he was running toward something, not fleeing, not alarmed. She almost broke into a run herself but remembered just in time that they must not make it obvious they were together. She stole a glance behind her and saw that Khoudi was walking at a much faster pace but not running, as were Kpindi and Ndevui. Namsa did the same, watching as Elimane’s frame disappeared down the hill ahead of them. What had he heard or seen?
