Johnny Mad Dog

by Emmanuel Dongala

  “Make the cork pop out, or I’ll pop your brains out!”

  Mr. Ibara took the bottle without a word. He was right—you didn’t need a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne, but what he hadn’t told us was that the cork would explode from the bottle and fly through the air like a rocket. If I hadn’t ducked just in time, it would have hit me in the eye—especially since Mr. Ibara had pointed it directly at me. Little Pepper grabbed the bottle, which was dripping with foam, and took a good swallow. He made a face, as if he didn’t like the taste.

  “Let me have some, too!” said Piston.

  I, the leader, was content with my Chivas. Now that Little Pepper had finally tasted the famous drink he’d heard so much about, he was satisfied.

  “Okay, so we kill them now?”

  “No, I have a better idea,” I replied.

  A commander should always have better ideas than his troops.

  “Mr. Ibara,” I said, “if you want us to spare your lives, go over and fuck your wife.”

  A sudden resurgence of dignity and anger gave him spirit. He tried to get up, but Little Pepper beat him back onto his leather sofa.

  “Kill me!” he shouted. “After what you’ve done to me, I’d be better off dead!”

  He made a grab for Piston’s gun. The shit-head. One good, well-placed kick and he collapsed again. He was lucky his daughters weren’t around, or we would have made him fuck one of them—the way I’d once seen Giap force a young man to violate his own grandmother.

  “We won’t kill you, Mr. Ibara. We’ll kill your wife if you don’t fuck her—right now, in this living room, while we watch. Make up your mind! Either you fuck your wife or we kill her!”

  Mr. Ibara, the Mayi-Dogo, looked at Mrs. Ibara, his DogoMayi wife. She was lying on the floor in a miserable state, pressing her bloody thighs together and sobbing. Little Pepper pointed the muzzle of his Kalashnikov at Mrs. Ibara’s crotch, ready to fire. Blubbering, Mr. Ibara got painfully to his feet, slowly unbuttoned his pants, and let them fall around his ankles. I was glad to see a bigshot humiliated. He walked forward in slow motion, with great effort, hollow-eyed like the ghost of a zombie, and when he was standing over his wife he lowered his underpants. His thing hung limply, wretchedly.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” I said to my men.

  We left Mr. Ibara’s house, taking only the Toyota truck, since we didn’t have time to dig up the tires for the Lexus and put them back on the car. We continued our raid through the Kandahar district, square meter by square meter, dynamiting the handsome villas, chopping down the fruit trees, killing the dogs, shooting every male individual between the ages of twelve and forty-five, and of course helping ourselves to whatever we wanted. For the entire rest of the day, we plundered, we killed, we stole, we raped. We were drunk with blood and sperm. From every direction you could hear cries of “Somba liwa!” along with gunfire, thundering grenades, screams, sobs, and the howling of dogs. Columns of smoke rose into the sky, twisted in the wind, and spread out over the city.

  We had never suspected that the Mayi-Dogos, our countrymen, had so much wealth hidden away. No surprise that their leaders wanted to hang on to power at any price.

  When we finally left the district at nightfall to return to our own neighborhoods, the scene looked like some vast carnival. Dozens of vehicles of every description—from huge military trucks to rickety old cars without headlights or license plates, from two-wheeled pushcarts to one-wheeled barrows—loaded down with the most motley array of items imaginable, all spoils of war—were streaming from Kandahar in a long, continuous file toward our own neighborhoods in the west of the city, their undercarriages scraping the ground because they were so heavily laden with CD players, DVD players, televisions, gas cookers, roof tiles, rafters, windows, sinks, toilets, mattresses, medicines, sacks of cassava flour, live chickens . . . Behind and alongside these vehicles trotted hundreds of other people armed with machetes, spears, automatic weapons, and, like us, gorged with blood and sperm—some of them brandishing pikes and bayonets topped with human heads, others sporting necklaces made of bloody human entrails, still others proudly flourishing genital organs, and all singing the war songs of our tribe. Finally came a long column of Mayi-Dogos made up largely of women, small children, and old people—a mass of lost, beaten, dazed refugees, carrying the little bundles of possessions that we, the conquerors, had been generous enough to let them keep.

  Yeah, we had won the war! We’d proven that we were the stronger! In only a few hours, we had succeeded in emptying that traitorous district of its three or four hundred thousand inhabitants. Before taking us on, their puny, pathetic leaders should have remembered that our leader was an army general. You should always let sleeping generals lie.

  Kandahar was devastated, bled dry, barren as a wheat field after a plague of locusts, bare as an elephant carcass after an attack of army ants. Once again, it was great to be on the winning side. That evening, our home districts would be alive with celebration. We would dance, we would make love, we would feast as we let loose our joy. We would organize one of those orgiastic revels whose meaning can be expressed fully, in all its nuances, only in the words of our tribal language. That evening would be filled with lé dza, lé noua, lé bin’otsota.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Laokolé

  My fit of hysterical grief must have lasted quite a while, for by the time it subsided the bodies of Mama and Auntie Tamila had been pulled from the wreckage. I was no longer sobbing, but silent tears still flowed down my cheeks. A woman led me to the spot where the two corpses lay. Mama a corpse!

  The bodies were mangled and broken—a horrible sight. This was not a fitting death for a worthy woman who had never harmed anyone, a widow who had done the best she could to raise her children properly, a woman who had never stolen anything or killed anyone. To be crushed, along with her best friend, under the ruins of a house blasted by a blind mortar shell. Mama. Tamila. I had just lost two mothers in a single blow. I began weeping again, and fell to my knees beside the two bodies.

  I wasn’t given a chance to grieve. People helped me to my feet. They told me that Dogo-Mayi militias were prowling the district and were already across the street, in Mr. Ibara’s house. I was a young woman and thus in as much danger as any of the young men, whom the militia fighters were killing simply because they suspected them of being Chechens. They would rape me, or else would kidnap me so they could rape me later.

  “But what about Mama and Tamila!” I heard my voice say.

  “We’re going to bury them immediately. And then you’ll leave with everyone else.”

  There weren’t any shovels. Someone found a couple of hoes, and two holes were hastily dug in a corner of the yard, side by side, about knee-deep. The bodies were each wrapped in a pagne and then placed in the holes. I was asked to throw the first handful of soil on each of the two friends. As soon as my left hand had flung the second bit of earth, the people with the hoes began to fill in the two makeshift graves.

  We had to leave. Someone gave me a push. I went a few steps and sank to the ground. I missed Mama. I couldn’t accept the fact that after struggling so hard to get her this far, first in a wheelbarrow and then on a bicycle, I was being forced to abandon her in a little hole in a backyard.

  “You must leave right away, Lao. They’ll be here soon.”

  I looked up. I didn’t know him—an old man whose white hair and deeply lined face bespoke weariness, pain, and resignation rather than the dignified coda of a happy, fulfilled life. I had no idea how he’d learned my name.

  “If you stay here, they’ll kill you—you won’t have accomplished anything. I don’t want to see what happened to my daughter happen to you. What she went through was so terrible she died from it. If you escape, if you survive, that will be one life those murderers won’t get. It’ll be like thumbing our noses at them—it’ll prove that they’ll never manage to kill us all. Go, my daughter, please! Go!”

  His persua
sive voice—warm, sincere, urgent—acted on me like a stern command and got me to my feet. But I hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps toward the departing group when he stopped me.

  “Wait, my child!”

  He opened his bag, which was lying on the ground, and handed me a small radio—one of those little transistors no bigger than the palm of your hand but capable of receiving an amazing range of frequencies. From the way he held it out to me, I was sure it was one of his most cherished possessions.

  “Take this—it’s my daughter’s radio. So long as you have it, you won’t be alone. Go now! The militias will be here any minute!”

  He picked up his bag and turned away without saying another word. He rejoined the group of people who were continuing to dig through the wreckage and pull out bodies. Evidently, those people had chosen to stay and had decided that in every life there comes a point when you have to stop. When you have to cease running away and look squarely at your pursuers, whatever the outcome might be. That old man, whom I didn’t know from Adam, had sensed that I hadn’t yet reached this point and had urged me to flee because he fervently wanted me to survive. Why? How was it possible that good could still exist in this world? I’ve often asked myself this question, and to this day it remains a puzzle to me.

  Before I, too, turned away, and set off down the road after the others, my gaze fell upon the wall surrounding Mr. Ibara’s house. A rocket had blown an enormous hole in the middle of it, but despite this damage it was still standing. Any other structure would have collapsed. It was still standing because, after we’d laid the stepped foundation, we had decided to strengthen the wall with concrete pilasters reinforced with ten-millimeter rebars, instead of using a traditional vertical armature. And the result was before me—this wall that had defied the bombs. A wave of foolish pride ran along my spine and spread through my entire being.

  At last I caught up with one of the groups of refugees and took my place in the procession. I felt lighter than usual. At first I attributed this to the fact that I was no longer pushing a wheelbarrow. Not until I’d been walking for about half an hour did I realize it was because I was no longer carrying the large bundle I’d borne on my head or my back ever since our departure. Not only had I left it under the ruins of Auntie Tamila’s house, but I honestly hadn’t given it a thought when I fled. The only bits of baggage that remained were my bandolier bag and, hidden under my pants, the little purse that contained all my money and the photo of Mama and Papa. What annoyed me the most was that I had only one pair of panties--the ones I was wearing—and I wondered what on earth I was going to do when they had become soiled and stained from my period.

  Since all the routes leading to Kandahar were blocked by the army and their backup troops, we could flee in only one direction: toward the forest. And we had to proceed cautiously, for it was rumored that the first routes taken by the refugees were now being watched by the factions currently in power, which had set up patrols that would fire without warning. So we had to divide up into small groups and find alternate roads. By chance, I found myself with about twenty others in the company of a man who had generously offered to guide refugees to his village—anyone who wanted to come could follow him. The problem was that the village was located about a hundred kilometers away, deep in the forest. The trek would take at least a week. I knew nothing about the place—I’d never even heard of it. But that didn’t matter. The important thing was to get away, to flee the bombs, the massacres, the rapes. At least he had a village. He wasn’t like us, who had been born and raised in the city. We’d never had any desire or felt any need to go to the villages of our forebears, or to speak our tribal language. The city was sufficient for us. And now a political dispute was sending us hack to our respective villages and our respective tribes. But the politicians who were forcing us to take to the road didn’t know that most of us had no tribe or village. Our villages were the districts of the city where we had grown up, where we’d made our first friends, where we’d first fallen in love. The members of our tribe were the kids we’d played soccer or dzango with, running around barefoot in the dust; they were the friends we’d sat next to in school. And now all of that was being destroyed.

  We walked and walked beneath the tropical sun, through the oppressive heat and humidity. I was perspiring so heavily that my damp clothes stuck to me, preventing the air from circulating over my skin and making it impossible to cool off even slightly. We were hastening toward that age-old refuge, the great forest, as fast as we could—for on the savannah we were crossing, amid the clumps of trees and the patchy secondary woods that had been thinned by agriculture and brush fires, we were exposed to view, and the sudden appearance of enemy helicopters or a militia patrol would mean the death of all of us.

  Having climbed out of a valley to the top of a hill, we at last spied the forest. From a distance, it looked like an immense mass of solid greenery, but when we arrived at its edge I saw that the greenery was in fact a wall of trees—a twisted mass of trunks, limbs, leaves, vines, and shrubs that seemed all but impenetrable. I saw no way through, not the merest path. Born and raised in the city, I had never been in the forest.

  This was not true of our guide. With a lithe movement, he ducked beneath a thick creeper and plunged into the dense undergrowth, vanishing into the depths of the woods. Like the others, I followed. I went into the forest. The true equatorial rain forest. I was sucked into a vaulted realm of shadows that, paradoxically, blinded me. I looked up toward the sky, but there was no sky—only a thick canopy that filtered the light and, with the stirrings of its leaves, imparted a rapid flickering to the few rays that penetrated it. At first, it felt good to be out of the scorching sun and in the relatively cool air under the forest canopy. But soon the muted light and the damp heat—all the more oppressive as it seemed to emanate uniformly from the surrounding atmosphere—in conjunction with the complete lack of any breeze, began to stifle me. All I could see were tree trunks, vines, leaves, ferns, grasses. How could you find your way in this seemingly endless ocean of plant life? I felt as if I’d been shipwrecked. I was suffocating, choking. I began to have difficulty breathing.

  The woman walking behind me saw that I was gasping. She called to the others to stop. The leader of the group came up to me, and I admitted I was afraid. He thought that was funny, and laughed. He said I was afraid because I didn’t know how to appreciate the forest. If I walked next to him, he said, he would teach my eyes to see.

  And he taught them to see that each plant had its own shape, its own size, its own nature, its own shade of green; that you couldn’t lump together this tree fern over here with the little phosphorescent frond over there; that if you thought this orchid was beautiful, take a look at that bird-of-paradise, which raised its petals proudly like the crest of a cock, and—oh!—the flash of color down there wasn’t the corolla of a blossom, but a butterfly; that amid the orchestra of diffuse sounds filling the air, not only could you distinguish the mocking screeches of the monkeys from the cries of the hornbills, butlisten!—you could tell the throaty plaint of a toad from the croaking of a frog; that over there—look where I’m pointing!—you’ve got to be careful: the thing you see wrapped around that tree trunk isn’t a creeper, but a boa constrictor getting ready to pounce on you and strangle you . . .

  My eyes worked perfectly well, but I hadn’t noticed any of that. I realized then that, yes, whoever knew the forest couldn’t get lost in it—there were so many markers and guideposts! My confidence returned and my distress faded away.

  We continued to walk for a long, long time. The forest penumbra gave way to utter darkness. If we hadn’t occasionally passed beneath one of the rare holes in the canopy, we wouldn’t have known that a full moon was glowing in the sky. The people in the group who had flashlights got them out, and we followed the beams—which didn’t extend very far, since they were blocked by the thick vegetation. At last we came to a halt. Our guide explained that the forest was dangerous at night—you could ste
p on a snake or a poisonous spider without realizing it. He chose a spot where the undergrowth was sparse, and said that we would camp there.

  I immediately sank down on the grass. I was completely exhausted and my feet hurt. Again I was glad that I’d decided to wear my old threadbare sneakers, which I’d often worn when I worked on construction jobs with Papa. I took them off and rubbed my toes. The people who were traveling with family sat close to their relatives, and the others sat apart or in groups, according to their inclinations. There were more of us than I’d thought when we set out—more than thirty, perhaps even forty. Small wood fires were lit, and people started cooking things to eat. Some began smoking wild tobacco, whose smell I found sickening. I had nothing to eat and was very hungry. My mother had brought me up to think that only a beggar would ask for food, and I told myself that going to bed hungry wasn’t the end of the world. In any case, I was used to it.

  I was sitting by myself off to the side, massaging my sore feet, when the leader of the group—the man who had generously offered to take us to his village—came over and sat down next to me on the grass. He asked me if I was feeling better. I expressed my gratitude and said that, thanks to him, I was becoming more familiar with the forest. I now understood how the Pygmies could live there all their lives: we had supermarkets, and they had the forest—which was stocked with more things and was less expensive. He asked, with great gentleness and tact, how a young woman like me came to be fleeing alone through the forest. I explained to him that in the space of forty-eight hours I had lost my brother and my mother, and that ten minutes before joining his group I hadn’t known that I would wind up in the forest—which we city kids disdained, along with everything associated with it. I, in turn, asked about his situation. He was a retired nurse. Had come to the city to replenish the supply of basic medical supplies (aspirin, chloroquine, quinimax, common antibiotics, disposable syringes) for the small clinic he was trying to maintain out in the bush. It was heartrending to see a child die of malaria for the lack of a few tablets of chloroquine. He’d arrived at the height of the war. The pharmacy where he usually bought his supplies had been looted. Nothing left to do but head back to his village.