Song for Night

by Chris Abani

  As night falls again, I jerk back from the fire in which I am roasting yams, howling from my burns as I haul one out from the hot coals and onto a big green leaf. I cut it into pieces with my bayonet and the heat steams up from the chunks, misting the dark in soft white clouds. I thaw some palm oil by the fire and crush salty herbs into it. I eat well, and later I drink the sweet palm wine that I liberated from a tapper’s gourd tied to a palm tree trunk when I was digging for the yam. The vanilla-scented liquid trickles down and relaxes aching muscles, soothing away aggression and the metallic knotted tension of living on the edge of death. Leaning back and lighting a cigarette, I think about the ghost soldiers and Peter’s magic. What does it all mean? I know this though: Grandfather used to say that the closer we are to death, the easier our facility for seeing ghosts becomes.

  Shelter Is Hands Protecting the Head

  The lost manual would call for shelter, so I hunt across the hilltop until I come to a rock formation. There is a gap in the side. This is not a cave, but the space underneath two rocks, like the air pocket from a careless fold, is big enough for me to shelter in. It is not the leader’s bunker, but then what is?

  The leader’s bunker is mythical. It is a talisman at its most ethereal, a mobile Camelot at its most concrete. Camelot: one of those things we learned in school that is useless to us now. Like the American Information Films that looked like they had been shot a hundred years ago, which were shown to us in boot camp. The films offered us ways to protect ourselves in the event of different kinds of enemy attacks, from catapults throwing Greek fire to napalm. There was one about protection in the event of a nuclear attack. It was simple and straightforward—hide under a desk. Some of those bush fucks in camp were impressed. Me, I could see through the fatal flaws of the logic even then:

  1. Where would we find desks in this war?

  2. Would the army provide them and would we have to carry them around ourselves?

  3. Why would anyone hide from a fireball under a wooden desk?

  But the frenzy of war dulls the senses. With death as our only option, I guess it is easy to believe anything. Besides, if the American government was telling their children to hide under desks, it must be true. They wouldn’t risk the lives of their own children, would they?

  I wish I had found this cave earlier when I was making dinner. That way I could have made the fire here and I would still have it to keep warm. This high, the heat from the day is lost very quickly and the rock feels cold against my back. I can always get up and go collect kindling and wood and build another fire, but I am too comfortable and tired to move. The best I can do is smoke. I light a cigarette and blow smoke out of the cave mouth. Is this how our ancestors lived so long ago? Hunter-gatherers making do in shelters like this?

  In the dim glow from the cigarette, I try to see if there are any markings on the rock walls. I can’t find any. Maybe I should make some. It occurs to me that this cave could be the result of a recent explosion, the force causing the crack.

  I cannot remember how many days have passed since that initial explosion that separated me from my men. I should have made that mnemonic device, I think, absently stroking the Braille cemetery on my forearm. Stubbing out the cigarette, I shut my eyes.

  Sleep comes easier and easier.

  Sometimes rest too.

  Music Is Any Dance You Can Pull Off

  I have not returned to the road, though I can see it winding around the hill. Instead, I decide to follow a bush path down into the opposite foothills, rapidly descending to a valley. From the path, I can see for miles as I head down, my view obstructed only by the frequent clumps of trees and bushes that mark springs. The dust that coats all the vegetation by the roadside in a crumbly red ochre like an old villa wall doesn’t seem to get this far, and the leaves here have a varied and beautiful appearance ranging from deep emerald, through mottled pink, ginger, and yellow, to a deep brown. The grass here is not high, no more than a few inches in places. There are patches where the sun has burned it, giving it the appearance of a heather moor. In the distance, herds of cows attended by young men and white egrets graze. The egrets stalk beside the cows in solemn procession, occasionally jumping on the cattle to feed on the fleas that hug their hide, or to wheel and cry like gulls in a display of dazzling whiteness. I stop and watch them, a song from my childhood, the song Grandfather taught me, coming back.

  The terrain levels off for a while and I pass through some more abandoned villages. The huts here are round. This gives the terrain the look of having haystacks dotted all over it. I go down one last steep incline and then the valley spreads out before me like a sheet. To the left, less than half a mile away, I can make out the silver ribbon of the river. Right in front of me, no more than a few hundred yards, is a lone house bordering a small pond. From somewhere I hear a gramophone scratch into life. It plays the same record over and over very loudly. The recording is of a voice; a woman’s. No other instrument. The woman sings a bit like Marlene Dietrich but also a bit like Eartha Kitt. I know these singers from the movies we saw in boot camp. I almost wish for boot camp; anywhere would be better than this. I don’t know what language the woman is singing in, it could be German, but as I follow the sound, which leads to the small tin-roofed bungalow by the pond, I am crying. It is dark when I finally arrive.

  Outside on the veranda, in the soft light of a storm lantern, sits the gramophone and a man who looks to be in his late seventies. He glances up and sees me standing there and motions for me to join him.

  “It’s beautiful,” he says, mournfully. “I don’t understand a word but it brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it.”

  I smile, uncomfortable at his tears.

  “I brought it back with me from the great war,” he continues. “The gramophone and a few records were given to me by my captain for my part in liberating France from the Nazis. Now they’ve got all these new hi-fi’s, but nothing plays like the old stuff. I don’t know what the words mean myself, but I was told that it is a long slow lament for the Aryan race. I play it because the tone of the song is extremely sad, reaching down inside you and yanking at the parts of you best forgotten. Beautiful,” the man sobs.

  I sob with him.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, after a while.

  I nod.

  “You don’t say much.”

  I begin to sign my explanation, but he waves it away.

  “It’s okay, I have been alone so long I can talk for us both.”

  I smile and mime my thirst. He nods, and getting up he fetches a machete lying on the floor beside him. I point my gun at him, but he just laughs and walks to the edge of the veranda. He descends painfully and shuffles over to some banana trees growing beside the house. From a fallen trunk in the shade he cuts some small squares. Bringing them back, he hands them over.

  “Suck on these,” he says. “They’ll cure your thirst in a way water cannot.”

  I suck gratefully. They taste salty, but surprisingly I feel my thirst slaked by the fourth cube. He then passes me some ripe bananas. They are so soft and ripe and sweet.

  “You know, in the old days, in villages, banana groves were used as rubbish tips. The compost helped the bananas grow and the trees released a chemical that degraded the rubbish quickly whilst neutralizing the odor,” he says. “I have survived on those bananas for so long I can’t remember what real food tastes like … I am too old to hunt, you see,” he adds, eyeing my gun pointedly.

  I get up and head off into the underbrush. Minutes later I come back with a small antelope, not much bigger than a dog. I cut some banana leaves and quickly skin and gut the animal. He watches with eyes wet from hunger. When I am done, he takes the meat from me and disappears into the house. I can hear him talking as he begins to cook. I feel good. At least he doesn’t treat me like a ghost. I lie back on the veranda and fall asleep.

  The old man shakes me awake gently and places a plate of antelope stew beside me. We eat in silence and I can’t believe
how good the food tastes. I want to thank him, but in the darkness I don’t know if he can make out my signs, so I don’t. When I am done, several helpings later, I light a cigarette and pass it to him. He takes it and thanks me. I light one for myself. He gets off the veranda and goes to the banana grove and begins digging in the dirt.

  “I play an instrument, but I keep it buried because of the war. I would like to play for you, to thank you for the meal,” he says, grunting as he digs. I want to help him but I feel like it is important for him to do this himself. I wonder why he would worry about losing an instrument and not his gramophone, which would be more valuable to any passing thief. Finally, with a sigh he pulls up a square wooden box. Flipping it open, he removes a beautiful musical instrument. I have never seen one like it. Fragile, its body is made of a thin hollowed-out calabash, which acts as a sounding board. It is carved with designs and stained a dark color. A long neck curves up in an arc of brown obeche. It has strings arranged like a harp. He sits down on the wooden box, balances the instrument on his crossed knee, and begins plucking it with a fishbone plectrum, right there in the darkness of the banana trees. The sound is ethereal; disturbing; and I almost expect spirits to appear at his feet, dancing. The song is unrecognizable. It escalates and then, just before the crescendo of the final movement, it falls back into a sigh. The sound is tight and seamless and the tune seems to have been written for it. His playing ends on a soft note, which vibrates in the air for a few seconds afterwards. He opens his eyes and turns to where I am crouching in the darkness.

  The moon tracks us in silver paint.

  Roll Call Is Fingers Counting off a Palm

  Roll Call—another chapter from the lost manual of John Wayne.

  In my platoon there are only twelve of us left so there is no real need for roll call, as one glance takes in the whole group, but I am doing this for me. It hasn’t been that long since I was separated from them but already their faces are unclear. I trouble the cemetery on my arm. This is an exercise in survival. I close my eyes and begin the roll call in my head, one that will include the dead, my fingers counting off in the air.

  Ijeoma. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Skin dark as time-worn wood and smooth to the touch. Eyes that never turned hard, no matter what they were beholding, as if she had an infinite capacity for forgiveness. Teeth that stayed white and fresh from the stick that she chewed on almost constantly. It hung from the corner of her mouth like a cheroot in the old black-and-white movies I saw as a child. I remember she tried to smoke a pipe for a while, in the manner of the older female soldiers, but she kept choking so she gave it up. She had a laugh on her that was infectious, like the sudden pealing of a bell, and she was smarter than all of us. She would draw a circle in the dirt with a stick, and picking a star from the sky, she would chart the direction to follow. Even in the middle of the day, she could tell from the shadows what time it was, and she was the only one of us who understood the arcane markings on maps. How concentric squiggles were hills and how high they were. I miss her.

  There was Nebu—short, stocky, and angry. Nebu never enjoyed killing, but for him it was his duty so he carried it out methodically and effectively. In a way, this made him seem more ruthless than the rest of us. This kind of dispassion was frightening to us. But he was dependable. A good soldier, and I felt sorry about the mine that just killed him.

  Hannibal has a giant personality. For someone no bigger than a Star Wars Ewok, his laugh reminds me of a gorilla. He is also the practical joker of the platoon. He would bury defused mines under us while we slept and let us wake up to the panic that we were resting in a minefield. He also tied an arm or leg behind him and pretended to have lost a limb. He got us every time.

  Isaiah is our prophet. He always wears an expression somewhere between the beatific and the deeply frustrated. I can understand that. In camp, before he lost his voice, he would quote from the Book of Psalms, and only the Book of Psalms, but our sign language was too crude for phrases like: I have longed for your salvation, O Lord (Psalm 174); Mercies come unto me, that I may live (Psalm 119); He willnever forsake his children (Psalm 174); How long Lord, shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked glory?

  American Express, or Amex, is the kid who can find you anything, anytime, and anywhere. He isn’t one of us in the sense that he wasn’t with us in boot camp and he doesn’t diffuse mines. He is just a kid who has been following us for months now. He is only seven or eight, and in his bedraggled clothes that are several sizes too big, he looks like a scruffy elf. The .45 automatic he lugs around would be funny if it wasn’t real.

  Vainly I try to recall the rest but cannot. This is terrible and I feel caught somewhere between helplessness and guilt, betrayal even. How can I not remember people I have fought and died with over the last three years? People I have played cards with, played at soccer, danced with, pillaged villages with? What kind of leader forgets his men? Maybe that is why I cannot catch up with them.

  I watch shooting stars like flares filling the sky.

  Fingers Pinching a Nose Is a Bad Smell

  Even before I see the camp, the smell of rotting bodies reaches me. It is a choking stomach-wrenching stench. I gag and hold my hand across my nose. Walking to the roadside, I pluck some aromatic grass from the verge. Crushing it into a field dressing I wrap it around my mouth and nose. When I breathe, a lemon-rosemary tang takes the edge off the worst of the smell. But it is still pretty strong and getting stronger the closer I get to the source. Monkeys call to each other and I stop abruptly as a family of baboons runs across the road in front of me. When they disappear in the forest, I continue.

  I see the spire of the church before I see the makeshift buildings. When I round a bend, I see a temporary camp sprawled out in front of me. The camp is in a disused church compound and the forest has been cut back for at least fifty yards and a wooden fence rings it. And just beyond the fence, the river winds around. Everything is still a sparkling white except for where blood has stained some places black.

  The sight that greets me is something out of one of the grisly fairy tales I heard as a child. On one side is a big pit dug into the earth from which flames leap maybe ten feet high. It is not clear at first what they are burning because there is so much smoke. Enough to hang like a blanket over everything. Near the pit of fire is a pile of dead bodies. There are flies everywhere, huge blue bottles that hum and dive like enemy planes on a bombing mission. I have to keep swatting to keep them off me. All over the camp, old women have lit bunches of aromatic herbs to drive away the flies and the smell of death, but the belching smoke from the funereal pyres smothers them and they are as ineffectual as an umbrella in a hurricane.

  I realize what is going on. Some men are fishing the dead out of the water, others are throwing them on the growing pile, and others are chopping them up and feeding the parts to the flames. I know it is meant well; both to help the souls of the dead and to stop infection and disease from afflicting the living, but it is gruesome and frightening nonetheless. In fact, given that I have seen ghosts recently, I wonder if this is not hell and the people I see, demons. But there is something fundamentally human about them: the looks on their faces or the tired sadness in their eyes, I am not sure which. Some of them stop and watch me as I walk past. A new look has come into their eyes—fear? I want to assure them that I am friendly. I wave at them and continue past them and the pyre, heading instead for an outcrop of stone projecting over the water. I sit there, light a cigarette, and drag the smoke down deeply. Before me is the water heavy with a sun high in the sky. I imagine that in the past children would have played here, diving off the rock into the river below. It amazes me how this very river has flowed through my life.

  I can’t stay here, not tonight. I want to double back to the old man’s place, but I need to press ahead, find my comrades. I flick the burning cigarette into the water and turn back to the forest. Still the river flanks me.

  Dirty Is a Scrunched-up Face
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br />   and a Palm Waving

  This river winds through my journey like an irritant that will not go away, and yet the water will not wash me clean. Not in a symbolic sense, but clean from the dirt here that grits every pore until I sweat mud. Neither will blood, though there is plenty of that to bathe in. It’s not the stench, which after a while becomes bearable. It is the dirt: black soot from everything burning, dust and the loam of the forest, unwashed sex, blood and cordite, smoke, plant and grass stains, and mud for sweat. It all congeals into a second skin that still itches with its newness, like Adam must have felt as God first clothed his naked soul. When my fingernails rake, they first pull away thick flakes of it, then with repetition and increased pressure, skin, then more blood.

  I stop by the river and light a cigarette. As I look around, the spot seems familiar. It is made distinctive by the big tree with bright red flowers that we call flame of the forest. They seldom grow this close to a river, preferring to hide deeper in the forest where hunters and startled villagers come upon its flame and are awed by it. It must have been years since we stopped here. Back then the war was only months old and I was still twelve going on thirteen and excited that my pubic hair was beginning to grow out. That’s how you knew you were a man—pubic hair, then armpit hair, then facial hair.

  We had made a stop to rest, the whole troop, vultures and all; plus a long train of refugees who had attached themselves to us thinking we could keep them safe. I had no idea where we were, but I didn’t care. It was all still new enough to be exciting. Even then, the dirt was irritating and the vultures in particular. That band of soldiers who had to count the dead were already in the river trying to wash. My platoon and I were lying in the shade of the flame of the forest, and from that shelter I looked around me. Accompanying the refugees were some nuns—probably Irish, it seemed like all the Catholics here were—and they all wore that tight-lipped look that years of enduring Catholicism bestows on the pious, except for one of them. She was wandering around with a curious smile on her face. She looked unhinged. We turned and peered at each other and then back at the nun. We guessed that for her the dirt was more bearable than the debris that had no doubt collected in her mind, befuddling her. It was early on in the war, when the horrors were still new enough to unhinge decent people.