by Joanna Scott
Amdu Diop, at his father’s insistence, had enlisted in the army in the summer of 1943. The war had seemed so far away then, its reality diminished by distance, and Amdu, the sole volunteer among a group of conscripts, hadn’t expected ever to have to leave the fort near Saint-Louis, where he had gone for basic training. But by the spring of 1944 he was in Tunisia, by the end of May he was in Corsica, and by the night of June 18 he was lying in a ravine, shivering inside a blanket, praying for a vision from God.
That he had a fever hadn’t occurred to him. He was shivering because of the cool night air, he thought, and he was damp with sweat because of the blanket. He was too hot and too cold at the same time. Mostly he was tired. He’d eaten enough to ease his hunger cramps, though not enough to satisfy. But he had drunk plenty of water—the water in the knapsack plus the brackish, cold water from a little spring. Tomorrow would be better now that he had a friend in the little princess. He’d meant to leave her and make his way somewhere else, but when he’d reached the wall he’d found that either he had grown shorter or the wall had grown taller since he’d scaled it to enter the property. So he had wandered back through the fields south of the villa, through moonlight that transformed the hard little olives into nuggets of gold. Imagine if the olives really were gold, along with all the grapes in the vineyard. Then these people would have too much wealth and not enough to eat, and they would be forced to pick up and go elsewhere, to a land where they could raise their children in peace, leaving their island to be plundered by mercenaries and then forgotten.
Amdu would prefer to forget. Not the June rains falling in the fields of Casamance—this was good to remember. Or the sound of a drill at a construction site in Dakar. He liked that sound, too. And he liked the sound of his mother’s voice, even when she was scolding him, telling him he must be serious about his studies and get his nose out of that book, La Dictionaire des Miracles, that listed every sanctified miracle since the birth of our Lord Jesus, including exorcism and stigmata.
He’d been taught at the mission school to understand life as the preparation for eternity. But he considered himself an exceptional thinker, and after thinking and thinking and thinking, he had decided that he could choose to mix profound optimism with the doctrines of catechism as they were translated by an efficient group of Senegalese nuns, resulting for Amdu in a peculiar, combustive faith, a mix of folklore and papal doctrine, Koranic law, and his own vivid imagination, that resisted all accusations of error. Beginning when he was a wise thirteen years old, he had remained steadfast against skeptics, undeterred in his journey. And though he’d faltered on this island, he had been guided back to the path, the only path that led to God, to be deposited by this trickling spring, where he would rest and recover his strength and dream and forget what he had seen.
A girl lying in a shed in a neglected orchard. Was it possible to know how she had suffered? But suffering was one of the challenges of life. Much could be learned from suffering—unless you were one of the unlucky ones who didn’t make it through the night.
Forget it.
How do you forget what you can only presume, having witnessed the aftermath?
Would they really cut out his tongue if they caught him? Who put this idea into his head?
Run, Amdu! But he didn’t want to run anymore. He was too tired.
A proper Tirailleur Sénégalais. He wanted a cigarette. But he didn’t smoke. Attention!
He wondered: to what extent did accident play a role in the expulsion from paradise? And at what point did the men in the shed know what they were going to do to the girl, how they would proceed, how it would end?
Forget it. Just tell yourself to think of something else, okay? Oui, d’accord.
Smoke trailed from burning stars. From the hills came the crackle of gunfire. But not here. Amdu, being blessed, would keep the place that was here safe. Miracles were possible again. He’d saved at least one girl from the clutches of his comrades, hadn’t he? The girl named Adriana. Perhaps in the history of his life this would constitute a new beginning. There would be other miracles. And it was clear to him now what the culmination would be: at the moment when he finally had earned the ability to hear the voice of God and follow directions, he would turn today into yesterday and prevent an act of savagery that had already been committed.
The nuns would say that he was confusing the illusion of magic with the possibility of divine intervention. But the nuns were wrong and he was right to believe that a reconstitution of reality was possible. He might even say that miracles were the point of faith.
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, Mark promised. In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick. Such things happened to the righteous. The challenge, then, was to achieve a purity of faith sufficient to earn the right to such abilities.
He was not unaware of the fact that he was, as his commanding officer liked to say in English, very much strange. He had yet to read a book about someone like him. Even the stories he’d heard the griots tell didn’t illustrate the capacity of the world to contain such an odd singularity as Amdu Diop. But he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. Sometimes he just wanted to laugh at himself. At home he was like a monkey gabbling in French, making promises to please his parents. Yes, Maman, he would become a doctor. Yes, Papa, he would serve in the military. Eventually his parents would find him a good wife to marry, and he would father many children—without, of course, losing sight of his great purpose. He would be everything he was expected to be, and much more. Corporal-Doctor-Saint Amdu. But until then he would remain a very much strange Tirailleur Sénégalais who didn’t feel so well, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of soap, lying among the rocks beside a spring on an island where the dead were accumulating with each far-off rattle of machine-gun fire, ten plus two plus twelve.
On the night of June 18, the second night of the liberation of Elba, additional Allied forces landed not on the beach at Bagnaia, as the officers in the kitchen of La Chiatta had suggested they would, but at Marciana Marina, to the east, coming in under heavy shelling from German defenses but successfully taking control of the port. Having already seized control of Marina di Campo, Porto Azzurro, and Portoferraio, the Allies pushed into the center of the island’s eastern end, isolating German troops in the mountainous region around and above the village of Marciana Alta.
Although La Chiatta and its neighbors were quiet, soldiers were dying in the forests and fields to the west. By sunset on the eighteenth it was clear to all sides that German resistance was failing, but their high command had not yet ordered evacuation of the island, and the Germans continued to fight in a suicidal frenzy.
Some might say that the Germans’ desperation infected the West African forces. It could no longer be called a proper war, this battle for a useless island. It was violence without purpose or restraint, and in the mountain village of Marciana Alta, young men whose brothers had been blown apart by German shells hours earlier went from house to house looking for girls to rape, while on Monte Capanne an Elban shepherd, enlisted to help carry supplies for an Allied platoon, watched soldiers chop off the hands of a wounded German before shooting him in the head.
The German batteries inland were unexpectedly resistant—some put up such strong opposition that they were killed by their own guns. Who was killing whom? Rumors spread through the Allied troops that the Elbans were firing on the Africans. The supposition behind this whole offensive—the idea of liberation—became uncertain. These were the people for whom the young Allied soldiers were sacrificing themselves? This bauble in the sea was the island where their lives would end?
Who was killing whom? Amdu wondered, shivering in his ravine. Who had tried to kill him last night when he was standing with a gray toad beside a well? He wished God would talk to him. But God wouldn’t talk to him as long as his head was full of visions of what s
oldiers did to the girl in the shed before they killed her, two of the men opening their trousers while the others held the girl down. And when it was over, the bayonets shining, coated with blood. No: if Amdu had his way, today would be the day before yesterday, and the girl would run from the house after fighting with her brother. She would find a secret passageway leading deep into the earth, and she would follow this to a cavern three stories tall, where she would wait out the war.
It was a fine alternative, but Amdu needed a long period of convalescence before he performed a miracle. Truthfully, he didn’t feel very well at all. His arm ached, his head ached, he wanted to sleep but couldn’t sleep, and there was a faint vile stink clinging to him even after he’d washed his face and hands in the spring. That smell had a meaning he could guess. But he’d rather think about something else. Not the war. Not himself. How about the songs Princess Adriana had played and the improvement possible if she would only practice? Being spoiled, she would expect everything to come easily. Yet Amdu had to admit that he liked her. He liked the soapy smell of her, which was the same smell as this blanket. He liked the way she’d thrown herself into his arms on the terrace. She was a good girl, though she cried too quickly and believed him too readily when he said they must wait for reinforcements. There was a sloppiness about her that would have aroused the disapproval of his sisters. And they’d notice that her French was less than adequate. She’d told him that he had a nose! He smiled to himself, remembering, and the smile made him sleepy, but the good feeling of sleepiness was interrupted by his shivering, and he gripped the blanket tighter.
He’d wanted to help her. He had helped her. Now he would let the girl named Adriana do the helping. She’d brought him his supper, leaving it in the field. And then the blanket had appeared. Tomorrow she would bring him his breakfast.
Measured against ordinary life, it was boggling that he, a seventeen-year-old Senegalese rifleman, had come to depend upon a young Italian girl who played the piano poorly. Yet to Amdu it made complete sense. The situation was exceptional because he was exceptional. He needed help in order to return to the important journey of his life. Help was being provided. It was right that he hadn’t been shot in the head or crushed by an ejected fuel tank. It was right that he was lying at the bottom of a ravine, where his enemy would never find him.
Enemy was the wrong word. Amdu Diop had no enemies. At worst, there existed people who would find it useful to make a martyr of him. But please consider this: not all saints were martyrs. Amdu was prepared to offer as an example the case of the girl called Bernadette who encountered the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in a grotto in Lourdes. Bernadette wasn’t a martyr. She wasn’t fed to the lions or thrust into a fiery furnace or beheaded. After her series of miraculous visions, she became Sister Marie-Bernarde. She lived a quiet life in the sanctuary at Nevers and died a quiet death.
Also, not all martyrs became saints. The girl in the orchard shed, for instance. She could be considered a martyr, but she wouldn’t be canonized. And add to her example the martyrs who in this war were dying for their nation rather than their god. What would happen to them at the Universal Judgment?
In the story of Amdu’s life, he was going to be a saint but not a martyr. He would learn the tricks of medicine in order to heal the sick, and when medicine failed, Amdu would ask God to step in. One miracle would follow another; his reputation would spread to distant lands; he would grow ancient, white-bearded and frail but still happily devout; and at the age of 109 he would fall peacefully into his final sleep—in his own bed in his own home.
But first Amdu had to make his way back to Dakar. He imagined his mother waiting at the front gate and from a distance mistaking every approaching young man for her son. He imagined his father writing a letter to General De Lattre de Tassigny. He thought about the motorbike he would own. He pictured an anatomy textbook open on his desk. He tried to remember things he knew. For no clear reason, the first thing that came to mind was something he’d once heard about how the juice of henbane root would drive a man mad. He wondered if this was true.
The night wore on. The explosions in the distance reminded him of cannon firing at the training camp near Saint-Louis. The stars reminded him of the desert sky. The smell of the earth reminded him of digging graves in a meadow in Corsica.
He remembered overhearing men at a wresting match talking about his father, calling him a black Frenchman. Also, he remembered poking at a beetle, flipping it over from its back to its feet. Was the beetle really as big as the palm of his hand? Or was he confusing the beetle with a tortoise? And after his uncle died from a tumor in his throat, what had happened to his vast fields of groundnuts?
Monsieur Diop!
Oui?
Que désirez-vous?
He wanted God to talk to him. He wanted to see the blood of Saint Januarius redden and froth. He wanted to hear his mother scold his sisters and tell them not to disturb their brother—Amdu needed to rest. He ached all over. Still, he wanted to prove that his faith was unflagging. When he felt he was absolutely ready, purified of doubt, he would set out walking from the beach across the sea. He would walk back to Dakar over water that would have the buoyancy of thick aspic. His mother would be waiting at the gate. His father would be working in his study. Waves would spread in gentle ripples while on a distant island shrapnel flew through the air at three hundred meters per second.
WHEN UNCLE MARIO LEFT La Chiatta in disgust at his sister-in-law’s demonic exaggeration of German conduct, he did not return directly to Portoferraio, as Adriana and her mother had assumed he would. After passing Allied convoys heading east, he could only assume that the port was still unsafe for civilians, so he went instead to visit his cousin in Bivio Boni. But he found the little enclave of Bivio Boni deserted. Except for the hens pecking at the dirt and a gaunt dog that beat its tail wildly and whined for food, he saw no sign of life, and no one answered when he called to the second-story window from the courtyard.
He drove on to San Giuseppe, to the home of his friend Corrado. Corrado was a notary and usually the first to hear the important unofficial news. But Corrado’s house was deserted as well, and broken pieces of singed wood lay scattered around the yard, as though the contents of the stove had been dumped there.
With Bivio Boni and San Giuseppe empty, Mario could only think to return to La Chiatta. But he didn’t want to return to La Chiatta, where his sister-in-law was waiting with her barbed tongue to tell Mario just what she thought about his affiliation with the Germans. Wasn’t that just like a woman, to offer insult only when it was safe to do so? And to think that when he was a young man, before he’d married her sister, he’d fancied Giulia Nardi. She had always been able to twist him this way and that. Hadn’t she implicitly approved of his associations during the months of occupation? He didn’t remember her ever refusing the German’s gift of meat, after all. She had readily accepted the advantages that came from having a brother-in-law in good standing with the Germans, though he was far from being that insidious thing called a collaborator—the accusation that was heard in mutters during the occupation and afterward would be directed with predictable derision at whomever someone wanted to blacklist. No, Mario Tonietti couldn’t be accused of having been a collaborator. He’d merely answered questions put to him by the German officers, who sought him out not only because of his fluency in German but also because, as the publisher of the local newspaper, he had influence across the island.
He had been one of the few civilians consulted on September 1 of the previous year, when a group of German officers had arrived on Elba under a white flag to negotiate with the Italian command for a surrender. And when sixteen German aircraft dropped their bombs on the center of Portoferraio in a surprise attack the next day, killing more than one hundred civilians, Mario Tonietti was already safely at La Chiatta, far from the havoc.
He would remind anyone who cared to wonder at his well-timed absence that he had urged the Italian military command to re
sist the Germans. His loyalty to the island of Elba had remained steadfast. He would only ever recommend what he thought to be in the best interest of his people. Before the war began he’d been planning to run for mayor of Portoferraio. He would make a bid when the war was over. His friends were expecting it. Mario Tonietti was born to be a leader, they all agreed. Mario Tonietti, il prossimo sindaco.
Giulia Nardi knew about his honest ambitions. Why, then, was her hospitality increasingly infected with contempt? Or was it? She had never directly accused him. Nor did she look at him with the side-eyed glance that people direct toward someone they secretly consider guilty. But when she talked about the Germans as though they were worse than the Russians—this, she certainly understood, was a subtle way of suggesting to her brother-in-law that he was complicit.
Un collaborazionista, Signor Tonietti? Non c’è nessuna ragione per crederci. . . . If there was a time when he’d been persuaded by Il Duce’s early apologia for individualism, if as a younger man he had been an ardent supporter of Mussolini, it was not because he shared any aspiration toward world domination. No—Mario Tonietti might have been an important man on Elba, but he never lost a sense of perspective. His island was very small, easily ignored. He preferred to keep it that way. He had never been foolish enough to think that a great empire could be born out of the seeds of social unrest. It wasn’t the militarism that appealed to him. Rather, Mario had been attracted by Mussolini’s early declaration that he and his cohorts had “torn up all the revealed truths . . . spat on all the dogmas, rejected all the paradises, mocked all the charlatans. . . .” In contrast with the fatalism of the Socialists, the early Fascists—in Mario Tonietti’s opinion—offered a freshness of vision.
