by Majok Tulba
I can hear the smile in his voice.
A dream leaves me like a spooked bird. My dreams don’t want to stay any more.
On my second day in the camp, outside the barracks, a shrill whistle. Parasite snaps to his feet, throws on his clothes and runs out before my brain is clear enough to figure out what’s going on. My sleep-fogged mind tells me, Run out after them. But my body is slow, maybe still half absent. I sit for a moment on the edge of my bed and stretch out my clenched limbs. I’m just so tired and want to sleep more.
My back explodes in a shower of stings, like a cloud of black wasps has landed on me. I jump off the cot and trip over the next one. As I fall down again I see three boys, tiny ones with shaved heads and long bamboo canes. As I try to pull myself up on the fallen cot, the boys start hitting me again, blows from their thin weapons fast like rain.
Outside the barracks, someone is laughing. ‘Mobile Force is meeting one of the new recruits.’
A rough hand grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet, we’re heading for the door. I’m now completely awake. I catch on quickly and run for myself. Lines smarting all over my body, I start sprinting towards the large crowd of boys. Behind me, the little boys chase two more recruits. One is Akot. I guess he was the one who pulled me from the barracks. He must have come to find me.
The Mobile Force boys aren’t the youngest, they’re just small. The officers want their army to be big and frightening, so the smallest stay in the camp, for the Mobile Force. Maybe that’ll be me: they are fast. The Mobile Force is in charge of making sure everyone obeys the rules when the officers aren’t around, or can’t be bothered. The Captain doesn’t have time to punish everyone who is slow out of bed. Even the elite bodyguards, the quiet eunuchs that stand by the officers’ houses and guard the wives, can be beaten by the Mobile Force.
From then on I learn to fear them, as everyone does, even more often than we fear the Captain, because you don’t always know when they’re around.
Once I am in ranks with the rest, though, there’s only one man to be frightened of. I make sure I’m lined up with those in front of me and on either side. For a moment I breathe in victory, until heavy boots tromp out of the shadows in the dawn light.
At this hour the Captain moves like an elephant, every step slow and careful, but long, so that he still moves quickly through our ranks. He begins by checking our legs, telling us to make them straighter, stand taller, chin up, chest out.
‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!’
He carries a long black stick. We are maggots, so he only touches us with the stick. He stops in front of me. The fear I breathed away rushes back in. Breathe in, breathe out. Please keep moving. Please. He whacks the stick into my knee.
‘Stand proper, maggot!’ the Captain yells.
His stick comes down once on my head. He continues walking, with those long, slow steps. I’m still shaking when he reaches the end of the row, but I’m glad to have got off easily.
‘All right, maggots!’ he bellows. ‘Into the creek, now. Run!’ He hits the nearest boy on the back with his stick, but most have already taken off.
Through the camp we run as fast as we can. It is a race, not against each other, but against Mobile Force, who run with their switches biting at the empty air between us.
The first set of splashes come seconds before the icy water laps at my ankles. I freeze. My body doesn’t want to go further. A boy collides with me from behind, making us both fall into the water. We’re only in there for maybe five minutes, but it feels like days. I’ve never been so cold in my life. My fingers go stiff as I break the surface and the feeling in my legs rushes out. I can barely stand, shivering uncontrollably, up to my thighs in the middle of the creek.
Now we’re running, through the creek to the far bank. The Captain wants us running up the steep mountains nearby. It’s like trying to run with crutches, my legs are so cold and stiff. Many kids trip and fall down crying, only to be hit by the Mobile Force until they manage to get back up. I go down, my knee screaming, it’s still too cold. Two switches bite into me, but I crawl from under them and push on, teeth chattering. This is our training.
The ones who don’t pay attention during drills get smacked around by instructors. The simple truth is that a human body can only be beaten so much before it stops. Why don’t the officers learn that lesson? They’ll beat a child again and again and again, until, one day, he simply falls over, never to stand again. A lot of other boys, after getting a beating, go to bed and never wake up.
Or maybe the officers have learnt the lesson but don’t care. Our commanding officers seem to know on sight which of us will make soldiers and which are too weak. They use the weak ones as examples. Any rule they want to teach us, they wait for a little skinny one to break. They beat him or shoot him.
I wonder whether the Captain has picked me as one of the weak ones. He’ll beat me whatever I do, until I don’t get up. I think about not getting up, but I know my father wouldn’t want me to do that.
The Captain isn’t in charge of everyone at the camp. There are other captains, with their own recruits, and the Great General, who is in charge of all of them. I don’t know if the Captain gets shouted at by the Great General. Maybe the Captain started off as a recruit, and the Great General was his captain. I like the thought of someone making the Captain run and beating him. It makes me like the Great General a little.
The Great General is the only fat man in the entire camp. He is not very neat. Most of the time he walks around without a shirt, just letting his hairy stomach hang out. He wears a small scarf around his neck for dabbing up sweat, and an old pair of shorts that sag halfway down his rear, showing a thick band of dingy underwear above them. Not even his wives have bigger rears. I don’t know why his wives don’t wash the General’s clothes more often, or make the recruits do it, like the Captain does. Maybe they don’t care what he looks like.
Then there are the commanders, who call for drills whenever they feel like it. There is no schedule, no routine. They just shout and you say, ‘Yes, sir!’ and go. Otherwise you get beaten, or whatever else they think will teach you.
Priest is the one person in the camp I can call a friend. He is one of the most senior soldiers – not an officer, though, he has no rank and sleeps in our barracks. We don’t have lots of ranks like the regular army, mainly they just use them to make everything sound more official. Our army is not so complex. Priest is older than most other soldiers. We call him Priest because he carries a bible everywhere. The Captain doesn’t believe in God – he believes in himself, God in the revolution kingdom. But Priest is allowed to do what he wants.
Priest got the bible when they attacked a village on a Sunday. They surrounded the church while everybody was inside. No one said anything. The drum stopped beating when the worshippers saw them. Priest said that the people looked at each other as if they were talking with their eyes, trying to tell each other that they would be safe.
The Captain walked up to the pastor at the front of the church, pistol in hand and puffing on his cigar. He snapped the bible out of the pastor’s hand and flipped through it. Then he looked out over the congregation, standing shoulder to shoulder with the pastor in front of the altar, as if preparing to read the lesson. ‘The white man is strange,’ he began, and then turned to the pastor and poked him with his loaded pistol. ‘They worship a god who has a son but no wife.’ He turned to the worshippers, who looked confused as to whether the words were actually coming from the bible. ‘But the son has a mother who is not the wife of the father.’ He closed the bible. ‘So much for the white man’s religion.’
They burnt the church. No one was allowed to escape. The Captain allowed Priest to have the bible, stolen in the name of the revolution.
Most of the kids have no one to look after them. As well as getting beaten and not knowing why, they get sick. You get sick in the villages, too, but it’s worse here. Here there is no rest for the sick. I’ve seen boys fall over during a r
un and just fill their pants with the rice-water diarrhoea. I had it myself once, and had to keep running out to the latrine. The latrine is a big crater where a mine had gone off in a clearing in the jungle, who knows how long ago. We use it because it’s away from camp, and a crater always means safety. Priest is not like Akot, he takes me out in the dark when I wake him at night.
He tells me to be strong. If I’m strong I can beat anything that comes my way here in the camp. If I’m not, then I’m like that kid from yesterday. He had the cholera. He lay under shade, curled up with his hands clutched around his stomach. He never got up.
When the Captain came he kicked him in the side with the tip of his boot. ‘This one is gone.’
They don’t care about the weak that die from the diseases. They only care about the heroes of the revolution. When a soldier dies at the hands of the government forces, our officers remove their hats for a minute’s silence, before we spend many hours singing revolution songs.
A lot of the kids drink water right out of the creek. My mother ground it into me that you always boil water first, get it bubbling for a while before you even think about drinking it. But these kids get up first thing in the morning and go to the creek. They get cholera. They shit so much that they get weak from dehydration, and what do they drink? More creek water!
Our commanding officers have wives who make sure they always have boiled water. The rest of us have to boil our own. Of course, even if you always drink boiled water, you’re still going to get something from the beans. Beans for breakfast. Beans for lunch. Beans for dinner. My first night, some of the boys tried to have a farting contest, but the superiors in the barracks thrashed them for it.
‘We’re all farting!’ they yelled. ‘We all fart a hundred times a day! Shut up and let us sleep.’
I met Priest on my first day. He’d heard about my vomiting over the Captain and the idea made him laugh. I’d seen a group of bigger boys from the barracks walk into a patch of jungle to relieve themselves. We’d been warned that the jungle around the training camp had a lot of mines, but somehow these boys had found a safe spot, away from the stinking latrine. I decided to use their spot as well.
Just as I dropped my pants I heard someone say, ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’
I looked up and saw the four big boys walking towards me.
‘Who the hell are you?’ one yelled. ‘Who gave you permission to shit here? This isn’t your village where you can just walk around and shit wherever you want.’
I pulled my pants up and backed away. The leader charged and tried to kick me in the ribs, but I was already running, with my bad knees. We were right at the edge of the jungle, and even though I was terrified of mines, somehow I was more petrified of the leaders.
The path was through a thick bunch of trees, leading away from the camp down to a banana grove. Before I got beaten I was always pretty good at climbing the trees, so I was thinking, If I can get to the grove and up a tree, I’ll be safe. As I reached the head of the path, I slammed into an even bigger man. My legs turned to mush. I’d get beaten for this, for sure.
From the ground I looked back, and the boys were frozen, staring wide-eyed.
‘Enough,’ Priest’s voice boomed.
The boys stood like petrified wood.
‘Go! Or I will shoot you where you stand!’ His hand was on the gun slung at his side.
My attackers didn’t know what to do. ‘But —’ one of them said.
‘Are you arguing with me?’ Priest bellowed, then in a quiet, dark tone, ‘I’m going to count to three.’ He raised the rifle to his shoulder. ‘One —’
They ran. I watched them go a few metres, then I sighed and collapsed to the ground. Priest let the gun swing back against his thick leg. He turned his gaze towards me. ‘And you,’ he reached out a hand. ‘You need to get up and quit running.’
I took his hand and he pulled me to my feet. I brushed the dirt off my clothes as Priest turned back to where he had been sitting. My legs were still shaking, partly from the adrenaline leaving them and partly from fear of this giant of a man.
‘Running won’t help,’ he said.
‘I’m fast,’ I blurted out.
He turned from his seat on a nearby rock and raised an eyebrow.
‘I was the fastest person in the village,’ I said, encouraged by the lack of anger in his face.
He picked up his gun. He’s going to shoot me. I stood paralysed.
‘This,’ he waved the gun, ‘is the only speed that matters.’ I remembered that the soldier on the truck had said the same thing. ‘That, and the balls to vomit on the Captain.’ He smiled a little and indicated, with a nod, a rock nearby. I went and sat on the rock.
Guns are all around me. Only the new recruits like me are not armed. There is no one in the camp weaker than us.
On my second day, I wake up to see Parasite sitting on the floor, a ratty towel laid out in front of him, and his AK-47 across his knees. As deliberately as a spider building her web, he starts to dismantle the weapon.
I don’t say anything, I just stare at the gun.
‘You like my disease?’ he asks with a smile.
‘Your what?’
‘This.’ He strokes the half-dismantled gun like a pet kitten. ‘My gun. It’s name is Disease. Get it? I’m the parasite, this is the disease.’ He pulls another piece off the gun.
With a small oily cloth, he starts wiping down the gun, digging out bits of dust. A little bottle of baby oil sits on the towel. He pours it on his hands, rubs them together, then rubs his hands all over each piece of the weapon. The way he does it, the look on his face, gives me a feeling like I shouldn’t be watching. Maybe he’s doing it to tease me.
‘I’ll tell ya, Baboon, cleaning a gun is like when you feel yourself getting an erection. There’s that lightness you feel, that little burst of happiness. And then it’s there, man. It’s you. Big and strong!’ Parasite shifts a little where he is sitting. He wipes his hands on the cloth and starts reassembling the pieces.
‘Shooting stuff,’ Parasite says, with his gun reassembled and glinting, ‘is just like making love, man. This gun has made love to three very beautiful women. Have you ever seen a woman dead?’
I remember my uncle’s wife, back in the village. They tore away her clothes and tossed her into the dirt. She was so weak from fear that, even on her hands and knees, she had trouble staying up. Once they were finished with her, they left her dead in the dust next to my burning hut. Looking at Parasite, I shake my head.
He smiles with half of his mouth. ‘It’s amazing. I’ll tell you a secret. Women, they’re so much more beautiful dead than alive. The first time I killed a woman for real, it was just me and her in the hut. Bang. Bang. Bang. Two in the stomach, one in the head.’ He mimes the shots.
Parasite sets the gun across his lap and folds up the towel with the cloth and oil inside. He pushes the wrapped towel under the cot, next to his boots. ‘She was still warm,’ he says. Standing up, he grabs his crotch and adds, ‘And so tight! Only took a minute. World’s best.’
He slings the AK-47 over his shoulder and stands there in his shorts, his erection at the level of my face. ‘Shit, man,’ Parasite whispers. ‘I gotta go to the hospitality house. Are you even old enough to get it up?’
I shrug. I know what Parasite is talking about, but not really. Akot used to compare the rears of all the women in the village. The single ones, at least. That never made sense to me, how one was better than another. He was the same with breasts. Hearing him talk, I did figure out that large breasts were somehow better than small ones, but I had no idea why.
‘Yeah,’ Parasite says distantly, and nodding for no apparent reason. ‘Real virgin, not just a blood virgin. You’ll get your chance, man. Someday, if you don’t piss off the Captain so he decides to beat you to death.’ He laughs and heads out of the barracks, gun across his back, to the hospitality house. I fall back on the cot.
As soon as we arrived here, the
soldiers handed the girls over to Mouse. Akidi shuffled and stumbled along with the other girls, away from the soldiers. I thought she was lucky. It took me a while to figure out what kind of hospitality was being offered.
That happened as I was walking behind the house, trying to get to the barracks without being seen by the Captain. There was a sudden bang on the wall, right by my head. I froze. Fear echoed in my bones. I heard heavy breathing and a woman’s little cries like she was being beaten, and then longer sounds.
I knew those sounds. My village was made up of simple huts and some people were very loud. Growing up, I’d heard those sounds so often that they faded into the back of my mind like the humming of grasshoppers. The only thing about it was that it was daylight. And the women went with more than one man, though I didn’t think too much about that. But now those sounds sent an instant wave of sweat across my palms.
I didn’t see Akidi much after we got to the camp. They didn’t let the hospitality girls out much. When I did see her, I knew she’d changed, everything about her was different. My uncle’s sister-in-law went into that house and never came out.
I wonder if Parasite will visit Akidi.
I don’t know whether Parasite had always felt that way about guns and girls, or whether it was being here that made him think those things. I hope he was always like that – but I think they want us all to become like him.
From the first, we had to learn revolution songs, but our morning runs included a different kind of song – not about the revolution and the glorious new world.
A farmer’s daughter tried to run from me
So I shot her once, right in the knee
I dragged her into the long green grass
And then I fucked her pretty ass.
To have those words coming out in my own voice terrified me, and still does. Sometimes, if I’m in the middle, away from the Captain and the Mobile Force, I sing the words from my village’s Sunday school songs under my breath, to try to cleanse myself.
