Song for Night

Town Is Hands Making Boxes in the Air

A minnow skirting through weeds in a pool, a plane skims trees that ripple like a dense Afro. I pause and listen. From the engine pitch I can tell it isn’t a bomber, probably a Red Cross or reconnaissance plane. Down the dark road, in the distance, the lights of a town beckon and I follow.

The market, built around a central square, is alive even this late. People move back and forth. Night markets are a common feature of this war — there is no nighttime bombing or strafing. I stop by a telephone booth, gleaming white and chrome. It is growing out of a pile of baskets that houses angry chickens. There is no receiver and it most likely hasn’t worked since the war started. An interloper, it is regarded suspiciously by the sheep grazing on the rubbish spewed by the market: tin cans, paper, cellophane, fruit peels, rotten yams. The road across the market is a dirt track, mined with potholes. As I make my way through the throng of people shopping, or looking to steal, scents chase after me: goats, chickens, open sewers, muddy earth, dry thatch, rotting fruit, and vegetables.

I leave the market, crossing a small bridge humping a tired stream. Under a mango tree, in the deeper shadows, cows drink from the belly of a canoe sailing on a pile of sand. Everywhere, madmen and mendicants call. Children: bulbous heads pendulous over hunger-distended bellies with eyes washed out like the earth here. I stop in front of a flaking, dusty building. Somewhere inside, a generator hacks in coughy spurts and the lights flicker in sympathy. A worn sign announces: Die Hard Motel and Eatery. I make to enter, but lying across the threshold, dry, brown, dead, and molting, is a lizard. I hesitate. Lizards are sometimes seen as symbols of rebirth, but every rebirth requires a death. I hover on the porch and an old man hunched in the corner sees the lizard and me, and smiling says: “Faith is not a gift. It is earned.”

I don’t know what he means, so I ignore him.

He spits into the night: “Tufia! Even the dead ignore me!”

Shellshock, I think, and return my attention to the interior of the bar. Several rebel soldiers, officers, I think, are eating at a table near the door, although they seem to be doing more drinking than eating right now. I stare at the plates of rice and stewed meat on the table and feel my stomach knot and my mouth water. Judging by the number of bottles strewn about the place, the men are drunk. One of them is telling a joke so loudly I can hear it out here.

“There are three construction workers, one of them is Igbo, one is Yoruba, and the other Hausa …” At this he spits.

“Enemy!” one soldier slurs, interrupting.

“Shut up, I’m talking! Anyway, the Igbo man opens his lunch pack and says, ‘Oh no! Not rice again. If I get one more rice dinner, I will throw myself off this scaffolding.’ The same is repeated by the Yoruba and Hausa man, except that the food in question is beans and okra respectively. The next day they all get together for lunch. The Igbo man sees his lunch. It is rice. He throws himself from the scaffolding and dies. The Yoruba man sees his is beans and throws himself after the Igbo man. The Hausa man soon follows.” The soldier pauses to take a drink from his glass, puts it down, and regardless of the fact that his comrades are half asleep, he continues. “At the inquest, the Igbo man’s wife says she had no idea he didn’t like rice and she would have changed his lunch if she knew. The Yoruba man’s wife says the same. The Hausa man’s wife is completely confused. ‘I don’t understand why he killed himself,’ she says. ‘For the past twenty years, Hassan has been making his own lunch.’”

Ever since the troubles, and the war, several racist jokes about the enemy have been circulating. This was one of the more famous ones. It is funny, but nonetheless I am tired of all this hate. The joke reminds me of my life in the north before the war.

The call to prayer cracked the skin of sleep. Starting softly, the muezzin’s voice trembled and then the chant grew robust. As the muezzin’s voice ruffled its feathers and strutted, the call rose to a single point. One note screaming in adoration of the most high. It trembled there in the sunshine for a few minutes before cutting off abruptly. There was a pause, a silence that itself was a call, a prayer. Then the muezzin’s voice began the call again. Softly, it built to a crescendo, then died again on that abrupt point, dropping the faithful into the pit of belief. Every morning the call came, rousing me. For the faithful it was joy, while the infidels fought it, struggling to wrap sleep tighter around the senses, but for me it was the voice of my father the imam. When the call ended, its last note a silent scream to Allah, the compound came awake.

It is a terrible thing in this divided nation, even in its infancy, for an Igbo man to be Muslim. I will never know why my father chose that path; one that put him outside his own community, his own people, most of whom are Catholic, and made him a thing that the people who would later become our enemies feared: a hybrid. Even though he had been a Muslim since he was fifteen and traveling as a singer with a band, and an imam for twenty, the only mosque they gave him was inside Sabon Gari: the foreigners’ ghetto. Everyone hated the mosque, sitting as it did by decree of the Saraduana in the midst of the Christian enclave. Everyone hated my father. Yet he was the one they came to for arbitration, for help, to borrow money, and to circumcise their sons. For a long time I hated my father too, but since he died, I have been trying to love him.

I look in at the soldiers and realize that somewhere along the line, somewhere in this war, I have lost my appetite for it. I want nothing more than to return to the safety of my platoon and to outlive this madness. I am tired. I sink onto the floor of the porch, not too far from the old man who spoke earlier, and I wonder if he just grew tired too. I light a cigarette, turning to offer one to the old man. He takes it greedily and lights up from the match I hold out to him. The price of coming this far has been too much. From my hiding space in the ceiling to this porch, there has been nothing but blood since the night my mother died. I didn’t come down for days after.

It was hot up there, the zinc roof heating up quickly in the sun, my hiding place soon becoming an oven, and I had to strip naked and sip continuously on the water my mother smuggled up. The roof was peppered with rust holes and the sun dripped through in rivers of hot oil, mixing the shouts of the marauding mobs outside, the scent of death, burning flesh, and the screams of the dying into a fire that burned me, patterning my psyche in polka dots of fear.

Finally, I unfurled my body from its cramped position. For the past two weeks there had been pogroms against the Igbos, a frenzy of murder and looting, and the streets were littered with so many bodies. Anyone who had even the slightest resemblance to the Bantu Igbo was killed. The litmus test for those in the shadowlands between was the ability to recite obscure sura from the Koran, or the taking of a life identified as Igbo. The night I left, I stood in the backyard of the tenement, which was enclosed by the U-shaped building. One wing housed the kitchens and bathrooms, the other L the two-room flats that housed the eight families.

Before the troubles, the yard echoed with life: children playing in giggling starts, mothers shouting gossip at each other, men sitting on benches playing checkers and drinking beer, music spilling out of rooms mixing with smells from the kitchens, giving the courtyard extra spice. I remembered the games of cricket, and Paul, who could bowl so fast his main job in the rebel army, if he is still alive, must be lobbing grenades instead of curve balls.

It was deserted. Most of the neighbors were dead or had fled south to safety. Something was rattling in the empty kitchens; some hungry rat despairing. Cobwebs hung in fine lacy decay from the soot-blackened walls. The bathrooms stood still in bracken-scum-surfaced puddles. A lovely breeze blew a newspaper across the courtyard vainly fluttering against the silence.

Hidden in a small latch space behind the headboard of my parents’ bed, I found the rolled-up bundle of knives. I took them out. One of my chores was cleaning and honing those knives: the imam’s circumcision knives. Small, curved blades that could cut through flesh with a whisper of effort. I grew to love them, polishing the silver blades until they shone. I stroked them, played with them, spoke to them. They in turn spoke of the blood-spattered hysteria of the younger boys and the grim, tight-lipped grunting and moaning of the older boys and the honest wails of babies. They spoke of the wisdom of blood — veins, capillaries; of flesh and bone — brisket, tendons, ligaments, and skin. When some of the other boys in school started bullying me, I took to carrying one of the knives hidden in my dashiki. Pain was a sharp, ripping lesson those boys learned early on.

Still hanging in the imam’s closet was a single Fulani robe. A shiny gray, it was symbolic of his office. Alone like that there was something about it that was both incongruous and melancholy. I felt the tears coming as I pressed my face into it and pretended I could still smell my father on it, even though my uncle must have worn it last. I pulled it over my head and it fell to the ground like a ballroom gown. I hitched it in my belt to keep from tripping, but still it swept the floor. I slipped one knife into the pocket of the robe and wrapped the others carefully and put them under the robe, tucked into the belt of my pants. With one last look at the empty house, I stepped out.

Barely a mile away, a man grabbed me. I didn’t know what he wanted and I writhed like mad, trying to get away. I attempted to bite his hand but he delivered a stunning blow to my head. As I tried to grab my robe away from the man’s clutches, my hand slipped on something hard and cold: the knife. I felt its sharp cut on my thumb goading me to action. I retrieved the knife; its gentle sag in my palm the weight of my decision. I struck. The first cut sliced off the man’s finger, splashing surprised jets of blood onto his robes. A terrifying rage came over me and I slashed wildly, ripping gashes deep in the man’s arms and face. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. There was blood everywhere. I broke free as the man convulsed and died. His face and arms crisscrossed with cuts. With a cold detachment that surprised me, I stuffed the bloody knife into one of my pockets.

I headed rapidly for the train station. The city center was alive with mobs. Fires burned everywhere, some from Igbo-owned businesses, others from cars or piles of goods seized from the markets. There were even some Igbos tied to flaming crosses, their screams pitiful. The night sky was a red glow. It must have been at least midnight and yet both the old and new towns were alive with people like red ants crawling over a lump of sugar.

The ancient city was split into two distinct parts. The old city held the old sultan’s palace, the central mosque, and the Islamic university, and was home only to the Fulani. Only they were allowed to live or conduct business in the old city. In fact, an infidel who so much as walked through there was courting death. The new city was called Sabon Gari — infidel’s quarter. It was here that all the non-Muslims lived, conducted business, and had their churches. It was the commercial hub of the city.

I had to cross five miles of Muslim-controlled territory before I got to the trains. Soon enough, I was stopped by a mob.

“Who are you?” one of them asked me in Hausa.

“Sheik Rimi’s boy,” I replied, also in fluent Hausa. The Fulani backed off. Sheik Rimi was important, not only because he had the sultan’s ear, but also because he was the feared ideological leader of the suicidal jihadic Maitasine sect. I only knew his name because my father hated him with a passion. Passion that was expressed in his use of the Arabic word walahi, and the way he used it, it snaked into the air and snapped back like a whip.

“Walahi! Fundamentalists will be the end of us all,” he said.

I figured it couldn’t hurt to use the sheik’s name in this situation, and it paid off. For a while anyway.

“It might be dangerous to mess with one of his boys,” one of the mob said.

“But up close, this one definitely looked like an infidel,” another said, advancing.

“Prove it,” the Fulani challenged. “Prove you are one of us and that the blood on your clothes belongs to an infidel dog and not a believer.”

“How?” I asked.

“Sing the call to prayer.”

In my best voice I began the call to prayer. A hush descended on the crowd as my voice went from a childish soprano to a cracked and smoky alto and then back again. The cracks teased some with memories of loves lost and dreams turned rancid. To others it was a caress that burned. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, a man screamed: “Stop! Somebody tell him to stop!”

The Fulani youth who stopped me initially pushed me roughly on my way. The rest of the trip to the train station proved uneventful. No one else stopped me. There was a train idling at the station and it was easy to sneak past the officials who were busy watching the mobs, onto the train, which was made up mostly of cargo coaches. Whatever they were carrying was very carefully held down with tarp. Ignoring the cargo cars, I headed for the one passenger car. It was empty and I hid in the toilet.

The journey down south to the nearest Igbo city of any significant size took thirteen hours. It was the longest, most harrowing trip I had ever undertaken. I kept expecting the train to stop at one of the many stations it rolled past and for the police or soldiers or an angry mob to pull me off and shoot me or eviscerate me. But there were no stops. The train was cheered at every station, town, and settlement it passed through and I guessed it had passed into Igbo territory when the cheering ended. A few hours later the train finally stopped, hissing angrily. I peered out of the window of the toilet, relaxing when I saw the sign on the platform. I was home.

I waited a few minutes before getting out of the train to be greeted by wails and screams of sorrow. The tarp had been rolled back to expose the cargo: dead bodies, hundreds of Igbo corpses, the harvest of a few weeks of carnage. Some of the bodies had started to decompose, filling the air with their rankness. Many were mutilated — vaginas, penises, mouths, noses, ears, hands, and feet were cut off or out. Even pregnant mothers hadn’t been spared; their fetuses cut out and draped sickly over them. I turned away, retching.

I saw a group of men surround the Fulani train driver. He stood in their midst trying not to look scared, but his eyes gave him away. The first blow, when it came, was sudden and caught him off guard. He sank to the ground with a sigh. The blows that followed were swift and the only sounds were the fading cries of the driver, the soft thump of fists on flesh, and the gentle grunts of the men. In a few minutes they had beaten him to death with their bare hands. But the bloodlust was keen now and they were not sated. Seeing me standing mouth open, robes spattered in blood, they advanced toward me. But the women in the crowd formed a circle around me, a wall between the men and me.

“Step aside,” the men said.

“So we are down to killing children now?” the women asked, not moving.

“They have murdered our children, so we must murder theirs,” the men countered.

Just then I found my voice and screamed repeatedly. “I am Igbo!”

I throw my cigarette into the street and walk to the door of the bar. I stand just inside, signaling a request for food. I am an officer too, I think. I have led a platoon of mine diffusers, I have earned this right in blood; but they ignore me. Finally, an older man, graying, stands up and approaches me. He hands me his chicken. I am so clumsy, I let it fall. As I stoop to pick it up, he asks me if I have come for him. I shake my head, not understanding what he means.

“You are not a demon?” he asks.

I shake my head thinking all the old soldiers in this town must be shellshocked. I hear the other soldiers laughing about how the older man always sees ghosts and demons coming for him. I wonder why he thinks I am a ghost. How do ghosts appear?

Just then he raises his revolver. “Go now!” he screams.

I am already disappearing into the night when he fires.

The bullet tears past me harmlessly. I hide in a bombed-out house further down the street.

“Crazy fucks,” I mutter.

I am still holding onto the chicken.

I take a bite.

It tastes good.