Song for Night

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.