City of Saints & Thieves(74)

“I was five years old. I remember loud noises, and seeing fire through the window. There was yelling. Screaming.” I put my hands together and squeeze them between my knees. “Mama pulled me from bed, pushed me out the back window, and told me to run.”

I swallow, looking at the yard, trying to see which way I would have gone. “I’m a good runner. I ran for a long time, to a place near a stream where she used to take me. Maybe you know it. There was a little cave there. I went inside and waited. For . . . I don’t know how long. Days. I ate plants and fruits that made me sick, and drank dirty water from the cave floor. I was afraid of the animals. I was afraid someone would come and find me. I was afraid no one would come and find me.

“I could hear the men passing all around me through the jungle. I was supposed to stay in the cave, but one of those days I had to come out and relieve myself. I was doing my business when I heard the men coming and didn’t have time to get back. I was just squatting there and I had to bury myself in leaves, right on my stink, and hope they didn’t step on me or smell me. One man came so close I could have reached out and untied his boot. I saw his eyes.” I finally look back at Cathi. “He would have killed me as easily as breathing.”

We sit. The clouds are rolling across the sky. Cicadas drone in the heat. My head is starting to feel a little more clear.

“Now,” I say, “I didn’t spend those days in a hole, lying in my own filth, for nothing. My mother didn’t say anything about where she had been when she finally came and pulled me out. She never spoke of that time, or any time before. One day I might have asked her, but she was murdered before I could, and I am going to find out why. I’m not asking you. I am telling you. Help me understand.”

Cathi’s daughter returns to us with a smile like sunlight on water, her dress full of fruit. Cathi watches her and says nothing for a long time. Ruth shows her mother what she’s gathered, sneaking glances at me. I can see the woman in this girl, hovering like a shadow.

“Go and take these to Nyanya Florence,” Cathi says. “Her old teeth will like them. Take the dog.”

The girl nods and runs off, a child again, and we watch her until she is across the creek and out of sight. The silence grows thick and green around us. Then Cathi takes a deep breath and begins.





THIRTY-FOUR


A Story of Two Girls:

Once upon a time, there were two girls who lived in a lush land far, far away.

One of the girls was loud and giggly, while the other one was quiet and stern. One liked boys and the other preferred books. One was plump like a mango and the other was skinny like a pencil. One girl was pretty, but the other was as beautiful as the moon.

As different as they were, they loved each other fiercely, and one was never found without the other. They grew from girls to young women, and after they finished secondary school, not wanting to be separated, both went to the hospital in town to be trained as nurses. The girls worked hard and became strong women and clever healers.

One year into the training, the loud one’s sweetheart gave her father five cows and asked for her hand in marriage. The quiet one was happy for her best friend, but had decided long ago to give her hand to God. Each was pleased for the other, though secretly, deep in their hearts, they both wished they would never have to be apart.

? ? ?

Midway through their second year of training, a whisper reached the hospital that gold had been found in the mountains. And the nuns made the sign of the cross on their chests and said, “Brace yourselves, because we’ve seen this before, and war is coming.”

At first it was just a rumbling in the distance, disappearances, a scarcity of medicine and food. It was hardly war, and more like a howling of wild dogs somewhere far off. An unseen shivery sound that you would close the window against and try to forget.

And so despite the nuns’ warning, the girls weren’t prepared when the war came through the front gates of the hospital, ripping and slashing. It moved fast. They weren’t ready for the way it spilled blood and flung bedpans and laughed at the nuns praying to God. It shot a priest. It took whatever caught its fancy: morphine and tinned puddings. And before it left, it placed its hands on five young women, including the two young women who would not be separated, and said, These are mine. And it stole them away into the night.

? ? ?

It was a dark night. A very, very dark and long night. A night that lasted for months, though it was hard to say how many, as the girls used their monthly bleeding to count the days, and when the bleeding stopped, counting became difficult.

The warlords brought the women they had stolen into the mountains, to their kingdom, where trees covered the sky. In that place the women realized some of the men were in fact little boys with red eyes and slack faces. When the men and boys went out to fight, they wore leaves and flowers in their hair because it made them invisible to bullets. There were other women in the warlords’ kingdom, but they spoke a different language, when they spoke at all, and moved like ghosts.

The men had chosen this place because their god lived there, deep in a hole in the mountain. Every day, the five women were sent with the other captives into the hole to pick away at the flanks of the god of gold and bring out his shiny scabs.

And at night? Every night was hell embodied as a man or a boy, five or six times over. The loud one didn’t know them; she just closed her eyes and let her soul drift far away while she waited for it to be over.