The Child's Elephant (22 page)

Gulu scuffled quickly away on his bottom, squatting watchfully against the farthest wall. ‘And you!’ Lobo scowled. ‘You are being put on woodcutting duties. There’s a pile of branches in the compound. You don’t need your feet to work with an axe.’

‘Can’t I help him?’ asked Bat. ‘I’m not sure he can manage.’

‘More likely he can help you.’ Lobo laughed. ‘He can tell you how not to end up like that. Look at him! That’s what happens to people who get
lost
. If he learns to walk again, we’ll keep him. He’s useful. He knows
how to mend engines. If he doesn’t . . . well, he knows what happens to soldiers who can’t fight. Military life begins now. Here, put these on.’ He threw Bat shorts and a shirt, then turned on his heel and went out.

‘Dead men’s clothes,’ Gulu whispered as Bat held them up. ‘They come from the people the army has killed.’

Bat, who for so long had been wishing he could wash his blood-stained shirt, shuddered as he changed. The shorts were too big and he had to roll the waistband up.

‘Hurry up!’ Lobo shouted as Bat finally stumbled out. His legs felt strangely weak. Lobo pushed him into a blundering run. On the far side of the compound another boy was waiting and Bat was forced down into a squat in front of him. He froze still as his curls were shaved with the blade of a knife. A group of other children were being herded into the middle of the compound. There must have been about twelve of them, he thought, counting them with the same rapidity as he could count cattle. All were wearing the same hotchpotch of ill-fitting garments as he was; all were looking as worried and bewildered as he felt.

His eyes darted around them. Was Muka among them? He had to look twice before he finally recognized her. He had never seen her wear anything but a printed wrap. Now she was dressed in a T-shirt and trousers like a boy. Her braids were all gone. She was shorn down to the scalp and she was thinner, much thinner, than when he had last seen her. A blue shirt hung in straight folds from her angular shoulders and a pair of brown
trousers had been belted with string. But she flashed him a look that meant she was managing and he felt an answering wave of relief. He longed to run towards her, to ask her what had been happening, to find out where she had been, what she had found out, but even as he began to edge hesitantly towards her, the man with the bloodshot eyes strode across to the group.

‘Line up!’ Lobo bawled.

The children jostled about confusedly as he forced them into some sort of file.

‘I’m your commander,’ the man told them. His eyes crawled down the line, drilling into each of the frightened little faces in turn. ‘From now on you will know me only by that name. From now on what I tell you will immediately be done. My second-in-command here’ – he pointed to Lobo – ‘will make sure of that. Now fall in!’

And so the military training began: a programme of exercise and hardship and discipline so relentless that it drove every thought except that of their next breath from the children’s brains. They had to run and keep running until every muscle screamed for rest; to lie and keep lying until the ants trailed over their skin; to squat and stay squatting until every sinew was groaning; to obey orders as instinctively as they would have swatted a fly.

The sun blazed down on Bat’s newly shaven scalp as he marched on the spot, up and down, up and down, until the sweat streamed from his face, neck and back and the insects that blundered against him got stuck. He felt thirsty and giddy and sick. But there was no respite.

‘You must act as one person,’ the commander yelled.

If the children flagged, they were beaten. If they fell behind, they were beaten. If they failed to act fast enough on an order, they were beaten. Sometimes it was the commander or Lobo who exacted the penalty, striking the elbows, knees or ankles with a stick. But it was worse when it was another child who was chosen to do the beating; when a soldier was forced to turn on his or her fellow sufferer.

If they didn’t strike hard enough, they would get a beating themselves. Bat dreaded the moment when he would be ordered to hurt Muka. What would he do on the day when her spirit flared up? Would he be able to punish her? His mind winced from the thought. Could your spirit break like a bone? he wondered. He suspected that Lobo also was waiting to find that out. Sometimes he would see his eyes flickering between him and Muka, narrowing cannily as he waited and watched.

Days passed into nights; but Bat, who now slept in a line of boys under a palm shelter, was almost too weary to notice the difference between them. ‘The army is like a machine,’ the commander would tell them. ‘You are parts of a whole. If one of you doesn’t function, the whole mechanism will fail.’ At the bark of an order they had to be up and ready, forgetting tiredness and hunger as they were drilled back and forth until each was so alert to the movements of the one standing beside him that the merest tensing of a muscle was enough to elicit a response. Over and over they went through their routines until after a while, Bat came almost not to mind it. At least it helped to distract him; at least he felt
too exhausted to do anything other than what he was told.

He came to prefer the marching to the times when the commander would have them dragged from their sleep in the middle of the night. Then they would be made to stand in a line, still as the statues on a wood-carver’s stall, while flying things whined around their faces and bit. The commander, planted straddle-legged before them for what started to feel like for ever, would talk. On and on he would go. Sometimes his voice was rough edged and menacing, sometimes it softened and sounded almost cajoling in the dark.

‘Our job is a serious one,’ he told them. ‘We are not like those government soldiers who fight for whoever pays them. We are here for the people. We have the gods on our side. We kill those who deserve it. The gods want it. It’s for the good of this nation. We are fighting against unfairness. We are fighting for peace.’

The words drummed into his brain like a tribal beat in the blood, until sometimes Bat found himself almost believing they were true.

‘We are here to protect you. We are your family. We will fight alongside you when the rest have gone,’ the commander assured them.

‘Sometimes I think that he cares,’ Bat whispered to Gulu one evening as they crouched together on the outermost fringes of the fire. A tree hyrax was roasting and they had been drawn to the flames by the rich drift of its smell. But they dared go no closer. The child leaders, the ones with the long matted dreadlocks who had been in the army so long that they now commanded
their own squads of child soldiers, were the only ones who were allowed to get up close to the warmth, to take the choice morsels as soon as they were ready.

‘Don’t believe him,’ muttered Gulu. ‘You can’t trust anyone here . . . not even yourself.’

As if to prove it, at that moment, a fight broke out. It was between two of the leaders who by now Bat recognized. One they called the Thief because, it was said, he could purloin pretty much anything. The other was nicknamed the Goat because he disliked getting wet. He wore a camouflage jacket with long sleeves and a wide grubby collar from which his sinewy neck poked. He looked like a child who had put on his father’s clothes, Bat thought. But there was nothing childlike about his outburst.

‘I’ll kill you! I’ll cut you up into pieces. I’ll slice off your lips,’ he screamed, leaping in fury at the Thief, who had just taken the last morsel of bush meat from its spit. The watchers scattered like clouds of tiny fish in a stream. A knife flashed through the firelight. The Goat made a grab and, securing his prize, drove his snarling rival back off with the blade. He gnawed on his gristly morsel as he watched the loser retreat, eyes glowing, sullen as a beaten hyena.

‘And they are friends,’ whispered Gulu. ‘Friends are dangerous things to have in this camp. You can’t trust.’

‘But I trust you,’ Bat murmured.

‘Don’t,’ Gulu snapped. ‘Friendships only bring trouble. Your allegiance is to the army. And the commander is always on the watch.’

‘But Muka?’ Bat faltered. ‘I will always trust Muka.’

‘Then guard your secret,’ Gulu hissed. ‘You will only be forced to betray her. There are informers among the children. They are starving. They will sell you for the price of a chicken leg.’

Bat believed him. He had seen the older soldiers snatching food from the fists of the youngest. They would sit grinning and eating while the little ones tried not to sob.

‘We have to pretend not to like each other,’ he whispered to Muka three days later, drawing her into the shadows beyond the ring of firelight. Behind them, at the fringes of the forest, he could see one of the sentinels who were always left on guard watching them, but he had to take this opportunity to speak. They could so seldom be together outside training times. Where he and Gulu slept among boys huddled under a palm-leaf shelter, Muka was kept always on the girls’ side of the camp.

‘We have to pretend that each of us is angry with the other,’ Bat urged Muka; ‘that each blames the other for having been caught. We can’t afford for them to talk of us in the same breath.’

‘But what about Lobo?’ the girl replied. Her question was almost a whimper. ‘If he thinks that you hate me . . .’ Her voice straggled off, but Bat knew what she meant. He had seen the way that Lobo strutted when he knew she was watching, the way he constantly monitored through narrowed eyelids. He knew why her lips now quivered. He watched her struggle for self-possession.

‘It’s so hard,’ she faltered. ‘I don’t know if I can manage without you. You don’t know what it’s like. There was one girl I spoke to in my first days here,’ she whispered, ‘who had been snatched from her village with her sister. The little one was only eight but she was forced to march all day with a huge sack of flour on her head; to walk and to walk until she was too tired to go any further, until she was wailing so much that one of the child leaders flew into a rage. “If you’re so tired, let’s give you a rest,” he said and he struck her on the head with the handle of his panga. She fell to the ground and never got up. And now her sister who was with me has gone too. She left the camp with the commander. I don’t know why. All I saw were the tears shining on her face as she left. And then I was glad, so glad, to know that I still had you with me,’ Muka whispered, ‘and though I tried to wish that you hadn’t been captured, that you hadn’t run back to find me, I was so glad that you had. At least together, I thought, we could find a way to escape. But how can we do that if we can’t speak to each other, how can we do that . . .’ Her voice broke into a sob. The sudden sense of abandonment was overwhelming her, bringing the girl who had been so strong to a breaking point.

Bat watched the feelings that flickered across her shadowy face. He could read them almost as clearly as if she had spoken aloud and, unable to bear it, he reached out.

But Muka, steeling herself, jumped up and, stepping rapidly backwards, turned on her heel.

‘Muka!’ Bat cried. Two other children turned at the noise. But all they saw was the girl stalking stiffly away
and Bat, his hand still half lifted, following her with his eyes. Lobo glided over. He too was now studying them, his eyes thin as slits. Bat let his hand drop and just stared into the night.

That was the last time he and Muka would let anyone see any contact between them, he thought. And though often in the days that followed they would exchange secret glances, they were warily alert whenever anyone was watching. They stalked stiffly about each other as a pair of village dogs. At first, tired and hungry, the loneliness tormented them; but it was strange, Bat realized one morning as he stole a slantwise look at his friend: the feigned distance was starting to make them feel all the more close.

One day the children were all given weapons. Anything served: hoes, sharpened stakes, knives, pangas or spears. They were made to lie on their bellies and crawl forward with their elbows until an order was given. Then they had to run onward as fast as they could and attack a banana palm that drooped faintly at the fringes of the camp.

‘Imagine that tree is your enemy,’ the commander barked. ‘Imagine that it’s coming to get you. If you don’t kill it now it will kill you . . . or far worse.’

The children stabbed, sliced and pierced. If they didn’t look fierce enough, the commander sent them back.

‘Is that how you would kill your enemy?’ he bellowed. ‘That’s pathetic. Let me show you how it’s done.’ And unslinging his rifle, he uttered a bloodcurdling shriek
and leaped forward. ‘The neck! The stomach! The heart!’ he screamed. A bayonet blade flashed as it flew in and out. The veins in his neck swelled, tight as the cords around a tugging cow. His sweat broke out in beads. ‘I would slaughter it before it slaughtered me,’ he panted as he wiped his weapon clean with a torn banana leaf. ‘Remember you are in the army now. You are the sworn enemy of the government soldiers, of the people who give them shelter, of the villagers who won’t join you; of everyone but your fellow fighter at your side.’

The children lunged at the palm, this time with a renewed vigour. If they didn’t please the commander, they wouldn’t be allowed to eat. They would have to stand at the side and watch while the others were fed, their bellies growling as the hunger gnawed deeper into their guts.