The Child's Elephant (34 page)

‘And it did.’ Gulu’s voice dropped even lower. He
clutched his hands around the bones of his shoulders and glanced out of the hut as if to check that no one was listening, but there was nothing outside.

‘One day the soldiers arrived in broad daylight. They had knives, sticks and guns. The shots rang around the village and everyone scattered. I saw my neighbour racing back to his hut, only to find that his whole family had fled. Everyone was running; all in different directions. The children were crying as they looked for their parents. The mothers were wailing for the children they couldn’t find. The goats were all bleating and dashing about. The chickens flew squawking up into the trees. I saw a man falling and his sister running towards him, putting her arms round him, begging him to get up; but he couldn’t. There was blood pouring from his mouth.

‘I saw a village elder: he was bent and his face was all wrinkled and he was hurrying, but the little boy who stood in front of him didn’t care. He pushed him with a gun. I could see his legs were shaking. I had come from a village where you would never speak rudely to your elders, where the old people never needed to raise their voices above a whisper: they knew they would be heard, however quietly they spoke. I remember my mother flinging her arms around me to try to keep me safe; and my little sister was crying and tugging at her wrap. But then one of the soldiers came running over. He was only a child himself; but he grabbed at my little sister and held a knife to her throat. ‘Give me the boy and I’ll give you this girl back,’ he said. He was laughing. I could see the excitement that was burning in his face; and I turned to
my mother. I wanted her to look at me; but she was too frightened. Her eyes were flapping about. My little sister was crying, but silently now. The knife was pressing into her skin. And when I looked back at my mother, I saw water streaming down her ankles, spreading over the ground at her feet.

‘ “I’ll go,” I said, and I tugged myself loose. My mother did nothing to encourage me or to pull me back. She just stood.

‘Nothing is very clear after that,’ Gulu continued. ‘All was confusion. All I can remember was shouting and rough hands shoving. I was trying so hard to do whatever they said. It felt like one of those nightmares when you can’t open your eyes even though you are screaming. I was terrified of waking in a pool of my own blood. We were all huddled up under the meeting tree.

‘I could hear my mother wailing across the village now. “Gulu, Gulu,” she was crying, again and again. And it didn’t sound like the gentle trickling of our stream any more. It was the sound of something that I have been trying to block out ever since.’ Gulu paused. Knees hunched to his chin, he gazed silently out into the darkness. His face was blank as the night.

Muka tried to put an arm round his shoulder. But there was no response to her touch. Gulu remained fixed, fists clenched so hard that the cords on his neck sprang out. He stared out through the open doorway as if searching for something that he knew he could never find; something that lay far beyond the horizons of the other children, beyond any understanding that the pair of them might have.

Then he began speaking again in the same flat monotone.

‘I don’t know how long we were there, but suddenly I saw my father coming, though he couldn’t see us, and he was heading towards the bridge. The youngest soldier in the squad ran to wait for him. We listened to the footsteps as my father crossed. My whole body was crying out to him. “Go back, go back,” it was shouting. But he wouldn’t. He knew something was happening. He was coming to help. But how could he? As soon as he arrived he was held at gunpoint.

‘Until then, the squad leader had just been watching, leaning against a tree and smoking as if nothing mattered very much. Now he strolled across. ‘You are against our cause,’ he said to my father. My father shook his head. He looked utterly bewildered. “Do you have any last words?” asked the leader. My father didn’t speak. His lips trembled but no sound came out. The leader smiled and shrugged. “Then, boy, since he hasn’t got anything interesting to say you might as well do your first job.”’

Gulu dropped his gaze, picked up a stick and poked at the low fire. A flurry of sparks flew glittering through the gathering silence. Shadows leaped and flickered like ghosts around the walls.

‘And suddenly I realized he was talking to me,’ Gulu said. ‘I was being pushed out of the line. I was stumbling across the compound. They were putting a gun in my hands. I was staring down the length of its barrel. I had never held a gun in my life. The point was jerking about with every beat of my heart. My chest was so tight
that I felt as if I was suffocating, but I couldn’t release the pressure. Everybody was watching me. “Pull!” the leader said, “or it will be your mother and your sister and your grandmother too . . . if we can find her.” They all laughed. But I didn’t do anything. It was as if a storm was about to break in my head. And suddenly everything around me seemed to be falling away. I felt dizzy. I could see the leaves on the trees swaying but I couldn’t feel the wind.

‘My father tried to look me in the eye. He might even have tried to smile at me, but his smile was no more than a grimace of fear. He held out both hands, palms upward. I could see the beads of sweat bursting open on his brow. I watched them streaming down his face. He was speaking, he was saying something over and over, but I couldn’t hear the words that came out of his mouth. I couldn’t understand anything. I was far beyond that. And it came almost as a surprise to feel the kick of the gun, to see the answering jerk of his body, to look at the corpse as it rolled over in the dirt. I looked down. And I felt nothing. All I could feel was the arms of the leader circling around me. “You are one of us now. You are our brother,” he was saying.

‘They left the body like a rat that has had its neck broken. I only turned back to look once. It was as we were leaving. The huts were all blazing. But my mother was kneeling, she was bending over the body, she was cradling it as gently as if it was still living, as if it still meant something even though it was dead and meant nothing any more. And I knew at that moment that my whole world had changed; that I could never go
back. I understood at that moment that it was not that there was no right or no wrong any more: it was just that there was no right.

‘From then on I lived with the army. They had made sure that I would. That’s what they do to children. They make sure that their villages won’t take them back. From then on the forests were my home, my squad was my family, my gun was my protector and my law was “kill or be killed”. And I just kept moving onwards. It was all I could do. At least it stopped me from thinking. We just marched and pitched camp, and then marched on again. Surviving through the day was my only goal. If I found fresh food or water I felt happy, but it was only ever for a while and so it didn’t seem to matter and in the end it seemed easier just to stay always sad. It’s not hard to give up hope when there is no hope left at all. Once you know for sure that you can never be forgiven, then there is nothing to worry about any more.’

Gulu stopped speaking as suddenly as he had begun. He was completely drained. He lay down to sleep. Bat looked at him as he huddled on his little wooden cot, his knees drawn up to his breastbone, his fists tightly curled.

It might have been two weeks later, it might have been three – they had lost all sense of time passing – that the children found themselves standing on a high mountain ridge gazing out over expanses of unbroken forest.

‘Keep close to that river,’ Yambabo was saying, pointing out the long snaking line of a watercourse far below them. It scoured its slow way through distant dusty flatlands, vanishing into the heat haze of the furthest horizon. The empty sky sang in the heat of the noon. This was not the life-giving savannah that he had grown up with, Bat thought as he squinted; this was the merciless Africa, the vast waterless land. He felt the first stirrings of fear in his gut.

Yambabo noticed. ‘A man could walk for all time across that desert and never get anywhere,’ he said. ‘Why
don’t you wait for the rains to come? Why not return to the forest with us?’

The children glanced at each other uncertainly.

‘There’s a drought,’ Yambabo urged them. ‘The rains will not fall. The animals are all dying. In the villages, the pigs are frying in their own fat.’

It was Gulu who gave a firm shake of his head. A few days ago the pygmies had returned from a hunting trip with tales of huge strangers: men with black boots and guns dragging lines of ragged children with ropes around their legs. The children had looked almost starving, they said. They were stumbling and bleeding, but the men with the guns kept driving them on.

Gulu knew then that their hiding place was no longer safe. These were government soldiers the pygmies had seen. They were rounding up the rebel army, capturing the children. ‘They will not be kind to those they have had to come out and capture,’ he said. ‘They will make an example of them. If they find us, they will kill us. They will kill us or worse.’

‘But look!’ Bat now cried, staring out helplessly over the emptiness that unfurled far beneath them.

‘It’s safer than the trees,’ Gulu said. ‘The forest is a trap.’

Yambabo spread his hands. He was surrendering responsibility. He had done all that he could. ‘Then, if you must leave, listen carefully,’ he said. ‘After a few days, the river leads to a lake. There you can drink, find fresh grazing for your elephant. And from then on it is the elephant who will know where to go.’

‘How many days will it take?’ wondered Muka.

Yambabo just shook his head. ‘I’ve never been so far. I’m a child of the forest. I don’t leave it. I would be frightened of that.’

He was frightened now and when, that evening, they reached the ragged scrublands which lay at the thinning fringes of the trees, neither he nor his cousin who had accompanied him on this journey slept. All night, they perched on a pair of stones staring out into space, only rising every now and then to stalk about restlessly, shaking their heads. ‘I’m trying to remember a tune to sing,’ Yambabo told the children, ‘but now no tune will come into my head.’

Even as they were about to say their farewells, he made one last attempt to convince the children they were making the wrong choice. ‘The pygmies are decamping deeper into the forest,’ he said. ‘We are going to places that no one except us little people has ever found. There, even when the sun has risen, there will still be darkness around you. And when it is the darkness of the forest it is good, because we are the children of the forest and have no need to fear it. But out there,’ he said, nodding in the direction towards which they would be going, ‘is darkness of a more dangerous sort.’

Bat felt his heart gaining a sudden rapid momentum. He put his arm round Muka, felt her shrink in to his side. But Gulu stood firm.

‘Don’t worry about us,’ he said. ‘We will find a way. We have all the food you gave us.’ He nodded at three little baskets of berries and mushrooms and salt meat that the pygmies had gathered for them. They were to be carried on the back with a thin string of bark slung
around the brow to secure them. When Muka had at first tried to lift one onto her head, the pygmies had all giggled. Every low-hanging branch in the forest would have knocked it off, they had said. But Yambabo was not smiling now.

‘Make sure that the water bottles are completely full,’ he told them, leading them downwards towards a small stream. The water should have flowed fast and sparkling at this time of year, but it had shrunk to a sludgy brown trickle in the drought. They dipped in their little goatskin bags, turn by turn. Then Meya stood, long after the others had finished, drinking and drinking until it seemed as if the whole stream would be sucked up.

Muka popped one of the little leaf hats that the pygmies had given them onto her head and peeped shyly out from under its green brim. ‘Do I look like one of the forest people now?’ she giggled.

But Yambabo didn’t respond. ‘You must lead them,’ he was saying to Gulu. ‘You know how to survive. Remember that a bolus of dried elephant dung will keep embers smouldering if you pack it up properly in a banana leaf. Then you can coax it back to life whenever you want.’ He gazed bleakly out towards the horizon. The first light of the sun stained a long line of clouds red.

‘May the gods of the ancestors go with you!’

He lifted his hand as he gave his parting words. He looked deep into Meya’s eyes as if he was telling her something, and then he stood there and watched without waving as they turned.

When they looked back to give him a last sign, it was as if he and his cousin had already forgotten them.
They were standing in the stream, their skin gleaming in the low rays of the sun, giggling and talking as they splashed one another. They scooped up the water and let it pour down their bodies. It was as if they were washing every last trace of a world that was not theirs from their skin.