"What are you?"The boy must be only about nine. His voice is a hundred times older, ancestral, as if his throat is a tomb, a rotting tomb; dark, deep. I cannot see his face; the darkness has devoured it, I imagine it must match the ancient voice – a caveman"s face.
But one can tell he is just a boy.
There had been a small boy"s fear in his voice and footfalls when he ran in my direction earlier. "They have reached our village!"
He was the first person I had heard speak unbroken English in
this village.
"What are you?" he had asked, after gathering his shredded breath back into his lungs.
"Photographer. Freelance."
I was not afraid of him; I could tell he was not a soldier, a
killer. . . He was afraid, of me, of dying.
"I mean, what are you – American?"
"Oh. Australian."
He sighed, and fell silent.
* * *
"Sir, do you have a drink, sir?" he asks, after a long, deep silence has swallowed the awkward introductions and small talk sprinkled between us.
"Yes," I say, and bring out my hip flask, take a swig and
olubunmi familoni
replace it in my breast pocket.
He cannot see my hand-to-mouth movements but he hears the whisky move in my throat. He swallows, and waits. I hear the small movements in his stomach, a grumble.
"Hungry?"
"No," he says, "Thirsty."
"There"s no water around here, I don"t think."
"I heard your drink in your throat, sir."
"It is alcohol. Whisky."
"We drink it, sir."
"We? Who is "we"?"
"My friends and I."
"Aren"t you guys too young to be drinking?"
"We drink, we f.u.c.k, we smoke . . . n.o.body is too young to be doing anything here. There is a war . . . n.o.body is too young to die, or kill, so n.o.body is too young to f.u.c.kin" drink . . ."
"Or use foul language."
"Sorry."
You can tell he is not; he just wants the b.l.o.o.d.y drink.
I give it to him – "Here, wash the French out of your mouth..."
He doesn"t seem to understand. He doesn"t bother to; he just grabs the flask from me, and pours the whisky into his mouth. Holds it in there for a sweet while, swishes it around with mouthwash vigour, holds it for a few more seconds before swallowing, and lets out his breath in a long, exaggerated Ahhhhhhhh . . .
He takes two more greedy swigs before he returns the flask.
"Thank you, sir."
"So, these friends of yours, where are they now?"
"Dead."
He says it offhandedly; so coolly I almost feel offended by it. As if death is, or has become, a casual thing, a handshake; something that happens without emotion.
"And you?" I ask him.
"Alive," he says, just as calmly as he had referred to Death.
"I mean, how did you escape, survive?"
"Have I survived?" He laughs a small, dirty laugh that could pa.s.s for an old man"s dry cough. "Survive indeed . . . n.o.body survives here; it is just that everybody"s death comes at different times. Mine hasn"t come yet."
"What if it doesn"t?"
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"Am not going to live forever, am I? It will!" He sounds terribly exasperated at my offer of hope, of life; almost indignant at the preposterous suggestion of surviving.
After this outburst, another long silence settles and stretches between us, widening the dark s.p.a.ce that separates us, like the seas between continents.
"So where are your photographing things? The cameras, the
lights . . ."
"I have only a camera. A Nikon. Broken."
"So what are you photographer for if your camera broken?"
I notice how his English is disintegrating gradually, becoming more broken with every sentence. I don"t know why. "The soldiers broke it."
"And them didn"t kill you?"
"No, they asked me to run."
"Ah, them going to kill me and ask you to run, you see, when they catch us . . . So that you won"t photograph them killing of me.
Hha . . ."
"I won"t let them kill you."
"How?" He coughs his small, dry laugh. "How you won"t let them kill me. With what you will stop them? Your broken camera?"
His broken English is becoming more annoying; it is as if he is doing it deliberately to make my own proper English look useless.
"I don"t know, but I won"t let them kill you."
"Amen," he says, with a bitter cough-laugh. "Cigarette?"
"I don"t smoke . . . I have chocolate."
olubunmi familoni
"m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kah," he says, under his breath, and makes a sucking sound between his teeth to register his disdain.
Somewhere within the next silence he sleeps off. I know because I hear how his breathing has changed, settled.
* * *
When I wake up, it is dawn, and the boy is gone, so are my broken Nikon, the hip flask, and my wallet!
He left my Lord of the Flies, and a pile of s.h.i.+t nearby already besieged by angry flies. The page he had used to wipe his a.n.u.s lies crumpled next to the ugly heap of faeces, like a dejected relative mourning a loved one. I turn it over with the toe of my boot – it is the page that quotes Gloucester in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to th" G.o.ds. They kill us for their sport."
The page is brown with lines of the boy"s s.h.i.+t.
* * *
I"m thirsty. Perhaps I"ll find a stream ahead. I don"t.
I find a pool of blood, a headless body in it. More flies hovering over it, angrier flies, buzzing cacophonously around the body as if trying to wake it – a crowd of rowdy mourners. On the body are the native Ankara s.h.i.+rt and matching trousers, buba and sokoto.
I know it is the boy. Even though I hadn"t seen his face last night, or now. But I know. His blood calls out – I can hear his ancient voice, asking for a drink, for a smoke, for death . . .
I bend double and add my vomit to the blood, already blackening. The flies become an irate mob – they attack me from all sides, as if I"m responsible for the boy"s death, as though I killed him...
I did. That"s how I feel. Like a killer.
* * *
The war, if it does not kill you, it makes you a killer; if you haven"t killed, it makes you want to; it sends blood rus.h.i.+ng through your head, into your eyes, blinding you, stanching your tears, flooding your heart and pounding in your ears until you obey the l.u.s.t, the burning bloodl.u.s.t that fills your heart with a barbaric sense of urgency, propels you into the blackness of it all.
I want to find his killers and kill them . . .
The war, like a dark lover, draws you into itself like that.
I had only intended to be a mere observer, a casual onlooker, capturing scenes of the gore and misery and beaming them to the world, through an independent, objective medium; to show the world what was really happening, not what the big news agencies wanted them to see . . . But the war had succeeded in its seduction and sucked me in, made me an unwilling partic.i.p.ant with blood on my hands and mind. . .
The saddest thing, as I stared at the corpse, was that I would never be able to photograph the boy"s face; capture the flame of anger in his eyes, the tick of a smile on the corner of his mouth, the carca.s.s of innocence in his stare, the hard blackness of his face. I would never know what his face looked like.
I would never know him.