On Black Sisters Street (22 page)

Alek felt dread worm its way into every crevice of her being. It filled up the cracks that fear had left exposed. The soldiers wanted to ransack the room. To check every bit of it. Under the bed! The cupboard! The drawers! Between the books!
Pa tried to stop them from checking the cupboard
. “It is just us, sir, honestly. There is no one else here. Just my wife and me.” Alek imagined her mother nodding. Hoping that the force of her nods would convince the men. Then her father’s voice. Faltering. A leaf blown by the wind. “Please, please, spare us.” A voice that did not sound like his.

Alek had never heard her father sound like that: timid. Servile. She felt embarrassed for him, this efficient policeman. Maybe on his knees. “Please, sir …” The faltering voice. Begun but not finished. A shot amputating the rest of his sentence. A stillness. Inside the cupboard, the smell of fear. Rising and rising. Then a wail.
Ma sounding bigger, louder
.

“Shut up!” a soldier caterwauled at her. The rest took up the refrain.

Wail.

“Shut up! Shut up!”

Wail.

“Shut up, Tora Bora wife.”

Wail. “Are we not people like you? Are we not?” Her grief raising her wails to a crescendo that made Alek’s lungs clog up as if she were inhaling dust. Alek wished she could block it out, this sound that was horrific in its peak.
I wished I could just wipe off the day and start again
. The wailing continued. Ripping Alek’s heart to bits. If she looked hard, she might see the pieces. Scattered over the floor, bloody and irretrievable. A shot. And then a dreadful nothing. Alek shut her eyes. Maybe, if she shut her eyes, she would wake up from this dream. The dust clogging her lungs would clear. Tips of her fingers against her eyes. She had to keep them shut. Let the still darkness segue her into some other realm where her reality was different.
And then I heard a soldier cough and say something that made the others laugh
. The raucous laughter punched her. Her mother’s wails replayed in her head. They raised an anger from deep inside her that took over her fear. And her reason. And she went insane. She scurried out from the cupboard. Her parents’ bodies were sprawled on the ground, an island between her and the soldiers. Her father’s white
jalabiya
was turning the bright red of a medicine man’s. She looked away from the bodies. Quickly. And focused on the men.
All I wanted was to be able to attack these men who had just blown my life away as if it were a handful of dust
.

The soldiers looked at her. A bean pole. Breasts like baby mangoes straining against her flowered dress. One of the soldiers smiled. A lopsided grin that caused her to instinctively cross her arms over her chest. He laughed. A long laughter that held no mirth but took its time in dying down. He slapped her hands away. Grabbed her breasts. Pinched them as if testing some fruit for firmness before buying. Her nipples hurt under his fingers. “Stupid African slave!”

Another joyless laughter.
He tore my dress. I fought, but he tore my dress. And. And. And threw me on the bed
. She tried to bite him. He felt her teeth graze his arm and slapped her. She dug her nails into his arm. Another slap. She aimed for his eyes. He pinned her hands down.
I wanted to gouge his eyes out
. She wanted to inflict on him a darkness that he could never emerge from. A pain in her back. One of the other soldiers had hit her with the butt of a rifle. She could not stop it. A scream. It catapulted her brother from his hiding place. A soldier aimed his gun at him and shot. Lifted him off his feet. Landed him with a
whack
on the floor. He did not make a sound. Not before. And not after. Alek tried to scream but could not. Her voice failed her. And then her body followed suit. A warm trickle from between her legs. Soaking her dress. The soldier on top of her slapped her. “Why are you urinating on the bed?” Another slap. “Stupid bitch!” Slap. Slap. No energy to fight back as he spread her legs. He tore off her underwear. She imagined that she saw her mother cover her face with her hands so that she did not have to watch. When he thrust his manhood inside her, when he touched her, Alek felt a grief so incomprehensible that she could not articulate it beyond chanting, “This is not happening. This is not happening.” A mantra to keep away the layer upon layer of pain that seared through her as he went in and out of her, groaning like a dying man. One by one the other men thrust themselves into her, pulling out to come on her face. Telling her to ingest it; it was protein. Good food. Fit for African slaves.

She concentrated on her mantra. Until she started to descend into a darkness, a void, where she felt nothing.

Alek had no idea how long she was left there. Naked. The pain between her legs, harsh. And in her nose, the smells of raw fish and dust. She remembered waking up with the sense that she was in mourning for something she could not immediately identify. And then her eyes fell on the floor. And she remembered. Alek let out a shout that dried her mouth. She groaned, scratched her hands, and screamed again.
Aiiiiiiiiiii. Aiiiiiiiii
. A scream that made her hoarse. And heralded a stampede of tears.
I had to get out of there. That was the only thing on my mind
. She dug her hand inside the cupboard and dragged out a dress. It was her mother’s. She held it against her nose and smelled a warmth that did not console her. She held it against her body and cried into it. Still sniveling, she pulled it over her body. It covered her and billowed out at her waist like a rainbow-colored parachute. She walked out, refusing to look at the corpses on the floor.
I thought if I did not look at them, it would all be a … I don’t know … a mistake, a dream, you know? Maybe they forgot me and left without me
. She yearned to wash out her nose. To wash out the raw-fish smell of the soldiers’ come. She wanted to scrub between her legs until she forgot the cause of the pain.

At the front door, her slippers. She had to be strong. Outside, dead bodies scattered on the street. Women in brightly colored clothes walking in a line, bright flashes of color in the midst of such utter desolation. There was something hopeful in the sight. Perhaps all was not lost. Maybe her family still lived and she was trapped in a nightmare. Some of the women had children strapped on their backs. Some had young children walking alongside them.
I joined the group
. No one asked who she was, and Alek did not volunteer. A collective sadness bound them together. Clamped their lips. Occasionally, a young child would sniff. Ask for food. Or a drink. Apart from these, the group walked on in silence toward the bridge. Stepping
around corpses. When they saw a football and a child’s sandals at the side of the road, Alek thought of Ater. His love of football.
He wanted to play professionally, you know. A midfielder for Hilal, his favorite team. Or Meriekh. His second favorite
. Alek swallowed hard. She would not cry. Crying would be giving up. Or giving in. She was determined to survive. She owed that much to her parents. And to her brother. They had sacrificed themselves for her. She could not let them down. That would be worse than what she had gone through.

She lifted one heavy foot after the other, swallowing her tears so that her stomach filled up with them. Made her so bloated that she was certain she would never need to eat again. It was not until they reached the bridge that Alek looked back. A silent goodbye to her city. She did not know when she would be back. Or if she would ever return. She let memories of the past play in her head. She edited the past. Clipped the horror. Kept only the laughter and the smiles. Her memories were black-and-white reels of evenings spent bantering and eating dinner and good-humored family teasing. But then she remembered. She was alone. She looked down at herself. At her feet. Cracked and coated with dust. Her throat was parched, and she longed for a glass of water. Sweat gathered between the soles of her feet and her slippers. It made the slippers squeak. She wished she could take a bath. A cool, refreshing bath to get the filth off her. Beyond the fishy smell, she could smell herself. Almost. And what she could almost smell scared her beyond fear. And filled her with the rage of a haboob.

Alek felt like she was carrying a ton of sorghum around each ankle. Every move she made was torture. But respite was in sight. The refugee camp on the other side of the river was a six-kilometer stretch of tents. Dust. People. Soldiers guarded the camp. She could see them, smoking and swaggering. With the pomposity of people who owned the earth.

The new refugees were directed to an office to register. For the
first time, she told her story to someone else: a white-haired United Nations worker who spoke through her nose like a European even though she was black.
The woman did not blink as she listened to my story
. She did not wince as Alek told how she had heard the shots that killed her parents. How the soldiers had taken turns raping her. How she had watched her brother die, his brains splattered on the walls of her parents’ room.
The woman did not blink!
She handed Alek a ration card, told her it was for food. Gave her a plastic sheet for her tent. And shouted out for the next in line. Where Alek had thought that her grief would singe ears and stop the world, the woman’s reaction convinced her that the camp was a collection of sad stories. Hers was nothing special. “Next!” the woman called out. Next. All the way at the end of the line, they heard her.
Nextnextnext
. She dispensed of the refugees. Doing the job she was there to do. NEXT!

At fifteen, Alek was setting up home with a bed. And a wooden table. Her dreams of going to university and becoming a doctor buried with a past that she could never get to again. Her new home a tent that she was not sure could keep out the desert sand in the face of a strong wind.

Once she could, she washed herself. Scrubbed the dust off her feet. Until it seemed they would bleed. She willed them to bleed. She would never scrub herself like this again until she moved to Antwerp. The pain of the scrubbing was cathartic. Ridding her body of the weight it carried, so that by the time she was done she felt reborn. Her feet shone, gleaming in the dark, and her ankles felt light.

That night she stood outside her tent and looked at the night sky. It was littered with stars. She smiled at the stars and had a conversation with her father about school. About how hard she would work once she could go back to school. She talked to her mother about her period, which had become painful. She had a quarrel with her brother about his shoes, which she had found in her room. “Your shoes are
stinking out my room,” she told him, and he pushed his tongue out at her. She was afraid to go to bed.
I was afraid of the dreams I’d have. But I did sleep
. When she slept, she dreamed of her father. When she woke up, she allowed herself to cry. Not even wiping the tears that trailed down her cheeks. It was a silent cry. Not the noisy howling that she had anticipated, the way she had cried at her grandmother’s funeral years ago. The tears moved the boulder on her chest and left a cavernous hole where the boulder had been. And in the middle of that hole was the epicenter of a sandstorm.

Alek could not settle happily into life at the camp, standing in line for food and soap. Enduring the shoving of those behind her. Impatient for their turn. During the day, she went with some of the women and young children to fetch firewood for cooking. Escorted by some soldiers from the African Union Peacekeeping Force. There was something distressingly humiliating in the routine of her daily life.

Sometimes, before she fell asleep, she saw her parents lying on the floor of their bedroom. She tasted her fear as she hid in the cupboard with her brother. She heard the laughter of the soldiers as they tore her dress and squeezed her breasts. Sometimes she wished the soldiers had killed her. Having been left alive, she felt an obligation to survive,
but what kind of survival did I have, living in a tent? I hated the camp. I couldn’t make friends with the other refugees
. Their singing and laughing irritated her.
As if all was well with the world!
She did not like the ease with which they adapted to camp life. She detested the sessions when the women gathered in a tent for coffee magnanimously distributed by aid workers who encouraged them to talk to one another. To tell one another about their lives in the belief that the exercise would help heal them of the trauma they had gone through. She did not want to hear their stories. To hear about Gyora, who was dragged to a tree behind her family home by two
janjaweed
soldiers. She was raped so violently that, six months later, she was still bleeding. “My body does not want me to forget the violation,” she
said at the end of her testimony. All the while her arms were wrapped around her waist. Protecting her from an unseen assailant. Neither did Alek want to listen to Raoda talk about being kidnapped. She and sixteen others. Soldiers on horseback. Galloping! Galloping! Took the girls to use as sex slaves. Raoda escaped. In the night. Four months pregnant. Three months later, a baby. Impatient to see the world but unable to survive in it. Alek did not want to sit down and drink coffee. And listen to the woman whose name she could never remember talk about how her fourteen-year-old son was forced to have intercourse with her. A gun at his head. Soldiers in his ear. “Touch her breasts! Put your penis in her!” Alek’s body shook with the paroxysm of her rage. What good was this? All this talking. And remembering. And digging up ghosts.
I think that maybe the aid workers got perverse pleasure from listening to these stories of madness, you know?
She refused to tell hers. She had no wish to open up her heart. To lay its bleeding rawness open to strangers.

She loathed the African Union peacekeepers, who strolled around with their hands in their pockets. Kalashnikovs around their necks like musical instruments. She almost died the day she had to go and ask for a sanitary towel. Her period had started at night.
There I was, telling a total stranger I was having my period. And a soldier nearby sniggering
. It made her aware how inconsolably helpless she was.