The Bite of the Mango (3 page)

One of the boys pointed his long rifle at the man’s back. Two others forced the man into a kneeling position on the ground facing his wife.

In front of us all, and in front of her husband, they killed her and the baby she was carrying.

“Do you like what you have seen?” one rebel asked me.

Marie had told me once about a rumor she had heard. “When the rebels kill, they make the person watching say they enjoyed it, or else that person will be killed too. If you ever get into that position, always say you like what you see, no matter how bad it gets.”

So I replied to the rebel, “Yes.”

“Good,” he spat back. “We may keep you alive after all.”

The rebel guarding us grabbed Adamsay by her braids and yanked her into a standing position. He shoved her into the arms of another rebel, who spun her around and dragged her by the hair down the road. I saw her, like a shadow, being pushed into the doorway of a house on the other side of the bonfire.

“Goodbye,” my heart said to her. “Goodbye.”

I had prayed before, sometimes as often as the five times a day prescribed for Muslims in our holy book, the Quran. The mosque in Magborou was a house made of red clay. At night, kerosene lamps and tiny candles cast the only light. We had a village imam, who conducted the prayers and gave sermons.

Marie had instructed me how to pray for happiness, for a nice man to marry me when I was older, or for a good harvest for that year. The only thing I ever really prayed for, though, was a pretty new dress. Every year for Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan, our fasting season, Marie would present us kids with new clothes that she had bought in Port Loko, a city about half a day’s walk away. I loved having a new docket-and-lappa, a two-piece African outfit made from cotton. Prayers worked, that much I knew, for I always did get a new outfit for Eid.

After Adamsay disappeared into the house with the rebels, I closed my eyes and began to pray and pray and pray. This time, it wasn’t for new clothes. “Please let me die quickly. Let it be over quickly. Let my family, if they have been captured by the rebels all die quickly, too. Don’t let the rebels cut my body piece by piece.”

I prayed hard, so hard my head began to throb. When I
opened my eyes, there was a group of rebel boys staring right at me. If it hadn’t been for their red eyes, their guns, and the knives in their hands, it would have been like opening my eyes after counting to a hundred during a game of hide-and-seek, and finding the village kids smiling in front of me.

I felt dizzy. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I stopped hearing things, and then my vision went too. I passed out.

When I came to, the first thing that struck me was the music. It pounded in my head. The men and boys were singing along to it, some even screaming lyrics that I couldn’t understand. Above the singing, the rebels were yelling some words to each other that I recognized only later, when I moved to North America.
Rambo. Red Eye. Killer
.

I had to pry my eyes open; they were caked shut from my tears mixing with the dirt and dust. At first, all I could see were red and yellow shadows. I could feel heat on my body, like the hot sun in the middle of the day. But as my focus sharpened, I realized that the shadows and the heat were from the bonfire of the villagers’ possessions. It was raging now, so big I couldn’t see the village anymore. The men and boys danced before it in silhouette.

I was lying on the road where I’d fallen. My hands were now untied, but they were numb from having been shackled by the rope for so many hours. I still managed somehow to gather fistfuls of the dry red earth, which I rubbed into my hair, face, shoulders, and legs. “If I am dirty, the rebels won’t want anything to do with me,” I told myself.

“Take her to the river to clean up,” the man who spoke
Temne bellowed. I hadn’t seen him, but he was there behind me, as he had been from the beginning. He barked his order to four boy rebels.

“Wait,” I pleaded as the older rebel pulled me to my feet. “I have to pee! Please, can I go pee before you kill me?”

The man let go of me and stepped back. “But we’re not going to kill you,” he said with a small smile. “We’re going to take you with us. You’re pretty. There are things you can do for us.”

“But I thought you said you weren’t capturing anyone else.”

“I lied,” said the man.

I don’t know where it came from, but I had had a feeling earlier that this rebel wanted me to go with him into the bush and to raid other towns. When I first saw rebel girls doing the cooking, I momentarily pictured myself frying cassava alongside them.

“Okay,” I replied. All I could think of was to play along with the plan. “I will go with you. But let me pee first.”

The man stood back and motioned for the boy rebels to come forward. “Watch her,” the man told them. “Don’t let this little one run away. I like her.” He ran his right hand along my cheek, and as he stepped away he winked. I shuddered.

The rebel boys let me go inside the outhouse alone. I was surprised and grateful for the solitude. I sank to the ground and cupped my face in my hands. I didn’t know what to do. I could try to escape by making a dash for the bushes, but I’d have to run through the open soccer field first. I remembered the smirking faces of the boy rebels after they had killed the pregnant woman. The boys standing outside the outhouse would wear the same smirks, I felt sure, after using me for target practice.

“So I will go with them,” I decided in a panic. But I didn’t want to be one of those girls. My body began to shake. A knot formed in my throat. Choking back tears, I straightened my back and slapped my cheeks. “Pull yourself together,” I admonished myself. “You will outsmart them. Go with them. Act as if you like them and would never run away … and then run away when you have your chance.”

Thoughts of Adamsay, Ibrahim, Mohamed, Marie, and even Alie flooded into my mind. They stood in front of me, smiling. I said goodbye to them all.

“Please help me, Allah,” I prayed again. “Let me find a way to escape.”

The rebel boys had started shouting. “What is taking you so long?” one demanded in Temne.

I didn’t bother to answer. I came out a few seconds later, turned, and walked back to the man giving the orders, with the boys trailing me.

The older rebel stood talking to another man, someone I had not noticed before.

The second man had very light skin, almost white. The two were speaking Krio. Their arms were flailing, they were shaking their heads, and their faces were red with fury. As soon as they saw me, they pointed my way. “They’re angry about me,” I thought.

I knelt down in front of my captors, lowered my head, and waited. I wanted to show the older rebel that I would be obedient.

“Okay, little one,” said the rebel as the second man walked away. “Get lost. We don’t want you after all.”

I wasn’t sure I had heard the words correctly, so I remained still.

“You can go,” the man repeated, waving his hand this time. “Go, go, go!”

I stood up slowly and turned my body toward the soccer field.

“Wait!” the rebel hollered. I stood motionless as a couple of the boys grabbed guns from their backs and pointed them at me. I waited for the older rebel’s order to shoot. Instead, he walked in front of me. “You must choose a punishment before you leave,” he said.

“Like what?” I mumbled. Tears I could no longer hold back streamed down my face.

“Which hand do you want to lose first?”

The knot in my throat gave way to a scream. “No,” I yelled. I set off at a run for the soccer field, but it was no use. The older rebel caught me, his big arm wrapping around my belly. He dragged me back to the boy rebels and threw me to the ground in front of them.

Three boys hauled me up by the arms. I was kicking now, screaming, and trying to hit. But though they were little boys, I was tired and weak. They overpowered me. They led me behind the outhouse and stopped in front of a big rock.

Gunfire filled the night. The rebels were shooting up the village, I assumed, and probably everyone left in it. “Allah, please let one of the bullets stray and hit me in the heart so I may die,” I prayed. I gave up the fight, and I surrendered my fate to the boys.

Beside the boulder, a shirtless man lay dead. Smaller rocks
lay all around him. With a shock, I realized it was the pregnant woman’s husband. He traded goods from town to town, like the man who had given me the palm oil. The woman who had been killed was his second wife, and the baby would have been his first child. Now the man’s face was nothing but a bloody pulp. I could even see parts of his brain. The rebels had stoned him to death.

“Please, please, please don’t do this to me,” I begged one of the boys. “I am the same age as you. You speak Temne. So you might be from around here. We would have been cousins, had we lived in the same village. Maybe we can be friends.”

“We’re not friends,” the boy scowled, pulling out his machete. “And we’re certainly not cousins.”

“I like you,” I implored, trying to get on his good side. “Why do you want to hurt someone who likes you?”

“Because I don’t want you to vote,” he said. One of the boys grabbed my right arm, and another stretched my hand over the flat part of the boulder.

“If you are going to chop off my hands, please just kill me,” I begged them.

“We’re not going to kill you,” one boy replied. “We want you to go to the president and show him what we did to you. You won’t be able to vote for him now. Ask the president to give you new hands.”

Two boys steadied me as my body began to sway. As the machete came down, things went silent. I closed my eyes tightly, but then they popped open and I saw everything. It took the boy two attempts to cut off my right hand. The first swipe didn’t get through the bones, which I saw sticking out in all different
shapes and sizes. He brought the machete down again in a different spot, higher up on my arm. This time, my hand flew from the rock onto the ground. The nerves kept it alive for a few seconds, and it leapt from side to side, as trout did when we caught them from the river, before we knocked them on the head and killed them to cook for our evening meal.

I had no energy left as a boy took my other arm and held it down on the boulder. It took three attempts to cut off my left hand. Even at that, some of the flesh remained and hung precariously loose.

I didn’t feel any pain. Maybe that was because my hands were still numb from having been tied together for so long. But my legs gave way. I sank to the ground as the boy wiped the blood off the machete and walked away.

As my eyelids closed, I saw the rebel boys giving each other high-fives. I could hear them laughing. As my mind went dark, I remember asking myself: “What is a president?”

My head seemed to be made of cement. My eyes opened, but before they could focus I began to cough. As I raised my right arm to cover my mouth, I could feel blood, warm and sticky. Horror gripped my body, and I remembered:
I have no hands
. Before fear could overtake me, I felt a surging pain in my stomach. My injured arms instinctively cradled my abdomen. “What happened to me?” I said out loud. No one answered.

Standing was difficult without my hands to push me up. I rolled around in the earth, onto my knees, and staggered to my feet. At first I walked around in a circle. I didn’t know which way to go. Then I regained my senses. I could hear the loud crackling of the bonfire, and its light shone through the trees, illuminating my way.

Still holding my abdomen, I started to put one foot in front of the other. I wanted to get away … away from here, away from this village. I was certain, though, that I was being set up. Some boy rebel was hiding behind a mango tree, waiting to shoot me. As I walked toward the soccer field and the bushes that lay beyond it, I was waiting at the same time for the sound of a bullet ripping through the air.

But the bullet never came, and my walk turned into a run. Soon I could no longer hear the loud music, the roaring flames, or the rebels’ cries and cheers. The soft calls of crickets welcomed me into the bush.

I was very weak, but I didn’t stop running until I was well into the bush and had reached a pond lit by the rays of the full moon. I knelt down at the edge. My arms tucked into my stomach, I placed my face right in the water. I drank for a long time. The liquid was cool and refreshing.

Afterwards, I sat up and looked down at myself. My docket-and-lappa was torn, dirty, and bloody. I pushed my arms out to examine my wounds. A thick layer of drying blood was all that remained where my hands used to be. I realized suddenly that I was in pain—sharp, darting pain that ran up and down my arms as well as through my abdomen. I was sick, sicker than I’d ever been in my life, that much I knew for certain. I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at my wounds, then dipped my forearms into the water, thinking the action would soothe my injuries. It didn’t. The pain was overwhelming. Its intensity made me dizzy, and I felt myself fainting.

“Don’t pass out,” I repeated to myself as I lay on the grass. I forced my eyes to remain open as I took a few deep, long breaths. I thought of my family, of my mother and father. Were they alive? Had the rebels reached them? And then I thought about my life. I heard a voice in my head. “You will live,” it said. “You will live.”

When my breathing had returned to normal and my head no longer spun, I sat up and looked around. Baskets of laundry
and clothes were littered everywhere. “Villagers never abandon their laundry like this,” I thought. “They must have been spooked, perhaps by the sound of the rebels’ gunfire.” I stood up slowly, and awkwardly approached one of the wicker baskets. Using my right foot, I rummaged through it. The clothes inside were still damp from the washing, but I didn’t care. I pulled out what appeared in the moonlight to be a blue lappa, a garment like a sarong. I tried to wrap the fabric around my torso, but without my hands I couldn’t do it. The lappa fell between my arms onto the ground.

I straightened my back and picked the fabric up again between my toes. This time I wrapped the lappa around my injured arms. As soon as I could find a path, I resumed my run through the bush.

The Sierra Leone countryside is crisscrossed with paths that villagers use to travel from their homes to the farms, to the ponds for washing, and to other villages. This path, I felt, was leading me away from Manarma. But where I was going, I didn’t know.

After a while I slowed my pace to a steady walk and began shouting: “Ya Marie! Pa Alie! It’s me, Mariatu!” I hoped that my aunt and uncle had escaped the rebels and were hiding in the darkened forest of coconut, avocado, and mango trees. “Help!” I called out. But the only response was from the crickets and owls that stopped their songs as I drew near.

Eventually the path led me to an abandoned farmhouse.

I could see that the farm had not been tilled in at least one season, maybe more.

It was overgrown with weeds and tall grasses swaying in the gentle wind of the night. A farm was a good sign. It meant that
a village was nearby—and help. But relief soon gave way to terror. What if the rebels reached the village before me? I took a few more deep breaths, then made myself enter the farmhouse.

Moonlight shone through a gaping hole in the thatched roof. There was a bench along one wall, and I let my body sink down onto the wood. As I closed my eyes, I blocked out any other thoughts by repeating to myself: “I’m alive. I will stay alive.”

I don’t know if I actually slept or not. But a hissing noise jarred me wide awake. I lifted my head with a jolt and saw beside me a jet-black cobra. Its long body was coiled on the floor just below the bench, and its big head, with its spitting pink tongue, was reaching up toward me.

I slowly rose from the bench and backed away. From the doorway, I saw the snake pulling its head back down into its body. I was puzzled. “Why didn’t you want to hurt me?” I asked the creature. “Is it that you sensed my pain?” The cobra looked at me for a moment while I stood paralyzed with fear and curiosity. Eventually, the snake turned its head away.

I ran and ran once I reached the path again. As soon as I started calling out for Marie and Alie, though, I spied another cobra, this one spanning the width of the path before me.

I stopped dead in my tracks. My grandmother had once told me that every person has a spirit watching over him or her. Some people, if they’re really good, have two or three spirits. These spirits are often relatives who have died, like a grandfather, like Santigie, and sometimes they come to you in the guise of an animal, a bird or a reptile. Here I was looking at the second black cobra of the night. Something was going on, that much I was sure of.

“What are you doing?” I yelled at the snake. I felt very frustrated, for I wanted to get on my way and couldn’t—the cobra was blocking the path. “If you are the spirit of my guardian angel, please get out of the way to let me pass.” The snake didn’t move.

With a determination I didn’t know I had, I plunged into the dark bush. The moonlight couldn’t penetrate the canopy formed by the trees, so I tripped over rocks and long, twisty weeds. But every time I lost my footing, I got right back up. I worked my way around in a semicircle, coming out on the path far beyond where I’d seen the snake.

I walked until the sun began to rise, casting long shadows in front of me. I tried to push on steadily, in the hope that I would arrive at a village the rebels had not yet reached. But every now and then I’d jump at a sound. The cooing of an owl or the snap of a twig caused by some small animal made me think the worst—that the rebels were there in the bush around me, taunting me, letting me believe I was safe only to kill me at a later time. I knew my mind was trying to get the better of me. “There are no more cobras. There are no rebels,” I chastised myself.

Finally, up ahead, I saw a clearing, and the waves of a small lake. I quickened my pace. I was thirsty by now, and hungry too. I thought, “When I reach the lake, I will drink and try to eat some fruit from one of the trees.” I also thought I would unravel the fabric to see what my arms looked like. But as I neared the clearing, two dogs, one jet-black and the other one brown and white, leapt out at me from the bush. The black dog was barking like I had never heard a dog bark before. Its body kept lunging forward, as if it wanted to jump on me, and saliva frothed from its mouth.

Every village had many dogs. Nobody claimed them as pets. Instead, everybody fed them, and all the kids played with the puppies. Dogs weren’t allowed in the houses. The women would shoo them away when they tried to enter. But they would walk with us to the farm and follow us kids whenever we played games. Tiger, a tawny brown mutt, was my favorite in Magborou, although he drove me crazy by always nipping at my ankles.

Dogs wouldn’t be so deep in the bush alone; there had to be people somewhere near. But I was too frightened of the black dog to continue along the path. I didn’t want to go back the way I had come, though, for that path led back toward the rebels. Ever so slowly, I crept into the bush again and tiptoed deep into the trees.

Growing up, I’d heard stories of little kids who’d wandered too far into the bush and got lost. Their families never saw them again. “A big fat boar must have eaten them,” Alie would say. I remembered his words now, as I walked through the forest. What if, after all I had been through, I were to get eaten by a huge wild boar?

Before too long, I found another path. I followed it until I reached a crossroad. That’s when I saw him, the first person since Manarma. A man, tall and slender, was coming along one of the other paths. He stopped when I called out “Hello.” He looked me straight in the eye, and his jaw dropped. I sensed his fear even before he spun around and ran away from me. I didn’t think twice: I followed him. His legs were longer than mine, and the rebels hadn’t injured him as far as I could see, so I quickly fell behind. But I pushed on. I was determined to catch this man.

The path ended at a village. When I came out into the clearing, I could see the man leaning against a hut, trying to catch his breath. I too stopped running. The man gaped at me. I walked slowly toward him, noticing that all the buildings in the village were covered in the long, twisted branches of mango trees. As with the farmhouse where I had met the cobra, the inhabitants had long since abandoned this town.

“What do you want?” the man questioned me as I neared.

“I am very sick, and I need your help.”

“What happened to you?” he asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. I tried again. Still nothing. “I’m hungry,” I finally managed to whisper.

The man bent down and picked up a mango. He passed it to me, and when I didn’t raise my arms to receive the fruit, he looked down and saw the bloodied fabric.

“They cut off your hands!” he burst out angrily. “Those bastard rebels! I knew you were hurt. That’s why I ran—I thought they might be nearby with you. You need to go to the doctor. But I can’t take you there. The rebels shot my wife’s mother in the leg. I have to find someone to help me carry her to Port Loko, for she can’t walk. I can’t help both of you. Here,” he said, holding the mango up to my mouth for me to eat. But I shook my head. I couldn’t eat from his hands. It felt wrong to be fed like a baby.

“Put it in there,” he said, lifting my arms gently and placing the mango in between the folds of the fabric. I raised my arms and managed to take a few bites of the juicy fruit. As I ate, the man explained that he was from Manarma. He and his family
had fled into the bush when they heard the rebels approaching. His wife’s mother was an old woman who couldn’t run fast enough, and so she was shot.

“I don’t remember seeing you at the village,” he said afterwards. “But then, I don’t really know what you look like. You are covered from head to toe in dirt and blood.”

I just stared at the man, whose name I never asked. Finally, my tears began to flow. “I want to go home,” I sobbed. “I want to go home.” I said it over and over again.

The man took me by the shoulders. “You need to go to a hospital,” he said. “You will die before you make it back home if you don’t. There’s a clinic in Port Loko, which is not far from here. I’ll tell you what I will do: I will walk you to the road that goes to Port Loko, and I will leave you there to find your own way.”

“The rebels said they were going to Port Loko next,” I choked out between sobs. “I can’t go there … not alone.”

“You will be fine,” the man replied in a soothing voice. “There are government soldiers in Port Loko. It’s safe, even if the rebels try to attack. It’s the
only
place to go, my sweet child. Without the medicine you can get in Port Loko, you will die.”

He was right. I knew that. I had to try. I wiped my tears away with my arms and motioned with my head for the man to lead on. I followed closely behind as he assumed a steady pace back along the path we had just traveled. We didn’t stop, nor did we say a word to each other, until we reached the road to Port Loko.

The road was lined with thick elephant grass, shrubs, and different kinds of fruit trees. That frightened me, for rebels
could easily hide in these bushes. I looked deep into the man’s eyes. “Please take me with you,” I pleaded. “Please! I don’t want to die.”

He placed one hand tenderly on my cheek. With his other hand, he cupped my chin. “You will die if you come with me,” he said in a soft voice. “I don’t think you know how sick you are. But I do. Follow the road, and by midday you will find yourself in a village only a short distance from Port Loko. Someone there will take you the rest of the way, I am sure.”

Before he left, the man wiped my face with a dirty blue rag.

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“I know,” he said. “We’re all scared. But you have to go. Goodbye.”

I watched as he ran back down the path, leaving me standing in the middle of the dusty red clay road all alone.