Black Mamba Boy Page 13

  A few askaris returned to Omhajer to report back on the front, where the Italians had turned against their own askaris when they could not catch the spectral Abyssinians. One man had seen the Italians force askaris to lie down one on top of another in the muddy water of a narrow river so they could cross along their backs, the men at the bottom drowning, murky water gurgling down their throats.

  In this dangerous climate, a few of the lazier boys had been let go, but Jama had held on to his job. The gangly Italian and his stumpy friend got up and stretched out their arms, yawning with afternoon ennui as they picked up their rifles. The other Italian had dark patches of sweat growing out of his armpits, groin, and back.

  “Waryaa! Hey, you,” shouted the tall Italian at Jama in heavily accented Somali. “We are going hunting, come and collect what we shoot, there will be a few coins in it for you.”

  Jama walked over to the cook, who was standing on the veranda, a cigarette in his hand, and piled all the glasses at his feet.

  “I’m off now, I might earn some real money with these Italians,” said Jama as the glasses tumbled against one another with a soft tinkling. The cook took a deep drag on his cigarette and smoke drifted from his nostrils. “Keep your wits about you, Jama. Run away if they start behaving strangely, or you might return as one of their wives.” The cook pursed his lips and blew out a long plume of smoke. “Seriously, be careful, Jama.” The cook winked before putting out the cigarette with his calloused bare foot and padding back to the kitchen.

  They walked in line across the Eritrean plains, Jama slowing down to maintain the requisite distance behind them. The shorter Italian was breathing heavily and going red in the heat, a black swipe of hair plastered to his forehead. “This little boy reminds me of my greyhound, both long, lean, black. God, I miss that dog, he knew me better than anyone,” he puffed. “Might be dead by the time we get home. Poor Alfredo, he had problems pissing when I left. I’ll never find a dog like him again.”

  The tall one didn’t respond, but took off his glasses to wipe condensation from them.

  “Are you a dog man, Lorenzo? City boys never truly understand animals like we do, it’s about understanding what their eyes are telling you, you have to know what an animal needs better than he does. Look at this little black face with us. If we told him to walk over there, he would do it, because he knows that we know better than him.” He stopped to take a swig from his water flask.

  Lorenzo stopped ahead of him and took a gulp as well. Jama looked away to hide his thirst but the tall Italian walked over to him and thrust his flask into his hand.

  Jama drank, wiped the top of the flask with his sarong, and handed it back to the tall Italian with a small nod of thanks. Jama’s grasp of Italian was sketchy but he understood that these two soldiers were fighting their own private battle. Their arms moved all the time and they threw out their words as if they were grenades. With their fast rat-a-tat speech and whirring arms, they seemed as mechanical as all the other things the Ferengis had brought to Eritrea.

  They carried on marching. The grass was high and rustled against their legs as they passed, crickets made small talk within it, birds sunbathed stock-still on branches. Jama noticed a venue of vultures flying overhead, following an imperceptible trail of death. The Italians were after big game, zebras, leopards, maybe one of the few elephants still left in Eritrea, anything to boast about back home. They walked and walked, unable to see anything bigger than a rat.

  The short Italian, drenched in sweat and frustration, threw his hands up. “Enough! Enough walking! Let’s stop. We’ll just shoot what we find.”

  Lorenzo looked around, there was nothing, just yellow grass and blue sky. “We’ve walked this far, Silvio, why stop now? Near a stream there would be better game,” he reasoned, still walking on ahead with Jama a respectful distance behind him.

  “No, no, absolutely not, I am stopping here, tell Alfredo to scare up the birds or something,” panted Silvio. Lorenzo sighed and gave Jama his instructions.

  Jama gingerly walked up to a spindly tree and gave its trunk a gentle shake. Nothing stirred. “What’s he doing? Tell him to make some goddamn noise,” barked Silvio with growing irritation.

  “Make noise, run around,” said Lorenzo in Somali. Jama felt stupid but he ran around, yelled out, kicked at the grass, beat the scrubby bushes with a stick. A few sleepy birds rose drowsily off their nests and flew straight into a volley of rifle shots, their proud chests blown into a cloud of feathers.

  “More, more!” shouted Lorenzo. Jama whooped and swooped.

  “That big tree over there now, throw stones at it,” said Lorenzo. Jama ran over to it and did as he was told. A large shape shifted behind the leaves, a leopard hiding in the branches, its ears on end. Jama leaped back and pointed into the foliage. The leopard came scrambling down the trunk, its muscular back gold and black. Lorenzo and Silvio fired shot after shot, but the leopard sprang out of range, just a shadow in the long grass.

  Jama looked on as it ran past him and away into a dark tangle of thornbushes and aloes. He chucked the last few stones in his hand at the leopard’s back. “For fuck’s sake, chase it, Alfredo, don’t let it escape, tell him, Lorenzo!”

  “It’s gone, Silvio, leave it,” said Lorenzo, lowering his rifle.

  “Goddamn it!” exploded Silvio. “A leopard! I said if there was one thing I would bring back from Africa it would be a leopard that I had shot myself, and look! This imbecile just lets it run right away. I’m tired of blacks, I really am, I have had it up to here with them.” Silvio raised his fingers up to his neck.

  “Calm down, Silvio, it wasn’t his fault, we weren’t fast enough.” Lorenzo pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face and hands. The gunshots still rang in the air with an electric effervescence. “Come, let’s collect what we’ve got and go back,” said Lorenzo softly.

  “Tell him to collect any birds that are still alive,” Silvio demanded.

  Lorenzo gave a long sigh and told Jama to collect them. Jama poked around the grass, found a few birds still moving and guiltily picked them up by their wings, piled them in front of the Italians.

  “He wants you to grab one by its feet and hold your arm out to the side,” said Lorenzo as he lit a cigarette. Jama did as he was told, though the bird was nearly half his size and it hung heavily, flapping its wings and struggling forcefully for its life, digging its claws into his palm.

  Silvio, a few paces away, brought his rifle up. One of his blue eyes scrunched up into a white and pink fist, he moved his shoulders around and steadied his aim. Jama looked at the rifle barrel pointed straight into his face, flared like the angry nostrils of a charging bull, and bit down on his tongue as he realized what the Italian was about to do. But Lorenzo grabbed Silvio’s arm just as he was about to fire and pulled him back.

  “What’s your problem? I haven’t come all this way to let little black bastards lose me my quarry,” shouted Silvio, shoving Lorenzo in the chest.

  Lorenzo gave him a few sharp slaps in the face. “Calm down! You’re behaving like a fucking animal. If you’re not careful I’ll send you home with a bullet in your fat peasant behind.” Jama looked on in shock, holding his bladder tight.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch, Jew, Jew, you fucking Jews think you are so much better than everyone else, I’ll teach you a lesson,” dared Silvio.

  Lorenzo grabbed Silvio by the testicles and wrenched them down until his knees buckled and he cried out. Lorenzo released his grip and snarled, “Stay the fuck away from me, Silvio, or I will turn you into a Jew with my fucking teeth.”

  The tall Italian’s glasses were twisted across his face and his teeth were bared like an angry dog’s. “Hey, boy! Come on! Let’s go!” he shouted at Jama, his voice strained and hoarse.

  Jama walked after him, his knees weak. He stepped around the short Italian as he lay on his side in the dry grass, clutching his groin.

  The office was inside a khaki tent. A table sat in the middle of the d
irt floor with brown files and papers neatly piled on top, a typewriter sitting silently to the left. Maggiore Lorenzo Leon pinched dried tobacco between his fingers and dropped it into the mouth of his pipe. A cup of coffee steamed beside him. Jama waited in front of the desk.

  “Welcome, Jama, what can I do for you?” asked Lorenzo, the pipe wobbling in his mouth as he spoke.

  “I want to know if you still need an office boy,” replied Jama, using his best Italian. He played down the kh and gh so common in his own language and mimicked the sibilance with which Italians spoke.

  Lorenzo took matches from his shirt pocket and lit the pipe. “Yes, I am going crazy with the dust and filth in here, why don’t you get started now?”

  “Si, signore,” said Jama. He stood waiting for an instruction, while Lorenzo carried on smoking his pipe.

  “Well?” laughed Maggiore Leon.

  “What do you want me to do, signore? And signore . . . how much will you give me?”

  “Good question. Let’s start you on five liras a week. You are only a small thing, I don’t expect to get much work out of you.”

  Jama’s heart fell. Five liras! It wasn’t worth leaving the café for, and at least he got fed there, but Maggiore Leon seemed to be an important man, and in a place like Omhajer proximity to importance mattered a great deal.

  “Start by sweeping the floor, and then I’ll find something else for you,” continued the maggiore. So you’re not so busy after all, thought Jama, his suspicion rising.

  Lorenzo watched Jama’s clumsy sweeping, the broom slipping from his grip. Lorenzo laughed and Jama looked questioningly at him.

  “Don’t worry, Jama, I just remembered something,” said Lorenzo, still laughing. If only his friends could see him now, sweating in a uniform, watching a native boy cleaning up for him. He found everything amusing now, Fascism, communism, anarchism, he could only trust in the patently idiotic. The blackshirts marching in front of his balcony in Rome, deliriously howling for an Italian Abyssinia, senile housewives rushing into the street to hand over their wedding rings to pay for Mussolini’s war. Demanding the civilization of a country they could not place on a map. He had joined the army late enough to miss most of the fighting but early enough to benefit from the generous officers’ allowances. To his delight he had also found a few Abyssinian girls to enjoy before the others had infected them with unpleasant diseases, but Omhajer was still a hardship posting after the leisure of Libya—a dusty, impoverished town full of the dregs of the Italian army, and a battalion full of ex-prisoners, alcoholics, and lunatics, few of whom had even finished their elementary schooling. They hated Lorenzo’s books, glasses, rumored Jewishness, and bullied him the way only soldiers can their officers. Lorenzo intended to study anthropology back in Italy so took photographs of the local villagers and notes on their lifestyles and societies; he had learned a smattering of Somali from the askaris, and he had even been invited home for a meal by a well-to-do Sudanese merchant. The other officers were shocked and disgusted at this intimacy with the natives, and one had threatened to report his crimes against racial hygiene to the commander.

  Lorenzo had been struck by Jama’s self-possession the day he had been thrown off the bus. Lorenzo sometimes observed Jama muttering to himself in the teahouse and saw him loitering around town late at night, and began to feel sympathy for him. He was always alone, his forehead screwed up in concentration, and he reminded Lorenzo of his own solitary childhood. When Lorenzo’s mother’s letters had first arrived, describing in her unsteady, spidery hand the murders and assaults on Jews in Germany that she read about in the Corriere della Sera, he had brushed aside her concerns, reminding her that she had trundled off to the synagogue the day Italy had invaded Abyssinia to sing the Fascist anthem “Giovinezza” with the other neighborhood crones. “Not in Italy, Mama,” had been his final word on the subject. Now that he had spent time with rough, country Italians, and heard their anti-Semitic jokes and rants, he grew more circumspect and advised his mother to get her savings out of the bank and prepare to leave for France. Soldiers idle in their barracks said incredible things. Even Lorenzo was startled to hear a soldier claim the most exhilarating experience he’d had in the army was firing into a civilian crowd in the Ethiopian highlands when villagers there had protested the massacre of monks at Debre Libanos. “Sir, I am finished. How much will I get as a soldier? Can I become a soldier for you instead?” asked Jama, leaning on the broom.

  Maggiore Leon looked at Jama. “Why would you want to be a soldier? You’re so young, you haven’t even stopped growing yet.”

  “Well, give me lots of macaroni and I will grow quickly,” argued Jama.

  Maggiore Leon laughed. “With teeth as big as yours, I am sure you could get through a lot of macaroni, but no, Jama, you have to be fifteen to sign up and then they treat you like dirt anyway, don’t bother yourself with soldiering. Here, go buy me some cigarettes, you can keep the change.”

  Jama went to the Sudanese tobacconist and bought the cheapest cigarettes on offer. When he returned to the office, Maggiore Leon had gone. Jama placed the cigarettes on the table and sat on a chair against the wall to wait. The sun rose to its zenith and flies buzzed lazily in the heat. Jama scratched his mosquito bites and paced the room, driven to madness by the buzzing and the boredom. At last he left the office to search for the maggiore.

  Maggiore Leon and the other officers were sitting around in the teahouse, Melottis in hand. “Ah, Jama, I thought you would find me. Do you have the cigarettes on you?”

  Jama shook his head and scratched violently.

  “Go and collect them for me, then go home. I am not going back in this afternoon. The mosquitoes are vicious here, they’ll eat you alive. When you get to the office, open the desk drawer, there is balm for your bites that you can take.”

  “Si, signore,” said Jama.

  Back in the office, Jama opened the drawer. It was full of scrunched-up papers, forms, letters, and a small pile of black-and-white photographs. Jama checked the door and pulled out the photographs. They were mainly head and profile shots of local Bilen peasants. There was a picture of a Takaruri man holding up the skin of a baby crocodile, and one of a Sudanese merchant smiling, his hands held out over his goods. The last picture was of a teenage Bilen girl, topless, her arms wrapped around her waist, her expression hidden by ornate gold chains that draped down her forehead and from nose to ear. Jama’s eyes scanned the incredible image. He had only ever seen his mother naked, and this girl looked like a mythical creature, unearthly, he could not tell where or when the photo had been taken.

  “Sta’frullah, God forgive us,” he said under his breath. He felt his hands burn as he held it, so he stuffed the photo with the others back into the drawer. Jama retrieved the twisted tube of balm and put the cigarettes in the waistband of his sarong. These Italians were becoming more and more perverse to him, he felt that they would corrupt his soul, no wonder his father, God have mercy on him, had fled them. He thumped the cigarette packet on the table and stomped off as Maggiore Leon shouted, “See you tomorrow,” at his back.

  Jama slept in whichever tent had spare ground, not that he managed to sleep much. Millions of mosquitoes congregated in the camp, moving in battalions from body to body while they innocently slept. Jama seemed the only one driven to distraction by them. He constantly shifted around, rubbed his legs together, scratched his bites, and slapped his skin, irritating the men whose dreams he punctured. He used the Italian’s medicine but it just seemed to attract the beasts.

  “Allah, you look like something pulled from the earth, what happened to you?” said Jibreel.

  “What do you think happened?”

  Jibreel felt guilty about Jama, the boy’s soul seemed dimmed. “I’ll get you some aloe,” he offered. “Why don’t you rest for a while?”

  The aloe soothed his skin but Jama felt like something evil had entered him, as if a jinn were pounding his head with a club, alternately roasting him on a spit and plun
ging him into ice-cold water. He shivered and sweated, sweated and shivered until his mat felt like a bucket of water had been sluiced over it. Jibreel watched over him and Jama heard his muffled voice through the pounding in his skull but couldn’t even turn his eyes toward him.

  Jibreel folded his arms and unfolded them, took a heavy breath and bent down over Jama. “You have mosquito fever. I don’t know what I can do for you but I will go to the Italian clinic and see if they will give us anything.”

  Jama couldn’t remember entering the tent or imagine ever leaving.

  The medic refused to give Jibreel anything. The quinine for the askaris had run out and the more expensive medicines were reserved for Italian soldiers. Malaria pounded at Jama’s body and made him feel like he had been attacked by a madman. Without painkillers or quinine, he had to wait and see if this unseen madman would cause enough harm to kill him. Far above him his mother realigned the stars, bartered incense and beads so that the angels would spare her son, and browbeaten, they reluctantly complied.

  Jama opened his eyes and instantly closed them again as a scorching wind blew across the plains and threw sand and grit into the tent. He shivered in the heat and rubbed his starved stomach. His skin buzzed with bites, red and angry like fire ants. With his leaden limbs too heavy to move, Jama raised his head and saw a pot on the fire. “Jibreel, get me some food.”

  “Well done, Jama, you’re a clever boy, I thought you were gone,” Jibreel said.