I am in the middle now. In the beginning, when we walked, the ropes that keep us joined together pulled tight and every few paces one of us nearly fell or dropped the box or bundle she was carrying. In the beginning? It was only yesterday. Today we are moving like a creature with a supple spine and many arms and legs. They said we would soon learn to cooperate and we have. The reason is simple: they will kill us if we don’t. Drop the sorghum, the bullets, the radio and you will be cut loose like a vine. They will not waste a shot on you. We have learnt to keep so close together that there is slack in the ropes even when we clamber over rocks or slide down cuttings.
Yesterday, Anya was behind me. But last night they split us into two groups and this morning they tied us differently. Now she is right in front and I am in the middle. Between the two of us, the girl called Amito and a boy who never speaks and does not yet have a name. Behind me, our neighbour from Atiak, and then her niece, and then the other boy, the one who called out to Amito when the Commander took her away to the fire last night. I think he may be her brother and his name is Kidega.
Perhaps I could learn to tell us apart by the different sounds we make. Amito’s skirt is full and starchy and it makes a different sound to my own, which has been worn soft by washing. The Atiak neighbour swallows the air with a rasp as if its edges are sharp. I also hear the pad of our soles on the path and the creaking of the boxes and bags we carry on our heads, like the sound a cow makes as it moves. Under it all, my heart beating, setting the pace. It would be pleasant, almost a kind of walking music, if things were different, if we were somewhere else and not here with these men.
They make a noise of their own. I hear their heels striking the ground, the clinking of buckles, the stock of a rifle tapping against a button, water sloshing in bottles. If we are an animal, they are a machine, some heavy weapon we have to drag along.
There are seven of them too, one for each of us, although that is the wrong way to put it because it is no more than a coincidence. One of them could subdue us. They have guns and boots and we do not even have shoes. They are men and we are children. Anya is the eldest, I think, and she is not even eighteen yet. Perhaps they planned to capture more of us? That would explain why they are so angry. If we were twice as many, they could kill a few of us to teach the others a lesson. But now they have to take care of us or the whole business will be for nothing.
I can hardly tell which one is which. They keep changing places and they look the same in their uniforms and berets. One of them has a beard, and one has sunglasses with pink frames, and one of them is the Commander. Also I cannot look too hard, because when Kidega, the boy who may be Amito’s brother, looked at the Commander this morning, he hit him in the face and told him to keep his eyes on the Lord.
Mostly, I watch Anya, to give myself courage. I am glad she is in front of me. Once, when the path turned sharply, she looked at me just for a moment. It was the kind of look she would give me when Father was angry about something silly and there was no point in arguing with him. That one look was like a whole conversation. Since then, I have been watching the curve of her shoulder, the muscle in her arm raised to steady the box, the way her calves flex as she walks, and I know she is telling me something. Be strong.
Hans Günther Basch took a deep breath and put his thumb on the yellow Post-it that marked the second passage he meant to read. The audience’s attention had been drifting between the reader and the writer, settling now on Basch, telling the story, now on Akello, who had lived it and was perhaps reliving it, although her expression remained remote, which made it difficult for them to picture her in the role. The sticky note got caught on Basch’s forefinger and he lost his place. There was a silence, given texture by some scuffing and coughing, while he leafed through the book in search of the passage he had marked. Just a brief section, but important, if one was to convey the story. The attention converged on him and cohered. In the instant before it fell apart, he found the pencilled bracket at the start of the paragraph and went on.
When I awake, the bearded one is standing over me, with his boots pressed to my thighs, pinning me to the ground by the cloth of my skirt. He blots out the firelight, the branches of the trees grow out of his body like thorny, crooked arms. Then the sky falls on me and I am choking on the bristle-brush hairs of his chest and the fabric of his shirt, which smells of smoke and sweat. The earth swallows me. Just as I am sinking into the darkness, he rises up and my hips lift off the ground, and then his head burrows into my belly and rolls from side to side, as if he is wiping his mouth on me. He blows out hot breath and spit, and then he pulls away again and drops me on the ground. Without a word, he goes to Anya, unthreads her from the rest of us like a bead from a string and takes her away. She doesn’t make a sound.
Another line had come into Leonenko’s head, the line ‘Reader, close your eyes’, and he thought of writing it down in the red notebook, but the fact that Hans Günther Basch was looking straight at him, or so it seemed, made it impossible.
Horst Grundmann thought his friend Hans Günther looked a little feverish and wondered whether he was coming down with something, or whether perhaps he’d been hitting the bottle; he used to have that problem, although everyone thought he was on the wagon these days.
The young man who was attending his first reading wondered if there was surfing in Zanzibar. He had seen something about snorkelling there on television, but he had always wanted to learn to surf. Perhaps he would ask her during question time. She was from that part of the world.
Prof. Ziegler remembered that the former student who was sitting a few rows behind her had written a very interesting thesis on the use of the mask in Greek tragedy in relation to self-dramatisation and the stylisation of emotion in the contemporary media, and she thought she should collar him afterwards and ask if he had finished that article based on his research. They had one slot to fill in the Spring edition of Exeunt.
Rolf Backer, the editor at Kleinbach, remembered the annual sales conference which was coming up and the spreadsheets on his computer at the office with their breakdowns of typesetting costs, marketing plans, review copies and sales projections, and the report from the distribution agency about book shops closing down, even in Leipzig, and how the ebook was the way to go, and he put his head in his hands and began to massage his scalp.
The student who had come in late and had to stand for the first half of the reading, but who was now sitting directly behind Rolf Backer, stared at his fingers as they prodded the rubbery pink skin of his scalp, which he had shaved that morning, the fingertips sunk in the flesh and shifting it around on the bone, forcing it into ridges and ripples, stretching out the long, furrowed crease that ran down into the collar of his jacket, and she could not look away even though the sight of it made her queasy.
There were no flies on Maryam Akello, Rolf was thinking. She’d had the sense to go to live in America. All the good African writers were in America or England. It was a big plus on the marketing side.
Hans Günther ran his eye down the passage he was about to read. How to speak these words? This was the inspiring part; it was painful but uplifting. It had given the book its title and had already been extracted in one of the papers. A few people in the audience were sure to be familiar with it. He must do it justice.
I keep the days in my pocket. Each day is a stone and so far there are only three of them, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It is easy to hold three days in your head, but it will not be easy in a week or a month.