7
THE ROADS MOVED: NOW FAST, NOW SLOW.
From where he sat in the back of the car, Jeebleh saw vultures everywhere he turned: in the sky and among the clouds, in the trees, of which there were many, and on top of buildings. There were a host of other carrion-feeders too, marabous, and a handful of crows. Death was on his mind, subtly and perilously courting his interest, tempting him.
He remembered with renewed shock how he and Af-Laawe had come to their falling-out earlier. Perhaps he wasn’t as exempt as he had believed from the contagion that was of a piece with civil wars as he had believed; perhaps he was beginning to catch the madness from the food he had eaten, the water he had drunk, the company he had kept. He doubted that he would knowingly take an active part in the commission of a crime, even if he were open to being convinced that society would benefit from ridding itself of vermin. He knew he was capable of pulling the trigger if it came to that. His hand went to his shirt pocket, where he had his cash and his U.S. passport. He meant to leave these in Bile’s apartment, where they would be safer than in his toiletry bag.
Dajaal was in front beside the driver, and Jeebleh had the back to himself. The ride was bumpy, because of the deep ruts in the road. In fact there wasn’t much of a road to speak of, and the car slowed every now and then, at times stopping altogether, as the driver avoided dropping into potholes as deep as trenches.
Looking at Bile’s man Friday, Jeebleh thought that Dajaal must once have been a high-ranking officer in the National Army. He deduced this from his military posture, from the care with which he spoke, and from his general demeanor. He suspected that Dajaal was armed: one of his hands was out of sight, hidden, and the other stayed close to the glove compartment, as though meaning to spring it open in the event of need. Getting into the vehicle, Jeebleh had seen a machine gun lying casually on the floor, looking as innocuous as a child’s toy gun. The butt of the gun rested on Dajaal’s bare right foot — maybe to make it easier to kick up into the air, catch with his hands, aim, and shoot. You’re dead, militiaman!
What Jeebleh had seen of the city so far marked it as a place of sorrow. Many houses had no roofs, and bullets scarred nearly every wall. In contrast to the rundown ghetto of an American city, where the windows might be boarded up, here the window frames were simply empty. The streets were eerily, ominously quiet. They saw no pedestrians on the roads, and met no other vehicles. Jeebleh felt a tremor, imagining that the residents had been slaughtered “in one another’s blood,” as Virgil had it. He would like to know whether, in this civil war, both those violated and the violators suffered from a huge deficiency — the inability to remain in touch with their inner selves or to remember who they were before the slaughter began. Could this be the case in Rwanda or Liberia? Not that one could make sense of this war on an intellectual level — only on an emotional level. Here, self-preservation helped one to understand.
“Why is ours the only car on the road?” Jeebleh asked.
“We’re headed south, maybe that’s why,” Dajaal replied.
“The roads were crowded on your way north?”
“We’re taking a different route from the one we took coming.”
“Why?”
“It’s the thing most drivers do.” Dajaal waited for the driver to confirm what he had said with a nod. Then he continued, “They believe that taking a different route from the one they used earlier will minimize the chance of driving into an ambush.”
“This is a much longer route, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
The driver, in a whispered aside, commented to Dajaal that he thought Jeebleh had arrived in the country only a day earlier.
Jeebleh’s eyes fell on a bullet-scarred, mortar-struck, machine-gunshowered three-story building leaning every which way, as if in homage to the towering idea of a Pisa. He was surprised that it didn’t cave in as they drove past — and relieved, for there were people moving about in the upper story, minding their business.
He asked Dajaal, “Have you participated in any of the fighting?”
“I’ve never been a member of a clan-based militia.”
“So what fighting did you take part in?”
“Let’s say that I got dragged into one when the American in charge of the United Nations operation ordered his forces to attack a house where I was attending a meeting.”
“The American-in-charge.” Jeebleh strung the words together, at first hyphenating them in his mind, to capture Dajaal’s enunciation, then abbreviating them: AIC. Jeebleh had heard that that was how he was known in certain circles.
“This was the first American attack on StrongmanSouth, in July 1993,” Dajaal went on. “I was at a gathering of my clan family’s intellectuals, military leaders, traditional elders, and other opinion makers. It was our aim to find a peaceful way out of the impasse between the American in charge of the UN Blue Helmets, and StrongmanSouth and his militiamen. The July gathering has since become famous, because it led eventually to the October-third slaughter. It was the viciousness of what occurred in July, when helicopters attacked our gathering, that decided me to dig up my weapons from where I had buried them after the Dictator fled the city.”
“I presume you know StrongmanSouth?”
“I served under him,” Dajaal replied. “He was my immediate commander, during the Ogaden War. We didn’t get on well for much of the time, which was why I declined to be his deputy when he set up the clan militia. I knew him well enough not to want to be near him if I could help it. The man is determined to become president, and he’ll use foul means or fair to get what he wants.”
The driver made a left turn, and as far as Jeebleh could tell, headed back the way they had come. He slowed down, as if to allow Dajaal time in which to gather his harried thoughts.
“I remember that Cobra and Black Hawk helicopters attacked us in the house where we were having our meeting,” Dajaal continued. “Once the attack began, it was so fierce I felt hell was paying us a visit. The skies fell on us, the earth shook down to its separate grains of sand.”
Jeebleh listened intently and remained still.
Dajaal went on: “I felt each explosion of the missiles, followed by an inferno of smoke so black I thought a total eclipse had descended on my mind. And the shrapnel, the spurting blood I saw, the men lying so still between one living moment and a dead instant, the moaning — I was unprepared for the shock. I remember thinking, ‘Here’s an apocalypse of the new order.’ It’s very worrying to see a man you’re talking to blown away to dust by laser-guided death, deceptive in its stealth. We all lost our sense of direction, like ants fleeing head-on into tongues of flame, and not knowing what killed them.”
Jeebleh dared not speak.
Dajaal’s voice had in it a good mix of rawness and rage. “Coming out the door of the house, I tripped on a pile of shoes. But I walked on, barefoot, shaking with fury, until I found myself in another compound, my eyes still smarting from the black smoke. You could say I came to only after the helicopters left. I knew then that I was still alive. But I couldn’t make sense of what had happened, even as the crowds gathered in front of the target villa. I learned that many of my friends had died, and that a number had been taken prisoner, in handcuffs, and treated as common criminals.
“It was a hell of a day.” Dajaal was close to tears, reliving the scene, and angry too. But Jeebleh couldn’t tell at whom. Dajaal resumed: “The cattle, terrorized, ran off mad, the donkeys brayed and brayed, and the hens didn’t lay eggs for several weeks. Our women noted a change in their monthly cycles, and their psyches were irreparably damaged. No time to mourn, our dead were buried the same day.”