Black Mamba Boy (20 page)

While 4th Company guarded a munitions store near town, caravans of refugees trundled past, some on camels, some on mules, and the poorest on foot, weighed down by their children, fleeing as their country was destroyed. Shidane’s enlistment pay was burning a hole in his pocket, so he frittered it away buying refreshing camel’s milk from the camel merchants.
As the battle raged over the hills, Jama made binoculars of his hands and watched explosions that gave the mountains the appearance of erupting volcanoes. It seemed to him that the mountains would eventually crumble under the bombardment. Occasionally, 4th Company had to desert the munitions as the RAF flew ominously over, but the British planes sought out more substantial targets; they scored a perfect, deafening hit on a train bringing ammunition to the Italian front line. The train flew off the tracks as the mortars, grenades, and magazines blew up. The driver in the steam engine tried to race away from the burning carriages but was engulfed in a white-hot inferno. Jama watched the man struggling in the flames, he was a beating heart at the center of the fire, dancing and flailing, refusing to give his life up. It was the most courageous thing Jama had seen in this war.

The boys listened for the roar of the British airplanes, and waited impatiently for the next humiliation to be meted out against the Italians. On the one day it seemed that their signaling would be finally put to use, they looked up eagerly to the sky to see eight Italian planes in formation above them; but they were quickly attacked by three British Hurricanes. In the ensuing dogfight three of the Italian planes crashed one after the other into a valley and the other five limped away. It was so exciting that the Eritrean bulabasha pulled out his whip to quieten the boys. Jama was the first to become afraid of the bombers and began to tie twigs onto his head so the planes could not see him from above. Shidane and Abdi humored him, competitively adding to the foliage until they resembled walking bushes, their faces lost behind veils of leaves.

Every night the British would halt their bombardment for ten minutes to play caterwauling Italian opera on their loudspeakers followed by summaries of all the defeats the Italians
had suffered that day. After the Italian-language segment, Eritreans and Somalis working for the British would take control of the microphone and translate the news, exhorting the askaris to desert, offering them rewards and medals if they did so. The askaris did not need much encouragement. Every night under the cover of darkness, thousands crept away, never to be seen again. All the Amhara disappeared when the British reported that Haile Selassie had returned from exile and Abyssinian patriots were pressing on to Addis Ababa. Ogadeni Somalis returned to their families and camels when leaflets were dropped on their heads, reporting that rebellion was brewing in Hararghe. Saturn and Mars had slid into conjunction, and the nomadic Somalis saw that a great defeat lay before the Italians and left before the stars punished them, too. That left a hodgepodge of Eritreans and young urban Somalis who used the leaflets to wipe their bottoms. From the ninety thousand askaris who had been present at the start of the battle for Keren, sixty thousand remained. The Italians tried to keep these obedient by shooting deserters or tying hands and feet behind backs and throwing insubordinate men into mountain gullies where jackals waited for them. The Italians also reprised one of their special forms of execution: they tied mutinous askaris, usually nomadic Somalis unused to taking orders, to the backs of lorries and accelerated along the rough road until there was nothing left on the end of the rope apart from a pair of manacled hands. One askari showed Jama and the boys a postcard he had bought from a hawker in Mogadishu. They squinted at the picture of the lorry, unable to see anything of interest. “Allah,” shouted Abdi, and he pointed to the shackled hands that hung off the back, piously cupped as if in prayer, but the wrists were shredded stumps, inscribing their curses in bloody script on the dusty road.

“Where’s the rest of them?” asked Jama.

“Probably still along the roadside,” said the askari, taking back his postcard.

Every askari returned from the front line with tales of the daily carnage, the lack of sleep, dead bodies exploding in the heat, men going mad with shellshock, the evil ways in which the Italians humiliated their black comrades.

“The lieutenant told me to bury the white bodies but to leave the black to rot. I couldn’t believe it, we had all just sacrificed our fucking lives for them,” raged one Eritrean askari. “When I said I would bury them all together, he raised his pistol to me.”

Jama, Abdi, and Shidane listened to these stories at night around the campfire. “Let’s stay until we have earned enough money to travel to Egypt,” Jama agreed. They hadn’t yet seen the violence and savagery of the war close up and still believed they could escape it altogether. At night, the askaris pooled their flour rations and cooked together. Shidane usually commandeered the pots and pans to make lahoh and surprisingly delicious stews with stolen cooking oil and spices.

“My mother is the best cook in Aden, she doesn’t make the sloppy bowls of grease you people are used to,” he boasted.

They crouched down around the fire and burned their fingers trying to get to the stew before the others. Even if bombing sorties flew overhead, the men would rather stay put in the open than risk missing out on Shidane’s cooking. Some jittery ones would be half standing, half crouched, nibbling the sour bread between shaking fingers. A man jumped out of his skin as a munitions store exploded, and put his foot right into the boiling pot. The askaris jumped up in a rage.

“Waryaa fulay! Hey, coward! Look where you’re stepping, get your dirty feet out of our food!” the boys shouted at him
with no concern for the red, scalded foot he pulled out of the cauldron.

Jama and the boys angrily returned to the food as the man shuffled away. They slept huddled together behind a boulder. Shidane, as always, slept with one eye open like a caiman, keeping guard over his charges. When it was too loud to sleep, Shidane told ghost stories that made Jama hold his breath. Backlit by the bombs, he would describe all the kinds of evil that he had seen.

“Wallaahi, may God strike me down this moment if even one word is untrue. One night when you two were snoring away, I saw something hunched moving down the mountain, it had white, white skin and long claws that scratched against the rock. I closed my eyes, thinking I must be dreaming, but when I opened them again, the thing was stood up like a man. Its red eyes were looking right at me so I ducked down behind a rock, praying for my life. The English had stopped bombing and everything was totally black. I lit a match, thinking the beast was coming for me, but it had already found a victim. It had an askari by the throat and it was carrying the limp man back up the mountain. It disappeared, but all night I could hear bones breaking and flesh being ripped apart. There are cannibals here, I am sure of it.”

Jama could believe anything Shidane reported. He hated the strange noises that carried on the air on quiet nights: growls, howls, screams, prayers. The wounded askaris’ pleas of “Brothers, help me” would turn into “May you all be damned to hell” before there was silence.

The stench of bodies grew. Jama was separated from Shidane and Abdi, sent with a small unit to defend a munitions store close to the front line, while they were ordered to Keren to collect binoculars for the Italian officers. They were to leave
their secluded dugout, behind its sandbags and hidden mines, and venture out into the tumultuous expanse beyond.

Shidane embraced Jama. “Don’t worry, walaalo, I will have a mouthwatering meal waiting for you. If it gets too bad up there, desert and leave a message with one of your clansmen, and we will come and find you, Al Furbo,” he said.

Jama didn’t dare speak, his voice would betray him. He climbed onto the lorry with shaking legs. Shidane stood proud in his uniform as he waved goodbye. From a distance the dirt on it was invisible and Shidane looked more elegant than any other askari, with his handsome brown face, bright eyes, and long limbs.

Some details Jama would piece together with time, some he would not, but askaris described to him seeing Abdi and Shidane in Keren. Their requisition papers were scrunched up in Shidane’s hand. The town teemed with deserters and men separated from their battalions, and military police herded them to camps before sending them back into battle. Abdi tightly held Shidane’s hand as they maneuvered around the mad drunken men. They arrived at the huge tent that housed the supply depot and had to suppress gasps when they ran in. It was like Ali Baba’s cave, glinting with hundreds of treasures, tins of food, coffee, bags of sugar, sacks of tea, weapons, shoes, binoculars and other gadgets.

They were the only askaris in the depot and they instantly drew the attention of the white men. “Ascaro, what are you doing here?” one middle-aged man shouted over.

Shidane held out the flimsy requisition order and waited for the man to come and get it.

“Come here, boy, it’s not your place to be waiting for me to walk over to you,” the man shouted.

Shidane handed him the note, and the clerk put on spectacles to peruse the order. While he read, Shidane and Abdi looked around to see if they could sneak anything into their pockets. At the top of a sack lay chocolate bars in brown wrappers; Shidane wrapped his fingers around one and snuck it into his shorts.

“Put that down now,” ordered the supply clerk.

Shidane returned the chocolate bar and smiled.

“That is a serious crime, ascaro, count your lucky stars I don’t walk you straight back to your commanding officer and report you.”

Shidane listened with a defiant smile on his face, he only picked out the words “ascaro,” “officer,” and “report,” but could understand the gist of what the clerk was getting at.

“Go and wait outside while we prepare the order,” said the supply clerk, pointing to the exit. The boys left, scouting all around them.

“Don’t worry, I will find something. I wanna get Jama a surprise for when he returns, inshallah.”

“Don’t bother, Shidane, it’s a bad idea,” pleaded Abdi, trying to give his voice an avuncular authority but whispering with fear.

The supply depot was within an Italians-only area, although a few German soldiers worked there, flying about like Nazi flags, their hair bleached white and their skin red. Abdi and Shidane were the only nonwhites within the wire perimeter, and they could feel their skin tightly wrapped around them.

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Meanwhile Jama had to hike up narrow paths and ease his way past supply mules to reach the munitions store high in the mountains, a cave packed with guns and mortars, its entrance shielded by a heavy metal door. All around the satanic guns roared and clattered. An Eritrean askari joined them and he and Jama stood guard at the door while the Italians observed the scene below them. The British broadcasted new positions they had taken every night, and most Italians were hoping their defeat would be swift and painless. Jama could see only stick figures running about through the smoke, and when he crept closer to the precipice, he saw askaris fleeing the bombardment, feebly holding on to their heads as if that would stop them getting blown off. Somalis usually said that holding your head would bring calamity, but in the askaris’ case the calamity was already upon them. Jama had a terrible feeling about this day: it would bring death for sure, he knew by the bloodred sky, all churned up like the entrails of a dead beast, and the burning men who rolled desperately on the ground, unable to put themselves out. Jama was ordered back to the cave by an Italian and he dragged his feet, he wanted to stay as far away from the dark oily munitions as possible, his skin itched with the fear of being blown up. Hardened Indian and Scottish soldiers were close to breaking through the rubble the Italians had blown into the gorge to take the peak that Jama and a thousand other askaris were guarding; and these shaking, illiterate boys, their stomachs tight with fear, their pants wet with terror, waited to be overwhelmed.

One calm fifteen-year-old waited for his chance to line his pockets at the Keren supply depot. Shidane squatted on the
white dust, trying to peer in, while Abdi stood nearby, trying to locate their dugout.

“Come here and get it then,” barked out the clerk to Shidane.

They returned to the cavern of treasures, the clerk handed Abdi a heavy crate of binoculars and Shidane reached up to help his uncle carry it out. The clerk laughed at them. “You skinny Somalis, you’re no use to anyone.”

Shidane and Abdi shuffled toward the exit and the clerk returned, whistling, to his paperwork.

“Psst, keep a look out,” Shidane whispered to Abdi before placing the crate down next to open sacks of spaghetti and rice.

Shidane pretended to fix his sandal as he stuffed handfuls of rice into his pockets and the crate. Abdi kicked him sharply in the ribs but Shidane had already seen shadows and smelled their sulfuric fumes. Three Satans had walked into Shidane’s life: Privates Alessi, Fiorelli, and Tucci emerged from the shadows looking as if they had just sailed out from the underworld. They were stocky young men who had spent their time in Africa stacking boxes and cleaning spillages in the depot; they were as pale as worms but their hands and hearts thirsted for blood.

“What do we have here?” exclaimed Fiorelli.

Shidane stood up and went to pick up his crate. Fiorelli kicked it away forcefully and the binoculars and rice spilled out with a clatter. The clerk ran over, shouting obscenities. Alessi and the clerk had a quick discussion, and with a shrug the clerk walked away. Alessi ordered Abdi to clear up the mess, then the soldiers surrounded Shidane and led him away. Shidane turned around to look at Abdi before he disappeared into the bright sun.

The depot clerks led Shidane to a tin shack in a corner of the compound, the corrugated metal buckled and cracked in the heat, and the door resisted but eventually admitted them with a shriek. The hut stank of urine and the only light came from the chinks in the metal, but Tucci lost no time in getting a coil of wire that was hanging from his belt and tying Shidane’s hands behind his back. It was only then Shidane’s bravado faltered and he let the smile leave his face. Fiorelli kicked Shidane’s feet away from under him and the others laughed. Shidane could smell alcohol on their breath.