Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

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.

The Commander has warned us not to complain about walking or carrying. Get used to it, he says, you will be doing it for a long time. If you cannot go on, you will be killed. The choice is yours.

He also says: You have come too far to find your way home. Which way will you go? What will you eat? Think how much harder it will be in two weeks’ time. Then it will be impossible to run away. We won’t even bother to tie you.

I turn the stones over and press one against the palm of my hand with my little finger. This hollow one is Thursday. Yesterday.

Yesterday I was glad that Anya was walking in front of me. I felt that she was showing me the way. Today I wish she was behind me, so I did not have to see the blood and ash on the back of her dress. She is like a smudged drawing. I hardly recognise the lines of her body.

Today, Friday, is a round pebble, perfectly smooth except for a thin, rough seam around its middle. When I picked it up I saw that it was dark, almost black, with a yellowish vein running through it like fat in a piece of meat.

I keep the days in one pocket. I keep the sugar in the other.

This morning, something glistened on my wrist and when I passed it over my lips I tasted sugar. Reaching to the top of the bag on my head, I pushed my finger into the fold and found that it has pulled open there. The gap is just wide enough for the tip of a thumb and forefinger. A pinch of sweetness.

It is our sugar. It belongs to my family. The soldiers took it from our larder when they took us. Just as they took the sack of sorghum that Amito is carrying from her mother’s kitchen. It gives me a purpose here. I am watching over our things.

Mother was always so careful with the sugar. Waste not, want not. You had to be sure not to spill a single grain opening a new bag. Some sugar might be caught in the folds of the paper.

I steady the bag with one hand, reach into the opening and pinch a few grains between my fingers. After a few paces I raise the sugar to my lips. Sweetness. And sweat.

We are in the open now, following a path along the grassy ridge of a hill. It was a relief to come out from under the trees. It is hotter here but the path is open and that makes the carrying easier. I worry about Anya. She has stumbled a few times even though the path is good. She is carrying the box with the bullets, the heaviest thing even though it is made of plastic, even heavier than the radio. They gave it to her because she is the tallest. I watch her back but it says nothing. Perhaps the sugar feels lighter because it is sweet? We have eaten nothing but scraps since we left Atiak. When we pass a mango tree they will not let us pick the fruit.

I am taking sugar for this evening. I had the idea to hide some in my pocket as we walk, so that tonight when we are tied up together I can share it with Anya. I must be careful not to let them see what I am doing or to tear the opening in the bag. If they think I have stolen from them, they will kill me. Even though the sugar is actually mine.

I look for a landmark on the path ahead, a dead tree or an anthill, and wait until we are there before I reach into the bag again.

The first pinch turns to syrup on my fingertips. I have to wipe the sweat off my palm on the hem of my skirt and try again. This time I manage to carry a pinch of sugar to my pocket, but then I can’t be sure it is still there. Perhaps it fell into the stitching of the seam and my poking finger pushed it deeper or melted it to nothing. I must be patient.

We walk all morning. It is Friday, a black pebble with a vein of yellow fat in it, which no tongue will ever taste. Stone, sugar. Once Amito says that she cannot go on and sinks down under the sack, but they shout at her until she gets up again. One of the younger soldiers, he is no older than me, hits her on the shoulder with the flat side of his panga. Let me kill this one, he shouts. But the Commander says, Then who will carry this sack?

At midday, they let us drink from a stream they have muddied with their boots. They eat cold porridge from the night before, from the hollow belly of Thursday, and we get the crusts scraped from the bottom of the pot. There are stalks of grass or tobacco in mine but I swallow it just like that.