Dave Eggers - What Is The What

She turned from me, and began walking home. I followed.

Early the next morning, the day my family left, bullets sprayed the fence of corrugated steel around our compound. It was a message for my father.

— The government wants us to leave, my father said. He threw our last bag onto the lorry and then climbed in to join us.-On this subject I agree with the government, he said, and laughed for some time. My stepmothers were not amused.

We had been gone three months. When we returned, we found only a series of circles of charred earth. I do not know if any homes were still standing. I suppose there were a few, and the families who remained in Marial Bai had crowded into them. My father's homes were no more. When we left, our compound, though damaged, still comprised three huts and a brick home. Now there was nothing, just rubble, ash. I jumped from the lorry and stood in the frame of the brick house where my father had slept. One wall stood, the chimney intact.

I found my sister Amel, returning from the well.

— The murahaleen just came, she said.-Why are you here?

Her bucket was empty. The well had been contaminated. Dead goats and one half-charred man had been thrown into it.

— It's not safe here, she said. Why did you leave Aweil?

— Father said it would be safe. Safer than Aweil.

— It's not safe here, Achak. Not at all.

— But the rebels are here. They have guns.

I had heard that Manyok Bol's militia, a rebel group based in Bahr al-Ghazal, were occasionally seen in Marial Bai.

— Do you see rebels? she said, raising her voice.-Show me the rebels with guns, monkey. Here comes Mother.

Her yellow dress was a blur sweeping over the land. She was upon me before I could sob. She grabbed me and took me and choked me by accident and I smelled her stomach and let her wash my face with water and the hem of her sun dress. She insisted to me and to my father that we needed to leave Marial, that this was the least safe of places, that the army had targeted this place almost above all other villages. The message from Khartoum was clear: if the rebels chose to continue, their families would be killed, their women raped, their children enslaved, their cattle stolen, their wells poisoned, their homes plundered, the earth scorched.

I ran to the hut of William K. I found him playing in the shadow of his home, which had been burned but otherwise was in better shape than any other hut in the village.

— William!

He lifted his head and squinted.

— Achak! Is it really you?

— It is me. I have returned!

I ran to him and punched him in the chest.

— I heard you were coming back. Are you a big-city boy now?

— I am, I said, and tried to walk like one.

— I think you're probably stupid still. Can you read?

I could not read and neither could William K, and I told him so.

— I can read. I read anything I find, he said.

I wanted to walk with him, to explore the village, to look for Moses.

— I can't, he said.-My mother won't let me leave. Look.

William K showed me a line of sticks, set end to end, encircling his family's compound.-I can't walk over those without her. They killed my brother Joseph.

I didn't know anything about this. I remembered Joseph, much older, dancing at my uncle's wedding. He was a very thin man, small, considered fragile.

— Who killed him?

— The horsemen, the murahaleen. They killed him and four other men. And the old man, the one-eyed man in the market. They killed him for talking too much. He spoke Arabic and was cursing the raiders. So they killed him with a gun first and then with their knives.

This seemed to me a very stupid way to die. Only a very bad warrior would be killed by the murahaleen, by a Baggara raider. My father had told me this many times. The murahaleen were terrible fighters, he'd said.

— I'm sorry your brother is dead, I said.

— Maybe he didn't die. I don't know. They dragged him away. They shot him and then they tied him to the horse and dragged him away. Here.

William brought me to a small tree off the path near his home.

— This is where they shot him. He was over there. He pointed to the tree.

— The man was on his horse. He yelled at Joseph, 'Don't run! Don't run or I'll shoot!' So Joseph stopped there and turned to the man on the horse. And that's when he shot him. Right there.

He pushed his finger deep into the hollow of my throat.

— He fell and they tied him to the horse. Like this.

William K arranged himself on the ground.-Pick up my feet.

I lifted his legs.

— Okay, now pull me.

I pulled William K down the path until he began kicking wildly.

— Stop! That hurts, damn you.

I dropped his feet, knowing the moment I did, William K would leap up and punch me in the chest, which is what he did. I allowed him this because Joseph was dead and I had no idea what was happening anymore.

My mother arranged my bed for me and I rolled left and right to warm myself under the calfskin blanket.

— Don't think about Joseph, she said.

I had not thought about Joseph since dinner, but now I thought about him again. My throat was sore where William K had pushed his finger.

— What did he do to them? Why did they shoot him?

— He did nothing, Achak.

— He must have done something.

— He ran.

— William K said he stopped.

My mother sighed and sat next to me.

— Then I don't know, Achak.

— Are they coming again?

— I don't think so.

— Will they come here? To our part of town?

I harbored the dim hope that the Baggara would attack only the outskirts of Marial Bai, that they would not attack the home of an important man like my father. But they had attacked the home of my father already.

My mother began drawing on my back, triangles within circles. She had been doing this since I could remember, to calm me in my bed when I could not sleep. She hummed quietly while rubbing my back in slow circles. Every other time she circled, using her forefinger, she made a triangle between my waist and shoulders.

— Don't worry, she said.-The SPLA will be here soon. Circle, circle, triangle within.

— With guns?

— Yes. They have guns just like the horsemen. Circle, circle, triangle within.

— Are there as many of us as there are Baggara?

— There are just as many of our soldiers. Or more. I laughed and sat up.

— We'll kill them! We'll kill all of them! If the Dinka have guns we'll kill all the Baggara like they're animals!

I wanted to see it happen. I wanted it more than anything.

— It won't be a battle! I laughed.-It'll end in seconds.

— Yes, Achak. Now sleep. Close your eyes.

I wanted to see the rebels shoot the men who had killed Joseph Kol, William K's brother who had done nothing. I closed my eyes and pictured the Arabs falling from their horses in explosions of blood. If I was near, I would stand over them, beating them with rocks. In my vision there were so many of them, at least one hundred, the Arabs on horseback, and they were all dead. They were shot by the rebels and now William K and I were crushing their faces with our feet. It was glorious.

In the morning I found Moses. He was living with his mother and an uncle in his uncle's half-burned hut. Moses was unsure where his father had gone. He expected them to return any minute, though his uncle did not seem to know his whereabouts. Moses thought that his father was a soldier now.

— For which army? The government or the rebels? I asked.

Moses wasn't sure.

Moses and I wandered through the cool darkness of the schoolhouse. It was empty, the walls punctured by bullet holes. We put our fingers in one, two, three-so many that we gave up counting. Moses fit his fingers, bigger than mine, into five holes at once. The schoolhouse was abandoned. Nothing was happening anywhere in Marial Bai. The market now was a few shops only; for substantial goods, one had to travel to Aweil. That trip could be undertaken by older women only. Any man traveling north to Aweil would be detained, jailed, eliminated.