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Eva Acqui
Captain Sneider
A Fragment from Peacemaker
Sneider, you’ve always been on my mind, always
The day poured in from nowhere, bringing along the stench of corpses from the beach. Indeed, Coconut Beach was very close to Randall Street. So was BTC, where the Doe government soldiers lived. So was Mamba Point, stuffed with people, sleeping and sitting on their mattresses, in the shade, and just living there. The so-called safe place! Safe right above hell fire!
Who rebel would dare approach the walls of the American Embassy, where the marines guarded the road the whole day, behind heavy weaponry? People would walk on the roads, go from house to house, or go to the market place. Because they had to open a marketplace, with all sorts of things, most of them looted from stores, houses, other markets: the most important things people would buy would be fish and the very rare greens. Yeah, people even sold oil, salt, maggi cubes and soap. Blue-white bars. But, no water.
The rains were yet to come and the water was scarce. The wells had dried, the people had drained all the water to drink and cook at times. Those who had some water were lucky. Very lucky. Everyday people would lie in the corners, some with big, swollen legs, or swollen stomachs, begging for water. Those who couldn’t get a drop to drink had their eyes swarming with flies by the evening . . . The night would carry them away, to better places than the Randall Street corners, the former Labor Ministry yard, or Coconut Beach.
That morning Joan was restless. The rains wouldn’t come and the water was very scarce. There were five men, one more woman and three children in the house. Yeah, the two German Shepherds also, yeah, the dogs. They were quite useful, real bodyguards, and no one would dare climb the walls from outside and jump straight in front of them. Anyway, from the street, only the unfinished part of the building could be seen with two huge floors, without windows yet, but the red brick and the roof. Nobody could imagine that there were apartments and offices behind, that people lived there. Those who had known the place before, a very strong business office, attempted to come for food, or little money. But the tall walls were closed in front of them.
Only these few people lived there. The Indian man, the boss of the companies that had made name in Liberia along those twenty years before the war, two of his Indian men, Joan with her husband and child . . . they were waiting for the absurd fighting to stop. Soldiers said they were at war. The evening before, as on all the other evenings, around ten o’clock, a group of soldiers had stopped on Randall Street, close to the supermarket, and started shooting at the walls, gates, and air, shouting, screaming, cursing, and promising death to an unseen enemy. The bullets fell like rain, all over. The madmen tried to force the locked iron gates, and cursed, cursed in all the languages they knew. Nobody would rest until after midnight, when the grass smoke would clear from them, or the alcohol would settle in their very troubled blood and minds. That was the time they would carry their guns and withdraw towards BTC.
The night before they got really crazy about the huge walls and gates around them. They kept on shooting at the locks, and Joan was afraid that the locks and chains might yield. The screaming, cursing and shooting went on fiercely after midnight too. They had withdrawn to the most sheltered corners of the house, protecting the children and the dogs, for fear bullets might touch them. The soldiers threatened to burn the building down. They threatened to cut anyone they found into pieces. One of them called the Indian man’s name and promised to eat him alive. Then the bullets started biting at walls, rooftops, iron bars, locks, more fiercely than ever.
Joan started praying. She looked at the boy, and then at the men standing by the kitchen wall, and their faces spelled out fear and terror. Even Bossman seemed to have lost all hopes. Her husband no better. He, who would always have something to say, could not utter any encouraging word. Dark-skinned, his face always determined, he seemed even darker as the hope of life left him little by little. The other woman, a European too, was crying, holding her two daughters in her lap. Joan could not see that. Her son was right by her, and the boy looked up at his mother, showing no fear.
“What happens if they manage to shoot down the gates, mum?”
The bullets started dropping from the ceiling too. They moved farther, into the other room. Over there, no better. “Let’s go outside, to the corridor,” Bossman whispered, and they followed the tall Indian man outside. The corridor lay between the apartments and the unfinished building, and had some kind of roof-like structure, under which they all sheltered.
“We’ll burn yoh, now, we’ll burn yoh bitches to coal,” the soldiers yelled from downstairs. Joan looked at her husband. He looked back helplessly. “We’ve got to take the children out from here, you hear me?”
“There is no way, you can’t do that, Joan, they’ll shoot you down.” He wished he could have told her anything but that.
There was a moment of silence. Joan held the boy tight. ”We’ll make it.” He smiled, but a new wave of threats and curses came from the street. From up the hill, from Broad Street and up Benson Street, a deep, long roar of guns broke into the night.
“The Prince people, the Prince people! Yoh run, run, run!” The soldiers started running, and their heavy steps made Randall Street fill with knocks into hell’s door. The heavy roar kept on pouring in ceaselessly. Joan fell to her knees, holding the boy in her arms.
“God, thank you for Prince! It is Prince, it is Prince!” The men sighed with great relief. Bossman was the first to move towards the door of the room. He took a deep breath and threw himself down onto the sofa. The two dogs joined. The others spread into the house, with their hearts a lot more lighter. Prince. There was Prince Johnson and his men, so everybody was saved from the soldiers. The heavy machine guns kept on tearing the night into shreds, but people went to sleep in deep peace. There came Prince’s men! Prince’s men!
At dawn, Joan stole to the part of the building facing the street. She looked towards the beach, towards Benson Street corner, but nothing was moving. Then, as she looked towards the beach, she saw a tall, long-haired man, all arms, coming into the middle of the road from between the houses. He stopped in the middle, and holding his rifle tightly, looked all around him. Nothing moved. Joan hid by the wall, so the man could not see her. Other people starting showing themselves from the corners, approaching the tall man in the street.
“You see how one Prince boy can scare away a whole army?” She did not hear Bossman coming. He too looked out, to see the people gathering in the street. The dogs followed him faithfully. The other men ran to see the wonder for themselves.
“We not eat for days, yoh boy, do somethin’ for us, now!” Johnson’s man stood among the people begging and raising their arms towards him. He said no word. He started walking, and the mob followed him. At the doors of the supermarket, he pushed everyone backwards, and started shooting down the locks. The huge iron doors opened and the people ran inside, shouting, grabbing, throwing things into the street.
“It’s time you people find something for us too,” Bossman said, turning to the men behind him. They turned around, ran down the stairs and opened the lock, pulled down the chain, and ran out in the street, towards the supermarket. They started carrying upstairs cartoons of beans, all kinds of beans, vinegar, Gordon gin, salt, sugar, flour, they even brought some cans of oil, tomato paste, chapatti flour, and butter cans. They kept on going and coming, until they filled the kitchen with boxes, cartoons, cans, bottles, but the biggest thing was that they managed to get twelve cartoons of Benson & Hedges Gold, and towards noon, everybody could smoke a cigarette, a whole cigarette, without having to save part of it for later on. Men and women drank gin, leaving the water for the children, who managed to get some dry biscuits and a whole bag of candy bars. They were happy. The two girls and the boy played the whole afternoon away, counting and dividing the prey.
The two Liberian men left to go up Mamba Point to the market, and they locked the door. Bossman said they better hurry, because more fighting was to come, the firing should not catch them in the street. They did listen because they had respect and appreciation for the Indian man. He was helping them and their families to survive. The women had been his employees, and they were doing their best to keep the Bossman in that position they had been used to. Joan even saved his life once, when one evening, caught by bullets on the second floor of the unfinished building, he got trapped and could not make it to come down. She crawled upstairs to check for him, but she could not reach him, as there was a train of bullets passing between the two of them. When she saw that he was in danger, as those things started dropping from the roof too, she threw herself over him, pushed him to the stairs and they both managed to crawl downstairs.
He was too mad at her. “Why on earth would you do such a thing? Why the hell didn’t you stay inside? What made you come there? You want to die, or what?” She didn’t mind his shouting. It made her feel safe. She understood his reaction. Just like the night in Congo Town, at his house, when the soldiers had broken into the house in the neighborhood. It was raining that night, and the swamp with its mangroves behind Bossman’s house was torn apart by lightning. The wind was wailing, it was an exchange of forces between angry skies and an agonizing earth, when the gunshots reached Joan’s ears. She could not sleep, thinking of her house in Sinkor, of her husband who had insisted to stay there, sending her and the boy to Congo Town, for shelter. Their house was on the beach and he was afraid that the soldiers patrolling the area might hurt his family.
When she heard the shooting, she ran outside, on the corridor, and saw the door of the room with the balcony wide open. There was no light on, but she didn’t need any, as outside no one could tell whether there was day or night, with all the lightning. The curtains were shaking their blue feathers all around the room, and she saw the tall figure of the owner of that house, standing outside, in the rain. She took a few steps, walking close to him. The shooting went on fiercely. Screaming could be heard. Suddenly she sensed something cutting into the air, very close to them, and she knew it was not the breeze tearing at the mango tree, but the bullets. She pushed the man, who fell to the ground. She threw herself down too.
“You are the one killing me, now, or what? You shouldn’t have moved from your room, you’re stupid or what?” The rain had washed his grey hair down all over his extremely large forehead. At the light cutting down from above, his eyes seemed to her deeper than the night itself, and no matter how harshly he had yelled at her, she felt no fear from him anymore.
The evening came, and people were still moving in the street. It was almost dark, when one of the men came straight to Joan, who had leaned against the wall, almost asleep, tired from the day’s heavy chores.
“Some woman downstairs, she ask for yoh.”
“Who’s that?”
“I not know, she some Mandingo woman or what, she say she know yoh, she want see yoh now.”
Bossman was just putting down two candles on the table, ready to make some light in the house. He still didn’t dare to put on the generator, it was too noisy. As he heard the man talking, he came outside. “Who woman, why don’t you ask her who she is, what she wants?”
“Bossman, she say that’s Joan she wan’ see, she know her.”
“Are you sure she is not some rebel woman?” Bossman was still thinking about letting some stranger in. Finally, he sent John to bring the stranger upstairs.
John stopped at the second iron gate, at the entrance of the corridor, and showed the way to a tall figure clad in blue. She was all wrapped in her attire, not even her eyes showed. Joan felt something familiar about the Mandingo woman walking towards her with rare, determined steps. She could not see well in the dark, but there was something about the way she was walking. About the way her body was turning left-right, in narrow angles, until she stopped in front of Joan. None of them moved. Bossman and the other men were watching the two women from inside, waiting for the proper moment to intervene. Nothing moved for a few seconds.
The gesture of lifting up her arms to untie her headtie, the way she shook off her headtie took Joan back, within that very second, to a tall mountain in Europe, to an autumn evening . . . a fire was burning in the garden so close to the woods, all red and yellow with autumn leaves.
She and a friend of hers sitting down by the fire, talking. Her grandfather’s two horses were grazing in the garden, already saddled, for the two women were ready for a ride. After turning the world upside down, talking and laughing, after telling the stories of their old people, the Romany coming from all over Europe during the years of the Second World War, they found some common ties. Joan’s great grandma’, a beautiful Romany woman, whose favorite thing was to ride into the woods: Joan, who loved riding, long, flowered Romany skirts, and their huge scarves with purple red roses, who envied the charcoal black hair of Romany women, as hers was auburn: who enjoyed her Romany friend, Arah, a word which meant “gold.” This woman was of gold, if black gold had ever existed on earth. Busy watching her horse, as for every Romany on earth, the horse was as important as life itself, Arah’s hair was too close to the fire.
“Your hair will catch fire, can’t you feel the breeze? Tie it before the flames bite into it! Tie it!” Arah lifted up her both arms, shook her head to gather all that hair and tied it into a knot . . .
The long, black hair freed from the cloth, to the other woman’s knees, made Joan jump and hold the other one tight, in her arms. Two huge, dark arms embraced Joan, who was a little shorter, reaching up to the line of two dark, black eyes. “You, I don’t believe you, it can’t be you!”
They held hands, then they looked at each other, then again held hands. The woman threw off the pieces of cloth wrapping her, and as she walked into the sitting room, where the two candles were burning, the men were startled by her tall, dark figure, her long, black hair brushing her knees freely, her huge, long eyes, the grenades tied to her jeans, the daggers, two of them, the pistols on both sides, the rifle hanging on her back, the ropes tied around her hips, her red shirt and the gold shining on her breast. She was in her early thirties or so, and her dark figure was brightened by two rows of shiny, white teeth.
“You are the goddess of war, or what?” Bossman looked at the woman, who looked back at him smiling, brightening up the whole room. “You are the big boss, right? I am no goddess, fine man, I am a rebel woman from Taylor side. So, what yoh say now?”
Bossman kept on watching her, not knowing what to say further. “Oh, look at our own man, Mr. Morris, long time . . . yoh feel good in the woman lap, not so?”
“Ay, Arah, stop, tha’ yoh big mouth again: how the woman lap? We are all here, what yoh wan’ now?”
“Yoh always sit in Joan lap, so, no wonder I find yoh here. Anyway, yoh luck this time is that I wan’ talk to her, so move, let me find place to sit, yeah?” Knowing Morris for years, Arah never missed any opportunity to tease him. She had never liked the idea of Joan getting married to that silent Liberian man, somehow he just didn’t match with her. As he enjoyed her teasing, she always picked fuss with him.
The two women stepped outside, found a place to sit, on some bricks, lit cigarettes and licked the glasses of gin. “The way I know you, Arah, I’m dead sure you are not here just to see me, right? So, what brings you here?” Arah put both her hands to the back of her head, and with a gesture familiar to Joan for years, tied her long black hair into a knot.
“Joan, Joan, God tell me you alive, that’s why I came all this way, to make sure he right.”
“Arah, that is as true as the two of us not being here right now, so what is it?”
“I came to send you away. Don’t ask what away, I will tell you what. First, listen to me. The time the Taylor people starting closing in on Monrovia, I was at my drugstore on the highway. I was treating some woman when they broke into my shop. My two boys were with me. My daughter, you know her, had gone before with her father, he had come with big mouth saying she would be safer with him, she wanted to go, so I let her leave, keeping only my two boys, one seven, the other three. Imagine! So, they broke into my shop, but when they thought I was a doctor they left me alone, did no harm to me. They told me to jump the force or die right there. So, I said OK. I jump your force. What they understood between nurse or doctor? I was doctor to them. They even brought in some wounded people for me to tie their wounds. I did. They carried us behind the front line, farther than Kakata, farther than my farm there. I never saw my husband. Those boys told me he had been killed for refusing to give them food or what. What could I do? My second son became an orphan right there. So, I had to stand on my feet. They took me to a place where they had a bigger camp. We ate, got a shelter, and then took me with them, by a pickup, for me to look for the wounded, take them to the shelter and care for them. I became a combat doctor. Sometimes, I would operate in the middle of the bush, using my dagger and tearing my shirts to shreds to tie wounds. One night, we were on patrol. Five men and me. We approached a place, on the highway, where we saw fire and heard voices. Some men were talking, and there was a huge pot, on the fire, boiling, and the steam yielded a terrible stench. Two legs were hanging out from the pot. We waited for nothing. We attacked those people . . . the stench, just like coming from a corpse . . .”
“Shut up, will you? You terrify me. What nonsense story is this? How could . . .”
“How could I be part of such things, right? Joan, you are keeping your ass safe here, you know shit about what war is like outside. You’ve been here all the while, safe and sound, little bit of shooting, Benson & Hedges, beans and rice for dinner, Gordon gin, what are you thinking? You’ve seen nothing—nothing! I have been inside, so I am the one who had to struggle to survive. You don’t know shit, let me tell you, shit about it. Now, what I wan’ to tell you is that the rebels will threaten the international community to ask for intervention from outside, by taking hostages—each and every foreign citizen they find. The American Embassy will start evacuations. Go there and have yourself and the boy airlifted from Monrovia . . .”
“What, you think I can’t hold gun if I have to? I can’t leave people here . . .”
“Oh, you can’t, can you? Let me tell you, the people will leave you here, if they have to, so stop playing the hero. Move your ass away from Monrovia, before they kill you for nothing.”
“Suppose I jump the force too, and then . . .”
“You, jump the force? Can’t you see you are not for it? You have to do something else for Monrovia, your place is not in the battlefield. You have always been damn different from all the others, you have mixed into all sort of big things, with big people, you are not for killing. You have to use your head for something different than killing. If ever, use it, but don’t waste your brains on the sidewalk, waste them for something, you hear me? Waste them for something! If you wan’ listen to me, OK, if not, it will be death for you.”
“We are in Prince’s territory so they will not harm us. Prince has pledged to defend Monrovia from Taylor and his army and the others will help them . . . ”
“Joan with all your smartness sometimes you think childishly. Taylor and Prince started together, then the show was that they split right before running down Monrovia. Now part of Monrovia is under Taylor, part of it under Johnson, part of it under the Americans. The Americans will soon leave for Iraq, for their Desert Storm business. Prince will be alone unless they manage to drag in an international peacekeeping force. What will you do in the meantime? When they come for Monrovia, believe me, they will not pick and choose. So move your ass from here, move. On top of it, there are the Doe soldiers right under your nose in BTC. So tell me now what will you do when they are ready? Tell me?”
Joan sighed deeply. The war seemed to have just started with no end. The three months they had spent in the building on Randall Street seemed to be a mockery to safety, a mean and feeble attempt to preserve lives, but, further, or for what?
“So sister, now I’ve told you everything to tell. It is your time to move. You don’t believe me, listen to the BBC: our speaker Tom Woieyuh will announce it. You will see. Take my good word and go.”
“What about you? What are you going to do from here?”
“I have my fight in this war, I am not leaving. We have been a long way ever since our youth. You know I have no way back. No family, no friends, no home there. But you do. You have not said your last word, so go, go back to Europe, to your people and wait. Don’t stay here. I have got all my military honors. I have been advanced to captain, so when you hear about Captain Sneider, you should know it’s me. I have told you everything, so promise me that you’ll leave as soon as the Americans move.”
“I just can’t think of leaving. That would mean erasing all these years from my life. I know that.”
Arah laughed out loud. “Even if you die holding your memories, you have to make sure, that after all this hell, you yourself have tried to fight your part. Combat, special forces is not for you. Gun? You? You’d be able to hold that gun and tell your enemy to please move aside, so that I shouldn’t shoot you, you too are a human being. Not so? No, no. Special forces? Come on, you are too straight for that. Excuse me, I’m here on spying business, just give me this or that information, I’ll be out from here right now. Oh, let me take your picture. Please, smile . . . Ha, ha, ha . . . Move, Joan, move from here.”
Joan wanted to say something else, but Arah hushed her to silence. She sprang to her feet and listened.
“There is something moving near the wall, back there, just listen,” she whispered, holding one of her daggers.
“Be serious, the dogs would sense it, nobody can be there.”
“Lay down and keep quiet: whatever, don’t move.”
Arah pushed Joan to the ground and stole to the other wall, crawling soundlessly along it, towards the end where there was a small passage downstairs from Randall Street towards Mechlin Street. The opening was closed with a wire net and the spot was dark as charcoal. Arah stood there, then suddenly the dagger slit the air, the wire net fell to the ground, and Joan saw her dragging something behind her . She threw her load to the ground in front of the entrance. The men held the candles and ran outside. Joan crawled down there too. A short man lay in front of the door, with his throat slashed by Arah’s dagger. He wore a pair of ragged jeans, some rubber pieces tied to his feet by strings, no shirt, a gun, and a cutlass.
“So they sent him behind me, I see.” Arah knocked him with her sneaker while she was wiping her dagger on his jeans.
“Will you tell me, lady, what we will do with the corpse?” Bossman stood over Arah with an angry face. She assured him that she would take care of that, he shouldn’t worry and he’d better mind his own business.
“Just who the hell you think you are?” The Indian man was really mad.
Arah smiled at him. “Leave things to me, mind your own business, Bossman, will you? Oh, it’s good you lit the coal pot, I’ve got something to do, before I leave. Excuse, yah?”
She turned to Joan. “Let’s conclude our understanding the Romany way, lady.” Joan followed her mechanically. She knew about the Romany way. Both people hold hands over the fire, until they feel unbearable heat, to make them remember what they have to do. Fire is like a seal of life, as it can stir life and provide light and heat. When she felt the heat burning her skin, she withdrew her hands.
“So let it be. Do the way I told you to do. Don’t look back. Look only in front of you, and remember, you are not going for vacation. Your fight starts across the Mediterranean, in Europe, no matter how long it takes.” Joan was still on her knees. She buried her head in her hands and started crying.
“No time for bullshitting! Move it!” She had heard that from her before . . . Riding far in the woods, almost at dark, on that autumn evening, they couldn’t control the horses as they encountered a huge cloud of thick smoke, rolling over the forest, and spread by the autumn wind all over. “Someone must have left some fire burning on this side! The woods caught fire! Let’s turn back!” Joan saw Arah struggling to control the horse, which had raised its two front legs, neighing and jumping backwards. The wind spread all that black hair, blowing it freely, and she almost fell on her back, had she not whipped the horse, making it to turn around and start galloping backwards.
“The fire will drive out the wolves, let’s run back, to the house!” Joan turned the horse, but it would refuse to move. She stroked its neck gently. “Whip that ass, let’s move . . . Do you hear the howling? The wolves! Whip that ass, move, move , move!”
“Wait, I’m bleeding, Arah, wait!!!” A branch had scratched Joan’s face, and blood was pouring all over it. Arah threw her red scarf to her while galloping, but it dropped into the dark smoke behind them. With a firm hand, Arah grabbed Joan’s horse by the strap on its neck and drove it out of the woods . . .
Arah tied the blue pieces of cloth around her, embraced Joan, the little boy, grinned at the others, took the dead body by the hair and starting moving towards the entrance. “Somebody should lock the gates behind me,” she commanded authoritatively.
Joan felt the world submerging into darkness. What if Arah was right? She has always had the habit of exaggerating about things, but what if this time she was right? How did she make it to cross rebel lines from Taylor’s territory into Monrovia? Why the Mandingo outfit, as Taylor’s men killed many Mandingoes, taking them to be traitors. What made this woman walk around Monrovia at night, have the courage to come right under Prince’s nose and talk to her?
Arah had always been a fighter, defending her own rights and words till her last breath. Even in Europe, where she was hailing from, she had the same outspoken, overly brave way of doing things. She belonged to the Romany by tribe, horse breeders, tough caravan people, moving all over Europe. While the two of them were living together, in the same block of flats, Arah would always amaze her by her inborn intelligence, her novel-like stories, her ability to throw knives and her love for everything exuberant involving force, competition, frenzy.
She graduated from a nursing school and was skilled in surgery assistance. She would cut and sew human skin without any vibration. She loved it. Joan urged her to study further, to become a doctor like her husband, but Arah preferred the household and the two children instead of heavy book and a life of studying. She loved dressing, she adored clothes, shoes, matching bags: one thing about her, this dark woman with gorgeous straight black hair, with huge, black flame eyes, loved to dress in white. Always in white. Joan would call her dark angel at times. She would always attract all the looks in the street. Joan has never felt jealous. It was just natural for Arah to behave that way.
Already in Monrovia, Arah quickly found solutions. She opened her own medicine store, started treating people, made her living, without her husband, whom she divorced on grounds of womanizing. Her second husband was already dead in this war. She was a combat doctor, a fighter, she was already advanced to be a captain. She could slash a man’s throat just like that, she knew about the future, she moved freely in the enemy’s territory at night . . . !
That night all devils on earth stood by Joan’s side and kept on saying that Liberia was going to disappear, as darkness would take over, that the children of paradise would all die, and only false angels would stay. That the lake up in the bush had no more mermaids. The water caught fire. The three red mermaids Joan had once seen in broad daylight were burning in huge, blue flames, wrapped in Arah’s blue pieces of cloth.
Copyright © Eva Acqui
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