Ezequiel
“I’M NOT AFRAID, you know.” My words chase the home-care nurse as she closes the door behind her.
I have always kept quiet and to myself. Even when I worked, I’d hurry home to my basement apartment, careful that no one followed. But it isn’t fear.
The two basement windows are rotting from years of rain and cold. One of the nurses, Helen, I think it was, told me that the windows are not up to code—too small, she said. They do let in the harsh light of a motion detector the neighbour installed between our houses. A cat or raccoon triggers it repeatedly. The floors are painted concrete and the whole place smells like soggy bread.
I like to keep the radio on all day. The music reminds me of Papa Gilberto’s windup record player. It had its own spot underneath his office window. A bookcase took up most of the wall. Papa’s collection of records and his books were arranged by subject: history, government, religion, but also books of poetry and novels, all organized neatly on the shelf. From his office window, I could look out onto cloud shadows creeping over the plains of high grass, over the thorn trees and the occasional outcrop of rock out to a horizon of purple hills, dotted with acacia, sycamore, fig, and mimosa trees, and the two baobabs at opposite corners of our land. A ribbon of forest ran along the river that cut into our mission. I can never return.
My kitchen window, above the sink and the tiled backsplash, is rectangular and faces the neighbour’s wall. From my La-Z-Boy I can see brick, a triangle of sky, and some green from a maple tree. When the neighbour walks between our houses I can see his knees and up his shorts. He has told me his name, but I can’t remember it. The refrigerator whistles for five minutes every time I open the door, and on the freezer door a magnet of the Canadian flag holds a hockey calendar, its squares empty. During the cold months, the boiler rages then hums behind the plantation doors I installed to hide the guts of the house, the boiler and the hot water tank and copper pipes like intestines. When the repairman is called in, I show him the doors and lock myself in my bedroom. At the end of a short corridor is a fire door, which leads to twelve steps rising to the backyard. On good days, I garden.
I bought the house years ago, but it was too big for me. I moved into the basement and I’ve had the same tenants renting out the top floors for the last fifteen years. I haven’t raised their rent since they moved in.
I hardly go out anymore. I stopped working—I was a night custodian—two years ago, when things got bad, when the doctor diagnosed Lewy body dementia, basically a cocktail of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Sixty-four is a bit young to show signs of degenerative disease, the doctors say, even though I tell them my memory is stronger than ever. They asked if I had any questions but they didn’t answer them. Why are my veins turning into electric wires? How come my dreams are flooded with colour? Why do imposters chase me every night? The Commander is after me. I tried to convince them he has connections that reach far beyond Mozambique.
My brain tires. All my senses have dulled to the outside world. I don’t deserve to participate in life, not after what I saw and what I did. I used to catch myself smiling—children playing, piri piri shrimp, All in the Family—and I would feel guilty for letting joy creep inside me. They give me risperidone, which dulls the noises in my head and lets me drift off to a time and place where everything seems real. I keep telling myself that it’s better not to look back. Nothing good comes from going back. Now, I spend part of my day or what is left of the night in my bed or in my chair staring into the dark until my eyes can pierce the thickness to see clearly through it. I see people, animals, and objects all around me, though they try to hide in the carpet pattern or in the paintings on the wall. I never switch lights on in the basement. I like it this way.
“I used to have a dream as a boy—not a nightmare,” I say. Then I realize I am alone. Still, I’m careful not to speak too loudly or to give too much away. You never know who is listening.
Once I could fly. Well, it wasn’t flying, exactly—more like jumping from treetop to treetop, high above the ground. When I looked down, a crowd of people gazed up; they saw me in the canopy bounding from one tree to the next, sometimes tumbling and flipping with an ease that stretched their mouths wide open. As I jumped, I felt flashes of light bursting from my body, so dazzling. They watched from below and shouted, “The wheel! Ezequiel has turned into the wheel!” I looked down and was suddenly fearful. I began to lose my weightlessness. I could feel myself getting heavy, sinking into the leaves and branches that no longer supported me. The crowds, all their anxious faces unknown to me, flashed by me as I crashed through the canopy of trees.
Life is a dizzying second.
I look out my window and enter the jungle and surge toward the backdrop of a world I faintly recognize. I want to go back to when I was a boy. Papa! I yell. Papa! But before he can turn to face me a blaze of white grabs hold of me and lifts me up to the sky. Mother Anke smiles, tosses me into the air again and catches me in her arms. I nuzzle into her neck and smell soap.
Our prayer house was the first building the guerrillas set ablaze. The fire engulfed the structure, and whipped up by the wind, the flames leapt onto the other buildings, until all of our mission was burning. Adjoining houses always burn, Papa Gilberto had often said to me, but I don’t think that is what the proverb meant. I cup my ears, trying to replace the sound of men’s laughter with my parents’ voices. One foot in front of the other, I hear Papa Gilberto say, and I do not feel my feet touching the ground. But Mother Anke’s words make my brain hum: Do not enter the jungle. There is fear in the dark forest. She always lit a candle before going to bed—a candle chases the shadows.
With every sound, I bite down hard, grind my teeth. I am thirteen and will not cry. We cut a narrow path through the jungle. Looking back at the mission, I see the golden embers and smoke rise up to mingle with the stars. The mission is turning into an upside-down heaven.
When he entered the mission as the leader of his men, he introduced himself as Macaco. He flashed his teeth—upper gums bracketed with large incisors. The missing row of upper teeth, perhaps four, turned his mouth into a gaping pink hole. I’m not sure what Macaco wanted with me—why he chose to spare my life and bring me with them. The boy, Armando, walks behind me. I wonder if he too was taken from his family. Whenever I stagger or when my knees get soft, Armando nudges my back with the muzzle of his gun.
It is night when Macaco falls back and allows one of the other men to lead. He does not look at me when he inserts himself into the line in front of me. I smell the sourness of his body. I trip and fall.
“Get up!” he says, striking my face with the back of his hand.
I feel nothing.
“You will march with us or I will tie a stone to your ankles and throw you in the river.”
I get up and straighten my legs. One step followed by another. I know I want to live. One step turns to a hundred then a thousand and then ten thousand. I hear his voice but can’t see Papa Gilberto’s face. Every time I try, my thoughts turn black. Mother Anke is always clear—tall, broad-shouldered, with a heavy bosom and hips. Her hands were bigger than Papa’s and they were always red, like her cheeks. Her mouth was wide. She kept her cinnamon-coloured hair pulled back tight in a bun, which made her eyes appear squinty—eyes blue like sea ice, she liked to say, even though it did not help me understand. She was uncomfortable in the heat. Her fair skin wasn’t suited to the sun, and her clothes were rough and chafed against her.
Mother Anke and Papa Gilberto were not my birth parents. “Your mother was an entertainer,” Mother Anke once told me, her face twisted as if she had bitten into an overripe mango. “Only three days old and she left you on the kitchen table, like a cut of meat,” she said. Over the years I had pieced bits together. I know my father was white and Portuguese, but I do not know his name. From gossip and conversation I overheard between workers, I learned he was a government worker from Lisbon who visited the hotel where my mother had a room and worked. He always chose my mother because she was more beautiful than the other women. I once heard Mother Anke say that many men asked for my mother. She never used her name. Lázaro, my favourite mission worker, shared it with me. Eugenia, he whispered once, while he taught me to groom my father’s horse.
Where am I? I see the calendar on my refrigerator and my panic eases. I hear a police siren outside. Someone’s knocking on the door, the renters arguing on the main floor, the flushing of a toilet, and the slapping sound the neighbour’s sandals make against his heels.
Noise.
We move at night, hide and sleep during the day. When the sun rises, Macaco raises his fist in the air and the men drop where they stand. After a few minutes, they begin to stir and make themselves nests of grasses and branches. Takudzwa, who belongs to the Shona tribe, appears with a headless snake draped around his neck. He falls to his knees and scores the snake before pulling the skin back in one long piece. The small morsels of meat fill my belly. Armando climbs the tree trunk, his legs and arms moving together in short bursts until he reaches the first large branch. He looks down at me. Directing with his chin, he points to an empty branch. I’m not as quick as he is, but I get up there and stretch my body out to nestle into the bough. Our heads are a foot apart. I listen to his breathing.
“His name is Malik,” Armando whispers in Portuguese, “but you only refer to him as Leader. Never call him Macaco.” Unlike the other men, Armando looks at me when he speaks. “The men told me prazeiros gave him that nickname as a boy. He uses the name landowners gave him to feed his rage.”
I do not know if it was my African blood that kept me alive or the idea that Macaco could possess the part of me he resented, the same way he held on to the awful name.
Armando tells me he was raised on colonial land. His family cultivated the fields but were given little for their hard work. His father encouraged him to run away—to search for a better life. “My mother used to say there are two places we are always moving toward: where it all ends and where it all began,” he whispers, shifting his body to gaze into the canopy of trees. “It’s a beautiful place.” I close my eyes and slip my hands into my pockets, where I touch the smooth surface of Papa Gilberto’s harmonica.
In those first weeks I was drawn to Armando. I learned he was fourteen, a year older than me, and had been with these men for two years. He did not give details about his parents, if they were still alive. I had heard whispers about young men being forced by rebels to kill their families and burn their villages. I never thought they were talking about boys.
As the men slept, I thought of the safest place in the world—Papa’s office. It comforted me to imagine the Persian rug covering the floor, the pieces of furniture never moved from their spots. Papa didn’t like to move things, and he saw no reason to fiddle. He was away often, travelling to estate sales as far as Porto Amélia. He witnessed growing unrest and frustration. Pleas and petitions proved useless. Peaceful protests were met by violence. In June 1960, hundreds of unarmed people in the northern town of Mueda assembled for a peaceful meeting. They were murdered.
Rumblings of war were driving the Portuguese out of Mozambique. Papa Gilberto told me about the Mueda massacre and about a brave man called Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique—FRELIMO. They were only fighting for what was theirs.
Many Portuguese families, some who had been in Mozambique for hundreds of years, were leaving everything behind and going to live in Portugal, a place foreign and unfamiliar to them—or at least that’s what Papa said. These landowners, prazeiros, were afraid that all would be taken from them, or worse, if they did not leave.
My parents stayed to do God’s work. We couldn’t call it that or the Portuguese government would close us down, like they had every other Dutch Reformed Church in Mozambique. We called ourselves evangelists, and our mission the Mission of God. Papa’s answer was always the same: “God is on our side. We are doing His good work.” But one night I overheard Mother Anke and Papa talking. Papa said the Portuguese were fools. Many families, like his, had been in Mozambique for generations, but more Portuguese were arriving daily on its shores. The government was giving them free land, and this was adding fuel to the flame. Papa said you couldn’t give away that which was not yours to give. Mother Anke pleaded with him to leave, tried to convince him the mission would never be a home. She reminded him that he had promised her only ten years; that he would take her back home to her parents in Holland when his work was done. Mother Anke never liked Mozambique—she was afraid of the jungle because even the plants had claws. Once she told me, “All things in this country are trained to bite, Zeca. The birds tear at the sky, the branches shred the clouds, and even the earth hisses when the rain falls.” In 1964 the Mozambican War of Independence officially began. The same year, I was taken from my family.
Papa Gilberto would say that just as the seeds of a mango tree undergo a change from seeds to tree, getting stronger and more firmly rooted, so too grow the mission and followers of God.
“To die a tribe and be born a nation.” A FRELIMO political slogan. I keep repeating it. Not too loud; you can’t trust anyone.
In 1965, guerrillas launched attacks on targets in northern Mozambique. Macaco and his men, including me, were never part of that. We weren’t even part of one of those official, small, platoon-sized engagements. We were always far from where the fighting was taking place. We lived in the bush, foraged from the local villages. What they did not offer, we took.
I wake up in a sweat. I want water. I can hear it dripping from the kitchen sink, but my legs do not move. There is nothing but a clock on my nightstand. The numbers glow 2:43. I lay my head back down. When I feel disoriented, the doctors have told me to think of the number three to calm my nerves. Everything comes in threes: Neapolitan ice cream, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the red, amber, green of a traffic light, a tricycle…the Portuguese army’s objectives: to destroy as much of the people’s food as possible in an effort to starve them out; to terrorize the people and make them feel unsafe and insecure, instilling the idea that FRELIMO could not help them; to destroy every man, woman, and child who believes in Mondlane’s mantra, A luta continua—the struggle continues.
I am determined to keep moving. Papa used to say that everyone complains about the sun’s scorching heat, the rains that wash away roads, the winds that topple huts, the drought that kills thousands, but there is never bitterness directed at the moon.
His words keep me strong at night, even though my back aches from the weight of supplies and the gun strap cutting across my shoulder blades. I use the muzzle to scratch my forehead. It would be so easy to end things with a quick pull of the trigger. I think about this when I am hungry. It has been only a few weeks since leaving the mission and we have travelled through jungle and over hills. The day’s warmth has dwindled and my skin tingles. In my dream I sprint across the treetops as fast as I can, my toes barely touching the leaves. “Go, Zeca! Go far!” I leap, fly. Beads of sweat splash my shoulders and arms. The sun sinks lower but I do not stop. I muster a second wind and keep pushing myself to reach the finish. But the sliver of sun slips away over the hills faster than I can fly. My heart sinks with it as it drops from my sight. The sky turns dark. I wobble on my feet, spent, and then I tumble into the canopy, my limbs getting tangled in the branches that break my fall.
Every so often the sound of running water or the roar of a waterfall draws us away from our path. Macaco tells us how long we can stay, which fruits to eat or roots to boil. I have learned nothing about this leader. I can’t imagine what happened in his life to bring him here. All I know is what I see. He carries a radio transmitter on his back. Macaco has us believe we are part of a bigger plan, fighting for the brotherhood. I am not convinced. We have not made contact with other FRELIMO soldiers. Macaco has not received any directives in months. There are no maps, and we wander aimlessly in circles. No one dares ask Macaco why.
Climbing out of the jungle’s shadow, we reach a tea plantation, the pickers in the distance, half their bodies lost in a green sea of leaves. Farther off, smoke billows from what must be their village. Warmth surges through my body; it reaches the tips of my fingers and my toes. There will be people and families and prayer. I allow myself the hope that Papa Gilberto is alive and may be waiting in the village for me. Mother Anke will be with him and she’ll run to me, her rough hands will draw me near.
The rains come down hard and the soil turns to mud. It doesn’t take long before my boots sink in deep, releasing the sharp odour of soaked soil. If I drop any deeper I’m afraid I’ll disappear. The skin on my feet will pucker and rot. All I think of is the warm fire that will greet us in the centre of the village. There will be food in a large pot and they will welcome us because we are tired and hungry and we are fighting for them.
I shiver, and Armando, by my side, wraps his arms around me to keep me warm. He nods, tells me he understands with his silent smile, and I lean into him. Every so often when he is sleeping, he kicks out in a panic, stabs out a word or two, and it is my turn to calm him.
I mark my days with knots in my bootlaces. Three months on and there is no more room for knotting. I pull thread from the hems of my pants—one strand for each day. Forty knots and eighty-six threads of frayed cotton so far. I am beginning to let go of the world I came from. I cannot reclaim Mother Anke and Papa Gilberto.
“You can never go back,” Armando whispers as if reading my thoughts. “Believe me,” he says.
The day these men came and walked into the clearing has washed away like the rains erase the track of animals. Another night falls. I will hold my gun to my chest and keep moving.
A dozen or so huts are scattered in the village. No villagers welcome us with food and drink. I see a prayer house next to a kraal. I shiver as a light wind shakes the thatched roofs. I cannot see any footprints and there are no livestock. The birds and the crickets have gone silent. I can hear my heart beating. My body tingles, every part of me alert. Behind me I sense danger, but I refuse to look back. Figures dash from behind a hut into the jungle. Macaco is the first to raise his gun and shoot. All the other men in our group scan the horizon and shoot blindly into the trees. Since being on the march I have yet to shoot. I raise my gun; my hands tremble. The shaking is coming from my insides.
Macaco lifts his hand in the air. The men stop firing, but they do not lower their guns until the forest has grown quiet.
“Why do you hide? You must help us in the fight!” Macaco yells out.
I hear the low call of a woman’s voice: “Zabere. Zabere.” She rises from the bush near the trees. She has been shot in the leg. She leans against a tree and holds out her hand in Macaco’s direction. A frightened young girl, ten or eleven years old, appears. She looks at Macaco as if to ask permission to go to her mother. “Zabere!” The cry is shrill and urgent. The girl takes a few steps. Macaco catches her around the waist. She kicks, tries to reach back and grab hold of Macaco’s head or bandolier. His dirty hand muffles her screams. The woman limps out from the edge of the jungle.
“Shoot her,” Macaco says to me, spit spraying from his mouth. “You are a soldier now. Shoot!”
The woman looks straight at me, holds out her hands. Her eyes are large and white. “Give me my daughter.”
“Shoot her!” Macaco yells. “Or I’ll kill them both!”
The words ring in my ears, and I am taken back to my home at the mission, back to the clearing by the well and the old acacia tree. I glance at the girl struggling against Macaco’s hip. I raise my rifle to my shoulder to look through the rear sight. I aim. My arm burns with the weight of the gun. My finger feels for the trigger. The woman staggers, places one foot in front of the other before catching a branch to steady herself. I am only now aware that I am sobbing.
“Shoot!”
My fingertip touches the curve of the trigger.
“Shoot! SHOOT!”
I open my eyes and through the smoke’s haze the woman stands still, a bullet hole through her neck. There is so much blood.
Zabere’s mouth will not close. Out of it comes a silent cry. Macaco suddenly drops her. He presses the sides of his head until his hands tremble. He disappears into the hut, and the girl scrambles to her feet and goes to her mother.
I let my gun fall to the ground. The flesh of my palms and fingertips tingle. I remain on my spot in the clearing, the village around me going up in flames and smoke. The prayer house burns bright. The other men begin to sack the huts—stealing what little money they can find, clothes, food, radios, any other supplies they think might be useful, including rope and wire. Then they light the thatched roofs. The world is blurred by the smoke and embers that float and swirl in the air.