Survival at First Light of the Dawn

Omayma Abdallah
It was as though the city had been deserted for a hundred years.
Neglected, forgotten, ancient, with no clear landmarks and no recognisable face. As though a fire had broken out and reduced it to ashes, or as though predators had torn it open and spilt its entrails, or a plague had swept through and wiped out its inhabitants. A city erased from history, covered in accumulated ash in which human bones lay buried.
I was standing at its entrance. The gates were flung open, tossed about by erratic winds. Ruin defined the place, and there was no one. Empty of everything, as though everyone had fled a flood, a famine, or a pestilence, and left it to the wind.
Strands of smoke were rising through the air, spreading upwards. They covered the sky above the city and began to overpower the last threads of sunlight, forming overlapping circles that climbed higher and spread wider. The smoke did not break against the buildings; it had overcome the city.
Yet I was still able to breathe. I watched the circles of smoke split into tongues that swelled and widened until they had completely devoured the clarity of the sky. Everything was receding in favour of those circles. By the time the smoke had spread all around me, I could no longer feel my heart or its beating, as though it had been torn away at the city gates. My mind, too, was incapable of producing a single thought, or perhaps it had judged that any thought would seem foolish and trivial before a city being swallowed by smoke.
Where were the people?
Whom could I ask? There was no one here.
The place was silent, like a coffin. The smoke wrapped itself around me, enclosed me, and began to seep inside me as darkness fell. My heart began to return to me, fainting from terror. Fear flowed through my veins like running water. I touched my stomach as though it were about to split open and release al-Sadiq, the child the fortune-teller had told me about before I entered the deserted city.
But the smoke will suffocate him, I warned her.
No, he will survive.
I could no longer see. The buildings, the doors, the sky — all of it was obscured from me by the darkness.
I was trying to push the smoke away from in front of me. I was drowning in it now, completely.
I woke up gasping. The dreams of fear had returned once again. The unconscious translates itself through dreams. The terrors of the Janjaweed turned them into something utterly horrifying. I was curled into myself, as though seeking protection from sleep, from dreams, and from them. I tried to stretch out my legs, but I could not. I remained lying there, folded into myself. The fear surging through me paralysed movement, drained away all strength, and drew my limbs tightly together. I felt myself gripped by fear. Dear God, it was as though I were in some far-off depth, layers of darkness one upon another. There was no refuge from them. They were spread across the city like locusts, from one end to the other. Whoever escaped them had received all the good fortune in الدنيا; whoever fell into their hands had no fate but one from which there was no escape. I wept without a sound. The tears ran down both sides of my face. I was afraid they might hear my crying and come.
They are terrifying, dear God.
How does one survive them? Inside me, everything was burning: fear, helplessness, and hope.
Between them ran a thin thread: anticipation and the heart’s panic, certainty and the severing of hope, the isthmus between survival and annihilation, the last threads of darkness and the first break of dawn.
The dreams of fear keep returning, but each time they come in a different form. They crouch upon my chest like a mountain of iron. Sometimes they come wearing the shape of their satanic faces, chasing me as I run across a hanging bridge, or cornering me in a narrow place, or driving me towards the abyss. These nightmares have never left me since the first time they leapt over the wall of the street. People now live in one world, while we with the Janjaweed inhabit another entirely. The house has become bleak. Water is scarce, and there is no electricity. We live by sunlight in the day and moonlight at night. No bakery sells bread to those few people who remain. No one knocks at the door. There is no vegetable market. Nothing at all. Even longing for a cup of tea has become an impossible wish. Only the sun and daylight offer hope; in the light, there is some safety.
Dense darkness. Everything around me is still and dry: the houses around us, the road, the air. Even the trees have withered, their branches dried out, and the beasts, birds, and cats have vanished from the city altogether. Here there is nothing to suggest life. Those whom fortune favoured managed to flee; they escaped them. Death here is the most constant form of hope. But now they are fate itself. Darkness rules the place. Fear chokes my heart. Anticipation hinders my breathing. The stillness around me explodes inside me into thunderous sounds and warnings: they could come at any moment. They roam the night like savage stray wolves, driving their vehicles without lights. Their eyes are lamps of evil, gleaming as though they had found fat prey. They delight in people’s terror of them. My soul feels on the verge of being ripped from me by fear. I imagine I can smell them. The odour is pungent; it clings to the air for days. I sense them as though they are even now leaping over the street wall towards us.
Their bodies have a strange smell. Their breath carries the odour of a rotting corpse.
Scent has a memory and an image. That smell has become embodied in them, and in no one else.
Their hair hanging down over their shoulders, the incomprehensible speech of some of them, their boundless urge to humiliate us, their violent desire to slap us every time they came upon us, their laughter among themselves as they pointed their rifles at everything their eyes fell upon, the bullet marks covering every wall of the house and the ceiling. My breathing was suffocated. I tried to seek help in the verses of God I had memorised, but they were fate now, and there was no escape.
I could hear al-Sadiq’s breathing, steady as it reached me. He escapes them through sleep. He has aged as though he were sixty years old. These horrors have added forty years to his life. He seems like my son rather than my brother. He stopped speaking months ago, ever since they came and beat him so savagely. He could not hear before, and now he no longer speaks. Only his eyes move in circular motions. Slapping my brother had become their amusement. The palms of their hands were so hard they seemed made of iron rather than flesh. They knew nothing of the world beyond the life of beasts, and so they had never before seen someone with autism. The fact of his condition amused them. They said they had never heard of such a thing. They said to me, You are lying to us.
“So you think we don’t understand? What kind of illness is that?”
They thought I was lying, and so he became their entertainment, as though they came only in order to slap him, to amuse their beastly selves by watching him collapse at their feet under the force of the blows. His eyes would vanish into some distant cave, fleeing to the furthest point on earth. He did not understand, yet each time he would shrink into himself. If only he had obeyed me when I tried to make him flee.
The wall before me seemed to crumble every time he fell to the ground under the force of a slap. My soul would leave me in order to protect him, to ransom him, if only I could. My heart bled, and after they left, my tears would not stop. He is my brother, and how often I wished I could carry him and run with him far away from the whole world. But there was his illness, his lack of awareness, and the war. And when the enemy is the Janjaweed, souls become the game, and there is no escape except through death.
They had not come from the unknown, nor from beyond this world. They were our neighbours and among us. Every age has its Mongols, and they were the Mongols of this age.
In mid-April, when they took control of Khartoum State — the entrances and exits — and spread across the main roads, they at first allowed departing families to leave. After that, they closed in on us like a calamity, or like mountains gathering together. Every house fell under their control, at the mercy of their desires. Houses that were not allowed to sleep, nor to live, nor to die. We were their game and their amusement.
On one rainy morning, I could hear the sound of the outer door. Someone was trying to open it. My heart fell to my feet. I ran towards al-Sadiq. He was still, at the edge of the bed, staring into emptiness, never turning towards me, his eyes never settling on me.
The sound of the attempt grew louder, insistent at the door.
“Open, Ruqayya.”
My woe — it was Zainab, my sister. My heart split apart. The air before me scattered. I crossed the distance in a single step, moved away the heavy stone, drew back the bolts, lifted the iron bar from the latch, and the door opened.
She had changed so much. She had grown old. Her hair had turned white. Her eyelids drooped and wrinkles had spread across her face. The garment wrapped around her scarcely covered her. Her hands trembled, and her right eye had developed a squint she had never had before.
I supported her, shut the door, and we went inside.
“He left a month ago and never came back. They kept me in the house and took everything. I escaped from them, sister. They showed me no mercy.”
She stumbled at the threshold and nearly fell. My heart ached for you.
Her husband, al-Amin, had disappeared. What a heavy burden she carried. I asked her how it had happened.
She did not answer. She only wept. And as for me, what was left? I had exhausted all my tears, Zainab.
“Do not cry, al-Sadiq will be frightened.”
Our fear had acquired a companion; Zainab had joined us. Al-Sadiq looked at her and did not look at her. He did not move from his place. He rarely moved from his place. It had been his corner for years; he knew no other.
He was in a distant world.
Her heart recoiled when she saw him. She asked me about him. Al-Sadiq had been a piece of my mother’s heart. She entrusted him to us as she lay on her deathbed. The last thing she said before she got martyred was:
“Take care of him.”
And what could I do, Zainab? They are the Janjaweed. They stole from him what little awareness remained.
She fell silent. And I fell silent. And the corners and pillars fell silent. Indeed, the whole universe fell silent. Only fear had a voice. And can a house remain a house once its sense of safety has collapsed?
I tried to make something for her to eat. We had nothing except a little flour, some oil gone weevily, and some broth.
She ate the aseeda despite the weevils, but al-Sadiq did not eat. I cannot remember when he last ate.
As the sun set, she shrank into herself: darkness, anticipation, terror. Perhaps they will come tonight. That was what I whispered to myself.
“My woe,” she said, placing her hands upon her head.
“Was it not enough that they took al-Amin, beat me every day, and kept me captive?” Then she began to cry again. She cried, and the tears streamed down her face, and she wailed until she fell asleep from exhaustion on the chair. I remained seated in front of her. Her features had altered completely. She was pale, her skin darkened, her bones protruded, her jaw jutted forward, and her eyes had lost much of their light, as though she were no longer my sister.
She did not ask me how we were, and I told her nothing. Her weeping gave me no opportunity to speak.
The sun tilted westward and things began to disappear. Time passed slowly. Darkness had completed its spread. It was time for them to arrive.
I felt drowsy, but how could I sleep while Zainab and al-Sadiq were as though both in the world and not in it?
I heard her gasp. What remained of me flew apart. Fear and night have their own laws. Darkness had descended fully upon a night darker still.
Their smell.
They had come.
The minutes passed — or rather it seemed to me they were hours, an entire night, an endless stretch of time — before I heard the crash of their boots inside the house. They had climbed over and jumped in, as was their habit.
Al-Sadiq was asleep, escaping them through sleep, as though he had not heard my heart falling, the thunder of my pulse, the bombardment of fear; as though they had not heard the crying of the house, the walls, my eyes. Who can sleep in a Janjaweed night, my brothers, and who can feel safe?
Zainab was startled when they smashed the last intact pane of glass in the window opposite her bed.
They said words I did not understand, but I leapt from my bed without knowing how and opened the door for them.
They entered like a plague. They knew the place very well. They went straight towards al-Sadiq, woke him while laughing, all of them speaking at once and gesturing wildly. There were eight of them.
One of them hauled him to his feet, then suddenly struck him with a violent slap, then the second did the same. Zainab rose in a single motion to place herself between them and al-Sadiq. She could not bear it. But one of them slapped her so hard that she fell beneath their feet. He stamped on her face with his military boot until froth came from her mouth.
Another fired a bullet into her leg. She screamed. It ricocheted through the corners and came back like the scream of the grave. If only Zainab had known that screaming excites them like hungry hyenas over prey.
He followed it with another shot to her forehead. It shattered, and blood burst forth. Al-Sadiq slipped away into unconsciousness. I dropped to my knees and fell into some abyssal depth, and I could no longer hear. They went out swaying as they walked.
God in heaven — Zainab, my sister!
Her blood ran close beside me. The sky collapsed upon me and split open. The pillars of the house sank away, and black smoke filled the air. It surged hotly; I touched it with my hand and tasted it in my throat.
Zainab.
Life disappeared, and the first threads of dawn crept in through the cracks.
Al-Sadiq rose from his stupor, opened his eyes wide, and walked towards the door. He turned, and for the first time since the war began he looked directly at me. He stretched out his hand to me.
We went out with the last of the darkness and the first threads of dawn, hoping we might survive.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=11978