A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [66]
One day we decided to break the glass windows in the classrooms. I do not remember why, but instead of finding rocks to break the windows like everyone else, I punched the glass with my fist. I managed to break several panes before my hand got stuck in the glass. I drew it out and began to bleed uncontrollably. I had to go to the hospital. My plan was to steal a first-aid kit and treat myself, but the nurse was there. She made me sit on the counter as she removed pieces of glass from my skin. She twisted her face whenever she was removing a piece of glass that was buried deep in my skin. But when she looked at me, I was still. She searched my face to see if I was in pain. She was confused, but continued to gently remove the pieces of glass from my bleeding hand. I didn’t feel a thing. I just wanted to stop my blood from flowing.
“This is going to hurt,” the nurse said when she was about to clean the cuts.
“What is your name?” she asked as she dressed my hand. I didn’t answer her.
“Come back tomorrow so that I can change the bandage. Okay?” She began to rub my head, but I pushed her hand away and walked out.
I didn’t go back to the hospital the next day, but on that same day, I fainted from a migraine while I was sitting on the verandah. I woke up in bed in the hospital. The nurse was wiping my forehead with a soaked cloth. I caught her hand, pushed her away, and walked out again. I sat outside in the sun, rocking back and forth. My entire body was aching, my throat was dry, and I felt nauseated. I threw up something green and slimy, then fainted again. When I woke up hours later, the same nurse was there. She handed me a glass of water. “You can go if you want to, but I suggest that you stay in bed tonight,” she said, pointing her finger at me, the way a mother would talk to a stubborn child. I took the water from her and drank it, then threw the glass against the wall. The nurse leapt from her chair. I tried to get up to leave, but was unable to sit up in bed. She smiled and walked over to my bed and injected me. She covered me with a blanket and began sweeping up the broken glass. I wanted to throw the blanket off, but I couldn’t move my hands. I was getting weaker and my eyelids grew heavier.
I woke to the whispers of the nurse and someone else. I was confused, as I wasn’t sure what day or time it was. I felt my head pulsating a little. “How long have I been here?” I asked the nurse, banging my hand on the side of the bed to get her attention.
“Look who’s talking, and be careful with your hand,” she said. When I sat up a bit, I saw that there was a soldier in the room. I thought for a minute that he was there to take me back to the front lines. But when I looked at him again, I knew he was at the hospital for other reasons. He was clearly a city soldier, well dressed and without a gun. He was a lieutenant and supposedly there to check on how we were being treated medically and psychologically, but he seemed more interested in the nurse. I was once a lieutenant, I thought, a “junior lieutenant,” to be precise.
As a junior lieutenant I had been in charge of a small unit made up of boys to carry out quick missions. The lieutenant and Corporal Gadafi had selected all my remaining friends—Alhaji, Kanei, Jumah, and Moriba—to form the unit, and once again we were back together. Only this time we weren’t running away from the war. We were in it and went out scouting potential villages that had food, drugs, ammunition, gasoline, and other things we needed. I would report our findings to the corporal, and then the entire squad would attack the village we had spied on, killing everyone so that we would stay alive.
On one of our scouting expeditions, we accidentally came upon a village. We had thought that the village was more than three days away, but after only a day and a half of walking, we began to smell the scent of cooking palm oil in the air. It was a beautiful day, as summer was giving us its last