A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [68]
There was a crack on the white ceiling of the room, and I could faintly hear the deep voice of the city lieutenant and the quick laughs of the nurse. I turned my head to the side and looked in their direction. The nurse had a wide smile on her face and seemed to be interested in the lieutenant’s jokes. I got up and started walking out of the hospital.
“Drink a lot of water and you will be fine. Come back tomorrow night for a checkup,” the nurse called after me.
“How do you like being here?” the lieutenant asked.
I looked at him with disgust and spat on the ground. He shrugged. Just another sissy city soldier, I thought as I walked back to the hall. When I got there, two boys were playing table tennis on the verandah. Everyone seemed to be interested in what was happening. It had been more than a month and some of us had almost gone through the withdrawal stage, even though there were still instances of vomiting and collapsing at unexpected moments. These outbreaks ended, for most of us, at the end of the second month. But we were still traumatized, and now that we had time to think, the fastened mantle of our war memories slowly began to open.
Whenever I turned on the tap water, all I could see was blood gushing out. I would stare at it until it looked like water before drinking or taking a shower. Boys sometimes ran out of the hall screaming, “The rebels are coming.” Other times, the younger boys sat by rocks weeping and telling us that the rocks were their dead families. Then there were those instances when we would ambush the staff members, tie them up, and interrogate them about the whereabouts of their squad, where they got their supplies of arms and ammunition, drugs, and food. It was also during this time that we were given school supplies—books, pens, and pencils—and told that we would have classes from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on weekdays. We made campfires with them, and the next morning another set of supplies was handed to us. We burned them again. The staff members kept resupplying the school materials. This time they didn’t say, “It’s not your fault,” as they usually did after we had done things they considered wrong and not childlike.
One afternoon, after the staff members had set some school supplies on the verandah, Mambu suggested that we sell them. “Who will buy them? Everyone is afraid of us,” some of the boys asked. “We can find a trader who wants to do business,” Mambu assured the boys. We loaded the supplies in plastic bags, and six of us went to the nearest market, where we sold them to a vendor. The man was excited and told us that he would buy from us anytime. “I don’t care whether you stole this; I have the money and you have the goods, we do business,” the man told us as he handed Mambu a wad of cash. Mambu counted the crisp notes with a wide smile on his face. He held the bills to our noses so that we could smell them. “This is good money. I can tell,” he said. We then ran back to the center to make it in time for lunch. Immediately after we were finished eating, Mambu gave each boy his share of the money. The halls became noisy as everybody talked about what they were going to do with their money. This was definitely more exciting than burning the supplies.
While some of the boys bought Coca-Cola, toffee, and other such things with their money, Mambu, Alhaji, and I planned a trip to Freetown. All we knew was that we had to take public transportation to the city center.
That morning we gulped our breakfast and left the dining hall one at a time. I pretended I was going for a checkup at the mini-hospital, Mambu went into the kitchen as if to get more food and climbed out the window, Alhaji walked toward the latrine. We didn’t want the other boys to know, as we were worried that they