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By Root 309 0

beneath the shrubbery that is just below and around the corner from my view. The women bring wildflowers, herbs, seeds, beads, ears of corn, anything they can claim as their own and that they can spare. They are mostly quiet. Sometimes they sing. It is when they sing that the men attack, even though the only song they all know and can sing together is the national anthem. They hit the women with their fists. They kick them. They swing at them with clubs, bruising the women’s skins and breaking bones. The women do not fight back but scatter like hens; huddling in the doorways of shops up and down the street, until the shopkeepers sweep them back into the street with their brooms.

On the day I was sentenced to death the men did not bother the women, who, according to Olivia, simply sat, spent, hidden as much as they could be, at the base of the dusty shrubbery. They did not talk. They did not eat. They did not sing. I had not realized, before she told me of their dejection, how used I had become to their clamor. Even with my family beside me, cushioning the blow of the death sentence, without the noise of the battle from the street I felt alone.

But then, the next day, the singing began again, low and mournful, and the sound of sticks against flesh.

BENNY

I CAN NOT BELIEVE my mother is going to die—and that dying means I will never see her again. When people die, where do they go? This is the question with which I pester Pierre. He says when people die they go back where they came from. Where is that? I ask him. Nothing, he says. They go back into Nothing. He wrote in huge letters in my notepad: NOTHING = NOT BEING = DEATH. But then he shrugged, that curious movement of his shoulders that caused my mother finally to like him, and wrote: BUT EVERYTHING THAT DIES COMES AROUND AGAIN.

I ask him if this means my mother will come back. He says, Yes, of course. Only not as your mother.

He said, Look at it this way. In the year nine hundred and twelve the people of Olinka had a stupid leader who put people to death by hanging. Now their stupid leader puts them to death by shooting. Now he is driven everywhere in a Mercedes. In nine hundred and twelve he was carried on the shoulders of four strong slaves everywhere he went. You see?

I did not.

ADAM

WHEN SOMEONE INFORMS YOU your wife is to be assassinated publicly, it is a very bitter thing. I am always thinking of it, worrying it like a pip at the tip of my tongue. Olivia tells me not to read the papers, that they are filled with lies. I can not help it. I have become morbidly interested in this country’s problems as they are revealed by inept and corrupt journalists. All the credible journalists have by now been beaten into silence, bought off, murdered, or chased into exile. The ones that are left have but one function: tell the people lies that flatter the president. In every edition of the two remaining papers there is a huge photograph of him: roundfaced, chuckleheaded, beaming like an evil moon. He is president for life, and that is that. The people are reminded over and over of his exploits as a youth against the white colonialists. They are told how, daily, he fights the neo-imperialists, who are still intent on stealing their country from them. They are told how frugally he husbands their dwindling resources and of how, during the latest interminable drought, he permits the lawn of his palace to be watered but once a week. Of course it is practically the only lawn in Olinka—lawns not being an African tradition—but no matter.

He has been rabid in his insistence on the death penalty for Tashi. It is said all of his wives, except for the one from Romania, were circumcised by M’Lissa. The few professional women who sought a meeting with him to beg for Tashi’s life were turned away by his secretary and warned they would lose their jobs if they pressed their interest in the case further. There was a photograph of the women as they were dismissed. They looked ashamed, and their eyes did not meet the camera. One easily imagined their sliding feet.

At night I dream of