The Great Agony & Pure Laughter of the Gods by Jamala Safari Read Free Book Online Page A

questioned the destination; everyone followed the same path, each person filling the footprint of their predecessor. The guns were heavier and sang rhythmically in the air. Their echoes came from different directions.
    They walked past dead bodies, burning houses, wounded soldiers, wounded civilians. Risto thought about his late friends Ombeni and Frank, then was distracted by the cries of a lost child. He shivered. The crowd was as large as that at a soccer tournament. To keep count of their children, mothers would shout the name of each child, from the firstborn to the youngest, and every one would answer loudly. The noise of guns combined with the cries of children was deafening. Bullets whispered a quiet but violent song that people often only grasped after fatal words pierced innocent bodies. The song of the bullets came in a wind that carried many voices, those of the dead, the dying, those fighting death and those escaping death, and when it became very loud, people fell down on their stomachs with no wish to open their eyes again. Then the bullets would fall, not very far from where they were lying. For some, it would then be time to bury their loved ones, for others, a time to build crutches for their own bodies, but the journey carried on and on to the unknown destination.
    On the third day of the journey, the songs of the guns could no longer be heard. Risto, his mother and his two sisters were alive and very far from Bukavu town; they were in the Luhoko village in the heart of Walungu territory. The woman they had followed, the friend of their mother, had been heavily pregnant when they first set out. On the journey, she had given birth to twin children. There was no clinic to go to. Everything – the labour and the birth – happened along the way. Generous villagers had given them food and a lot of fruit without questioning. It was the spirit of the people of the village to help.
    The news had come that the pregnant woman needed to rest. The entire group stopped. The pregnant woman was taken in by the villagers and offered a small straw hut. Then everything turned into a grownup women business. From where the curious children watched, a frenzy of activity could be seen at the hut. Two women, with plastic basins in their hands, ran to the pregnant woman’s hut. It didn’t take long before some shouting could be heard. Apparently there was not enough paraffin in the lamp they were using. An old woman emerged from the hut and ran like a buck. One of her loincloths fell off unnoticed. She went straight to another hut a few metres away and came back with a working lamp.
    Later that afternoon, the news came that the journey couldn’t go on; the pregnant woman had given birth to twins. Songs burst into the air. The villagers gave the new mother the small hut where she had given birth, and offered other huts to Risto’s family. Many other families were hosted by volunteers from the village. Some who had family members in nearby villages decided to carry on.
    Eventually, reports came that war had ended and peace had returned to Bukavu. Displaced people started returning home. Risto’s family and the entire group that had found refuge in Luhoko village decided to go back home too. The twins were two months old when the party set out on the journey. The refugees thanked the villagers for their generosity and warmth, and promised to stay in contact.
    Bukavu had changed. Was it wearing a mask, or did it have another spirit in its body? The people said it was a new country, and indeed it was. It had new people with new tongues, new ideologies, many new things indeed. These new things had captured the attention of the media. The country was in the headlines across the globe.
    Something else surprising had happened. Teenagers were now more rare than gold. And those who were visible had deer eyes on their backs, ready to run whenever suspicious or sinister stories emerged of the kidnapping or militarisation of children.