Babi Yar Symphony

Chapter 14

68 14 The following day at supper eight inmates were reported missing. Their absence descended on the meal with more devastating effect than the weevils they had protested against and which the Superintendent had promised to remove from the beans. Everybody played listlessly with their cutlery: some tried to see how many rice grains they could lift, others how successfully they could grain all the prongs of their fork at the same time. The rice was the long-grained Chinese type – good quality, served with meat in cabbage sauce. The weevils were gone but somehow every heart yearned for their return. If this was the price to pay for their exit then the inmates were ready to have them back in any numbers they cared to return in, ready for any bean-weevil ratio that Sanko cared to inflict on them. But for heaven’s sake they needed to know what had become of Nine Lives, Stone Finger, Man Pass Man, Victoria Tiger, Wikum, Mbah Atah, Ntonifor Alemkeng, and the grey-haired Ayuk Eba. They needed to know. If they did not know and did not care then the day they too disappeared into thin air no-one would care. Inmates could not just be vanishing as if removed by magic hands. Sanko was not the edge of a precipice where the least flutter of wind tipped people over and down below for always and their shouting voices receded into the depths of eternity. The prison management maintained sealed lips over the missing inmates. No queries were answered, no explanations were offered. The silence grew more and more afflicting and the mounting sense of insecurity emptied the place of whatever residual pleasure being there had given the inmates. What macabre thing could Mbake Javis have planned and executed in so short a time and to such perfection? The chill was not in the number of inmates that had disappeared. It was in the kinds of detainees that had been targeted and actually taken away. You just didn’t get up one morning and twirled Victoria Tiger or Stone Finger or Nine Lives or for that matter Man Pass Man around your little finger. If ten of you came ten of you were faced and overcome, any time, by any one of them. So what had happened? And who was next on the line? Who stood closest to the edge of the escarpment that Sanko had become? The following day at supper they discovered that their weevils had returned, this time in swarms. There were whole armies of them in the pots and the captive beans jotted their besieged heads only very infrequently. The inmates ate with expectant delight, discovering a 69 new relish in the weevils. Jaws chewed noisily and each inmate reached for more in happy and interested celebration of the return of the weevils. Supper that evening climaxed with a song to weevils, composed instantaneously and taught to the refectory just as instantaneously. The composer and music master was Levi Mu’tum, who was known to be a chorister in the Bethel Baptist Church when he was not out in the field stalking news. Weevils today Weevils tomorrow Weevils forever Weevil is food Bean seasoning Weevils, not beans, feed And fill Starve not where weevils abound Say never no to Weevils! Never never no to weevils! The refectory broke into song, a plea, a supplication. They had eaten the weevils. They had welcomed them back on their plates with joy. And here was a gay song to them in which the inmates expressed their love of weevils. They sang and looked at the door. Maybe the song would bring back their gone inmates; at least loosen the tight lips of the Superintendent and he would come and talk to them and tell them something that would soothe their hearts and put a glimmer in their minds. They sang themselves hoarse, repeated the song over and over, now in high tones, then later like dirges. And then gently they streamed out, each one whispering the tune to himself and in a very special way to Mbake Javis. Shechem’s own whispering was attended by a new awareness of their collective weakness. These unexplained disappearances meant that the claws of evil poked out from the dark and danced over their heads ready to snatch them by the hair in the deep night and carry them to the meeting house where the barons of the night wined on human blood and...