Babi Yar Symphony

Chapter 23

104 23 Shechem was still in poor spirits, degenerating physically and worsening emotionally with great speed. The furrows on either side of his dotted nose had cragged and deepened and his hair had sped up its greying and balding. Ordinarily, his mood entered your system quietly but strongly, and made sure you warmed to it; but something inimical had happened to all that. There was no more current left of the kind that sucked you up like a whirlwind. He was now a bland sight. He had difficulty forgetting the way he’d lost his friend to Sanko. Memories of his last days with Levi put sorrow in his chest that grew deeper the more the shooting weighed down on him. The warder could not pretend that he did not know who he was killing. He knew. There were no two persons like Levi in Sanko, no two shapes. You saw him before you saw him, heard him before he spoke; such was the power of his energy. The man could not claim ignorance. Ignorance meant total absence of knowledge…no foresight, no hindsight. This man was dripping with knowledge of Levi. Yes, Levi appeared suddenly in his field of vision that night, and at deer speed, but anyone familiar with the architecture of Sanko - and that warder was certainly one such person for having served the establishment for thirteen years – knew that Sanko was escape-proof and that any escape attempt ended either in one of the many forbidding outer trenches or then in the barbed-wire meshes entangled in surrounding shrubs. And knowing all this, what was the need opening fire on a clearly doomed escapee? Why not just allow him to consume his attempt in one of those impregnable obstacles? What need was there in shooting down a man just inches away from sure surrender? His body shuddered even now, many days after the incident, as he recalled his friend’s bleeding body in his arms. Maybe it was the confusion caused by the sudden turn of things, but he thought he heard slight, very faint, breathing even as he bore the body towards the brick-walled hut. And why had he not drawn the attention of the warder marching him off towards that hut? Why had he not done that? Wouldn’t it have made all the difference if he’d resisted the man’s injunctions and instead insisted on having the bleeding body taken to the prison infirmary for examination? Why had he been so docile, so emptied of fighting spirit? Could it be, just be, that he’d 105 actually carried his wounded friend, not his dead friend, to the brickwalled hut? Something said he should return to Sanko and ask to be taken to the brick-walled hut. He caught himself laughing when this thought entered his mind. What would they see now so many days, weeks even, after Levi was dumped there? And who would even take the pains for such unrewarding business? Certainly not Mbake Javis. Ah! Mbake Javis. Bedridden. Strong, passionate Superintendent. Bedridden. The thing had happened so suddenly, almost without warning. His own marriage too was bedridden; but with warning signs. On returning from detention he’d stood in front of his own house, unable to get in, until his neighbour from across the road, Ngongmun Sabitout’s wife had taken up her head from her weeding and seen him stranded there and come and stood by her own side of the road. “Your woman,” she’d said hesitantly, “don go. Day you commot for prison.” “And my daughter?” “With me. She di sleep. Your woman, she always go like dat.” “Know where she goes?” “Capital sometime, Tabessi sometime too.” “Alone?” The woman had declined an answer; and Shechem too hadn’t pressed the issue. “My daughter, get her up for me.” Kunsona had fled in his direction and jumped to his chest, landing so hard that both of them had tottered to the point of falling. She’d clung fast to his neck and nuzzled her head into his left shoulder. Then she’d climbed down and taken him by the hand behind the house and shown him a hole from which he’d extracted a bunch of keys. “Who put it there?” he’d asked his daughter who’d said her mother, and that she would be gone for quite some time. This was where he was, many days after his return from Sanko. His daughter and...