Babi Yar Symphony

Chapter 5

10 5 Levi was trailing his right leg to and fro on the ground and causing a light blanket of dust - mud baked by the sun and beaten into flower under the bare feet of prisoners and the thick-soled boots of warders – to rise to ankle level. They sat on a little stone hedge, the remaining part of a high wall that, until two years ago, had segregated the women’s quarters from the men’s when Sanko was a mixed establishment. To say the place was segregated was really stating it awkwardly, when one looked at the prevailing conditions closely and saw the kinds of things that happened there: pregnancies, births, abortions, many, many abortions, suicide by overdose, suicide by opening of the vein, marriages…one man one wife, one man two wives; even this case of one detainee pushing the number to four. Prisoners fell in love with the kind of passion that only risk exudes. First the Administration cried enough is enough! hoping by this cry to exorcise the invisible worm. But no. The worm burrowed deeper. The love fiesta grew by leaps and bounds. Detainees sought ways of prolonging their term; like this one who punched a row of teeth off the mouth of an unsuspecting warder and earned himself a seven-month extension; or this other one who clinched his four-month extra time by breaking into the Superintendent’s office just for the fun of it and with all the precautions taken to ensure that he was caught in the act. The inmates had located the heart of happiness; discovered that where it was lodged had nothing to do with human judgment but with divine endowment. They had come to the knowledge that God gave happiness a heart the day he created woman, knowledge towards which the builders of Sanko had acted with sorry blindness and had erected a paradise in the place of a prison. Inmates had refused to leave Sanko at the end of their term. Even those who had not succeeded to contrive an extension had landed themselves in immediate return from the emptiness of the outside. And the abortion rates had grown in number and crudeness; and the rivalries had intensified, leading many a time to killings done in the cold anger of jealousy. Happiness and paradise, lust and blood. Enough not having proven enough, the radical decision had been taken by the Sanko administration to bundle out the female population, source of all the troubles in the prison. They were sent first 11 to temporary quarters in a rundown primary school become prison, then to a permanent site at a forbidding distance away from human habitation, a sight tough like Montségur of the Languedoc Templars. Only then had the prison administration discovered the key to all the mayhem: a huge hole dug in one of the walls separating the cells on either side of the sex divide: The orifice had been neatly dissimulated with smuggled cardboard painted in the colours of the walls. You needed to be a specialist in the art of transformation to detect the job. From where they sat they could see the other inmates occupied with the same struggle to rebuild shattered lives. “They picked you up just like Munira,” Levi said. “Just like Munira, yes. It’s strange how the colonial ordeal sits unbroken on our continent.” “Our continent,” Levi repeated, with a strong pensive edge to the adjective, then looked away sombrely. “Has the place ever been ours? How much? How much of it can we say belongs to us the way a thing belongs to its owner? The Darfur, Yupogon, Rwanda: that’s our Africa. In those parts we engrave our ownership in blood.” He stopped for a while, then said again: “You cannot own in bondage. We’ve never been free, unless in your infinite generosity you want me to believe otherwise.” “That’s matter for debate,” Shechem answered. “Freedom is a way of feeling. You see that man called Mandela? He was never quite as free as in his twenty-seven years of imprisonment.” “But that place is a stinking prison!” Levi cried in a mixture of affront and protest. “Only Mandela’s flesh entered it. His mind and will, hopes, all his strength remained with his people in the townships and docks, in the mines and in the plantations of the white people. If we ever come out of this place alive, remind me for the Anatomy...