A Gift from Darkness Read online

  At first I felt uneasy about my promise, but then I made peace with it. Didn’t Jesus teach us to forgive? At least Petrus had noticed that he had left the right path, and regretted his deeds. That distinguished him from many other men. I preferred not to judge him.

  We became confidants, I would almost say accomplices. Of course, we were always on guard to ensure that the others didn’t notice. It was a great help to us that we had a secret language in common. Whenever we had the chance we exchanged thoughts in Fulani. It did me an enormous amount of good to have a friend here.

  One morning I was out gathering grass and leaves to lay on our sleeping place, when I met Petrus. He was sitting a little way from the other fighters, fiddling with his gun. I noticed that he was only pretending to concentrate, because he was making the same movement over and over again: putting the magazine in and then taking it out again. In fact he seemed to be thinking about something completely different.

  I walked shyly over to him and asked what was wrong. He flinched involuntarily as if I had caught him doing something forbidden.

  “You see this magazine?” he asked despondently.

  I nodded. “What about it?”

  “It’s almost empty, they’re not giving me any more ammunition.”

  I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, so I said nothing and waited to hear if he wanted to go on.

  “It’s my turn tonight,” Petrus told me at last. “They are going to kill me today.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked him, startled.

  “They decided yesterday, I heard them talking about it.” He was quite sure of it, because he had listened in on a conversation between some other fighters and the commander. “He clearly said my name.”

  I was deeply shaken. The idea of losing Petrus suddenly seemed unbearable. Apart from Jara, and formerly Hannah, he was the only person in the camp who treated me like a human being. I struggled to think how I could avert this tragedy. But, of course, I couldn’t come up with a solution: in the end Petrus was just as much a prisoner as the rest of us. He had to obey the orders of his superiors. We were all trapped.

  In the afternoon water supplies ran low in the camp. A group of women were supposed to fill them up again; Petrus was given the job of going with them. He waved to me frantically to come along too. I was busy sweeping the yard. But when I saw him waving at me so urgently I dropped everything and joined his troop.

  There were eight young women, and Jara came with us as well. We wandered with our buckets toward the stream, a journey of about two miles. We trudged through the bush and the muddy fields. On the way I didn’t exchange a word with Petrus. I just looked at him from the corner of my eye and noticed that he was extremely nervous. He kept pulling at his beard, and his eyes darted in all directions. I wasn’t surprised, in his place I would have been nervous as well. Perhaps this was the last walk he would ever go on.

  When we got to the stream, he told us to fill our buckets with water. He thoughtfully studied the course of the water. When our buckets were full we lifted them onto our heads, thinking that he would take us back to the camp, where people were bound to be waiting for us.

  But Petrus told us to go to the other side of the stream, away from the camp. My pulse quickened when I guessed what his plan was. Had the other girls guessed as well? No one asked any questions. From the corners of my eyes I tried to read their expressions. But they just stared at the path straight ahead, apparently concentrating solely on balancing the water on their heads without stumbling. We stuck rigidly to the path that Petrus had signaled to us. We were completely silent; only the chirping of the crickets sounded impossibly loud while we marched on as if possessed.

  We were heading south. Eventually we left the path and continued along a slightly better paved road. A sign told us that it was about six miles to Pulka, the little town at the foot of the Mandara mountain range, which we had passed shortly after we were kidnapped. My heart leapt with joy. That meant we were heading home. By now dusk was falling.

  We walked steadily onward. Suddenly, in the twilight on the road in front of us I made out three shadowy figures. They had guns over their shoulders. They were Boko Haram fighters, this was one of their checkpoints. And we were walking straight toward them. Did Petrus not have eyes in his head? If they recognized who he was and saw what he was about to do, they would make mincemeat out of him.

  “Petrus,” I whispered and tried to tug on his sleeve.

  “Stop that!” he hissed.

  We were already so close to the men that they could presumably hear us. So I didn’t dare say any more. Petrus greeted them. “Salaam aleikum, brothers,” I heard him say. The other girls and I stared at the ground and said nothing. Some of them pulled their headscarves tighter. Nothing else was expected of us.

  “Salaam aleikum. Where are you going?” replied their spokesman, a man with a ragged beard and unwashed clothes.

  “Our brothers in Pulka are thirsty,” Petrus said as if butter wouldn’t melt. “We have been told to bring them water.”

  The fighters looked him and us up and down. But they couldn’t see anything unusual about us: to them, one of their men accompanying a group of female slaves was the most natural thing in the world. And the news that we were missing from the Kauri camp clearly hadn’t reached them yet. There was also the fact that they were probably all scared to death of making some kind of mistake. Because inadvertently crossing one of their superiors and refusing to obey an order could get them into terrible trouble. In the worst case, it could be fatal.

  “Then may Allah go with you,” they said politely.

  “Thank you, brothers,” Petrus replied in a similar tone.

  They raised their guns in greeting. Then Petrus ordered us to go on walking. “Come on, you lazy sluts!” he roared. “We want to get there today!”

  He didn’t need to say it twice: we stumbled hastily on. I prayed to heaven when the men were out of sight.

  We walked and walked—but not to Pulka.

  Short-lived happiness

  Petrus led us further and further away from the camp. We had now left the paved road. When night fell he told us we could throw our buckets away. “They’ll just make it harder for you to walk.” We enthusiastically got rid of the vessels. Now the other girls realized that Petrus was serious, and actually wanted to escape with us. We were all delighted. Without our buckets, and with the prospect of freedom, we advanced twice as quickly as before.

  We walked all night without a break. I didn’t feel tired in the slightest. Of course we gave the town of Pulka, occupied by Boko Haram, a wide berth.

  The next morning we reached the long Mandara mountain range, where our home villages were. “You are free now,” Petrus told us. “You can go wherever you like.”

  We could hardly believe our luck. None of us had expected that the nightmare would end so suddenly and so unexpectedly. Weeping, we hugged each other. And everyone hugged Petrus too.

  Jara held him tightly. “I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life,” she said.

  “Me too!” I added.

  “I owe you my life. I will always be in your debt,” said another girl.

  Our savior was visibly overwhelmed. I don’t think he knew how to cope with so many declarations of sympathy and gratitude all at once. “You’re a good person,” I told him.

  “Do you really mean that?” He looked at me doubtfully. “What I have done for you can’t nearly make up for what we have done to you.”

  “If you save one human life, you have saved humanity,” I replied. It was a Muslim saying. I knew that because our Muslim neighbor in Damaturu had said it occasionally. But I didn’t care: the fact that these monsters called themselves Muslims didn’t mean that the whole religion was wrong.

  “Maybe,” Petrus said thoughtfully. “But you’ll still have to pray a lot so that God forgives me.”

  Some of the girls headed off toward their villages. Jara, Petrus and I walked on toward Gwoza. W
e were already looking forward to being reunited with our families. But we were also a little apprehensive. What had happened at home in our absence? Were all our loved ones well?

  As we didn’t know exactly what might have happened in the meantime we didn’t take the main road to Gwoza but the path over the mountains. It was a very warm, pleasant day. The rain had stopped, at least for now. It was the first time since I was taken prisoner that I had eyes for the beauty of my surroundings. Brightly colored lizards sat on the rocks, darting into their hiding places as soon as we passed. Once we even saw a rock hyrax. And of course baboons and other monkeys patrolling their territory.

  We took a rest at a viewpoint high up in the mountain. There was a great view of Gwoza from here, and soon we would be climbing down to the village. I looked into the valley and tried to recognize our compound.

  But then I suddenly saw something that didn’t fit with the picture I expected. I narrowed my eyes to see more clearly. Was it possible? Smoke was rising from several of the houses. “Do you see that?” I asked my companions.

  “Yes, it’s smoke,” Jara said flatly. “The houses in Gwoza are burning.”

  We all stared at the clouds of smoke. No one said a word. Instead of the joy I had felt a moment before, the hard fist of fear clenched in my stomach: our escape had brought us straight into Boko Haram’s next assault!

  Going down into the valley was out of the question now. We stood there mute, looking at the misery being played out at our feet. Luckily we were too high up to make out the details. But having been through such an attack myself, I could imagine the screams of the people being slaughtered or abducted down there only too well. At that moment I hoped only one thing: that my family would not be harmed, particularly my husband.

  Meanwhile more and more refugees from the town were streaming up toward us. The whole mountain was slowly filling with them. Perhaps Ishaku was among them. I decided to look for him.

  Since I assumed that he would come to our millet field sooner or later, that was the first place I wanted to check. I said goodbye to Jara, who wanted to go to her own family’s field. But Petrus, who was from a little village beyond Gwoza, came with me a little way. I honestly had the feeling that he wasn’t in a hurry to get home. After everything that had happened he probably wasn’t sure whether there was any going back. “I’ll go as soon as I know you are safe,” he said to me.

  I agreed. Together we walked through the mountains toward the field, which was some way below our earlier vantage point. On the way down we met some people from Gwoza. They urgently warned us not to go down into the town. “Boko Haram are setting everything on fire,” they told us. “They have come with hundreds of fighters.”

  I was scared that the people would recognize Petrus as one of them. He was still wearing his gun around his neck. What would people think if they saw us together? And Ishaku? Perhaps it hadn’t been such a great idea to let Petrus come with me.

  By now we were near the field. I could see the stalks of millet through the bushes. Ishaku would have been working here only a little while ago, and was probably still somewhere nearby. “This is my husband’s field,” I said to Petrus.

  “Then I’d better leave you alone.”

  I nodded hastily.

  “You have been a great help to me, Patience,” he said. “I wouldn’t have found the strength without you.” He took my hand, and I nervously pulled it away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  The man who had saved my life turned round and disappeared.

  “Patience!” I heard a man’s voice calling across the field a moment later. Ishaku’s head appeared among the stalks of millet. “Patience, is that you? Where have you come from?”

  I was incredibly relieved to see him, and ran toward him.

  “My God, how thin you are! Where were you?”

  “I was in…in one of those horrible camps,” I stammered.

  But Ishaku wasn’t listening. “Was that a man with you?”

  “Yes, he brought me here,” I answered truthfully.

  “Who was it?”

  “He was one of them, but he regrets it now. He helped me to escape.”

  Ishaku muttered something. By now the rest of the family had appeared. The children gathered round me and asked me where I had been for so long. For now I held them tightly in my arms and plunged my nose deep into their wonderful hair. Lara’s apparently indifferent expression was like the face she had greeted me with on the first day after I had married her husband. She would clearly have been able to live with it if I hadn’t come back. But she welcomed me politely too.

  “You must have been through a lot,” she said, and gave our husband a meaningful look. “You know what happens in those camps…”

  Ishaku absorbed the words with a frown. He gave me a penetrating look. “And that man? Why did he help you?” he asked again.

  “He just did. Because he wanted to escape as well. He rescued eight women.”

  “Hm, quite the hero, isn’t he?”

  “Leave her alone for now,” Lara said, interrupting his severe interrogation. “You can see that she’s exhausted. Are you hungry?”

  I nodded. She gave me water and some of the cold millet broth and the potatoes she had taken with her when they fled. I gulped it all greedily down, and felt as if I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life. Even if their faces were suspicious, I was very glad to be back with them.

  We stayed on the mountain that night. It was too dangerous to go back to Gwoza. We spent the night in the cave where the spring bubbled, and where we girls had once fetched water.

  The cave was surrounded by undergrowth on all sides. But everyone knew it. So we weren’t the only ones who chose it as our quarters for the night. Other Christian families were already camping here. The children thought it was exciting, because there were lots of other children also seeking refuge there. The trip into the mountains was a big adventure as far as they were concerned.

  But the adults were very anxious. For fear of being discovered we didn’t even dare to light a fire. So there were only a few peanuts for dinner. Admittedly the Boko Haram people hadn’t yet appeared on the mountain. But we were sure that that was what they planned. We knew what their bloodlust made them capable of.

  “We can’t stay here,” an elderly man said as we sat together in the evening. “They want to encircle us on all sides, and smoke us out in the end.”

  Many of the people sitting around nodded.

  “They’ve already occupied Pulka, Ngoshe and Gavva. Now they’re trying to do the same in Gwoza,” said another man, probably his son. “By the time I left the town this morning they’d already commandeered all the important buildings.”

  “The villages on the other side of the mountains are to be converted into camps,” Ishaku said.

  I immediately thought of my family when I heard that. I quietly asked him if he had been in touch with my father or my uncle, and whether he knew anything about them.

  “Your father? No,” he said evasively.

  “Which family is that?” a woman asked.

  I told her the name of our clan. Her face told me that she didn’t have good news for me. “There have been some deaths,” she said.

  “Do you know anything about my father, Haruna Aiga?”

  She lowered her eyes. “No, nothing precise.”

  I didn’t have the feeling that I could believe her. Or Ishaku either. Both seemed to know more than they were telling me. But I wasn’t sure if I could deal with the truth in my present state, so I didn’t probe any further.

  Then the men spoke again. “There is only one possibility,” said the older man who had been the first to speak. “We need to carry on along the valley to the border.” He meant the border with Cameroon, which was about six miles east of the mountain range.

  “That’s a good idea,” his son agreed. “We’ll be safe there, and able to wait until the government soldiers have dealt with them. We should set off for Ashi
gashiya early tomorrow morning.”

  “But Ashigashiya is occupied too,” I cut in. The border town was the first place where I had been held prisoner. The men looked at me in astonishment: a woman speaking out of turn was more or less unheard of.

  “How do you know that?” Ishaku asked me.

  “Because they took me there.”

  He didn’t ask any further questions. I had a feeling it was embarrassing to him that everyone here knew about my abduction. “Whatever,” he said. “Then we’ll cross the border somewhere else.”

  The others agreed, and the matter was decided. We would set off at the crack of dawn tomorrow and try to escape over the eastern side of the mountain.

  I spent the night on the bare cave floor beside Ishaku. He had put his arm around me. It felt like a great gift to have him by my side again. As soon as I felt the warmth of his body and heard his even breaths, I felt calm and protected—even though our situation was anything but safe. But right now I could forget all that. For a few hours all that existed was him and me and the little creature that had sprung from our union and now lived in my body.

  “I have protected it well,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Our child.”

  Ishaku didn’t reply. Perhaps he was just too tired.

  The next day we were all up bright and early. Some women, including Lara, had made kunnu before sunrise. Even if the smoke was risky, they felt that their husbands and children should be given something to eat before their flight. And I tucked in as well, since the opportunity was there.

  Then we set off. We fought our way through the undergrowth toward the valley. Ishaku walked a long way ahead of me with the other men. The broken branches cracked when we stood on them, and the moss that grew among the rocks was springy under our feet. I was very cautious: after all I had been through, this last stage of my flight—because that was how I saw it—was nothing. What could happen to me now that God had freed me from hell? At least I wasn’t alone anymore, I was with the people I belonged to.