A Gift from Darkness Read online

  We came to terms with each other. I tried to work my way into the everyday life of the family. I knew its rhythms, as they were the same as those in my own family. Like my father and my uncle, Ishaku farmed a millet field in the mountains, which was the source of the family’s livelihood. He also owned a few animals: chickens, goats and three cows. His claim to be a cattle-breeder had been a wild overstatement. His wife looked after a garden and a small field of peanuts behind our kral.

  What I had to offer was my labor. Lara assigned me household tasks. As she was older than me, that was her right, and I had to comply. So I soon found myself performing the same duties as I had at my uncle’s house: fetching water in the morning, cleaning the huts and the yard and preparing meals. That took a lot of stress off Lara, and perhaps it was a small compensation for my having landed in the middle of her family. At least that was what I tried to persuade myself.

  We didn’t talk to each other very much, and if we did it was only ever about practical matters. Did we have enough firewood? Were the animals being fed? Did one of the roofs need to be repaired before the beginning of the rainy season? How many meals would we be able to make with our millet supplies? Did we need extra food from the market?

  Lara was neither friendly nor unfriendly to me. She accepted me as a tedious but inevitable evil. Like a relative that you can’t choose. And to some extent that was the case. But I knew it wasn’t so easy for her to cope with the new situation. Where our intimate life was concerned, Ishaku clearly preferred me, his new, younger wife. At first he visited me almost every night, while Lara lay alone in her hut. He was crazy about me. Of course I liked that.

  Sometimes I wondered whether he hadn’t even been telling the truth when he described Lara as his “ex-wife”: the two of them were an economic unit, but they clearly weren’t a loving couple anymore. They were united by the farm, their children and everyday tasks. As his first wife Lara had something like a pension arrangement with my husband.

  But the loving couple were Ishaku and me. Even though he often seemed sulky or preoccupied by day, at night he was transformed, he was the lover once more. And I very much enjoyed being the focus of his attention. His nighttime caresses made up for a lot of the things I had to cope with during the day.

  His children were a positive surprise to me as well. They were open and unselfconscious with me. They thought my presence in the household as an “aunt” was the most natural thing in the world. The fact that I liked to stir some sugar into our morning kunnu also gained me brownie points.

  The two boys, Yousufu and Yoshua, were five and seven years old and real rascals: they had so much nonsense in their heads that you could hardly take your eyes off them for a minute. Their little sister Tabita had a calmer temperament, and was much more even-tempered. But she often had to be protected from the attacks of her older brothers. So it was the three-year-old girl that I immediately chose as my favorite among the three. If I had nothing else to do I put her in my lap and just held her there so that she could look at the world around her. She loved that secure spot. And I loved feeling the warmth of that innocent little creature.

  But I also had to be careful not to provoke the jealousy of her mother in that respect. Because whenever Lara had a sense that the bond between us was getting too close, she took the little one away from me for the flimsiest of reasons. That hurt me very much. Oh, I thought wearily, how lovely it would be to have a little girl of my own like that. In church on Sunday I prayed to God to grant me fertility.

  About church: as a polygamous family we all went there together on Sunday. The first time I was ashamed to appear there as a second wife, since Ishaku and I had not had a Christian wedding. But then I established that there were other families like ours. Even if a man came with two or more wives, he wasn’t turned away. No vicar would have dared to refuse a believer the Sunday sermon, and in this way put their soul at stake. But I was refused admission to the choir and the women’s association: membership was permitted only to the first wives.

  My prayers were heard, and much faster than I had expected. Only a few weeks after my wedding I noticed some physical changes, but thought no further about it.

  By now it was May, and we expected the first rain every day; normally it comes in June. But even before that we had our hands full. First we had to dig the fields and loosen the earth. Only then could the soil accept the seed. After the first rainfall it was hardly two days before the seeds began to germinate. From then on we spent every day in the field. The children came with us and helped to defend the precious little plants against the dangerous wild ones.

  Weeding was heavy physical work for all of us. Normally I had no problem standing bent over for hours. After all, I had been working in the fields since I was a child. So I was surprised when I suddenly felt ill in the field one morning. I stepped to one side and crouched on the ground to keep from falling over. Then I had to throw up.

  Ishaku, who was working not far away, came rushing over. “What is it, Patience?” he asked me. “Are you not feeling well?”

  “No,” I said weakly.

  He held his hand to my forehead. “Do you think you might be ill?”

  I listened to my inner voice. “No, I really don’t think so.”

  “You have a rest. Would you like some water?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine now,” I told him.

  I was touched that my husband was so keen to look after me. I sat in the shade of a big tree on the edge of the field for a while and watched the birds in the branches. Then it passed. I went back to the field and started work again. I worked unstintingly until the evening. What had been wrong with me? I wondered—and had no answer.

  The next morning we set off at dawn again. It was still quite dark and relatively cool when we took the steep path into the mountains. But soon strangely shaped rocks appeared in the early sunlight. They looked magical. We climbed through them along narrow paths overgrown with thin trees and bushes, to reach our field before the sun was too strong. Ishaku ran ahead as always. Lara and I followed him, as fast as we could with the three children in tow.

  I looked into the valley, now lit by the morning sun. Below us lay the town of Gwoza, where I now lived, and from which the whole administrative area took its name. My home village of Ngoshe belonged to the Gwoza district. Soon, when we had reached the highest point, it would be visible on the other side of the mountain range, and I could wave to my mother from the top.

  Again I felt nausea welling up in me, but I ignored the feeling, or tried to. Instead I struggled to catch up with Ishaku, who was by now quite far ahead. Then the uneasy feeling in my stomach became so strong that I stopped in the middle of the path. I couldn’t walk another step.

  “What’s up?” I heard Lara saying behind me.

  “Nothing. No idea, I just don’t feel well.”

  “Is it what I think it is?”

  I looked at her blankly. “What do you think?”

  “Well, that you’re pregnant?”

  The word shot through me like a lightning flash. I felt myself breaking out in a sweat. A moment later I had to throw up again. Lara looked on indifferently.

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked little Yoshua.

  “Nothing serious,” his mother reassured him. “She’s just a bit weak on her legs.”

  “What’s going on? Are you coming?” Ishaku, who was unaware of all this, called from above.

  “Straightaway. We’re nearly there,” I replied and tried to pull myself together. Even if the suspicion turned out to be true, a pregnancy wasn’t a reason for special treatment.

  All day in the field I brooded on what Lara had said. She certainly knew more about such things than I did. After all, she had given birth three times. Had she been telling the truth? Or was she making fun of me? She must have known that I was desperately waiting for a child. I prayed to God that she wasn’t playing with my emotions.

  I secretly felt my belly to check whether she might be right or not.
But it was flat as a board. Only my breasts struck me as larger, and they hurt. Did that mean anything? I didn’t know. I barely dared to hope that it actually might be so. Unfortunately I didn’t have a female confidante in Gwoza who I could have asked. And though my mother lived only a couple of miles away, it was still too far to ask for advice.

  My husband was the only one I felt close to in my immediate surroundings. When he visited me in my hut in the evening I could no longer hold back and told him about Lara’s suspicions. He wasn’t very surprised.

  “Do you think she might be right?” I asked.

  “Why not? I’m very fertile,” Ishaku boasted. He put his ear to my belly and pretended to listen. “Hello!” he called. “Anyone in there?” He laughed. I laughed too. But in fact it was quite a serious matter for me, and I needed certainty about it.

  “Should we send for Saratu?” I suggested. She was an elderly woman who knew about herbs. She was also brought in to deal with childbirth.

  “Not at all,” he said. “She always wants money.”

  I pulled a disappointed face. I was already annoyed with myself for even confiding in him.

  “At least you’re not ill,” he carried on. “And if there is a child growing in your belly we’ll get to see it soon enough.”

  The morning sickness came and went. Most days I was fine. Then others would come when I was very ill. Lara looked at me knowingly when the attacks came. There were lots of things I would have liked to ask her, but I held back. We weren’t all that close, after all. Instead I decided to talk to my mother about it as soon as possible.

  I could hardly wait. It would be wonderful to know that a son or daughter was on the way, a child that would give my own existence a new meaning.

  But first I had to be patient. Because at the moment we had so much work that there was no time for family visits. We exhausted ourselves in the fields from dawn till dusk.

  I was very glad that at least there was no need to fetch water every morning during the rainy season. We caught the water from the roofs of the huts in big plastic sheets and filled whole canisters with it. But I still had to make breakfast for everyone. And the evening meal was my responsibility as well. So in the afternoon I always came back a little earlier than the others, because after the work in the fields everyone was starving. The children complained if there wasn’t something hot to eat as soon as they got home, so I always tried to make sure the food was ready on time.

  One evening I heard my family coming back to the compound with the neighbors. But even before I saw them I was aware that the mood had changed. The usual hubbub of voices and laughter was missing. Even the children weren’t making the racket that they normally did when they got back. Instead of staying to chat, the people said goodbye and hurried to their respective compounds.

  I opened the gate for the homecomers. The children were the first to slip inside. Then came Lara, and Ishaku last of all. “What’s up?” I asked when he stepped into the yard. “Has something happened?”

  He seemed relieved to see me. “I’m glad you’re home,” he said, and hugged me. He usually never did that in front of the others.

  “Yes, of course.” Where else would I have been?

  “Did you have any problems on the way home?”

  “No.” I walked along that path every day.

  “Did you meet anyone?”

  I shook my head.

  “Boko Haram are supposed to be in the area…”

  “Here, in Gwoza?”

  I looked at Ishaku in horror. And as if by some kind of trick I suddenly saw not him, but my first husband, lying stiff and lifeless in a pool of blood on the floor. The past that I had wanted to forget had forced its way violently back into the present, and I immediately felt an urge to run away. I knew these murderers. I started to shiver. “Where are they?” I asked in alarm. “Are they somewhere around here?”

  “We came across some people in Ngoshe who had run away from them.”

  From Ngoshe—my home village. “For heaven’s sake!” I said. “What’s happened there?”

  “Boko Haram raided the village. That’s what people are saying.”

  What about my family? Were they safe? “Did you ask them after my parents?”

  “Yes, of course. But they didn’t know anything about them. Some of the villagers were working in the fields when they came. The rest hid or ran away or…“

  Yes, I thought, but my mother, who usually stayed at home because she was blind, couldn’t run away if there was no one there to take her by the hand. That would have been my task. I felt very guilty for not having been there for her.

  “We need to go and check on them!”

  “Are you crazy? Now that it’s getting dark it would be far too dangerous to set off on the road.”

  Ishaku was right. After all, no one knew where the Boko Haram fighters would be after their raid. But they were probably still somewhere nearby. So it was quite possible that we would run right into their arms. I didn’t want to risk that. “Then at least try to contact my uncle.”

  Ishaku took out his phone and dialed the number, but the line was dead. “They’ve probably blown up the towers so that we can’t contact each other,” he guessed, and tried to call his sister who lived in another village, but he couldn’t get through to her either. “It seems to affect the whole Gwoza district,” he said, and thoughtfully scratched his head. “I’d like to know what plans they have for this area.”

  Now I started to become really frightened. What did Ishaku mean by that? His remark shook the image of Boko Haram that I’d previously had in my mind.

  Until now I had seen my husband’s murderers as an Islamist gang that hunted down Christians or Christian institutions. Relatively often you heard of them killing Christians in the immediate surroundings or further away, setting a church on fire or attacking a school. The abduction of over two hundred schoolgirls from Chibok, a village the size of Ngoshe, had attracted a lot of attention in the spring. Everyone suspected that the girls were being held in the nearby Sambisa Forest, to which the group often withdrew.

  But in most cases it was influential individuals that were attacked by Muslim radicals. People Boko Haram thought disadvantaged the Muslim population. The Yousefs, my first husband’s family, were typical in that respect. Such punishment actions were designed to intimidate other Christians and drive them out of the region. But Muslims who didn’t agree with their warped worldview were shot down as well: only recently we had buried the emir of Gwoza, Alhaji Idrissa Timta.

  But I had never heard of the sect trying to conquer a whole territory for itself. That was why I was unsettled by Ishaku’s turn of phrase. Had he told me everything he knew? “What else did the people from Ngoshe tell you?” I asked him nervously.

  He looked at the ground. “It was a very big and well-planned attack,” he said. “The Boko Haram people came on motorbikes. They are supposed to have fallen on the village like an army.”

  I felt very miserable. “Were many people killed?” I whispered.

  “Probably. No one knows exactly.”

  That evening I couldn’t face eating or doing anything else sensible. I was constantly thinking about my family. I sat dully in front of my hut staring into the middle distance, until eventually Ishaku told me to join him in bed and sleep a little. But I couldn’t sleep a wink. Not before I had some idea of what had happened to my parents and my brothers and sisters.

  “They probably ran up to their field like all the other villagers and we’ll find them there tomorrow morning,” he said, trying to reassure me.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I hope so.” But I was still uneasy. I guessed that something terrible had happened.

  I spent all that night in Ishaku’s arms, listening to his heartbeat and breathing in the smell of his body. He was strong, and would protect me if necessary. I loved that man. And I needed him, and so did the baby growing in my body. Ishaku wouldn’t abandon me as my first husband had done. He would stay with us a
nd look after us.

  The next morning I got dressed, hastily made breakfast and couldn’t wait to get going. First of all, as usual, we set off along the steep path that led to our field on the mountain. Lara stayed there with the children, weeding as they did every day.

  The other side led down to the valley. That was the most direct and the shortest way to Ngoshe, even if it wasn’t actually a path, more a battle through bushes and rocks. But at that precise moment no one dared to use the actual road. It was simply too dangerous, because no one knew where the Boko Haram people were.

  Among the bushes and the big boulders that lay around everywhere on the slope, we met some people from Ngoshe who had spent the night up here. Their fear was still etched on their faces. Yes, they confirmed, the attackers had come to the village on motorbikes, in large numbers. They had claimed to be a unit of the Nigerian army, and as they were all wearing military uniforms, the villagers believed them. They thought the army wanted to protect the area against Boko Haram, because too many Christians lived there. But then the men went from one farm to another and asked where the Christians lived. Shots were heard, and screams.

  “Then I picked up my two grandchildren and ran as fast as I could,” said an old man with two boys. I knew him very well, as he lived near my parents.

  “Have you seen my father or my uncle?” I asked him.

  “No, my child.” He noticed my anxious face. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Some men who were up here during the night,” someone else said, “went back to the village early this morning.”

  “That’s where we wanted to go too.”

  The old man looked doubtful. “I don’t understand why everyone’s in such a hurry,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who knows if those people are still somewhere nearby…Do what you think is right. But I’m staying here with my grandchildren for the time being. I’m responsible for them.”

  His words made me think. Would Ishaku and I be putting ourselves in danger if we went down to the valley now? At any rate we were taking a risk. It would probably have been more sensible not to go. On the other hand I also felt responsibility toward my family. I was out of my mind with worry about them.