The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 22
“Shut them up!” he shouted. Disrupted from her prayer, Ma came to get us away from the window; but we all fought to remain, pushed her hand and chest as she attempted to pull us away.
“Shut them up!” the soldier shouted again.
“Children,” Ma said softly first, before her voice escalated in fear. “Shh! Children!” but we pushed and kicked to stay near the window in close sight of Papa.
Our misbehavior in the booth nearly tipped it over and the passing crowd was delayed when they noticed the noise coming from it. Brother James tried to hold us down also, but he was pushed away like Ma and Torma.
After waiting at the opening of the booth for us, and on several occasions grabbing his gun as if he was going to shoot us to sleep, the soldier left the opening of the booth and walked to where Papa stood. He pulled him from the line and asked him more questions. After a couple of minutes he pulled the giant’s arm toward the booth where we wrestled with Ma and Brother James. The soldier pushed Papa’s back and returned to a group of other armed guards. Surprised and trembling, the giant stumbled to the opening of the booth, where we ran to him crying. I wrapped my arm around his leg and squeezed.
“Go, go, go,” he said and we nearly fell over each other’s feet across the line to Junde, all astounded, all grateful, none looking back.
That night as we slept, waiting for the canoe that would carry us along a still river to Lai, I lay against the giant’s chest. Rebels had not seized Junde. It was still one of the dragon’s cities, they had said. In Junde, Papa found a fisherman who agreed to take us to the village in the forest, where we would sail the unstirred waters, where we would walk briefly through the woods until we reached a circle of houses, hidden from the war outside. I unfolded Papa’s hands and pressed mine against his palms in the last house on our journey from Caldwell. There were many families asleep there that night, some hoping to make it all the way to Sierra Leone, some planning to stay in Junde until the fighting in Monrovia stopped. I asked Papa to sing to us, and he did. K and Wi lay near Ma, and Torma lay across from them as she played with the stem of a pink flower that had only one petal left.
NINE
Lai was our hiding place. Mam had told us many stories about her visits there when she was a small girl. The rooster and the sun fought, each morning, over which one would welcome the day. The hum of Lake Piso was a part of every conversation, both during the day and in our dreams. The houses in the village formed a circle around a sandy plot of land, where the villagers frequently met. There were two large orange trees in the corner of the village, close to the lake, Piso, that flowed back to Junde. Behind the houses were woods, full of cotton and kola and ironwood trees, that had to be crossed in order to get to a vast forest, and if you walked that forest for long enough you would reach the Atlantic Ocean, which Vai legend claims was the same beach where old Vai kings did business with German and Portuguese people. When we got to Lai, we saw that Mam’s family from the city was already hiding there. My cousin Cholly was Papa’s roommate. And Ol’ Pa Charles, Mam’s father, a man so tall he made Papa look like his son when he stood beside him, and who always patted my head when he passed me. Torma was home in Lai now, and she joined her family and lived across the village in another house.
On July 29, 1990, a group of boys dressed as Hawa Undu’s soldiers went into St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, where six hundred civilians were hiding. It was two in the morning. When the first shot was fired, those who were hiding quickly arose from the bare floors where they slept and scrambled for an escape from the compound. But as the lanterns were lit in the dark, they found Hawa Undu’s soldiers surrounded them; all the men, women, and children were attacked with guns, grenades, and swinging machetes. On the following day the remains of the six hundred were paraded along the streets and burned. Hawa Undu decided on that day to speak to the BBC.
“I will not step down!” President Doe said. “It was rebels dressed in army uniforms that killed the civilians at the church. Charles Taylor’s men did it. Not army soldiers. Rebels killed them. But no rebel can kill me. Only God can.”
The BBC also said that 375,000 Liberians were now in Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
The voice from the small radio was muffled, but loud enough for the small group of men surrounding it to hear. They set the radio on the window of a tiny wooden chicken coop. One of the men stood near the radio and held the edge of the antenna between two of his fingers, twisting it periodically for improved reception. Papa was with them, sitting on a plastic stool close to the outside walls of the broken-down shack. And he looked like he was trying to make a serious face, the kind of face someone makes to hide something serious. Only a few of the men had spent enough time outside of Lai and bordering towns to know English well. Most only spoke Vai, but they crowded around the radio because every other man in the village was doing so. When the man on the radio paused, one of the villagers repeated what he said in Vai. Papa kept his journal with him, a leather-bound book now worn to shreds. While sitting with these men,