by Wagas Elsadig
Translated by Omar Seddig
The nicest way to describe Mu’assa Street, which used to be one of the nicest streets in Khartoum Bahri, is to say it’s a hellish street, a silhouette, or the image of the old street in a broken mirror, or rather, a copy of it from a child’s nightmare. Is there a nicer way to describe it? The street, which witnessed four battles with heavy weaponry, six rounds of air bombing, fifty-seven thieves roaming its stores, sixty-three starving dogs, and one hundred and fifty-seven corpses stacked by twenty men in one place after two hours of exhausting work—this, being the most they could do. When they decided to rest a little, a skirmish erupted along the street between the army and the Rapid Support Forces that led to seven of the twenty men dead, thirteen stores in flames in just around a thirty-meter area, with nothing but the sign left from the famous Abu-Saad store. The Wad-Alzain store had been completely untouched when the owner was able to check it after a two-and-a-half-hour walk. Hopeful and thanking God, he went inside only to find a hole where the air conditioner was, everything stolen, not a single piece of gold left on the shelves, not a spot missed. Not a single earring had slipped the thief’s pocket; he imagined the thief as a calm person to be this good. He imagined him wearing glasses and holding an electric torch in his hand, thieving while listening to serene music. The owner of the Wad-Alzain store fell unconscious. His companions took him to the nearest hospital, or this is what they thought they were doing until they found it had turned into a military garrison. The man died on the road, and two of his companions died three hours later after they crossed Al Halfaia bridge thinking they exited the conflict zone. Still, Mu’assa Street wanted to be described in a nicer way, it was still in disbelief from the quickness of it. One night it was fine. Come sunrise and it was nothing but the remnant of an old road.
Still, five fully-equipped RSF vehicles saw it fit. Fit for what? The Toyota vehicles stopped at the Pepsi crossroad, soldiers dismounted checking the street left and right and lined their cars under the few tall buildings. They roamed here and there, inside nearby buildings, and in some alleyways and came to many conclusions: some stores are still intact so we can use them for food and provisions. There are buildings standing—for us to rest and sleep in—many yards and buildings to hide the cars in, so the military aircraft don’t notice them. They concluded it was the perfect place for a checkpoint.
Fifty meters away the driver of a small Mitsubishi is worried and unsure whether to go forward or stop and turn back. His hands are shaking on the steering wheel while he turns his panicked face to his family members—his little child cries, followed by the older one, his wife’s heart is pounding, unable to cry. Few choices remain, and the oxygen levels tighten in the car. What will happen is when a soldier finds them in this way, he will tell them to go without stopping. Still, they will continue crying for another hundred meters. A Honda approaches the checkpoint, inside it are two people, one of them is contemplating the idea of a checkpoint—it’s where the normalcy of things stops and we have to be someone else, to play a role, to say answers they already know, with authenticity though—as if we truly mean them, and carefully too, so they don’t sense them as cooked answers, and they had to be mindful to not sound smarter than them, like some kind of agreed exchange between the sword and the neck, for the soldier can kill you for an insignificant reason, for the slightest excuse; so you have to take it slow, as if everything is normal, and there is nothing irregular caused by the person in front of you, someone else caused it, always; the checkpoint is the center of our living, what decides our fate. When you make it alive out of a checkpoint, that’s a win, and loads of experience for next time. A lorry carrying three-hundred people approaches the checkpoint, the passengers whispering at the back. One of them is reciting Quran so hastily that he misses whole verses, one is praying and blessing the prophet with a misbaha inside his pocket, one is calling “Sheikh Hassan the buried without a coffin,” another is talking to someone beside him about something neither of them knows anything about. The driver keeps pushing the brakes fifty meters before the checkpoint to stop exactly at the point they tell him to stop at. He reminds the two passengers beside him that his hearing is weak and begs them to repeat what the soldier will say to him, “What’s your name?” they shout it to him. “‘What’s your name?’ he said, ‘What’s your name?’” He says his full name, and then he concentrates his attention on the soldier to the best of his abilities, but to no avail. He hears nothing, and then lends his ears to his neighbors: “Where are you going?” He doesn’t hear it from the second person beside him, so he turns to the third. He says, “Where are you going?” and then catching it like ripe fruit, he says, “I’m going to Atbara.” Then he strains to focus, again, on the soldier mouse asking him for his license. He understands it without aid and then hands it him. He prays for God to save him from the suffering of another question, he prays in his heart a thousand times. The soldier says a long and complicated sentence to him, and hearing nothing, he turns his head to his companions. He sees them saying something he can’t comprehend either. The world is turning in circles inside his heart, he is losing hope: the soldier is going to get upset and ask him to get down from his car. He tries to hear again but sees nothing but moving lips. Has he lost his hearing! A moment later the soldier excuses him. And in disbelief he leaves the checkpoint a new man—while the soldier stops another car.
In a Corolla at the end of the street, a father instructs his family to do exactly what he is doing: “Open your phones, go to the home screen, now delete everything, videos, WhatsApp messages, apps, delete, delete.” In another car, the driver throws his phone out of the window before he arrives at the checkpoint. In another car the father invents a quick plan: the mother should lower the chair and close her eyes and pretend that she is sick, the children should hold her hands and head. “We are on our way to the hospital,” the father says, “Do you understand?” On the bus, the driver asks the passengers to recite from the Quran, “Say, He is Allah, the one.” The soldier asks for their IDs, moving from seat to seat:
Ali Mohammed Mahjoub, university student, travelling to my uncles in Halfa.
Zainab Alsiddeg Widaa, accountant, traveling to Egypt. Abdelkader Ahmad, traveling, don’t know where yet.
Jamal Abd Al Rasoul, No ID, going to Dongola, taken off the bus immediately.
Ali Alsoul, laborer, going to relatives in Meroe.
Abdo Alnema, merchant, they take two phones from him and gener-ously give him his SIM cards.
Abbas Ali, no ID but a birth certificate, not his, he took it from a corpse in the street.
Abdelkader Al-Mubarak, freelancer, going to my friend in Port Sudan, a gun to his head because he took too much time to answer.
Awadia Al’Ajaba, no profession, travelling to Gedaref, the soldier doesn’t take notice that Gedaref is in the opposite direction.
Khair Alseed Ahmad, judge, going to Port Sudan, “What business do you have in Port Sudan?”… “An old friend.”
Suliman Alsafi and his family members, two sons, three daughters, and a wife, our IDs were stolen with the bags before we boarded the bus, when asked about his destination, he says, “Allah’s land is vast.”
Sufian Al Lobi, no ID, is asked out of the bus but takes too long, so the soldier escorts him by the hand, he cries at the door of the bus, some of the passengers beg the soldier to leave him; the soldier doesn’t and the bus moves on without him. He swears by Allah, by Sheikh Dom, by his father and mother that he is not an army soldier, that he never had any ID or any certificate in his life, he only came to Khartoum from Damazine two years ago, and he has nothing but a wheelbarrow in the central market and that he was about to get a small vending table, which is still at the carpenter, Wad-Wida’A’s. and when the war broke out, he was naked in a public bathroom in the central market, and he didn’t get to put on anything but his shirt, imagine a man running out of a public bathroom with nothing but a shirt.
“And then what happened?”
“I was running and looking around, until I saw the store where my wheelbarrow was.”
“You were looking for your wheelbarrow under those conditions?”
“What should I have done sir? One has to be looking for something, and I have nothing in Khartoum but my wheelbarrow.”
“And what about the table at the carpenter’s?”
“Not finished yet, a drawer cupboard not finished yet, the hinges not steady, and the glue and paint, and I only paid the down payment.”
“Did you find your wheelbarrow?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you ask the store owner about it?”
“I did, I mean, I was someone with only a shirt on him, no one would answer someone with only a shirt on.”
“And how did you afford a bus ticket?”
“I didn’t, it was free, the driver found me lying on the station floor for four days, and told me that if I wanted to leave, I should get on the bus, so I did.”
For a moment, the officer feels for him, he thinks of considering his case, but soon his story dissolves into the countless other stories at the checkpoint: there’s the car that refused to stop, so the soldier pointed his heavy machine gun at it, and emptied five rounds into it, which made it roll for six rolls until it hit the building across. Nobody—soldiers or citizens—cared to check it. The checkpoint continued to work as normal, and the officers forgot the stories of the lined-up citizens with their strangeness and sadness, one of them was suffering from some kind of trauma that prevented him from answering the same question, he always answered something completely different, when asked his name, he tells them about something from yesterday, when asked whether he was crazy, he told them his destination. At the same time, he told them about his predicament: he wasn’t able to give answers to the questions he was asked.
One of the soldiers asked the people why they were leaving. He wasn’t concerned about anything else. Some soldiers shouted and some soldiers bullied, some checked IDs and papers, while he were looked at the person and asked: why are you leaving Khartoum?
OMAR MOHAMAD ABU-SHAMA: I never like Khartoum. Boring, ugly city, I don’t know how I stood it for all those years. So, I thought this is the perfect opportunity to leave it. (He never mentions the war.)
SUFYAN BABIKER, engineer: I’m leaving Khartoum because of my mum. She has to get gland surgery, and you know, no functioning hos-pitals in Khartoum. She was supposed to get the surgery at Alsha’Ab hospital. Do you know how many shells have landed on Alsha’Ab hospital?
ABDELKADIR ALAMIN, laborer: I left because of my house. It’s not livable anymore, only one room left standing, and we are three sons and two sisters and mother and father. We cannot live in one room, can we?
BABIKER ABDELKADR: I didn’t want to leave Khartoum, but you know, the complications. “What complications?” Problems, this situa-tion. “What is the situation?” I mean, everything that’s happening, the war.
SAFIA ABDALAZIZ: We are leaving for Umrah, I mean not because of Umrah, but we have an reservation, so might as well go.
SAIF ALDIN BABIKER: I’m leaving Khartoum because I wasn’t able to concentrate from the shelling and pounding, I couldn’t focus on anything. I want to focus, to think about other things, I want to talk about the shelling without being interrupted—you know—by the shelling!
SALMA AHMAD: I don’t want to leave but the family wants to, what could I do.
SULIMAN AHMAD: I think the reason is obvious, you have other questions?
It all goes asunder when a military aircraft approaches, the soldiers run left and right, some take their guns out while others hide it, the pickup trucks get hidden under the trees and walls, one soldier tries to point his anti-aircraft weapon toward the aircraft but to no avail, some cars hurry while others stop at the checkpoint. The moment the plane leaves and its sound fades, the soldier starts to gather himself and look upward. A strange silence overwhelms the checkpoint while it recreates itself, and they start to stop the cars again. Such freezes erase the short-term memory for everything. The soldier asks the same question to the same person again, so he answers it the same way or changes his answer out of shock. With all that, while the days exhaust their possibilities for strangeness, there is always an event that wins the trophy for oddness. In spite of everything that can happen on a normal war day, no one was prepared for what was going to happen between 3 and 3:30 a.m. at the checkpoint.
Everything started with a man sitting on the sixth seat on a public bus. The bus stopped slowly at the checkpoint and the soldier started to check the papers as normal while another soldier checked for the passenger’s IDs, the normal questions with their normal answers, the fear, the worry and the tension. It was at this moment that a sergeant gasped at the sight of the passenger in the sixth row. He took two steps backward with a horrified face, and then ran to the center of the bus. The soldiers took notice and loaded their guns; inside the bus, the sergeant stopped right over the man in the grey shirt and blue pantaloons, a green scarf around his neck.
He shouted at him. “You…it’s you!” He held him from his cheeks and face, shouting. “Weren’t you dead yesterday?”
Indeed, this is the strangest utterance you could hear on a travel bus, or anywhere for that matter. All heads turned to the soldier, looking for confirmation for what they had just heard. So, he said it again.
“You are the man we killed yesterday at Omdurman, aren’t you?”
Everyone was stunned for a moment, even the driver turned off the engine without noticing, turning his head after he had been watching from the mirror. While the man who was the target of the inquiry was looking unfazed at the soldier.
He asked the soldier, “Excuse me, do you mean me?”
The soldier slapped him in the face in front of everyone and said: “Yes, you.”
Whispering grew to talk among the passengers for a moment before another soldier intervened and asked the sergeant: excuse me, comrade, but what do you mean you killed him yesterday?
The sergeant realized the strangeness of his question.
He held him by his shirt collar, saying, “Do you have a twin?”
“No.”
“You live in Shambat, isn’t it so?”
“Yes.”
The sergeant looked to his comrade and said:
“Yes, this is him, we took him from his house in Shambat yesterday, and when we arrived in Omdurman, we got ambushed near Abbassia, I killed him, with a shot between his eyes, I’m sure of it.”
The sergeant looked for the bullet in the man’s face. His face was perfectly clean. Three people laughed in the last row, and two in the second row. The soldier beside the sergeant laughed. Another soldier across the window laughed. The sergeant gave them a stern look. He was about to relieve his anger at the point of his gun had not the soldiers escorted him out of the bus—he and the man. They ordered the bus to leave without him.
The man gave a last sad look as the bus departed. It was a strange nightmare. His body looked frail and cold, unconcerned by the pushing and shouting and the amazement of the soldiers. Until then, he couldn’t understand the sergeant’s talk about him being killed yesterday. An officer observed the quarrel from afar so he called everyone. They came, followed by the laughing of the soldiers eager to understand.
When questioned by the officer, a first sergeant volunteered, explaining, “The sergeant claims he, yesterday, killed this man, with a shot between the eyes. He seems certain.” The soldiers started laughing loudly when the officer commented, “Sergeant Saadoon, are you saying, that this man standing here, flesh and bone, was dead yesterday?”
Sergeant Sadoon crossed his lips annoyingly. “It’s strange, sir, and seems funny. But it is him, flesh and bone, I can’t mistake him.”
The officer looked at the man laughing and asked him: “And you, is this what really happened. Were you killed by this sergeant yesterday?”
The soldiers burst out laughing.
“Sir, I don’t understand what he means by killing, but they got into my house yesterday, this sergeant and the soldiers with him. They took me with them to a pickup truck, and when we arrived in Omdurman, we got shot at. After that, I don’t remember, I think I might have passed out, because I woke up and found myself under Al Halfaia bridge.”
The sergeant cleared his throat.
“What happened, sir, is that when we got shot at, and we took cover and started shooting back, this man started to panic, so I shot him in the head.”
“Were you drunk, sergeant?” asked the officer.
The sergeant swore that he was completely sober, and that he had witnesses, so he sent a soldier to fetch his truck crew, their yawning and sleepy faces suddenly awakened by the sight of the standing man. Yes, it was him, the same man their sergeant killed yesterday. They confirmed the sergeant’s report without a doubt. Amazed, the officer’s face changed, and he began taking the matter seriously. He asked the man for his name, but the sergeant answered instead:
“His name is Hashim Rahwi, sir. He works as a teacher and writer, and he lives in Shambat.”
The officer turned to the man and asked: is this true?
“Yes,” said Hashim.
Nobody laughed this time. Only amazement and bewildered gasps. The officer stood and came closer to the man who was standing with a slight tilt to the left, apparently restfulness, a tremor in the right hand, signs of exhaustion and redness in the eyes, a bag in his left hand. The officer opened it and took three books out of it, a stack of papers in a file, a shaving kit, a jar of Vaseline, a few pens and pencils, a box of biscuits, a battery, and a tuna can.
He read the titles of the books. The first was One Hundred Years of Solitude, the second was The Corpse Exhibition. The officer smiled and asked what the book was about. “It’s about war,” said Hashim. The third book was Five Ways to Go, author, Hashim Rahawi. The officer eyes widened curiously.
“You wrote this?”
“Yes.”
“Five ways to go where?”
“It’s just a title.”
“What do you mean, it’s just a title. There have to be five ways to go somewhere, don’t there?”
“Not necessarily. For example, I don’t know where I am going.”
The officer threw the book down indifferently. He dismissed the soldiers except the sergeant and the first sergeant, then he said to Hashim: “There are five soldiers swearing you were dead yesterday morning, what do you say about that?”