Read Song for Night for Free Online Page B

thereby declaring it an open feast.
    Not that I have ever seen a pygmy or even an elephant, except at the zoo before the war. I must have heard it somewhere, maybe I saw it in a documentary in school. Absently I wonder whether the animals in the zoo have been eaten in the food shortages. The thought of lions and giraffes clubbed to death for meat upsets me. If Ijeoma were here, she would say my feelings are irrational. She would say I am just homesick.
    “It’s not the animals you mourn,” she would say. “It is your home.”
    The voice in my head is loud enough to make me look around, half expecting to see her. Apart from the toads I can hear in the muddy bottom of the near empty pond, I am alone.
    Plucking up courage, I jump inside the first armored car and root around. Nothing. Gaining the light again, I sit on top and smoke a cigarette. There on the barrel of the gun is a bright red knit bag. How could I have missed it? I smoke and watch it for a while, almost as if it is a mirage.
    When I was a boy, my mother taught me how to crochet. I loved it. The way one knot would slip into another and another until the thread spread into a wide but strong web, while the steel crocked needle, like a shepherd’s stave, flashed. I used to imagine I was God, and the doily or cap I was knitting was a world, and the flash of the needle was lightning doing my bidding, spreading life like a primal shiver of fire.
    My father was alive then and he didn’t mind. He saw it as a harmless distraction, one that in fact presented the opportunity of a metaphor for him teaching me the Koran, the suras learned stitch by stitch— there is no God but Allah ; hook and stitch; and Mohammed is his true prophet ; circle with the wool; blessings be upon his name; pull needle through and loop. He was a gentle man, my father the imam. But my uncle, the distant relative who arrived when my father died and claimed my mother as his wife in the name of some old custom, hated me and he hated that I didn’t play the rough games like other boys. He beat me so bad; and my mother watched, afraid or unable to help, I wasn’t sure why, but I hated her for it. Why would she let this goat possess her? One day she showed me the crawl space in the ceiling, and I would hide up there for hours crocheting, wrapped around the wooden beams, building one huge web that became a hammock, became a shelter.
    Tossing the cigarette, I jump down, grab the bag, and stuff it full of tins of food, all well past their sell-by dates. I also stuff in cartons of cigarettes, some cheap plastic lighters, some watches, and a few notes of nearly worthless local money—they will make good bribes. I pick up the bag, my gun, and stuff my feet into a pair of old boots, before heading off in the direction of the road.
    I crouch in the grass by the roadside for a long time watching a roadblock up ahead. Hidden in a curve of the road, it is hard to see what is beyond and in fact who is manning it, and how many. It is clearly unwise to proceed so I decide to use the river. Darting across the road, I drop noiselessly into the water. I need to head upriver, in the direction of the roadblock, because I know beyond it is a town and I might find shelter, but there is no way of getting past the roadblock unseen. Or even of getting across the river to flank it along the other bank. There is also the matter of the boat I saw the other night. If it comes back while I am still visible, it will be the end of me and I can kiss any chance of reuniting with my platoon goodbye. The safest thing to do is to grab hold of one of the corpses, get under it, and float downstream for a while. If I can circle back to the mangroves, I might be able to find an adjacent tributary and use it to make my way back up, closer to the other bank.
    The smell is beyond anything I even have words for. I close my eyes and throw up soundlessly into the water as I float along. Time, in the water, loses all weight and the day passes