One always comes out from a mortar-shell hole where he’s taken refuge until he can return to his trench close to dusk, when no one is shooting. Then, with my machete, I slash the backs of his knees. It’s easy, he thinks I’m dead. The enemy from the other side doesn’t see me, a corpse among corpses. Now, in his mind, I’ve come back from the dead to kill him. The enemy from the other side is so scared, he doesn’t make a sound when I slash the backs of his knees. He just crumples. So I disarm him, then I gag him. I tie his hands behind his back.
Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s more difficult. Some of them don’t give in. Some don’t want to believe that they’re going to die. Some resist. So I knock them out, silently, because I’m twenty years old and, as the captain says, a force of nature. Then I pick them up either by the sleeve of their uniform or by a boot, and I pull them very gently as I crawl into la terre à personne, “no-man’s-land,” as the captain says, between the two giant trenches, across the mortar holes, across the pools of blood. Whether it’s wind, rain, sleet, or snow, as the captain says, I wait for him to wake up, I wait patiently for the enemy from the other side to wake up if I’ve knocked him out. If I don’t have to knock him out, if the one I dragged from his mortar-shell hole has let me take him, believing he can outsmart me, I wait and catch my breath. I wait until we’re both calm. While waiting, I smile at him, in the light of the moon and the stars, so he doesn’t become too agitated. But when I smile at him, I can sense him wondering, “What does this savage want from me? Is he going to eat me? Is he going to rape me?” I am free to imagine what the enemy from the other side thinks because I know, I understand. Looking into the enemy’s blue eyes, I often see a panicked fear of death, of savagery, of rape, of cannibalism. I see in his eyes what he’s been told about me, and what he’s believed without ever seeing me. I think that in seeing me look at him, smiling, he’s telling himself that they didn’t lie to him, that with my teeth, white at night with or without a moon, I will devour him alive, or something even worse.
The terrible thing is when, once I’ve caught my breath, I undress the enemy from the other side. When I unbutton the top of his uniform, that’s when I see the enemy’s blue eyes mist up. That’s when I sense that he fears the worst. Whether he’s stoic or distraught, brave or cowardly, at the moment I unbutton the jacket of his uniform, then the shirt, to expose his belly, bright white in the moonlight or in the rain or in the softly falling snow, that’s when I catch the eyes of the enemy from the other side starting to dim. They’re all the same, the tall ones, the short ones, the fat ones, the brave ones, the cowardly ones, the proud ones, when they see me looking at their trembling white bellies, their eyes go dim. All the same.
Then I pull back a little and I think about Mademba Diop. And each time I hear him in my head begging me to slit his throat and I think that I was inhuman enough to let him beg me three times. What I didn’t do for my friend I can do for my enemy. Out of humanity.
When they see me reach for my machete, the blue eyes of the enemy from the other side extinguish themselves for good. The first time, the enemy kicked me and tried to run away. Since then, I make sure to bind the ankles of the enemy from the other side. And that’s why, as soon as I have my machete in my right hand, the enemy starts to squirm like a madman, as if he thinks he can escape. It’s impossible. The enemy from the other side must know that he can no longer escape, being so tightly bound, but still he hopes. I can read it in his blue eyes the way I read it in Mademba Diop’s black eyes, the hope that I might alleviate his suffering.
His white belly is exposed, it rises and falls in jerks. The enemy from the other side gasps and screams, now in stark silence because of the gag I’ve cinched around his mouth. He screams in stark silence when I take all the insides of his belly and put them outside in the rain, in the wind, in the snow, or in the bright moonlight. If at this moment his blue eyes don’t dim forever, then I lie down next to him, I turn his face toward mine and I watch him die a little, then I slit his throat, cleanly, humanely. At night, all blood is black.
IV
GOD’S TRUTH, on the day of his death it took me no time to find Mademba Diop, disemboweled on the battlefield. I know, I understand what happened. Mademba told me, before his hands began trembling, while he was still asking me nicely, as a friend, to finish him off.
He was in the middle of a full-blown attack against the enemy on the other side, gun in his left hand and machete in his right, his performance was in full swing, he was fully playing the savage, when he fell upon an enemy from the other side who was pretending to be dead. Mademba Diop leaned in to look, casually, in passing, before moving on. He stopped to look at a dead enemy who was only pretending. He stared at him because, even still, he had his doubts. A brief instant. The face of the enemy from the other side wasn’t gray like the faces of dead people, white or black. This one looked like it was playing dead. Take no prisoners, finish him with the machete, Mademba thought. Don’t let down your guard. Kill this half-dead enemy from the other side a second time, just to be safe, so as never to have to feel bad about one of your brothers-in-arms, one of your friends, taking the same route and getting caught.
And while he is thinking about his brothers-in-arms, about his friends, whom he must protect from this half-dead enemy, while he pictures this half-dead enemy dealing a blow to someone other than himself, maybe to me, his more-than-brother, who may as well be him, while he’s telling himself that he must be vigilant for others, he’s not being vigilant for himself. Mademba told me, sweetly, as a friend, still smiling, that the enemy had opened his eyes wide before tearing open Mademba’s stomach from top to bottom in a single slash with the bayonet he’d held hidden in his right hand beneath a fold of his big coat. Mademba, still smiling about the half-dead enemy’s attack on him, told me calmly that there was nothing he could have done. He told me this at the beginning, when he wasn’t yet suffering so much, not long before his first plea to, as his friend, finish him off. His first plea addressed to me, his more-than-brother, Alfa Ndiaye, youngest son of the old man.
Before Mademba could react, before he could take revenge, the enemy, who still had some life in him, fled back to his line. Between his first and second pleas, I asked Mademba to describe the enemy from the other side who had disemboweled him. “He has blue eyes,” Mademba murmured, as I lay by his side looking at the sky crisscrossed with metal. I asked again. “God’s truth, all I can tell you is that he had blue eyes.” I asked again and again: “Is he tall, is he short? Is he good-looking, is he ugly?” And Mademba Diop, each time, responded that it wasn’t the enemy from the other side I should kill, that it was too late, that the enemy had had the good luck to survive. The person I now had to kill a second time, to finish off, was him, Mademba.
But, God’s truth, I didn’t really listen to Mademba, my childhood friend, my more-than-brother. God’s truth, I thought only of gutting the half-dead blue-eyed enemy. I thought only of disemboweling the enemy from the other side, and I neglected my own Mademba Diop. I listened to the voice of vengeance. I was inhuman from the moment of Mademba Diop’s second plea, when he said, “Forget the blue-eyed enemy. Kill me now because I’m suffering too much. We’re the same age, we were circumcised on the same day. You lived at my house, I watched you grow up and you watched me. Because of that, you can make fun of me, I can cry in front of you, I can ask you anything. We are more than brothers because we chose each other as brothers. Please, Alfa, don’t let me die like this, my guts in the air, my stomach devoured by a gnawing pain. I don’t know if the blue-eyed enemy is tall, if he’s short, if he’s good-looking, or if he’s ugly. I don’t know if he’s young like us or if he’s our fathers’ age. He was lucky, he saved himself. He is no longer important. If you are my brother, my childhood friend, if you are the one I have always known, the one I love like I love my mother and my father, then I beg you a second time to slit my throat. Do you enjoy hearing me moan like a little boy? Watching as my dignity is chased away by shame?”