And maybe the little blue-eyed enemy soldier was standing guard when I threw myself headfirst into the hot trench, arms outstretched, without knowing who I would catch. I carried him out with his gun hitched to his shoulder. A soldier standing guard shouldn’t smoke. Any blue smoke, in the darkest night, is visible. That’s how I spotted him, my little blue-eyed soldier, proprietor of my fourth trophy, of my fourth hand. But, God’s truth, I pitied him in no-man’s-land. I killed him as soon as he begged me, once, with his blue eyes filled with tears. It was God who’d made him stand guard.
It was after I returned to the trench that was our home with my fourth small hand and the gun it had cleaned, oiled, loaded, and fired that my soldier-friends, white and black, avoided me like the plague. When I returned home crawling in the mud like a black mamba returning to its nest after rat-hunting, no one dared touch me anymore. No one was happy to see me. They must have believed that the first hand brought bad luck to that little fool Jean-Baptiste and that the evil eye would fall on anyone who touched me or even looked at me. And Jean-Baptiste wasn’t there anymore to rally the others to rejoice at seeing me return alive. Everything is double: one side good, one bad. Jean-Baptiste, when he was still alive, showed the others the good side of my trophies: “Look, here’s our pal Alfa with another hand and the rifle that goes with it. Let’s celebrate, friends! This means fewer Kraut bullets aimed at us! Fewer Kraut hands, fewer Kraut bullets. Glory to Alfa!” That’s how the rest of the soldiers, black or white, Chocolat or Toubab, were rallied to congratulate me for having brought back my trophies to our dark trench, open to the sky. They all applauded me up to the third hand. I was courageous, I was a force of nature, like the captain said many times. God’s truth, they gave me good things to eat, they helped me clean up; above all Jean-Baptiste, who liked me. But on the night Jean-Baptiste died, when I returned to our trench the way a mamba slithers back into its nest after the hunt, they avoided me like the plague. The bad side of my crimes had won out over the good side. The Chocolat soldiers began to whisper that I was a soldier sorcerer, a dëmm, a devourer of souls, and the white Toubab soldiers were starting to believe them. God’s truth, each thing carries its opposite within. Up to the third hand, I was a war hero, beginning with the fourth I became a dangerous madman, a bloodthirsty savage. God’s truth, that’s how things go, that’s how the world is: each thing is double.
XIII
THEY THOUGHT I WAS AN IDIOT, but I’m not. The captain and the old Chocolat Croix de Guerre infantryman Ibrahima Seck wanted my seven hands so they could trap me. God’s truth, they wanted proof of my savagery so they could lock me up, but I would never tell them where I’d hidden my seven hands. They would never find them. They couldn’t imagine the quiet spot where they’d been laid to rest, dried and wrapped in cloth. God’s truth, without these seven pieces of proof, they would have no choice but to send me temporarily to the Rear to rest. God’s truth, they would have no choice but to hope that upon my return from the Rear the soldiers with matching blue eyes would kill me so they would be rid of me without too much bother. In war, when you have a problem with one of your soldiers, you get the enemy to kill him. It’s more practical.
Between my fifth hand and my sixth hand, the Toubab soldiers stopped wanting to obey Captain Armand when he whistled for the attack. One fine day they said, “No! We’ve had enough!” They even said to Captain Armand, “You may as well be whistling for the attack so the enemy on the other side will be ready to gun us down as soon as we leave the trench. We won’t leave it anymore. We refuse to die for your whistle!” And then the captain replied, “What, just like that, you won’t obey orders?” The Toubab soldiers replied immediately, “No, we don’t want to obey your whistle of death!” When the captain was very sure that they wouldn’t obey anymore, and when he saw that it was now only seven of them and not the fifty it had been at the start, he made the seven culprits stand in the middle of the rest of us and commanded, “Tie their hands behind their backs!” Once they had their hands tied behind their backs, the captain yelled at them, “You are cowards, you are the shame of France! You are afraid to die for your fatherland, and yet you are going to die today!”
What the captain made us do then is very, very ugly. God’s truth, we never would have believed that we’d be treating our fellow soldiers like enemies from the other side. The captain told us to hold our loaded rifles to their jaws and to kill them if they didn’t obey his final order. We were on one side of the trench, where it was open to the skies of war, and our traitorous friends were on the other, a few paces from us. Our traitorous friends turned their backs to us, so they were facing the little ladders. Seven little ladders. The little ladders we climbed to rise out of the trench when we would launch an assault on the enemy from the other side. So, once everyone was in their place, the captain shouted at them, “You have betrayed France! But those who obey my final order will be given a posthumous Croix de Guerre. For the rest of you, we’ll write to your families that you are deserters, traitors who sold out to the enemy. For traitors, there is no military pension. Nothing for your wives, nothing for your families!” Then the captain whistled for the attack so that our friends would climb out of our trench and be gunned down by the enemy from the other side.
God’s truth, I’ve never seen anything so ugly. Even before the captain whistled for the attack, some of our seven traitorous friends clattered their teeth, others pissed their pants. As soon as the captain whistled, it was terrible. If the moment weren’t so dire, you could almost have laughed. Because with their hands tied behind their backs, our traitorous friends had a hard time climbing the six or seven stairs of the attack ladders. They stumbled, they slid, they fell on their knees and screamed in fear because the enemies with matching blue eyes understood almost at once that our captain was delivering them their prey. God’s truth, as soon as the master artilleryman who had killed my friend Jean-Baptiste saw the gift he was being offered, he launched three small malicious shells that all missed their intended target. But the fourth one exploded on one of our traitorous friends who had just emerged from the trench, a traitorous friend who was being brave for his wife and children, whose insides flew out of his body to splatter us with black blood. God’s truth, though I was already used to it, my white and black fellow soldiers were not. And we cried a lot, especially our traitorous friends who were condemned to climb out from the trench to be massacred one by one, or else no Croix de Guerre, the captain had said. No pension for their parents, no pension for their wives or for their children.
God’s truth, the leader of the traitorous friends was brave. The leader of our traitorous friends was named Alphonse. God’s truth, Alphonse was a real warrior. A real warrior is not afraid to die. Alphonse climbed out of our trench stumbling like an invalid and crying, “Now I know why I must die! I know why. I am dying for your pension, Odette! I love you, Odette! I love you, Ode…” And then a fifth small malicious shell decapitated him just like Jean-Baptiste, because the master artilleryman from the other side had begun to hit his marks. His brains rained on us and on the other traitorous friends who screamed with terror because they had to die like their traitorous leader, Alphonse. God’s truth, we all wept at the death of the leader of our traitorous friends. The elder Chocolat Croix de Guerre infantryman Ibrahima Seck translated what Alphonse had cried out. Odette was lucky to have had him as a husband. That Alphonse was really somebody.