Solomon’s Compass
Mark Sadler
It is surely no surprise the rebels chose the town of Dahizz, close to the western border, to stage their counterattack. The wadi Hijarhar points, like a crooked rifle barrel, down the length of the country. The region has served as a Petri dish for war since the early golden age.
When my friend, Yaseen, was a boy, his father told him that if you stood in the dry canyon bed, facing east, and looked through binoculars, you could see, framed within the vista, the coastal town of Rimm’yanhar, hundreds of miles away, where the houses have white, sloping rooftops. Yaseen’s father was in the military. He would hold a pair of compact field binoculars up to his face. His small, neatly-trimmed moustache would move up and down as he described the scene before him: “There are lots of boats out on the water today... and cruise ships. There are fish jumping out between the waves. On the beach there is a big wheel and a man turning a handle to make it go round. There are children eating ice-cream...”
The boy would jump up and down franticly at his father’s side, begging to see for himself, grabbing at the bent elbows of his father who stared into the distance, unmoved.
“These binoculars are for army use only. I need them to spot any rebel activity,” he would say, returning them hastily to the leather pouch on his belt. I think that, maybe, he did not want to run the risk of light flaring off the lenses and catching the attention of a sniper.
His son continued to strain his eyes towards the coast. Although he did not know it until later, the scenery that his father described was better than the truth. The wadi does not point directly towards Rimm’yanhar. It passes between the stumpy sandstone cliffs of a winding mesa for two-hundred miles, until even the rocks grow tired and sink into the desert.
Close to the spot where Yaseen used to stand with his father, there are ruins that date to the biblical era, when the land was fertile and prosperous. Of particular note are the remnants of a palace that was built by King Solomon; the surviving walls gnawed down to the foundations by time and desert winds. Until a few years ago, a tall pillar with smooth rounded sides, that bulge out slightly at the centre, stood upright in the gritty sand.
In 2014, the ground nearby was struck by a wayward artillery shell. The impact shook the air, permanently warping the shimmer of the heat haze. The pillar toppled over and fractured across the middle but did not break apart. It rolled into the shallow crater made by the explosion. Ever since that time it has crept, imperceptibly, from one side of the depression to the other, and then back again, as if being moved by an invisible force; a stray, toothless cog in the broken engine of war, unable to come to a full-stop; instead fated to traverse a rut worn into the landscape by endless conflict.
The coarse sand is ground to fine powder under the crushing weight of the stone. In the wake of the pillar, it rises up from the parched bed of the wadi. Maybe you will not believe me when I tell you, that this insignificant crater is the source of the four-year sandstorms that gather on the spot months before the roiling dust floods over the high cliffs.
On many occasions, I have measured the time that it takes for the pillar to journey from one side of the crater to the other. It is always four years. The same four years playing endlessly forward, or in reverse. If the pillar rolls to the east, then I know that we are progressing through time, advancing into further conflict. If it rolls to the west, then everything will be as it once was. The dead will return to life. The undocumented mass graves and secret prisons will vanish from the land, replaced by the cereal crops, of seasons long past. The fallen buildings will take root on the sites of their own ruins and gradually reassemble themselves. Yaseen and I will be young men again, untouched by our recent hardships and sorrows, yet somehow fated to relive them.
Six months before I make this observation, on the fifth day of November, 2017, my friend, Yaseen Hineti, and his wife, Fatima, return to Amarmoch, the town of their birth. They stand in the ruins of the home that they abandoned over three years ago. In their bedroom, a bullet-ridden double mattress, with a torn and stained covering, has been gutted of its filling by the scavenging ravens and black kites, who have used it for nesting material. The coiled springs poke out from the remnants of stuffing like the ribs of an animal carcass.
There are two large holes in the bedroom wall that provide views overlooking the street. Turquoise scraps of painted plasterwork lie strewn across the floor like the shards of a broken pot. Fatima finds three pieces that fit together so perfectly that she can barely see the join between them. She lays them carefully on the floor, kneeling over them. Trembling, she sinks down slowly onto the flats of her hands. Her palms move around blindly in the dust as if they are searching for fragments of her old life that has been ground to powder and re-shaped by the overlapping bootprints of strangers.
The year before, when the couple are refugees, Yaseen begins gathering together the tools and building equipment that he will need to make the repairs on his home. He stores them in the house of his brother, Abed, underneath a blue tarpaulin, next to the television set. When I see him in the year 2018, I do not tell him that it is a pointless effort; that before he even mixes the concrete he is always blown back to where he is now, and beyond, almost to the start of things.
Abed has already visited the old house. When Fatima is out of the room he tells Yaseen: “Nearly everything is ruined. The garden courtyard is gone. It is like it was never there. The soldiers destroyed every last piece of furniture. They even shot the toilet to pieces.”
He shows Yaseen a pillowcase, filled almost to the brim with spent brass shell casings from a machine-gun. He plans to make the 70 mile journey to Egila and sell the casings at the metal market. He says he will give half of the money to Yaseen.
He takes something small and shiny from out of his shirt pocket and places it in the hand of his brother: “A gold tooth. For you. I found it inside a hole in the wall of your bedroom. Maybe it is a sign of good luck.”
On the 5th May, 2015, the siege breaks. The rebels are driven out of Amarmoch. They flee into the wilderness in scattered groups. An advancing column of loyalist troops and creaking tanks, that would be regarded as war museum antiques anywhere else in the world, moves in to reclaim the town.
The rebel colonel, Moonif Antar, takes one final lingering look around the building that has been his home for the past fortnight. He peers through one of the holes that he made in the wall for the machine-gunner and the spotter. He imagines a sniper’s bullet penetrating the gap; his head rupturing, exploding in all directions at once, as his body falls lifeless to the ground. The thought fills him with a strange feeling of exhilaration.
On the opposite side of the room, he thoughtfully drills one finger down inside a tapering bloodstained hole in the plaster. At the bottom, he feels the smooth surface of Marwan's gold tooth, embedded two-inches-deep in the mud-brick.
He loads a belt of ammunition into the machine-gun and walks through the house firing in short bursts at the walls and the surviving furnishings. The mattress, soiled with blood and sweat, erupts into fibrous white clouds. The western-style toilet explodes under sustained fire, as he uses up the last of his bullets.
Time continues to creep backwards, through the early stalemate; the slow-turning months of the siege that passes under a haze of gun-smoke; the two sides suspended in the doldrums as their momentum stagnates. One by one the bullets and shells remove themselves from their final resting places. Temporarily reprieved from the shot that kills him, Marwan, picks Khat stems from between his teeth. He runs his tongue along his upper jaw and feels the smooth texture of gold among bone.
The fog of war withdraws to its home inside the barrels of guns. When the air finally clears we have returned, once more, almost to the beginning; late May, 2014. The rebels are still regrouping, following an earlier retreat from the interior. In their propaganda they call it ‘a strategic withdrawal.’
Only a little further now, to the start of things: Today, Yaseen and Fatima move into their new home with their son Halil, who is four years old and will not live to be five. On their first morning, Halil runs around their bedroom with his arms stretched-out like an aeroplane. His fingertips brush the sky-blue walls of the room, which are smooth and cool to the touch.
A few miles from the town, I walk with my friend, Ferhad, along the dry riverbed. I have recently graduated from the university in the capital with a degree in physics. My head is filled with theories on time and space that do not yet correspond with anything in the world that lies beyond the campus library.
We both sense that strange quality of stillness in the air that heralds incoming artillery; the approach of a shell hurtling through cloudless blue sky, erasing its own sound and all other sounds around it. It strikes the ground with a decisive thump. We feel it reverberate through the soles of our shoes. The aftershock of the explosion, which is hidden from our view, races between the cliff walls as a tepid shockwave. We both watch as it changes the shape of the heat haze forever.
Ferhad immediately runs home to his family. I walk to the site of impact. I see the pillar unseated from its buried foundation, lying on its side on the western slope of the smouldering crater. Though it appears stationery, I am that struck by the notion that it is rolling very slowly towards the bottom of the depression. I am taken by the urge to place my hand upon it and stop it. When I do, I feel a resistance; a relentless energy, like a magnetic force emanating from within; stronger along a shallow fissure that has appeared around the circumference.
I do not leave the crater again. I begin my vigil, sitting at its edge, observing the column's ponderous back and forth transition across the span of four years, as if endlessly deliberating on a final judgement. Like the moon that controls the tides, it seems to exert a strong localised force upon the ebb and flow of time. Within its vicinity I am guarded from hunger or thirst. Events creep forward and I see them in my waking dreams: glimpses of Yaseen and Fatima, and Yaseen's brother, Abed, who I have never met, and strangers—soldiers on both sides of the conflict, who live and die and then live again.
Time advances to the day in 2018, when I meet Yaseen. We have not seen one another in person in over four years. He has returned to Amarmoch to rebuild his home and start a new family. He is amazed that I am alive. I feel only a pervading sense of déjà vu. I have stopped counting the times I have lived in this moment.
I tell him: “From here I am able to spectate upon a small area of time and space, and form judgements.”
He regards me sympathetically. Though he does not say it, he believes my mind has been damaged by my experiences in the war. I can see it in his eyes. I direct his attention towards the toppled column, the engine of our mutual entrapment.
“It is a thing of terrible perpetual motion. We are caught within the gravity of its eternal back and forth.”
There is a lull in the conversation as the creeping transition of the fallen pillar ascends to its eastern-most zenith, then imperceptibly reverses its course, gradually erasing our recently-spoken words.
Later, I watch Yaseen recede backwards into the skyline, heading east, like a pilgrim, towards his childhood memory of Rimm’yanhar on the coast. He disappears into the flatness of the horizon that warps and shimmers in the dry heat. I remain within the crater and await his inevitable return.
Mark Sadler lives in Southend-on-Sea, in England, with a chameleon named Frederic. His stories have been performed by Liars’ Leagues in Hong Kong, London, and New York City, and have also appeared in a number of online and print publications that include The London Magazine, The Ghastling and Litbreak.
This story was inspired by a visit to the town of Senafe, in Southern Eritrea, in 2003. At the time, the population were picking up the pieces of their lives in the aftermath of a border war, subsisting among buildings that had been structurally damaged by the fighting, many past the point where they could be repaired.