Free The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto

one, the one from the leg, I got in the Colonial War. The one in the thigh, that one came from the war with Ian Smith. This one, in the arm, is from the present war . . .
    â€” What about the other one?
    â€” What other one?
    â€” The one in the shoulder?
    â€” I don’t remember that one .
    â€” That’s a lie, Zachary. Go on, tell us .
    â€” I’m serious. I sometimes don’t even remember the others.
    He wiped the projectiles on the sleeve of his shirt and stuffed them back in his flesh, using his fingers as if he were pushing in the plunger of a syringe.
    â€” Do you know why my bullets and I are inseparable?
    We knew. But we pretended we were hearing it for the first time. Just like the saying that he himself had invented and ceaselessly intoned: if you want to know a man, take a look at his scars.
    â€” They are the opposite of my navel. It was through here— and he pointed to the holes —it was through here that death escaped.
    â€” Leave the bullets alone, Zaca, we want to know about other things.
    â€” What other things? I only have the skills that animals have: I can sense death and blood.

    After my brother’s convalescence, Silvestre Vitalício believed that radical change would have to occur in Jezoosalem. So he made a decision: Ntunzi and I went to live for a while with Zachary Kalash. It was to clear our minds and, at the same time, to learn the riddles of existence and the secrets of subsistence. If we ever lost Zachary, then we would replace him in the life-saving activity of hunting.
    â€” Make them wallow around in the mud —my old man ordered.
    It was envisaged that we would roam along isolated paths, learn the arts of tracking and hunting wild animals, master thesecret languages of the trees. And yet Zachary abstained from his role as teacher. What he wanted was to tell stories about hunting, to talk without conversing, to listen to himself in order not to hear his own ghosts. But we demanded other topics of conversation.
    â€” Tell us about our past.
    â€” My life is a mole’s burrow: four holes, four souls. What do you want to talk about?
    â€” About our mother, and how she and our father courted.
    â€” No, certainly not. I’ll never talk about that.
    Zachary’s reaction seemed excessive. The man shouted, his hands crossed over his chest, and he went on and on without stopping:
    â€” No, never.
    He was the grandson of a soldier, the son of a sergeant, and he himself had never been anything but a soldier. So they shouldn’t come to him with the heart’s strategies, love and worthless yearning. Man is a creature with a taste for death, who loves Life, but likes even more to stop others from living.
    â€” You still feel you’re a soldier. Own up to it, Zaca, do you miss the barracks?
    The fellow ran his hands lovingly over the military tunic he always wore. His fingers lingered sleepily on the barrel of his rifle. Only then did he speak: It’s not the uniform that makes a soldier. It’s the oath. He wasn’t one of those who had enlisted because he was scared of Life. His being a soldier, as he put it, stemmed from the momentum of the moment. There wasn’t even a word for soldier in his mother tongue. The term used was “massodja,” and had been stolen from the English.
    â€” I never had any causes, my only flag was myself.
    â€” But Zaca, don’t you remember our mother?
    â€” I don’t like going back in time. My head doesn’t have a long range.
    Ernie Scrap, now renamed Zachary Kalash, had encountered deaths and shoot-outs. He’d escaped crossfires, he’d escaped all his recollections. His memories had fled through all the perforations of his body.
    â€” I was never good at remembering. I’ve been like that since the day I was born.
    It was Uncle Aproximado who discovered why he was so forgetful: why didn’t Zachary remember any wars? Because he’d always