Invasion of the crickets

I used to always associate the sound of crickets at night with summer holidays in the Mediterranean as a child. There was something exotic and relaxing about it. I never thought then that one day the sound would fill me with panic.

As a child I was never very good with insects, in fact I would refuse to go to bed if there was anything flying around in my bedroom or a tiny harmless spider hiding in a corner. To my parents delight and surprise, this seemed to have passed over the years, and although I still may utter some noise should I find a cockroach crawling up the inside of my sleeve, I am fairly calm about the fact that all sorts of insects are inhabiting my home these days. The most beautiful being a bright green Praying Mantis I once had as company on my terrace. But that was up until a few weeks ago.

I remember well how it started. I was on the phone to a friend a few days earlier, and while talking I had to occasionally brush away a few crickets that had made their way into my apartment. I did not think much of it. They had gradually increased in number over the last week, but not to the extent that I had really taken much notice of it. And so I lightly joked about it to my friend in London, who, not surprisingly, wondered how I was willing to sacrifice so much (I believe this was a reference to the lack of western luxuries) to do what I am doing. I just laughed. Little did I know that in two days all I would want was to get as far away as possible, back to the sterile cleanliness of the Scandinavian culture I grew up in.

Nothing really seemed out of the ordinary the following night when I went to bed. At around one in the morning I woke up feeling something jumping on me. Surprisingly, several crickets had made it in under my mosquito net. Being still half asleep I kill a few, brush them down on to the floor and drift off again. But it is not long until I wake up once more. Again I have crickets jumping on me. This time I wake up realizing that this is not quite normal. There are seven or eight of them and as soon as I get one, another one is there. I decide to get up. And that is when I realize; my whole house is full of crickets, and not just ten or twenty, but at least a hundred. The bathtub is covered in a carpet of loud crickets and they are jumping around me everywhere. Three in the morning and still not fully awake, I panic. There is absolutely nowhere to hide. I turn on the light at one end of the room and retire to the opposite end with a broom in my hand fighting them off as they come. It is only in the morning hours that I dose off for an hour or so, hidden under a blanket on one of my spare beds. At six o’clock in the morning I decide to take a change of clothes and a towel and head to the office to use the guesthouse facilities since my bathroom is impossible to enter, thinking that certainly it will be much better there.

As I turn up in front of the office entrance a sight awaits me that I never thought I’d ever see, and I suddenly realize that I am in the midst of one of the biblical plagues. The entrance to the office, a small white container where the guard sits, is completely covered with crickets, to the point where the inside walls are black and humming. The guard has moved his chair out on the street and is wearing a mouth cover. The crickets are everywhere, on his clothes and in his hair. He shakes his head and mutters ‘mushkila, mushkila’ (problem). But when he sees the panic in my eyes he laughs, and tells me to wrap my scarf around my head and face and just run through it, but warning me that it is bad inside too though in the slow process of being cleaned. I decide to wait outside, and I, who generally only smokes at social occasions, gratefully accept the cigarette he offers. Standing in the middle of the dirt road, looking around me in a combination of horror and surprise, I try to gain a sense of calm. With a stuttering conversation in part Arabic, part English and part sign language of some sort, I discover that the crickets all came from Eritrea and are likely to stay for some days, maybe even a week. I suddenly have a feeling of being trapped in a Hitchcock movie.

The rest of the day is spent mostly cleaning up the office. I continue the cleaning job at home in the afternoon, realizing that electricity and water is off. It seems that the authorities turned the lights off so not to attract them all. I go to bed steaming hot and rather paranoid. Around me all I hear is the sound of crickets.

I am delighted and relieved when I the next morning jump in the car and head for Khartoum leaving the armada of crickets behind. I don’t think my R&R could have been timelier.