Small Country

by Gaël Faye

  “They’re no match for oysters,” declared Papa, in his element, “but it’s good to eat something decent every once in a while!”

  “What are you complaining about, Michel? Do we feed you badly at home?” Maman asked coldly.

  “Yes! That idiot Prothé makes me swallow his starchy African cooking every lunchtime. If only he knew the correct way to grill entrecôte!”

  “Don’t get me started, Michel!” said Jacques, taking up the theme. “My baboon in the kitchen grills everything to death, with the excuse that it kills off parasites. I’ve forgotten what rare steak tastes like. I’ll be glad to get back to Brussels and dose myself up on amoeba!”

  Everyone burst out laughing except for Ana and me, at the far end of the table. I was ten, and she was seven, which probably explains why we didn’t appreciate Jacques’s sense of humor. In any case, we were strictly forbidden to speak unless spoken to. This was the golden rule when we were taken somewhere. Papa couldn’t abide children joining in grown-up conversations. Especially not when we were visiting Jacques, who was like a second father to him: a role model to the point that, without even realizing it, Papa would often copy Jacques’s expressions, his body language, and even the cadence of his voice. “He’s the one who taught me everything I know about Africa!” Papa would often tell Maman.

  Ducking his head under the table to get out of the wind, Jacques lit a cigarette with his silver Zippo that was engraved with two stags. Then he stood up and stared at Lake Kivu for a moment, a few curls of smoke escaping his nostrils. From his terrace, you could make out a string of tiny islets in the distance. Beyond them, on another of the lake’s shores, was the city of Cyangugu in Rwanda. Maman’s gaze was set in that direction. Her thoughts must have weighed her down every time we ate at Jacques’s place. Rwanda, her country, which she had left in 1963 during a night of massacres, by the light of the flames that had set her family home ablaze, the country where she had never again set foot since the age of four, was right there, a few cable lengths away, almost within reach.

  Jacques’s lawn was immaculately maintained by an elderly gardener who wielded his machete in great pendulum strokes, as if executing a golf swing. In front of us, in a stunning choreography, metallic-green hummingbirds gathered nectar from the red hibiscus flowers. A pair of crowned cranes strolled in the shade of the lemon and guava trees. Teeming with life and bursting with colors, Jacques’s garden gave off a gentle scent of lemongrass. His house, which had been built using porous black rock from the volcano of Mount Nyiragongo and rare wood from the Nyungwe forest, resembled a Swiss chalet.

  Jacques rang the small bell on the table and the cook appeared instantly, his uniform of a chef’s toque and white apron clashing with his bare cracked feet.

  “Bring us three bottles of Primus and clear up this goddamn mess!” Jacques ordered.

  “How are you, Evariste?” Maman asked the cook.

  “Thanks be to God, not too bad, Madame!”

  “Leave God out of it!” Jacques retorted. “Things aren’t too bad because there are still a few whites left in Zaire to keep the wheels turning. Without me, you’d be begging on the streets like the rest of your kind!”

  “When I say God, I mean you, Boss!” the cook replied mischievously.

  “Don’t make fun of me, you baboon!”

  The pair of them cackled.

  “And to think I couldn’t hold onto a good woman for more than three days,” Jacques went on, “but I’ve been lumbered with this chimpanzee for thirty-five years!”

  “You should have married me, Boss!”

  “Funga kimwa! Go and find us those beers instead of talking goddamn rubbish!” Jacques guffawed again, before producing a hawking that made me want to bring my prawns back up.

  The cook set off, humming something liturgical. Jacques blew his nose vigorously into a handkerchief embroidered with his initials, picked up his cigarette once more, dropped some ash on the polished parquet floor, and turned to Papa.

  “The last time I was in Belgium, the docs told me to give up the smokes or I was done for. There’s nothing I haven’t been through here: wars, looting, shortages, Bob Denard and Kolwezi, thirty years of bloody ‘Zairinization,’ and it’s the cigarettes that’ll get me in the end! Goddamn it!”

  Age-spots flecked his hands and balding head. It was the first time I’d seen him wearing shorts. His hairless, milky-white legs contrasted with the burned skin of his forearms and his sun-etched face; it was as if his body had been assembled from ill-assorted pieces.

  “Those doctors might have a point, you know, you should slow down,” said Maman, sounding worried. “Three packets a day is a lot, Jacques.”

  “Don’t you start as well,” Jacques directed his words at Papa as if Maman weren’t there. “My father smoked like a trooper and he lived to ninety-five. You don’t know the half of the life he led. Back in the days of Leopold II, the Congo was a whole different story! A great strapping man, my father! He built the Kabalo–Kalemi railway line. It hasn’t worked in a long time, by the way, that line, like the rest of this messed-up country. What a goddamn shambles!”

  “Why don’t you sell up? Come and settle in Bujumbura. You could have yourself a nice life over there,” said Papa, with an enthusiasm he reserved for spur-of-the-moment ideas. “I’ve got plenty of construction sites, and I’m being asked to tender for more contracts than I can keep track of. Right now, there’s money for the making!”

  “Sell up? Stop talking bullshit! My sister keeps phoning me about joining her in Belgium. ‘Come back home, Jacques,’ she says, ‘it’ll turn out badly for you. When it comes to Zaireans, the whites always end up getting robbed and lynched.’ Can you picture me in an apartment in Ixelles? I’ve never lived over there, so what the hell would I do in some boring rich suburb of Brussels, at my age? The first time I set foot in Belgium, I was twenty-five with two bullets in my belly, sustained in an ambush while we were chasing the communists out of Katanga. I went under the surgeon’s knife, they stitched me up, and I was back here double-quick. I’m more Zairean than any of those darkies. I was born here and I’ll die here! I can handle Bujumbura for a few weeks, I sign two or three contracts, help out some big bwanas, do the rounds, catch up with old friends, and then I head home. Truth is, the Burundians don’t do it for me. At least with the Zaireans, they’re easy to understand: you just pay the bribe. One matabish-bakshish and things get moving! With the Burundians? Those people! They scratch their left ear with their right hand…”

  “That’s what I’m always telling Michel,” said Maman. “I’m sick of Burundi, too.”

  “It’s not the same, Yvonne,” Papa snapped. “You dream of living in Paris, you’re obsessed with the idea.”

  “Too right I am; it would suit you, it would suit me, and it would suit the children. What kind of future do we have in Bujumbura, apart from this lousy existence? Can you tell me that?”

  “Give it a rest! It’s your country you’re talking about.”

  “Oh no, no, no, no, no…my country is Rwanda! Over there, right in front of you. Rwanda. I’m a refugee, Michel. And I always have been, in Burundian eyes. They make it very clear, with their insults and insinuations, their quotas for foreigners and restricted intakes in schools. So allow me to have my own opinion on Burundi!”

  “Listen, darling,” said Papa, trying to sound conciliatory. “Take a look around you. The mountains, the lakes, the nature. We live in a nice house, we have staff, we have space for the children, we enjoy a decent climate, and business is good. What else d’you want? You’d never have this kind of lifestyle in Europe. Trust me, it’s far from the paradise you imagine. Why d’you think I’ve spent the last twenty years building my life here? Why d’you think Jacques would rather stay on than go home to Belgium? Here, we’re privileged. There, we’d be nobodies. Why won’t you hear that?”

  “Talk all
you like, Michel, but I know the other side of the story. Where you see gently undulating hills, I see the poverty of the people who live there. Where you marvel at the beautiful lakes, I’m already breathing in the methane that sleeps below those waters. You fled the peace and quiet of your France to seek out adventure in Africa. Good for you! I want the security I never had, the comfort of raising my children in a country where I’m not afraid of dying just because I’m—”

  “Stop right there, Yvonne, I’ve had enough of your anxieties and your persecution complex. You always have to make a drama out of everything. You’ve got a French passport now, so what are you afraid of? You live in a villa in Bujumbura, not in a refugee camp, so please, cut it out!”

  “I couldn’t care less about your passport, it doesn’t change anything, least of all the threats that are all around us. You’ve never been interested in my version of the story, Michel…You came here from Europe in search of a playground where you could eke out the dreams of your spoiled childhood in the West…”

  “What are you talking about? You drive me crazy! Plenty of African women would give their eye teeth for what you have…”

  Maman fixed Papa with such a hard look he didn’t dare finish his sentence.

  “Poor Michel,” she went on calmly, “you don’t even realize what you’re saying anymore. A word of advice: Don’t try your hand at racism when you’re an old hippy at heart, it doesn’t suit you. Leave that to Jacques and the real settlers.”

  Jacques choked on his cigarette. But Maman, who was beyond caring, stood up, flung her napkin in Papa’s face, and stormed off. Just then the cook appeared, with a cheeky smile on his lips and the bottles of Primus on a plastic tray.

  “Yvonne! Come back right now! Apologize to Jacques this minute!” bellowed my father, hovering over his seat with his fists clenched on the table.

  “Leave it, Michel,” said Jacques. “That’s women for you…”

  3

  In the days that followed, Papa tried several times to make it up to Maman with sweet talk and jokes that left her cold. One Sunday, on a whim, he decided to take us out for lunch in Resha, by the shores of Lake Tanganyika, sixty kilometers from Bujumbura. It was to be our last Sunday, all four of us together, as a family.

  The car windows were open wide and the wind made such a din it was almost impossible to hear one another. Maman seemed in her own world, and Papa kept trying to fill the silence with endless explanations that nobody had asked for.

  “Look, over there, that’s a kapok tree, as introduced by the Germans into Burundi at the end of the nineteenth century. It produces silk cotton, the fiber used for stuffing pillows.”

  The road ahead followed the lake and continued south all the way to the Tanzanian border.

  “Tanganyika contains the most fish and, at over six hundred kilometers, is also the longest lake in the world,” Papa went on for his own benefit. “It has a surface area larger than that of Burundi.”

  The rainy season was coming to a close and the sky was clear. We could see the corrugated-iron rooftops glinting on the mountains of Zaire, fifty kilometers away, on the other side of the lake. Tiny white clouds hung above the ridges, like balls of cotton wool.

  The bridge over the Mugere river had collapsed after the recent floods, so we drove across the riverbed instead. Water began seeping into our jeep, and Papa activated the four-wheel drive system for the first time since buying the Pajero. When we arrived in Resha, a sign declared “Restaurant Le Castel.” A narrow dirt track lined with mango trees led to the car park, where we were welcomed by a group of green monkeys grooming one another. At the entrance to the restaurant—an odd building with a red corrugated roof and a semaphore flag on top—there was a copper plaque depicting the Pharaoh Akhenaton.

  We sat out on the terrace, under an Amstel parasol. Only one other table was taken, near the bar, by a minister having lunch with his family and flanked by two armed soldiers. The minister’s children were even more well behaved than we were, scarcely moving or reaching for the Fanta bottles set down before them. A pair of loudspeakers crackled, feebly relaying a cassette by Canjo Amiss, while Papa rocked on his plastic chair and turned his keys on his finger. Maman was watching Ana and me with a sad smile. Then the waitress arrived and it was time to give our order: “Captain’s brochettes, four! Two Fruito. Two Amstel.” Maman never wasted words on restaurant staff, she sent telegrams instead. Waiters didn’t warrant the benefit of verbs.

  It wasn’t unusual for the food to take at least an hour to arrive. The atmosphere at the table was heavy going, between Papa’s clinking keys and Maman’s fake smile, so Ana and I made ourselves scarce by diving head first into the lake. “Hey, kids, watch out for the crocs!” Papa roared, to scare us. Ten meters from shore a rock rose above the water, like the rounded back of a hippopotamus. We raced over to it, before swimming to the metal jetty from where we could dive and view the fish basking in the turquoise waters between the big rocks. As I climbed the ladder I spotted Maman on the beach, all in white, with her wide brown leather belt and a red scarf in her hair. She was waving at us to come and eat lunch.

  After the meal, Papa drove us to the Kigwena forest to see the baboons. We walked for nearly an hour along a clay path without spotting anything, except for a few green turacos. There was no let-up in the tension between Maman and Papa: they didn’t speak to each other and kept avoiding eye contact. My shoes got caked with mud. Ana ran ahead to find the monkeys before anyone else.

  Next, Papa took us to Rumonge to visit the palm-oil factory for which he’d overseen the construction when he first arrived in Burundi in 1972. The machines were old and the entire building appeared to be coated in a greasy substance. Piles of palm nuts were drying on large blue sheets of tarpaulin. A vast palm grove extended for kilometers all around. While Papa was explaining the different stages of pressing nuts, I noticed Maman heading to the car. Later, back on the road, she closed the windows and turned on the air-conditioning. She put on a Khadja Nin tape and Ana and I started singing “Sambolera.” Maman joined in. There was a beautiful quality to her voice, one that touched your soul, triggering as many goosebumps as the air-con. It made you want to pause the cassette and only listen to her.

  Driving through the market at Rumonge, Papa changed gears and then tried to put his hand on Maman’s knee. She batted him away, much as you might swat a fly from your plate. Papa immediately checked in the rear-view mirror and I looked out of my window, pretending I hadn’t seen anything. After thirty-two kilometers, Maman bought several balls of ubusagwe (a cold pastry made from cassava flour), which were rolled in banana leaves. We loaded them into the trunk. Toward the end of the trip, we stopped off at the Livingstone–Stanley Monument, which read “Livingstone, Stanley, 25-XI-1889.” Ana and I messed about re-enacting the explorers’ famous meeting: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” In the distance, I could see Papa and Maman finally talking to each other. I felt hopeful that they would make up, that Papa would wrap his strong arms around her and she would lay her head on his shoulder as they strolled, hand in hand like lovers, through the banana plantation below. But it wasn’t long before I realized, from their angry gestures and jabbing fingers, that they were arguing. A warm wind prevented me from hearing what they were saying. The banana trees swayed, a pod of pelicans flew over the headlands and the red sun plunged behind the high plateaus to the west as a blinding light covered the glistening surface of the lake.

  * * *

  —

  That night, the walls of our house trembled with Maman’s rage. I heard the sounds of breaking glass, of windows being shattered and plates smashing on the floor.

  “Yvonne, calm down,” Papa kept pleading with her. “You’ll wake up the entire neighborhood!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Raw emotion had transformed Maman’s voice into a torrent of mud and gravel. A flood of words, a roar of insults filled the
night. The noises were moving about our property: I could hear Maman howling below my window, then destroying the car windscreen. After that, silence, until the violence began rumbling again, all around. I watched my parents’ footsteps to-ing and fro-ing in the light that filtered under my bedroom door. My little finger worried at a hole in the mosquito net over my bed. Their voices were indistinguishable, distorted by the high and low notes bouncing off the tiles and reverberating in the false ceiling, I could no longer tell what was French and what Kirundi, what was shouting and what were tears, whether these were my parents battling or the neighborhood dogs fighting to the death. I clung to my happy existence for the last time, but no matter how hard I tried to stop it from escaping, it was coated in the same palm oil that had glistened at the factory in Rumonge, and it slipped through my fingers. Yes, this was to be our last Sunday, all four of us together, as a family. That night, Maman left our house, Papa held back his tears and, while Ana was sleeping with clenched fists, my little finger tore the netting that had always protected me from mosquitoes.

  4

  To make matters worse, it was almost Christmas. After an argument between Papa and Maman over who would have us for the holidays, it was agreed I would stay with Papa while Ana went with Maman to visit Eusébie, one of Maman’s aunts who lived in Kigali. This would be the first time Maman had been back to Rwanda since 1963. The situation seemed more stable now, thanks to new peace agreements between the government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebels of Maman’s generation who were themselves the sons and daughters of exiles.

  Papa and I spent Christmas together, just the two of us. My present was a red BMX bike with multicolored tassels on the handles. I was so excited that, at first light on Christmas morning and before Papa was awake, I took it to show the twins who lived in the house opposite, at the entrance to our street. They were suitably impressed. We messed about doing tchélélés—skids—in the gravel. Then Papa appeared in his striped pajamas, livid, and dished out a slap, in full view of my friends, for leaving the house so early without permission. I didn’t cry, or perhaps I did a little, but my tears were from the dust kicked up by our skids, or else a fly caught in my eye, I can’t remember now.