by Gaël Faye
For New Year’s Day, Papa decided to take me on a hike through the Kibira forest. We spent the night in a village of pygmy potters, at an altitude of more than two thousand three hundred meters. The temperature was close to zero. At midnight, Papa let me have a few sips of banana beer to help warm me up, and to celebrate the start of 1993. Then we lay down together on the beaten earth, snuggled up by the fire.
Papa and I tiptoed out of the hut at dawn, while the pygmies snored on, their heads resting on the calabashes they used for drinking urwagwa, the local banana beer. Outside, the ground was covered in hoarfrost, the dew transformed into white crystals as a thick fog shrouded the tops of the eucalyptus trees. We followed a winding path through the forest. I found a large black-and-white beetle on a rotten trunk and popped it inside a metal box, making it the first specimen in my insect collection. As the sun rose gradually in the sky, the cool of dawn gave way to a dusty humidity. Papa walked in front of me, in silence, sweat turning his hair lank but frizzy just above the neck. The cries of baboons rang out through the forest. From time to time I was startled by something moving in the undergrowth, probably a serval cat or a civet.
Toward the end of the day we crossed paths with a group of pygmies, accompanied by a pack of basenji hunting dogs. They were from the village of blacksmiths, higher up in the mountains, and returning from a hunting expedition. They wore their bows slung across their shoulders, and their haul included the corpses of moles, Gambian pouched rats, and a chimpanzee. Papa was fascinated by these diminutive men who had maintained the same way of life for thousands of years. When we left them, his voice was tinged with sadness as he talked to me about the inevitable disappearance of their world because of modern life, progress, and Christian missions.
On the final stretch of track before we returned to the car, Papa asked me to stop.
“Go over there!” he said, producing a disposable camera. “I’ll take a photo of you, as a souvenir.”
I climbed a tree shaped like a giant catapult and stood between the two trunks, while Papa turned the little notched wheel. Smile! There was a click followed by the whirr of the film rewinding.
Back in the village, we thanked the pygmies for their welcome and hospitality. The kids ran behind our car for several kilometers, trying to grab hold of it until we reached the asphalt road. As we headed down to Bugarama, we were overtaken by the “suicide-bananas”: bikers who pedaled as fast as the cars, their racks laden with heavy clusters of bananas or sacks of coal weighing in at tens of kilos. At that speed, a fall could prove fatal and the slightest swerve meant you might end up at the bottom of a precipice—in the cemetery of Tanzanian trucks and crushed minibuses. On the other side of the road the same cyclists, having delivered their wares to the capital, were climbing back up the mountain by discreetly holding onto the rear bumpers of the trucks. I tried to picture myself on my red BMX with its colorful tassels careering round the bends from Bugarama, overtaking cars and trucks in a crazy race, with the twins, Armand and Gino, cheering me on my arrival in Bujumbura, as if I’d just won the Tour de France.
It was dark when we arrived home. Papa tooted the horn several times in front of our gates that bore the sign: “Beware of the dog! Imbwa Makali.” The gardener limped over to open up, followed by our small russet-and-white curly-haired dog, a chance-cross between a bichon Maltese and a ratter, whose heart wasn’t in playing his role as advertized.
“Where’s Calixte?” Papa asked the gardener, stepping out of the car. “How come it’s you opening the gates?”
“Calixte has vanished, Boss.”
The dog was still following the gardener. He didn’t have a tail, so he wagged his hindquarters as a sign of contentment. He also bared his gums, which made it look as if he were smiling.
“What do you mean, vanished?”
“He left very early this morning, and he won’t be coming back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’ve been a few problems with Calixte, Boss. Yesterday, we celebrated New Year’s. While I was asleep, he went into the storehouse and stole a lot of gear. Then, he vanished…That’s all I can tell you.”
“What did he steal?”
“A wheelbarrow, a toolbox, a grinder, a soldering iron, two cans of paint…”
The gardener was in full flow with his list, but Papa stopped him with his hand.
“All right! All right! I’ll register a complaint on Monday.”
“He also stole Monsieur Gabriel’s bicycle,” the gardener added.
I felt sick to my stomach. No way. Surely Calixte would never do something like that? I was crying real tears now. It felt as if the whole world was against me.
“Don’t worry, Gaby,” Papa kept saying, “we’ll find your bike.”
5
The following Sunday, the day before school began, Ana came back from Rwanda. Maman dropped her off at the house in the early afternoon. Ana’s hair had been plaited into fine braids with blond highlights. Papa didn’t approve, he thought the color was vulgar for a little girl. He argued with Maman, who immediately started up her motorbike and drove off, before I’d even had the chance to give her a kiss or wish her a happy New Year. I stood on the steps by the front door for the longest time, convinced that she’d be back as soon as she realized she had forgotten me.
Then the twins came over to tell me about their Christmas holidays at their grandmother’s place in the countryside.
“It was horrible! There was no bathroom, so we had to wash stark naked in the courtyard in front of everybody. We swear, in God’s name, Gaby!”
“And they’re not used to seeing anyone mixed race, so the kids from the village came to spy on us through the fencing. ‘Little white butts!’ they kept shouting. How mean is that? Mamie shooed them away by throwing stones at them.”
“That’s when she noticed we weren’t circumcized.”
“D’you even know what circumcized means?”
I shook my head.
“It means snipping your willy!”
“So our grandmother asked our uncle to circumcize us.”
“We didn’t know what it meant, either. So, to begin with, we weren’t really bothered. Mamie was speaking to Tonton Sosthène in Kirundi, and we couldn’t understand what they were saying, but she kept pointing at our trouser flies. We wanted to call our parents, because we had a feeling that our grandmother and uncle were up to no good. The trouble is, it’s the countryside where they live, for real, no telephone, no electricity. The toilets are a hole in the ground with long-stay flies parked up everywhere! In God’s name!”
Every time they swore, the twins said “In God’s name” and drew a finger across their neck, like a knife slitting a chicken’s throat, before clicking in the air, thumb against index, snap!
“Tonton Sosthène turned up with our older cousins, Godefroy and Balthazar. They took us to the edge of the village, and into a small earth house with a wooden table in the middle of the room.”
“Tonton had bought a razor blade in the shop.”
“Godefroy held my arms behind my back while Balthazar blocked my legs. And then Tonton Sosthène pulled my pants down. He caught hold of my willy, put it on the table, unwrapped the Gillette, tugged on the skin and sniiip! He cut off the end! Then he put salt water on it to disinfect it. I swear, in God’s name!”
“Yébabawé! I’m telling you, when I saw that I ran for the hills, like an impala being chased by leopards. But the cousins caught me, pinned me down, and sniiip! Same thing!”
“Afterward, Tonton Sosthène put our willy skins in a matchbox that he gave to Mamie. She opened the box to check the job had been done properly. You could see ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones written on her face, in God’s name! It was evil! To top it all, she buried our willy skins on her plot of land, under the banana trees!”
“Our willy
skins have gone up to heaven! May God rest their souls!”
“Amen!”
“But that wasn’t the last of it! No, we had to wear dresses, like girls, because—get this—trousers would rub you where the wound is.”
“Wearing a dress was, like, an international embarrassment!”
“When our parents came to collect us at the end of the holidays, they were surprised by our outfits. Our father asked us what we were doing in skirts.”
“We told him the whole story. Papa was furious with Mamie, he insisted we were French, not Jewish!”
“But our mother tried explaining it was for hygiene reasons. To prevent any dirt from getting stuck inside.”
The twins were always out of breath by the time they got to the end of one of their stories. They gesticulated wildly to explain and bring drama to the tiniest detail. A deaf person could have understood them. When they spoke, it was a helter-skelter of words and a pile-up of phrases. As soon as one of them finished a sentence, the other one took over, like the baton change in a relay race.
“I don’t believe you!” I told them.
Because, the fact was, the twins had a habit of lying. If one of them started fibbing, the other would keep going, even though they hadn’t planned it. They had the gift of the gab. My father always said they were tall-story merchants, prestidigitators of the truth. When I told them I thought they were having me on, they chorused, “We swear, in God’s name!” Then they drew a finger across their necks and clicked in the air, index against thumb, snap! They dropped their pants at the same time to reveal two little stubs of purplish-red meat. I shut my eyes in disgust.
“And you know what?” they added, pulling up their pants. “In our grandmother’s village we saw someone riding your bike. We swear, in God’s name!”
6
“Gaby! Gaby!”
Papa’s hoarse voice woke me. I leaped out of bed, worried I’d be late for school. I often failed to wake up and Papa had to call me. Ana, by contrast, was always ahead of the game and dressed, with clips in her neatly brushed hair, coconut butter applied to her body, teeth cleaned and shoes polished. She would even remember to put her gourd in the fridge the night before, so that her water was nice and cool in the morning. She handed in her homework early and learned her lessons off by heart. What a girl! She always felt like my older sister, despite being three years younger. When I made it out into the hallway, I saw that Papa’s bedroom door was closed. He was still asleep. Once again I’d fallen into the trap: the parrot had been mimicking him.
I headed out to sit on our barza, the covered terrace opposite the birdcage. Our parrot was pecking at peanuts by gripping them in his claws, then using his hooked beak to crush the shells and extract the seeds. He glanced at me, a black pupil in a yellow eye, before whistling the opening bars of the “Marseillaise,” which Papa had taught him. He poked his head between the bars of the cage for me to stroke him. When my fingers sank into his gray plumage I could feel the hot pink flesh of his neck.
In the courtyard, a gaggle of geese ambled in single file past the night watchman who was crouched on his mat, a thick gray blanket pulled up to his chin, as he listened to a small radio that broadcast the morning news in Kirundi. Prothé came through the gates and walked up the path, climbing the three steps to the terrace to greet me. He had lost a lot of weight and while he had always looked older than his years, his gaunt features now made him resemble an old man. He hadn’t come to work for the past few weeks because of the cerebral malaria that had nearly finished him off. Papa had paid all the medical bills, as well as his sessions with a traditional healer. I followed Prothé into the kitchen, where he changed out of his town clothes and into his work outfit: a threadbare shirt, trousers that were too short for him, and a pair of fluorescent plastic sandals.
“Would you prefer an omelet or a fried egg, Monsieur Gabriel?” he asked, inspecting the fridge.
“Two fried eggs please, Prothé.”
Ana and I were already sitting on the barza, waiting for our breakfast, when Papa appeared with a few small cuts to his face and the remains of some shaving cream behind his left ear. On a large tray, Prothé brought out a Thermos of tea, a pot of honey, a saucer of powdered milk, margarine, gooseberry jam, and my fried eggs, slightly crispy, just the way I liked them.
“Morning, Prothé!” said Papa, noticing his employee’s sallow complexion.
The cook nodded shyly.
“Looks like you’re doing better!”
“Yes, I am, thank you, Monsieur. Thank you for your help. My family is very grateful to you. We pray for you, Monsieur.”
“Don’t thank me. As you know, the money I paid for your treatment will be docked from next month’s wages,” said Papa, matter-of-factly.
Prothé’s face hardened. He picked up the tray and disappeared into the kitchen as Donatien arrived on the terrace with a rolling gait. He was in an abacost, the jacket worn without a shirt or a tie that Mobutu had imposed on Zaireans to free them from the colonial style; this one was short-sleeved and lightweight, in a dark fabric. Donatien had been Papa’s foreman for twenty years, and was his most loyal employee. The workers on the construction sites called him mzee, the elder, although he was no more than forty. Donatien was from Zaire and had come to Burundi straight after his baccalaureate to work in the palm-oil factory at Rumonge, where Papa was supervisor at the time. He never left and now lived in the north of Bujumbura, in the district of Kamenge, with his wife and three sons. He always had biro lids peeping out of his pocket and, whenever he could, he read passages from the Bible that he kept tucked inside a crocodile-skin satchel. Every morning, Papa would give Donatien his instructions for the day and hand over a sum of money to pay the daily laborers.
The next person to make his entrance on the terrace was Innocent, who had come to collect the keys for Papa’s pick-up truck. Innocent was a young Burundian, barely twenty years old. He was tall and thin, with a vertical scar running down his forehead that gave him a severe appearance he cultivated. A toothpick, already chewed on a thousand times, was forever wandering from one corner of his mouth to the other. He wore baggy trousers, a baseball cap, chunky white trainers, and a bracelet in the pan-African colors of red, green, and yellow. He was frequently in a foul mood and adopted a standoffish attitude toward the other employees, but Papa was very attached to him. Innocent was more than just the driver for Papa’s business, he was a fixer. He knew Bujumbura inside out and had contacts everywhere: from the garage owners in Bwiza, the scrap-metal merchants in Buyenzi and the shopkeepers in the Asian quarter, to the soldiers in Camp Muha, the prostitutes in Kwijabe, and the meatball-sellers in the Central Market….He knew whose palm to grease in order to unblock administrative requests that had been stuck for months on the desks of minor officials. The police never stopped him, and street kids watched over our pick-up for free.
Having communicated his instructions for the day, Papa poured the remains of the Thermos of tea into a pot containing a sad-leafed oleander, whistled two seconds of the “Marseillaise” to the parrot, and then we all jumped into the car.
7
The French school in Bujumbura brought together students of all ages, from maternelle through to terminale, within its sprawling grounds. There were two main entrances: the senior entrance, by the Prince Louis Rwagasore Stadium and boulevard de l’Indépendence, leading directly to the office building, as well as the collège and lycée classrooms; and the entrance for the infants, on the corner of avenue Muyinga and boulevard de l’Uprona. In the middle was the école primaire, which we attended. Force of habit meant that Papa still dropped us off at the infants’ entrance.
“Innocent will pick you up at midday and drive you to your mother’s shop. I’ll be back tomorrow, I have to visit one of my construction sites out of town.”
“That’s fine, Papa,” said Ana sensibly.
“Gabriel, n
ext Saturday you’ll go with Innocent and Donatien to Cibitoke to sort out this bike business. You need to be with them in order to identify it. Don’t worry, we’ll find your bike.”
* * *
—
That morning, the classroom was fizzing with excitement. Our teacher had given each of us a letter, sent by a class of ten- and eleven-year-old students, just like us, but from Orléans in France. We couldn’t wait to find out who our pen pals were. On the envelope in front of me, my name had been written in pink capital letters, surrounded by French flags, stars, and some hearts. The paper was sweetly perfumed. I unfolded the letter carefully. Inside, neat handwriting sloped to the left:
Friday 11th December 1992
Dear Gabriel,
My name is Laure and I am ten years old, just like you. I live in Orléans in a house with a garden. I’m tall with blond hair down to my shoulders, green eyes, and freckles. My little brother is called Mathieu. My dad is a doctor and my mum doesn’t go to work. I like playing basketball and I know how to make crepes and bake biscuits. What about you?
I also like singing and dancing. What about you? I like watching TV. What about you? I don’t like reading. What about you? When I grow up, I want to be a doctor like my dad. Every holiday, I stay with my cousins in the Vendée. Next year, I’m going to visit a new theme park called Disneyland. Do you know it? Can you send me your photo?