by Gaël Faye
I can’t wait to hear back from you.
Love,
Laure
PS: Did you get the rice we sent you?
Laure had enclosed her photo. She looked like one of Ana’s dolls. I felt intimidated by her letter and I blushed when I read the word “love.” It was as if I’d been sent a parcel of treats: I was suddenly opening the doors to a mysterious world that I had never imagined existed. Laure from France, with her green eyes and blond hair, this girl who lived in a faraway place, was sending love to me, Gaby, from Kinanira. I was worried someone might notice my excitement, so I tucked her photo into a pocket of my schoolbag and put the letter back inside its envelope. I was already wondering which photo of me I could send her.
In the next lesson, the teacher asked each of us to write a letter in response to our pen pals.
Monday 4th January 1993
Dear Laure,
My name is Gaby. Everything has a name, doesn’t it? Roads, trees, insects…My neighborhood, for example, is Kinanira. My city is Bujumbura. My country is Burundi. My sister, mother and father, and my friends all have a name. A name they didn’t choose. We’re born with our name, and that’s just how it is. One day, I asked my friends and family to call me Gaby instead of Gabriel, that way I could choose, rather than other people choosing for me. So please could you call me Gaby? I’ve got brown eyes, which means I only see people in brown. My mother, my father, my sister, Prothé, Donatien, Innocent, my friends…they’ve all got milk-with-coffee skin. Everyone sees the world through the color of their eyes. You’ve got green eyes, so I’d look green to you. I like lots of things I don’t like. I like the sugar in ice-cream but not the cold. I like swimming pools but not the chlorine. I like school because of my friends and the atmosphere but I don’t like the lessons. Grammar, subtraction, essays, punishments—they’re so boring, it’s barbaric! When I grow up I want to be a mechanic, so nothing ever stays broken in my life. It’s important to know how to fix things when they stop working. But all that’s a long way off, I’m only ten and time drags sometimes, mainly in the afternoons when there’s no school and on Sundays because there’s nothing to do round at my grandmother’s. Two months ago, the whole school had to be vaccinated against meningitis. It’s a big deal if your brain gets sick, because you can’t think anymore. So, in front of all the parents, the principal told us we had to have our injections, which I guess you’d expect him to say, what with our brains being his job and everything. This year, we’re going to hold elections for the President of the Republic in Burundi. It’s the first time it’s happened. I won’t be able to vote, I’ll have to wait until I’m a mechanic. But I’ll tell you the winner’s name, I promise!
Bye for now.
Love,
Gaby
PS: I’ll find out about the rice.
8
I set off very early with Innocent and Donatien. The pick-up rattled along faster than usual, without any bags of concrete, or spades and pickaxes piled into the back. The three of us were embarking on a funny sort of adventure. Or that’s what I was thinking as we approached the first military roadblock on the way out of Buja. What would we tell the soldiers if they stopped us? That we were on a dawn raid, headed for the other end of the country, to recover a stolen bicycle? We looked suspicious, no doubt about it. Innocent was at the wheel, chewing on the same old toothpick. It was a disgusting habit, in my view. All the wasters in Bujumbura had started doing it. Men who wanted to look tough and pass for cowboys, men like Innocent. I guess that one day, after watching a Clint Eastwood matinée at the Ciné Cameo, some poor guy figured he could stand out from the crowd, and in no time the trend spread through the city like wildfire. Two things travel fast in Bujumbura: rumors and trends.
Donatien had been slumped in a sulk from the start. He was sitting in the middle and couldn’t find a comfortable position for his legs, because of the gearstick. He was all wonky, his left shoulder against Innocent’s and his legs at an angle. I’d made a big fuss about wanting to be next to the window: it was raining and I liked following the trail of water droplets down the window, as well as blowing on the glass to draw in the condensation with my finger. It passed the time on long journeys through the countryside.
By the time we arrived in Cibitoke it had stopped raining. Donatien refused to let us drive up the track to the home of the twins’ grandmother, because there was too much mud and we risked getting stuck. He suggested continuing by foot, but Innocent didn’t want to get his white trainers dirty. So I went ahead with Donatien and we left Innocent in the truck, picking his stupid teeth.
Up in the hills, even when you think you’re alone, there are always hundreds of pairs of eyes watching you, and your presence is announced for kilometers around by voices that ricochet from one hut—or rugo—to another. So, by the time we reached the old woman she was already waiting for us and holding two glasses of milk curds. Donatien and I couldn’t speak much Kirundi, especially not the complex and poetic Kirundi of the hills, which required more than a few words of Swahili or French to plug the gaping holes in our vocabulary. I’d never really learned Kirundi, because everybody spoke French in Buja. Donatien was from Kivu in Zaire, and the Zaireans from Kivu often speak only Swahili or classic Sorbonne-style French.
Here, it was a very different story. In the interior of the country, it’s impossible to have a conversation with people like the twins’ grandmother: there are too many subtleties in their language, with its references to proverbs from time immemorial and expressions that date back to the Stone Age. Donatien and I were not at that level. Still, the old woman tried explaining where we could find the bicycle’s new owner. Having failed to understand a single word she had spoken, we made our way back down to the car with Godefroy and Balthazar, the twins’ famous willy-snipping cousins, to find Innocent, who would have to act as our translator. We hit the road again, with the cousins in the back of the pick-up ready to show us the way. Two kilometers out of town, another track led us to a village where we found a boy called Mathias, the one who’d been spotted by the twins riding my bike. It turned out that this Mathias had sold it on to a certain Stanislas, from Gihomba. So we climbed back into the pick-up, along with the two cousins plus Mathias, to track down the famous Stanislas, who, it transpired, had in turn sold the bike to a beekeeper in Kurigitari. Off we set again, this time bound for Kurigitari and with Stanislas on board. It was the same story with the beekeeper, who joined us to help with the address of the new owner, a man from Gitaba, by the name of Jean-Bosco. Once in Gitaba, we were informed that Jean-Bosco was in Cibitoke. So back we went to Cibitoke. And there, Jean-Bosco explained that he had just sold the bike to a farmer from Gitaba…
About-turn. Except that, as we were driving along the main road out of Cibitoke, we got stopped by the police who enquired what we were up to, with nine of us piled into one vehicle. Innocent started telling the story of the stolen bike and the hunt for its new owner. It was midday and curious passersby were quick to rush over. In no time, hundreds of people had surrounded the pick-up.
Opposite us was the central cabaret, which did the biggest trade in drinks in town. The mayor and a few local bigwigs were polishing off a serving of goat-meat skewers washed down with bottles of warm Primus. The crowd that had gathered around us swiftly attracted their attention. The mayor stood up gingerly from his stool. He burped, hoisted up his trousers, adjusted his belt, and headed in our direction like a weary chameleon, slicing through the crowd with his big belly, greasy chops, and a greenish-yellow shirt covered in meat stains. His face was long and thin, but his fat auntie’s backside extended right up the middle of his back, and his paunch was as taut and stretched as that of a pregnant woman at full term. He looked like a calabash, this mayor.
While the rabble argued among itself, I suddenly spotted Calixte in the crowd. The same Calixte who had stolen my bike. No sooner had I sounded the alert than he scarpered faste
r than a green mamba. The entire town ran after him, as if chasing a chicken whose neck needed wringing in time for lunch. There’s nothing like a spot of blood sport during the midday lull to kill time in the sleepy provinces. Popular justice is the name they give to lynching, it has the benefit of sounding civilized. Luckily, the crowd didn’t have the last word that day. They caught Calixte, but the police swiftly intercepted the democratic thrashing. At which point the mayor attempted to gain the upper hand by playing the wise man intent on calming heated spirits, with a pompous speech about the importance of being an honest citizen. But his flights of lyricism fell flat, at that hour and in that swelter. He gave up mid-speech and returned to his proper place, in front of a beer, to calm his own spirit. Calixte, who was in a terrible mess, was remanded in custody while Donatien rushed off to press charges.
Putting Calixte behind bars didn’t fix the problem of my bike, so we decided to look up the beekeeper from Gitaba. This meant, once again, following the track that led to the twins’ grandmother’s house and then continuing farther. Innocent insisted on taking matters into his own hands and driving the pick-up through the mud, despite Donatien’s insistent warnings about getting stuck. In the locality of Gitaba there was a small clay house with a roof covered in banana-tree leaves. The hut was at the top of a hill, where we were captivated by the view that suddenly revealed itself. Rain had washed the sky, while the rays of sunshine striking the sodden ground traced spirals of pinkish mist above a vast green plain intersected by the ocher waters of the Rusizi river. Donatien admired the spectacle with religious awe, while Innocent, who couldn’t have cared less, removed the grime from under his fingernails with the same revolting toothpick that had been in his mouth moments earlier. The beauty of the world wasn’t his concern, he was only interested in the filth from his own body.
In the yard, a woman was kneeling on a mat grinding sorghum into flour. Behind her, a man perched on a stool invited us over. He was the farmer. At home, when a stranger turned up, even before saying hello, Papa would bark irritably: “What d’you want?” Here it was the opposite, there was restraint and politeness. We didn’t feel like strangers. No matter that we’d appeared unannounced in these people’s small yard, tucked away on a mountaintop, they gave us the reassuring impression that they’d been expecting us for a long time. Before enquiring as to the reason for our visit, the farmer invited us to be seated. He had just returned from the fields. His bare feet were covered in dry mud, his shirt patched and his cotton trousers rolled up at the knees. Behind him, an earth-clogged hoe was propped against the hut wall. A girl brought us three chairs, while the woman smiled and carried on grinding the grain between two stones.
We had barely sat down when a boy of my age pedaled at high speed into the yard on my bike. Without stopping to think, I leaped from my chair and flung myself at the handlebars. The family stood up in bewilderment, casting distraught looks in our direction. The boy was too surprised to resist as I wrenched the bike out of his hands. There was a very awkward pause and Donatien shook Innocent’s shoulder, urging him to speak in Kirundi and explain the reason for our visit. Innocent exerted a superhuman effort to stir himself from his seat, where he had already made himself comfortable. He seemed unenthusiastic about repeating the same explanations he’d given earlier to the police, but eventually he told the whole story, right from the beginning, in a flat monotone. The family listened in silence. The boy’s face crumpled as the situation gradually dawned on him. When Innocent had finished, the farmer began to explain in turn, tilting his head to the left and opening the palms of his hands to the sky, as if imploring us to spare his life. He said that he had made sacrifices in order to give his son this present, that he had saved up for a long time, that they were people of modest means and good Christians. Innocent didn’t appear to be listening: he scratched the inside of his ear with his toothpick, before inspecting the gunge on the tip with keen interest. Donatien was embarrassed that our hosts clearly felt so confused and dismayed, but he didn’t dare say anything. While the farmer was still talking, Innocent walked toward me, grabbed the bike, and loaded it into the back of the pick-up. His irritation was apparent as he coldly advised the family to confront the person responsible for their misfortune, currently to be found in prison in Cibitoke. He pointed out that all they had to do was press charges against Calixte in order to get their money back. Then he signaled to me to climb into the pick-up. Donatien joined us reluctantly. I could see that his mind was racing for a solution. He took a deep breath as he sat down next to me in the front.
“Gabriel, for pity’s sake, let’s not take the bike. What we’re doing is worse than stealing. We’re breaking a child’s heart.”
“That’s all?” jibed Innocent.
“What about me?” I wanted to know. “My heart was broken when Calixte stole my bike.”
“Of course it was, but the bike doesn’t mean as much to you as it does to this boy,” Donatien continued. “He’s very poor and his father worked so hard to give him this present. If we leave with the bike, he’ll never own another one again.”
“What are you playing at?” Innocent shot Donatien a nasty look. “D ’ you think you’re Robin Hood or something? Just because they’re a poor family, are we supposed to hand over what doesn’t belong to them?”
“Innocent, you and I grew up in this kind of poverty. We both know they’ll never get their money back, which means they’ll have lost years’ worth of savings through no fault of their own. You understand how it goes, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend! And here’s my advice: stop feeling sorry for these people. They’re all cheats and liars in backward places like this.”
“Gabriel,” said Donatien, turning to face me again, “we could tell the boss we didn’t manage to find your bike, and then he’ll buy you another one. It’ll be our little secret, for which God will forgive us, because it’s in the name of doing good. To help a poor child.”
“So your plan is to lie?” asked Innocent. “I thought your precious God was against that kind of thing? Leave Gabriel out of it, stop blaming him. Anyway, the other kid lives on a bloody farm, what’s he going to do with a BMX? Let’s go!”
I couldn’t bring myself to turn around or look in the rear-view mirror. Our mission was accomplished. We had found my bike. The rest was none of my business, or that’s what Innocent said.
When we got stuck in the mud a few minutes later, just as Donatien had predicted we would, he recited a passage from the Bible that spoke about difficult times, selfish men, the end of days, and then he began muttering all sorts of things under his breath that frightened me. He took it as a sign that God was punishing us for our bad deed. I pretended to be asleep for the entire journey, to avoid meeting his eye. However much I tried to justify what we’d done, I felt a mounting sense of shame. When we arrived back at the house, I told Innocent and Donatien that I would never touch the bike again, to make amends for my behavior. Staring at me with a mixture of exasperation and disbelief, Innocent muttered, “Spoiled brat,” and headed off to the kiosk to buy a new packet of toothpicks. Donatien leaned over me, his big square head a few centimeters from my face, his bitter breath hinting at an empty, acidic stomach. His eyes brimmed with an icy anger that cut me to the core.
“The damage is done, kid,” he spelled out slowly.
9
My grandmother lived in a small house with green rendered walls, in a settlement administered by the Office of African Municipalities (OCAF), in Ngagara, District 2, Bujumbura. Mamie shared the house with her mother, who was my great-grandmother Rosalie, as well as Mamie’s son, my uncle Pacifique, studying in his final year at the lycée Saint-Albert. Pacifique was a seriously good-looking guy. Every girl in the neighborhood was after him. But his only loves were his comic books, his guitar, and singing. His voice wasn’t as exceptional as Maman’s, but he was an outstanding performer. He worshipped the French crooners we
heard constantly on the radio, singing about love, or sadness, or sadness in love. His renditions of their songs made them his own. As he closed his eyes, screwed up his face and began to weep, the whole family fell quiet, even old Rosalie who didn’t understand a word of French. We listened without moving, or if we did, it was just the tips of our ears that wiggled, like the hippopotamuses floating in the port.
For the most part, Mamie’s neighbors were Rwandans who had left their country to escape carnage, massacres, wars, pogroms, purges, destruction, fires, tsetse flies, pillaging, apartheid, rapes, murders, settling of scores, and I don’t know what else. Like Maman and her family, they had fled those problems only to encounter new ones in Burundi—poverty, exclusion, quotas, xenophobia, rejection, being made into scapegoats, depression, homesickness, and nostalgia. The problems of refugees.
War had broken out in Rwanda two years ago, when I turned eight. It happened at the beginning of the school year. We heard on Radio France Internationale that the rebels—Rwandan refugees who had joined from the bordering countries of Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire—had launched a surprise attack. Their army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, was on the move. Maman danced and sang when she heard this news. I had never seen her so elated.
But her happiness had been short-lived. A few days later we had received news of the death of Alphonse. Alphonse was Maman’s other brother, the oldest in the family and Mamie’s pride and joy. He was a brilliant man: a chemical engineer awarded degrees from the most prestigious universities in Europe and America. It was Alphonse who had coached me in maths and planted in my head the idea of becoming a mechanic. Papa was very fond of him and used to say: “If we had ten men like Alphonse, Burundi would become the next Singapore in no time.” Alphonse had been top of the class, but he was also as laid-back as the class joker. He was always having fun, joking around, tickling us under the arms and kissing Maman on the neck to embarrass her. And when he laughed, happiness washed over the walls of Mamie’s small living room like a fresh lick of paint.