by Gaël Faye
With the remains of our crop, we returned to the Combi to gorge ourselves in an orgy of mangoes. Juice flowed down our chins, our cheeks, our arms, our clothes, and our feet. The slippery stones were sucked, sheared and shaved, while the underside of the skin was scraped and cleared out, then cleaned again. The stringy flesh clung between our teeth.
Once we were sated and inebriated from all that juice and fruit pulp, short of breath and round of belly, the five of us flopped onto the dusty old Combi seats, heads lolling backward. Our hands were sticky and our nails black, our smiles broad and our hearts sugary. Ours was the well-earned rest of the mango-pickers.
“Why don’t we mess around in the Muha?” suggested Armand.
“Nah, not the river, I’d rather go fishing at the sailing club!” said Gino.
“How about a game of football on the pitch at the International School?” the twins joined in.
“We could head over to the Swiss guy’s place to play Atari?” I said.
“Forget about it, he’s an idiot, that piece of cheese-with-holes-in! He charges five hundred francs for a round of Pac-Man!”
We ended up walking down the river Muha, all the way to the sailing club. It was a proper expedition. At one point, we stumbled upon a waterfall that nearly swept the twins away. The rainy season had made the current stronger. In front of the sailing club, we made fishing rods from bamboo reeds and bought maggots and flour as bait. The Omani seller from the Asian neighborhood was always down on the beach. People called him Ninja because he spent his days performing karate moves in thin air while shouting, as if he were fighting thousands of invisible enemies. Grown-ups said he was crazy, with his martial-arts obsession. But the children were fond of him: we reckoned what he did was a lot more normal than plenty of other grown-up stuff, like organizing military parades, spraying deodorant under their arms, wearing ties in hot weather, sitting in the dark drinking beer all night, and listening to Zairean rumbas that never seemed to end.
* * *
—
We sat down on the riverbank, in front of the sailing-club restaurant, a few meters from a pod of frolicking hippopotamuses. There was a strong wind, the lake was flecked with the white crests of waves, and the spray at the foot of the rocks looked like soapy foam. Gino started peeing in the water. He wanted us to have a who-can-pee-farthest competition, but nobody was in the mood. The twins had barely recovered from being circumcized, Armand was shy about that part of his anatomy, and when I saw that the others weren’t joining in, I bailed out.
“You bunch of wimps, you chicken shits, you lumps of rotten goat’s meat!”
“Up yours, Gino, go ahead and piss as far as Zaire, and then Mobutu can send the BSP to cut your balls off.”
“It’s Francis’s balls I’m going to cut off, if I keep seeing him hanging around our area,” Gino replied, still peeing as far as possible.
“Here we go! It’s been a while since you mentioned his name. You’d better watch out, or we’ll think you’ve got a crush on him.”
“Kinanira is ours! I’m going to beat the shit out of that son-of-a-you-know-what!” Gino shouted, leaning into the wind and opening his arms wide.
“Stop showing off, we all know you won’t do anything to him. Your mouth is so full of shit, you’re like a crocodile from the Ganges!”
Francis was old in our eyes, about thirteen or fourteen. He was the bitter enemy of Gino and our crew. The trouble was, Francis was stronger than all five of us put together. Not that he looked particularly solid; far from it, he was all wiry. Dry as deadwood. But to us he seemed invincible. His arms and legs were like lianas covered with scars and burns. It was as if he had metal plates under his skin in some places, preventing him from experiencing any pain. One day, he cornered Armand because he wanted to extort the Jojo chewing gum we’d just bought from the kiosk. I gave him one hell of a kick in the shin to make my getaway, and he didn’t even wince. I was speechless.
Francis lived with an elderly uncle, opposite the Muha bridge, just one and a half streets away, in a gloomy house covered in lichen. The river flowed past the bottom of his garden, thick and brown like an African rock python. We used to hide in the ditch when we went past his house. He hated us with a vengeance, calling us rich kids and spoiled brats with afternoon tea at four o’clock. This drove Gino mad, what with his dreams of becoming the boss of Bujumbura. Francis claimed to be a former mayibobo, a street kid, with first-hand knowledge of the gangs from Ngagara and Bwiza, the ones people called “The Invincibles” and “The Diehards,” and which had featured in the newspapers for a while now because they fleeced honest citizens.
I didn’t dare admit to the others that I was scared of Francis. I wasn’t keen when Gino insisted on fights and fisticuffs to protect our street, because I could see my friends becoming increasingly fired up by what he said. Not that I wasn’t roused too, but I preferred it when we made dugouts from the trunks of banana trees to travel down the Muha, or watched birds through binoculars in the maize fields behind the International School, or built tree houses in the local rubber fig trees and acted out endless cowboys and Indians adventures. We knew all the hiding places in our cul-de-sac, and we wanted to stay there for the rest of our lives, all five of us, together.
* * *
—
No matter how hard I try, I can’t pinpoint the moment when we began to think differently. To believe that, from then on, we would be on one side, with our enemies like Francis on the other. I’ve raided my memories, but I can’t recall exactly when it was that we decided it was no longer enough to share the little we had and that instead we would stop trusting, that we would see other people as a threat and erect an invisible barrier against the outside world by transforming our neighborhood into a fortress and our street into a sealed-off area.
I still wonder when it was that our little gang began to feel scared.
11
Nothing is sweeter than the moment when the sun sinks behind the ridge of the mountains. Dusk brings with it the cool of evening and warm colors that deepen with every minute. This is the hour that marks a change in rhythm. People head home from work at a leisurely pace, the night watchmen come on duty, and neighbors sit out in front of their gates. There is silence before the toads and crickets start up. Often, it’s the perfect time for a game of football, for sitting with a friend on the low wall above the gutter, for gluing your ear to the radio, or for visiting a neighbor.
With the tedium of the afternoon finally ebbing away, it would be in that interval, in those slow-moving minutes, that I would find Gino in front of his garage, beneath the scented frangipani tree, and the two of us would lie down on the mat belonging to the zamu or night watchman. He would let us tune into news from the front line on his small crackling radio set. Gino would fiddle with the aerial to reduce the hissing. He translated every sentence for me, putting his whole heart into it.
The war in Rwanda had resumed a few days earlier. Pacifique had picked up his kit bag and left his guitar behind. The Rwandan Patriotic Front was on its way to liberate us, Gino declared. He cursed the fact that he was stuck here unable to do anything: as far as he was concerned, we were cowards, our job was to go and fight. There were rumors of mixed-race kids like us joining up. Gino even claimed that some of them were Kadogos, child soldiers of twelve or thirteen.
Gino, my best friend, who was scared of the trapdoor spiders we collected in his garden and who flattened himself to the ground whenever we heard a thunderstorm rumbling in the distance, this same Gino wanted to wage guerrilla warfare, with a Kalashnikov bigger than he was, in the mist of the Virunga mountains. He had scratched his skin with a branch until he drew blood, tattooing “RPF” into his forearm. His skin had scarred badly, leaving three swollen letters. He was half-Rwandan like me, but secretly I envied him because he spoke fluent Kinyarwanda and knew exactly who he was. It got on Papa’s nerves, seeing a twel
ve-year-old joining in adult conversations. But there were no secrets when it came to politics, as far as Gino was concerned. His father was a university lecturer and he always asked for Gino’s opinion on the news, recommending that he read this article in Jeune Afrique or that one in Le Soir. Which meant that Gino always understood everything grown-ups said. This was also his handicap.
Gino, the only boy I knew who drank black coffee with no sugar for breakfast, while listening to the news on Radio France Internationale with the same enthusiasm that I reserved for a Vital’O football match. When we were together, he insisted on me acquiring what he called an “identity.” According to him, there was a certain way of being, of feeling and thinking, that I should adopt. His words echoed Maman’s and Pacifique’s and he kept repeating that we were just refugees here in Burundi and we had to return to our home, to Rwanda.
My home? But that was here. Yes, I was the son of a Rwandan woman, but my reality was Burundi, the French school, Kinanira, our street. Nothing else existed. Still, with the death of Alphonse, and now Pacifique’s departure, there were times when I felt as if politics did affect me. I was afraid, though. Afraid of how Papa would react if he heard me talking about these things. Afraid because I didn’t want to introduce chaos into my neatly ordered world, for this was about war and, in my mind, that could only mean sadness and misfortune.
That evening, we were listening to the radio when nightfall caught us unawares. We withdrew into the house, where the walls of Gino’s living room displayed a gallery of animal portraits. His father was an avid photographer. At weekends, he would set off in his uniform of hat, short-sleeved shirt, capitula shorts, light sandals, and socks to go on photo-safari in the Ruvubu Natural Park. Then he would lock himself away in the blacked-out bathroom to develop his negatives. Gino’s house had the whiff of a dental surgery about it, the pong of chemicals from the photo lab mingling with the eau de toilette his father splashed on liberally. He was like a ghost, Gino’s old man. We hardly ever saw him, but you could tell he was around thanks to the pervasive smell of bleached toilets that clung to his skin, and the rattle of the typewriter on which he spent his life hammering out lectures and political books. Gino’s father liked cleanliness and order. After any simple task, such as opening the curtains or watering the plants, he would say: “Right, that’s done!” The whole stupid day long he would tick off in his head whatever he had accomplished, muttering: “That’s one more thing done!” He brushed the hairs on his forearm so they all lay in the same direction. He had a bald patch at the back of his head, which he disguised with a comb-over. On days when he wore a normal tie, he would comb over from the right; on days when he wore a bow-tie, the comb-over was from the left. He was meticulous about trimming the hairs around his sunroof, always leaving a narrow strip of bald patch exposed, like an uncamouflaged trench on his head. Despite his passion for photography, his nickname in the neighborhood was Kojak not Kodak, because of his spreading bald patch.
When he was at home, Gino wasn’t much fun to be around—he was less into messing about and spitting and burping and wedging my head between his buttocks while breaking wind. He followed me about like an infatuated poodle, checking to see if I’d flushed, if I’d left any drops on the toilet seat, if I’d put the knick-knacks back where they belonged in the living room. Not only did his father’s fussiness infect him, but it made the house seem cold and unfriendly.
Despite the warm tropical night, even Gino could sense the polar wind blasting through those rooms. After a few minutes we looked one another in the eye, sensing that neither of us felt comfortable round at his place. Without a word, we walked away from the dingy neon lighting, leaving the moths to be gobbled up by the geckos, heading out of earshot of the maddening clickety-clack of his father’s Olivetti and back out into the reassuring darkness.
When the two of us strolled along our street, we would hold hands and tell each other what was happening in our lives. Gino was the only friend I felt comfortable enough with to overcome my shyness and confide in from time to time. After my parents’ separation, I had been pondering some new questions.
“Do you miss your mother?”
“I’ll see her soon. She’s in Kigali.”
“Didn’t you tell me she was in Europe, last time?”
“Yes, but she’s back now.”
“Are your parents separated?”
“No, not really. It’s just that they don’t live together.”
“Don’t they love each other anymore?”
“Of course they do! Why d’you ask?”
“Because they don’t live together. Isn’t that what it’s like when parents don’t love each other anymore?”
“That’s what it’s like for you, Gaby, not me…”
Slowly, we drew closer to the pale glow of the storm lantern hanging from the kiosk. In front of the shipping container-cum-grocery store, I took out what remained of the thousand francs Madame Economopoulos had given us. We bought a packet of Tip Top biscuits and some Jojo chewing gum. We still had plenty of change, so Gino offered to buy me a beer at the cabaret tucked away in a recess of our street, beneath a parched flamboyant tree.
* * *
—
The cabaret was the greatest institution in Burundi. The agora of the people. The radio of the pavement. The pulse of the nation. Every neighborhood, every street boasted these little huts without lights where, under cover of darkness, people came to drink a warm beer, perched uncomfortably on a bottle rack or a low stool barely off the ground. The cabaret offered drinkers the luxury of being there without being recognized, of choosing to join in conversations, or not, without being spotted. In this country, where everyone knew everyone, the cabaret was the only place you could speak your mind freely. It afforded the same freedom as a polling booth. And for a people who had never voted, lending your voice mattered. Whether you were a mighty bwana or a simple houseboy, hearts, heads, bellies, men and women were free to express themselves without pulling rank or status at the cabaret.
Gino ordered two bottles of Primus. He enjoyed going along to hear people talking politics. How many of us were sitting under the corrugated canopy of that little shack? Nobody knew and it didn’t matter. The darkness plunged us into shadows from which only the occasional spoken word emerged here and there, at random, like a shooting star. Between each contribution, the pauses lasted an eternity. Then a fresh voice would rise up out of the void, skimming the surface before fading to silence again.
“I’m telling you, democracy is a force for good. At last the people will be able to determine their own fate. We should celebrate these presidential elections. They’ll bring us peace and progress.”
“My fellow compatriot, allow me to challenge your point of view. Democracy was invented by whites with the sole aim of dividing us. We’ve made a mistake in abandoning the single-party system. It took those whites centuries and many conflicts to reach the point where they are today. And now they’re asking us to achieve the same thing in the space of a few months. I fear our leaders are sorcerers’ apprentices, toying with a concept they only dimly understand.”
“The man who doesn’t know how to climb the tree remains on the ground.”
“I’m still thirsty…”
“Culturally, it’s ingrained in us to worship one king. One boss, one party, one nation! That unity is our motto.”
“The dog cannot a cow become.”
“This bloody thirst of mine is unquenchable…”
“It’s a fake unity. We need to develop the cult of the people, which is the only guarantee of an enduring peace.”
“Without preliminary work in the area of justice, my fear is that peace, which is the necessary framework for democracy, will simply be impossible! Thousands of our brothers were slaughtered in ’72, but not a single trial took place. If nothing is done, the sons will end up avenging their fathers.”
&
nbsp; “Nonsense! Don’t stir up the past, the future is a step forward. Death to ethnic grouping, tribalism, regionalism, and antagonism!”
“And alcoholism!”
“I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty…”
“My brothers, God is with us every step of the way, just as he accompanied his son to Golgotha…”
“Aha, now I understand! It’s that woman who’s making me thirsty. I need another beer.”
“Those whites will have triumphed with their Machiavellian scheme. They palmed off their God onto us, as well as their language and their democracy. Today, we seek out medical treatment in their countries and send our children to study in their schools. All Negroes are damned or deranged…”
“She’s cleaned me out, that bitch, but she can’t take away my thirst.”
“We’re living on the site of tragedy. Africa is shaped like a revolver. The facts are staring us in the face and there’s nothing we can do. We’ve got to leave! Head north, or wherever, but we’ve got to leave!”
“The future comes from the past, like the egg from the chicken.”
“Beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer! beer!”
We stayed a while longer, downing our warm Primuses in silence, and then I whispered goodbye in Gino’s ear. With the alcohol coursing through my veins, I wasn’t sure whether the shadow next to me was even his. But I had to get back. Papa would start worrying. I made my way home in the dark, staggering slightly. Hooting noises descended from the branches. There was a clear sky overhead, and through the darkness those nocturnal words still reached me. They can talk, the drunks at the cabaret, just as they like to listen, to prise the caps off beers and thoughts. Theirs are interchangeable spirits, floating voices, erratic heartbeats. In the ashen hours of night, individuals disappear and all that remains is the country talking to itself.