by Gaël Faye
Finally, a car pulled up. I recognized the Pajero’s horn and rushed over to open the gates. Papa wore a serious expression and there were bags under his eyes. He got out of the car and asked if we were all right. I nodded, but Ana was sulking, she wanted to give him a hard time for abandoning us all night. Papa headed straight to the living room and switched on the radio. We heard the same piece of music that had been wafting in and out of earshot before.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Papa kept saying over and over again, his head in his hands.
Later on, I discovered that it was traditional to play classical music during a military coup. On November 28, 1966, for Michel Micombero’s coup, it was Schubert’s piano sonata No. 21; on November 9, 1976, for Jean-Baptiste Bagaza’s coup, it was Beethoven’s 7th symphony; and on September 3, 1987, for Pierre Buyoya’s coup, it was Chopin’s Bolero in C major.
On this day, October 21, 1993, we were treated to Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. Papa secured the gates using a heavy chain and several padlocks. He ordered us not to leave the house and to stay away from the windows. Then he set up our mattresses in the hallway because of the risk of stray bullets. We spent the whole day lying on the floor. It was weird: like camping in our own house.
Papa shut himself in his bedroom, as usual, to make phone calls. At around three o’clock I was playing cards with Ana, and Papa was on the telephone, when I heard a scuffling noise coming from the kitchen. I tiptoed over to take a look. There, out of breath and standing behind the bars, was Gino.
“I can’t open up,” I whispered, “my father’s double-locked the house. How did you get in here?”
“I slipped under the fencing. Anyway, I’m not staying. D’you know what’s going on?”
“Yes, there’s been a coup, we heard the classical music.”
“The army has killed the new president.”
“What? I don’t believe you….Swear you mean it!”
“I swear! A Canadian journalist called my father to tell him. It’s a military coup. They also killed the president of the national assembly and other big bwanas from the government….There are rumors that massacres have begun throughout the interior. Oh, and d’you want to know the best news of all?”
“What is it?”
“Attila’s escaped!”
“Attila, the Von Gotzens’ horse?”
“Yeah! Crazy, eh? Last night, a mortar bomb landed close to the stables of the equestrian club, behind the president’s official residence. A building caught fire. The horses panicked, Attila went nuts, he was rearing up and whinnying like he was deranged and then he started kicking down the door of his box: he smashed the lock and jumped the gates, before disappearing into the city. You should have seen Madame Von Gotzen this morning. She came round to ours in her nightie, with curlers in her hair and her eyes all puffy from crying. It was the funniest sight! She wanted my father to use his contacts to find her horse. ‘There’s been a military coup, Madame Von Gotzen,’ he kept repeating, ‘there’s nothing I can do to help you—not even the president of the Republic was able to help himself.’ But she wouldn’t let it drop: ‘Attila must be found! Contact the United Nations! The White House! The Kremlin!’ She didn’t care about the president being killed; that wrinkly old racist just wanted to talk about her stupid horse. They’re too much, those colonial settlers! Their pets’ lives matter more to them than human ones. Anyway, I’d better get going, Gaby. More news in the next update.”
Gino ran off. He looked electrified, almost as if he were enjoying this turn of events. But I felt lost and unable to take in what was happening. Our president had just been assassinated….I thought back to what Papa had said, on the day of Ndadaye’s victory: “They’ll pay for this, sooner or later.”
That evening, we went to bed early. Papa was smoking more than usual. He had also brought his mattress into the hallway and he listened to the little radio set, stroking Ana’s hair while she slept soundly. We had a single candle for light, and it blurred the shapes in the room.
Toward nine o’clock, the classical music stopped. A presenter began to speak, in French. He kept clearing his throat between sentences, his monotonous voice at odds with the gravity of the situation; you’d have thought he was announcing the results of a local volleyball competition.
“The National Council of Public Safety has taken the following decisions: there will be a curfew throughout the territory from eighteen hundred hours until six o’clock in the morning; all borders will be closed; the movement of persons from one municipality to another is forbidden; gatherings of more than three people are forbidden; the Council calls on the people to remain calm…”
I nodded off before the end of the list. I dreamed I was sleeping peacefully, suspended in a soft cloud of sulphur fumes produced by an erupting volcano.
17
We spent several days sleeping in the hallway, not even leaving the house by day. A gendarme from the French embassy called Papa to advise against venturing outside at all. Maman, who was living over at a friend’s place in the hills above the city, telephoned us daily to catch up on the news. The radio reported widespread massacres in the center of the country.
School reopened the following week. The city was strangely calm. A few shops had raised their shutters, but the civil servants hadn’t returned to work and ministers were still taking refuge in foreign embassies and in bordering countries. When we drove past the presidential palace, I could see the damage to the security wall. These were the only traces of fighting that were visible in town. In the playground, the students told stories about the night of the coup, about gunfire and the sound of mortar bombs, the death of the president and mattresses in hallways. Nobody was genuinely frightened, though. For privileged children like us, who lived in the city center and in residential neighborhoods, war was just a word. We heard things, but hadn’t seen anything. Our life carried on much as it had before, with gossip about parties, crushes, clothes. The domestic staff in our houses, the employees of our parents, those who lived in poor neighborhoods, or in Bujumbura Rural Province, or in the interior, those who didn’t receive security warnings from any embassy, and who didn’t have a watchman to guard their house, or a driver to take their children to school, those who traveled on foot, by bike or local bus, they had the measure of what was really happening.
When I came back from school at lunchtime, Prothé was shelling peas on the kitchen table. I knew that he had voted for Ndadaye, and how sweet that victory had tasted to him. I hardly dared look at him.
“Hello, Prothé. How are you?”
“Forgive me, Monsieur Gabriel, but I don’t have the strength to talk. They’ve murdered hope. They’ve murdered hope, that’s all I can say. Truly, they have murdered hope…”
When I left the kitchen, he was still repeating those words.
After lunch, Donatien and Innocent drove me back to school. When we were level with the Muha bridge, we passed an army tank.
“Look at those soldiers,” Donatien pointed out wearily, “they’re lost. First they stage a coup, then they kill the president and now that the people are rising up and the interior of the country is being torn apart, they’re backtracking and demanding the government return and put out the fire lit by the soldiers in the first place. Poor Africa…may God come to our rescue!”
Innocent didn’t comment, he just concentrated on driving, staring straight ahead.
The days passed more quickly now, since the curfew forced everybody to be home by six o’clock, before nightfall. In the evenings, we slurped our soup while listening to the radio and its alarming news. I began to wonder about the meanings behind silences, about what some people left unsaid as well as the insinuations and predictions of others. The country was built on whispers and riddles. There were invisible rifts, sighs, and glances that I didn’t understand.
As the days went by, war continued to rage in the co
untryside. Villages were ravaged and set alight, schools suffered grenade attacks and the students inside were burned alive. Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing toward Rwanda, Zaire, and Tanzania. In Bujumbura, the talk was of clashes in the outlying districts. At night, we could hear the gunfire in the distance. Prothé and Donatien often failed to turn up for work because the army kept rounding up people in their neighborhood.
From the womb-like safety of our house, all of this seemed unreal. The impasse was as sleepy as ever. At siesta-time you could hear the birds chirruping in the branches, a breeze stirred the leaves and the venerable rubber fig trees offered welcome shade. Nothing had changed. We carried on playing and exploring. The heavy rains were back. The vegetation was lush and verdant once more. The trees bowed under the weight of ripe fruit, and the river flowed full.
One afternoon, when all five of us were out on a mango-hunting expedition, barefoot with rods in hand, Gino suggested venturing farther afield since we’d already raided our street. We found ourselves standing outside the fencing to Francis’s house, and I had an uneasy feeling.
“Let’s not stay here, it’ll just end in trouble.”
“Don’t be a scaredy-cat, Gaby!” said Gino. “This mango tree has our name on it.”
Armand and the twins stared at each other; they were in two minds, but Gino wouldn’t let the idea go. So we made our way slowly up the gravel path, muffling our footsteps. There were no gates, making it easy to get onto Francis’s plot. The house, which had been built on top of a hillock, looked sinister with its peeling walls and damp patches where the plaster on the veranda’s dropped ceiling had blistered. We approached the mango tree, its branches spread over the entire garden. Dirty mosquito nets, behind the window bars, prevented us from glimpsing the inside of the house. The doors were closed and the place felt unnaturally quiet. We stopped at the foot of the tree and Gino knocked off one mango, then two, then three. His rod ruffled the leaves, which jostled like a party of hornbills, while I kept a lookout.
Suddenly, I thought I saw a shadow moving furtively behind the dusty mosquito nets. “Wait!” We froze, staring at the house. Silence. All we could hear was the river babbling at the bottom of the garden. Gino resumed picking off the mangoes. Armand cheered him on and danced the Soukous every time a fruit landed on the grass. The twins and I stayed on the alert. Behind us, a bird took flight with a rustling of wings. We spun round. Armand and the twins were the first to bolt, at the speed of light, in the direction of the road. Next, Gino made a run for it and I followed without a thought. We raced round the house and down the slope leading to the Muha. I was terrified of being caught. Still, I wasn’t convinced that Francis was chasing us, so I glanced backward. That’s when his fist smashed into my face and I hit the ground. The blows came fast and furious, like a swarm of wasps. Gino was shouting and trying to protect me. Then I saw him go down, too, centimeters from where I had landed. A hand dragged us over to the river’s edge and Francis plunged our heads into the brown, silty waters. I couldn’t breathe. My face was pressed against the riverbed. No matter how hard I struggled to break free, Francis’s hand was like a vise crushing my neck. When he brought me back up to the surface, I caught snatches of what he was saying. “You shouldn’t steal from other people’s gardens. Didn’t your parents ever teach you that?” Then he dunked me again, head first, with a fury that chilled my bones. Everything went blurry. My hands were flailing, trying in vain to grab hold of something, a branch, a buoy, a shred of hope…I clawed at the riverbed as if to find another way out, a hidden trapdoor. The water was seeping into my ears, into my nostrils, as the voice droned on in the background. It was so faint by contrast with the grip that held me underwater. “Bunch of spoiled brats, I’ll teach you manners.” As well as smothering me, Francis was trying to knock me out. My forehead kept hitting the bottom. My instinct was to find air as fast as possible. But where? My lungs were suffocating, shriveling up. My racing heart panicked, trying to escape through my mouth. I could hear the distant echo of my stifled cries. I was calling out for Papa and Maman. Where were they? Francis wasn’t messing around. He had made up his mind to kill me, for real. So was this what violence meant? Raw fear and disbelief. “Your mothers are white men’s bitches!” I heard, as he yanked my head out of the river. And then I was back under again. I was losing the battle. Slowly, my exhausted muscles began to relax as I resigned myself to these ten centimeters of water, I was slipping imperceptibly away, with Francis’s voice to lull me. Fear and submission were mine; violence and strength his.
But Gino refused to drown. He put all his might into resisting the water and Francis’s words. He could see further ahead. He still wanted to harvest mangoes in November and build rafts out of banana leaves for us to row downriver. He was neither paralyzed nor fascinated by this new kind of violence. He faced it down. He was at Francis’s mercy and yet he behaved as if they were equals. He fired back, retaliated, counterattacked. I noticed the veins in his neck bulging like an inner tube. “Don’t insult my mother! Don’t insult my mother!” I felt the pressure on my neck relax as Francis tried to contain Gino’s mounting energy. He was using both arms, both hands, both knees pressed into my best friend’s back. At last there was some air in my lungs again. I was on all fours at first, before collapsing onto my back, spluttering. The blue sky was so very bright. Dazzled by the sun, I closed my eyes and crawled over to prop my head against the trunk of a felled banana tree on the ground. One of my ears was blocked.
“Nobody has the right to insult my mother!” Gino kept saying.
“Oh yes, they do, I can say what I like. Your mother’s a whore!”
Francis thrust Gino’s head back into the brown water where I had wanted to surrender. It was siesta-time and the heat of the day had reached its peak. The road was deserted. There wasn’t a single car over on the bridge. As I buried my dazed head in the spongy bark of the banana tree, I spat out yet more water and coughed up panicked words. Francis kept on talking, never drawing breath, like those washerwomen who plunge their laundry into the water while chatting about the weather. At the end of each of Francis’s sentences, Gino’s head disappeared into the foam of the river. “So where is she, your bitch of a mother? We never see her around…” Gino gulped a few mouthfuls of air before slipping back down, like the float of a fishing hook. He was yelling underwater, and this made the river eddy and swirl around his head. “Where is she, your bitch of a mother?” The more Francis repeated it, the more Gino risked suffocating, the more I shouted at Francis to let him go, and the more Francis kept asking the same question. Gino was losing his strength. He was giving up.
By the time I had finally come to my senses and got to my feet, to try and stop Francis, Gino stammered: “Dead.” I heard the word, clearly. “My mother’s dead,” he said a second time, with a sob.
Over on the bridge, an old man in a black hat was leaning against the railings, a rainbow-colored umbrella unfurled above his head, its metal tip gleaming like a Christmas star. Old people enjoy watching children messing about in rivers. They know their days of playing like that are over. Francis waved at him. The old man didn’t respond. He watched us a while longer before shuffling on his way, with his black hat and his colorful umbrella. Francis walked straight past me and I shrank back. He didn’t even look at me, he just left. I went over to Gino, who was sobbing by the river’s edge, his head between his legs as he cried into his sodden clothes. Everything seemed calm again. The water flowed by with cruel indifference. I put my hand on my friend’s shoulder to comfort him. But Gino rebuffed me, standing up abruptly and heading in the direction of the road.
I sat by the water until my ear finally popped. Gradually, the sounds of traffic started up again. The bells on the Chinese bicycles, sandals scraping the beaten-earth pavement, the squish of minibus tires on warm asphalt. The city was returning to life. There was movement on the bridge. I felt an icy anger rising up inside me. The inside of my
mouth was bleeding, and I had grazes on my hands and knees. I washed my wounds in the Muha.
My anger was telling me to defy my fear in order to stop it from growing. It was the same fear that made me give up too often. I decided to confront Francis. I went back to his garden to rescue our rods. There he was on the doorstep, threatening me as I walked over. But I carried on, the salty taste of blood on my tongue. Then I stopped and looked him in the eye for a long time. Behind that arrogant smile of his, he didn’t flinch. He just stayed there on the threshold of his house. I had been scared of him when my head was in the water. Not anymore, though. I could taste the blood in my mouth, but it was nothing—nothing compared to Gino’s tears. All I had to do was swallow the blood and its taste would be forgotten. But Gino’s tears? Anger had rushed in to replace my fear. I was no longer afraid of what might happen to me. I picked up our rods and left the mangoes behind. Nobody would collect them now. I knew that, and it didn’t matter. There was a rising tide of anger inside me and I couldn’t have cared less about those mangoes rotting in the fresh grass.
18
Gino avoided me after that. Armand and the twins had no idea what had happened down by the river. I let them think we’d got away safely, like they did. But I was haunted by Gino’s tears. Was his mother really dead? I couldn’t bring myself to ask him outright. Not yet. We were living through uncertain times. The weeks were like the sky during rainy season: each day brought with it fresh rumors, violence, and safety directives. The country still had no president and part of the government was living in hiding. But in the cabarets, people drank their beers and ate their goat-meat skewers as if making a stand against tomorrow’s worries.