by Ondjaki
“And, Comrade, you never heard anybody say they were going to blow up all of Bishop’s Beach?”
The Old Fisherman stopped to look at us with sad eyes. He said nothing. He just breathed: recreating in his chest the coiled sound of the waves. The noise mingled with the flight of birds and the cry of a siren somewhere far off in another neighbourhood.
And the sea awoke, slowly at first, like a newborn swallow, then a little more as it imitated the clouds, until all that we could look at was its dark blue: on the enormous hide of the sea, with Mussulo Island on the other side, a wind came in to push the sun lower to where it sleeps every night.
“Hey, kids, you brought the wind with you.”
“We’re taking off now. The elders will give us a hard time for being out when it’s getting dark so quick.”
The square with the gas station was empty. Leaves were being swept across the ground by the squalls. A hot breeze was blowing and crazy Sea Foam was smiling with satisfaction at the gate of his house.
“Anybody who hasn’t got an umbrella is going to get soaked. La lluvia no perdona a los que se ponen por debajo de ella... Down, dust. Down, evil thoughts! Long live poetry, which can speak of anything!”
Granma Agnette was waiting for me at the gate with her far-seeing gaze. She had seen us run through the garbage dump and had watched us all the way back.
“Get inside. It looks like rain and you’re out there running around, just asking for an asthma attack.”
The rain fell suddenly, without giving us time to say it was still just starting, with the beautiful odour that washes the dust from the leaves and bothers the bats: on nights like that, they don’t fly, the sounds disorient them. Granma Catarina said that since bats only see through their own cries they’re like radar, like the MiGs when they make night flights to bombard the japie South African troops.
“Does all that rain fit in the sky, Granma?”
“It’s the dead who are crying or laughing. Lots of people are dying out there.”
“Don’t frighten the children, Catarina,” Granma Agnette begged.
“The children aren’t afraid of the truth. Rain cleanses the world. I’m going upstairs to close the windows.”
I went up with Granma Catarina to witness this ritual. In fact, the windows were always closed, but she opened them really wide, glanced out at Bishop’s Beach, or at some neighbour in another house, and pulled the double windows shut with a thump so that nobody could doubt that they had been open. Granma left the room and went downstairs.
I went into the bathroom to close the small window. I stood on the toilet and peeped out at the Mausoleum: in the darkness I saw trucks arriving and lots of boxes being unloaded by military people in those dark green uniforms. I turned out the bathroom light so nobody out there could see me; I’d learned this from a war movie, or someone had told me about it. There were various trucks, many boxes; they put everything in a really big storage shed.
The thunder started, and Granma Agnette’s waterworks, too.
“Children, everyone into the bathroom.”
The cousins arrived and the bathroom started getting crowded.
The electricity went out, but Granma Catarina had already prepared the oil lamp, with its nauseating smell of slow-burning oil. Granma Agnette said this was the safest place in the house if the roof was struck by lightning. Once we were all in there, it was always the same thing:
“Did you cover the mirrors?”
Granma Catarina laughed, unafraid of the thunder or the lightning. She sent Madalena to fetch the bath towels to cover the biggest mirrors: the display cabinet downstairs in the living room, full of antique dishes and a Chinese tea set, then the mirror in Granma Agnette’s room, and a really heavy round one in the hall.
“Girls—Tchissola, Naima,” Granma scolded, “take off those bright red blouses right away. Madalena—bring them a change of clothes.”
Red, on towels, carpets or even blouses, might attract lightning, and it would be terrible if a lightning bolt hit a person because they said that the bolts came full of totally out-of-control electricity. 3.14 told me once that they should use the rocket of the Mausoleum, in all its height, to catch the bolts and then connect it directly to the poles on Bishop’s Beach, and that way we would never run out of light; but they said this wasn’t possible and it might ruin the embalmed appearance of Comrade President Agostinho Neto.
Fortunately, Granma Agnette forgot to close the little window and, along with the noise and the lightning flashes, fresh sea air came in and alleviated the atmosphere of so many people exhaling mixed with the body odour of those who had run to get here.
Granma Catarina stayed in her room on the rocking chair, and seemed to be serving herself “a hot drink,” which might have been whisky or brandy. Then she lay down for a bit on the floor of her room.
“For those who are already gone and await the others...”
The sea breeze carried a heap of smells that you had to keep your eyes closed to understand, as though it were a carnival of colours: mangoes still green and pretty hanging from the trees, mangoes already gnawed by bats, the green smell of the cherimoya fruit, the dust brushed off the guavas that were about to fall, the smell of Surinam cherries blended with that of the loquat tree, the smells of chicken coops and pigpens, the cries of the parrots and the dogs, two or three bursts from an AK-47, a radio that someone had left on during a news broadcast in an African language, the footfalls of people who were running to get home, or at least to get to a place where they wouldn’t get wet, and even if it were already late, the sounds of the bakery that was in the street behind, where they started work so early and worked all night to ensure that the bread arrived hot at the houses of people who spent the whole night sleeping. Which meant that, in the end, the smell of the rain was a difficult thing to describe to someone who wasn’t familiar with the bathroom of Granma Agnette’s house.
“Are you fallin’ asleep, or what?” they asked me.
“Shut your mouth. I’m putting the rain in my thoughts.”
“Oh yeah? When you grow up you’re gonna end up crazy like Sea Foam. Your thoughts’ll be soaked.”
“At least I’ll know how to speak Spanish.”
“You retard. He speaks Cuban!”
A thunder clap like an explosion of dynamite made a blazing light, then burst over us so loudly that we trembled with real fear. Granma Agnette started to pretend that she was praying. Granma Catarina had already told us that Granma Agnette didn’t know how to pray; she’d forgotten all the prayers and was reduced to moving her lips, like when we sang a song in English and improvised with syllables that we set to the rhythm of the music.
Granma Agnette grabbed the face towel and covered the small mirror that was above the washstand. I remembered the word dynamite and thought that those trucks might have been from a hidden convoy, that, after all, they didn’t want the people of Bishop’s Beach to know when they were going to dexplode the houses to enlarge the construction site to complete the Mausoleum.
“Can a lightning bolt ignite a box of dynamite?” I asked an older cousin.
He was really irritated because, at his age, he didn’t believe in stories about lightning bolts coming into people’s houses in search of big mirrors or children dressed in bright red blouses, yet Granma kept herding everyone together in this spot until the rain passed.
A strong wind extinguished the oil lamp and our eyes took a long time to make sense of the darkness. Then there was a knock on the door downstairs.
“Oh my God.” Granma Agnette was afraid.
The girl cousins hugged in a shivering embrace. I was afraid, too, it was just that with my older cousin looking at me, I pretended it was only the cold.
“Who could it be at this time of night?”
“It can only be Father Inácio!” Granma Catarina said.
Bu
t though Granma Catarina was joking, it was a serious moment. Nobody wanted to go downstairs and Granma Agnette was kind of a scaredy-cat. She always wanted to send somebody else downstairs.
“Madalena, go see who’s there.”
“Granma?”
“Granma, what? Don’t you understand? Go downstairs and see who’s knocking on the door.”
There was another knock, this time even louder.
“Death always knocks loudly, that’s what I say.” Granma Catarina began to laugh.
We all fell into a silence of fear and darkness, relieved only by the light that came in through the small window. We almost didn’t all fit into the bathroom, and Granma Agnette started to push Madalena very slowly out the door.
Madalena pushed back and grabbed the door to try to avoid being ejected. It all happened in silence, and it looked like a struggle between two ants.
There was another knock. A thick voice spoke a few words that nobody understood.
“What’d he say?” I asked my cousin.
“He said he’s coming to eat you!”
Granma Agnette continued to push Madalena. Since her flip-flops were soaked, she skidded very slowly in the direction of the stairs. Either she decided to walk or she was going to fall down the steps all the way to the bottom.
“Death doesn’t like to wait for the rain,” Granma Catarina laughed.
The light came back on.
We were all looking at each other, each of us trying to see where the others had finally managed to find a seat. The girl cousins, hugging one another, pretended that they hadn’t been afraid. Granma Agnette released Madalena as though she had never pushed her, and the doorbell rang three times.
“You can open the door,” Granma Catarina said. “It’s just that dumb Soviet!”
It was Comrade Guderafterov’s ring, three times as always, with long pauses in between.
“Gran Nhéte, you can oben. It is me, Bilhardov. Very rain here.”
“Ten years he’s been here and he’s never learned Angolan Portuguese. These Soviets are a disgrace to linguistic socialism,” Granma Catarina said.
In the time it took him to come in the door, soaking, to squeeze Granma Agnette’s hand, we all sat down on the stairs like the audience at a movie matinée.
“Gudafter-noon, kildren.”
“Gudafter-noon, Kom-rad,” we imitated, and Granma made an ugly face.
Over in Comrade Gudafterov’s country it must be really cold because he had the bad habit of always wearing a big, warm coat that magnified his body odour, so that if the wind was blowing in the right direction, people always knew that he was about to arrive.
“Take off that coat, it looks like a bear. All it’s missing are claws and a raw fish in its mouth.” Granma Catarina was having fun.
Comrade Gudafterov laughed out loud. He looked at Granma Agnette, who didn’t know where to look. We weren’t going anywhere; we enjoyed these scenes as if they were a live soap opera.
“Gran have hod drink?”
“Tea?” Granma Agnette asked.
“He wants a take-out. Tell him this isn’t Senhor Tuarles’s bar.”
“Saw-ry?”
Comrade Gudafterov’s Angolan Portuguese was really very funny, but we’d succeeded in deciphering it. He said “saw-ry” to say “sorry” when he hadn’t understood something. “Kildren” was “children,” and he always liked to say, “Gudafter-noon”; that was one of his habits. I understand: sometimes a habit is like a torn old nightgown that a person likes because they like it and that they don’t want to stop wearing because it reminds them of something nice, or because it soothes their nostalgia for someone who’s not there.
“‘Saw-ry’ is a load of bull!” Granma Catarina said while Granma Agnette went to the kitchen.
The Soviet laughed. There were wrinkles in the corners of his eyes; this comrade must be old. His teeth didn’t have a good colour either—only his eyes. All the children knew this: only his eyes were pretty, of a blue that was lighter than that of the sky. We didn’t know whether over there in the Soviet Union everybody had eyes like that, or if it was just a family thing.
“Family live in far-away. Bilhardov have sadness.” He spoke as though we were all one person capable of conversing with him. “Family big, in cold, in snov. Angol very hod. Gud beer! Very dust.”
The cousins laughed and started whispering secrets in each other’s ears. Granma Agnette had already said that it was rude to speak in hushed voices in front of strangers, even if they were Soviets. Everybody was distracted, the water was boiling in the kitchen. Poor Comrade Gudafterov! They were only going to give him a cup of tea instead of the vodka he must be nostalgic for. Suddenly I felt bad. I swear I thought about this business of a person mixing different subjects, talking about his family, the “snov,” the dust of Bishop’s Beach, and his eyes growing shiny, which at times is a warning that tears can suddenly appear. I thought about all of that without telling anyone so they wouldn’t give me a hard time. I thought it must all be a sad yearning. Having his whole family living in the far-away couldn’t be easy for Comrade Gudafterov. Was that why he always tried to strike up a conversation with Granma Agnette?
Something else that I thought, and which made me want to smile, was that Comrade Gudafterov couldn’t even imagine that he was often mentioned in our after-lunch conversations with Granma Agnette.
She did it on purpose to make us take our nap after lunch. There was an instant’s chaos. We all went upstairs to Granma Agnette’s room, while we listened to the ruckus of Granma Catarina opening and closing windows, murmuring some little prayer in front of the mirror over her dresser, then she drew the curtains to fall asleep and began to snore.
“If you stop hearing me, come and wake me up,” Granma Catarina advised. “I’ll fall asleep again afterwards.”
Granma Agnette hugged each of the many grandchildren as we went into her room. I don’t know how we all managed to fit in that bed, even though it was a double; a bed wasn’t made to hold so many grandchildren all at once.
She sang the music of slow Fado tunes, adapted to put us to sleep, and nobody slept. She told crazy stories about her friend Carmen Fernández who had become pregnant, but had given birth to a huge bag of ants that bit the inside of her stomach. The second time she got pregnant she finally had a baby, but it had the head and wings of a bird and, as the window was open, it flew away and escaped. Granma said that Carmen Fernández was afraid of becoming pregnant a third time, but even then we didn’t fall asleep. Then Granma started with her threats.
“Nobody likes me.”
“That’s a lie, Granma. We like you.”
“Then everyone who likes me is going to fall asleep now.”
“No, Granma. We don’t want to sleep.”
“Then I’m going to accept the Soviet’s proposal.”
And the joke, which always started as a joke, even though we knew where this story was going, always left someone very sad or even crying.
“The what, Granma?”
“I’m going away to the far-away. The Soviet’s already said that he wants to take me to the far-away. And I’m going. No one will regret my absence.”
“Granma, don’t say that.” Someone would start crying.
“Granma’s going away to the cold, to stay there with the Soviet’s family.”
“But Granma, we like to have you here, you can’t go to the far-away...”
It was a strange joke, but it worked. In the middle of this conversation we, the grandchildren, became convinced that it was better to sleep a little than to endure the thought of Granma Agnette’s departure with the Soviet. It seemed like it took a long time to get over there to the far-away and it must be even more complicated to return from that place whose exact location nobody knew.
“You know verbena leaf?” Granma Agnette appeared
with the teacup in her hand.
Comrade Gudafterov made a strange face, sniffed the tea and smiled the way we did when we were asked if the refried beans were good.
“Tankyou!”
Granma Agnette opened the window and saw that all of Bishop’s Beach was dark. But we had light.
“These house have electric light! Bilhardov connect to generator for Mausoleum. Gran Nhéte sleep gud. Direct connect to generator. Petromax nyet!”
The Soviet lifted the teacup to his mouth but didn’t drink. He just laughed, with his mouth and with his blue eyes that looked aquamarine.
“Drink the damned tea.” Granma Catarina continued looking at him, as she did with us when she was keeping track of the soup.
“Thank you, Comrade Bilhardov,” Granma Agnette said. “And the other houses, can’t they also have light from the generator?”
“Other house, other lady. These house very close to Mausoleum. Direct connect.”
“Listen here, tupariov, since you’re here for tea, which you’re not even drinking, just blowing on”—Granma Catarina was like that, she said anything she felt like—“is it true you’re going to explode our houses?”
“Dexplode? Nyet. Every booty relocate. New house, pretty. Veranda and all.”
“I’m not asking about the veranda. This house has a veranda, too. When it’s for?”
“Whan? Month of year?”
“Yes, month of year! And day of month. Whan is the blow-up?”
“No have direct information. Boss General decide. Bilhardov only know Mausoleum.”
“But it looks like they already brought the boxes of dynamite, Granma,” I said to Granma Catarina.
“Children remain silent and don’t interrupt adult conversations,” Granma Agnette reprimanded me.
Then, looking as though she were in pain, Granma laid her hand on her leg and rubbed it in the direction of her foot.
“What’s wrong, Sis, have you got that old pain?”
“It’s been there since the morning, but it’s worse now.”
“You should call your daughter to find out what can be done. You’ve been like that for months.”