Good Morning Comrades

by Ondjaki

  Aunt Dada took forever to come out. My armpit was starting to stink and I sure didn’t want her to meet me when I was stinky! The wait at the luggage belt always lasted so long, at times bags disappeared and it wasn’t worth complaining to anyone. It was just a question of good luck or bad luck, as the elders said. But when she came out and approached us I saw that she was sweating a ton, too, which meant we were even.

  She was one of the few older people I’d met who didn’t talk to me as if I was a dimwit kid. She greeted me with two kisses on the cheek when I was used to giving the elders a single kiss on the face, and all she said was: “It’s very hot, don’t you think?”

  Now I’ll tell you: I was very happy with the fact that she wasn’t tall, but what I really liked was hearing her voice live like that, and yes, you could say it was a sweet voice. “Can you help me?” She passed me a bag which I couldn’t tear my eyes away from: there was tons of chocolate in it.

  As we were walking to the car, I saw that she was looking for something in her handbag. Then she put down the bags and asked me: “Can you call that boy over there so I can take a photo of him with his little monkey?” I glanced over and I felt pleased. The little monkey was already happy again, jumping wickedly on the boy’s shoulder, pretending to pick lice off his head, or perhaps doing it for real.

  “You can’t, Aunt. You can’t take photographs of that monkey!” I told her, as I set down the bag containing the chocolates in the seat where I was going to sit.

  “I can’t take a photograph of that inoffensive little monkey?”

  “No, Aunt, you can’t . . .”

  “And why not?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll understand. . . .”

  “Well, tell me,” she said, her voice serious.

  “You can’t take photographs of that monkey. . . . for reasons of state security, Aunt,” I said, my voice serious.

  But she got the point right away because she looked at the FAPLAs over there, and held onto her camera. She sat down at my side and didn’t say a word all the way home. She just looked around, and afterwards she opened the window and it was as if she was doing what I do in the morning, smelling the air.

  We found Comrade António at the smaller outer door. He came out laughing, as if he already knew my aunt from somewhere. Of course he was wrapped in the smells of the lunch that I was sure he’d just finished making. I was completely sure, because he wasn’t wearing his apron, which meant that he was about to set or had set the table. Now when he set the table it was only “twenty minutes” until lunch was ready.

  It was so hot that the first thing we all did was to take off our sandals. Aunt Dada went upstairs to the room where she was going to stay, then she took a bath. She must have been reeling from the heat because she was already starting to turn red. When she came downstairs for lunch, my sisters had come home and they were smelly, too. There’s not much you can do in this heat. They went to wash quickly under the armpits before we sat down at the table.

  By chance, or in fact not by chance, but because Aunt Dada had arrived and had so much to tell us, we barely heard the news broadcast. I wanted her to tell me what the flight in the airplane had been like, especially the part when the plane accelerates so fast it feels like everything’s going to break. My younger sister winked at me because she wanted to see the presents.

  Shortly after lunch, because we kept asking, we went to Aunt Dada’s room to open her suitcase. It was really heavy and I thought she’d brought us a lot of stuff, but the weight was due to all the food she’d brought, and among that food was my present.

  “What’s that, Dada?” my mother asked, startled.

  “They’re potatoes. . . . Your son said that he missed potatoes,” she said, picking up the potatoes scattered among the clothing.

  We were fortunate that Aunt Dada was very kind and brought with her, in addition to potatoes, a mountain of chocolate.

  At times, I mean very rarely, chocolate appeared at home, but three bars each – it was the first time that had happened to me. I thought about the amount of things she had brought. I was thinking that she must have asked different people, each with different ration cards, to buy these presents, but she said she didn’t have any sort of card and that it wasn’t necessary. As I was late for school, I decided we’d talk about this later.

  At school, at that time of day, it was always very hot. People became drowsy. This only annoyed me because instead of telling stories, some classmates slept while waiting for the teachers to arrive. But in the distance I saw Murtala arrive with Comrade Teacher Ángel and his wife. I lost hope that we’d have a spare period.

  In the end we even had a pleasant afternoon. We were preparing our lessons the way we would do it if the comrade inspector appeared by surprise, although, as Petra explained to us during recess, “We can’t call it a surprise anymore.” Cláudio, who always had an answer for everyone, told Petra that it was a surprise that we already knew about it but that didn’t mean that the visit wouldn’t be a surprise. But nobody paid much attention to the disagreement because we were more worried about Empty Crate, and whether they would appear at our school. Murtala was betting that they would because last week they had been at a school at the foot of the Ajuda-Marido market that was very close to ours. Murtala drew a terrific map in the sand, with Heroines’ Square, Kiluanji Street, Kanini Street and our school. It was good that he made that map and explained to us what he thought was going to happen because right next to him Cláudio drew a map of our school and then each of us said what we thought were the best escape routes, depending on whether or not you were wearing a backpack and whether or not you were being chased, and even taking into account the possibility that the comrade Cuban teachers, with all their stories of the revolution, might want to dig a trench and challenge Empty Crate.

  After explaining to us the subject matter on which we might be examined, the teachers came with us to direct us in cleaning up. Each class cleaned its classroom, but the front hall and the back yard were divided among five classes, the interior courtyard among three others. The walls were left as they were. Petra said in a voice that sounded as though she was enjoying herself that this visit of the comrade inspector was becoming a lot of work.

  As we finished cleaning the school quickly, and everything was more or less presentable, the comrade principal let us leave early, but before leaving we lined up and sang the anthem. Romina invited a few classmates and the comrade teachers to come and have a snack at her house because it was her brother’s birthday and he didn’t have anybody to invite over so her mother had said that she could bring people from school. When I saw Romina talking to Murtala I figured she was making a mistake because Murtala was always starving and he didn’t have the manners to eat at someone else’s house.

  Romina’s mother sent everyone to wash their hands, especially Bruno and Cláudio, who also had to wash their armpits because it was just too much.

  The table was very pretty: there were meat rolls, sandwiches, soft drinks, fruit, cake and pie. We were salivating, our eyes so rivetted that we forgot to say happy birthday to the little boy. One person whose eyes were really rivetted was Comrade Teacher Ángel, the guy had never seen so much food in one place. It was fun to watch him attack the jelly rolls.

  Since we were making a ruckus, and we couldn’t eat any more, because Romina’s mother kept bringing out more food, Romina put on a movie for us to watch. I wanted to watch the screen, but I couldn’t stop watching the comrade Cuban teachers because their faces, I don’t know how to explain it, they resembled my face the first time I saw colour television at Uncle Chico’s house – I liked it so much that I spent half an hour listening to the news in African languages. Comrade Teacher María was almost drooling, which she refrained from doing because she still had her mouth full of strawberry compote.

  It was a spaghetti Western with Trinità. Everybody was excited, shivering even, applauding and everything, as the actor dodged bullets. Cláudio said: “Hey, I�
��ve got an uncle in the FAPLAs who can dodge bullets, too!” But I don’t think anybody believed him. Everybody knows that only Trinità can do that. I mean, maybe Bruce Lee knows how to do it, too.

  We were all so distracted that nobody noticed that Murtala wasn’t watching the movie with us anymore. We started to hear some strange noises, which at first we thought were coming from the film. Romina turned up the sound but it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. Romina turned off the video. Everybody sat still, trying to listen to the silence

  The sound was coming from the kitchen.

  It made us afraid: we all got up slowly and walked past the table which no longer had any food. Cláudio said: “I warned yuh, Romina. . . .” When we got to the kitchen we saw that the extra plates no longer contained food, either. The two dishes of pudding only had leftover streaks remaining, the pie had been finished off as easy as pie and only two slices were left. But the noise continued and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Somebody called: “Murtala. . . . Murtala, where you at?” The sound was pitched a little high to break the silence. Romina’s mother put her hand over her mouth and said: “Oh my God!” We all rushed forward to look: we crossed the kitchen and went around to the other side of the fridge. Beneath the tattered yellow jersey, we could see Murtala’s huge stomach puffing right out. The dude had got stuck and couldn’t get out of his hiding place. Cláudio started to laugh like crazy.

  When we dragged back the fridge, Murtala broke free and went to the bathroom where he vomited so much that it was necessary to draw five buckets of water from the bathtub to get rid of the evidence.

  Since it was getting dark, the comrade teachers walked Murtala home. Cláudio just said: “Didn’t I warn yuh, Romina? You can’t say I didn’t warn you. . . .”

  As I was approaching home, I saw a group of kids around the front door of Bruno Viola’s house and I became curious. Before going inside, I went over to see what was going on. I was met with silence. It seemed that the only person who could talk was Eunice.

  “There were more than fifty, I’m telling you. . . . More than fifty. . . .” Eunice said through her tears.

  “Oh Eunice, come on, you don’t have to exaggerate like that,” Caducho’s brother was saying, but he laughed nervously.

  “Hey, whoever wants to believe can believe. . . . The school was completely surrounded. I escaped by sheer luck.”

  “But what time did this happen?” somebody asked.

  “Just a little while ago. We were in the last class and we started to hear the noise of a truck skidding . . .”

  “It was Empty Crate?!” I said.

  “It was Empty Crate, but the truck was full of men . . .” Eunice wiped her tears. In my head I imagined Murtala’s map: Ngola Kanini Street was right next to our school, the next attack could only be on Kiluanji or on Youth-in-Struggle.

  “You saw the truck? It was a Ural, right?” Tiny was already filling in the details.

  “I didn’t see the truck, but some of my classmates saw it. The crate is on the truck . . . it’s really a crate, painted black. They arrived, some of them started to jump out of the truck and surround the school, we started to see them out the window, then they began to yell. Four of them who were on top of the truck opened the crate . . .”

  “And what was inside?” Bruno Viola asked.

  “Nobody could see. . . . I just ran. When I got outside I saw tons of men, at least seventy . . .”

  “It was fifty, Eunice, fifty!” Tiny made the gang laugh.

  “It was tons anyway! Look, I started running and one of them grabbed me right here.” She showed off the scratch. “But I just kept running and luckily he lost his grip . . .”

  “The police didn’t come?”

  “The police?! What do you think? . . . The police are afraid of them. . . . They were all dressed in black, then they stole everyone’s backpacks, one girl said she heard a woman teacher shouting inside, she must have been being raped . . .”

  “Really raped?” Bruno Viola, excitable as ever, wanted the details.

  “Yes, they say they always rape the women teachers, then they cut off their tits and hang them from the blackboard. . . . If there’s a tit hanging from the blackboard tomorrow that means they raped her.”

  Eunice fled, exhausted by her fear.

  When I got home my aunt told me that I looked white. It was because I’d been told that they raped the women teachers and killed the male teachers, but nobody knew what they did with the pupils who never returned. At least that was the story that Bruno’s maid’s daughter always told; it had been told to her by one of her cousins. Now, of course, it was all true, if Eunice herself had seen the truck with the empty crate, and if she had a scratch and everything. . . . That meant that within a few days it would be our school. I had to telephone Cláudio and tell him to bring his switchblade.

  My mood improved when I found those chocolates that Aunt Dada had brought, which were so good, so good, so good! that I had to eat the three bars one after the other before anyone could come to tell me that I was only allowed to eat four squares. Then I went to talk with Aunt Dada.

  “Aunt, there’s something I don’t understand. . . .”

  “What is it, dear?”

  “How were you able to bring so many presents? Was your card good for all that stuff?”

  “But what card?” She was pretending not to understand.

  “Your ration card. You have a ration card, right?” I asked her this figuring she was going to tell me the truth.

  “I don’t have any sort of ration card. In Portugal we make our purchases without a card.”

  “Without a card? But how do they keep track of people? How do they keep track, for example, of the fish you take home?” I didn’t even let her respond. “How do they know you didn’t take too much fish?”

  “But I make the purchases I wish to make, provided that I have the money. Nobody tells me that I took home too much fish or too little . . .”

  “Nobody?” I was startled, but not overly so, because I was certain she was lying or joking. “Isn’t there even a comrade in the fish market who stamps the cards when you buy fish on Wednesday?”

  Later my younger sister came in to ask some questions about mathematics, and I remembered that I had to go and use the telephone to pass along the rumour about Empty Crate. Of course I was already thinking of saying that there were about ninety or a hundred of them, that they’d brought three trucks full of crates and not all the crates were empty, and even that I thought that those crates were where they put the kids who disappeared.

  But I was so tired that I fell asleep.

  I dreamed, of course, that a Ural truck from Empty Crate arrived at our school, I dreamed that the comrade Cuban teachers showed us how to dig a trench and operate AK-47s, and that when they were about to grab us because we didn’t have bullets for our machine guns, Trinità appeared with the police and arrested them all.

  The dream was so noisy and chaotic and full of gunshots that my mother had to wake me up when it was almost morning and ask me not to say so much nonsense while I was dreaming.

  “But why does this beach belong to the Soviets?”

  “I don’t know, I really don’t know . . . It could be that we have a beach there in the Soviet Union that’s only for Angolans!”

  I woke up feeling great again because I was going to the beach with Aunt Dada. My sisters had classes and I was the only one who could go with her. This was also great because, as we were going to be alone, I’d have the chance to pull the wool over her eyes without anyone being there to contradict me.

  “Good morning, son!” Comrade António said when I was finishing breakfast.

  “Good morning, Comrade António, how’s it going?” I said, as he was starting to tidy up the glasses, move the plates around, open the fridge and peer inside, then open the kitchen window. He did it all out of habit, it’s not that the gestures did any good. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that elders do this a
lot.

  “You’re going on a trip today, son?” he said, and continued moving things around.

  “Yes, I’m going to the beach with Aunt Dada. Comrade João’s taking us.”

  “Did your aunt bring presents, son?” He was laughing in a way that meant he was asking if my aunt had brought presents for everyone.

  “Haven’t you talked to her yet, António?”

  “Your aunt was talking to your father, so I didn’t talk to her much . . .”

  “Hmmm . . .” I smiled. “I bet she brought you some really sharp shoes.”

  We went out with Comrade João. He didn’t turn up drunk because he respected people he didn’t know well, and it was rude to make a bad first impression. I mean, I think this was why he was acting this way because he even came out wearing a starched short-sleeved jacket. Maybe the guy wanted my aunt to give him a present, too.

  We were driving down António Barroso Street.

  “See that, Aunt?” I pointed out the rotunda down below.

  “Yes . . .”

  “That’s the Alvalade neighbourhood swimming pool!”

  Comrade João started to laugh because he knew this trick.

  “But I don’t see any swimming pool, dear. . . .”

  “You don’t see it because we’re far away, but when we get close you’re going to feel it.”

  The car approached the rotunda and had to slow down because of the potholes. There were tons of water pouring over the edge of the road and little kids were taking baths in the potholes and the spot where the water was coming out looked like the illuminated fountain on Luanda Island that never works. The car hiccuped.

  “Now you see, eh Aunt?” I was laughing and laughing.

  “It’s here?”

  “Yes, this is swimming pool number two for the Alvalade neighbourhood.”

  We passed into Maianga Square and I was just praying that the comrade traffic policeman would be there. That comrade deserved to be on a poster: he had a really pretty blue hat, white gloves fit for a wedding, a sash that started at his shoulder, crossed his chest and only ended next to his pistol – yeah, the comrade traffic cop could even take a shot! And he was right there. My aunt didn’t say anything, but I saw that she was impressed when she looked at him. I bet that in Portugal they don’t have poster-boy comrade signalmen like that.