Good Morning Comrades

by Ondjaki

  “Why?” my father asked.

  “Well . . . She didn’t know she had to get out of the car, then she just about put her hand into the car to get her hat right when the comrade president was going by.” I sat down. “She’s lucky the FAPLAs didn’t see anything.”

  It was ten to one. My father turned on the radio, but for the moment there was only music. I closed the doors, the windows, I turned on the air conditioning, or the “air additioning,” as we called it. I smelled the scent of the food coming from the other room. Without a doubt, it was grilled fish.

  “Mum?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Did you know that in Portugal the president walks out into the street without any bodyguards and goes to buy the newspaper?”

  “Yes, dear. If security conditions permit it.”

  “Well, they must permit it on Sunday because Aunt Dada said that the Portuguese president always goes out on Sunday on foot to buy the newspaper. . . . Is that really true, Mum?”

  “Is what really true?”

  “That he doesn’t have soldiers on the street when he leaves home? That he goes out alone. . . . What if people are waiting in line at the spot where he buys his paper?” I started to laugh. “Wouldn’t that be funny if he had to stand there waiting?”

  We had lunch.

  I wanted to know if there had been problems in other schools, if Empty Crate had appeared close to my older sister’s school because, according to Murtala’s map, I figured her school was next in line. She said no, they’d seen a truck and started to shout, but the teachers didn’t let anyone leave the classrooms, and everything was fine because it was just a truck on its way to the barracks. But of course, why hadn’t I thought of that, they would never go to my sister’s school in the morning. In the morning they’d have to be sleeping, that was why they had gone to Eunice’s school in the afternoon, and they had also gone to Mutu-Ya-Kevela School at night.

  When I arrived at school, as soon as I saw Romina’s face I knew something was up. They were all outside with their backpacks on. Nobody wanted to go into the classroom.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There in the classroom . . .” Romina was almost crying.

  “There in the classroom, what?” I was afraid, too.

  “There’s a message. . . .”

  Cláudio and Murtala grabbed me by the arms. Even though I didn’t want to go, they pushed me into the classroom. “Look at that!” they said, while they glanced nervously out in the direction of Kiluanji Street. Kiluanji lay close to the way out of the Ajuda-Marido Market, which, according to Murtala, was where they would come from.

  “But look where?” I didn’t see anything.

  “There!” They pointed again.

  There were a thousand and one inscriptions on the wall, in felt-tipped pen, chalk, coloured pencil, blood, gouache, everything and then some, and they wanted me to see “there” – but then I recognized the phrase: Empty Krate wil pass bye here, twoday, at four oclock! I shuddered.

  “But Bruno. . . .” Petra came forward with a theory of her own.” That ‘twoday’ doesn’t mean that it will actually be today. Nobody knows how long that’s been there!”

  “It’s today and right now!” Bruno was nervous, too. “If not, how come we’ve never seen it before? Tell me that, smartypants, have you ever seen it before?”

  Petra was silent.

  “Well,” Cláudio said. “The problem is going to be convincing the teachers that this is true.”

  “Well it is . . .” Romina didn’t have any more fingernails to chew. I warned her that she was about to draw blood.

  “They never believe us, but afterwards they’re the first ones to run,” Cláudio continued. “What are we going to do?”

  “By my reckoning we can still arrange for everyone to be absent. . . . If we’re all in agreement, no one goes to class,” Petra said.

  “But it’s not so simple, Petra,” I said. “Even if we skip the four o’clock class, imagine if they come late, or arrive early, what’ll it be like?”

  “Yeah, that’s true . . .”

  “Well, so all we have is a theory . . .”

  “And what is it?” Bruno, while looking at the wall, appeared to be searching for the lowest point where he could jump over it.

  “We accept that we go to classes, but everybody keeps their backpacks on. . . . If anything happens, it’s everyone for himself. . . . I mean, everyone running!”

  Romina had tears in her eyes. I felt sorry for her. I was almost certain I knew what she was thinking: sometimes, in dangerous situations, she couldn’t move, she just froze up. And she knew that it was going to be like Cláudio said. If something happened, everybody was going to take off running, nobody was going to want to know about the others, that was how it always was. Murtala was so nervous that he wasn’t speaking. I didn’t even tell them Eunice’s story so as not to make the gang more nervous, especially Romina.

  In the first period we still took out our notebooks, wrote normally, but we were alert. Those who were seated close to the window, usually Bruno, Filomeno or Nucha, didn’t really sit down, they were always peering forward. We saw a truck that everybody found strange and we started to get up. Even Comrade Teacher Sara became afraid. She didn’t understand what was going on, but when we were about to open the door Murtala said: “There’s no maka. That truck’s from the Party office.” We all took a deep breath, but everybody kept their backpacks on.

  Comrade Teacher Sara was really cool. Since she saw that nobody was in the mood to study, she took advantage of the class to explain the details of the next day’s parade. But she didn’t know a lot about it either. She’d been told at the last minute that our school would take part. She told us only to come in our uniforms, to look clean, not to forget our OPA4 neck scarves, and that whoever wanted to could carry a canteen. We would gather at the school at seven-thirty, then we would march to May 1st Square. This meant that we would be marching with the workers and with other students, and that we were going to see the comrade president sitting on the podium.

  During recess the rumour about Empty Crate spread to other classes. A Zairean teacher in Room 3 packed up his belongings and didn’t give a class; according to Murtala, that meant that either he was smart or he knew very well when Empty Crate was coming. The corridors were full, nobody had left their backpacks in the classrooms, and there were even a few people sitting on the walls waiting for a far-off dust cloud that would indicate that the truck was on its way.

  Cláudio hadn’t brought his switchblade, Murtala had come to school in sandals, which was going to make running more difficult, and Romina and Petra were wearing skirts, which would only make rapes more likely. Nucha had a strap on his glasses, which was good for running, but I, sweating, with my glasses crooked and heavy, knew that mine would fall off while I was running. So I took off the glasses and put them in my pocket. The whole world suddenly lacked definition; but it’s not bad, I thought. I focused on a colourful point that was the tree behind the wall that I’d chosen to jump over. Now, I thought, I just have to be fast and not fall when I’m running. Falling was the worst, as everyone knew. When you fall others step on you, nobody stops to take a look, nobody will save you, you get trampled by all those running kids, and if you’re conscious, it’s the man from Empty Crate you’re going to see smiling at you, maybe with a knife in his hand.

  “What are you thinking about?” Romina’s voice was trembling.

  “Ró . . .” I put on my glasses to see her better. “In the next period let’s sit together at that desk over by the door. If something happens, we’ll take off running . . .”

  “That’s good, that’s good. . . .” She was very nervous. “And where do we run to?”

  “You see that stunted tree over there?”

  “Yeah, I see it. . . .”

  “We run out of the class. If there are a lot of people in the corridor we jump over the wires opposite the classroom, we run towards that corner w
here the hole in the wall is, and if we can get across the avenue fast, we’ll get to the Party office and once we’re there nobody’ll touch us.”

  “Good, good . . .”

  “The only thing is, we can’t fall, Ró, we can’t fall . . .”

  “And what if we do fall?”

  “We can’t fall. . . . Take care because the older kids are going to push us. We just have to run towards the wall. . . .” I put away my glasses again.

  The comrade chemistry teacher came into the room, and on top of everything else he had put on combat fatigues. This wasn’t a good sign because it could enrage the men from Empty Crate. Cláudio gave me a signal, laying his hands on his slacks to catch my attention, but I had already thought about this.

  “But. . . . ¿qué pasa? Nobody has brought their notebooks today?” He began to write the lesson summary on the board.

  “It’s not that, comrade teacher. Today we’re going to have a visit.”

  “A visit? Is today the surprise visit of the comrade inspector?” He looked down at his worn combat trousers.

  “No, comrade teacher,” Cláudio said. “It looks like it’s another visit.” He pointed to the wall.

  “Where? Over where?” The teacher squinted to read. “And what is this ‘Empty Crate’?”

  “It’s a problem, comrade teacher. A problem. . . .” Petra had fear in her voice.

  “But is this why you are afraid? You are scared to death. . . . But why? ¿Por qué?”

  “They’re from Empty Crate, comrade teacher. You’ve never heard of them?”

  “I don’ care if they are from an empty crate or a fool crate. . . . This is a school and they will not enter!” He slammed his fist on the desk, but that didn’t impress us because this teacher didn’t really understand what Empty Crate was.

  “They enter all right, and they’re even going to enter with a truck . . .”

  “I don’t want you to sit there with those faces. . . . You’re pale with fear! Look, the school is also a site of resistencia . . . What do those clowns want?”

  “They want everything, comrade teacher. They’re going to take some people away with them, they’re going to rape the women teachers and I don’t know what they do with the men teachers. . . .” Cláudio said all this in a tone of astonishment. But the comrade teacher wasn’t afraid.

  “Look, I guarantee you that they will do nothing like this. . . . Not here in our school. We will make a trench. If necessary, we will go into combate against them. We will defend ourselves with the desks, with sticks and stones. But we will fight to the end!” He slammed his fist on the desk again. He was sweating, sweating.

  “But comrade teacher, how are we going to fight against them if they have AK-47s. . . . They have Makarovs . . .”

  As the comrade teacher was turning to reply, somebody next to the window shouted: “Oh, ay, Mama!” We all felt the same shiver rise from our feet, pass through the crack in our ass, heat our necks, make our hair stand on end and reach our eyes almost in the form of tears.

  Cláudio, before getting up, asked: “But what are you seeing?”

  And that classmate replied: “I can’t see anything, it’s just dust, but it’s coming really fast.”

  It wasn’t necessary to say anything more, and if someone had said something it wouldn’t have been heard because the shouting started in my classroom, passed through Room 2, and before I had time to take off my glasses the whole school was in an incredible uproar. I’m not even sure if everyone knew why they were shouting.

  Romina grabbed my hand in desperation. I thought I’d dislocated my finger bones until I looked at her and saw that she was in a Petra-like state, that’s to say, she was petrified, she couldn’t move. I glanced at her and said: “Let’s go, Ró!” And I thought that we were going to take off and run out of the classroom, but the comrade teacher placed himself in the doorway.

  “Nobody leaves!” he shouted, more loudly than all the shouting in the school. “We stay here hasta la muerte! We will fight the enemy to the end! We will defend our school!”

  As luck would have it, in the midst of the confusion, Isabel got to the front, and she was almost as big as the comrade teacher. Since everybody was pushing, he couldn’t hold his ground and was pushed out of the way. He was almost maimed as he hit the grating on the other side of the corridor.

  A huge uproar filled the school. It was as though everything was happening in slow motion, but that wasn’t it: so many of us were trying to get out the door at once that we were obliged to walk at a measured pace. I remember seeing Luaia’s face with her mouth wide open, leaning against the blackboard, trying to retreat in the direction of the window when everyone was moving towards the door. She was always like that: something happened and she had an asthma attack.

  It was much worse in the corridor: it was narrow, and the three classes were trying to leave their classrooms, so that only the oldest students succeeded in pushing past the others; they slapped, elbowed and punched to get through in a hurry. Off in the distance I saw Isabel speed up and head towards the hole in the wall I had mentioned to Romina. Others began to run towards the comrade principal’s office, as if this was going to help.

  Romina shouted at me: “We’re going to find Teacher Sara.” And she tried to tug me along.

  “No, Romina, we can’t. That’s the first place they’ll go, let’s just run.”

  The dust in the schoolyard began to lift and the atmosphere became even stranger.

  In the midst of the confusion, I heard the voices of Cláudio, Murtala and Bruno, who was unleashing enormous gulps of nervous laughter. Petra was crying, and there was a backpack that everybody was stepping on, but I don’t remember who it belonged to. In the midst of the confusion I tried to add it all up: had the truck already entered the schoolyard? Were they going to lie in wait for us outside and grab us after we jump over the wall? Were they actually going to open fire, or were the weapons just to scare us? Will we be able to run to the wall without falling? In the midst of the confusion, I looked over my shoulder: I could no longer see the comrade chemistry teacher, I could no longer see Luaia or Petra, and I just had to run, run towards the wall.

  We got out of the hallway. Now all I had to worry about was not falling in the dust and the people. There was more space than I’d thought, people were jumping over the wall in different places, which was just as well because it was going to be a problem for all of us to get through the hole at the same time.

  It was precisely at this moment that one of the most amazing and unbelievable things I’ll ever see in my whole life took place: we were running flat out, I didn’t run slowly over short distances, it was just that I couldn’t run for a very long time because I, too, had asthma; Romina was wearing a skirt, and she, too, was running fast. In fact I think we were both going very fast. Anyway, we expected to be running faster than the person who overtook us. It was the comrade English teacher, a short individual, who, judging by her appearance, had prepared herself for a run because she had her handbag pulled up sideways, and she no longer needed to worry about that; she had her glasses in her left hand and no longer had to worry about those either; her skirt, which must have been long, was tied up at mini-skirt length, which enabled me to see what I’m going to tell you about now, whether you wish to believe it or not: my comrade English teacher, as everyone knew, was a cripple. She had one leg that was more delicate than the other, like a cursory sketch that fails to provide an explanation. But, in the middle of the swirling dust, as Romina and I were running with all our strength, the comrade teacher burst out of nowhere and passed us so quickly that I could only observe those three things (handbag, glasses and skirt). Even so, I only noticed the skirt and the glasses, it was Romina who told me later that she had her handbag tied to her side.

  Well, as I was saying, the teacher appeared on our left-hand side, moving very swiftly, staring straight ahead, and with her head twisted a little bit upward (it was Romina who said this), but her secret lay in t
he way she used her legs to run. My God! I hope I can explain: as soon as her good leg touched the ground at full force, but also with a force that looked as though it was coiling for a jump, the withered leg made two movements in the air, as though it was going to touch the ground but without touching it, so rapidly, so powerfully, that I think I only saw the good leg touch the ground four times before she disappeared on the other side of the wall – Romina and I almost lost the concentration we needed to keep running. This must be a secret technique for running fast in frightening situations, but which I saw because she had pulled her skirt up so high. I’ll never forget that weak leg giving two swinging, forward turns while the good leg hit the ground and made her run. People asked me if she was hopping. I don’t know how to explain it, I guess she was running, but the truth is that she overtook me, Romina and three other people, jumped the wall without placing her hands on the stone, stretching her good leg to the side and gathering up the withered leg with her arm.

  I’ve seen people run fast when they were being chased by dogs; I’ve seen crippled people run when they were nervous; I heard about a thief who jumped out of a fifth-floor window; I’ve been told that there was a little shrimp who used to beat up fat older kids, but one thing is for certain: when Romina and I jumped over the wall the comrade English teacher was already out of sight. We almost got run over crossing Ho Chi Minh Avenue, and since there was still a lot, and I mean really a lot, of shouting coming from the school, we ran without speaking, and only stopped when we got to the National Radio station. Romina was smiling, I guess because Empty Crate hadn’t caught us, but I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of the teacher running at that speed, passing us and jumping the wall without touching it.

  “Fuck!” was the first thing I said. “Can that teacher run!”

  Since we were close to my house, I said to Romina that we could go down the street and she could phone her mother. We were already calmer. We met Eunice along the way, she saw we were sweating and asked: “You’re leaving school at this time?” I gave her a serious look.“What? Don’t tell me it was Empty Crate?” She became fearful.