by Alan Cumyn
CP has nothing, although I do get sidetracked by a story about a gigantic Canadian weather balloon that has gone astray and is now threatening commercial airspace over the Atlantic. Canadian fighter jets pumped over a thousand rounds into the balloon but couldn’t bring it down. Perhaps this could add a new chapter to aviation history: intercontinental ballistic balloons. Don’t tell India or Pakistan.
My dear Maryse. Just a few thoughts I meant to share. We have journeyed so far into bitterness and yet are still both standing. I am sorry for it and yet somewhat in awe, too, of what we can do to one another. In the name of love? Survival? I keep moving my house back from the edge but then more parts of me fall away. Is that sick or what? My leg jerks up and I get up and walk around. I sit down again until it jerks up once more. I talk on the phone and send off letters and wait and wait to hear – about what? About the country that returned the empty skin to you saying it’s okay, it’s still your husband, here he is, just bring him back to life.
Tell your son I’m sorry. Tell him to wear a helmet. Keep his head up. Some people bounce and some people don’t.
At ten-fifteen a flurry of new stories is posted:
SULI STALEMATE CONTINUES
24 August 1998
Dorut Kul
The stand-off between unarmed supporters of Freedom Party leader Suli Nylioko and armed factions supporting Armed Forces Chief Mende Kul and self-proclaimed President Tinto Delapango continued into the heat of the day today on Kalindas Boulevard in downtown Santa Irene.
Temperatures reached 42°C and several civilians were taken to hospital with heat exhaustion. A row of tanks supporting Kul parted to allow tritos to transport civilians to Kolios and Wengata hospitals. It was a tense moment: soldiers at first refused to allow the tritos to pass, but relented finally when Suli herself arrived to plead on their behalf.
Tinto publicly called on Kul to stand down his troops and disband his “rebellion.” Kul, on the other hand, announced through Island Radio that Tinto’s declaration of martial law was unconstitutional and that Third Battalion soldiers were only protecting the country. The Freedom Party supporters and civilians who flocked to Kalindas Boulevard early this morning were technically in breach of the curfew proclaimed by Tinto yesterday. However, no one has been arrested as yet and so far the stalemate has remained peaceful.
Suli, while remaining most of the day in prayer, released a statement late in the afternoon calling on both Tinto and Kul to stand down their troops and allow free and fair elections.
FESTIVAL ATMOSPHERE OVERCOMES CAPITAL
24 August 1998
Islander staff
Despite the tense stand-off in the middle of Santa Irene today, or perhaps because of it, a curious festival atmosphere enveloped much of the capital. Citizens mingled on the streets in a way they’ve been too afraid to do ever since the Minitzh assassination and the outbreak of violence. In Welanto the last of several fires set by roaming gangs was put out. According to reports, the gangs themselves helped volunteer fire brigades douse the flames.
Ritaga music could be heard on many streets, and some people even returned to work.
“I don’t know,” said Kati Tulungota, a shop clerk in the exclusive Wexfords mall, which has suffered looting in recent days. “My brothers have gone to help Suli and somehow today I feel really happy. It could all end badly but I don’t think so.”
Such spirit was evident was well in the Fort district, where street parties formed spontaneously as people listened for news on Island Radio and danced and drank between announcements.
“We are so happy that Minitzh is dead,” said 89-year-old Lori, a former labourer who sat in the shade and watched his great-granddaughter dance with other members of his family. “It’s like the end of a long bad dream and Suli is leading us out. If they are still there tonight I will go stand with her.”
Several others also said they would join “Suli’s army” this evening when the heat cools down.
“They can’t shoot everyone,” said Desu, a clerk with the Ministry of Labour and Industrial Relations. “If they did, then there wouldn’t be any country left.”
In a grainy picture Suli kneels in the middle of an ocean of people, wrapped in her blue cloth saftori with white trim, one small shoulder bare, her black hair short, hands clasped, eyelids closed. A waif in the midst of great forces. The people around her are also kneeling or sitting but most are looking at her.
THE FRACTION OF A MOMENT
24 August 1998
On Kalindas Boulevard this morning time stopped for Santa Irene and it remains stopped as I write. We are caught in a moment of historical import that will be discussed and debated for years afterwards in our country.
If we have a country, that is.
In this fraction of a moment no shells have left the muzzles of any tanks. No soldiers have launched any grenades, no mortars have been fired, no blood has washed the hot concrete of this boulevard built by Minitzh as the approach to his great palace.
No flies swarm around limbless and headless corpses. No wounded parents feel their life ebb into mud while their children wail. There is no stench of death, although a crowd of a hundred thousand bodies doing what healthy bodies must do in the heat of day is not odourless. It’s alive, as alive as any of us have been in recent years. It moves as one animal, thinks, prays, sings as one body.
The singing especially has been remarkable. It began with Upong harvest songs, then turned to celebration songs from the Telde and Iluny tribes, one song turning into another into another. How did a hundred thousand different people decide which song would follow which song? No one seems to know. This is unscripted, happening bit by bit. We have come together as one and it is the fraction of a moment before any shell has left its casing, any more life has been separated from an earthly body.
It is the fraction of a moment before a country slides into chaos, and the more people who sit and sing and pray the longer the fraction might last.
Suli Nylioko
6
I used to love wearing a suit. Stepping out of the shower, fitting a firm, healthy body into a fine set of clothes that tells the world this man has a purpose, a career, a proper place. All those wonderful illusions. Believe them and it’s just as good as if they were true. Now I feel like a stick man in a sack, throttled at the neck. My blue tie with pink splotches. Maryse will remember. Her sister’s wedding. A hundred lifetimes ago. Maryse’s father bringing that young thing, what was her name? Mercedes. With the drug problem. She kept ducking out to the washroom and then drifting back, enlightened.
“Where is it?” Joanne asks. She’s standing by the door of my apartment dressed in a black silk shirt, burgundy bolero jacket embroidered in gold, and flared, 1970s-style pants. She’s even in cloggy high-heeled shoes that make her tower over me. She’s a bit like looking at the sun, she’s so brilliant, and so I keep my eyes lowered. Not for me this beauty, not even if I wanted it.
She repeats her question and I say, “I have no idea where it is. Some things are beyond my shrinking brain.”
“They don’t have to be,” she says. “What’s it called? Wicked Ash?”
“I have no idea.”
“If you don’t use it you lose it.”
“That’s one theory,” I say. “The one I’m operating on is ‘Take it easy, don’t wear yourself out.’ ”
Joanne eventually figures out where we’re going. Wicked Ash Gallery in the Glebe. I let her explain it to the cab driver, Abrahim Abinulla from Nigeria. He drives with one eye on the road and the other looking back at Joanne. Normally she can wheedle a life story out of a taxi driver, but this time Abrahim has her talking about her one trip to Lagos.
“My friend was supposed to meet me at the airport. He was teaching in a village about three hours away and he said, ‘If I’m not there on time you wait. Don’t go off with any Nigerians.’ ”
“Careful, careful with Nigerians,” Abrahim says. I expect a grin but he’s serious. “Some of
those guys slit your throat to get your passport.”
“Well, I waited and I waited, no Jeremy,” Joanne says. “I had no one to call. It got dark. These men kept approaching me, offering to bring me to a good hotel. I said my friend was coming to get me. The men said they’d bring me to stay at their aunt’s house. She had an extra room and would give me a good price. I said, no thanks. They went away and came back, went away and came back. Soldiers kept looking at me. There were police too, walking by, staring. Not good. Finally it was midnight and I knew Jeremy wasn’t coming. I picked up my pack and three soldiers started to trail me, two police, another bunch of men. The guy with the aunt. My God. I started to run. They followed. I felt as if I’d been separated from the herd by hyenas. I saw this taxi and jumped in and locked all the doors. Do you know why I’m so good to taxi drivers? Because of Charles at the Lagos airport. He knew exactly what was happening and he sped away even before I told him where we were going. He said, ‘Sheraton Hotel, yes, ma’am?’ and I said, ‘Sounds good to me. How fast can you get there?’
“We hit a roadblock almost immediately. Soldiers, only they didn’t act like soldiers. They wanted me to get out of the car. I said, forget it. I showed them my passport through the window. Charles talked to them and then some more soldiers came up behind us in a Jeep, the same ones from the airport. I slid down in my seat. Charles talked and talked. He wouldn’t leave the car either. I don’t know what he said to get us out of there, but he got me to the Sheraton Hotel that night. I paid him seventy-five U.S. dollars and told him to be back to get me at eight o’clock the next morning. I bribed my way left and right, flew all the way to Cape Town to get back to Kigali. Goodbye, Lagos! I’ve never felt so relieved to be leaving a place.”
Abrahim says much of his family is still there. “I keep sending them money,” he says. “I think I support half the country by now!”
Joanne tips him well. “This is for Charles too,” she says, stepping out.
The gallery is small, glassy, new-looking, in an old building sharing a block with upscale coffee shops, boutiques, and stores with Third World crafts. Several people are already inside. I see my parents through the window, am surprised. Joanne has also seen some people she knows but stays outside with me for a moment. I ask her what happened to Jeremy.
“He had some story about a flat tire. I told him on the phone he almost got me killed.”
“Did you see him for long?”
“Pretty hard to with him in Nigeria and me in Rwanda. My nerves were jangled by then anyway. I heard he’s gone back to England.”
Occasionally Joanne will talk about some of her old boyfriends. There was an American serviceman (“God, he was pretty”), a Dutch boy who wore his blond hair over his shoulders and brooded even on good days, a Frenchman who was too pure. “He didn’t even drink wine, for God’s sake!” Joanne said. “You have to wonder about someone who’s so far removed from his own culture.” She seems to me the kind of woman who never goes for long without a man – it takes no effort, they gather of their own accord. And yet she admits that she chooses badly. The flaws that later are so obvious hide in the heat of the moment or appear worth the gamble.
Heads turn as soon as we enter. Conversations lull or stop, the focus shifts to me and Joanne, the survivor and the striking beauty. My mother crosses the room and hugs me. “You haven’t been eating!” she says. She glances harshly at Joanne, just the once then not again. Somehow she seems to have reached the conclusion that Joanne stole me from Maryse, is performing the duties a good wife should be performing. I tried to tell her that Maryse and I mutually agreed to separate, that I hired Joanne much later, that everything is strictly professional. It doesn’t matter what I say. She believes what she believes.
“You don’t look like you’re eating so well yourself,” I say. She has sagged visibly, is ashen except for two pathetic spots of rouge on her cheeks.
“I’m doing the best that I can!” she announces. “Say hello to your father before he wanders off.”
He’s hiding by a tall, skinny tropical plant. He looks worse than I do in a suit: his hands shake and his face wasn’t properly shaved this morning, his eyes are sunken and glum.
“Hi, Dad!” I say, gripping his hand just to keep it still. “What do you think?”
She hasn’t been trimming his eyebrows. They droop over his eyes. Is this what happens when your brain goes under? Things start growing out of control?
“It’s quite a party, isn’t it?” I say.
I let go of his hand and it resumes shaking. He doesn’t look at my face but down at my shoes.
“My son painted these,” he says, still looking down.
“Not your son,” I say, too loud. “I’m your son. It’s your daughter-in-law who painted these paintings. Maryse.”
“My son did,” he says.
“I’m your son. I’m right here in front of you, Dad!”
“He painted all these.” Still looking down at my shoes. He backs away from me, bumps into the skinny plant, knocks it over.
“Careful!” I say, grabbing him too hard. “Here, do you want to sit down?”
Maryse is with us in an instant. I smell her before I see her – the scent of her hand lotion. She holds him by his elbow and shoulder. “Come on this way, Dad,” she says, and he goes with her meekly.
“Did you see my son’s paintings?” he asks her, and she finds chairs then sits beside him for a bit while I awkwardly right the skinny plant. She’s taken my place, I think. They love her like a child. I’m the one who has fallen out of the family.
Someone brings me a drink and asks me about the situation in Santa Irene. We talk about it while I hold the wineglass, which is too full, I have to be careful. The man is brusque and worldly, his grey hair so neat, like a carefully tended lawn. Do I know him? It’s quite possible that I do, but I’ve forgotten entirely. He probes me repeatedly about Suli Nylioko.
“She really is a phenomenon though, isn’t she?” he says. “The country seems to have fallen in love with her.”
The news coverage was sparse for a time, overshadowed by the stock-market crash and Russia’s woes. But the image of Suli Nylioko praying between the tanks is starting to garner attention.
“Do you think she has a chance? How long can Suli and her people last? Any feel about this from your sources?”
He pushes, but I’m stuck on trying to remember who he is. From the suit he looks like Foreign Affairs. Probably quite senior, from his age and confidence. What’s he doing here? Has he just come to talk to me?
Patrick runs by then wearing orange goggles and I excuse myself. “Hey!” I say, spilling my drink. I put it down on a little table, try to see where he’s gone.
Many more people have arrived now. The talk fills the few spaces not occupied by bodies, jams the air above our heads like a physical thing pressing down on us. Patrick squirms his narrow shoulders between the hipbones of two young women dressed in black and white. “That’s the husband,” a young woman says when I squeeze past, my ear not two feet from her mouth. She raises her voice so her friend can hear her above the din. “The one who was tortured!”
Somebody asks me to sign my book. I haven’t brought a pen, but he has, and I stand staring at the title page trying to remember his name. He’s in international development, I knew him from before. He and his wife used to come to our apartment when there weren’t any kids. A hundred years ago. We went to their cottage once and got eaten by blackflies. Click, click, click. The gears in my brain slowly turn over. He’s on the West Africa beat, smokes cigars in the backyard and brews his own foul beer.
“Who should I sign it to?” I ask finally, looking him straight in the face. He hasn’t changed a bit, is so dramatically unchanged that he looks like an old photograph fallen out of an album. That sense of ages having passed.
“Just sign it to me,” he says, unhelpfully, and I stare back down at the page, the pen poised.
“To me and Cecile,” he adds to compl
ete my bewilderment. Cecile? Do I know anyone named Cecile?
Finally I leave out both names but write this quote, the one thing that stayed with me from my time in the hospital.
Flatten and pave a field,
the grass still pokes through,
water widens the tiniest crack.
It was hand-printed in careful block letters in the margins of a handout called “Keep a Good Thought.” The hospital stamp was in the top corner of the cover page. There was one good thought for every morning – something short and sweet for lint-brained depressives on medication. I can’t remember any of the standard-issue ones, but when I saw this one I made a project of holding it in my head. It only took a week.
And it takes some time now to get it all down. When I’m finished I look at my scrawl – the scribblings of a madman. My signature especially has become a black storm of meaningless scratches.
I hand the book back and look now for my son’s orange goggles, wedge myself between bodies. Suddenly no one is familiar. Joanne has disappeared, as have my parents, Maryse, Patrick. Replaced by these young chattering souls in their black and white clothes. How can they all be wearing the same thing? “Sorry. I’m sorry!” I say, fumbling. More wine spills. “I’m sorry!”