Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  The ref blows the half-time whistle, the young spectators make for the tree opposite the house, partly to stretch their legs but also to argue more loudly without disturbing their host. Only Madické stays by the house. He wouldn’t miss the second half for the world. Nothing but ads on the TV now. Even in these regions, where drinking water’s still a luxury, Coca-Cola brazenly comes to swell its sales figures. Have no fear, Coca-Cola will make the Sahel wheat grow! The TV attracts a group of scrawny seven- to ten-year-olds, their only playthings the sticks of wood and tins they’ve picked up in the street, who burst out laughing at the ad’s suggestive scene: a boy approaches a group of girls who seem to be ignoring him. He offers a Coke to the prettiest one and beckons to her; the girl, after a refreshing gulp, generously offers him her waist. He puts his arm around her and they leave together, smiling. The boys guffaw. One asks another: “What’s he going to do to her?”

  The others snigger. The apparent leader of the gang answers, digging him with his elbow: “You stupid or what? He’s going to screw her.”

  Encouraged by the leader, another boy goes on: “They’re having a dance at the back of my house. I saw my big brother and his friends bring cases of Coca-Cola. Wahey! The girls are going to get what’s coming to them!”

  The laughter breaks out louder than ever. Now it’s Miko’s turn to whet their appetites. An enormous ice-cream cone, colours glistening, fills the screen, then a chubby little boy appears, greedily licking a huge ice cream. Envious purrs replace the inanity of a moment ago: a chorus of “Mmm! Oooh! That’s good! Mmm!” These kids know ice cream only through images. For them it’s a virtual food, eaten only over there, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the paradise where that plump kid had the good sense to be born. But they’re crazy for that ice cream; for its sake they’ve memorised the advertising schedule. They chant the word “Miko,” repeat it the way believers intone their holy book. They look forward to this ice cream as Muslims look forward to the paradise of Muhammad, and come here to await it like Christians awaiting the return of Christ. They’ve found icons for this Miko cone; they’ve made rough sculptures out of bits of wood, painted them with red and yellow crayons to represent mouthwatering ice creams. And it’s these sticks of wood they sniff now as they savour the ad. I dream of a Miko swimming pool, built in the name of pleasure, not turnover. They dream of devouring this ice cream as Madické dreams of shaking Maldini’s hand.

  The ads draw to an end. The older boys, who were arguing about the match under the tree, gather in front of the television again and shoo away the younger boys, who are too noisy. Elders are respected around here. An old fisherman, still strong, dressed in rags, makes himself comfortable right in front of Madické, who identifies him by the smell of fish penetrating his nostrils. Greetings are polite but brief. That smell is fetid but respect shuts you up. Madické keeps quiet. He knows that in these parts the decades you’ve accumulated are aces that trump everything. He’ll have to put up with this putrefying fossil for the whole of the second half. So he concentrates and imagines he’s over there, where the match is being played, far from the old fisherman.

  The stadium reappears. The players aren’t out of the dressing rooms yet, but the commentators are warming up, and Maldini’s name keeps being mentioned. What are they saying about him? Madické wonders. He strains to hear; it’s not easy with his neighbours commentating the match like seasoned experts. He leans in nearer to the flickering screen, cups his ear in his hand as if better to isolate himself from the group, and listens again. The commentators’ voices are slightly more audible, but the language they use flies past his ears without really going in. It’s so annoying! And that smell, too, getting stronger and stronger . . . Only Maldini’s name reaches him clearly at odd intervals. But what the hell are they saying about him?

  And yet he’s often heard, even seen, that language. Yes, he’s seen it, here in his country: that language wears trousers, suits, ties, shoes with laces; or skirts, suits, sunglasses and high heels. He does recognise the language that flows in Senegalese offices, but he doesn’t understand it and that irritates him. The second half begins.

  The first free kick goes to the Italians. Madické’s delighted. They’ve pulled themselves together, he thinks, and that reassures him. But his optimism’s soon frustrated. The Dutch value their honour. They defend their goal like a nun defends her fanny. The Italians have to deal with it. This sublimated war on the turf demands nerves of steel, and it’s not easy holding out for ninety minutes. Especially in these last moments of the match when every move counts. Madické sweats; it’s hot, and, besides, that stink of fish is beginning to turn his stomach.

  The ref whistles an end to the ninety minutes; the adversaries will have to wait for extra time to fight on. Although their thirst for glory keeps them on their feet, their ravaged faces beg for rest. Like a protective mother, a sister moved to tears or a devoted wife, I’d like to offer them a drink, sponge their faces, bandage their cuts and give them a hug. I’d like to tell them their frustrating match is like life: the best goals are always yet to come; it’s just that waiting for them is painful.

  Covered in mud and streaming with sweat, the players huddle together, their shoulders slumped, crushed by so much fruitless effort.

  Rest before extra time. The group of young spectators who’ve stayed in front of the television becomes animated. The match is upsetting their forecasts. The nervous ones are keen to assert their point of view, waving their hands about. The advertising jingles ring out. The kids from before rush over. The old fisherman picks a quarrel to kill time; with a teasing smile, he taps Madické on the shoulder and, stroking his beard, says: “What’s happening? Maldini, eh? Eh? Not up to it today, huh? Your opponents are looking pretty solid.”

  Madické looks up at the man before fixing his eyes on the dusk-filled horizon. There’s something disarming in silence, in knowledge, too. The old man’s feeling inspired and won’t back down. Coming over all learned, he keeps preening his beard and utters a deep thought that’s just occurred to him: “You know, Maldini, the greater the obstacle you overcome, the more dazzling your success. The quality of the victory depends on the merit of the opposition. Beating a coward doesn’t make a man a hero.”

  This rambling is hardly a consolation to Madické. He’s heard this Neanderthal philosophy before—this exotic verbiage, falsified a thousand times, dumped on us by westerners, the better to sideline us. Enough already with all these convenient proverbs. Didn’t the old fisherman know, conversely, that losing to a brave adversary doesn’t make a man a hero either?

  The sun seemed to flee human questioning and threatened to plunge into the Atlantic. The sky, fired up with passion, looked lower than usual, leaving a hanging trail of reddish light over the tops of the coconut palms. The sea breeze, in its mercy, brushed the skin almost imperceptibly. Only a few women on their way back from the well, late with their domestic chores, noticed the dusk’s light wind, which swept under their cotton pagnes to caress them where the sun never sees. It was devoted women such as these, too, who dared disturb the village’s incipient calm with the last pounding of their pestles. Thump! Thump! Thump! These pestles, distant and repetitive, reverberated in the depths of Madické’s heart. Because he’d heard them all his life, he recognised them, could even decode them: they always precede the call of the muezzin and the owl’s song. For all the islanders they’ve become the music that heralds the night. But in this superstitious universe, they also mark the hour of the evil spirits and the moment ancestral fears slip into the shadows.

  When, as a kid, he’d hear the pounding of the pestles, Madické would leave the improvised playgrounds, following his friends, and run back to our mother. He knew exactly where to find her: she was always in her kitchen at this hour, at the far end of the back yard, busy cooking supper or grinding a fistful of millet to make the milk curd porridge for the next day. If by some unhappy chance she wasn’t there, he’d take his little bench and settle down in
the kitchen in front of the fire, to avoid his dread of the creeping shadows outside. Impatiently, he’d stave off his boredom by feeding wood to the fire, marveling at the dancing flames until a voice, feigning severity, reached his ears.

  “Hey, stop that, Madické! What a blaze you’re making! You’ll burn my supper!”

  Time had passed. The uneasy atmosphere of dusk still drove him to seek the reassurance of skirts, but no longer his mother’s. In any case, on this 29 June 2000 the most beguiling of nymphs couldn’t have held his gaze.

  The magical curtain of ads is torn. The younger boys scatter, echoing the last notes of their favourite song: Miko! Miko! Sunk in black, the yard looks like a marine graveyard. Only the bluish glow from the old television weakly illuminates the spectators’ faces. The silence is proper for contemplation. The muezzin yells himself hoarse for nothing. He’ll just have to have some mint tea afterwards; it’ll do him good! The stadium reappears, the faithful cheer their gods. The old fisherman noisily clears his throat, shakes his neighbour’s arm and announces, as if confiding in him: “Maldini, my son, the moment of truth is upon us.”

  Madické gives the requisite faint smile before taking his arm back, irritated by a foul by Jaap Stam, a Dutch player.

  “Red card!” he yells.

  But the ref’s satisfied with a yellow.

  “Shit, he should’ve got a red card! That ref’s a right b—”

  The sentence is left unfinished; no one knows where anger will end. The Dutch are undeterred. They’re more and more audacious. Aron Winter makes his point forcefully and wins a corner. Eighty-four caps earns you a lot of experience, especially in cheating. Seedorf fancies himself to take the corner. Delvecchio rushes forward, proving to his mum that her milk wasn’t wasted: she definitely suckled a hero, capable of restoring hope to the entire Italian nation. But the Dutch mothers have done the same, and their sons, eager to make them proud, go back on the attack. Cannavaro blocks and gets it away; Maldini sprints off. Madické peels off his bench, imagining he’s right behind him: “Come on! Go for it! You can do it! Go!” he shouts, practically rupturing his vocal cords.

  Everything you want, you’ve got it!

  A cousin who’d been deported from the USA never stopped listening to that song and translated it for anyone who wanted to hear: where there’s a will there’s a way. Madické’s beginning to have his doubts, and justifiably so.

  The two periods of extra time remain goalless. Now a penalty shoot-out’s inevitable. Madické knows this, and his heart’s beating wildly in his breast. He presses his hand to it but that doesn’t help; the palpitations increase.

  The mistress of the house calls everyone for supper. The meal here isn’t reserved for those who live in the house; everyone who’s around when it’s served is welcome and automatically invited to share it. A young girl brings a small calabash filled with water for everyone in turn to wash their hands, while her mother places a series of steaming bowls in the middle of the yard. The fisherman briefly rinses his paws and makes a beeline for the head of the family. Discussing how bad the catch has been lately, he positions himself cross-legged on a mat and begins to pay tribute to the woman’s efforts. Mmm! You can smell the spices in the talalé, a dish fit for a king! Our women are the only ones who can make such delicious fish couscous, and that’s a fact!

  As for Madické, his stomach’s in knots. A late lunch is his excuse to decline the invitation politely. Besides, unlike the older generation, he doesn’t like sharing other people’s meals whenever circumstances dictate. If this match hadn’t gone on, he’d have extricated himself before supper-time. While some wolf down mouthfuls of couscous and compliment the cook to justify their greed, he savours the calm created in front of the TV.

  “Great,” he says to himself, “I can watch the penalties in peace.”

  But the weather decided otherwise. He’d hardly had this thought when a series of lightning flashes ripped through the sky. A violent tornado whipped the coconut palm branches. The white sand, the islanders’ pride, became their worst enemy, a whirlwind flagellating their skin and carrying off everything in its path. The people eating quickly deserted their mats, which were either flung against the fence or swirled above their heads. Then big raindrops began to fall: one of the first June rains, often short-lived but always unpredictable, that let Sahelians know it’s the start of the winter season and time to work in the fields.

  Madické hadn’t waited for the first drops of water to seize the old set and carry it into the living room, but in vain. At the first flash of lightning, the TV had blinked and then, letting out a last beep, had abruptly died. He didn’t want to think the worst: that beep wasn’t a last sigh; the TV couldn’t have given up the ghost. He told himself it was an electrical whim, just a shock, a kind of heart attack brought on by the virulence of the lightning flashes. In the living room he attempted a long, solitary resuscitation, with no success. He needed to hear the owner’s verdict to convince him to leave the patient’s bedside: “I think it’s dead. There’s nothing you can do; it doesn’t like the rainy season. Last year, too, it died on me at the first clap of thunder. Luckily I managed to get it going again. This time, I think it’s finished.”

  With his hand resting on the television, the man smiled as he talked on. Glancing at the living room clock, Madické realised bitterly that the penalty shoot-out was finished, too. He politely stammered some excuses and left.

  BOUBACAR BORIS DIOP

  • Senegal •

  from MURAMBI, THE BOOK OF BONES

  Translated by Fiona McLaughlin

  Jessica

  “THEY LOVE EACH other like crazy, those two. And now events are forcing them to postpone the date of their marriage again!”

  “Ah! Lucienne and her boyfriend Valence Ndimbati . . . It’s so sad,” I say distractedly.

  You get used to anything very fast. In her hometown of Nyamata, where my friend Mukandori is looking for a refuge, we find a way to chatter on like two old women. She asks me suddenly, stopping:

  “Do you really think they’re going to do it?”

  I’ve learned a lie.

  “It’s impossible, Theresa. They’re looking mainly to scare people. It’ll calm down in a few days.”

  The idea that from now on she could be killed at any moment by anybody seemed very odd to her.

  As for me, I lead a double life. There are things that I can’t talk about to anyone. Not even to Theresa.

  For example, this message dated April 8, 1994, that I’ve just received from Bisesero. Stéphanie Nkubito, our comrade in that district, wrote it a few hours before being discovered and slaughtered. It seems to me that they didn’t take the time to question him. They suspected that he was a member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, operating in Bisesero. The letter from our comrade shows just how organized and determined the killers are. They’re really ready to go all out this time around.

  Stéphanie tells me that on Thursday, April 7, 1994, Abel Mujawamarya, a businessman from Kigali, arrived in Gisovu with the two yellow trucks full of machetes. He had them unloaded at the home of Olivier Bishirandora. The latter, who has a forge in his workshop, immediately started sharpening the machetes. Olivier, a member of Parmehutu/DRM, was also the mayor of Gisovu in the seventies, during the time of President Kayibanda.

  Abel Mujawamarya then organized a meeting, during which he gave out machetes and grenades to the Hutus. The Interahamwe then started to terrorize the Tutsis, accusing them of having murdered their beloved president, Juvénal Habyarimana. They set to, looting and setting fire to the Tutsis’ houses, and then killed some of them. The Tutsis started fleeing their houses to take refuge in the parish churches of Mubaga and Kibingo, as well as in the Mugonero hospital. Others preferred to head for the mountains.

  Stéphanie Nkubito asks me to make a note and spread the word that the inhabitants of Bisesero, those tough warriors, intend to put up a fight. Since 1959, every time there are massacres, they get organized and at l
east succeed in driving back their attackers. At times they’ve even been able to get back their stolen animals through bold punitive expeditions. That’s why, adds Stéphanie, their reputation for being invincible is circulating around Rwanda. Refugees are flocking in from all over the place. But between the lines of his letter, Stéphanie’s fears were clear: according to his sources, the government is intending to put an end to the myth of invincibility of the Abasero, as the Tutsis of Bisesero are called. The army will do the bulk of the work, and Interahamwe militia reinforcements will be dispatched from Gisenyi and other towns where, because of the relatively small number of Tutsis among their populations, the massacres will be over earlier than elsewhere.

  I read and reread Stéphanie’s message. At the bottom of the page there’s a little drawing with the following caption: “Jessica Kamanzi making the victory sign.”

  Jessica Kamanzi, that’s me. I smile as I look at my two fingers raised triumphantly toward the sky. Oh yes, victory is certain. I’ve never doubted it, not even for a moment. But it will be so bitter . . .

  I’d love to keep the drawing as a memento of Stéphanie Nkubito. I finally decide to give it up: my comrade thinks he’s being watched. I tear the message into pieces.

  Theresa touches my arm:

  “This is it,” she says in a low voice.

  We’re in the neighborhood of the parish church of Nyamata, right near the lodgings of the Salesian Fathers, who people say are originally from Brazil. Behind the thick curtain of eucalyptus and acacia, we can see people hurrying by the hundreds into the church.

  “I’m going,” says Theresa. “You’d better come with me, Jessica.”

  I think the exact opposite. The fighters I came with into Kigali found out that future victims were being encouraged to take refuge in churches so that they could be exterminated there. But I have nothing else to propose to Theresa.