Johnny Mad Dog

by Emmanuel Dongala

  “Don’t you remember me?” I repeated.

  “N-n-no,” she said again, glancing at one of the technicians with a look of desperation.

  I could tell instantly, from the way she looked at him, that the guy had slept with her. He must have forced the poor woman to do it, perhaps even raped her. He had sullied my beautiful TT. I glared at the traitor; he was still on his knees. He wasn’t even good-looking. And bang! A single bullet, right between the eyes. He went down. Yeah, they didn’t know I was quicker than greased lightning. Rambo knew a bit about it, from where he was at the moment. TT threw herself on the floor screaming.

  The other technician, who was still alive, opened his mouth and eyes so big they got stuck, and he froze like that, as if he were dead too. A tear ran down TT’s cheek and dripped onto her front. Then I noticed the shape of her breasts, which swelled beneath her loose-fitting boubou. My little guy immediately began to get stiff, not like the prick of that idiot Giap, who couldn’t do anything, but like that of a man who wanted to go all the way. All the way with TT.

  I told her to take off her boubou, her pagne, and her bra, because I wanted to see her breasts. She looked at me without moving. Then I lost my patience. I ripped off her boubou and her bra. She no longer resisted; she let me do what I wanted. That’s what’s so terrific about a gun. Who can resist you? We’d been told that power lies at the muzzle of a gun, and it was true. Finally I took off her panties and went at it right there in the studio, before the eyes of the technician, who was still paralyzed, openmouthed and wide-eyed, next to his colleague’s body. I pumped and pumped the beautiful TT. I even think she liked it—she was weeping with pleasure, was no longer struggling, was looking at me without emotion, her eyes wide as if she were in another world. Yeah, she was in another world, as cold as a fish, skillfully concealing the heights of pleasure I’d taken her to with my thrusts. I turned her over and rode her from the rear. With her, it wasn’t like doing it with the others. She was classy; I respected her. I’d never dreamed that someday I’d be doing this with her. I wished the TV cameras had been on, so that all my buddies, even Giap, could see that I’d really done it with TT. They’d die of envy—maybe they’d even kill me.

  When I’d finished, I wiped myself with her pagne. Then I dug around in her handbag and found a photo of her, which I kept as a souvenir. I also pulled off the jewelry she was wearing and put it in my pocket. As I was about to leave the studio, it occurred to me that I should kill the technician in order to protect TT. Guys like him were all spies for that elitist, antidemocratic government we’d just driven from power. Besides, if TT hadn’t dared to reveal our liaison, it was because she was afraid the technicians might betray her to the secret service of that evil regime. She would have been tortured and perhaps executed. That was obvious. I understood. If I’d been in her shoes, I would have done the same thing.

  But at the very moment I was squeezing the trigger, I had second thoughts. If I killed him, there’d be no witnesses left to prove that I’d done it with TT. Giap, Gator, Idi Amin, Hurricane, and the others—no one would believe me. As a witness, he was essential. So I merely shot him in the right leg to prevent him from escaping, and then I left.

  Chapter Five

  Laokolé

  As soon as we came to the main street, we were caught up in a maelstrom, a seething mass of panic-stricken humanity. The crowd had inundated the pavement and was advancing with difficulty, fifteen or twenty people abreast, raising a cloud of ocher dust and thundering over the ground like a herd of stampeding elephants. The movements of the individuals in this mass were so chaotic that it took me a while to realize the crowd was actually moving forward. Those who wanted to hurry were blocked by the slower ones and brought up short; people who slowed down felt the pressure of those pushing from behind; still others were zigzagging, with the hope of finding a gap they could slip through.

  Everyone had had the same urge that we did: flee, with whatever belongings were most highly prized. People were carrying their cherished possessions on their heads, on their backs, in wheelbarrows, in basins and baskets. Swaying to the rhythm of people’s steps were demijohns, straw mats, plastic jugs. I understood completely why these destitute people forced to take to the road were hauling so many miscellaneous objects. Whereas rich people all prized the same things, for us, who had so little, identical objects did not have identical worth. A pair of slippers was less valuable to one person than an old plastic bag was to another; a bar of soap was worth more to one person than a liter of kerosene was to another. But for everybody, these objects were as precious as a diamond necklace was to a rich person; the most important thing was that they could help you survive. And since women were the ones who were the most skilled in the art of surviving, I took to observing them while I was walking.

  All of the women had enormous bundles balanced on their heads. As if that weren’t enough, they also had heavy loads or babies tied to their backs. Their children who were old enough to walk followed in their wake, the littlest ones attached to their mother by a cord. An ingenious way of preventing them from getting lost in the confusion. I suddenly realized why a woman should limit the number of children she has. It wasn’t only for the reasons we were always given—namely, that the fewer children you had, the better you could feed and educate them. It was also because the fewer children you had, the more easily you could flee in times of war and looting. These children, some of whom were scarcely old enough to walk, were not suffering lesser torments commensurate with their age; no, they were paying the same price but at a higher rate than the adults. They, too, carried burdens—small bottles of oil or water, woven mats, little bundles—as they toddled along, unsteady on their feet. Silently I swore that I would never have more than two children.

  It wasn’t only children who were paying the price of the suffering that those politicians and their armed supporters were inflicting on us. There were also old people. I saw many—hobbling along, sometimes with the aid of canes—who were likewise trying to escape with us, for one is never too old to flee death. But at the snail’s pace they were going, I doubted they would get very far.

  The men were not like the women. They didn’t know the difference between what was essential for survival and what was not. The things they were carrying were extremely varied and sometimes surprising. Several were wheeling heavily laden bicycles. I saw one man laboriously pushing a bike that bore a trussed-up pig squealing plaintively on the baggage rack and a demijohn of palm wine suspended from the frame’s horizontal bar with lengths of vine. Surely the dowry of his daughter or niece and the remains of a ruined wedding. Another man, in contrast, had taken practically nothing. He was fleeing at a jog-trot, carrying only an enormous radio–tape player blaring at full volume, and he made dancing movements in time to the music, as if he were off in a different world. That radio was doubtless his most cherished possession. My own most cherished possession was the wheelbarrow holding Mama.

  Fofo was pushing the wheelbarrow. I’d tried to make it as comfortable as possible for Mama. The acrid dust that rose from the ground made her cough badly, more so than it did us. I’d put a pillow behind her back and, underneath her, a blanket folded in four. Since her legs were nothing more than stumps, there was room for her to cross them and even to stretch them out if she wished.

  It hadn’t been easy. At first, she hadn’t wanted to go with us at all. She’d ordered us to leave her behind, saying that she was already an old woman and that nothing would happen to her. I pointed out to her that in this country age was no longer a protection, as it had been according to the African traditions of her day, and that in any case, at thirty-eight, she was still young. She replied that even if something happened to her, it couldn’t be worse than what she had already lived through—namely, the day they’d murdered her husband. She mustn’t delude herself, I retorted; if she stayed, those men wouldn’t hesitate to use her cruelly before killing her. Well, she answered, since her husband was dead, she had no fu
rther reason to live; life had lost its meaning for her.

  At that point, I pretended to get really angry. I said that Fofo and I had thought she loved us, her two children, but now I realized that she didn’t love us at all, that we didn’t count. That hurt her, and made her very unhappy. She choked up and found it difficult to restrain her tears. In a voice full of affection, but also of sadness and helplessness, she swore that she loved us very much, loved us terribly, and that after Papa’s murder she had stayed alive solely for our sake. If she didn’t want to leave, it was precisely because of her love for us. She would be a burden to us, would slow us down in our flight; and she wanted to spare us the trouble of hauling her along in a wheelbarrow. I was speechless when I heard this. Never had it occurred to me that my mother could be a burden. It was my turn to be unhappy, even desperate. I didn’t know what to say that would persuade her to leave with us. And leaving was absolutely essential. General Giap’s troops would soon overrun the town.

  It was Fofo who hit upon the perfect argument. Dear Fofo! He told her that we, too, loved her very much, and that if she didn’t want to come with us, we wouldn’t go at all. Period. He started to undo the ties on his baskets. The argument shook Mama—she wasn’t able to find a retort. I seized the opportunity to add that it was better to die like that—all together, as a family. She gazed at us both, and the tears she’d been trying to hold back spilled down her cheeks. Mothers are like that. They can fearlessly contemplate their own death, but cannot bear to see their children die. The only thing left for her to say was, “Let’s go.”

  I asked Fofo to push the wheelbarrow while I carried on my head the large bundle that held two days’ worth of food, a few kitchen utensils, and some spare clothing (as well as some cotton cloth for me, since my period, always quite painful, was due very soon). Fastened close around my waist and hidden beneath my pants was the little purse that held our money and the photo of Mama and Papa. I’m not sure why I put the photo there—perhaps it might bring me luck. In any case, one would have to take off all my clothes to find the little purse. In contrast, my large leather bag hung openly across my front like a bandolier—the decoy purse to fool people. Into this I had put the things we would sacrifice, the ransom that would save our lives if we ever came to one of those barricades that the militias were always setting up along the roads.

  The crowd of refugees was moving more slowly, often by fits and starts. Someone ahead of us would stop short; Fofo would bump the person with the wheelbarrow; there would be shouts and insults, which I tried to calm as best I could.

  A car horn sounded behind us and I turned to look. Unbelievable—a vehicle was trying to get through the crowd. It was inching forward, honking furiously, and actually making some headway. People would reluctantly clear a bit of space for it, and then close up behind it once it had passed. I helped Fofo move the wheelbarrow from its path, and when the car came up to us I recognized the Japanese 4×4 owned by Mélanie’s family.

  Mélanie was my best friend. We were both in our senior year at school, but I was two years younger—I’d done well in my studies and the principal had allowed me to skip a grade, whereas Mélanie had had to repeat one. We’d become friends when her father had hired my father to build a large wall that would surround their house and screen it from the street. Since my father could use an extra pair of hands, he often took me along to help on days when I didn’t have classes. It was hard work sometimes, but I enjoyed the role of mason’s assistant when, from his perch on the scaffolding, he would call down to me to hand him his folding ruler, or the trowel, or a pail of water.

  One day when it was extremely hot and I was sitting in the shade of a badamier tree, tired after helping to mix the cement, Mélanie brought me a glass of lemonade. While I was drinking it, she looked at my raggy sneakers, which I always wore when I was working on-site with Papa; she looked at my old jeans, covered with cement dust; and she looked at my hands, not callused but slightly hardened by the loose stones I often had to pick up and by the buckets of water or sand that I hauled for Papa. And she asked, “What would you like to do when you finish school?” And I answered right away that I would become a mason or an engineer, so that I could construct large buildings. She gazed at me sympathetically and said that hauling wheelbarrows full of sand or cement, climbing scaffolds, and pulling tape measures were not women’s work. You didn’t go to school for that. You went to school to become a doctor, like Mélanie’s father, or a judge, like her mother; you could also become a businesswoman and earn lots of money, or a TV journalist and be a celebrity.

  It had never occurred to me that there were professions reserved for women. I hadn’t dared to tell her that although I was a woman, I loved to measure things with a contractor’s ruler; loved to see how bricks were laid at the intersection of two walls to create a perfect right angle, and how little taps with the handle of a trowel or hammer could adjust a brick so as to make a wall as straight as a plumb line. To fasten the rectangular iron-cable armatures to the vertical rebars before pouring the cement into the forms, we used steel wire; for that, we had to cut long steel wires into lengths of fifteen or twenty centimeters, and often I was the one who did this. I particularly liked to hear the steel wire break with a snap between the beveled blades of my shears from nothing but the strength of my left wrist, for I was left-handed and it wasn’t always easy for me to use some of those tools. There were no problems when the tools were symmetrical, like the pliers, the hammer, or the plane. But when there was a break in the symmetry, the asymmetry was always biased in favor of the right-handed, who had built a world that operated the wrong way around. They’d made it difficult for you to use a pair of shears with your left hand; forced you to screw a lamp to a wall by turning the screwdriver clockwise, though the most natural thing for a lefty is to turn it counterclockwise. They had even skewed the neutral orientation of a saw blade by shaping the handle for righties, making it more receptive to their grip. Yes, it was hard to live in a world of right-handed people, but eventually I’d gotten used to it.

  I hadn’t said any of this to Mélanie; I’d merely told her that I would think it over. Little by little, we’d become close friends, and since I was better at math, she would often invite me over to her house so we could do our homework together and watch TV on her color set, especially the evening news presented by the beautiful journalist Tanya Toyo, whom we both admired.

  Immediately I saw through the window that the entire family was in the vehicle, all six of them: Mélanie, her sister and brother, her parents, and her elderly grandmother, who lived with them. I couldn’t tell if they’d seen me. I would have liked to ask them to take my mother along—Mama, who was riding so uncomfortably in the wheelbarrow. But they had already passed us, and the only thing still visible in the distance, through the mass of people, was the big blue tarpaulin covering the baggage piled on the vehicle’s roof. They, at least, were saved. They had a car; and once they’d gotten beyond the crowd that was hindering them, they could step on the accelerator and leave behind the anarchy and chaos in which we were mired. Life was like that. Some people were lucky; others weren’t.

  Mama asked me whether that was indeed the 4×4 of Mélanie’s family. I answered yes. She said nothing, but the look of sadness that flickered across her face did not escape me. The feeling that she was a burden to us was doubtless still weighing on her. She was surely thinking that were it not for her—a cripple confined to a wheelbarrow—her two children would already have made their escape. You had to understand her point of view. The poor woman had been through a frightful time.

  When rumors of the first round of looting and violence had begun, she’d kept insisting that it didn’t concern us, that it was the work of a bunch of politicians and their henchmen who were settling scores and jockeying for power. “Your father’s a mason—he’s not mixed up in politics. And I run a stall at the market.” Furthermore, what did we own that was worth stealing? A few sticks of furniture and an old gas stove? Wel
l, she was wrong.

  They had savagely kicked open the door and invaded our little living room. It’s true we didn’t have anything worth stealing, with the possible exception of the cheap gas cooker that Mama had bought the previous month, to relieve us of the irritating smoke and hot embers of the wood fire. That made no difference. They still took the rickety table, the four chairs, and the old sofa that served as Fofo’s bed. In the kitchen they found Mama trying to hide a sack of rice. Furious, the leader of the unit attacked her and began to tear off her pagne. Hearing her cries, Papa and Fofo ran to the kitchen. Everything happened very quickly after that. Papa, blazing with anger, grabbed the soldier by the collar, threw him to the ground, and began to kick him. At that instant, one of the militiamen shot him in the head at point-blank range. Fofo, spattered with his father’s blood and brains, began to scream hysterically. They shoved him roughly into the living room. The leader of the commandos got up off the floor, beside himself with rage, and dealt Mama two violent blows with the butt of his gun, breaking her legs. Then he stripped her, just to humiliate her, to display her naked before his men.

  I wasn’t at home when all this happened; I was at school. Unfortunately, it was the first day of our high school exams, and there had been no warning of the chaos that was to descend on the town. Of course, the examinations came to a halt amid the general panic. I returned to the house through streets filled with gunfire, looters, and burning buildings. Utter chaos. I found Mama moaning in pain; there was nothing to assuage her suffering. We didn’t know where to take her for treatment, in a city that was no longer functioning. Some of our neighbors came by after the marauding soldiers had left the house, and were weeping next to Papa’s body, which was wrapped in a sheet. Later, when we were able to get Mama to a hospital, there was nothing that could be done to save her legs. Thus, in a single day, this woman who, regardless of the season, would get up every morning at five to wait for the trucks bringing vegetables from the countryside so she could buy produce for her stall; this woman who would elbow rivals on the docks in order to buy boxes of trinkets from Europe or America so she could resell them and provide clothes for her children; this woman who risked her life in old jalopies on rutted roads to hunt for groundnuts or cassava roots; this strong, dynamic woman had, in the space of a few brief minutes, been transformed into a cripple, simply for trying to keep a few grains of rice to feed her children. For her, this was a fate worse than death. It was certainly for our sake that she had not let herself die.