At that moment, three people came out of one of the buildings and walked toward us: an Indian or Pakistani, and two whites. They were all wearing blue berets. They weren’t carrying guns. The Indian or Pakistani—or maybe he was a Bangladeshi—seemed to be the leader, and he was extremely angry. He spoke very quickly, as if trying to confuse me. But since I’d been to school, I knew he was speaking English. Amid all the gobbledygook he was spewing out, I recognized the words “you,” “international,” “out,” “refugee,” “help,” and especially “crime,” which figured in nearly all the sentences he uttered. (I should mention in passing that I also know Spanish. For example, “I love you” is “Te quiero mucho muchachita amor de mi corazón,” and “To dance the rhumba you have to look good” is “Para bailar la bamba se necessita un poco de gracia.” It was while listening to one of those Spanish songs that I’d picked up the beautiful name Lovelita.)
So by putting together and properly arranging all the English words I recognized, I understood he was trying to tell us that he was offering us his international help to chase out, expel from the compound, all of those refugees, who in fact were nothing but criminals. That was precisely what I wanted, so he had no reason to take such an angry tone with me. He could certainly speak in a calmer and more civilized way, especially since those two whites were observing us and might think that we Third Worlders—whether Indians, Bangladeshis, Congolese, Yemenites, or Uighurs—were uncivilized. But before I could explain to my commandos what he’d just said, one of the whites wearing a blue beret began to shout at us in French, one of the languages of our country:
“You have no right to come in here! This is the property of the United Nations, an international zone! You can’t shoot unarmed people! You’ve committed a crime! We’re going to write up a report!”
The guy hadn’t even finished speaking when a woman appeared—so suddenly that it seemed she’d been blown toward us on the winds of a hurricane. She’d come out of a building that was flying the HCR’s flag. And she was in a raging fury.
“You realize what you’ve done? Have you seen all those wounded? All the people you’ve killed for no reason? You’re murderers! Criminals! How could you shoot at defenseless men and women? And children! Children—do you realize that? You’re a disgrace to us! A disgrace to Africa and to all Africans! You have no right to be here—this is UN property! Get out!”
Taken aback, I stared at her. She wore her hair in something like dreadlocks, but fine, clean dreadlocks that swung freely as she shook her head in anger. No jewelry, except for two little earrings that would have gone unnoticed if they hadn’t given out flashes of light with every movement of her head. I don’t know why, but I thought she looked like Lovelita. Why was she so angry? And how dare she tell me—me, Mad Dog!—that I had no right to be there? Didn’t she know that we’d won the war and that our leaders had assigned us the task of tracking down Chechens, wherever they might be? Hey, beautiful, I don’t take orders from any chick!
“You can’t order me to do anything, and I don’t give a shit what you think, no matter how beautiful you are! This is my post, and I’m the commander of this unit. Beat it! Go back to the building you came from and let us do our work! If you don’t—”
She interrupted me again:
“You’re the ones who are going to beat it! You and your gang of killers!”
“We’re UN staff—that’s what our blue hats mean. You’re in the compound of the High Commission for Refugees, and this lady is the director of this branch of the HCR, which shares the premises with us.” One of the two whites said this very quickly, as if to take the words out of the fury’s mouth and calm things down a bit. (He, at least, had realized that it wasn’t smart to mess with me.) “It’s our responsibility to protect the men and women who seek asylum here,” he continued impassively. “In addition to the refugees, personnel from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, some charitable organizations, and various development projects have also taken shelter here. It’s our job to protect them.”
The problem for me was that up to now, my business had been solely with the Mayi-Dogos and their militia fighters, the Chechens. And here I was, trying to cope with foreigners, with an international organization, the UN, and last but not least with a woman who hadn’t the slightest fear in her eyes. But since I was an intellectual, I knew what the UN was—yeah, I’d heard people speak about the organization and its soldiers. They were neutral. They didn’t make war; they kept the peace. But when things got hot and their lives were threatened, or if they simply thought they were in danger, they took to their heels and left you all alone in the shit. That’s what happened in Rwanda. So I decided to follow the same strategy—to threaten them, so they’d go away and leave us all in the shit, and then we could settle accounts with the Chechens.
I assumed my most commanding expression. I frowned and knit my brow, and with a menacing glare I put on my dark glasses, which I’d slipped into my pocket so I wouldn’t lose them in the stampede. And I pointed my gun at the Bangladeshi leader. When you want to terrorize a village, you should always start by humiliating the leader.
“That’s my last word,” I said. “Go back to the buildings immediately, or we’ll kill you, beginning with your commander.”
To my great surprise they didn’t run off, the way they had in Rwanda. On the contrary, their Pakistani leader began to shout in English—and even if you didn’t understand a single word, it was crystal clear that the guy who was erupting like that was mad as hell. I was caught up short. I didn’t have any backup plan, for it had never occurred to me that they wouldn’t just turn tail and run. Maybe the Indian guy hadn’t understood because I hadn’t spoken in English? You know, to terrorize a village, you don’t always have to humiliate or kill the leader. You have to begin by threatening the weakest, the women and children in particular. After that, the ones who are supposed to protect them, namely the leader and his men, will obey you pronto, for fear of seeing their precious little ones molested or their dear wives raped. A small arc, and the barrel of my Uzi was pointed at the woman from the HCR.
“This is my final warning. Go back to your buildings immediately, or I’ll shoot the woman.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
“Get out of here!” she shouted.
With one bound she was practically on me, whether to hit me or grab my gun, I’m not sure. My god! Women these days are no longer women. She was restrained just in time by one of the white guys in a blue beret. She was trembling, not merely from anger but from uncontrollable rage.
“We may be wearing the blue hats of the UN, but that doesn’t mean we’re sitting ducks!” said the other blue beret. “We can defend ourselves, and we will! And we’re not alone. Go ahead, shoot—we’ll see if you get out of here alive!”
He didn’t seem to be bluffing. With my attention focused on these four, I hadn’t noticed that an entire operation had been mobilized. Blue berets armed with guns had appeared in the courtyard. I glanced toward the gate. They had managed to close it, and two jeeps emblazoned with the letters “UN” and sporting pale blue flags were posted there. One of them had a machine gun mounted on it, and the barrel was pointed in our direction. Even if Idi Amin and his commandos arrived, they wouldn’t be able to help us. I glanced at the Bangladeshi leader. He didn’t look like the weak-kneed type. He was saying something, but my mind was so preoccupied with the tight spot my commandos and I were stuck in that my brain couldn’t recognize any of the words he was shouting in English. So I said:
“I’m going to call my commanding officer and tell him you refused to obey the forces of order and that you—”
“Who’s your commander?” cried the Pakistani, and the sentence was translated immediately.
“Giap,” I said. “General Giap. And he’s a man who never kids around.”
“Giap, my ass!” snorted one of the two whites, who no longer hid the fact that he, too, was angry. “You want to know the name of my grandf
ather who fought in Indochina? Ho Chi Minh!”
“Just get out!” yelled the Bangladeshi in English.
“Out!” cried the woman.
“We’re going to arrest your superiors, and you’ll be punished!” added Ho Chi Minh’s grandson, who didn’t look the slightest bit Chinese to me, though his grandfather had been a companion of Mao Tse-tung and must have been Asian. Maybe the guy was lying, or perhaps there was another Ho Chi Minh—a white European I’d never heard of. You never know. Whatever the case, now was not the time to reveal my ignorance. And besides, in life you have to know when to retreat, all the better to attack.
So I decided to return better prepared, with Giap, Idi Amin, and all the Mata Mata, to teach the UN’s blue berets a lesson like the ones they’d been given in Somalia and Sierra Leone. And to accomplish this later, I had to beat a tactical retreat now, especially since more blue berets were approaching us in response to the Indian’s orders. Without asking for my opinion, they escorted us firmly to the gate, with the machine gun on the jeep aimed at us as we walked. The entire crowd of refugees watched us in silence. There were a lot of them, and they seemed even more numerous if you counted the number of eyes that were fixed on us. I felt my skin burning from the heat of those gazes charged with hatred and fear. I was glad they weren’t hurling laser beams—we would have been fried to a crisp. When they saw we were being shown to the gate, they began to yell, “Murderers!” “Thieves!” “Rapists!” and shouted cheers and other crude insults. Like the captain of a sinking ship, I was the last to leave. But even before the massive wings of the compound’s gate had clanged shut behind me, I heard the crowd’s applause and the cries of victory and joy.
Let them mark my words, those refugees, bandits, killers, tribalists, Mayi-Dogos: we’d be back, and we’d teach them a lesson they’d never forget! Let them mark my words well: we’d give them no quarter! No one humiliates the Roaring Tigers and gets away with it! If Giap had been here instead of me, they certainly wouldn’t have done what they did. For that reason alone, my revenge would be all the more terrible. So much the worse for those UN employees, and so much the worse for that beautiful woman. She asked for it.
So we left. An eerie silence now filled the city, replacing the bedlam of grenades, Uzis, Kalashnikovs, and human cries. The silence was so profound you could have heard a flea fart. My commandos, too, were strangely quiet. I looked up and saw our 4×4 in the distance. Lovelita was still there, waiting for us. She was bobbing her head, a priori for no apparent reason, until the melody of a song—an incongruous, even unearthly sound in that ghostly silence—came drifting from the vehicle and reached our ears. I recognized the refrain and the voice. Lovelita was still listening to the tape of Mbilia Bel, and Mbilia Bel was taunting her ex:
Ozali ko loba que ngai na bala to
E swi yo epai wapi e
You tell everyone I’m not getting married.
So what? Why should you care?
It was beginning to get dark. Night would soon come. All of a sudden, I was ravenously hungry and dead tired. It had really been a long day.
Chapter Sixteen
Laokolé
It had really been a long day. I walked back to Mama’s tent beneath a great big round moon. I’m very fond of the moon, especially when it’s full. It looks like a large motherly eye watching over us, pouring out its smooth, milky light to calm our souls, which have become overheated from the violent solar eruptions of the daytime.
I thought I would collapse from fatigue and sleepiness as soon as I sat down next to Mama to begin my bedside vigil. But that wasn’t what happened—quite the contrary. My mind went wandering about in all directions, caught up in the kaleidoscopic welter of experiences I’d had that day. One moment, there was an image of Mama in the wheelbarrow; next, an image of that young fruit-seller callously kicked away by the female commando before being shot; this immediately gave way to an image of the fellow wheeling a pig on his bicycle; which in turn yielded to the memory of the young man snagged on the barbed wire atop the embassy wall.
Then a different sort of image suddenly filled my head—a vision of the man who had appeared out of nowhere to seize the handles of Mama’s wheelbarrow—and only then did my brain cease playing hopscotch. I tried to summon up his features, to remember the color of his clothing, to recollect if he’d worn a hat, if he’d had a beard. Nothing. I’d retained not a single specific trait of that person who had revived my hope when I was on the verge of letting myself fall into the black abyss of despair. How is it possible that I could recollect in minute detail all the scenes of cruelty I’d witnessed, even from afar, yet remember so little about a generous act that had such immense significance for me? Does this mean that evil leaves a deeper impression on our memory than good? It disturbed me even more to think that someday I might cross paths with the man without recognizing him, though I wanted so much to offer him something important in return for the life he had saved—to offer him the only thing in the world that could convey my profound gratitude: the word “thanks.”
I must have fallen asleep without realizing it, for when Mama’s groans awakened me, the sky was already beginning to brighten. The sedative had doubtless worn off long before—and if I knew her, she had surely done everything she could to avoid waking me, despite the pain in her infected leg. Actually, it wasn’t even groans that had roused me but rather the sort of breathing—uneven, tense, controlled with an effort--that causes you to prick up your ears. The strain apparent in her face, the sweat glistening on her skin, the force with which she clenched her teeth—all showed how hard she was trying not to moan or cry out.
“Mama, I’m here!” I said, bending over to wipe her brow. She opened her eyes and looked at me, and the first thing she said was:
“Is Fofo with you?”
“Don’t worry—he’s here in the HCR compound. I’m going to speak with the doctors, and as soon as you’re taken care of I’ll go looking for him. Don’t worry.”
I got up and went to find a doctor. In a place like this, every case was urgent and there was no guarantee that anyone would be able to tend to Mama immediately. But [ had to try, for I couldn’t just sit there and watch her suffer so terribly. I had two great strokes of luck: not only was the first person I encountered the French doctor who had accompanied Birgit to Mama’s bedside, but by some miracle he actually remembered me and my poor mother, despite the countless people he’d attended to since the day before.
“The woman in the wheelbarrow,” he said. “Of course—how could anyone forget her? I’ll come right away.”
And he came immediately, with his disposable syringes and his little vials. He lifted the pagne that was draped over the stumps of her legs and examined the one that showed signs of gangrene. He frowned alarmingly and said:
“It’s serious. The only solution is to amputate the stump. I don’t know if we’re set up yet to do surgery here. While waiting, we have to ease her pain. It’s all we can do, for the moment.”
He gave her an injection of what I think was morphine, and promised to come back as soon as he could. As he was turning to leave, I asked him if he knew where we could find our wheelbarrow.
“Yes, I told someone to put it over there, behind the tent, so it would be out of the way.”
“Thank you, Doctor! And—forgive me—one more thing: I know you were very busy, but do you remember the man who brought Mama here in the wheelbarrow?”
“Not really. He didn’t even give his name. Now that I think of it—yes, he mentioned that the woman was accompanied by her daughter, who had fainted on arrival and who was in the reception area. But your mother’s condition was so urgent that we unfortunately didn’t request any more information. Careless of us—but in all that confusion, there were many things we ought to have done and didn’t.”
“Could you describe the man? I’d very much like to find him, so I can thank him . . .”
“Honestly, I don’t remember anything about him. Now I really mu
st be going. I’ll come back as soon as I can. Perhaps we can find some alternative remedy in the meantime, before the amputation.”
Amputate a leg that had already been amputated. What would she have left? This was what I was thinking as the doctor walked away.
I dug around in our bundle of possessions and pulled out something to eat. Mama barely tasted the food but drank a good deal of water, which reminded me that the first thing I ought to do was replenish our stock of water, since we were down to our last few drops. The morphine soon began to take effect. The tension drained from Mama’s face, and she gradually dropped off to sleep. The time had come to look for Fofo.
I went off in search of my little brother, taking along a plastic jug—which I tied to my back with a pagne, the way one carries a baby—in case I came across a source of water. I began, quite naturally, at the registration desk where Birgit had taken me the day before. Once again the UN workers looked through their lists of names, but there was no record of Fofo. I didn’t know what else to do except crisscross the compound, look through the various rooms and tents, check the many clusters of people, make inquiries wherever I went. In the end, the camp wasn’t as big as all that—within an hour, I had visited and revisited every inch of it. As I was walking past our abandoned wheelbarrow for the third time, I realized I had to face the truth: Fofo wasn’t here. What was I going to tell Mama? For a long time, I sat by myself on the upturned body of the wheelbarrow so I could think. But think about what? I’d lost all hope.
I decided to fill the water jug before returning to Mama. There was a crowd around the two faucets that dispensed water for the camp. Things would have moved much more quickly if everybody had lined up and taken their turn—first come, first served. But if you’d expected that, you obviously didn’t know my countrymen. No one was willing to yield to anyone else, so there was a general free-for-all in which only the biggest and strongest could get near the faucets. Our solidarity as refugees melted away before a few drops of water. Well, war is war. Mind your manners and you’re dead. I untied the jug from my back, knotted my pagne tightly around my hips (just as I used to do when there’d been fights outside the schoolyard, often over trivial things), and waded into the melee.
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