by Edem Awumey
35
“Did you love Koli?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“The way one loves.”
“By touching him, desiring his body?”
“He was blind. Beyond words, it was the only way to make him feel that I was there.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“We slept huddled together when it was cold.” “
“You touched him because you loved him?”
“No. Because he was beautiful.”
“Is he really dead?”
“I believe so. There was a silence after his screams in the cell.”
“But you aren’t sure.”
“I wasn’t able to verify it.”
“Because you left the camp.”
“Yes.”
Ito Baraka remembers, that was how Kimi questioned him about Koli the second time. It was on an evening like any other, after supper, when they were sitting on the broken-down sofa. In front of them, the grey of the bare wall-to-wall carpet reminded Ito of a dance floor where, in other times, he might well have gone dancing with the girl, that rumba that could still take him back to the past, a way to give fate a helping hand and a time for them to settle into the habits of a couple on a Saturday night of music, alcohol, subdued lighting, and the longing to touch. Outside, a timid wind was climbing the sloping street, and the lampposts were flirting with the silhouettes of the bare, exposed trees of January.
36
The lock on the door resists for a minute, then yields. Kimi Blue comes in holding a paper bag. She pushes the door closed with her foot. He can see her slender back and her jet black hair. She turns and smiles and jerks her head to flick away the stray lock of hair over her left eye that’s preventing her from seeing the man at the table in the shadows of dusk. She turns on the light and comes over to run her freed hands—she has set the bag on the table—through Ito Baraka’s thick head of hair. He responds by putting his arm around her waist, and she pulls away a bit to look at him. She can see that he has lost more weight since their last evening together two days ago. He’s breathing noisily and looking at her in silence. She wants to warm up the food, which has cooled, and heads to the tiny kitchen between the bedroom and the bathroom. She says, “I’ll be back in ten minutes. You’ll tell me about your trip while we eat.” Ito Baraka watches her moving around. Kimi has put on her slippers. She appears fragile at one metre sixty, with her tiny waist and her young girl’s jeans. The clatter of pots and pans fills the apartment. Ito opens his notebook again. He feels the evening fever coming on. His throat hurts too. The lines he has just written in the dim light are not very straight. He feels like vomiting again, holds back. He wants to continue his story, it’s a stubborn player that won’t give up the game even though failure is imminent. Again, the illusion of fleeing his painful body through words.
***
Hours after we left the camp, our jeep was still travelling through a rural region. I could sense it from the persistent smell of cut grass and wet earth and the characteristic rustle of trees. There were four of us in the vehicle. I heard the driver curse from time to time because of the state of the road—we were no longer moving on asphalt—his swearing supplemented by that of his colleague, who was supposed to keep us under control in the back. I was not the only prisoner in the vehicle, another person’s breathing was superimposed on mine, and it quickened when the driver said to his colleague, “We’ll be there soon, get ready. Relax, the map doesn’t show any villages around here. You’re going to be okay. I know it’s the first time for you, but it’ll go quickly. Just remember that these are orders.” The other man replied in an uneasy voice, stammering. “Yes, sergeant. But . . . I see fields, cleared areas between the trees.” “Impossible,” replied the driver, “it’s forest here, and besides, I’ve already been to this region.” “I swear, sergeant, there are cleared areas, we might run into people.” “Stay calm, corporal, it won’t take long. Orders are orders.”
It was clear that they were going to liquidate us in the woods. I began to sweat. Under my bum on the seat I felt a warm liquid, the other prisoner had pissed himself. I didn’t have time to gauge the unpleasantness of the situation, because the sergeant braked suddenly and the vehicle stopped. He gave brief instructions to the corporal, “Get out of the jeep and take the shovels, and lock the doors behind you.” “Yes, sergeant!” I found myself alone in the vehicle with the other condemned man, and a minute later, we could hear the sound of the shovels against the earth, and their voices. The sergeant said to his subordinate, “Keep working, I’m going to take a look around.” The corporal continued with the task, and at one point we heard him say in a frightened schoolboy’s voice, “Forgive me, Lord, they’re orders, there’s nothing I can do about it, forgive me.” The sergeant returned from his round. “Here, go on, have a drink, corporal, it’ll make it easier. Take a good slug!” They picked up the shovels again, and for a quarter of an hour, we didn’t hear their voices. The boy beside me said in a panicked voice, “My name is Kézié, what’s yours? They’re going to put a bullet in our heads, they’re going to eliminate us!” I told him my name, and said nothing more.
The sergeant spoke again, “That should do it, it’s deep enough. Phew, this is gruelling! We could have asked those bastards to dig the holes themselves, but they take too long, they drag it out and really try your patience.” The doors of the jeep opened again, and the corporal ordered us to get out. He said to his superior, “Sergeant, do you hear that? It sounds like footsteps.” “Impossible, there’s nobody within ten kilometres.” “Yes there is, listen.” Footsteps were indeed approaching. The sergeant hissed through his teeth, “Shit! Get in the jeep!” At the same time, Kézié started running, and I followed him unseeing, still blindfolded. The jeep roared to life and I bashed my head against a tree trunk.
I stayed there for several minutes with my face against the rough bark, expecting my neck to be shattered by a bullet from the corporal. Footsteps again, advancing hesitantly through the bushes. Then hands, with exasperating slowness, removing the blindfold from my eyes. I found myself face to face with an old man who must have been around eighty. A few metres behind us, Kézié was sitting in the grass weeping, his knees together, trembling. Two women were standing beside him, and one handed him a gourd of water. At their feet were two huge bundles of firewood. The old man said, “My name is Mambou. Come on, let’s go.” And for a good five kilometres, we staggered after Mambou and the two silent creatures with the firewood, whom he introduced as his wives. We came to a hamlet and the older of the wives went and got a mat from a hut and Kézié and I collapsed onto it. The old man lay down on his reclining chair and told the other wife to bring him tobacco, while the first one prepared to light the stove. Kézié was trembling less, the morning was drawing to a close. I sat up and watched Mambou smoking his pipe. The old man looked at me and murmured, “You can tell me about it if you want.”
Which I did after the meal. The women remained silent, and after I finished my story, the old man said, “We’re in the central region. Tomorrow morning, I’ll take you to the highway and you’ll be able to get a ride in one of the trucks going to the capital.” Kézié had barely touched the food prepared by the women, who, after serving us and eating themselves, had gotten to work weaving baskets. Mambou went into his hut for an afternoon nap. I continued watching the women work, and Kézié went to sleep on the mat. Dusk came quickly, we had another meal, and I went to sleep beside Kézié in the hut of the young wife. She had joined her octogenarian husband, who apparently hadn’t yet lost certain habits.
In the morning, Mambou asked us to help him take the baskets the women had made to the highway, where he was going to try to sell them. It must have been six or seven o’clock. We walked for an hour on increasingly narrow trails that finally led to the cracked asphalt of National Hi
ghway 1. We squatted in the grass beside the road like guerillas preparing to attack. A few cars and heavier vehicles passed us without stopping. Two hours later, a truck carrying big bags of charcoal stopped about a hundred metres from our observation point. The driver, a bearded potbellied guy, bought Mambou’s baskets after laborious negotiations that must have lasted a good ten minutes, after which I had a feeling the old man had been taken in. He asked the truck driver if he could give us a lift, and the man, suspicious, replied, “They look strange, where do they come from? I don’t want any problems.” Mambou tried to reassure him, “They’re my grandsons, they’re going back to the capital.” “I see. Can they unload bags of charcoal?” “Don’t judge by their appearance, they’re strong.” And without further ado, the old man said goodbye to us and headed back along the trail. The driver told us to climb up on top of the bags and started his truck, which moved off at the pace of a dying donkey.
37
After leaving old Mambou, we drove to the capital. I found myself on an avenue packed with pedestrians and street vendors. It must have been eleven o’clock or noon, and I headed towards the seashore. There was no crowd at the beach. A little albino boy was napping in the shade of a coconut tree and two girls were arguing and laughing their heads off. There was a metallic glint on the surface of the water in the distance. I sat down on the sand, my arms around my bent knees, my toes lapped by the dying waves. But very soon, I no longer saw the open sea before my eyes. I was thinking back to Koli, imagining him sitting beside me and asking me to describe the scene to him.
So I described to my friend the ridiculously blue waves, the fishermen and rowers coming back to shore, the line of sweating men pulling in nets, accompanying their task with songs repeated in chorus, the women sitting on an overturned pirogue, each waiting to be the first to bargain for the fish, the laughter, the loud voices, the two lovers perched at the end of the wharf, and the young man sitting beside it plucking the strings of an ancient guitar. I described that beach scene to Koli, the cheers of the men, who had succeeded in pulling in a net filled with seafood, the rush of the women for the sardines, carp, skate, tuna, tilapia, shrimp, crab, and herring, and the fishermen paying the men who had helped them. What I presented to Koli was a country of my own invention, because the nets were now empty, the fishermen bitter, and at the end of the wharf there were not lovers but a father worn out by his many burdens, getting ready to throw himself into the waves.
From the shore I headed to our neighbourhood on the outskirts. In the Hanoukopé district, I walked along the abandoned railway line. A pair of beggars went limping down the middle of the track, begging bowls in their hands and offspring hanging onto their big tattered boubous. Snot dripped from the kids’ nostrils, darkened by the dust-filled air. They were breathing black dust from a little charcoal market along the railway track, which had piles of bags punctured during transportation or by little pilferers. Roaming kids would help themselves to the charcoal and resell it a few sheds farther on to a stout old woman who cooked bean fritters and cornbread in a stove.
When I arrived in front of our house, I stood staring at the door for several minutes before opening it. My father, who wasn’t working that day, saw me from the terrace and dropped his reading glasses. He got up from his chair and shouted my name. Behind the house, there were hurried footsteps, and my mother appeared with a shriek and threw herself on my bony, ghostly body. My father stood to one side, a tear in the corner of his eye, while my mother hugged me till I could hardly breathe. My brothers and sisters weren’t at home, they’d gone out to get food. My father went to get another chair and sat me down, and my mother started circling the revenant in a strange ritual, feeling my body, my face, my belly, my muscles, while her breathing accelerated. My father stopped her, saying, “How about getting him something to drink?” Looking at me, he said, “Don’t say anything, we have all the time in the world.”
He was the one who spoke. He told of the dead and the disappeared. For the dead, things were settled, but for the others, those who hadn’t been found, no one could know. No way to track them down. My father had spent months harassing the police and carrying out fruitless searches wherever he could. He’d made long journeys into the interior of the country, questioning people, and twice he’d also gone to the neighbouring countries, especially those to the west, where people said there were training camps for young fighters. Perhaps I had decided to join the ranks of some obscure rebellion, he thought, to return to the back alleys of the country with a gun and a masked face.
The next day I went into the city to visit my friends. I was reunited with my little world, Beno, Sika, and Wali. I felt uncomfortable, because I knew I had ratted on them. But they were overjoyed and did not seem to notice my shifty traitor’s eyes. I asked for news of Gueule de Bois, our mentor and printer of our leaflets. Sika coughed and said he had been found in a drainage ditch with his throat slit. His computer had been stolen and they had tried to burn down his office. Many houses had been set on fire after the riots. At night, organized groups had lists of the homes they would burn. Old people who couldn’t escape the flames were asphyxiated and burned to ashes. There were thousands of handicapped people, paraplegics, amputees, and those with other injuries. The number of cripples had mushroomed.
My friends spoke of camps in the interior of the country. From there, too, people returned diminished—or never returned. And names of detention sites circulated, Otadi, Kazaboua, Agombio. People often came back blind, my friends said, their eyes dead for some obscure reason, and when they got home, they could no longer see what their house looked like or observe with their own eyes if it had remained intact or was damaged. They would feel their way along the walls and through the doors, but they didn’t actually know, and they still had in their heads the image of the house they had left and that couldn’t have changed. They now lived in nostalgia for that hut from the time before, nostalgia for an unchanged world, which was immutable in their heads and their memories as discredited deportees. They were cut off from the new order of things, and the trick would now be to re-establish the connection with that unsettling order—or disorder. And it must be said that very few of us managed it, even with good eyes in the full light of day, we found ourselves blind, like Koli and Hamm, desperately groping our way along the walls of this new world in the hope of finding markers, signposts, traces by which to relearn how to move forward. We walked into the walls, going around in circles, and in that rotation, the land, the country in our heads, was no longer facing the sun in the morning. And night after night we continued the rotation, lost to ourselves and others.
38
Kimi has finished warming up supper. Ito Baraka pushes the notebook aside and stares without appetite at the contents of the plate she has set on the table. He knows he’ll barely touch the chicken and steamed vegetables. He’ll spend his time examining the face of the woman across from him in the hope of understanding the mystery of her stubbornness, why she persists in playacting at a normal life with him, with its little habits and rituals, the things they enjoy doing together because it gives them what is known as pleasure and a joy that makes you dream of thousands of other seasons of happiness to come, love and laughter under the sun, rituals like their Friday night dates.
A few days ago, they went out and spent the night in a bar in Old Hull listening to the sad music of a saxophonist. And because they had gone a bit far with the Scotch, they returned home at dawn wrecked, but terribly excited, happy. In the morning street, Ito Baraka sang a bawdy song at the top of his lungs, with Kimi trying to respond to the verses. Ito was clowning around, his voice loud, his arms raised in a big V for victory, because they had come close to Heaven and Grace. At one point Kimi tripped on a branch and they almost ended up sprawled on the slippery pavement. She swore loudly, and they hobbled home. Ito said, “If I had the strength, Kimi, I’d write you a play, with a role just for you, as the dawn,
light, and happiness! It would be the story of a florist with a stall on a sidewalk. Early in the morning, the customers crowd in front of your stall filled with roses. You tie happiness up for them with flowers and smiles, you sing in the cold morning, and with a sweep of your arm, you show your first customer the variety of your roses. Then you choose the most beautiful ones and make a bouquet, and so on, your mood growing happier and happier as your imaginary customers come and go.” A few moments later, Kimi stopped short in the middle of the street. Suddenly serious, she said, “You know, I’ve never been to the theatre.”
“You should go.”
“I’ve heard that in the theatre the actors play at inventing a different life. I don’t believe in that. Life, lived in shit or in light, is imposed on you. That’s all there is to it. Take detox, for example. I believe that’s a way to reinvent your life. Well, it doesn’t really work. You always get hooked again. It may be possible to change the lives of others around us, but not our own. Especially when that life is already rotten. Like mine. You can’t get anything out of rot, Ito. There’s nothing my friends and family can give me. A long time ago, we were burned up from the inside.”
“You’re wrong, girl. Back home, it worked for some people. They went on the stage, they acted, and they began living again. They found their true place there. And what if that’s the problem, Kimi? Things have gone wrong for you because you aren’t in your true place?”
“Our place is the reserve. I stayed there for years and I saw nothing good come out of it. And you’re not going to ask everyone to go on stage, are you?”
“Your true place, Kimi, your home. Think a little in terms of a home and not the reserve.”