by Tony D'Souza
I’d always be embarrassed in the mornings to have gotten so drunk the night before. But Wu would put me at ease. I’d sit on a crate in the sparse kitchen and watch him cook noodles and shrimp in his underwear over his kerosene burner while he smoked a cigarette, tapped the ashes to the floor. We’d eat with the steel bowls balanced on our knees, chopsticks clicking and slurping loudly, which I understood was the Chinese way, and he’d tell me what teacher or other had recently contracted gonorrhea. One day, I would have to visit his sister in Queens and say hello to her for him, he’d tell me as we’d eat. She’d made it to America in a cargo container, now owned her own takeaway shop. He promised me that she’d treat me like a king.
“Let’s go have a drink together at the Club, petit,” he’d lift his eyebrows and say, but it would still be early morning, and I’d beg off. I was here to live in my village; I had to get back to it. Then I’d hop on a logging truck to take me out to the bush, and for the next month or six weeks that I was out there, I wouldn’t think of Wu at all.
I liked Wu because he was kind to me, and because we shared our isolation together. The children called him “Chinese man!” and they called me “Whiteman!” We were both literate in our languages and liked to read. We knew that there really was a world beyond the hot and violent here. I had lost my father when I’d been young. Wu, I was to learn, had lost his son.
His trust in me had been building for a year, and I don’t know that it was any one thing that finally made him decide to take me into his confidence. Perhaps it was simply time, but perhaps, too, it was his need to unburden himself. We’d celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday together at Club des Amis, gotten drunk, and at his house that night, he showed me Wen’s picture, told me he’d died, and described what had happened next.
We sat on crates, lit cigarettes. The news was sobering and I didn’t know what else to do but be quiet. Then Wu looked at the cracks running through the paint of his bedroom’s walls and told me the story.
Together with his wife before she left, they’d ridden the thirty miles out to Mankono on his mobylette, his wife sitting sidesaddle behind him, which was her way. The road was cracked and broken, washed out in places from the rain, and often they had to stop so he could push while she walked. The forest was all around for a time, and then there was the long and lush savanna, baobabs standing up in it like sentinels. His wife had never been outside Séguéla; she was overwhelmed by how primitive the few villages they rode through were. People waved at them, but she pinched Wu to tell him not to stop. Again and again she said, “How could our son have lived like this?”
At the girl’s village, the chief and everyone came out to meet them. For whatever reason, Wu wasn’t angry, and under her parasol, his wife didn’t say anything. The chief presented the girl to them, and she was clearly pregnant. What had his son seen in this small African girl? That she’d sold chilies in the market was all Wu knew of her. There were dozens of girls like that. His wife wanted to know every detail of what had gone on here, and Wu translated her questions to the chief, to the girl and her family. “Where did my son sleep?” his wife wanted to know. The chief led them in a great procession through the thatched huts of the village, showed them one at the back that looked like all the others. Wu and his wife peered into the gloom of the simple structure. On the dirt floor was a frayed raffia mat, nothing more. “This is where my husband slept,” the girl told them. She showed them a ceramic cistern of water, a small calabash dipping cup. “This is the water I brought him to drink. This is the stool where he sat in the evening.” The girl seemed frightened. If the chief’s heavy presence hadn’t hung over everything, Wu felt that the girl would have run off into the bush.
Apparently, Wen’s few possessions had already been claimed by the living. These were brought forth from the crowd and set at Wu’s feet. There was a well-worn machete that his son had held in his hand. There was a tattered green boubous that his son had worn in the evenings. The chief barked at a young man standing near him, and the young man removed his flip-flops. The chief set them before Wu and said, “These were his shoes.”
The village was a nothing place in the middle of nowhere: a collection of huts and the meager people that lived in them. The gnarled witch doctor with his staff came in his rough Korhogo cloth robe, looked down at his feet, and told Wu, “The boy was sick for three days. The ancestors called loudly for him. He was strong, very strong in his heart. But the ancestors called to him with hunger. He died in my hut as I prayed over him. He was strong until the end.” The old witch doctor pointed to another hut, where Wen had died. It looked the same as the rest.
The chief led them out into the tall grass of the savanna. They followed a path through it until they came to a clearing under a stand of yellow and red blooming acacia. There were old graves here, mounds of stony soil where the earth had been pried open, turned, and behind these was another mound, the soil fresh and red, soft looking, not so old. The chief said, “That is where he lies,” and he scattered rice onto the ground from his hand for luck.
It was a heap of earth, pebbles all through it like rough gems, no marker of any sort, already settling down to anonymity from the rains. “Why didn’t you bring him into the town when he was sick?” Wu asked the chief.
The girl spoke. She said, “My husband did not want to go into the town.”
“Why didn’t you bring us his body?”
The chief said, “He prayed with us. He died as a Muslim. We buried him here in the Muslim way.”
Wu gave the girl money, told her to come to him in Séguéla. He promised to take care of her. He promised to help her with her every need. Wu’s wife took the green boubous and the flip-flops. The girl’s mother ran out with a blue pagne and wrapped these things carefully in it. Wu rode them back to Séguéla, his wife holding the blue package close to her chest. His wife had stopped talking to him days before; he knew his life as he had known it with her was over. Wu tried to see the village, the land, through his son’s eyes as they left it. White clouds scudded through the blue sky, and for the first time—and only briefly—Wu allowed himself to admit that Africa was beautiful.
Wu’s story was known in all the villages, was known in mine. The only reason no one had ever told it to me was because I hadn’t known to ask. A year and a half into my service when I did know, I asked Mamadou, “Do you know the story of the Chinese doctor?”
“Oh, yes, Adama. Everyone knows it well. It has been happening since you have been here.” Mamadou waved his hand before his face in the night where we sat smoking on stools outside my hut. It was as though he was trying to ward off trouble. He said, “A tragic story. Very sad. Who knows what sorts of genies have their hands in it? Now the doctor wants the small boy. The girl does not want to give up her son. For certain, genies have been conjured now. Trouble like this must be given a wide berth.”
It took some time for the girl to take Wu up on his offer, but after the child was born, she came to live with her aunt in Séguéla, and brought the infant to Wu every day. I had only just become aware of the situation at this time, the beginning of my second year. Wu still had money then, and he lavished it on his grandson. He brought toys up from Abidjan, colorful balls, a plastic dump truck, and he bought the girl Dutch wax pagnes and closed-toe shoes so that she might dress nicely. The girl called the boy Moussa, a Muslim name, but Wu called him Didi. I was never exactly sure what this meant, but I had a sense that it meant ‘little’ or ‘small.’
Wu stopped drinking almost as soon as he had told me his story, and for six months I didn’t see him in any real way. Still, his story was on the lips of everyone, and I kept abreast of it that way. When I’d stop by his house to inquire how he was, I’d notice those toys in the entryway, understood that Wu was happy, that his grandson was suddenly in his life, that his life had diverged from mine in a good way.
Time passed. The rainy season became the dry, the harvest masks came out to dance their benedictions to the ancestors, the people
had time on their hands. This was the beginning of my third dry season in Tégéso, and then Ramadan was upon us. Yet again, I rose at the imam’s call to eat okra soup with my neighbors by firelight in the darkness, gave up food and drink during the day, observing the custom, though I didn’t pray. There was a prolonged lull in the violence that had marked those years, and I and everyone began to wonder if Ivory Coast would now be good again. Perhaps it was the irritability that the fast put into its observers, but just when it seemed like the nation had righted itself, violence broke out everywhere.
I went into Séguéla once the government took control of the city again, to see what had happened. It was the typical scene I’d witnessed nearly half a dozen times already: the soldiers’ and Christians’ homes burned, the préfets offices looted and in shambles. Club des Amis was still standing, and the proprietor and his sisters greeted me with troubled expressions, warm embraces. The owner’s cousin was the subcom-mander of the region’s military detachment, and the heavy machine gun he’d had set up to protect the bar was still on its sandbags like a testament to how dangerous things had been. Wu was drinking in the corner. I was excited to see him, but he didn’t seem himself at all. As I approached, I saw that his ashtray was full of cigarette butts, that he’d set a long row of the beer bottles he’d drunk on the ground beside him. His face was dark with stubble. He coughed and looked sick.
“Did you ride out the trouble here, Wu?” I asked him.
He nodded. He said, “They looted my house. Everything is gone.”
“And what about Wu Didi?”
“My grandson? The girl took him away weeks ago. She only wanted money. She told me I had to pay 50,000 CFA every time I wanted to see him. She refused to leave him with me because she was afraid I would take him to China. I told the police what she was doing. She heard of this, and ran away. It’s her family who looted my house. I have not otherwise had trouble here.”
We drank a few tall beers together, but the drinking didn’t help his mood. He was maudlin, smoking. The evening settled over us and turned to night, and Wu, his head lolling, wanted to ride himself home. Instead, I made him sit on the back and, one eye closed for precision, rode us there myself. All the windows of his house had been broken out, the glass shards lay in the rooms like litter. They’d taken his television, his bed, his stove. On the floor in the debris were muddied aerograms covered in Chinese characters, and bent pictures of his son.
We sat on crates in his bedroom, lit cigarettes. Wu had composed himself during the ride over. “Jack”—he waved his hand at the mess—”this is the life I’ve made for myself, isn’t it? I came here because of greed, and this is what I’ve earned.” What was there to say? Wu picked up one of the pictures, smoothed it flat on his knee, then looked at it a long time like looking at a photo of someone he didn’t know. He said, “You call me Wu. Everyone here calls me Wu. That is not my name. My name is Chang. Chang Gochiang.”
“Chang Gochiang. What is Wu?”
“Wu is a sound. Someone else’s name. ‘Chang Gochiang’ is too difficult for them to say. My cousin told me to tell them ‘Wu.’ It is the same name as he uses. Many Chinese here use it. It is easy for them to say. Every Chinese here is Wu. But my name is Chang Gochiang.”
I helped him sweep up, bought a cheap plastic mat from a night vendor for him to sleep on. I worried that he might kill himself, but what could I do? When I left, he was sleeping on the mat in his underwear, the pictures of his life in a stack beside his head like a pillow.
Wu lingered on in Séguéla after that uprising, became something of a fool. To the locals, he was a strange man from China with troubling stories circulating about him: a dead son, a lost wife, a half-breed grandchild missing somewhere in the distant villages. And to the functionaries in the bars, he was a drunk, a wretch, a foreigner who’d come where he shouldn’t have, who had lost everything because of it. Besides, he knew too many of their dirty secrets.
Wu bought another bed, another television set to watch the Ivorian news. He’d greet me perfunctorily at his door in his depression as though our friendship belonged to a time he didn’t want to remember, and though he’d ask how I’d been, he wouldn’t invite me in. When I’d come across him in the bar, he’d be buying beers for a table full of rowdy soldiers, sitting close to the magistrates and judges in their fine suits like a sycophant, offering them tumblers of neat Johnnie Walker. His French seemed to deteriorate to a buck-toothed caricature of the accent that it had once been. When the drunk soldiers would egg him on, he’d arm-wrestle shoe-shine boys, dirty fous, mugging when he’d lose with bright smiles to make everyone laugh. Now and again, I’d catch his eye from across the bar, witnessing his strange humiliation. Then his face would compose itself for an instant as though he wanted to say to me, ‘You know this is not who I am.’
What Wu did or didn’t do during that time, I’ll never really know. I had no power to help him, and even had I, I don’t know that I would have. When I’d bring up Wu to Mamadou, Mamadou would shrug and sigh. “It’s terrible to lose a son. But the girl does not want to lose hers, either. Shouldn’t a child belong to its mother? The Chinaman wants to have the boy to ease his loss. But doesn’t the girl have a right to her son as well?”
Other times, Mamadou was more reticent. He’d say, “Why must that girl make so much trouble? The child is not a normal child here. Here, his life will be one of ridicule. That girl will have many children. Why does she want that boy if it isn’t about money? Better to let this one go to the life the Chinaman will give it, and keep her new ones, which will be truly black.”
It wasn’t a secret that Wu was paying bribes right and left at this time. It was rumored that he’d given 500,000 CFA to the préfet, an equal sum to the district judge, and that each and every night he had drinks and cigarettes carried out to the soldiers who manned the checkpoints in and out of the city. A half-breed child was an impossible thing to hide. Soldiers in plainclothes went to the girl’s village, searched it, searched all the villages of her family. Her father, then brothers, were brought into the Séguéla jail one by one. They were fined enormous sums they couldn’t hope to pay on the premise that their identity papers weren’t in order. But no one’s identity papers were in order in the Muslim north. The girl’s relatives were tortured and released. If they knew where she had gone, it wasn’t squeezed out of them.
Rumors flew about. Some said she was living with a Senoufo cousin outside Korhogo. Others put her in a Bozo fishing village north of Beoumi. The more romantic versions said she’d drowned herself and her child in the Marahoué, while the most outlandish said that a French dignitary had fallen in love with her in Abidjan, whisked her and the child away to Paris.
The soldiers promised Wu that they were closing in. These reports made it even into the villages. Someone had seen a little boy with tea-colored skin and Chinese eyes wandering lost in a market in Boundiali, crying for his mother. Another had seen the girl with the child tied to her back trying to cross the Burkina border at Ferkéssédougou. Violence flared up here and there as it would: Dioula labor strikes in Abidjan, Mossi lockouts on the great palm oil plantations. That war was inevitable was like moisture gathering in the air. Soon the dry season would end in great thunderstorms, too.
Sometimes, I would try to imagine the girl. Who was she? What I knew was that she had sold chilies in the Séguéla market, that she’d grown up in a village as obscure and primitive as the one I lived in. Somehow she’d made it into town, where certainly the streetlights and few rusted taxis impressed her; where she’d fallen for Wu’s son, made love with him, got pregnant.
The flirting stage of their romance played itself out in a thousand examples every day in the market for anyone to see: the bored girls teasing the unemployed boys about their rags, their muscles that meant nothing, the boys teasing back about the girls’ servitude to their produce, their illiteracy and frayed pagnes. The girls were skinny as plucked chickens, the boys said, the girls would tell the boys back
that they had donkeys’ teeth. All day it went on. And in the night, after meals were eaten and dishes washed, the young people would stroll in tight groups under the orange Séguéla streetlights, half of them burned out, and once in a while some bold one or other would look both ways for aunts or cousins, cross the street, touch an arm, grasp a hand, pass some moments in a shadow beside the loved one, too shy at first to say anything at all.
Of course there would have been stars in the sky the night they met. Perhaps she had said to him, “Tell me about your country.” Or perhaps he’d said to her, “Do you know about my country?” An unmarried girl like her would have always been under the eye of her aunt and her aunt’s household. For his part, his mother always home, Wen couldn’t possibly have brought her there. Maybe there was a grassy place in the bush that she knew of where they could sit and look at the town’s lights. Maybe Wen had made a friend who could loan them a room. Somehow, somewhere, they had gotten to know each other, fallen in love. They made love together then, the cultures that bound them finally undressed to their simple bodies. The girl soon understood that she was pregnant; she called Wen “Husband” when she spoke to him, and he liked that. His father struck him when he revealed what had happened; the couple ran away together. Did she imagine they would live together in her village like that forever? Or had she hoped to one day travel with him to China? Had either of them stopped to consider the complications that would face their child? Or had everything seemed golden and bright in the throes of their love and youth?