Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  “Let’s go together, Father.”

  The old Peul said a prayer in Fulani. I twisted dirt in my fingers as I waited for him to finish. The sky was blue as usual; I was frightened. We stepped out from the grass and onto the asphalt as though it was any other day. The teacher waited in the grass to see if we would be shot. We weren’t. Then he scrambled out after us. “Don’t leave me,” he said, and held my arm. I didn’t shake him off. There was gunfire far away, across the city. Here, it was quiet, the sun on us, the roadway hot under our flip-flops, and we walked a long time, approaching the city from the west. The road usually bustled with traffic and people. Today, there weren’t even dogs.

  We came to Séguéla’s outskirts where the first huts were. Some were burned, cinders smoldering in cone-shaped piles where they’d been, ashes drifting down through the air like a black snow. There didn’t seem to be anyone left. We heard a truck rumbling ahead somewhere. I grasped the old man’s arm. He was walking with a tall staff, and I hadn’t noticed that until now. The buildings were shuttered everywhere. There were brass bullet casings on the ground in piles like rice spilled from sacks. The walk took over an hour. We saw no one, though as we entered the city proper, I began to feel people everywhere, behind every shuttered window. The old man came to his cross street, turned to say good-bye. I embraced him, felt how old his frail body was under his robe. He stank of perspiration, and I knew then that I did, too. He smiled for me and I saw that he didn’t have any teeth. He said, “Allah ee kissee, good man. Go with God.”

  I walked faster now, came to my street. The teacher was holding my arm. “Take me to my house,” he begged me. I shook him off. “Please. Please,” he said, “it’s not far.” I jerked my arm from him, didn’t look back. I heard his flip-flops slapping up against his soles as he ran away. Then I began to run, too. Everything was shuttered. Fires had scorched the walls. A dog was dead with black flies on its face like a mask, flies crawling in and out of the nostrils, sucking at the black holes on its side that were the cause of its death. I didn’t stop running until I was at the security door of our flophouse. I pounded on the door. “Open up! Open up! Please! It’s Jack!”

  Melissa opened the door, the crowbar in her hand. She looked worn and pale in such a way that I wondered how I looked. We locked the door and embraced a long time.

  “Do you have any idea how shitty it’s been? I’ve been alone in here since Gbagbo was on the television. What took you so long? Why isn’t anybody coming in?”

  “You’re the only one here?”

  “I’ve been the only one here for two nights.”

  “And there hasn’t been any word from any of them?”

  She shook her head.

  Inside, the water was cut, the electricity. I picked up the phone receiver to listen to the nothing I knew I’d hear. There was no food in the house. I sat on the couch and ran my fingers through my hair. Melissa sat beside me, slipped her arm around my waist. We were quiet together a minute in the silent room. Then Melissa said, “Do you have any cigarettes, Jack?”

  “No,” I said, and shook my head.

  “Then you’d better go back out again.”

  A dog came from the bedroom doorway, stood in the short hall, and blinked at us as though it had just woken from a nap. It sniffed the air as if tasting it, yawned and stretched, then came over with its nails clicking on the cement floor and licked my dirty toes as though we were old friends. It was a typical amber-haired African dog with paws like white slippers and a white tip on its tail. “Whos this?” I said, and scratched the dog’s face roughly.

  “This is Petite Afrique.”

  “Who’d give a dog a name like that?”

  “Nancy would,” Melissa said, and petted the dog with me. “She went to Abidjan to meet her boyfriend. They were going to go to Mali together. A big vacation. She asked me to watch her dog for her. I said sure.”

  “Little Africa, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  I scratched Little Africa’s ears, and she set her forepaws on my lap to stretch up and lick my face. “So you want to be friends?” I said to the dog as I clamped her mouth shut to nuzzle her. “I think we can manage that.”

  Over the next days, the other six came in. Marcus and Sean rode in from the east on bicycles, had been held up by a squad of soldiers who stepped out of the trees near the approach to the city, had to sit with their hands behind their backs for hours until the soldiers received word on their radio to let them through. Nikki and Shanna negotiated a ride on the last logging truck piled with teachers and their families fleeing the northern areas. Rachel came in on back roads, holding tight to a Malian contrabander on his motorcycle. And for three days, Courtney had walked through the forest with her boyfriend, had paid bribes to get through checkpoints while her boyfriend picked his way around them through the trees. Finally, at the city’s edge, they’d said a hurried farewell, and he’d stayed behind in the grass.

  There was nothing to eat, and we didn’t. We had a few bottles of water among us, and we rationed sips from them. We couldn’t bathe, we couldn’t flush the toilet. It filled with shit, and then we didn’t shit anymore. We listened to the BBC all day, gleaned nothing new from it, lit candles at night and played hearts. Once in a while, there were sudden bursts of gunfire, mostly not. There was nothing to do but wait. Four days went by like this.

  Perhaps it was hunger that finally made us brave. But perhaps, too, it was the long confinement, our desire to know what was happening. None of us had any cash but Rachel, who had 370,000 CFA, which she’d gotten from her church at home to build a well in her village. It was a huge sum. We took turns volunteering to go out into the city in pairs, to pound on doors, to pay extortionate rates for rice and sardines; for water, cigarettes, cookies, candles, beer. No one was ever on the streets, and when we’d hear a military jeep rumbling near on rounds, we’d plead through shuttered windows until the frightened families would let us in. In this way, we got news: The rebels were on the edge of Mankono; the rebels had taken Mankono. The rebels were on the edge of Touba; the rebels had taken Touba. The rebels were consolidating; they were on their way to Séguéla. Séguéla was now the last Muslim city to be freed. We played cards, drank warm beer, smoked cigarettes, waited for the rebels.

  The new ones were excited to be going home. The older ones regretted the unfinished projects they were leaving behind. We all talked about our village friends, times we’d had, crazy things that we could never have imagined before getting here: waking up with a sheep standing over us, a neighbor giving birth to her eleventh child in the morning, chopping wood at night. Melissa, who’d been caught in the city, wished she could see the women of her compound one last time to say good-bye. Courtney lamented her boyfriend. The girls slept on the mattresses in the bedroom, Sean and Marcus and I on the floor in front. Someone was always out on the porch, smoking in the dark Sean said to me from where he lay one night, “You should have gone home when you had the chance, hey, Jack?”

  I shrugged, didn’t know that. I kissed the neck of the dog asleep beside me.

  When the phone rang in the morning, I jumped up to answer it. The others in their bleary eyes gathered to listen. It was the Abidjan office, our security coordinator, Judith. She said, “Everyone okay, Jack? Everyone accounted for?”

  “We’re all here.”

  “What’s your situation?”

  “We’re fine. We’re calm. We have food. We have no idea what’s going on here. We’ve heard the rebels are on their way. Everything’s a rumor.”

  “First thing in the morning, we want you to get out. Do you understand? Do not tell anybody. Not any neighbors, not any friends. You guys are too far north for us to get you. Pack your things today, make a plan. Pack light. First thing in the morning, go down to the transport stand. Arrange whatever you can. Any price. But don’t mess around. If it’s not safe, then stay where you are. The rebels have been helpful so far. But we still want you to move.”

  “Is everyone el
se okay?”

  “Everyone’s fine, Jack. Worry about yourselves now.”

  “Tell our families we’re all right. Tell them we’re together.”

  “We will.”

  “Everyone’s been good here. Everyone’s been brave.”

  “We’re proud of you.”

  “We’ll make it out.”

  “No foolish chances, okay? No heroics.”

  “Okay,” I said. Then we lost the line.

  We made our packs, stripped the house of anything valuable. For ten years, PWI workers had shared this flophouse, good times in it; had left behind photos of their happy selves tacked to the wall, colorful batik tapestries from trips to Guinea and Mali depicting the village scenes: women pounding rice in mortars, men weeding corn rows with machetes. Once stripped of these things, the house looked just like the three-room cinder-block structure that it was. The dog came to me where I sat in an armchair looking at the blank walls, yawned widely, wagged her tail. Her eyes seemed to sympathize. I scratched her ears. “Feel like traveling?” I asked her. She wagged her tail as though to say yes, set her face on my knee to be scratched more.

  One of the strangest incidents of my years there happened that last afternoon, toward evening. Someone pounded on our security door. We’d been reading, playing cards, and we looked at each other. The pounding only got louder. With the others’ eyes on me, I finally picked up the crowbar and went outside. “C’est qui?” I said in a menacing voice.

  “Eh, blofwé, we know you are in there. Open the door! We won’t hurt you.”

  They’d said “blofwé,” the Christian word for ‘whiteman.’ The only Christians around were the soldiers controlling the city. I looked at the others back on the porch, and they looked grim. I said, “Say who you are and I’ll open the door.”

  “Le militaire. ”

  For a last time, I looked at the others. How strange they all seemed. How filthy and haggard and scared and tired. But they were stone-faced, too. I turned the lock.

  There were half a dozen soldiers in mirrored sunglasses and fatigues. They held automatic weapons, index fingers extended over the trigger guards as if pointing. They were young and smoking cigarettes. One also had a basketball under his arm. The leader said, “Come on out, blofwé, and play basketball with us.”

  “Basketball?” I said.

  “Oui, ” he told me, “basketball. Our commander has sent us off duty for now. We want to play basketball with vrais Américains.”

  Marcus, Sean, Shanna, and I went out and climbed onto their covered troop carrier. What choice did we have? Then the soldiers got on, too. The two in the rear hung their legs out the back trained their guns on the receding road as if ready to shoot. We hurried through the deserted city. The sky that I could see was wide and blue, cleared of the smoke of the week’s fires. This was Marcus’s fault. He’d taken to playing pickup basketball at the stadium the weekends he’d come in.

  The young soldier beside me said from behind his glasses, “You’ve been here many years, no?”

  “Three.”

  “You speak Worodougou, isn’t it? You must really love these Muslims to have learned such a tongue. Or is it only that you are good with languages?”

  “I love them. I’m also good with languages.”

  “That is good. Do you speak German?”

  “Ja. Ich spreche ein bischen Deutsch.”

  “Wie geht es?” he asked me, looking down his nose.

  “Es geht mir gut.”

  “Ja. Gut. Deutsch ist gut, nicht wahr?”

  “Ja, Deutsch ist gut.”

  “I taught myself with tapes,” he said in French.

  “Sehr gut,” I said.

  We went past the mayor’s office. The windows were all broken, the great doors hanging off the hinges as though a tornado had run through. There were scorch marks above the windows so it was clear that the inside had been burned. The flagpole in the yard was broken in half.

  “Ich heisse Girard.”

  “Ich heisse Jacques.”

  “Sehr gut, mein kleiner Kerl,” he said, and slapped my knee.

  At the stadium of Séguéla, we played half-court basketball, four on four. The grass had grown out on the soccer pitch, and sheep grazed there, between the two cement grandstands in their few and meager tiers. The facility was just outside of town, and because the basketball court sat on the hill above it, being on it was like playing on a dais: the lush savanna open and yellow and green to the north, an endless tableau; the black wall of the forest to the south. The sky was pink and yellow in the evening, as beautiful toward the horizon as the feelings I had for the place.

  The soldiers could sink jumpers, but didn’t like to pass. We worked the ball in to Marcus, who’d post up, or swing it out to Shanna, who sank them from the top of the key. We played to twenty. They won, then we did. Then they did, then we did. They played in their boots. We played in our flip-flops. The thoughts that went through my head as we played were: I’ll never see this land again, and, these young men will all die tomorrow.

  At dusk, they took us home. Girard took my hand. He pointed his finger at me and said, “Du musst morgen gehen. Ver-stehst du das? Tomorrow morning. Not any later.”

  “Ich weiss,” I told him, and nodded.

  And Little Africa? She’d eaten more in the past seven days than the rest of us combined. Every scrap we could find was hers, whole tins of sardines. Why not? She was calm as she spent the days watching us from her perch on the couch, and her calmness soothed us. It was like taking care of a child. Still, Courtney had been saying for days, “How can we take a dog with us and leave my boyfriend behind?”

  Melissa and I met in the bathroom the night before we left. I sat on the toilet lid, and she sat against the wall. The bathroom was a tight and humid space, thick with the smell of the shit piled in the toilet. With the power out, we sat in the dark. I said, “We call the shots tomorrow. You and me. We can’t have anybody making any other plans. Courtney can complain about her boyfriend as much as she wants tonight, but tomorrow morning it ends. If she stays, she stays. But she’s not going to stay. We’ll hide money on each of us. If it gets bad, we come back. No last-minute plans about Mali or Guinea.”

  “They’re going to listen to us, Jack.”

  “I know they will.”

  “I’ll back you up.”

  “We’ll back each other up.”

  We lit cigarettes. The stars shone in the small and high window.

  Melissa said, “We’re not coming back this time, are we?”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “I’ve loved it here. I’ve felt alive and important for the first time in my life.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Jack, what about the dog?”

  “I’ll manage the dog.”

  “And if something bad happens on the way?”

  “I’ll worry about it then.”

  We finished our cigarettes, sat quietly together an instant as the thought of tomorrow settled in. Then we went out to where the others were waiting.

  At first light, we shouldered our small packs, and I tied a rope around Africa’s neck for a leash. Rachel was trying to take too many bags with her, and after watching her wrestle with them a minute, Melissa told her, “One.” We left the security door swinging open behind us. The house would be looted today, regardless.

  We were eight Americans and a dog. The mosques were silent as they had been, a mist hung over the city’s streets in diaphanous folds. As we walked through it, doorways opened, people crowded in them to see us go. If they’d had any illusions about what was in store for them, this ended it: the departure of the whites. All along the way, people called out our African names. “Allah ee kissee!” they said. ‘Go with God.’

  It began raining immediately. We banged on the shuttered window of the transport shack bribed the gbaka driver hiding in it ten times the rate to take us out of the city. As soon as he started the engine, teachers and functionaries hiding in the
Christian bangi bar across from the terminus ran out in the rain with their handbags to try to board the minivan. They were fish-eyed and frightened, and we let them on until the seats were full, the driver shouting huge fares at them. Others tried to push in, to lay across our laps. The dog between my legs squirmed to get free. I tried to slide the door shut, but men kept thrusting in their arms. “We’ll die!” they pleaded with me. “We’ll never see our families again.”

  “Drive, goddamn it! Drive!” the others shouted at the gbaka driver, banged the roof with their hands to urge him on. The Christians who had seats yelled this at him, too. I pushed the men’s arms away with my hands. I shut the door hard on their arms and fingers, shut it again when it was clear. They ran after us in the rain, hung from the gbaka’s sides. I shoved them off through the windows. We all did.

  The driver went fast. Suddenly the forest was tall on either side, the rain falling hard. We came upon a checkpoint. The driver swerved around the nail-studded board, the minivan tearing through the tall grass at the roadside, and we could hear the soldiers’ shouts. When I looked back, the checkpoint was already receding into the rain, figures running both ways across the road. The dog squirmed where it was pinned between my feet, tried to clamber out onto my lap. I hit her hard on her head and she yelped, settled. Then she thrust her face up between my knees, nuzzled me to apologize, and I scratched her snout to apologize back. We crested a rise, and before us on a short bridge was a logging truck toppled over on its side. It looked like a dead dinosaur; it spanned the bridge from side to side and there was no way around it. The driver pulled right up to the truck’s belly, to the great driveshaft as thick as my chest, and the river below was a muddy torrent from the rain. The forest around us was mighty and primal. Then we heard an engine, and a military jeep with its lights out crested the rise behind us. There were so many soldiers on it, their legs hung off the sides like bristles.