Kaveena

by Boubacar Boris Diop

  In order to break a potentially very heavy silence, one of them asked whatever came to mind: “What is that building?”

  The president looked around him. “The little yellow building there on your left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Asante, what is that building?” (He never called me Colonel Kroma during those drives.)

  “That’s the Satellite, Mr. President.”

  He slowed down to get a better look at the leprous facade of the building and the dull lighting around it before saying more precisely to his guests, in a detached tone, “That belongs to a large insurance company.”

  “Funny name,” one of them said.

  And he explained, “No one knows why it’s called that. There are also apartments and some private offices inside.”

  A brief silence ensued inside the car. I was imagining the president’s guests laughing silently to themselves. Did any among them know what the Satellite was really used for? Those people knew everything. You could always tell them whatever bullshit and they’d shake their heads as if to say, go on, keep talking, little one, I’m interested. Of course, they were not going to make a big story of it, about what went on in the basement of the Satellite. That’s where the tough ones were interrogated. They were buried on-site. Nobody could get out alive. It wasn’t even conceivable.

  It is important to know, by the way, that in those days N’Zo Nikiema and Pierre Castaneda were the best of friends. Most of those who visited Nikiema were otherwise more or less connected to Cogemin. All they had to do was plug their noses, and this reassured them that the country was led by a man with an iron fist. Those people were adults, not some young idealists. They had no need to involve themselves in the internal politics of a sovereign state.

  Sometimes, to show how popular he was, Nikiema would make a stop with his little nocturnal procession. We would enter any old bar to drink some beer. At first intimidated, after a few minutes the customers would summon the courage to come gather around us. Some little wise guys would ask to meet with him; others would shout about how devoted they were to his regime; some made critical remarks since, after all, we were in a democracy; and there was always a half-blind old lady who would pull him aside to say affectionately, while feigning sternness, “Do you remember me, my child?”

  He would respond with an awkward smile. “No, mama.”

  And she would cry out, her hands in the air, “Would you look at that! What an ingrate! Eight days after his birth in Nimba, it was I who organized his ngénte, and he no longer remembers me! Don’t forget your past, my son—you mustn’t let the power make you go mad.” She went on speaking in proverbs and ended on a moralizing tone, all choked up: “As God is my witness, you are too good, my child! We all pray for you. The day you were born, when I cradled you in my arms, I knew you were destined for great things! And not only because your father was the king of Nimba! Wallaay!”

  Everyone acquiesced warmly and it caused some excitement in the bar, leaving them feeling nice and relaxed. N’Zo Nikiema held the old woman in his arms and they stayed there without saying a word to one another, almost stifled by the emotion of it, and he seemed to remember his childhood years. Then he bought a round for everyone and still managed to make a path through the middle of an increasingly dense and active crowd. His guests were fascinated to see that Nikiema’s popularity was the only thing that could cause riots in the country. I personally could see in their eyes that they were mostly impressed by the president’s mastery. If for a moment they realized that it was all an orchestrated act, they would still be unaware of the extent to which the people were ridiculing them. Not for a moment did one of them suspect that the little old lady, the bar manager, the passersby, the akara fritter vendor at the bar entrance, the musicians who were playing whatever they fancied on the little poorly lit stage in the back—in short, all of them there were my guys. I especially loved the old woman. An all-time pro. A filthy old lady, besides. She had invented all kinds of refined torture techniques to use against N’Zo Nikiema’s and Pierre Castaneda’s adversaries. When she’d finished with one of them, he would drag himself to her feet begging her to give him sweets. She killed me, that old woman: to be such a bitch at that age, it was really something.

  Those are the kinds of things I did with the deceased N’Zo Nikiema. Were he to wake up in that small house there, we would not be bored. We could muster up so many shared memories . . .

  The first explosion was followed by a couple more, brief and a little muted. Within a few minutes, the sounds of ambulance sirens from near and far could be heard across the entire city. Nikiema instinctively cocked his head toward the window and stayed alert, listening anxiously. He heard the firefighters’ trucks from within the ruins of Jinkoré, but a moment later it seemed like the screams were coming from the other side of Maren. It seemed like several fires were flaring up, one after the other in different parts of the capital.

  I had seen him again a few hours earlier in the presidential palace. The country’s highest officials were seated with stoic faces around a long oval table. The president had never seen them so tense. Everyone stared intensely at him. They knew it was the end of the war and there was only one question running through their minds: who would be the final victor, N’Zo Nikiema or Pierre Castaneda? They didn’t want to end up in the wrong camp.

  I was there, and like everyone else I thought, I have very little time to negotiate this turn of events. At the same exact moment, N’Zo Nikiema was thinking about one of his counterparts—some dictator in Asia or Latin America—who had summoned everybody under the pretext of wanting to thank all who had served him, some of them for several years. After a moving speech on loyalty, he had slaughtered them all before they could flee.

  Yet, in a voice that was calm and strong, the voice he used every day, the president turned to me and said, “I put Colonel Kroma in charge of reviewing the situation. We all appreciate the rigor and precision of our colleague. Colonel?”

  I opened my folder and promised to keep the presentation brief. As I spoke, I saw the same nagging question in everybody’s eyes: Who is this guy, anyway? They had never been able to get a read on me and they hated that. Of course, my position certainly made them anxious. The boss of information services was generally supposed to know whatever they concealed from the world. Despite this, they really didn’t care. They could embezzle huge sums of money, tamper with currencies by the tens of millions, or lead lives of debauchery. As long as they seemed clean, they didn’t have to worry. No, I was not the man in the shadows who could shake up these masters of the hour. These bastards, much like young people with their whole lives ahead of them, had a truly carefree attitude and a real gift for happiness. They had faith in their good fortune. Nothing scared them and they thought they could fool fate with some decoy moves if it managed to piss them off.

  More than anything else, they were wondering what I was doing among them. They felt that a senior official should wear a ceremonial costume with brightly colored medals and ribbons. They imagined someone prosperous and pot-bellied, maybe somewhat depraved and a little bit of a scoundrel who gesticulated a lot and had a booming voice. In short, someone who fit into their world. I was far too dowdy for their taste. Even for special occasions, I wore gray or dark blue suits—very sober. I’d never worn a tie in my life and some of them hated me just for that. And why exactly? Well, they wondered, who does he think he is? He thinks we like to choke under these ties? It made these people sick when you didn’t behave like everybody else. With my goatee and the messy stubble on my hollow cheeks, I didn’t quite fit the profile of the dignitary, as they would want. They also knew I led a disciplined life and I wasn’t rich at all. Not that this stopped me from liquidating a lot of people in the name of the stability of the state and from getting involved in all kinds of dirty stuff. They were all completely corrupt but were unable to hurt a fly. How did they get this way?

  Usually my briefings were models of clarity and I was happy
to just report the facts. This allowed N’Zo Nikiema to make the right decisions pretty quickly. But that day, everything was messy in my head and I obviously lacked confidence. The cunning bunch in front of me never listened to words; they only read signs. And my entire attitude said to them that N’Zo Nikiema’s fall was imminent. Besides, none of them had failed to notice one specific detail: I was not wearing my famous striped cap, which is part of my legend. President Nikiema had granted me permission to always keep it on, even in his presence. So the mere fact that they didn’t see it on me wreaked havoc in the ranks. A few days later, alone in his Jinkoré refuge, N’Zo Nikiema must have made the following observation: “Well then, it was Colonel Kroma’s bald head with its badly healed wounds and grotesque pink coloring that signaled the end. Fortunately, I was able to decipher God’s message just in time.”

  That is probably what saved him. The day before, I’d promised Pierre Castaneda that I would neutralize Nikiema.

  “What does that mean, to neutralize?” he had asked, squinting at me as he smoothed his mustache.

  “To eliminate. We have a meeting in the palace tomorrow in the late afternoon. I’ll shoot him in his office.”

  “No, I want him alive.”

  Castaneda wanted Nikiema to suffer and probably hoped to kill him with his own bare hands. And this is what allowed Nikiema to slip through our fingers. He had definitely played this game very well.

  I look back today—a little late, I admit—to certain details that should have betrayed him. First, the firmness of his voice during that final meeting. After taking suggestions from everyone present, he had given precise orders. He would not stop arranging the portrait of the Mother of the Nation—his wife—above the row of Chinese vases in front of him. And perhaps I should have suspected something given the way he was crossing and uncrossing his fingers nonstop. I thought it was quite normal for everyone to be a little nervous on such a day. I was wrong.

  Everything he said to us boiled down to one word: resistance.

  After describing Pierre Castaneda as an adventurer leading his Lil Boys, a desperate young bunch drunk on blood, he added, “We will not leave him this country.” All of us around the table watched him as he paused and then whispered in a voice that was meant to be deep and definitive, “This is the land of our ancestors.”

  Which meant exactly, “This is the land of our ancestors, after all.” He hadn’t spoken those last two words but each of us understood them clearly. And then we thought, it’s his royal blood talking. N’Zo Nikiema, heir to the throne of Nimba, will die here rather than flee or surrender himself.

  The moment was almost magical.

  This is the land of our ancestors, after all.

  But I had not understood that for this too—the surge in dignity, the panache, the final stand, or anything along those lines—it was too late. For thirty years, each day we had had the opportunity to pull ourselves together and we didn’t do that. The moment had come for each of us to follow his own path. Toward an uncertain future or toward a horrible death. N’Zo Nikiema, smarter than all of us, was only looking to save his skin. He had performed his little act as the resolute patriot, and without any fanfare he had risen against the face of a foreigner who was coming to take over the country. I had really believed—and the others did too—that Nikiema refused to be, in the eyes of future generations, someone who would tolerate such disgrace. How could our memory be so short! How could we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by these antics when we had seen him walking hand in hand with Pierre Castaneda for so many years?

  Less than two hours later, he was staggering like an old drunk through the streets of Maren. It was night and it was impossible to recognize him. The hardest part had been getting to the small house in Jinkoré. Pierre Castaneda’s militia had seized the city and was preparing to launch a second assault against the presidential palace. The militiamen were stationed near the columns of public buildings and at all the intersections. It was pretty tight for him. He could neither be too careful nor decide too early to take shelter in the deserted streets of Maren. In order to save his life, he had to imagine that the militiamen were looking at him every second. He had decided that if he was stopped he would burst into laughter, lift his eyes up to the sky, and say whatever nonsense came to mind. Despite his situation, he had the strength to wonder, in jest, whether it would be better to recite some poetry. Of course, his voice could betray him. It was between calling it quits or being captured. The militiaman could kill him off on a whim or shake his head, smirking in amusement.

  Luck was on his side, because he was able to find his way to the small house without any trouble. As soon as the door was closed, Nikiema sat down on the divan in the living room. It was not very common for this bed to be in the front room of the small house. He loved this spot. It was the only place where, from time to time, he experienced true happiness.

  The second he got out of his disguise, three explosions went off. As the firefighters roamed the flaming streets of Maren, we were waiting for him on the beach at the end of the secret tunnel. Castaneda was not in position yet. I myself was excited by the idea of witnessing this exceptional moment in our history: the encounter between N’Zo Nikiema and Pierre Castaneda on Nawom Beach on the last day of the war. In this case, all that mattered was the very first second. They would look into each other’s eyes and would experience something they had never felt before. In spite of knowing each other for years, they would feel like true strangers. N’Zo Nikiema and Castaneda would each say to himself, it’s true, I never imagined he was so different from me, before the conflict between us and the civil war that ensued. We believed we knew each other all too well and yet now here we stand on Nawom Beach under the intense watch of the Ukrainian mercenaries in their dark glasses and heavy faces. In this single second, which I know will escape into eternity, I will never grasp why we became enemies and why there lie between us thousands of corpses and ruins, ruins, and more ruins.

  Then Pierre Castaneda would feel a small pang in his heart despite himself. What a mess, my man, what a mess, we made a good team, why did you suddenly imagine that you could become a real president of some fucked-up African country? Just like that? Both of them would remember the time when they were like brothers, killing off their enemies in unison—Abel Murigande, Prieto da Souza, and others who were executed in a joyful collaboration. N’Zo Nikiema wasn’t all that tough during those days. He had nightmares about the children whose throats he had slit open or strangled. Instead of crying, those kids skipped happily around him, laughing like celestial angels, and he didn’t understand their jubilation, and it broke his heart. It turned his stomach and he vomited sometimes, and Castaneda, the hardest of them all, would mock him and tell him to dream of the stars above, of all those planets gliding side by side through space, and of this immense world with its virgin forests and unending rivers and of people on a July evening seated on restaurant terraces in Washington Square. You think these brats crying over their asshole fathers in this hellhole are more important than the profound and mysterious brothel of life? Think about the movement of stars, my man, and drink to our friendship. Hey there, Ta’Mim, another small Premium Club. This was often the routine at the Blue Lizard, Ta’Mim’s backyard bar under the mango tree. They downed their bottles of beer and soon it was no longer necessary to talk to Nikiema about Jupiter and Pluto to make him forget his crimes. He came to like the blood and he didn’t have nightmares anymore.

  There, facing the sea, all these images would flash before their eyes. And then, to shield himself from this moment of sheer honesty, Castaneda would make one of his enigmatic little comments whose meaning only he knew. Maybe he would have said to Nikiema disparagingly. “You already look less proud than in your official photos!”

  He didn’t really have the pleasure. The reality was, at the end of the day we had to face the facts: while we waited by the sea, President Nikiema was either already en route to the border or safe in a neighboring country.


  Never was victory more bitter for Pierre Castaneda.

  He had no one to blame but himself. I could have settled this matter in a tidy way but he had been determined to get N’Zo Nikiema alive. That’s what happens when you get too greedy.

  He could not sleep that night. But he didn’t feel worried. He had gone from the living room to the bedroom several times, and then into Mumbi’s studio. Each time he would light a match to admire her work, which she had apparently not had time to finish. There were all kinds of black-and-white geometric shapes—circles, diamonds, triangles, and squares—painted on a calabash. N’Zo Nikiema remembered the day she had started to work on this. She admitted that she didn’t know what she wanted to do but was letting her instinct guide her.

  He also thought he would never see her again. Maybe he didn’t really want to. What name could you possibly give to all his years of involvement with Mumbi? This was the best-kept secret of his life and that’s how it would remain. Anyway, whom could he discuss it with now?

  N’Zo Nikiema was aware that he had little chance of ever living outside of this house again. But in my opinion, this would not have dissuaded him from negotiating his survival once the storm had passed. In this bunker, right under his feet, were all the state secrets that I had not been able to gather during the course of my entire career in the Secret Services. Recorded conversations. Handwritten documents from Pierre Castaneda. And most importantly, the video of the murder of Kaveena, Mumbi’s daughter. N’Zo Nikiema knew: this was the one thing that mattered to Pierre Castaneda. Of all the crimes he had committed, strangely, this was the only one he was ashamed of. He was willing to do anything to be exonerated. Yet, perplexed, N’Zo Nikiema asked himself: desperate enough to let me leave the country? Nothing was less certain. It was just a possibility. But it didn’t interest him at the time. He, too, wanted to be acquitted of the murder of this little girl. I’m not here for nothing, he told himself in exaltation mingled with anger and a vague sense of relief. True, he thought, he was only innocent of this crime by chance. He had committed so many others but there was no reason to assume he was responsible for what had happened to Mumbi’s child.