The Death of Comrade President

by Alain Mabanckou

  Papa Roger and I ate in silence. The bits of porcupine meat weren’t as tasty as before, and it wasn’t Maman Pauline’s fault, the dish was well made, but it’s hard to enjoy your food when your heart’s aching. You don’t just taste food with your mouth, your whole body is involved, but my body and Papa Roger’s body weren’t concentrating on what we were eating, so we were just eating to get something down into our stomachs.

  Later, after dark, Papa Roger listened to the evening news on the radio. They still hadn’t said anything about the captain’s death and I came in to pour him a glass of wine just at the moment when our journalists were congratulating the French rugby team on their victory over Ireland in the Five Nations Cup in Dublin, 15–6 …

  Maman Pauline had already shut herself up in the bedroom, turned out the light and begun weeping for Captain Kimbouala-Nkaya again. The noise of military trucks passing in the street made my heart pound. I wondered what they could be transporting at this hour of night. They were heading for Mont-Kamba cemetery, like in the daytime, except there were no people inside them weeping. They had the streets and avenues all to themselves; no one dared go out, not even a cat. Our town had never been so silent, as if something even bigger, even more serious, was about to happen. But what could be bigger or more serious than the death of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, and, for our family, the death of Captain Kimbouala-Nkaya? Maybe if you add up little things and put them together with some other little things it will make big things happen? Papa Roger had told me, for example, that in the late afternoon the militia had arrested François Nzitoukoulou, a man who works at the Atlantic Palace Hotel and who he knows well because they both work on reception. Sometimes if there’s a problem with rooms, they call each other to sort it out: my father puts up his client for a night, then François Nzitoukoulou takes him back for the next night, and the other way round when my father gets stuck at the Victory Palace. According to my father, François Nzitoukoulou has been arrested because he’s said to be a cousin of Cardinal Emile Biayenda. His neighbours had gone to the Public Order Offices that the Military Committee of the Party set up in each neighbourhood this morning. The State gives lots of money to true patriots who catch the enemies of the Revolution, my father explained. Now Cardinal Emile Biayenda had been at the headquarters a few hours before the assassination of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi.

  I asked my father:

  ‘Did you know he was the cousin of Cardinal Emile Biayenda, even though they didn’t have the same name?’

  ‘Yes, I had the honour of putting the cardinal up at the Victory Palace; François himself asked me, as a favour to his cousin. Our suites are better than the ones at the Atlantic Palace …’

  Sweet dreams

  It upsets me to hear Maman Pauline weeping like that in their bedroom in the middle of the night. I bet she’s looking at the photo of Uncle Kimbouala-Nkaya.

  Papa Roger tries to comfort her:

  ‘Pauline, have you seen what time it is? I understand your pain, but this is out of all proportion. If you carry on like this—’

  ‘Carry on how? Watch what you say!’

  My mother tells Papa Roger off really loudly, and I can hear everything, as if I was standing outside their bedroom door:

  ‘Let me be, Roger! Wouldn’t you rather go and sleep at Martine’s? What are you doing here in my bed anyway? Your head’s not here! Leave me to weep for my brother and don’t touch me, or I’ll go and sleep in Michel’s room!’

  I put my hands over my ears so I can’t hear them, but it’s stupid, because suddenly I can hear my own heart beating, and it’s beating so loud that I feel like I want to sick it up, so I can breathe. I need to think of something different, something happier, or keep myself busy with something like reading till I fall asleep.

  I open the book I brought home from school last Thursday. The title is Understanding the Geography of the Congo. They say in this book that the area of the Congo is only 342,000 square kilometres and that there aren’t as many of us as there are Zairians, there are over twenty-four million of them and fewer than two million of us but we have as many problems as the twenty-four million Zairians. It also says that our country only has two seasons: the rainy season and the dry season. Now if I’m not mistaken, this book has got it wrong because we don’t have two seasons, we have four! From October to December it’s the long rainy season and it’s very hot: that’s the first season. The short dry season starts in January and ends in February: this is the second season, when there’s hardly any rain and it’s too hot. The rainfall in this season isn’t nearly as heavy as in the season before. From March to April you get the short rainy season, when it rains, but not all the time like in the long rainy season: this is the third season. And lastly there’s the fourth season, between May and September, the dry season, when it hardly rains at all and sometimes you have to wear a jumper.

  Understanding the Geography of the Congo isn’t even a real book, it’s just a bundle of photocopied pages held together with a bit of wire at the top and another at the bottom. You can’t tell who wrote it, there’s no name on it. At the bottom of the first page, in red, it says, It is strictly forbidden to steal these pages. Parents of miscreants will be summoned. You might mistake this for the title of the book, when in fact it’s just to scare pupils off tearing the pages out and taking them home. They do this because they think the teacher will pick the homework questions out of here. So they study them like parrots, and if the question’s different the parrots are lost. Some people pinch the pages so they can cheat in exams. It’s like the parrots, because you need a question that’s got the answer on the page you’ve stolen. I’m not like either of these types of miscreants. During the geography lesson, the teacher asks us to get into groups of five or six and he picks the most intelligent pupil in each group and lets them take the textbook home. At the weekend this pupil has the others round to their house to prepare the presentation. We do a presentation every Monday, which means we talk in class in front of the teacher and the girls, who pull faces, and the boys who pretend to be gorillas and scratch their backs. If you take too much notice of these comedians, you’ll lose your thread and start saying things that aren’t in Understanding the Geography of the Congo.

  Normally, if it hadn’t been for the terrible news of the death of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi, my three classmates would have been round that afternoon to prepare the presentation with me. That’s right, Etienne Tokoutani-Lelo, Zéphirin Malanda-Ngombé and Louise Mwana-Watoma would have been round here. A week before chaos broke out in our country, I was sitting with them right where Papa Roger is now, listening to his Grundig. We sat in a circle so we could all see each other. As usual, I was holding Understanding the Geography of the Congo and it was also me asking questions to make sure we’d understood everything. Then we each had to recite in turn what it said about the different peoples, the Vilis, the Yombés, the Larsi, the Kunsi, the Mbochis, the Tékés, etc. It was really long, so I asked Louise to take the book and ask the questions instead. In any case, Etienne and Zéphirin won’t be the teacher; they don’t want to look silly in front of Louise. And there’s another thing: we all wanted Louise to take over from me because she’s really nicely dressed, in a grown-up see-through clingy dress. Louise is already one of those women men turn round to look at in the street. She gets whistled at, the black capitalists stop in their cars, she has to explain that she’s a minor, she lives with her mum and dad, who might go and tell the police if they force her to get in the car and take her to a place she doesn’t know and make her do things I’m not going to go into here, or people will say Michel always exaggerates, and sometimes he says rude things without meaning to. Anyway, Louise is almost a real woman. She wears ladies’ heels, lipstick, jewellery, which all belong to her mother, Ma Longonia, who was Miss Pointe-Noire before our parents even knew we were going to be born and that Comrade President Marien Ngouabi was going to come to power and be assassinated on 18 March 1977 at 14:30. Louise ha
s already told us that back then the rich people in this town all wanted to go out with Ma Longonia and some of them promised her all the gold in the world! While she was telling us all this, I was wondering if it’s a good idea, when you’re chatting up a woman, to promise her all the gold in the world. What if the woman leaves you, or gives all your money to the other men she loves in secret, younger, better looking men with more muscles, what do you do then, when you’re left with nothing? Louise did us an imitation of her father’s voice the day he tricked her mother into marrying him:

  ‘My dad said to my mum: “Miss Pointe-Noire, you are all the gold in the world to me, and when I’m with you I feel like gold too, I shine …”’

  We couldn’t really see what was so great about this, but Louise added:

  ‘My mum had never heard a man say that before, so she married my father straight off, and I’m their only child … I mean, I know my dad’s twenty-five years older than my mum, but he’s a great guy.’

  At this point Zéphirin started laughing:

  ‘So did he end up giving all the gold he had to Ma Longonia?’

  Now Etienne started teasing her:

  ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Give me a bit of gold, and I can have a nice big bracelet made!’

  Louise didn’t realise they were joking, and she got cross:

  ‘You’re not men yet! You don’t realise, that’s what chatting up is! You don’t get it – that was my dad’s way of telling my mother he would love her even after they were both dead? Honestly, mmcht!’ She smacked her lips disdainfully.

  What really turns us on about Louise is her amazing hairstyles, though it’s not Célestine who does her braids, it’s her own mother. And what really gets to Louise is when Etienne, Zéphirin and I look too hard at her chest. Which is why, as soon as I asked her to take my place asking the questions, she used the textbook to hide her chest.

  Etienne and Zéphirin are always competing to get Louise to fall in love with them. That’s why they’re always distracted while we’re working. They tell funny stories, thinking Louise is going to fall for that, but they end up laughing at their own stupid jokes about disabled people running races and getting overtaken at the last moment by an old snail who set off last.

  I know Louise is secretly in love with me. My cousin Gilbert Moukila, who all women just adore, taught me things about how you get a woman to fall fatally in love with you. Etienne and Zéphirin don’t know, and I’m not going to tell them the secret, or one of them will capture Louise’s heart and kick it around like a football. Gilbert Moukila, who we also call ‘Magician’, says that for women love steals up unseen, and even if you see it come racing up like a sports car, you have to stay calm, chill out, pretend you haven’t noticed, or love will spread its wings and fly away and go and find a home with the kid who always stayed calm. Magician’s right, and that’s why I stay calm too, and wait in my corner for love to come along in its own time. Last month, though, I did lose my cool a bit, I wrote a poem and showed it to Louise, without telling Etienne and Zéphirin. I haven’t finished it yet, there are still only four lines and I keep altering them because I feel like it’s still too long, with too many syllables, when what I’d like to write is alexandrines like the poetry in our French books. Here are my four lines, it’s only a draft, I still might change it tomorrow, or the day after:

  White cranes will envy all your dresses,

  Spotless they’ll be, for all eternity

  I’ll wash them every night while you are sleeping.

  And fresh each morning each of them will be.

  When Louise read this she looked me up and down, the way you look at people who are badly dressed and dare go walking about in the centre of town, you’d think they had no sense of shame.

  ‘Michel, did you copy this out of somewhere?’

  I thought to myself: If she thinks I’ve copied it she must have really liked my little poem, it must be good.

  Feeling very proud I replied:

  ‘Do you really think I would copy something?’

  ‘Well, who did you write it for? Because if you look carefully, it doesn’t mention the girl’s name!’

  Maybe at this point I should have declared my feelings. Instead of announcing that I’d written the poem for her, I said:

  ‘It’s for the girl who will one day be my wife, who I’ll love from dawn to dusk …’

  We’d moved away from the mango tree a bit because Etienne and Zéphirin wanted to know what we were talking about and why Louise was listening to me with that friendly, smiling expression.

  But when she read it for the second time, then again a third time, she didn’t look so friendly.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Michel, you wrote that for Caroline, your girlfriend in primary school, Lounès’s sister …’

  ‘No, Caroline was in love with my enemy Mabélé, not with me …’

  ‘So it’s really over between you and her?’

  ‘Yes, it’s better that way, she messed around, it made me unhappy. Anyway, I don’t speak to her brother any more, and Caroline doesn’t live in Pointe-Noire now, her parents sent her to Brazzaville because she was getting too involved round here with boys who were too old for her …’

  Louise was really happy now:

  ‘So you mean that right now you don’t have a girlfriend, right?’

  I blew my chance again, maybe because I didn’t want her to tease me and say I was a cold shoulder, meaning someone who never manages to get a girl.

  ‘Think I’m a cold shoulder, do you? Well, I’m not actually, I do have a girlfriend!’

  ‘Really? Is she in school with us? Do I know her?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t go to our school, you don’t know her.’

  ‘So what’s her name?’

  ‘I’m not telling you her name because she wants it to stay top secret between her and me or our love will fly away and make its home with another boy who’s calm and chilled …’

  She started patting her hair and touching up her lipstick in front of me. It didn’t even seem to bother her or annoy her that my eyes were glued to her top half, which is so round and curvy, if you’re not careful you might actually think she’s got two giant papayas hidden in there. There she was, getting more beautiful by the second, and Etienne and Zéphirin were starting to sulk over there, and I just couldn’t think what to say to her. Magician often says that if you don’t know what to say when you’re with a girl, it’s better to say nothing than risk spoiling everything by letting your mouth open and say any old thing before it’s asked your head for permission. If you say nothing, the silence will speak for you.

  ‘You see, Michel, I’d like a boy to write that to me. The girl in your poem’s really lucky …’

  ‘In what way, lucky?’

  ‘Well, you wrote it in your poem: she won’t have to wash her dresses, you’ll do it for her …’

  I wanted to tell her she was the girl in my poem, but on the other hand I thought that if she took it badly I’d be embarrassed in front of Etienne and Zéphirin, who were already fighting over her and would go round telling everyone in school. I said nothing, she went back to our two friends, we all said goodbye, and they left.

  I stayed outside our plot watching how Louise walked and how her Netherlands wiggled. I put my hand on my chest: my heart was racing.

  So I was in love, and I knew that I’d stay in love, despite all the bad news about the assassination of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi and Captain Kimbouala-Nkaya, which meant I wouldn’t see her again this week because school would be closed until after the funeral for the leader of our revolution.

  Often when we’re preparing our geography presentation under the mango tree, we find we don’t understand what it says in the manual, and Papa Roger has to come and help us. He turns the pages quickly and is amazed at what’s in there, because they didn’t teach it like that in his day:

  ‘What’s this nonsense? How can they say, “The Congo is a country that straddles the equator”? First they
need to explain what the equator is!’

  At this point he turns into a geography teacher himself. He tells us that the equator is something you can’t see, it’s an invisible line that runs all the way round the earth a bit like when you wear a belt so your trousers don’t fall down in front of people, except the equator isn’t there to stop the Earth falling, just to separate the people in the north from the people in the south. And he adds that the world wasn’t divided up properly, because the people in the south suffer so much more than the people in the north.

  One day I showed my friends the map of the world in our textbook:

  ‘We’re lucky – our Congo is one of the eleven countries the equator goes through, along with six African countries: Somalia, Zaire, Sao Tomé et Principe, Uganda, Kenya and Gabon …’

  Zéphirin pulled a sad face.

  ‘What about the countries it doesn’t go through, what will happen to them?’

  I closed the textbook, because it was the end of our session, and I replied:

  ‘What do we care if the equator doesn’t go through them? We didn’t decide it should exist in the first place, or that our country should be astride it. That’s their hard luck, that’s why they call them “non-aligned”.’

  I don’t want to read the textbook now. Usually I do, telling myself that the next day I’ll go into class and what I’ve revised will be fresh in my mind, so that when the teacher asks a question I’ll put my hand up faster than the others, to show them that Michel’s a hard worker, he doesn’t copy the stupid things the people next to him are writing.

  If there hadn’t been all this toil and trouble I’d have left the house tomorrow morning at six o’clock to go to school. When I get to Three-Glorious-Days there are people everywhere, scooters, push bikes, groups of people who’ve walked for hours from neighbourhoods like Mbota or Fond Tié-Tié. They’re already sweating even though the sun hasn’t come out yet. They’re wearing sandals, with the school uniform, which is compulsory: the boys all in beige, girls in dark blue trousers and a light blue shirt. They’re all talking. They say rude things about the headmaster, the monitors, the teacher who’s always asking the girls round to his house even though they’re pupils and their breasts aren’t fully developed yet. We can’t stay outside all morning, suddenly the bell will sound, which is the sign to stop chatting and go into class. I’m in there somewhere, too; I’ve walked to school from our neighbourhood, Voungou, because Maman Pauline says only the children of black capitalists demand to be driven to school.