Small Country

by Gaël Faye

  Alphonse had left for the front without telling anyone, or leaving a note behind. The RPF didn’t care about his diplomas. As far as they were concerned, he was just another soldier. He died there, one of the brave, for a country he didn’t know, where he had never set foot before. He died there, in the mud, killed in action in a cassava field, like some soldier who didn’t know his two times table, let alone how to read or write.

  When he’d had too much to drink, Alphonse suffered from the same melancholy that afflicts all children of exiles. One day, as if experiencing a premonition, he had spoken about his own funeral. He said he wanted a big party with clowns and jugglers and people wearing colorful pagnes—wrap-skirts and other outfits in the wax-print cotton you could buy at the Central Market—and fire-eaters and sun eulogies, without a depressing requiem or a Nunc Dimittis or a gloomy face in sight. On the day of Tonton Alphonse’s funeral, Pacifique took his guitar along and sang his favorite song for his older brother. It told the story of a former soldier denouncing the absurdity of war. It was a song that could have been written about Alphonse: funny on the surface but sad deep down. Pacifique’s voice gave out before he made it to the end.

  * * *

  —

  And now, two years later, in early January ’93, it was Pacifique who had made up his mind to set off for war. He had already talked about it with Mamie. So on this particular Sunday morning, once we were back from Mass and sitting round the table, Maman didn’t hold back.

  “We’re worried about you, Pacifique. Your teacher, Mr. Kimenyi, has been in touch with Mamie. It seems you’re not attending your classes at Saint-Albert anymore?”

  “All the other Rwandan students in my year have gone to the front. And I’m getting ready too, big sister!”

  “You should wait. The peace agreements will bear fruit. I was over at Aunt Eusébie’s in Kigali ten days ago, and they are hopeful, they believe matters can be resolved through political channels. So just be patient, please!”

  “I don’t have any faith in the extremists. The Rwandan government is keen to throw the international community off the scent, but in the interior of the country the militia continues to be armed, the media is being used to incite violence, and massacres and targeted killings are being carried out. Politicians give hate-fueled speeches, calling on the people to hunt us down and throw us into the Nyabarongo river. So it’s up to us to organize ourselves in response. We have to be ready to fight back if the peace agreements fail. This is about our survival, big sister.”

  Neither Mamie nor Rosalie said anything. Maman’s eyes were closed as she rubbed her temples. The neighbors’ radio was broadcasting hymns. We could hear forks clinking against plates. A gentle breeze raised the curtain at the window. In the heat, a fine layer of sweat glistened on Pacifique’s handsome skin. His jaw muscles were tense from the piece of beef he was chewing on, and I sensed that the unspoken subject at table—the death of Alphonse—was as present as the flies Ana kept fishing out of the tomato sauce.

  After lunch, Mamie ordered everybody to go and lie down, as usual. I went off to have my siesta in Pacifique’s bedroom, which used to be Maman’s room when she was a girl. There was no window, just two camp beds on either side of the tiny room and, hanging from a bare flex, a light bulb painted red that cast a sinister light over green walls covered in posters. Pacifique slept on the bedstead springs, he said it was to get used to the tough conditions of life at the front. In the mornings, he rose early to train on the beach with a small group of young Rwandan men. They ran on sand along the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Some days they only ate a handful of beans, in preparation for hunger and hardship.

  Lying on the bed, I recalled the face of the boy I had reclaimed my bike from the day before, as well as Donatien’s lecture about God’s work, selflessness, making sacrifices, and the rest of the horrendous guilt trip. Since yesterday I’d been feeling vain, selfish, and generally ashamed of the whole episode: I had gone from victim to executioner, simply by wishing to retrieve something that belonged to me in the first place. I needed to talk to someone about it, to banish my dark thoughts.

  “Pacifique,” I whispered, “are you asleep?”

  “Mmm…”

  “D’you believe in God?”

  “What?”

  “D’you believe in God?”

  “No, I’m a communist. I believe in the people. Now leave me alone!”

  “Who’s that on the calendar, above your bed?”

  “Fred Rwigema, commander of the RPF. He’s a hero. It’s thanks to him we’re fighting. He gave us back our sense of pride.”

  “So are you going to fight by his side?”

  “He died. At the beginning of our campaign.”

  “Oh…Who killed him?”

  “You ask too many questions, kid. Get some sleep!”

  There was the creaking of metal as Pacifique turned over to face the wall. I could never nap during siesta-time, or see the point in it. The night was enough to restore my energy. So I waited for the minutes to pass. I was only allowed to get up if I heard a grown-up walking about in the house. I interrogated every noise, listening out for the first movement that might signal my release from the mattress. Sometimes I had to wait for two hours. The door onto the living room was ajar, allowing a small amount of light to seep in. I examined the posters on the walls. They were pages from magazines, crudely stuck up using wallpaper paste. The stars of Maman’s youth rubbed shoulders with those of Pacifique’s: France Gall between Michael Jackson and Jean-Pierre Papin; a photo of Pope Jean-Paul II visiting Burundi encroaching on one of Tina Turner’s legs and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar; a Kenyan toothpaste advert covering a poster of James Dean. To kill time, I scooped up Pacifique’s pile of comics from under the bed: Alain Chevallier, Spirou magazine, Tintin, Rahan…

  As soon as the household began to stir, I leaped out of bed to keep Rosalie company. Every afternoon, she observed the same ritual. She would make herself comfortable on a mat in the backyard, open her snuffbox crafted from vegetable ivory, stuff pinches of tobacco into her wooden pipe, then light a match and, eyes closed, take the first small tokes of fresh tobacco. Next, she would remove some sisal fibers or banana-tree leaves from a plastic bag and weave them into coasters and conical baskets. She sold her handiwork in the town center in order to contribute to the household finances, which survived thanks to Mamie’s small nurse’s salary and sporadic handouts from Maman.

  Rosalie’s frizzy gray-white hair stood on end like a chef’s toque perched on top of her head. It made her skull appear oblong-shaped and disproportionately large for the graceful neck supporting it: like a rugby ball balanced on a needle. Rosalie was nearly a hundred years old. She often liked to tell the life-story of this or that king who had rebelled first against the German and then the Belgian colonists, and who had been exiled abroad for refusing to convert to Christianity. I never showed much interest in the antics of the monarchy and the White Fathers. I always yawned, which irritated Pacifique, who scolded me for my lack of curiosity. Maman would fire back that her children were French kids, and it was pointless boring us with their Rwandan stories. Pacifique, on the other hand, could spend hours listening to the old woman recalling the Rwanda of bygone days: heroic deeds in battle, pastoral poetry, panegyric poems, the Intore dances, the genealogy of the clans, moral values…

  Mamie berated Maman for not speaking to us in Kinyarwanda. She believed that the language would allow us to hold onto our identity, despite living in exile, otherwise we would never become good Banyarwandas (“those who come from Rwanda”). Maman didn’t buy those arguments: in her eyes we were white kids, with skin the color of pale caramel, but white all the same. Whenever we spoke a few words of Kinyarwanda, she immediately made fun of our accent. So it’s hardly surprising I showed little interest in Rwanda, its monarchy, its cows, its mountains, its moons, its milk, its honey, and its rotten mead.
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  As these afternoons drew to a close, Rosalie continued to recount the stories of her era, her sepia memories of an idealized Rwanda. She would insist that she didn’t want to die in exile like King Musinga. That it was important for her to breathe her last on home soil, in the land of her ancestors. Rosalie would speak slowly and softly in a gentle murmur, with the cadences of a sitar player. Her cataracts made her eyes appear blue. A tear or two was always poised to slide down one cheek.

  Pacifique liked to soak up the old woman’s words. He would nod while being lulled by his grandmother’s nostalgia. But on this particular evening he clasped those tiny hands of hers, flat and bony, between his own, and whispered that the persecution was soon going to stop, that it was time for them to go back home, that Burundi wasn’t their country and they weren’t meant to stay refugees forever. The old woman was clinging to her past, to her lost homeland, while the young man was peddling her a future, a new and modern country for all Rwandans, regardless of their identity. And yet they were both talking about the same thing. Returning to their country. One belonged to history, the other was tasked with making history happen.

  A warm wind enveloped us, wrapping itself fleetingly around us before taking off again into the distance, carrying with it precious promises. In the sky, the first stars began to flicker shyly. They shone down on Mamie’s small yard, far below on earth, a square of exile where my family traded the dreams and hopes that life seemed to impose on them.

  10

  It was Gino’s idea, to start with. He wanted us to find a name for our band of brothers. We kept going round in circles. We thought of The Three Musketeers, but there were five of us. The twins’ suggestions were all cringeworthy, along the lines of “The Five Fingers” or “The Best Friends in the World.” Gino thought we should give ourselves an American name. Anything American was in at school, everybody said “cool” all the time, they swaggered or snake-walked, had designs shaved into their scalp, and played basketball in baggy clothes. But Gino’s main inspiration came from the American R&B group Boyz II Men that we used to watch on the music show Au-delà du Son on Saturday-night TV. We thought it could work, because there was a Burundian in the group, so it would be a tribute to him. We didn’t know for sure, but in Bujumbura the rumor was that the tall, skinny guy in Boyz II Men came from Bwiza or Nyakabiga, not that any journalist had ever confirmed this. Another reason for Gino wanting us to be called Kinanira Boyz was to stamp our mark as the new kings of the street, to make it clear that we controlled the neighborhood and nobody else could impose their law.

  The impasse—the cul-de-sac where all five of us lived—was the zone we knew best. It was some two hundred meters long, a dirt and stone track with avocado trees and spider flowers growing down the middle of it, which naturally formed a road with two lanes. The gaps in the bougainvillea hedges afforded glimpses of elegant houses set in gardens planted with fruit trees and palm trees. The lemongrass bordering the gutter gave off a gentle perfume that kept the mosquitoes at bay.

  The twins’ house was opposite mine, at the entrance, first on the left. They were mixed race too, with a French father and a Burundian mother. Their parents owned a video rental shop, specializing in U.S. comedies and Bollywood films. On afternoons when it was pouring with rain, we would all go over to their house and hang out in front of the telly. Sometimes, on the sly, we even watched sex movies for grown-ups, but we weren’t so keen on them, apart from Armand, who stared at the screen with his eyes popping out of his head while rubbing himself against a cushion, like a dog on someone’s leg.

  Armand lived in the big white-brick house at the end of our street. Both his parents were Burundian, making him the only black kid in our group. His father was a thickset man with sideburns so long they joined up with his mustache to form a circle around his eyes and nose. He worked as a diplomat in the Middle East and knew many heads of state personally. Armand had a photo pinned above his bed from when he was a baby, in a romper suit, on the knees of Colonel Gaddafi. Because his father was always traveling, Armand lived for most of the time with just his mother and big sisters: they were all sour and sanctimonious, and I’d never seen them smile. Despite everyone being so strict and uptight in his family, Armand had decided that his role was to dance about and play the clown. He lived in fear of his father, who only returned from his travels to exert his authority over his children. No hugs, no displays of affection. Ever. He would deliver a slap in the face and then hop on a plane bound for Tripoli or Carthage. Consequently, Armand had two personalities: one at home and one in the street. Heads or tails.

  And then there was Gino. The oldest kid in the group, by a year and nine months. He had stayed down a year at school on purpose, to be in the same class as us. Or at least that was his excuse for not making his grades. He lived with his father in an old colonial house, behind the big red gate in the middle of our street. His father was Belgian and a lecturer in political science at the University of Bujumbura. His mother was Rwandan, like Maman, but none of us had ever seen her. Sometimes Gino told us she was working in Kigali, sometimes she was in Europe.

  We spent our days arguing the way friends do, but it goes without saying that we loved each other like brothers. In the afternoons, once lunch was over, the five of us would slope off to our headquarters: the carcass of a Volkswagen Combi on a patch of wasteland. We laughed and had heated debates inside that van, smoked Supermatch cigarettes in secret, listened to Gino’s incredible stories as well as the twins’ jokes, and Armand performed astounding feats: revealing the underneath of his eyelids by flipping them inside out, touching his nose with his tongue, twisting his thumb backward until it met his arm, using his front teeth to take the tops off bottles, or chewing on pili-pili hot peppers and swallowing them without wincing. It was in that VW Combi that we plotted our futures, from small outings to grand excursions. We were full of dreams and it was with impatient hearts that we imagined the joys and adventures life held in store for us. In short, we felt at one with the world, in our hideout on the patch of wasteland by our street.

  One afternoon, we were roaming the neighborhood in search of mangoes. We had given up on our old technique of throwing stones to dislodge the fruit from their branches on the day Armand had hurled a stone a bit too far and damaged his father’s Mercedes. His old man had given him a beating to remember. Armand’s screams rang out all the way from the closed-off end of our street to the Rumonge road, as his father’s wide belt sliced through the air. After that episode, we rigged up long poles with wire hooks on the end, held together with old bicycle tubes. These rods were over six meters long, allowing us to pick off even the most inaccessible mangoes.

  A few drivers shouted insults as we traipsed along the main road, because they didn’t like the look of us. Barefoot and bare-chested, with our rods scraping the ground and our T-shirts tied in bundles around the mangoes we’d harvested, we were a sight to behold.

  A smartly dressed woman, who was probably a friend of Armand’s parents, walked past. When she recognized Armand, with his exposed torso and his feet covered in dust, she glanced skyward and made the sign of the cross: “Dear God! Put your clothes back on quickly, my child. You look like a street urchin.” Grown-ups cracked us up, sometimes.

  Back on home turf, we had our eyes on the big, fat juicy mangoes hanging in the Von Gotzens’ garden. We’d managed to hook a few from the street side with our rods, but the most mouthwatering were out of reach. We’d have needed to climb the low wall, but we were frightened of encountering Monsieur Von Gotzen, an old German who was a little crazy: he was a crossbow collector who had done time in prison, once for urinating in his gardener’s food—the latter having dared to ask for a pay rise—and then for locking his houseboy in the freezer as a punishment for burning the banana flambés to a crisp. His wife, who was more discreet but also more racist, played golf every day in the grounds of the Méridien Hotel and was the president of the Bujumbura eque
strian club, where she spent most of her days pampering her horse, a handsome thoroughbred with a lustrous black coat. Their house was the grandest on our street, and the only one with an upstairs and a pool, but we steered clear of them.

  Opposite, behind the twins’ place, was the house that belonged to Madame Economopoulos, an old Greek lady with no children and ten dachshunds. We managed to sneak under her fence, thanks to a hole dug by the neighborhood dogs for nocturnal visits when the female dachshunds were in heat. In her shaded garden, as well as the giant mango tree there were vines covered with fruit, probably the only vines in the entire country, and an abundance of flowers.

  Armand and I were pilfering bunches of grapes while Gino and the twins picked off the fleshiest mangoes, when the Greek woman’s houseboy arrived on the scene in a fury, brandishing a broom above his head. He opened the dogs’ enclosure, and the dachshunds immediately gave chase. We were out of there quick as a flash, sneaking back under the fencing. In our scramble, Armand ripped his shorts when they snagged on the barbed wire. He had us in fits of laughter for a good quarter of an hour, with his bare patch of buttock. After that, we stationed ourselves in front of Madame Economopoulos’s gates. We knew that she returned home from the town center at the same time every day, and that she’d be glad to see us.

  When she appeared, in her small red Lada, we rushed over to the car door to sell her our mangoes. Or, strictly speaking, her mangoes. She bought ten or so from us, before her houseboy opened the gates and we bolted with a one-thousand-franc note in our pocket. The houseboy was beside himself, hurling his broom into the air and calling us all sorts of names in Kirundi, but we were already long gone.