Small Country

by Gaël Faye

  12

  Frodebu. Uprona. Those were the names of the two major political parties contesting the presidential election on June 1, 1993, after thirty years of one-party rule by Uprona. They were the only two words we heard all day long: on the radio, on the television, from the mouths of grown-ups. Seeing as Papa didn’t want us taking an interest in politics, I listened in elsewhere when people were talking about it.

  Across the country, the electoral campaign felt like a big party. Uprona members wore red-and-white T-shirts and caps, and when they came across fellow supporters they made a sign by raising their three middle fingers. Frodebu followers chose green and white, and their rallying symbol was a raised fist. Everywhere, in public squares, in parks, and in stadiums, they sang and danced and laughed and organized noisy happenings. The only word on the lips of Prothé, our cook, was democracy. He had always been so serious, with that hangdog look of his, but even he had changed. Sometimes I would catch him in the kitchen wiggling his skinny backside and singing in a shrill voice: “Frodebu Komera! Frodebu Komera!” (“Frodebu okay!”) It was inspiring to see the high spirits that politics produced. The upbeat energy felt like Sunday-morning football matches. I found it increasingly hard to fathom why Papa refused to let children talk about this joyousness, this wind of change that played havoc with people’s hairstyles and filled their hearts with hope.

  The day before the elections, I was sitting on the kitchen steps in the backyard of our house, squeezing the dog’s ticks and removing its Cayor worms. Prothé was crouched down doing the laundry in front of the enamel sink, humming a religious song. After filling a big bowl with water and the contents of a box of OMO washing powder, he plunged the pile of dirty linen into the blue solution. Donatien sat on a chair opposite us, polishing his shoes. He wore a charcoal-gray abacost and a plastic comb in his hair.

  Innocent was taking a shower a little farther off, at the end of the garden. His head and feet poked out from the piece of rusty corrugated iron we used as a door for the shower area. To annoy Prothé he’d made up a song that mocked the Frodebu party, and he was singing it at the top of his voice. “Fro-de-bu in-the-poo! U-pro-na: you-betch-ya!”

  “He can be as childish as he likes,” grumbled Prothé, glancing anxiously at Innocent to check whether he could be overheard, “but they won’t win this time. I’m telling you, Donatien: they’re blinded by thirty years of power, and their defeat will be even more bitter as a result.”

  “It’s sinful to be presumptuous, my friend. Innocent is young and arrogant, and your wisdom should set an example. Don’t be distracted by his puerile taunting.”

  “You’re right, Donatien. But I still can’t wait to see his face when he finds out we’ve won.”

  Innocent emerged bare-chested from his shower and slunk toward us like a cat. The droplets of water in his frizzy hair glistened in the sunlight, giving him a white skullcap. He stopped in front of Prothé, who looked down and scrubbed the laundry with renewed vigor. Innocent dug a hand in his pocket and fished out one of his stupid toothpicks, which he tossed into his mouth. He flexed his muscles and posed to impress us, while staring contemptuously at the back of Prothé’s neck.

  “Hey, you, houseboy!”

  Prothé stopped scrubbing. He pulled himself up to his full height and held Innocent’s eye with cold defiance. Donatien trailed off polishing his shoes. I let go of the dog’s paw. Innocent couldn’t believe that frail Prothé was standing up to him. Caught off-guard by the cook’s self-assurance, Innocent eventually gave a small, faintly embarrassed smirk, spat his toothpick onto the ground and walked away, making the Uprona sign above his head, his three middle fingers raised. Prothé watched him saunter off. Once Innocent had disappeared behind the gates, Prothé went back to his enamel bowl and began humming to himself: “Frodebu Komera…”

  13

  It was a typical morning. The cockerel was crowing. The dog was scratching behind his ear. The aroma of coffee wafted through the house. The parrot mimicked Papa’s voice. We could hear the sound of a broom scraping the ground in next door’s yard, and the strains of a radio blaring somewhere in the neighborhood. A brightly colored agama lizard was sunbathing, while a column of ants transported the grains of sugar that Ana had spilt from the table. A morning just like any other.

  But this was also a day for making history. Across the country, people were getting ready to vote for the first time in their lives. From first light, they had begun making their way to the nearest polling stations. A never-ending procession of women wearing colorful pagnes, and men carefully dressed in their Sunday best, was moving along the main road, where minibuses full to bursting with euphoric voters paraded past. On the football pitch near our house, people were flooding in from every direction. Voting tables and polling booths had been set up on the grass. Through the fencing, I watched the long queue of voters, calm and law-abiding, waiting in the sunshine. There were those in the crowd who couldn’t contain their joy. An old woman, dressed in a red wax-print cotton skirt and a Jean-Paul II T-shirt, danced out of the polling booth singing: “Democracy! Democracy!” A group of young people lifted her off the ground amid cheers. The presence of whites and Asians, wearing multi-pocket utility vests with “International Observers” written on the back, was noticeable in all four corners of the pitch. Burundians were conscious of the significance of this moment, of the beginning of a new era. This election would bring an end to the one-party system and military coups. Individuals were free at last to choose their representatives.

  By the day’s end, when the last voters had left, the pitch resembled a vast battlefield. The grass had been trampled underfoot. The ground was littered with discarded papers. Ana and I slipped under the fencing and crawled as far as the polling booths, where we gathered up the forgotten ballot papers for Frodebu, Uprona, and the People’s Reconciliation Party (PRP). I wanted to keep a souvenir of such a momentous occasion.

  * * *

  —

  The following day felt strange. Nothing stirred. The city was anxiously awaiting the results. At home, the telephone didn’t stop ringing. Papa wouldn’t let me go out to see my friends. Our watchman had disappeared, the garden was empty, and there were very few cars on the road. It was all in such contrast to the elation of the day before.

  During Papa’s siesta, I escaped through the back door. I wanted to speak to Armand who was bound to have some information, courtesy of his father. I knocked at the gates and asked the houseboy to call for him. When Armand appeared, he told me his father was pacing the house, smoking cigarillos and putting a lot more sugar in his tea than usual. Their telephone, like ours, kept ringing. He told me to go straight back home and not to hang about in the street, because nobody knew what might happen. There were worrying rumors going around.

  Shortly before nightfall, the three of us were sitting in the living room, Papa, Ana, and I, when someone rang my father and told him to switch on the radio. It was dark, Ana was biting her nails, and Papa was trying to tune into the right station. He found the frequency just as the Burundi National Radio and Television newscaster announced that the results were about to be declared. We heard the hissing of an old tape, followed by a brass band that accompanied a choir singing at the top of its voice: “Burundi Bwacu, Burundi Buhire…” After the national anthem, the Minister of the Interior began to speak. He declared victory for Frodebu. Papa didn’t react. He just lit a cigarette.

  There wasn’t a single shout of joy in the neighborhood, no tooting of horns, no firecrackers. I thought I could hear distant clamoring up in the hills. Was it my imagination? With his obsession for keeping us out of politics, Papa holed himself up in his bedroom to make phone calls. Through the door, I caught snatches of phrases I didn’t really understand. “This isn’t a democratic victory, it’s an ethnic reflex….You know better than I do how things work in Africa, the Constitution has no weight….The army supports Uprona….In countries
like this, you don’t win an election without being the army’s candidate….I don’t share your optimism….They’ll pay for this, sooner or later…”

  We ate an early supper. I had made an onion omelet, and Ana served us slices of pineapple with Clarisse Sisters strawberry yogurts. Before going to bed, we watched the news in Papa’s bedroom. The image was fuzzy: it was snowing on the channel. I wiggled the coathanger-aerial above the TV set. Seated in front of the Burundian flag, the outgoing president, Major Pierre Buyoya, said in a measured voice: “I solemnly accept the verdict of the people and I invite the population to do likewise.” I immediately thought of Innocent. Next, our new president, Melchior Ndadaye, appeared on the screen and announced calmly: “This is a victory for all Burundians.” At which point I thought of Prothé. Finally, the chief of staff spoke: “The army respects democracy based on the multiparty system.” And that’s when I thought of Papa’s words on the telephone.

  I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when I heard Ana scream. I rushed into our bedroom to find her standing on my bed, clinging to the curtains. Below her, on the tiled floor, a scolopendra was crawling along the middle of the room. “Piece of filth!” Papa shouted, crushing the giant centipede.

  As I clambered into bed, I asked Papa whether having a new president was good news.

  “We’ll see,” came his reply.

  Dear Laure,

  The people have voted. On the radio, they said there was 97.3% turnout. That means everybody minus children, sick people in hospital, offenders in prison, madmen in asylums, bandits wanted by the police, lazybones who stayed in bed, people with no arms who can’t hold a ballot paper and foreigners like my father, my mother and Donatien, who have the right to live and work here, but not to express their opinion, which has to remain where they come from. The new president is called Melchior, after one of the three wise kings. Some people love him, like Prothé, our cook. He says it’s a victory for the people. Others hate him, like Innocent, our driver, but don’t worry, that’s just because he’s moody and a bad loser.

  I think the new president looks like he means business: he stands tall and doesn’t put his elbows on the table or interrupt when people are talking. He wears a tie and a well-ironed shirt and he speaks politely. He’s presentable and clean. This matters! Because soon he’ll have his portrait hung throughout the country, so nobody forgets about him. It would be annoying to have a president who looked sloppy, or who had a squint, staring out of his photo-portrait in the ministries, airports, insurance companies, police stations, hotels, hospitals, cabarets, maternity wards, barracks, restaurants, hair salons, and orphanages.

  Talking of which, I wonder where they’ve put the portraits of the ex-president? Have they thrown them away? Perhaps there’s somewhere they can keep them, in case he decides to come back one day?

  This is the first time we’ve had a president who isn’t from the military. I don’t think this job will be as much of a headache for him as it was for his predecessors. Military presidents always suffer from migraines. It’s like they’ve got two brains. They never know whether to make peace or wage war.

  Gaby

  14

  The reptile was sprawled out on the grass at the bottom of the garden. It had taken ten men, using ropes and bamboo poles, to lift the beast out of the van. News spread fast along our street and in no time a curious mob had gathered around the lifeless crocodile. A pair of yellow eyes, still open, with vertical black slashes for pupils, conspired eerily to make it look like it was watching us. The mortal blow to the top of its head was marked by a wound the size of a rosebud. Jacques, specially over from Zaire, had shot it with a single bullet. A week earlier, a Canadian tourist had been walking along the beach of her lakeside resort when a croc had carried her off. The local authorities had reacted as they always did, by dispatching a retaliatory operation. Papa and I went along for the adventure as privileged spectators. Jacques had led crocodile-hunting expeditions like this for years, with a small team of white men who were big-game enthusiasts. We boarded the motorboat at the sailing club, along with our ammunition and sniper rifles, and hugged the coast as far as the mouth of the Rusizi, where the muddy river joins the turquoise waters of Lake Tanganyika. As we headed slowly back up the delta, the hunters kept a finger on the trigger and a sharp eye on the scattered pods of hippopotamuses, fearing that a solitary male might charge at any moment. The noise of the engine was muffled by a cheeping colony of weaverbirds, whose nests dangled from the branches of the acacia trees. The men squinted in the sunlight and surveyed our surroundings using binoculars, their Winchester rifles to hand. Through the viewfinder of his gun, Jacques spotted the crocodile on a sandbank. It was sunbathing in the early-afternoon light, jaws wide open, while a crocodile bird dutifully cleaned its teeth. Jacques fired and a flock of whistling ducks rose up from the rushes by the riverbank. The shot rang out like the snap of dry wood. Felled at rest, the beast scarcely had time to move. Its jaw closed in slow motion. The little bird hopped around his friend for a few seconds, as if paying his final respects, before flying off into the distance to tend to another mouth.

  * * *

  —

  Once the bystanders had departed from our garden, we laid the beast on its back and Jacques methodically cut it up. He transferred the lumps of meat into plastic bags, which Prothé stored in the big freezer in the garage. Night was falling, but nothing was ready. The gardener helped Donatien put out the tables and chairs. Innocent carried the charcoal for the barbecue. Gino lit the Chinese lanterns hanging from the rubber fig tree and Papa unrolled an extension lead so we could set up the hi-fi in the garden. Ana was responsible for arranging the anti-mosquito coils under the tables. It was a special evening: we were celebrating my eleventh birthday!

  When the music began wafting out of the speakers, all the locals were rounded up again. Attracted by the prospect of free booze, the drunks made an exception and deserted our local cabaret. The garden was quickly filled with the hubbub of voices combined with the boom of the subwoofers. I felt as if I was going to burst with happiness, caught in the throng of all those comings and goings, in our improvised bar beneath the moon, where the mood was festive and tears gave way to laughter.

  It was the beginning of the summer holidays and things had got off to a positive start. I’d heard from Laure: “Hi Gaby! I’m having a fab time by the sea with my cousins and my little brother. Thanks for your letter, what you wrote was really funny. Don’t forget about me during the holidays. Bye for now. Love, Laure.”

  On the back of the postcard was a selection of mini-photos from the Vendée: a chateau at Noirmoutier, high-rise hotels at Saint-Jean-de-Monts, a beach at Notre-Dame-de-Monts, a line of rocks at Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez. I read and reread that postcard dozens of times, always with the feeling that I was someone special for Laure. She had asked me not to forget her, and not a day went by without me thinking about her. In my next letter, I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me, that for the first time I felt I could share my feelings with someone, that I hoped to write to her for the rest of my life and that I even planned to visit her in France one day.

  The other good news at the start of the holidays was that my parents were back on speaking terms, after months of cold war. They had congratulated me on successfully moving up to senior school. “We’re proud of you,” they had chorused: the “we” of a couple, of reunification. I lived in hope.

  Pacifique had telephoned from Rwanda to wish me a happy birthday. He told me that peace talks were underway again, that he was well, that he missed us and wished he could be with us on my big day. After arriving in Rwanda, he had fallen head over heels in love with a girl and had just got engaged to her. He was impatient to introduce her to the family. She was called Jeanne, and Pacifique described her as the most beautiful woman in the entire African Great Lakes region. Then he confided something to me over the phone: once the war was over, he w
as going to launch his singing career, writing his own love songs and celebrating the beauty of his bride-to-be.

  Life was sorting itself out, things were falling into place, and that evening I relished being surrounded by the people I loved and who loved me.

  Out on the main terrace, Jacques was regaling a spellbound audience with the story of the crocodile hunt. He was really getting into his stride, puffing up his chest and rolling his “r”s with that Belgian accent of his. Like a movie actor unsheathing a revolver from its holster, he pulled out his silver Zippo from his pocket to light the cigarettes that dangled carelessly from the corner of his mouth. This worked its magic on Madame Economopoulos, who was enthralled by his charisma and wit. She kept showering him with compliments, which he was only too pleased to accept; while his jokes prompted peals of laughter from her, as she swooned like a teenage girl in love. Neither of them could believe they hadn’t met before, and they embarked on some lengthy reminiscing about the good old days when Bujumbura was still called Usumbura, with its Grand Hotel, the dances and jazz orchestras at the Paguidas Hotel, the Kit Kat Cinema, and the sight of handsome American cars—Cadillacs and Chevrolets—in the city’s streets. They spoke of their shared passion for orchids, for fine wines from faraway Europe, of the mysterious disappearance of the French television presenter Philippe de Dieuleveult and his camera crew close to the Inga Dam, of Mount Nyiragongo erupting and its majestic lava flows, of the gentle climate and stunning lakes and rivers…

  Prothé moved among the guests, plying them with beer and grilled crocodile steak.

  “Yuck!” said Innocent with a look of disgust, rejecting a plate offered to him by the cook. “Only whites and Zaireans eat crocodiles and frogs. You’d never see a real Burundian touch those bush animals! We’re a civilized people!”