Small Country

by Gaël Faye

  “Who did it?”

  Armand shot me a hostile look.

  “Hutus, of course! Who else? They had it all planned out. They waited for hours in front of our gates, with a basket of vegetables, passing themselves off as market gardeners from Bugarama. Then they stabbed him in front of the house, before setting off again, cool as you like, joking as they went. I was there, I saw everything.”

  Armand started crying again. Gino stood up and punched the van’s bodywork several times. Out of control, he grabbed an iron bar and smashed the Combi’s windscreen and rear-view mirrors. I watched him, distraught.

  Francis turned up, looking stony-faced. He was wearing a bandana, like Tupac Shakur.

  “Get moving,” he said, “they’re waiting for us.”

  Gino and Armand followed him without a word.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “We’re going to protect our neighborhood, Gaby,” Armand replied, wiping his snot on the back of his hand.

  In normal times, I’d have turned back. But the war was in our homes now, it was threatening us directly, together with our families. Armand’s father had been murdered, and I no longer had a choice. Gino and Francis had criticized me for claiming these weren’t my problems. They were vindicated by the facts. Death had just stolen into our street. There was no sanctuary left on earth. I lived here, in this city, in this country. There was nothing else for it. I put my best foot forward with our gang.

  The impasse was silent. All we could hear was the crunch of gravel underfoot. The residents were stuck at home like toads in their holes. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Nature had gone mute on us. A taxi was waiting at the end of the path, its engine running. Francis signaled to us to climb in. The driver wore sunglasses and had a gash on his left cheek. He was smoking marijuana. Francis greeted him with a fist-bump, Rasta-style. The car set off slowly. We had hardly gone a few meters when it stopped at the entrance to the Muha bridge. This was the main roadblock in the Kinanira district, guarded by young gang members from “The Invincibles.” Behind a barbed-wire barricade, tires were burning. The thick black smoke issuing from them made it hard to gauge what was happening over on the bridge. A group of youths kept shouting, using baseball bats and large stones to attack a dark mass that was lying on the ground, inert. They appeared to be getting a thrill out of whatever they were doing. A few of the gang members spotted us and came over to meet us. Francis was on first-name terms with all of them. I recognized the man with the Kalashnikov, the one who had taken aim at us at the house.

  “What the fuck are these two white kids doing here?” he asked, eyeing Gino and me.

  “It’s all right, Chief, they’re with us, their mothers are Tutsi,” Francis explained.

  The man examined us sceptically. Then he rattled off some instructions to the others and climbed into the back of the car, next to us, his Kalashnikov between his legs, its magazine covered with stickers featuring Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi.

  “Drive!” he commanded, banging the outside of the car door.

  A youth pulled the barbed wire back off the road, and the car zigzagged carefully between the stones that littered the asphalt. Our eyes were smarting from the fumes of burning rubber, which also made us cough. Once we were level with the group that was all buzzed up on the bridge, the man with the Kalashnikov ordered the driver to stop. The gang members drew apart, grinning. A shiver ran down my spine. There, writhing at their feet, on the hot tar, was Attila, the Von Gotzens’ black horse. In the very same spot where we had glimpsed the beast’s shadow one stormy night, he now lay on the ground, his legs smashed, his body streaked with bloodied wounds. The youths had taken it out on the horse, which raised his head and looked in my direction, his sole remaining eye staring at me insistently. The guy with the Kalashnikov pointed the barrel of his gun out of the car window and the youths dispersed.

  “Bassi!—that’s enough!” he shouted, and the hail of bullets began. I nearly leaped out of my skin. Armand clung onto my shorts. The car set off again under the watchful gaze of those youths, visibly disappointed to have lost out on the highlight of their day.

  When we reached the district of Kabondo, the driver turned off onto a potholed road that ran along the river.

  “You the son of the ambassador who’s just been killed?” enquired the guy with the Kalash.

  Armand nodded without looking his way. The taxi had reached a rocky promontory overhanging the river. Huge kapok trees rooted in the red clayey soil surrounded the spot. We got out of the car to find there were other kids from our neighborhood there. Sons from good families, who I’d taken for law-abiding students, were armed with sticks and stones. A badly beaten man was writhing on the ground. The red laterite dust that covered his face and clothes had blended with the congealed blood from a fresh wound on his skull.

  The guy with the Kalashnikov, whom the others were calling Clapton, grabbed Armand’s arm and told him: “That Hutu is one of your father’s assassins.”

  Armand didn’t react. Clapton was the first to strike the man, and the others followed suit. The blows kept raining down. Caught up in the frenzy, Gino and Francis joined the pack. Just then, a motorbike pulled up at high speed and two men wearing helmets with visors dismounted.

  “That’s the boss,” said Clapton, and everyone stopped the thrashing.

  “Hey, guys, on your best behavior, it’s the chief of ‘The Diehards’ in person!” Francis declared proudly, turning toward Armand and me. “You’re not gonna believe this!”

  The passenger from the motorbike took off his helmet and handed it to the driver. When he saw me with the younger members of his gang, in full daylight during a lockdown, next to the victim groaning on the ground, I guess he couldn’t believe his eyes. The chief of “The Diehards” was none other than Innocent. And his face broke into a smile.

  “Check it out, Gaby. Good to see you here.”

  I didn’t reply. I just stood there, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists.

  The gang members tied the victim’s arms behind his back. Even though he was on the ground, he still put up a fight and it took several of them to immobilize him. In the scuffle, his identity card slipped out of his pocket, landing in the dust. Once they’d done their job, the men carried him over to the taxi. The driver with the scar produced a can of gasoline from the trunk and poured it over the car seats as well as on the hood, before closing the doors. The man didn’t stop screaming, he was terrified, begging us to spare him. Innocent took a lighter out of his pocket. I recognized Jacques’s Zippo, the one that’d been stolen from him on my birthday, shortly before the war, the silver one with stags engraved on it. Innocent offered the flame to Armand.

  “It’s your chance to avenge your father…”

  Shaking his head, Armand shrank back, his face crumpled. At which point, Clapton walked up to Innocent.

  “Chief,” he suggested, “why don’t you let the French kid prove he’s one of us.”

  Innocent smirked, clearly surprised the idea hadn’t already occurred to him. He came toward me, holding out the lit Zippo. My temples and heart were beating fit to burst. I scanned right and left, in search of help. I was trying to find Gino and Francis in the crowd, but when I caught their eye, I saw that they had the same blank faces as everyone else. Innocent wrapped my fingers around the lighter. He ordered me to throw it. The man in the taxi was staring intently at me. My ears were ringing. Everything was blurred. The kids in the gang were jostling me, hitting me, shouting in my face. I could hear the distant voices of Gino and Francis, the cries of wild animals, bursts of feverish hatred. Clapton was saying something about Papa and Ana. I was struggling to decipher his threats in the midst of the mayhem and all those calls for murder around me. Innocent lost his temper and said that if I didn’t do it, he would personally make the journey to take care of my family. I pictured Pa
pa and Ana lying peacefully on the couch, in front of the television. It was a vision of their innocence, of all the innocence in the world teetering on the edge of an abyss. And I felt sorry for them and also for myself, for the purity that is ruined by all-consuming fear, which transforms everything into wickedness, hatred, and death. Into lava. Everything around me grew hazy as the shouts of rage increased in volume. The man in the taxi was a horse that was almost dead. If there exists no sanctuary on earth, does one exist somewhere else?

  I tossed the Zippo and the car caught fire. A giant inferno rose up into the sky, licking the uppermost branches of the kapok trees. The smoke escaped above the treetops. The man’s cries pierced the air. I vomited on my shoes. I could dimly hear Gino and Francis congratulating me, and I felt them patting me on the back. Armand wept. Long after everybody else had left, he was still weeping, curled up like a fetus in the dust. We were alone in front of the burned-out wreck. The place was calm now, almost serene, with the river flowing below. It was practically dark. I helped Armand to his feet. We had to make our way home. Before leaving, I searched in the dust and ashes. I found the identity card of the man who had just died. The man I had killed.

  30

  Dear Laure,

  I don’t want to be a mechanic anymore. There’s nothing left to fix, nothing left to save, nothing left to understand.

  It’s been snowing for days and nights over Bujumbura.

  The doves have taken to the milky-white sky. Street children are decorating pine trees with red, yellow, and green mangoes. Farmers are schussing down the hills to the plains, hurtling along the wide avenues in toboggans made from wire and bamboo. Lake Tanganyika is a skating rink where albino hippopotamuses slide on their floppy bellies.

  It’s been snowing for days and nights over Bujumbura.

  The clouds are sheep in a sky-blue field. The barracks of hospitals are empty. The prisons of schools have a thin coating of whitewash. The radio is broadcasting the sound of rare birdsong. The people have unfurled the white flag, and abandoned themselves to snowball fights in cotton fields. The sounds of laughter ring out, triggering avalanches of icing sugar in the mountains.

  It’s been snowing for days and nights over Bujumbura.

  Leaning against a tombstone, I share a cigarette with old Rosalie over the shared grave of Alphonse and Pacifique. Six feet below the ice, I can hear them reciting love poems for the women they never had the time to love, humming songs of friendship for their fellow soldiers fallen in combat. The seasonal steam that escapes my mouth is blue, and it transforms into a myriad of white butterflies.

  It’s been snowing for days and nights over Bujumbura.

  The drunks in the cabaret are drinking warm milk from porcelain chalices in broad daylight. The vast sky is filled with stars that flash like the lights in Times Square. My parents fly over a sacramental moon, in the back of a sleigh drawn by frost-coated crocodiles. As they travel past, Ana throws handfuls of rice from humanitarian sacks.

  It’s been snowing for days and nights over Bujumbura. Have I already told you that?

  Snowflakes land delicately on the surface of things, coating infinity, their absolute whiteness permeating the world all the way to our ivory hearts. Heaven and hell no longer exist. Tomorrow, the dogs will go quiet. The volcanoes will sleep. People will return blank votes. And our ghosts in their wedding dresses will wander out into the wintry streets. We shall be immortal.

  It’s been snowing for days and nights now.

  Bujumbura is immaculate.

  Gaby

  31

  The war in Bujumbura intensified. The number of victims was so significant that the situation in Burundi had become international front-page news.

  One morning, Papa found Prothé’s corpse in the ditch in front of Francis’s house, covered in stones. Gino said Prothé was just a houseboy, and he didn’t understand what I was crying about. When the army attacked Kamenge, we lost all trace of Donatien. Had he been killed as well? Or had he fled the country, like so many others, in single file, a mattress on his head, a bundle of belongings in one hand, his children in the other, ants in the human tide flowing along the roads and tracks of Africa at this end of the twentieth century?

  A minister dispatched from Paris arrived in Bujumbura with two repatriation planes for French nationals. School closed from one day to the next. Papa registered us for departure. A host family would be expecting Ana and me, over there, somewhere in France, a nine-hour flight away from our home. Before leaving, I went back to the Combi to pick up the telescope and return it to Madame Economopoulos. When it was time to say goodbye, she walked over to her library and tore out a page from one of her books. It was a poem. She would have preferred to copy it out, but there was no time left for copying out poems. I had to leave. She told me to keep the words safe, in memory of her, and that I would understand them later on, in a few years. Even after closing the heavy gates, I could hear her voice behind me, still lavishing me with never-ending wisdom: take care in the cold, look after your secrets, may you be rich in all that you read, in your encounters, in your loves, and never forget where you come from…

  When we leave somewhere, we take the time to say goodbye: to the people, the things, and the places that we’ve loved. I didn’t leave my country, I fled it. The door was wide open behind me as I walked away, without turning back. All I can remember is Papa’s small hand waving from the balcony of the airport at Bujumbura.

  I have lived for years in a country at peace, where every town has so many libraries that nobody notices them anymore. A country that’s the way our street was, where the sound of war and the fury of the world reach us from a distance.

  At night, it all comes back to me: the scent of the streets of my childhood, the calm rhythm of the afternoons, the reassuring sound of rain drumming on a metal roof. Sometimes I dream; I find myself walking up the path to my family home, by the road to Rumonge. The house hasn’t moved. The walls, the furniture, the flowerpots, they’re all there. And in my dreams about a country that has disappeared, I can hear the song of the peacocks in the garden, the far-off call of the muezzin.

  In winter, I stare forlornly at the bare chestnut tree in the square below my block. In its place, I picture the mighty canopy of mango trees that kept my neighborhood cool. When I can’t sleep, I open a small wooden box hidden under my bed, and the scent of memories washes over me as I look at the photos of Tonton Alphonse and Pacifique, at that picture of me in a tree taken by Papa one New Year’s Day, the black-and-white beetle collected in the Kibira forest, Laure’s perfumed letters, the voting ballots from the 1993 election that Ana and I found in the grass, a blood-stained identity card…I twist a braid of Maman’s hair around my fingers and I read the poem by Jacques Roumain that Madame Economopoulos gave me on the day of my departure:

  If you come from a country, if you are born there, as what might be called a native by birthright, well then, that country is in your eyes, your skin, your hands, together with the thick hair of its trees, the flesh of its soil, the bones of its stones, the blood of its rivers, its sky, its flavor, its men and women…

  I sway between two shores, and this is the disease of my soul. Thousands of kilometers separate me from my previous life. It’s not the terrestrial distance that makes the journey long, but the time that has elapsed. I was from a place, surrounded by family, friends, acquaintances and by warmth. I have found that place again, but it is empty of those who populated it, who gave it life and body and flesh. The memories projected onto what is before my eyes are futile. I used to think I was exiled from my country. But, in retracing the steps of my past, I have understood that I was exiled from my childhood. Which seems so much crueler.

  * * *

  —

  I have found our street again. Twenty years later. It’s changed. The great tall trees of the neighborhood have been razed to the ground. The sun crushes
the days. Breezeblock walls topped with broken bottles and barbed wire have replaced the colorful bougainvillea hedges. The impasse has been reduced to a gloomy, dusty corridor, its anonymous residents shut away in their houses. Only Armand still lives there, in the large friendly white-brick house at the end. His mother and sisters have scattered to the four corners of the world, from Canada to Sweden, via Belgium. When I ask him why he didn’t follow them, he replies with his legendary humor: “Each to their own asylum! Political for those who leave, psychotic for those who stay.”

  Armand has become a strapping man, a senior executive at a commercial bank. He has developed a paunch and responsibilities. On the evening of my return, he insists on taking me to our old local haunt, the cabaret. “We’ll go to the trendy places later, but first of all I want you to immerse yourself in the real country, direct and with no transfer.” The little shack is still there, with the parched flamboyant tree in front of it, the moon casting its shadow onto the beaten earth. Its tiny flowers move weakly in the evening breeze. The cabaret welcomes talkers and the taciturn, force-fed on newspapers and disillusionment. In the same darkness as before, the customers empty their hearts and their bottles. I sit on a beer rack, next to Armand. He gives me sketchy news about Francis, who has become a pastor in an evangelical church. The twins and Gino? They’re somewhere in Europe, but he hasn’t tried contacting them. Neither have I. Why would we?

  He insists that I tell him about the life Ana and I led, on our arrival in France. I don’t dare complain, imagining what he must have experienced during the fifteen years of war that followed our departure. But I do confide in him, with some embarrassment, that my sister doesn’t want to hear about Burundi ever again. We fall quiet. I light a cigarette. The flame illuminates our faces with fleeting crimson. The years have passed, we avoid certain subjects. Such as the death of my father, who was ambushed on the road to Bugarama, a few days after our departure. We don’t talk about the murder of Armand’s father, either, or everything that followed. Some wounds don’t heal.