Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa

by M L Rudolph

“So you give out gifts to keep people from stealing? So I should have given a few packs of cigarettes to that driver at the airport then he wouldn’t have mugged me?”

  “Maybe. Or better, not got in his car.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes you don’t have a choice,” Matt said. “You have to take the ride on offer.”

  Jacques knocked the hub cap in place and at that everyone got back in the car. Matt noticed the open glove box, the stolen passports visible under the dim interior bulb.

  “Seems my pistolet is missing,” Jean-Louis said, as Jacques started up. “Why do you suppose anyone would take an unloaded weapon, Monsieur Reiser? Any idea?”

  Matt didn’t answer.

  Jean-Louis didn’t react as Matt would have expected when he discovered the gun missing. He just slammed the glove box and remained silent. Sally slept, or pretended to, and Jacques navigated a long section of unpaved road.

  Matt shifted in his seat from time to time to keep the gun from digging into the small of his back.

  Chapter 14

  First light etched the orange rays of dawn on the horizon at the petrol stop on the outskirts of Korhogo. Small homes and roadside stalls lined the street. A pair of scooters spluttered past a rickety green jitney painted with Arabic script and crude drawings. Men and women pushed their way into the already crowded interior of the waiting vehicle.

  Jacques swung a jerry can full of petrol into the trunk of the Mercedes.

  Matt stood flexing his limbs in a warm breeze at the entrance to the narrow property. He was tired and stiff, his lower back seizing up from hours of rough road, and he craved a strong coffee, a hot shower, and somewhere flat to lie down.

  The patron of the petrol stop called out and Matt turned to see two young men scurrying to roll a tire from the garage.

  Behind the men, Sally walked out from beside the building, her sleeves shoved past her elbows. Her face was still swollen, one eye shut, but gone was her tough and bitter glare.

  “There is a pump in the back,” she said to Matt, her swollen cheek giving her speech a heavy sound. She pointed beyond the two young men energetically rolling out the spare. Her injured eye fluttered, trying to open.

  “How are you?”

  “I am glad I don’t have a mirror.”

  “I am so sorry,” Matt tried again. Twice Matt intervened with Robert, once to free him from under the bumper, then unsuccessfully to spare him a fatal beating. If he’d known what Robert did to Sally, he would have held him in the driveway and there never would have been the fight at the warehouse.

  “You can quit saying that.”

  “But I am sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

  “All I can do is put it behind me. Robert is dead. How much more punishment can I expect?”

  “But are you okay? No…other injuries?”

  “You do not need to worry about me. I will heal.”

  Jean-Louis walked up and tossed Matt a small banana.

  Sally stiffened at her uncle’s approach.

  “Shouldn’t she see a doctor?” Matt asked Jean-Louis.

  “Mòmuso will care for me,” Sally answered firmly.

  “Who?”

  “My grandmother. If I need hospital I go later. But not now.”

  “But don’t you want to be tested for an infection? Or to make sure you didn’t chip a bone in your face? So you heal without complications.”

  “As soon as you wash, monsieur,” Jean-Louis interjected, “we continue. Don’t make us wait on you.”

  Sally avoided facing her uncle.

  Back on the road northwest of Korhogo, heat lightening flashed in the distance and with startling suddenness gusts of gray-brown dust kicked up on the horizon. Within minutes a dust storm swept in from the east, cutting visibility to a few hundred feet and forcing Jacques to slow the Mercedes on the narrow asphalt road.

  Jean-Louis, his impatience with everything increasing, urged his nephew to drive faster, but was unable to push him past the bounds of good sense.

  “The French carved us up like a drunken butcher,” Jean-Louis said, redirecting his frustration. “They chopped up the land, stole our wealth, and we were too weak, too backward to resist. With typical colonial arrogance, they sat in their offices in Dakar and drew maps.”

  “Ti-Jean,” Sally said.

  “The French,” Jean-Louis continued. “They take our wealth to Paris and leave behind their problems. The poor and the weak always lose in this world.”

  “Every time we cross the border,” Sally said to Matt.

  “What?” Matt said.

  “Every time we come to the border, Jean-Louis likes to remember how much he hates the French.”

  “It is what it is,” she said to her uncle. “Forget history. It is our problem now. We can’t blame the French forever.”

  “It is not right to forget. The French were a disaster for us. Ignorant mapmakers, petty bureaucrats who never set a foot in the country.” Jean-Louis catalogued the borders between Mali and Côte d’Ivoire, between Mali and Upper Volta, between Mali and Senegal, between Mali and Algeria, between Mali and Niger, between Mali and Mauritania. Then he blasted French politicians, French money, French cars, French wine. In English, for Matt’s benefit.

  “Bah,” Sally said, waving her hand dismissively. “It is what it is,” more interested in the imminent threat of the dust storm than her uncle’s anger at past colonial masters.

  “It is what it is,” Jean-Louis repeated, mocking her. “Of course it is. For you. You didn’t see what it was like after they stripped the country bare. You’re a child of independence. You never saw how mean-spirited they were. After we voted for independence, all the petty bureaucrats destroyed everything they couldn’t carry back to France. They broke the light bulbs in the offices! They left us in ruins.”

  “Bah,” Sally said. “I think we have replaced all those light bulbs by now.” She looked out at the dust. “Did the French leave behind the sand storms, too?”

  Jean-Louis opened his mouth to erupt at her sarcasm, but stopped. Instead he angrily twisted the top off a bottle of water and took a long swig. ––It looks bad, he said to Jacques and sat back in sullen silence.

  By early afternoon when they reached the border between Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, visibility had reduced to dangerous limits. Jacques stopped behind a row of long distance trucks parked at the side of the road. Waves of gray-brown rippled past, alternating with gaps of murky visibility. A platoon of roadside vendors fought off the storm to climb into truck cabs to hawk their wares.

  A man with his head wrapped in blue cotton cloth, a narrow slit for his eyes, came up to Jacques’s window and presented a view of Rolex watches. Next a man came by with gold necklaces. Then a man with tape cassettes. The driver fended them all off, then drove slowly past the line of trucks, avoiding a few donkey carts, and pulled up to the lead truck.

  Here Jacques turned off the engine, stroked his amulet, then braved the gusts of gritty wind to run up to a pink squat concrete pillbox at the side of the road. A young guard in a uniform of dark glasses and an untucked shirt met Jacques at the entrance to the shelter and received a quick handshake before taking him inside.

  Matt noticed the handshake included some folded CFA notes.

  “Nobody around here cares where the border is,” Jean-Louis said. “Look at this place. Five soldiers could take it over without firing a shot. Last time we came through here, these huts were empty. Wait until the leaders decide to care about where the borders are, then we will have our hands full. Real fighting. Between nations. All because of the mess the French left behind.”

  “What was here before?” Matt asked, slapping his passport pouch on his knee, at the ready for Jacques’s return.

  “Before the French? Nothing,” Jean-Louis said. “Even they didn’t have borders at first. We were all one big territory called the Sudan.”

  The border check reminded Matt that Consular Officer Bigelow told him his passport was cancelled, listed as s
tolen. What would that mean at an isolated outpost like this? A haggle over price?

  Jacques rushed back out of the wind, bringing a cloud of fine brown dust into the car with him.

  —How much? Jean-Louis said.

  —Two thousand, Jacques answered and stroked his amulet.

  “These border guards have good jobs,” Jean-Louis said to Matt. “Not so good as a concièrge, but still not so bad.”

  With a tiny nod, Jacques acknowledged the guard in the glasses and drove slowly on into Mali.

  “Our family farm is south of Bamako,” Sally said, after they were out of sight of the border post. “Jean-Louis’s mother is Malinké.”

  “Malinké?”

  “Our people. Ti-Jean grew up on the farm. He and my father went to Abidjan to get work. They found jobs at a university and they took classes. My father died when I was three.”

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said.

  “Why are you sorry? It has nothing to do with you.”

  As they proceeded into Mali, another gray-brown onrush obscured visibility except for a narrow view of the road. The wipers labored under the pounding waves of desert sand.

  “Harmattan. The hot wind from the Sahara,” Sally said. “Normally, we come to the farm after the rains. Now is not a good time to come up here.” She faced him, no longer hiding her swollen cheek. “But we are not here to help on the farm this time.”

  The dust plummeted from the sky forcing Jacques to stop at the side of the road and kill the engine.

  —This could last all day, Jean-Louis said, upset at the further delay.

  While they waited for a reprieve in the storm, the wind shifted directions and lashed the car with such rage that at one point Matt placed his palm on his window in self-defense as if he could hold off the violence. Fine dust built up inside the car. Matt tried to close his window tighter but it didn’t make any difference. The dust infiltrated. A gale lifted a windshield wiper until the wind shifted and let it fall.

  Peepholes of visibility offered views of the storm’s ferocious power. A pair of stunted trees stood firmly anchored on a nearby knoll, their branches whipsawing as if engaged in an angry slapping contest. A plastic bag flew up against Matt’s window, pinioned for a second, then zipped away.

  “Someday the desert will erase all the borders.” Sally said. “The Sahara is the real enemy, don’t you think, Ti-Jean?”

  “Don’t be foolish,” he snapped back. “The storm will stop. But the French mess is forever.” He motioned to her bruised and swollen face. “Look at you. You deserve better.” He turned to Jacques and grumbled bitterly, —Turn on the low lights. We have to keep moving.

  —It is not smart.

  —Don’t tell me what is smart. If they are coming up on us from behind, they won’t let the storm stop them, and I don’t want to get caught here on the side of the road.

  —I can’t see!

  —You can see well enough.

  Chapter 15

  The dust storm maintained its fury for what felt like hours then with tropical abruptness, it quit, as if spent, and the sun shone through a dirty sky. Jacques drove on, the trailing desert sand settling to earth until gradually the sky returned to a flawless blue. All around dry savanna, as if they penetrated a curtain of sand at the edge of the jungle to enter a spare and rocky country. They passed small farms bordered by dry acacia and mimosa scrub. At the villages, stuttering cars and jitneys, scooters and bikes, jockeyed for right of way with pedestrians and lumbering cattle.

  An imposing baobab tree towered over a village of conical mud huts. Nearby, carefully spaced nut trees blossomed within a low mud wall enclosure, directly beyond which Jacques suddenly braked and turned off the road onto a rutted trail. The bounding path jabbed the gun repeatedly into Matt’s lower back.

  “Stop the car, dammit! I have to get out!” His outburst snapped everyone out of their road hypnosis. They shuffled in their seats and stretched, reminded how stiff and bored they were.

  “We are almost there,” Jean-Louis said. “Then we all get out. Not only you are uncomfortable, Monsieur Reiser.”

  Matt put his palms on the seat and held himself upright to relieve the pressure. “I have to get out. My back’s killing me.”

  “Maybe there is a reason for this pain? Something I could relieve you of?” Jean-Louis said, keeping his eyes ahead.

  Before Matt responded, Jacques turned abruptly to avoid a bush taxi that appeared out of nowhere throwing Matt sideways into Sally.

  —Quit with the speed, Jacques, Sally yelled.

  The car dropped hard on to ragged terrain, straining the shocks.

  “Now where are you going?” Matt brought a leg under him to sit on his boot to cushion his back.

  “This is the way to the farm,” Sally said. “Only a little more.”

  Jacques followed a pair of ruts, then a narrow passage around a rain-induced mud slide that blocked the trail. Farmland stretched on both sides of this makeshift road, property lines marked by squat trees and mud walls. A field showed the brown stubble of a recent harvest. A young boy tended a small herd of goats nibbling at shoots of vegetation.

  The Mercedes crossed an earthen bridge spanning a narrow stream, passed a group of metal storage buildings built directly beside the road, then after a stretch of sun-burnt scrub passed hundreds of trees planted in rows next to another stream on the opposite side of which Jacques turned into a lane that curved into more trees and ran directly into the low afternoon sun. He drove past a cluster of round mud huts with corrugated metal roofs until he came to a low ochre wall.

  There, Jacques skidded the Mercedes to a stop and the grounds erupted with life.

  Boys and girls ran out, shooed a pair of curious goats, and mobbed the visitors. Clucking chickens scampered to safety and three bony mongrels barked. Matt watched from within the lee of his open door.

  Jean-Louis and Jacques absorbed this ecstatic welcome, greeting each child individually. Jacques opened the trunk and passed out a bottle of Coke or Orange Fanta to every child. Sally waited in the car, watching the children turn their attention to opening the bottles and dancing to carbonated sprays.

  A middle-aged woman with an elaborately patterned head scarf and dangling brass earrings glinting in the sun approached through an arched opening in one end of the wall. The soft featured woman gave Jean-Louis a kind but puzzled look as she took his head in her hands and spoke to him in a language Matt could tell wasn’t French. Next, the woman turned to Jacques and gave him the same warm greeting. Then she noticed Sally and extended her arms to welcome her out of the car.

  When the woman saw Sally’s swollen face, she turned to Jean-Louis for an answer. Sally immediately became the center of attention. The woman fussed over the injured girl and scolded Jean-Louis before turning her full attention to Sally and walking her inside the enclosure, leaving the men with the children, the chickens, the goats, and the dogs.

  “Let’s unload,” Jean-Louis said after the women were gone. “Then one of us will drive you up to your hotel.”

  “Your mother?” Matt said.

  “My mother, yes.” Jean-Louis reached inside the trunk and pulled out a carton filled with tins of tomato paste and other foods. “This is her farm.” His tone indicating that was all the explanation on offer. He then called the children to gather round and help carry the supplies. He removed several cartons of batteries which got a show of some excitement.

  “They need them for their cassette players,” he explained.

  “What language am I hearing?” Matt asked.

  “Bambara.”

  The word meant nothing to Matt and his face showed it.

  “The language of the once mighty Mali Empire,” Jean-Louis continued, “if you care to know.”

  Jean-Louis handed off a box of spark plugs to an exceptionally tall boy who took the load with no excitement.

  “Empire?”

  Jean-Louis hefted a large tightly packed roll of cloth and drafted two of the bigge
r boys to carry it away.

  “One of the first empires in Africa. As big as all of Western Europe. They ruled here for hundreds of years.” He drew out a container full of baseball caps and sunglasses, all in a variety of shapes and colors. “I can see you never heard of it.”

  These items were a hit. The children attacked the box and immediately began trying on caps, laughing as they determined who looked best in which hat.

  “Mali was once the richest and most powerful state in the world.”

  The idea of wealth was incoherent with the scarcity and squalor Matt witnessed on the drive north. Plus the poverty on the streets of Treichville, in Abidjan, destitution only a short walk over the Charles De Gaulle Bridge from the wealth of Le Plateau with its gleaming hotels and high rises.

  “Now we are one of the poorest countries in the world,” Jean-Louis said and leaned in the trunk to pull out a boxy generator the size of a tree stump. “Reduced to surviving on our wits. Can you grab a corner?” he asked.

  Matt leaned in to help and immediately Jacques stepped up from behind and relieved him of the pistol.

  “Merci,” Jean-Louis said. “We can set it down anywhere now.”

  As soon as Matt’s hands were free, he turned to meet Jacques’s stare; the driver held the pistol unthreateningly, almost apologizing, but clearly unwilling to release the weapon.

  Matt had let his guard down again. Felt foolish. But decided there was nothing he could do about it. The ambience of the family farm and the sight of Jean-Louis’s mother caring for Sally had put him at ease. He decided this was not a dangerous place and these were not dangerous people.

  Chapter 16

  After transferring the supplies from the Mercedes to the farm, Matt asked after Sally to say goodbye. Some of the young girls understood what the American wanted and ran to bring Sally from a shelter at the corner of the property.

  “I couldn’t leave without wishing you a strong recovery,” Matt told her.

  “I am in the right place,” she said.