Risto sat on the grass outside the hospital beside Landu and his mother, the green grass his seat and bed. The world seemed different; it was quiet and clean, peopled by loving and caring people. He looked at the streets, the hills; things seemed brand new again. Only one week was left before he would go back to those streets. Would he reconnect with his old friends? Would they welcome him? Darkness was falling; the hospital bed was calling.
Landu was fast asleep beside his cousin when Risto’s body, like a melting iron bar, burned him; his sweat was as hot as steam from a boiling pot. His entire body moved in an endless earthquake.
‘What is going on, Risto? You are burning up!’
‘Call the nurse, I am dying,’ said Risto, shaking.
Landu couldn’t run fast enough. Suddenly a towel soaked in cold water shocked Risto’s face. It started to take the malaria fever from his skin and brought him a bit of relief. Landu came with another soaking towel; he took off Risto’s robe and spread the towel over his chest.
Risto felt the bed moving, turning. His head was about to explode. He had escaped the rage of the militia in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, only to be killed by malaria. He closed his eyes, waiting for death. Nearby, a voice was speaking urgently to a nurse. The nurse approached Risto and asked how he was feeling. The nurse had lost his senses, Risto thought; couldn’t he see how badly he was suffering?
‘Carry on soaking him; it will help,’ the nurse told Landu.
This time it was as if Landu had poured a bucket of water onto Risto. The cold wet towels dripped; the bed was a pool of sweat and water. The nurse came back. He gave Risto an injection and attached a drip.
Risto felt low. The hospital had become a tiresome place. Visitors were no longer very regular. Many knew that he was supposed to have left the hospital by now. He had discovered a nice spot to spend the late afternoon, a bench in the garden of the hospital. He sat here to watch the moon take over the day from the sun. His wounds were almost dry, but he still had a permanent bitterness in his mouth and no wish for food. His malaria was at the verge of disappearing, surely it was a matter of days, but the doctor wanted to keep a close-eye on him nevertheless.
Risto sat on his bench looking at a young girl in the garden playing with a baby. The baby boy, bare-bottomed, was crawling; he couldn’t walk yet. The girl would throw a ball, and then the baby would crawl quickly to retrieve it, screaming with joy.
The girl looked over at Risto and smiled, and he humbly returned a smile. She approached him, her eyes looking aside.
‘Sorry, may I ask you something, please?’ she said with shy courtesy.
‘Yes, no problem.’
‘Did you see a pastor here before I arrived?’
‘A pastor? No, but it is not easy to know if a person is a pastor or not.’
‘I don’t know if you are from here and would know him … he preaches early in the morning and prays for sick people in the hospital rooms.’
‘I don’t know which one you are talking about, we are visited by more than three pastors a day, and they are not the same each day. But I haven’t seen anyone looking like a pastor out here today. I am sorry.’
The girl’s Swahili was spiced with the Mashi dialect, and her discoloured, torn loincloth made her look like a villager. Her slippers were hooked on with wires, and Risto wondered if the wire didn’t hurt her toes. Her naturally chocolate skin seemed to be craving lotion; it had gone khaki. The baby playing on the lawn was barefoot.
‘Was there something important with the pastor?’ Risto asked.
‘Yes, we had an appointment here.’
‘Pastors have a lot of people to see, maybe he met someone else … be patient.’
She stared at the sky, as if to say that the night was approaching.
‘When were you going to meet?’
‘At 6pm.’
‘He might still come. It is not yet late, we still have the sun.’
The sun was setting over the mountains in the west, in the direction of Kabare territory.
‘Oh, such a cute boy! Where is his mother?’
The girl looked at him as her face changed. She sucked her lips for a moment. ‘He is my baby.’
She passed her left hand over her face like someone drying sweat, but it was tears she was wiping. The answer hung in her mouth; she wasn’t proud to be a mother. Risto was quiet; he understood that she hated who she was.
‘I dreamed all my life of furthering my studies. I wanted to go to college, to get a degree, I dreamed of becoming a nurse. But the dream was thrown away and burned to ashes …’ She lowered her face to dry her tears.
It had always been very difficult for a young girl who fell pregnant to carry on with her normal life in the South Kivu. Often a girl would drop out of school, unable to cope with the gossip and bother coming from her classmates. Some school principals would not allow a pregnant girl to remain at her desk, fearing she might become a distraction to her class. The girl would be marginalised, stigmatised and finally rejected. Her family would often believe that she had disgraced them.
The girl had stopped weeping, but her eyes were still dropping tears, ‘My name is Mina. I am not from this town; I am from Kalahe village where no one lives anymore except those bloody armies. Right now, we are staying in the village of Luhoko. Yes, I dreamed of becoming a nurse one day but today I am nursing the child of a snake. Whenever I think about this, I feel like … but I don’t have the heart of a killer. If I had, I would have thrown this child into the forest or the lake. This child is a curse, a shadow that my heart carries every day.’
Risto, who had at first thought he might cheer Mina up, was now sweating. Her story made him deeply uncomfortable, and even worse, there was a third person hovering. His voice echoed on the wind’s rhythm, it whirled. An ironic and horrible laughter followed when he saw the person behind Mina. The voice, the laughter came from his mirror image, a Risto whose body floated in the air.
‘Kill her, stab her … she knows all about you,’ taunted the other Risto.
As he stared at himself, Mina continued her story, explaining how her family had given everything they had to the militia. But the militia wanted more. Mina was thirteen years old. Five men, three times her age, left her unconscious on a moonless night, naked in her family’s yard. She became bitter as her dreadful memories overflowed. ‘Oh, the cruelty of these dogs! Why didn’t they kill us so that we don’t have to live like this? Will we ever regain our dignity? My shame is here, in this child with his five faces – who is the father? How can I ever know?’
‘It’s you she’s talking about. It’s you she hates,’ said the ghost Risto, with his nasty laugh.
Mina’s cries were like calls for Risto’s death. He didn’t deserve to live; he had stood by, even helped, as this had happened to his people. A breeze passed, and for a moment, a freezing silence cooled the garden. Risto saw the ghost-Risto holding the little baby in his arms while the mother, Mina, leaned on that ghost’s shoulders.
That night was unusually cold. Risto had covered himself with sheets to call sleep, but no sleep came. He wanted to forget the story of that day. He begged for the lights to be switched off, and this time even the tortoise man agreed. He begged for absolute silence, and it was given. The silence of the shuttered room became indescribably eerie. He desperately needed deep sleep. One hour passed; he was still awake with his eyes closed. He avoided thinking; he wanted his mind to remain blank. When something would appear in his head, he would open his eyes to let it go. However, something refused to leave him, making the night unbearable. He opened and closed his eyes quickly; there was something hanging around that he couldn’t see, but he could feel, the echo of a female voice crying. Perhaps it was Mina, the girl he had met that evening? The echo seemed to come from far away, maybe from the mountains. A voice came on the breeze, carrying a story. It cried and mourned, growing louder and louder.
‘Can you hear it too?’ Risto asked the tortoise man’s guard, who seemed t
o be staring at him in the dark.
‘What? Are you dreaming?’
The voice he could hear faded, but now Risto felt the staring of a strange figure. The story of little Mina had awakened ghosts from his past. Risto threw back his sheets, restless in the quiet room, with everyone else asleep. Only the tortoise man moved in his shell made of cloth. Risto took the glass of water from his bedside table and drank, then sat on his bed.
. Chapter 10 .
Risto’s sisters surrounded him. The youngest, Zaina, was in his arms; she leaned on his chest and looked at her sister Pendo, who stared at their brother as though he were a newborn child. They examined every single scar. They would run fighting to give him the glass of water, or plate of food he had requested. Advised by their parents, they avoided asking him questions about his mysterious time in the jungle of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park.
Every day since their brother and Benny had been kidnapped by the militia, they had cried with their mother, thinking they would never see him again. They had missed him, but their mother had helped them by driving them to work hard at their studies. She had become very strict and wouldn’t tolerate the slightest mistake. So both girls had done well at school.
Landu, who had arrived in Risto’s family to resume his studies, had become a best friend to Risto’s two sisters, and this had helped the ache of his absence a little. He was kind to them, told them beautiful stories and played the most beautiful tunes on his flute. The gentleness of his melodies, the tenderness of their rhythms, and the peace they brought to the heart of each listener was what had sealed the great friendship and strong brotherhood between Landu and the girls. He had become so attached, so close to the entire family, a visitor would have thought that he was born and raised with them.
Each evening, the family looked forward to Landu’s musical performances. He mostly played his own compositions, except for a few ballads he had learned from his teachers. He played his flute in many different ways, his fingers caressing the instrument as he let his breath transform into sweet melodies of great magnificence. The beauty of his melodies had led Zaina and Pendo to become background singers. They sang to his melodies, whispering at first, then with angelic voices. And this way he had contributed to the healing of the family; his music brought hope of a better tomorrow, and his presence gave them the love that they needed. Of course they missed Risto, but things would have been worse without Landu.
Zaina told Risto in a sad and soft voice that Néné didn’t live in town anymore. She had been kidnapped by the foreign militia; no one knew if she was still alive or not. Pendo gave her sister a fierce look; she wanted Zaina to stop her stories. The younger girl stopped speaking and looked down.
‘She is alive,’ Risto said sadly. ‘Maybe one day she will come back,’ he added, even though he did not see how this was possible.
His sisters looked at one another with amazement, but did not say more.
Days passed by as Bukavu, the town where a story travels like wind, gossiped about a child soldier, a militia boy who had come back from close to death. The supposedly secret story travelled the streets faster than a storm; it caught each ear along its way. A wife would tell her husband, he would relate it to his closest friends, who would in turn recount it to their wives, who would debate it in the open market of Kadutu.
Néné’s mother came to ask Risto questions about her daughter. Each one of her words carried tears, and when she thought about the fate of her daughter, she tore at her hair, pulling tufts out. Risto didn’t know how to describe the situation with the militia; it was torture to recall, and he wept at the horror of it. Eventually, he told Néné’s mother how her daughter cried every day in the forest, how they had been taken, and how he had been rescued. He didn’t have words to describe the evil man who had taken Néné as his wife; and because he did not want to kill the woman with the full story, he said little, trying to keep his account as broad as possible. The few words that Risto did say made the woman mad with grief; she threw herself to the ground, screaming. She cried out, imploring, why this had happened to her, to her daughter? Risto didn’t have an answer; he had the same question, and he never knew who to ask it of.
Two weeks after arriving home, Risto was still barely able to leave the house. The experiences he had when he went out frightened him. Twice he had left for the market, but was unable to finish his shopping. He could not explain why. He had sensed an omnipresent person following him, but whenever he looked behind him, the person hid. He could tell no one about the creature in empty streets and corners; it might make them wonder about his past, about his healing, or perhaps they would think he was going mad; no one would take him seriously.
Risto’s mother wanted him to meet people, to talk to his friends and to visit family members. She wanted Risto to start a new life, socially and mentally. She was particularly displeased because he kept postponing visits to his uncle at the last minute.
This time, she was serious; the visit to his uncle had to take place. He was a successful businessman who stayed in the Avenue du Gouverneur, one of the richest suburbs in Bukavu. Risto knew what he needed to avoid along the way; eeriness and empty paths and gossiping women who hung around the streets looking for slander and lies. The plan was simple; in order to avoid walking and talking, he would get a moto-taxi.
The main road was about a hundred feet from his home; he waited there for a moto-taxi. It was a sunny morning. The first moto-bike passed, the motard leaving a cloud of black smoke behind. He didn’t look around. He had a fat woman on his bike. Another one passed, a young woman on the back. It was moving more slowly than the previous one, perhaps because the customer had a child on her lap. Two women who saw shouted at the woman with the baby and her motard. How could she carry a child on a dusty road with a crazy motard!
Motards were cursed every day by elderly and conservative people. They were hated for their way of driving, and the noise and trouble they created in the streets and roads of Bukavu. The roads had merely the colour of tar, covered with a thick layer of dust, but the motards didn’t consider it dangerous to speed along these so-called roads. They would drive as fast as they could in the dust, hooting a horn that could destroy a person’s eardrum. They cared less about getting fined by the police. What mattered to them was the attention and esteem of other motards. Each motard wanted to be known as the master driver, and so they never respected the laws of the almost non-existent roads. They would make up roads where roads never existed, and passed where this was forbidden. Even in the midst of many people in a narrow space, they would pass, hooting insistently, while pushing and knocking human bodies.
For the elders and all true Bukavians, the most abhorrent thing about the moto-taxi industry was its growing popularity. Many women now used moto-bikes as their preferred means of transport, even though their husbands and fathers judged this unacceptable. They could never understand how women could bear the reckless driving of the motards. The design and size of the motorcycles themselves left women in an uneasy situation because of the clothing they wore. Most women wore pagnes or loincloths which easily left their bodies exposed once seated on the moto-taxi. Men thought this was intolerable. And the danger of an accident was always imminent. The motard would drive fast, racing against the wind, and the customer could cry and curse and scream, but the motard would not slow down until the final destination was reached.
The motard who stopped for Risto was young, as most of them were. He wore fashionable expensive pants, shoes and a shirt, with a brand-new cell phone hanging from his neck. This was typical. Motards used the money they earned to show off to girls and to impress their colleagues, showing that they were not afraid of spending. Each motard wanted to show that he was a cut above the rest, and richer than his peers.
‘Where to?’
‘Avenue du Gouverneur,’ Risto said.
‘300 francs Congolais.’
‘No, 150 francs.’
‘Make it 250,’
‘I on
ly have 200.’
He had more, but bargaining was like a genetic disease in this part of the world and Risto couldn’t help it.
‘Where to exactly?’
‘The third house, near the governor’s.’
‘Fine.’
Every ten seconds, Risto passed a motard and his client. This wasn’t the case before he had left Bukavu; there had been a moto-taxi revolution while he was away. He realised that he had spent a long time in the jungle and hospital; many new things had happened. The motard hooted as he reached one moto-taxi station and held down his clutch to make a loud noise. His colleagues hooted back. The wind was stinging Risto’s ears and eyes. He had to clear them with his hands.
He heard a voice singing his name. He looked all around, but could only see motards and their clients, taxis and private cars, and a few people walking. No one seemed to be singing. Then he saw her; a young girl, fourteen or fifteen years old, with a child on her back. She wore old-fashioned clothing. She was neither on a moto-bike nor in a car, but she was moving fast – she was being carried by the wind. At first she was in front of them, then she fell behind. She yelled at Risto, she cried and sometimes sang. Then she was in front of them again.
‘Do you know her?’ Risto asked the motard, slapping him on the back.
‘Eh, stop it, stop it! Know who?’
‘The girl with the child on her back?’
‘Where did you see her?’ The motard held his anger in his teeth.
‘Look … look! Look in front of us!’
‘Am I not looking in front of us? Do you think I am looking behind? Eh, man, one more time and you are off my moto!’
The girl had gone and the voice had died. Even so, a mysterious creature was drawing closer to Risto. He could feel its breath on his neck.
‘Okay, okay, drop me here!’ he yelled in the ears of the motard.
‘This is Nyawera, we are close to Avenue du Gouverneur.’
‘No, no. Drop me here. Drop me, please!’ He was desperate to jump off the motorbike.
The Great Agony & Pure Laughter of the Gods Page 12
