Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

It was long past midnight when I woke again. Vincent was snoring. I wanted to go to the latrine, and padded outside, barefoot. Then I stopped dead. Above the unlit camp spread the African stars. Nothing familiar shone there. I looked for Venus or Orion, but they were far below the horizon. The whole sky was alight with an infinity of strangers. The heaven of the northern hemisphere had become an ice field of unknown constellations, multiplying their millions into a haze of alien light. I went on gazing up in emptied fascination.

  For the first few days I was invited to teach the Bible classes while Vincent squeezed into the church office and coped with English documents from the Tanzanian government. A cheery junior pastor appeared, speaking only Bantu, and an eager interpreter with fast, grammarless English.

  The pastor’s courtyard was packed with thirty students of different ages. I could not guess who came out of curiosity, and who with some vocation. They sat on rough benches in the glaring light: the women sleek-faced in their turbaned headgear, the men a cluster of shaven heads, silent at first, nervously respectful. They had only two bibles between them: New Testaments in their Kinyarwanda Bantu, thumbed and torn on their laps. Each sentence that I spoke was followed by the interpreter’s vowel-filled torrent of words, giving me time to phrase what I would say next. And the students, I came to realise, wanted stories. That was their tradition. My tentative theology drew only silence – even the interpreter looked bored – but they greeted the parables of Jesus with excited recognition and cried alleluias at His healing miracles. Later I moved to Proverbs, but the faces raised to mine had lived too deep, too painfully, and my thoughts rang out naive and condescending to me, and sometimes died on my lips. I had never felt more young.

  ‘When will God deliver us from evil?’ The question came from a burly man. Then: ‘Are my ancestors the same as saints?’

  A woman asked if the Bible could cure cholera, and what offerings might be made to the Holy Spirit. Another, simply: ‘What did we do wrong?’

  Two men, in particular, fixed me with blank expressions that never changed, as if their gaze had been frozen by something years before. But the pastor had invested me with priesthood, and I must have carried with me the aura and hope of a wider world, the world outside. Afterwards the women clasped my wrists in gratitude, and some of the men touched their hands to their hearts.

  These classes continued all week. Sometimes I suspected the interpreter of invention, since he brought the students to excitement at unexpected moments. But twice he was replaced by a young woman, an ex-teacher, who translated my words with a soft familiarity, as if I were telling secrets, and then an illusion of intimacy arose among us, and their questions multiplied, and I relaxed a little.

  On our first Sunday Vincent and I entered the low, mud-built hall of the packed church. Its walls were washed pale blue, and almost windowless, its corrugated ceilings hung with shining cloths and loops of tinsel. There was no altar, no lectern, only a platform where one man plucked a guitar while another tapped a pair of drums. We were ushered to the front, where the pastor sat us on aluminium chairs before a low table and three bottles of Coca-Cola. Other men were circling the walls with uplifted arms, their heads thrown back in prayer, their eyes shut in private ecstasy, and a young woman in scarlet collapsed shaking behind our seats, her fingers splayed over her face, and poured out inchoate cries.

  One by one, groups of worshippers – sombre men, brilliantly clad women – climbed on to the dais. They sang hymns of joy and exultation, remembered from their shattered homes, and the drums and guitar throbbed like a promise beneath them. From time to time some part of the congregation would surge to its feet to sing out in euphoria, their hands outstretched or pointing to Heaven. I sensed Vincent simmering with concern, then sitting like steel beside me, while on my other side Olivier sipped at a Coca-Cola and drummed his feet. Frozen in surprise, I hoped he would not call on us to speak. I waited for the familiar service of the seminary – for statements of belief, prayers of intercession – and they did not come. Instead, on and on, the crowded men and women, gaunt from malnutrition, broke into their ecstasy of salvation, while small children wandered in and out, stamping to the music, and the congregation sent up its hosannas and amens, and rocked in unison. But out of this celebration there would sometimes arise a contravening threnody of loss, whose just-composed words yearned for a New Jerusalem where no government or United Nations need exist, only a plenteous peace. Over four hours no prayer of forgiveness or repentance sounded, no Kyrie Eleison for elemental sin. I felt utterly bemused. It was as if the people’s sufferings had absolved them of all guilt, and they were free.

  Then Olivier launched into his sermon. For a full hour he commanded his congregation to seek Jesus. He abandoned the dais for the aisle between their benches, shouting, flailing the air, sometimes whispering. Later he told me what he had preached, but for the moment we could only watch astonished as he danced amongst us, crying out the text from Matthew: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ His flock replied at first with frightened quietude, then bursts of adulation, springing up to screams of ‘O Yesu!’ Soon I dared not look at Vincent. Remorselessly Olivier repeated his command as if sheer will and incantation could prevail, hammering the air to shouts of ‘Knock! Knock! Knock!’, beating his knuckles on the bench ends and wooden dais, then slipping into a theatrical hush, as if the outer world had momentarily prevailed, before his hands cut the air again, and he bent forward in a parodic prance to ‘Search! Search! Search!’, his teeth flashing, and the people exploded into clapping and alleluias. ‘For every one that asketh receiveth . . .’ From time to time he cradled the offertory box, whose gifts would feed the camp’s orphans, and a worshipper would come up to drop a coin there; and once a stately woman strode forward and lifted off her gold necklace, saved from her life’s wreck, and laid it among the rest.

  Vincent murmured: ‘Olivier’s like a clown . . . these people . . .’

  At the end they queued for the pastor’s blessing, while on the dais they started singing again, the drummer dancing and beating his drum between his knees. This grave-faced drummer never rose to rejoicing, but went on thudding out his refrain until long after the last troupe had ended. For a while people seemed reluctant to leave, and a chilling sadness descended. The women waited and murmured together, their babies asleep on their laps, and the men stood round the door but did not go. On the platform the drummer continued monotonously, and I started willing him to stop. The relentless undertone was too much like the noise of reality, as if all the furore and exultation were only a delusive release from whatever was waiting outside.

  I barely noticed her at first. She stood behind me sometimes to interpret at Bible classes: an immaculately dressed young woman whose hair was swept back uncovered from her face. She spoke with a precision that somehow deflected enquiry. I knew her simply as Chantal. Once, at the end of our third class, she asked if she had correctly understood an expression I had used. The phrase, I remember, was ‘memory trace’, and I had spoken it doubtfully. Already I was wondering if I had anything to teach these people. What new could I impart that they did not already know in their veins?

  A memory trace, I said to her uncertainly, was perhaps the faded remembrance of something long past, even something imagined.

  She frowned. ‘Can you remember something that never happened?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I felt stupid now. ‘I suppose you imagine an event, then you remember what you imagined. Then you keep remembering your memories.’

  ‘We have no Kinyarwanda word for that,’ she said.

  I heard my own laugh, short and dry, like Vincent’s, meaningless, and then my tentative ‘You have enough real memories here . . .’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Her look on me was suddenly softer, uncertain.

  And at this moment her beauty began to dawn on me. She was touched by the defensive detachment of many women here. I had the illusion that her features – the wide
nose and full lips, the high, delicate cheekbones – were swimming seamlessly into one another, to compose a mask of alien serenity, and her uptilted eyes watched me with some thought that I could not guess.

  I blundered on: ‘It must be very hard . . . Life here is hard enough, but the memories . . . that must . . . Olivier says it is memories that will either drive people away or drive them back to Rwanda.’

  ‘There is no way back to Rwanda. Our homes are not ours no more. If we go back, we be killed.’ She broke off. ‘Do you really want to know these things?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had backed a little against the brushwood fence. Her words stayed precise, as though she were still interpreting. ‘Our leaders already been killed, and there is worse coming.’ She gestured at the courtyard, where the last students were filing away. ‘Nobody has wish to stay here. The worst thing is despair. We have to hope for something. Maybe the Tanzanians will settle us in the end. But this will never be our home.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘We’ll be farmers. Maize farmers.’

  ‘I meant you. What will you do?’

  She said: ‘I will like to teach again. In my home town I taught English. It is good to hear it from a real Englishman.’ The ghost of a smile. ‘Perhaps I will start to talk like the BBC.’

  I laughed again, then met her strange eyes. Their tapered almonds seemed to tilt back in her head, so wide apart that I imagined her gaze unfocusing into a dreaming privacy.

  I asked: ‘If you left, where would you go?’

  ‘To Tabora or Dar es Salaam. But you need money for that. And my mother very sick. The journey will kill her.’

  I blurted out cruelly: ‘And your husband?’

  ‘I do not have a husband.’ She was looking past me, at nothing. ‘Very much will surprise you here. I think you come from a good country. Ours is not a good country. My people belonged to a church, but it was Christians killed us. They even hunted for us in the churches. They were people we knew, neighbours.’

  I asked: ‘Were they poorer than you?’

  ‘We be the same. They all been to my school. My father was a pharmacist, and treated them the same. Tutsis and Hutus intermarried in our town. My people had a few cattle, that the difference. One night the Hutus came and hacked off the legs of our cows. That was when we be afraid.’

  Later Olivier told me that hers was a common story. The Hutu had broken into her father’s shop and clubbed out his brains, then killed her husband in the road outside. She was found unconscious, her clothes torn from her, cradling her father’s head.

  There seemed no order to these alleys except the numbers chalked on their doors. Only the scaffold of the United Nations water tank lifted a landmark higher than one storey. Here and there, glimpsed through a window in a wall scrawled Magasin or Coiffeur pour femmes, somebody was trying to resurrect their old profession; but no customer ever seemed to enter.

  I walked these streets for hours while small boys called out, ‘Musotho!’ –white man – or ‘Bonjour mister!’ and broke off their games in ragged packs to stare at me. One of them, an orphan named Raphael, would slip his hand into mine and follow me, gazing up with uncomprehending eyes, never speaking. But there were faces I came to know. Many of those who greeted me seemed innocently grateful, trusting that the outer world had not forgotten them. We exchanged unchanging greetings – ‘How are you? You good?’, ‘I good!’ – and students from the Bible school came up to converse in broken French with diffident smiles. It was easy to forget the tragedies they came from.

  On Sundays a rowdy street market gathered, but the only food for sale were tomatoes and cassavas, with some mussels and sprats caught in the local river. A quiet trade went on, I realised, between charcoal-burners and those prepared to barter their paraffin or cooking-oil rations; and a Tanzanian trader arrived to haggle for the women’s jewellery at a fraction of its city value. The ratio between time and money had become pitiful. I saw people sit all day in the market with a padlock or a cheap brooch or a handful of fishing hooks, and sell nothing.

  But beneath the greetings, the children’s games and the faces that broke easily into smiles, I became conscious of a dark undertone: a kind of seething languor that harboured rage and stunned memory, I think, and boredom and a bittersweet homesickness. Young men would sidle up to me as I left my hut and ask if I could procure them a work permit for America or a visa to England. Others watched me in silence from their doorways, and walked in the alleys with averted eyes. There seemed always to be one or two of these men lingering on the fringes of things, even around Bible studies, watching, without interest, or with an interest of their own. From time to time I glimpsed others more enigmatic: purposeful men in shining suits, who must have belonged outside the camp. Yet the nearest town was over a hundred miles away. I had the ugly thought that the Hutu and the Tutsi were in essence the same people, as Chantal had intimated, and that what one had been able to commit, the other might avenge in equal measure.

  The nights seemed endless. Sometimes Olivier would invite us to eat with him, but he was often morose for no reason we knew, and I was anxious in case Vincent offended him. Vincent complained of his petty vanities in the church office, his neglect of pastoral care and his overall ignorance. He called him ‘the witch doctor’.

  But most evenings Vincent and I ate our boiled maize alone. We had one paraffin lamp between us, by which he read into the night. He had brought the whole of Barth’s Church Dogmatics with him, and I would sometimes wake from a fitful sleep to see him still reading, his gaunt features sharpened and concentrated in the lamplight, and his finger on a text. For myself, by the day’s end, I was often worn into a state of odd, jaded suspense. Something was eating my energies from inside. I shrank from kneeling by my quilt in Vincent’s presence, and tried to pray in the dark, lying under the canopy of the mosquito net. But my thoughts would always cloud, then wander. It was as if I had forgotten how to speak with God. And when I thought about the seminary, I imagined only schoolrooms far away, dim-lit by an English sun. Yet it was only three weeks since we’d left. I should have felt alarmed, but I was filled instead by a numb bemusement, as though waiting for something to happen.

  By the third week I was growing very thin. It seemed to draw me closer to these people. I imagined that the throb of hunger in my stomach, my inner emptiness, was the throb of self-denial, or penance. I tramped the lanes with it as if it were my exoneration, and it was in one of these alleys that I saw people emerging from a tiny hut that I had noticed before. Its doorway was chalked with a faded spiral. At first, peering into its darkness, I thought it empty. Then I saw under my feet a white circle and star inscribed in the clay floor. A ledge along one wall was dotted with offerings: cassava roots, some polished stones, a bowl of water. A red mask lay in one corner. I had entered an ancestral shrine, and these were offerings to the dead. For a long moment the bowl of water disquieted me. I dipped my finger into it. Out of a parched mouth, my mother had cried for water, which I could not give. Liquid can choke those suffering from a stroke. Women’s voices sounded near the door, then faded away. My eyes became accustomed to the dark. The water shone on the shelf against the blank wall. There were dead gnats in it; but it was offered to the living past. I left into the dazzling sunlight, my eyes flinching. Foolishly I had to hitch up my trousers from my thinning waist, and Raphael, who was waiting outside, laughed for the first time: a sudden, unpleasant sound, like a tin rattling.

  That morning my Bible class overflowed Olivier’s courtyard. The faces upturned to mine were more relaxed and vocal than before, and I answered their questions with apparent assurance. But as my voice became more resonant, it seemed to sound out separate from myself, as if another person were speaking – Vincent, perhaps – and I began to despise it. When I spoke to these ravished people about God’s purpose or the Lord’s goodness, the phrases turned hollow in my throat, and nobody seemed to notice.

  But I was conscious of wanting to make a c
ertain impression. Chantal was standing behind me, interpreting in her meticulous voice. Sometimes, as I continued, my words became spoken not for the students, but for her, and they then grew meaningful. Words of compassion, even of love. I read the parable of the Good Samaritan and the opening of the Sermon on the Mount. Whenever I spoke and she turned to me, a little fleur-de-lys of concentration gathered between her eyes, and the illusion of our union – our shared purpose – was like an indefinable healing. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ In these exchanges – I thought of them as exchanges – the heaviness lifted from me. My words sounded musical in her voice. I imagined them nesting behind her eyes as I spoke. ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.’

  Afterwards, to my astonishment, she came up to me and said: ‘Did I do something wrong?

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘You always looking at me.’

  ‘No, you interpret very well.’

  She gave her faint smile. ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘By the students’ faces.’

  She had stopped against the brushwood fence again. ‘But you still use some words I don’t know. Maybe they are not in our language. And ours are not always in yours.’

  I might have replied piously that God speaks all languages, but I said: ‘There are always things we can’t understand.’

  ‘Yes.’ She seemed content with this. ‘But we are all glad that you have come, and can teach us about Jesus. And Monsieur Vincent also. Although he is not happy with us.’

  I was startled. ‘Why do you think not?’

  ‘He don’t like Papa Olivier. We all see this. He don’t like our service.’

  ‘We’re surprised that there is no prayer, only sermons and music.’

  She said: ‘Music is our prayer.’ She touched a hand to my arm. Her fingers were fine and tapered. (You could tell people here by their hands.) ‘This church is good for us, you know, especially for women. We are not protected in this camp, women alone, and girls. The old systems have broken up. There are no more elders, and no more inyangnmugayo. Our families are broken. Some of us are afraid.’