by Edem Awumey
For a little while, there had been a rumour in the camp that the head guard, the pudgy guy with the walk of a punch-drunk boxer, would soon be retiring. He would, of course, have to be replaced. And in such cases, the head guard, before leaving, would suggest to his superiors the name of a possible successor, preferably to be chosen among his drunken corporals. It would be the second time since Koli Lem had been there that the position changed hands, and all the head guard’s underlings coveted the job.
One night, Koli Lem spoke of the sorcerers and the powers they were believed to possess, which some people there called gbas or ebo, gris-gris, sacred spells or amulets that could make you more powerful than ordinary humans, strengthen your aura, and allow you to bend others to your desires, control their thoughts and movements, and make them go in the direction you want them to. And Koli, who had a certain closeness with the alleged sorcerers shut up in their yard, was ready to gamble that they really did have power, although I was doubtful, because if those wretched old people had so much power, why didn’t they get themselves out of this death camp? Koli had approached one of the guards who was a potential candidate to succeed the pudgy head of the camp and directly proposed that the guard organize my escape in exchange for a gbas that would enable him to rise in the ranks. A dirty, underhanded scheme. My friend assured him that he had discussed it with the sorcerer, who would provide the gbas in exchange for a list of favours, beginning with better treatment. The guard rubbed his hands. “An interesting proposition,” he replied. “But maybe you’re putting me on! Could you be trying to bribe a loyal servant of the state?” Koli replied firmly, “Who’s talking about bribing you, Corporal? I’m simply suggesting you increase your chances of becoming the next head of the camp. You’d have to be very naive to think your colleagues are standing idly by without trying to give fate a little boost!” The guard asked, “Why me, blind man?” Koli: “Let’s just say it’s because you’re not the most stupid one. This isn’t the kind of bargain you propose to just any fool.” The guard: “I see, I see . . . What’s in it for you, old man?” Koli: “I’m trying to help a friend. You and I can be sure of one thing, those sorcerers are sly devils. Do you know what I’ve heard? That at night, they leave their earthly bodies, take flight over our heads, and go off to a depraved banquet with the owls, where blood flows freely in chalices of sparkling white gold! You know very well, the people of the north call them flying men. So think, if they’re capable of doing that, why couldn’t they give you a gbas or some little spell that would convince the head guard to make a decision in your favour? Don’t tell me you don’t believe just a little in the power of those sorcerers? Judging by how violently you beat them . . . ”
Then I wanted to know a little more about the flying men. “Explain to me,” I asked Koli. “Explain what?” he replied. “The sorcerers, their flying, or the night?” I didn’t sleep a wink after Koli presented his scheme to me. Obviously, he was taking a risk. The story of magic and secret spells sounded like a hoax, the corporal surely couldn’t be fooled so easily, and if Koli, who had finally obtained a few favours in the camp, was found out, he could be sent back to square one, to isolation, pliers, and the “black diet,” consisting of no food or drink, and no light. I was worried that he would pay a heavy price for my cowardly escape.
However, my mentor was sure of what he was doing and had begun preparations for the escape. In the prisoners’ kitchen, he had scavenged a canvas bag, a gourd of water, some dried coconut, and some cassava flour, which he had secretly brought back to the cell. The provisions were supposed to last me until I got to the first village. He put all his energy into organizing what he called my “release.” He whispered, “Yes, we’re going to create a new freedom for you!” The days and nights went by, and according to Koli and the corporal’s plan, I was to leave in a week, on a national holiday. The guards would drink more than usual, and in the evening they would be snoring like malfunctioning electrical generators. That would be the time to clear out.
Yes, Koli Lem took risks to get me out of hell. That, in my view, explains what subsequently happened to him. I’ve often thought back to it, survivor’s shame sticking to my boots like dog shit. I think back to it and I tell myself that since I, the survivor, have been unworthy of Koli Lem’s hopes, since I’m ending up a piece of shit, it would be better to cut my losses. No, my life will not have been worthy of my old companion’s sacrifice. And so, every day, I stop on the Alexandra Bridge. Under my feet, the silvery sheet of the Ottawa River. Frozen. I wonder about the thickness of the ice on the water. Would it break if you jumped on it? Would it break enough to let a body plunge straight down into that cold water that should bring a quick death, drowning and hypothermia combined? I ask myself that question. I tell myself the bridge may not be high enough for a person to die right off from the fall on the ice if it doesn’t break. I’m transfixed by the white immensity under my feet, its surface free of cracks. The pathway of ice, bare, deserted, white, like a life in which nothing has happened. Nothing beautiful or ugly. I clutch the metal railing of the bridge with both hands, the wind whips my wobbly silhouette, I try to empty my mind.
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As the night of the planned escape approached, Koli began giving me his final advice. He strongly warned me against going home to the capital, where I would be in danger. Instead, he wanted me to head north towards Burkina Faso. He wrote down the name of a friend who was a nurse in Bobo-Dioulasso. Koli didn’t have his address anymore, but he thought I would just have to go around to all the dispensaries and hospitals in the city. I was to find that man, who would put me up and give me a refuge while I waited for better days.
“And,” my friend added, “in that new city and that other life, you’ll try to live again, but I know that the nights will be difficult for you, disturbed by the haunting memory of what you’ve experienced here, you’ll at times relive the blows and the rape you suffered, the insanity and death you’ve witnessed in this place, and you’ll often ask yourself if you really got away from it. And in the morning, although it will be hard, you’ll put it all aside, including us, and try to move on to other things. In any case, it’s what most human beings with memory do, they try to wall off things they wish they hadn’t experienced and plunge back into the streets of the present. The difference is that, depending on what you’ve experienced, it can turn out to be more complicated. The images that will persist most in your thoughts will be those of violent death. You’ll have to get used to it, Ito, or you’ll have to do something with it, or else you’ll die. The people who don’t go crazy are the ones who make music or books, whatever. The important thing is that you get away from this shit. For the rest of us, you’ll be on the list of the disappeared.”
The disappeared, the ones of whom nothing remains but absence. And during that time, their families hope. “Who knows?” they say, assembled in front of their houses, “who knows, our dear child might come around the corner of the street with a smile on his lips, his face thinner.” “Who knows?” the orphans console themselves, but no one is fooled, least of all themselves, they aren’t anywhere close to seeing the disappeared again. The disappeared have been dumped on the high seas and there’s no wave crazy enough to bring them back to land. And if by some miracle, they’ve lost the blocks tied to their feet and they manage to float, if their swollen bodies touch the shore, they’ll be stabbed again and sent back to the sharks.
“You’ll settle in that city where no one knows you and you’ll figure out the best way to shroud your violent dead, and my hope is that you’ll draw from the rattling of their bones the music or books that will enable you to keep your head above water.” Koli Lem repeated the idea again that night, which was to be the last one we spent together. He wasn’t sad, quite the opposite, he was happy and a touch excited. Another morning came, and he went to work in the kitchen, while I joined the other prisoners in the yard outside. I passed the time watching the sorcerers, who we
re wasting away more and more. I would never forget their bodies of metal and wood.
It was a national holiday, and the millet beer was flowing freely. The guards’ eyes were red and they were using strong language, and there was crazy laughter and quarrelling. At one point, the voices rose a notch and I recognized that of the corporal who was the accomplice in my escape plan, in an argument that was reaching an alarming intensity. The pudgy head guard tried to act as referee, the uproar continued, a curse, a punch, a scream, and the corporal was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood with a knife in his heart. That night, Koli Lem sighed and promised we would try again. We stayed awake, and the next day, Koli was told he had a visitor. It was his nephew, who had reappeared with new books, a dozen of them. But that day we learned we would not be together anymore. I was moved to another cell, which I was to share with a silent guy, and Koli kept the same cell, but with a prisoner the others called Nivaquine, the worst kind of scum, a son of a . . . a real shit!
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So Koli Lem and I were separated. What happened next . . . Nivaquine. Nivaquine, that bastard. The day after his transfer to Koli’s cell, he came up to me in the yard and, sniggering through brutish yellow teeth, told me that Koli had asked him to read to him during the night. I imagined Koli urging him, begging him. But Nivaquine had refused. He never did anything for nothing. He replied something like, “I could read to you, but what will you give me in exchange?” And Koli, without thinking, promised, “Whatever you want.” Nivaquine laughed, “Your ass, old man! That’s what I want!” Koli gave him the bag that contained the supplies I was supposed to take with me on my escape. Nivaquine gobbled up the flour and the nuts, belched like a half-wit, and told Koli it wasn’t enough, he wanted more. Koli called him a devil and demanded that he read him a chapter now that he had eaten everything, but the son of a bitch farted loudly and went to asleep.
During this time, there were rumours circulating in the camp that the situation in the capital was deteriorating, the government had been shaken by a series of demonstrations, and public discontent in the streets was entering a critical phase, which might hasten things in the camp. There was even speculation that they were beginning to close the detention camps, bulldozing them to erase any trace of their existence. Meanwhile, in their cell, Nivaquine began exploring Koli’s chest, and as the days went by, Koli finally surrendered a patch of his skin. The scoundrel stroked his upper body and rubbed his belly. Koli remained impassive, undoubtedly focused on the man’s promise, “Let me do it and I’ll read you a first chapter.” Koli, absent from his body, oblivious to the hands running over his torso. And Nivaquine licked Koli’s torso and put his tongue in the little holes left by the torturers’ pliers in place of his nipples. He bit the blind man, who didn’t flinch, and moved from his chest to the hollow of his navel. Koli breathed noisily then and tried again to forget, he went back to his former life, to his last biology class with his students, the sketch of a human torso on the blackboard and the descriptions of the organs, the liver, the pancreas, the heart, the veins, the lungs, all that Nivaquine was trying to bite, with the children repeating the names of the organs. Nivaquine with his slobbering mouth, intoning strange words, in a trance, his hand seeking to go farther than the belly of the blind man, who finally swore and grabbed Nivaquine, who shouted, “You bastard! Okay, no reading for you!”
The next night, Nivaquine’s hands went farther than Koli’s navel. They advanced toward his lower abdomen and pressed it furiously, and then they descended again and grabbed Koli’s cock, erect in spite of himself. And because Nivaquine repeated his promise, the old man let him have his way, it was only a little game of the flesh. Nivaquine bit his glans, and Koli hit him on the neck, but that shit actually enjoyed it and he grunted. With Koli at his throat and one hand firmly gripping Koli’s cock, Nivaquine undid his pants and took his own cock in his other hand, twisting and squeezing it. Nivaquine had become the possessor of two cocks. He shook his own and let out a hoarse cry, and the hot, sticky liquid landed on Koli’s face. Nivaquine, out of breath, said, “I’m pooped, can’t read you anything tonight, we’ll see tomorrow.” Koli did up his pants, as if anyone could see him or spy on him. He grabbed a book and threw it against the wall, swore through clenched teeth, and kicked into the emptiness, striking the ribs of the bastard, who was already asleep. He dragged himself to the window and grabbed hold of the bars.
The next day, the same rumours were still circulating. The capital was in turmoil and the camps were being closed. As for Nivaquine, his mind was tormented by Koli’s body. That night, repeating his promise, he again threw himself on the old man, who was silent and on his guard to make sure the fiend did no more than touch him. Nivaquine went past the barrier of the belt and forced his way between the thighs of his fellow prisoner. Koli had expected the same thing to happen as the night before, but then the ugly ape suddenly got down on his knees, grabbed his feet, and tried to turn him over. The blind old man managed to keep his elbows against the floor before backing away and getting to his feet again. Nivaquine swore and came closer, and Koli could smell the beast’s breath. Nivaquine dove for his waist, but Koli managed to dodge his heavy body and Nivaquine banged his head against the wall. He turned around again and pushed Koli into a corner. The old man kneed him in the crotch, and he screamed, grasping Koli’s head in his hands and pounding it against the wall over and over.
Koli Lem’s shouts aroused the other prisoners, and we heard the guards running in the night. The commotion was followed by a troubling calm, with a burning smell on the wind and whistling and crackling sounds. In the morning, we observed what was left of a fire, in which there were documents still burning. Around ten o’clock, the sorcerers were released, the guards opened the gates of the camp and pushed those old people out into the bush, where they had no chance of survival. I waited in our yard with the other prisoners, and toward evening, the soldiers came and blindfolded us. We were thrown into jeeps, which immediately drove away. We travelled all night long. I never saw Koli Lem again. He must have died.
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Koli Lem was dead, but everywhere my travels took me, I would see him in other bodies and other eyes. In the cities I passed through, I had a habit of wandering the streets, and after I had honoured my commitment for lectures or workshops, I would roam the urban jungle in search of my friend. Since I hadn’t seen his cold body, he couldn’t be dead, so I searched for him from Port Said to Durban, and one morning in Bamako, there he was, a newspaper hawker on a sidewalk of the city. He was alone, and his skin was burnished by the Sahel wind. As thin as he was, he was holding his head high. In the street, the plaintive notes of a kora somewhere must have been celebrating our reunion. I introduced myself to the stranger and invited him for tea. It was Koli, for sure. We talked for a good hour on the patio of the café. At first reticent, he told me about his life as a pedlar in that part of Africa. He spoke with the vigour of his forty years, and I wanted to touch him to be sure he was real, to feel his face again and his nearly hairless chest. The next day, I invited him to my hotel room to rediscover the atmosphere of the four walls of the cell we had once shared. He brought me a gift, an amulet that was supposed to protect me from evil spells, and in return I gave him my first published play. He looked at the volume with an indifferent eye and stuffed it into his canvas bag, as if books were unfamiliar objects to him. He had Koli’s thick hair and regular features.
He finally took his leave, and from my window, I saw him pulling his newspaper cart in the crowded street. A few months later, I found him again in Gibraltar—no, it was actually in Salvador de Bahia. His body was not as thin, and he was fishing in the waters of the Baía de Todos-os-Santos, dressed in wide white pants, his bare chest gleaming. In the distance, another fisherman had started singing a song. I sat down on the bank and watched the Brazilian, with his heavy muscles, hauling the net up from the depths, slowly, pati
ently. It was Koli. The man introduced himself, “My name is Zumbi,” and continued, “Do you want me to show you Bahia?” I accepted, and the whole next day, we walked on the black cobblestones of the city. He was a fisherman, and a capoeira dancer in his free time. He took me to a backyard where he trained with other, younger guys, because he was already going on fifty, solid and agile in spite of his age. After the dancing, he wanted us to go back to the hotel for a shower. At the hotel, I left him alone under the stream of water, but he asked, “Are you coming?” I backed away, and he got mad and said something like, “I don’t understand you!” He came out of the shower furious, threw his towel on the ground, got dressed, and left the room, slamming the door.
Through the course of my travels, I pursued the shadow of blind Koli, and one evening he was in the Paris metro, big sunglasses covering his dead eyes. He was playing the trumpet, and the rare notes that he managed to get out mingled with the rumble of the trains and the noise of the footsteps of the passersby, who threw coins at his feet. The man was playing a mournful solo. I stood to one side to listen to him, and when the spectators from the subway vanished, I went over to him and invited him to Rue des Lombards to a discotheque that offered cautious jazz, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker.
After the concert, we separated, but I was to see him again in New York, in Havana, in a bar in Amsterdam, where smoke from the fat spliff he was smoking momentarily masked his features, the same ones, and in Mexico City, Toronto, and, a few weeks ago, in the bar in our little city of Hull where I’m a regular now. Very often, I would buy him a drink and we would talk late into the night and I could reassure myself that my friend was not dead.
