by Edem Awumey
“I can see you really did philosophy. And were you really an actor? On a real stage?”
“I tried.”
“What did you play?”
“An old man stuck in a trashcan. A crippled old man. “
“A little like you are now.”
“Except that now it’s not theatre. Let’s say the role I’m playing is staying alive.”
“Oh, you’re going to get better. And we’ll take a trip. Tell me, have you ever tried to go back to your house in Africa?”
“It’s not the same house anymore.”
“It’s been rebuilt?”
“It’s in ruins now. Everyone who lived there is gone.”
“You said your mother was still alive. She didn’t leave.”
“No. She stayed.”
“And you never went back to see her.”
“She wouldn’t have recognized me. I’ve changed.”
“Didn’t you miss her?”
“Every day.”
“So you could have gone back.”
“A few weeks after my cancer was diagnosed, I bought a ticket. But I was already too worn out to make the trip. It takes two flights and twelve hours of waiting on a bench at an airport.”
“But you could have tried.”
“I tried.”
“Was there a girl you loved in your country?”
“You’re changing the subject. That isn’t what we’re talking about, Kimi.”
“I know. So?”
“She didn’t want me.”
“Why not?”
“She said it was to protect me. She was a prostitute.”
“And where are your brothers and sisters?”
“Scattered all over the world.”
“They all left home?”
“Yes.”
“You told me you were a prisoner in a camp.”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
“A violent, motionless time.”
“And that’s where you met Koli.”
“Yes.”
“Was it hard?”
“On my body.”
“Only on your body?”
“I’m cold, Kimi. Can we go home?”
“You go ahead!”
And without waiting for Ito’s reaction, she rushed toward the backyard of their building. He followed her laboriously. When he finally managed to get to the yard, she provided a strange spectacle. She had opened one of the big blue recycling bins and was pacing the area with her head down. Ito wanted to know what she was doing. She turned to him, her eyes shooting daggers. He backed away. “What am I doing?” she replied. “I’m doing what you did, I’m acting. I’m throwing the people in my life into this garbage can. My alcoholic father, my mean, crazy mother, my junkie loser cousins, my friends who live at the Shepherds of Good Hope, my first boyfriend, who showed me how to shoot cocaine, all of them, I’m throwing them in, and believe me, they don’t mind. You were talking about finding our true place? Well, this is it! We’ve done it. You can congratulate us.” And she started throwing everything she could pick up into the blue bin, frozen boots, a bicycle wheel, empty beer bottles, boards. Ito told her to calm down, she would wake up the neighbours. She continued filling the garbage can, then stopped suddenly, burst into tears, and ran towards the apartment.
39
After the meal, they sit on the couch again. Ito Baraka listens to the sound of his bones knocking together. “Read me what you’ve written,” says Kimi. He doesn’t have the strength. Or he’d rather devote what’s left of his strength to dictating his story to her. He’s trembling again. The fever. Kimi comes over to him and places a hand on his sweaty forehead. He asks her to get the notebook. She hesitates. And without waiting for her reaction, he starts to dictate the next part of the story to her. Kimi has no difficulty following him, he’s speaking slowly. She only wonders if everything he’s telling her is part of his life story, and to what extent invented people, places, and things have come to the rescue of his memory, which is following the same path of decline as his body, and how much the friends, the fears, the streets, the blood and its smell that he describes are true or false.
***
A few days after my return home, I headed inland again, to the village Koli Lem had said was his. After a dozen hours on the road, the minibus I had taken stopped in the little town where Koli had been a schoolmaster. I slept in the only motel in the place, a building with narrow rooms and an unusually low roof. When I got up, I offered the owner, a man in his forties, some money to take me to my friend’s village on his motorcycle. Along the way, we encountered some school children. The man left me in front of the first house in the village and promised to come back for me in an hour. I walked from there to the middle of what seemed to be the main avenue of that lost homeland. Not a soul in view. It was morning and the peasants must have been in the fields. I walked straight ahead. On either side of the street, the same adobe huts with thatched roofs, a few of them covered with sheet metal. The wind raised the ochre dust.
Then I noticed a thin, almost scrawny man coming towards me, carrying a hoe over his right shoulder and a machete in his left hand. He was walking very slowly, holding his head straight, and when he came face to face with me, he stopped. He spat to the side and said, “You’re not from the village.” I answered that I was looking for Koli Lem’s hut. The man asked, “You mean schoolmaster Koli?”
“Yes, I’m a friend, I used to know him.”
“Where?”
“In a camp.”
“Schoolmaster Koli disappeared a few years ago. He hasn’t been seen since. I was his student and I remember that at the time we were preparing for our primary school certificate exams. Some soldiers came and got him, and there’s been no trace of him since. A week after his arrest, people came at night and set fire to his hut. It’s the last one on your left, at the end of the road. We put out the fire to protect our own huts.”
He asked me again to tell him where and how I had met Koli. Then he murmured, “He must be dead. No one in the village has heard of that camp. Everyone who knew about it must have kept silent for fear of reprisals. Yes, schoolmaster Koli must be dead.” I answered, “I believe so. We got separated.” Koli Lem’s former student added that the hut had not burned down completely and no one had touched the debris, out of respect for the village teacher and because they hoped he would come back. The man walked with me to the house and then left.
The thatch had been consumed by the fire, but part of the charred frame was still standing in spite of the years and the weather. The wooden door was bleached and crumbling in places. I pushed it and it opened to the inside without resistance. The bed in the right-hand corner of the room had also been partially destroyed, the mattress was yellowed and covered with mildew stains, and there was a drinking glass on the dirt floor. On a bedside table were an oil lamp and a clay pipe. Across from the bed, there was a pair of pants hanging from a clip on a clothesline. The rest of the clothes had slipped off the line and formed a rotting pile on the ground. Behind the clothesline, two trunks sitting one on top of the other, the one on top padlocked. I picked it up and set it down beside the second, which I opened.
I wasn’t surprised to find books inside. A dog-eared Flaubert, a Fuentes in several volumes, a Pasolini spread open at the bottom, a Lao-tzu (it was the first time I had seen anything by him), The Brothers Karamazov, a Conrad, Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, and a lot of others. I closed the trunk and managed with a lot of effort to hoist it onto my shoulder, it was that heavy. I thought Koli would have wanted to give the books away. I went back to the main road of the village, and at the end of it, the man with the motorcycle was waiting for me in the shadow of the first hut. After some hesitation, he agreed to load the trunk on the
handlebars and gas tank of his machine. As we headed back to the city, I asked him to make a stop at the school where Koli had been a teacher. I intended to give them the books, but when we reached the school, I changed my mind, because it was obvious that they weren’t reading material for primary school kids. Back at the motel, I gave the money I had left to my host, who agreed to make a final trip to the village to pick up the other trunk.
I took the minibus back that afternoon. The next day, at home, I broke the padlock on the second trunk. It held notebooks, a dozen of them, containing my friend’s observations and reflections, and underneath them, some pages held together with elastic bands, the manuscript of a novel, I immediately realized. Pages filled with handwriting that had to be Koli’s. On the first one, in big red letters, the title, which reminded me of the strange expression my friend had used for the sorcerers in the camp: “The Flying Men.”
In it, Koli told the story of a little boy from an African savannah who had spent the first ten years of his life tending cattle and following the flights of airplanes in the vast sky on their way to faraway places. At twelve years old, when he was sent to school, the boy wanted to become an aviator like Jean Mermoz and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. However, he lost his parents very early and had to give up school in order to survive. He went back to tending cattle for a quick-tempered uncle. In the sky, the airplanes continued their flights, and the boy was unhappy. But one day, he met a solitary old man, for whom he started providing a few everyday essential services. One night before the man died, he said to the child, “I know your dream, you want to fly. Come, bring your ear close to my lips.” And the old man gave him a spell that he was to recite at night in his bed with his eyes closed. When he recited the words, the child found himself in the sky above the trees, houses, rivers, and towns. He could go wherever he wanted, from Pondicherry to the Cape of Good Hope, but he had strict instructions to always come back to his physical body before dawn, or else he would find himself wandering above the clouds for the rest of his days. He only had the right to travel at night. But one night, the boy had a desire to see what the towns looked like in the light of day. He chose not to return to his physical body and found himself suspended for eternity above the Red Sea, near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
A story of disarming simplicity, which I read to my friends, who found the style much too classical. Thinking about the flying men, I remembered something that had seemed to me to be just one of the many tortures the sorcerers in the camp were subjected to. Some nights, the guards would smear their bodies with burning peppers, in order, the pudgy head guard claimed, “to prevent their cunning, rebellious spirits from returning to them, and to deprive their travelling souls of bodies.” And the guard continued, “When you don’t have a body anymore, there’s not much you can do, you can’t influence the course of events in life.” That’s what happened to my friends, who were deprived of body and memory.
40
Last night, half asleep, I saw them again. My friends. As if in a dream. I should mention I had news of them a few years ago through my cousin Sefa. He told me that shortly after I left the country, Wali had been hit by a drunk driver on an avenue. After two weeks in a coma, he had opened his eyes, his eyelashes fluttering feebly under the fluorescent fixtures of his hospital room, the harsh light showing his mother what would now be her son’s life. Ironically, Wali, who’d had the role of blind, paralyzed Hamm in Endgame, had become a piece of furniture displayed in front of their house in the Bé neighbourhood by a resigned mother, who had hung around his neck a rosary with shiny transparent beads that gave him a papal air. And he would bat anxious eyelashes on the world around him, at passersby and fidgety kids, and it wasn’t theatre anymore. Although, seeing him so immobile and attentive, you’d have said he was waiting for his cue from another actor. Wali, soft flesh propped up against a tricycle.
Things weren’t great for Beno either. Shortly after Wali’s accident, he began to walk the streets of his neighbourhood with a bundle of crumpled newspapers under his arm, his hair unkempt, skimpily dressed in shorts and a tank top, which he later dropped to go naked. Or at best with just some scraps of fabric around his waist like Christ the martyr on Good Friday. There was talk of mental strain, and the family did try to lock him up in the house after successive treatments by a healer, an old priest who was a friend of his father, and an immature psychologist, which did nothing to stop his deterioration. The bundle of newspapers under his arm continued to grow, and he would plant himself in the middle of a road, smooth out the papers and read the news and events of the day out loud. And once his task as a news broadcaster was fulfilled, he would carefully fold his newspapers and start running toward a virtual finish line in the distance. And there were those who swore he could be seen all over the city, in Amoutivé, in front of Collège Saint-Joseph, in Agoué, in Djidjolé, but in particular in Tokoin, around the high school and the roundabout with the huge white marble dove. He had set up his headquarters near the dove, and it was said that at regular intervals, he would remove his loincloth and take a shit at the foot of the huge stone bird. He was agitated and loud, and many times, the police came and picked him up. He would disappear for a week, but finally reappear, calm and docile. He would sit against the base of the statue with his arms stretched out along his extended legs, and he could have been mistaken for his paralyzed friend, Wali.
Things were different for Sika, but just as extraordinary. She married a soldier, in what was considered a good match. She didn’t finish her studies. Sika, a housewife and mother of an army of six feisty kids. The colonel with the red beret married her in a sumptuous wedding and set her up in a big house on the outskirts of the city. He must have told her, “In my house, women don’t work. You won’t want for anything, ma chérie, my little firebrand.” And after the wedding, Sika began to hatch her chicks and get bored, and later, when the children were in school, she parked herself in front of a huge TV screen that took up a whole wall of her garish living room and devoured, via satellite, those series that would deaden the mind of a genius in no time at all. Sika stuffing herself with fritters in front of the TV and guzzling Pepsi-Cola and beer. She had become huge, like Big Momma in the movie with Martin Lawrence, lugging around rolls of flesh, with a big potbelly, elephant legs, and a greasy neck like an accordion. She would get drunk and try to forget the cute young girl she had been, sighing like a punctured inner tube and saying, “If my father had been alive, he wouldn’t have let me marry that lout with his tropical Légion d’Honneur!” And very often, she would end up falling asleep on the sofa.
That was the latest news of my friends, Wali immobile in his chair, Beno limp against the marble pedestal of an imperturbable stone dove, and Sika like a hot air balloon stranded in the thicket of comfortable tedium. And sometimes, the birds of a pointless remorse came and pecked at the balloon of her flesh, which began to lose its air in little farts through every pore. And her fat ass that in the evening would welcome with full honours the colonel on his return home from work. You could say it was endgame for Ito Baraka and his friends, children of the Green Revolution, the agricultural awakening that produced on an African coast a generation of young people who lolled around day after day in front of family homes they still hadn’t left at forty years of age, whistling the refrain of waiting through their decayed teeth while successive economic crises weakened hearts and purses that had long been empty. They waited with a feeling of having been screwed by that wily angel that had promised them change, a new, just world, etc. And the tail of the angel continued to smash their last illusions.
41
Ito Baraka breaks off his story, struck again by the devastating current shooting through his veins. His limbs tense and stiffen. Then the cold sweat returns. His jaw clenches. The current grabs him by the belly, a dismal rumbling. A lump rises, he grits his teeth and staggers to the bathroom. From the sofa, Kimi hears him emptying himself. Then, nothing. She
knows he has sat down with his back against the bowl. Ten minutes to regain a little control. She won’t go check on him. He doesn’t want her to. She examines the Giacometti on the wall with a neutral eye. Ito comes back and lies down, his head close to her thighs. He asks her to pick up the notebook again.
She refuses, and goes to get herself a glass of water. She comes back with two thick blankets and covers Ito Baraka from head to toe. With the cold, he feels his sore throat coming back, hammer blows in his head, and steel teeth gnawing at his joints. He bites the blankets and clenches his fists. Kimi turns her head and wipes away a tear. Ito is relieved that she doesn’t display the noisy, resounding suffering of the inconsolable mourners in the funeral parlours of his childhood. She says, “Tomorrow we’ll go back to the hospital. This time, the doctor will have to keep you there. No way you’re leaving after just a few days of treatment!”
Ito Baraka grumbles in protest. Kimi stands up and takes a few steps across the carpet. She glances out the window. The neighbour across the way is smoking in front of the entrance to his building. She goes back to the desk and picks up the joints. She returns to the window and smokes, alone. Ito seems to be sleeping, his breath whistling. He moves, then suddenly becomes motionless. And Kimi, watching him, understands. That it will soon be the end of the story. The day of reckoning when the dead and the survivors are counted. It’s clear that Ito Baraka belongs to the latter category, that sad, illustrious breed of miraculous creatures who bear open wounds, haunted by the nights of torture and the horrible metamorphoses of the bodies they lived with in prison camp, those silhouettes that dry out and pile up over time, logs with a large nut at one end that vaguely reminds you of a head. And each time Kimi Blue finds herself facing the photograph of the Giacometti on the wall of the apartment, she inevitably has the same thought, that it is not of a metal object but of a living creature, a prisoner whose veins have finally given up their last drops of blood.
