“He can’t quite figure out where artists fit in. In any event, you are still good advertisements for Uganda and therefore for him,” Robert adds. So stay at the biggest hotels, eat the best food. But say nothing. Amin’s spies are following you everywhere.”
“Even here in Venezuela?” asks Charles incredulously.
“Even here.”
Every day stories from home circulate secretly.
Screeching in the dark. A small mound squirms and squeaks, softly at first, then like the tearing of tin. Again and again. Agitated. Excited. A thump against bars. Flesh hitting metal. Over and over. A cage flies up. And rats run out, packs of them. Leaving the intricate organs of their victim lying bloody and distended. Decorated in red ribbon.
While a man dies.
And stories circulate.
A former boxer, now in military uniform stands there flexing his muscles. He is handed a hammer. Swings it, back and forth, up and around, gathering speed and momentum, as though it will carry him off. A line of men forms in front of him. All swinging hammers like windmills.
“Now!” rings out the command. Hammers come crashing down on heads. Pound down simultaneously as the bodies fall, gently, soft as melons.
The last man stands with his bloody hammer.
Slumps obediently when the gunshot rings out.
And circulate.
A refrigerator door is opened and in the harsh cold light, human heads stare. A hulking shadow of a man takes them out one by one, places them on a golden tray. And holds them up for everyone to see. Laughing his deep red, roaring laugh. Like molten lava from a volcano. Unstoppable. Deadly.
And do not go away.
Two men saw desperately at leg bones. Trying to fit someone’s long bullet-ridden corpse — the president of an American company — into the back of a car.
Abafumi does not risk returning to this new, this horrific Uganda yet. There are theatre festivals in Poland where they have standing invitations. They beckon to Robert. For reasons he cannot quite fathom, he decides to bring Renga Moi to Eastern Europe. He senses there is some truth waiting for them in Poland. Something they have been avoiding.
They have also begun rehearsals for a new production — Amarykiti: The Flame Tree. It will unashamedly cry out the martyrdom of their country. It is what they can do now: paint the picture, tell the world. The Flame Tree will be both the pyre of Uganda and the fire under Amin. A wound in the earth. An image of ending and beginning that must be understood.
They leave the Caribbean behind.
In Warsaw, their searing images burn into the imagination of audiences. Renga Moi’s visually raw allegory of suffering seems to be working well. It is understood and solemnly embraced. Those who have seen rehearsals of Amyrikiti are also moved.
Walking the old Eastern European city as tourists, Abafumi learns why.
“Your Flame Tree parallels our Jewish Ghetto,” says Marek, head of the very political student theatre festival that has agreed to host them. “Even though Poland’s Ghetto Uprising was a failure and we lost, we also won. And you will win too.”
Marek shows them photos of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Soldiers crouching behind blasted pillars. A solitary woman hurrying along, a human form slumped in her arms. An old man limping through broken glass. An impromptu street burial: two men crouch, their backs to the camera, obviously pawing at the earth. Two women watch. One with her hand to her face, still capable of shock and grief. The other, a mask of stillness. At the edge of it all, a small boy looks on, bundled up in cap and boots and scarf, his face, impassive.
Charles tries to read the boy’s mind, back through time to a place so different from his own. But so eerily similar in these days of Amin.
A third photo: The final desperate battle for Warsaw’s telephone exchange. “Hitler hated Poland’s resistance. That’s why he bombed Warsaw just before the war ended. Spite. There was no military point.”
“They look so fearless,” says Charles, scrutinizing the two clearly visible faces so resolutely close to hopelessness, bodies tensed to take back what is theirs.
“It would have been their last moment on earth,” says Marek. “This picture keeps them alive.”
“Hitler reduced Poland to rubble,” he continues, “a burning ruin. But we rebuilt. We reconstructed our capital, brick by smoking brick. We wanted the city to look exactly as it had been before Hitler bombed us. The rebuilding began in the first moments of liberation.”
Marek shows them another photo of a Polish flag waving over ruins. He points to scraps of paper, notes wedged into window frames of burnt-out buildings — from those looking for lost family members. “Like mail between ghosts,” he says. “And look, here’s a restaurant in a demolished tram car.”
Charles studies a large metal cooking pot and a wooden kitchen table piled high with loaves of bread.
“If you look closely, you’ll see a bombed out church behind it all. Empty arches where stained glass should be.”
It is a merely a facade, flooded with dusty daylight.
“A theatre set,” says Robert.
“That’s right,” agrees Marek. “One didn’t have to imagine anything after the war. Reality took over. Look at this. A flower shop in a blasted street. In the theatre, you would say, ‘This is too obvious.’ But it is what life became here.”
To Charles, it could be a market in Kampala, with its flimsy awning and plastic bins of bright blooms. Though a watery sun plays on their faces, the women wear heavy coats and shoes. In photo after moody black-and-white photo, the craggy, gaping ruins of Poland rise up to meet them.
Abafumi stays in one of the city’s huge old Stalinist-style hotels. Officially, this is a privilege but it makes Charles feel like a prisoner. Every time he rides the clanking elevator cage, grinding up to the highest tower, he panics. He imagines winter in the cold streets, where slow cars rumble along, blowing up wisps of stinging snow. He feels so alien.
It is spring but he never sees faces, only hunched figures. Somewhat cheered by the red lamplight of cafés, he longs for music but finds only secretive whispering groups, huddled over drinks, as though hiding.
In front of the city’s largest church, he watches the sun glow white fire, bleaching fine pillars and filigree behind the stern figure of Jesus bearing his cross, his right arm raised and beckoning. Encouraging, rallying.
Heaven. This way.
They are one of a dozen foreign companies in Warsaw. “The only Africans again,” remarks Willy with a smile. “We are really quite exotic.”
Abafumi’s physical theatre — seen in two productions now — is widely praised. Its music and drumming an audience favourite. Every company member fights the temptation — even here in a truly sophisticated theatre environment — of easy celebrity.
Joseph is not happy though. “The audiences are always enthusiastic. But you just ask them about the images we project and the politics they contain. Noboby has a clue.”
“It’s not true,” counters Charles. “Look at how The Flame Tree is being interpreted here.”
“Over and over again as the cross,” says Robert. “Suffering is the message. Sacrifice. They do understand.”
Kampala is where Abafumi needs to play, thinks Charles.
But Poland grips Charles now. Including its women. They are sophisticated works of art, paying attention to every detail of their appearance from earrings to handbags and belts. They are the most fashionable women he has ever met. With their heels and their stockings and their smooth clinging dresses on fine chiselled figures. He loves their jaunty hats and their fiery red lips. Even communism has not thwarted these beauties. They way they look at him, hearing drums as he walks, aching with him, yearning, struggling to be Amarykiti.
The women are, somehow, both old and new, full of the secrets of their city. They are Gothic and Renaissance like the Old Town,
with its café tables and long-stemmed parasols fluttering before archways. Formal, elegant, but fragile. Modern, but restrained conservative.
There is so much complicated history here. A city and a country so often bargained over and sold. Used and bought back. Fought over. Defeated and restored. German and Polish. Enslaved and empowered. So much to learn from their example.
The company moves on to play in Krakow with its colonnaded courtyards of pale pink stone and delicate balconies. The domes dazzle them, green conical roofs spiralling into crosses, tiny bronze banners and whirling weather vanes, airy towers embroidered in stone. Peaceful over sun-reddened flowerbeds.
“In 1945, the German governor set up local headquarters in the university here. He executed the university’s teaching staff and then sent thousands of Jews to Auschwitz,” Marek tells them.
Charles looks at Joro and Willy. Then at Kiri and Beth. They all seem as dazed as he speaks. They know about World War II. They do not really know the truth about concentration camps. Or Jews being tortured and killed. He looks at Joseph whose face has gone blank. And Robert who is frowning.
Amarykiti is again hailed in the press. On their first day off Robert herds them onto a bus. Only then does he reveal they are bound for Auschwitz, ninety minutes away.
His voice is very quiet as they speed through farmland. Charles and the company have been so distracted with the tragedy of their own country that it is almost impossible to imagine anything remotely as bad happening anywhere else. They have come abroad to escape. To be praised and admired. To share damage that they cannot repair. To bring news of their disaster elsewhere. The enormity of what they are losing. So that some part of it may be saved. Any part of it.
They have not come abroad to be plunged into someone else’s pain. To weep and cry over past human destruction on such a scale that they will never be innocent again.
“This Auschwitz,” says Robert, his voice emotional, “is what is happening today in Uganda. It happened here three decades ago. Genocide. The wiping out of a people. I am telling you so that you know. It is not enough that I know. You, also, must know. When I am gone, you will carry the message.”
Gone?
Where is he going? wonders Charles in the heavy pall that has slowly settled over them. Like that thick political cloud that leaked slowly into the train from Mombasa, when Headmaster showed them the newspaper coverage of Idi Amin. The cloud that tipped up and poured down on them, its gourd full of poison, once they had returned to Kampala.
“They brought the victims to Auschwitz in boxcars from all over Europe,” Robert begins. “The Nazis deceived their victims by saying that they were part of a workers’ resettlement plan and that transportation costs had been taken care of. Those being ‘deported’ were given pre-paid train tickets. They were treated worse than cattle. When the big doors clanged shut on the trains, there was no light or air, food or water. Nowhere to relieve themselves.”
The slave boats, thinks Charles. The middle passage.
“All they knew was the rumbling of metal towards an unknown fate.”
They had each other. At least they had each other, thinks Charles uncertainly as the bus rolls alongside an intricate network of track, crossing and criss-crossing, in gleaming grey rain.
Each other. What does that mean? Charles has not thought of his family in so long. Mother and Father. Debra. Their faces fly in and fade before his eyes. How are they? Where are they? How can he help them? What has he been doing all this time away from them?
As the bus enters the gates of Auschwitz, he begins to panic. They glide under deserted watchtowers.
“How calm it is now,” muses Robert. “But then, there were machine guns ready to cut down these people for the slightest reason. Searchlights picking them out like bugs crawling, one by one. Tramping sentries. Boots at the changing of the guard. Boots that would kick them to death for the merest infraction.”
They have begun walking. Every few steps of the way, they encounter signs with crossbones, that say: “Halt-Stoj,” a grim reminder of the electric current that used to run along endless fences of spikey barbed wire, assuring death at a touch.
“Once the boxcars unloaded, a selection process began. Each prisoner had to pass before the camp doctor for medical inspection. Those fit for work were sent one way. The unfit — the old and the children — were sent another.”
“Where did the unfit and the children go?” asks Willy.
“Extermination,” says Robert bluntly.
The group is now joined by an official Auschwitz guide. He is dressed in a black and white striped uniform. Like pajamas, thinks Charles.
“I was here and saw everything,” he says. “I am going to show you. This is how we had to dress.”
They walk through room after room. One chamber filled with a mountain of human hair. Another filled with tumbled suitcases. A third, a landslide of boots and shoes. Whole warehouses of clothes. A huge room — a gas chamber behind glass. Lit and still, except for the insidious hum of neon.
“After selection,” says the guide, “people destined to be gassed were taken to the bathhouse. When they looked up, naked and crowded together, some already broken and bleeding, they saw shower fixtures. A few knew there were no showers. Then the door was clamped shut. Poison gas billowed in through special vents.”
The horrors they hear separate them.
Charles finds nothing familiar. Isolated in a reality he instinctively rejects.
In a photo, a single child with hands held up. A gun pointed at him.
Robert does not allow them to avoid the connections. “Amin,” he says, “has recently called Hitler his model for racial purification, for the Africanization of Uganda. Well, this is Hitler. This is what that means.”
They are outside now. Beside a pond still as a mirror. Where human ashes were thrown.
“At least Hitler was original in what he did,” says Robert. “No one had ever worked toward genocide on such a massive scale before him. Amin has a perfect example to follow.”
The guide stands with them. “Many ask why we keep this alive. I tell them that to forget is to repeat.”
Charles stares into the water. All he sees are trees growing down through the glassy surface, their leafy tops plunged into darkness. The scream of trains remains. He hears it. Through the night bringing human sacrifice. He sits and weeps. For himself. For all these deaths. For the ladies of Poland.
The bus trip back to their hotel passes in total silence.
Gathered together in the Old Town, Abafumi searches its soul. But the company is completely distraught in the shady colonnade. Fanned by breezes they don’t feel, oblivious to the chat and clatter of tourists, they look past each other, each angled differently in thought. Only Robert sees what he has created: a new group sculpture, shiny and stiff, inappropriately erected in an old historic market square. Robert breaks the silence. “As artists, we can tell the world what we see. It is all we can do. Even if our own government might not want us to. We carry the images and spread the word. I am resolved.” He pauses, measuring precisely how much information to share.
“So we are working against them by doing what we do,” states Joseph, wanting wilfully to clarify.
“Are we?” asks Charles. “Are we really working against the government? Do they know we are working against them?”
“Some of us more than others,” counters Joro, now looking directly at Robert. Suddenly they are all looking at him. Auschwitz has become Kampala. Hitler is Amin. A troupe of wandering African artists have suddenly become Jews.
“I can tell you nothing else,” Robert states bluntly. “It would endanger your lives.”
“And what about your life?” Kiri aims her dart directly at him.
“No one can guarantee any life in times of war. And there is definitely a war on. No, I cannot guarantee my safety any longer,” he
replies, calm once more.
The foundations of Charles’ very being are shifting yet again. Moving beneath his feet.
“What will keep me going longest is your faith in me,” says Robert.
They reach the inevitable conclusion. Finally, it is time to return to Uganda. But before they leave Europe, Robert has arranged two last performances. In Rome.
Guided as ever by his master plan, they wander Warsaw’s Old Town in search of their last Polish supper. Gather near their hotel, fitfully whispering fears and questions to one another. Nobody sleeps that night.
Groggily they check into the airport for the night flight to Italy. Beth and Charles are inseparable now. Beth tells him, “We will be all right if we stay together.” Holding hands, she and Charles sleepwalk through the formalities.
Charles watches the moon come into view, remembering another moonlit night when he defended himself against thugs.
It is so bright that he wonders whether Amin’s spies can see him even up here? Perhaps the general himself, with a huge telescope, has the plane in his sights right now and is peering straight into their minds. Reading traitorous thoughts. Is Amin already preparing extravagant punishments for this precocious tribe of artists who have taken themselves and all their privileges just a little too far, for just a little too long. He drifts off to sleep against Beth to the rumble of engines.
“I can get you guns.”
A loud whisper invades his dream. He awakes with a start to see, just ahead of him, a white man speaking softly to Robert.
“And why would we want guns? We are actors.”
“I know who you are,” he says. “And my name, for the moment, doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have several businesses in Kampala. Amin needs capital and wouldn’t dare throw me out or close me down. More important, he would never suspect me.” The businessman sits down in the plane seat next to Robert. Charles picks up as much as he can of their conversation. And Robert knows Charles is listening.
“Let’s get serious, Mr. Serumaga. I know you and I know your company’s reputation. I am aware you have your own contacts and your own business dealings. I believe I can speak freely here. These are your people.”
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