by Rémy Ngamije
“Yeah. But that’s here, and that’s there.”
Jasmyn lets out a small “Oh.”
Across from the bed is a long writing desk with textbooks and the latest in music-playing technology: a rectangular CD, radio, and cassette player with a wooden finish fills the air with the acoustic hopes and dreams of young love.
Jasmyn gets off the bed and crosses over to the desk. Next to the player are thin red, orange, purple, blue, and green CD cases grouped by colour. A neat hand has taken the care to name the discs in permanent marker ink.
“What’s this one about?” She holds up a purple case with Soundtrack of The Disconnect written on it.
“Sad songs, really depressing stuff. You don’t want to listen to that. Trust me.”
“And this?”
“More sad songs,” Séraphin says as she puts Crumpled Bedsheets back down on the desk. “The purple ones are sad ones; red is for all the romantic cheese; orange for the happy ones; blue for gym; and the green ones have study music.”
“So much sadness, Séra,” she says. The purples outnumber all of the others.
“Yeah, well, high school, you know.”
“This one sounds like a good one,” she says. She looks at All That Glitters Is Good in its orange casing.
“Don’t play that unless you’re prepared to spend the next hour dancing. Late nineties pop music is a drug. I nearly failed tests because of that CD.”
“And this?” After The Winter looks up at Jasmyn.
“Lighter, happy stufff. More chilled. But it’s good. I like that one.”
Her eyes glide over the blues. “Between Rock And A Loud Place; No Guitars For Quitters; Shoestrings And Sweat Patches – how do you come up with these names?”
“They kinda come to me in the moment. One minute I’m busy with chemistry homework and then, bam, Smells Like Team Spirit calls out to be made.”
Jasmyn laughs and pulls out one of the red cases. “Cancel Today, Postpone Tomorrow – such a funny title,” she says. “You really put effort into these.” She comes back to the bed. “Playlists are clearly your thing.” Her body is turned sideways towards him slightly. The curves of her body make straight answers a bit hard for Séraphin, whose eyes dart from her eyes to her pronounced chest before finding Patrick Vieira’s, grinning knowingly.
He coughs. “Playlists for all moods and times.”
“So what do you have for this moment?” Again, her eyes are teasing. Patrick Vieira seems to be enjoying his squirming awkwardness.
Séraphin’s face warms up. Another cough. “I have something.”
Jasmyn kicks off her shoes and pulls her legs onto the bed, crossing them underneath her. “Put it on.”
Séraphin goes to the desk, shuffles through the disc covers and pulls out a disc in a transparent casing.
“No colour. Is that a good thing?” Jasmyn asks.
“I didn’t know which colour to give this.” His voice is tightening, dwindling to a whisper. “Maybe later I’ll know.”
“What’s it called?”
“Nostalgia For The Near Future.”
On the bed, Jasmyn smiles encouragingly. “Clever.”
Séraphin plays the score he has carefully compiled for his deflowering ceremony. A brief whirring sound emanates from the CD player as it prepares its acoustics for a momentous performance. A red light flashes as the CD is read. Once, twice, thrice – and then it plays.
“I like this song,” Jasmyn says in a near-whisper, her eyes closed as though enjoying the taste of a memory. “Can you turn it up?”
Séraphin rotates the silver knob to the right and stands sheepishly next to the desk. He waits for a sign about how to proceed from the mute audience pasted on his room’s walls. None comes. Jasmyn beckons Séraphin to the bed. He sits next to her, hands in his lap. Their bodies observe a short silence out of respect for the moment and the impending death of innocence before Jasmyn leans towards Séraphin and kisses him, whispering softly along as she tugs at his bottom lip. “I’ve been searching for you …”
The kiss is light, airy. And as she pulls away he is tugged in the undertow of the passing sensation. He blinks his eyes open and finds her looking at him. “What?” Séraphin whispers.
“Nothing.” She kisses him again, longer this time, with careful deliberation and then pulls away. “How’s that?”
“It’s, err, nice,” he says, swallowing past the chokepoint that has developed in his throat. She laughs softly again and kneels on the bed. She motions for him to do the same.
When they are facing each other she reaches for the bottom of his T-shirt and lifts it gently. He helps her pull it over his head and arms. Then she tugs at the corners of her own top, pulling it off in one smooth movement to reveal a small concave belly button at sea in a creaminess of skin. She reaches behind her back to unclip her bra and, just before it slides off her breasts, Séraphin involuntarily closes his eyes and then forces them to open on the terra nullius of her breasts. They are round with flat, light brown nipples, almost faint upon her skin. Even as his eyes gorge themselves on them he notices something peculiar about them.
“They’re different sizes,” he blurts out. The right is a little larger than the left.
Jasmyn laughs at his surprise. She wiggles her chest to make them jiggle. “Yes, they are.” She looks at him closely. “Touch them.” Séraphin raises his left hand and passes a fleeting touch against the right one. Jasmyn laughs again. “They won’t fall off, you know,” she says. “Here, let me show you.”
She takes his hand and presses it against her breast, running his palm against its roundness, and his fingertips against the hardening light brownness. As she does so she looks at Séraphin’s face, attentive. When she releases his hand to its own exploration he pulls away first, looking at her for permission. She nods slightly and feels both of his hands envelop and circle her chest. The touch is naive, slightly ticklish, but it kindles a warmth under her skin. She reaches out to touch his exposed torso, dark, brown, and lithe from athleticism but not yet fully developed. As she leans forward to kiss his neck he can smell the heat of the day on her coupled with a cool, fresh fragrance his nose cannot place. The smell is intoxicating and he breathes her in. Jasmyn moves forward slowly and encircles her slender arms around his back, raking it from top to bottom, enjoying the power that comes with seeing Séraphin’s back arch, feeling the spinal cord and vertebrae underneath her fingers. Then she pushes him back on the bed and he feels a hand slip underneath his basketball shorts. He inhales sharply when it arrives at its destination and, again, Jasmyn watches his eyes narrow as he computes the new sensation. She maintains an alternating firm and gentle stroke until she sees his eyes close and his breath become heavy. And then she releases him at the elastic of his shorts. He anticipated a two-step undressing – shorts first, then boxer shorts – and nearly sits up in consternation when he feels the entire assemblage being tugged at. Jasmyn presses him back down and then whisks them off before climbing off the bed to wriggle out of her jeans and underwear too. Finally free of them she stands in front of Séraphin fully naked. From top to bottom her figure is one smooth, unbroken curve, and the patch of womanhood is dark and fine. She picks up her jeans and pulls a crinkly packet out of the pocket before coming to lie down next to Séraphin, who inches up closer to the wall to make space for her.
They kiss once more, with hands discovering pockets of ticklishness and niches of rapture, Séraphin driven by inquisitiveness and Jasmyn by a mounting need. She delicately tears off the top strip of the packet to produce a translucent sheet which she expertly slides onto Séraphin’s member before rolling on top of him. She places a palm on his stomach to steady herself and then slowly, with great care, connects the two of them, letting out a small gasp at the turgid pressure pushing inside her.
Séraphin’s mind is a thrashing live-wire as numerous sensations course through him: the pressed heat which makes their skin sticky, the shortness of breath in the small room, and t
he enveloping warmness on top of him. His inexperience pins him to the bed and when Jasmyn finds her balance he lets her dictate the pace and the rhythm. Eyes wide open, the sight of her atop him is mesmerising.
Jasmyn’s pinches her thighs closer together and the pull in Séraphin’s loins intensifies, forcing him to sit up to pull closer to her heat. The moment of the near future which shall be immortalised in nostalgia forever is nearly at hand. In his ears he can hear the roar of the Highbury faithful behind Thierry Henry, cheering with mad ecstasy, and Martin Tyler’s energetic commentating – What a glorious strike! Mark this day! This boy is going to be phenomenal!” Patrick Vieira’s grin is no longer cheeky but welcoming, ushering him to a new sublimity. He finally understands Bergkamp’s ascension. Séraphin feels Jasmyn’s hands clawing at his back, as though attempting to break through some integument that will release a pair of bound wings, allowing them to fly from his body. As they try to pull deeper into each other, Jasmyn’s teeth on the muscle of his shoulder and his face buried in the sweet smell of her neck, Séraphin looks up as his bedroom door swings open and his mother walks in.
“Sera—!”
V
Therése was a beauty, and a smart one. In the old days, when Rwanda was feeling the bite of the independence bug, she had the prudence and luck to secure a scholarship to Paris to study at L’École Parisienne. She surmised that in twenty years on her family’s farm in Gisenyi she had seen enough of the green countryside and the brown soil that ran like melted chocolate when it rained. When she was younger her routines were broken by attending school. She could leave home and walk the five kilometres to the village’s ramshackle collection of long houses which served as the principality’s source of foreign words and ideas. But as she grew into slender, firm-breasted womanhood her education was pushed aside. After completing high school her horizons looked bleak: an eternity of planting and harvesting, fetching firewood, drawing water, peeling and cutting potatoes, killing and plucking chickens, marriage, and child-rearing. Her life would be a subscription to wisdoms and customs which lay heavily on the land, connecting pasts and shaping predictable futures. She did not want to be her mother or the majority of her aunts. Therése secretly planned an escape. She cheated her prescribed future by filling in an application form for secretarial training scholarships offered by L’École Parisienne.
On a small flyer she picked up from her school’s office on the last day of the academic year she could see two smiling students, a woman and a man, walking in a paved courtyard, discussing something worldly and grand, something unrelated to the flagging fortunes of the cassava and manioc plantations at the back of their farmhouse or the fertility of the hens whose egg count was declining. She looked at the intelligence and freedom in the woman’s eyes, how straight her hair was, and the smiling acceptance of the pale-faced man walking next to her. She longed for the intellectual equality promised by education, and desired to be looked at like a woman who could offer more to the world besides the thankless sweat of her labour or the fecund fields of her womb.
Therése hesitated, but only momentarily, when she arrived at the regional government office, a rickety brick and mortar house with two rooms full of stacked paperwork, to hand in her application. What if her application was rejected? What if her French results were not strong enough? Her armpits moistened with anxiety. She bundled her nerves into a rough bale of confidence and then strode past the office door. In the room where she was required to submit her application was a wooden desk and sitting behind it a man wearing large spectacles which magnified his eyes, making him appear shocked at whatever was in front of him. He was hard at work on a black typewriter, which clacked away with machine-gun speed, raining industrious letters and words on the sheet of paper in the contraption’s carriage. The man’s attention to his work was so rapt Therése was convinced he was doing something of labyrinthine complexity instead of what he was doing: writing a misleading report about the office’s performance and the need for more Rwandan francs to be funnelled its way. She approached the desk timidly.
“Where do I place the applications for the scholarships for secretaries?” She suffused her query with diffident politeness – men in the area bore little resemblance to the smiling male college student in her application flyer, not only in skin tone, but also in temperament. A married woman could be taken seriously at times, even a widow, but recent high school graduates had no standing. Their words had no power, their ambitions were the fancies of women yet to come to terms with the way the world worked, and the needs of men therein.
Without looking up from his typing the man in the glasses asked her which intake she was applying for. She said she would like to be considered for the start of September. It was early May and with her grade twelve year having ended the previous year in December she was eager not to be out of school for too long. With his eyes still on his paper and his fingers playing the typewriter’s keys, the man asked in a smooth French accent, “Marseille, Nice, Bordeaux, ou Paris?”
“Paris, monsieur,” Therése replied.
“Placez l’application sur le tas avec qui dit ‘Etudiants’ à votre droite,” he said. Therése gently placed her application on top of a stack as though it would break upon contact and shatter into a hundred pieces of rejection and a thousand chores and a million little sighs of regret as her dreams faded and she wrinkled into matronly neglect in some man’s household.
The typing paused for a moment as Therése moved across the room to the door on her way out. The clerk, whose name was Alphonse, looked admiringly at her figure. It was solid like most of the girls from the area, but it was also filled with feminine curves which mated sensuality and strength. He cursed himself for not engaging her in conversation when she had walked in. These village girls were easy pickings for anyone who could buy them a bottle of Fanta or a chocolate. Alphonse preyed on vanities and curiosities of worlds unknown and unseen.
“If your application is successful,” he said to her retreating figure, “you will receive an answer in a month.” She stopped when he spoke and turned to face him. The ovalness of her face, its brownness, which looked reddish in the fading afternoon sunlight, and the curve of her eyebrows made him swallow uncomfortably. Her neck was long, graceful, and her bosom was laden with all of the imagined and unimagined fruits of young femininity. “If you are accepted, then you will have to get a passport before you can go to France. You have a passport, no?”
Therése’s face flushed. Alphonse saw an opening. For helping her secure a passport he could have fun with her until she boarded her flight to Kinshasa. Feigning officious efficiency, he picked up, stacked, and fanned a random assortment of papers before placing them back on the desk. “No problem, I can arrange a passport.”
“Non, monsieur, please do not trouble yourself. I have an aunt in Kigali who can help me with that,” Therése replied after blushing for the required length of time. “You would be doing so much already by just helping me submit the application.”
Alphonse smiled. Less work for him tramping through paperwork just for a passport then. All he had to do to slide beneath her skirt was move her application to the top of the pile and write a short motivation to support her candidacy. Of course, he would have to dress his labour in layers of inconvenience and deeds of chivalrous clerkliness. “You can come back to check on the application in a week,” he said. The sooner he had her back in the office, the sooner he could give her what he called the Send-Off Package.
“Oui, monsieur,” she said. She even curtsied.
It is to be remembered, though, that Therése was no fool. She had heard of Alphonse’s deviance and wanton jettisoning of young girls. Also, what she wanted was not a bottle of carbonated sugar or the taste of some foreign delicacy. She wanted what she had dreamed of, what she had read about, what she had only tasted in carefully constructed sentences with French adjectives, memorised from a weathered poster stuck to a classroom wall.
Une promenade ensoleillée dans L
es Champs Elysées.
Un tas du café chaud dans un café. Un pique-nique dans un jardin.
Une danse amusante dans un discothèque.
Alphonse had no hope of providing her with that.
Therése had walked out of the office and called her mother’s youngest sister, a woman held in contempt in the village for daring to go to the city, taking up with men as she chose, even wearing pants like a man, the ultimate sign of rebellion. Over the phone they planned the coup which would see Therése applying for a birth certificate, take a passport photo at the only shop in the village that had a working Fujifilm camera, and then submit her passport application form at another village office staffed, thankfully, by a cheerful clerk who was publicly and proudly married to one wife.
When Therése finally walked into Alphonse’s office – a month and a half later, he had counted the days, angrily typing reports, waiting for his prey to materialise – he flourished her successful application and some flight tickets. She waited until she had stowed the paperwork in her battered handbag before she brushed his leathery and lecherous hand off her shoulder.
Therése walked out of the office with her future safely tucked in her bag and headed home. Suddenly she was buoyant in her chores, ebullient with the energy of one who sees a near end to an unpleasant task. When she announced her departure to her parents they were greatly displeased. They prophesied her failure and scried her inability to integrate into European life. But Therése could not be talked out of her decision. She tried to appease them with promises of returning with a diploma, and the prospect of a job in Kigali which would allow her to buy them the latest trappings of modernity but they merely sighed and “O-hoed” disparagingly at her heightened ambitions.
As September drew nearer she could barely keep her excitement in check, so curious was she about all of the peculiarities of Europe she would finally get to experience, like snow, and cinemas, and trams, and crowded streets, things she had only seen in her colourful French textbooks.
