For A Long Time, Afraid Of The Night Read online

  Your grandmother would often be lying down, resting her limbs from eternities of hard work. She’d study you, watch you, watch each of your actions and gestures, reassuring you when you seemed too preoccupied. Her comforting you only increased your anguish, so she’d fall silent, closing her eyes as if to let you know she felt powerless.

  You were aware that nothing would ever be the same again, but you hadn’t imagined the worst yet. You were eight years old and not at all prepared to face life all by yourself, alone.

  Sometimes your mind goes around in circles, obsessively reconstructing oblivion. You’re looking for answers, for the reasons why the old woman was determined to save you. Your chances for survival were thin and tragedy was added to separation.

  Your entire life lies hidden inside her intention, the rebellious thought, resisting, but one she couldn’t bring herself to stifle.

  Suzanne is using the blackboard. A legible handwriting with rounded vertical strokes fills the first segment of her writing workshop.

  The students are fixed on the same point: Suzanne’s right hand drawing twists and turns then coming back to the line. They all have an object on the corner of their table, the family object Suzanne asked them to bring to class. A little bit of their home has entered the school compound.

  That often forgotten, rarely beautiful object, kept out of a sense of duty, out of respect for the ancestors. Essentially, it is no more than an object of mourning. The students can’t resist touching it, examining its every detail as if it were going to grant a wish, produce a miracle. Suzanne walks through the rows, interested in every one of them: a box of sculpted wood, an ivory fan for a ball, an allegedly prehistoric stone, a very old almost gutted Bible, a porcelain doll that’s lost its right eye, an ancient coin. Without showing it, Suzanne is delighted. There’s also the old inkwell, the pocket watch, the cufflinks, or the old tumbler with engraved initials. Eclectic objects as useless as they are attractive. The students feel incredibly proud when Suzanne handles them. Suddenly brought together, they savor the moment and laconically answer her questions. Suzanne asks each of them where the object came from and to which family member it belongs.

  One student in the back of the room has brought only a photograph of his object, too large to be carried in. It concerns a brown leather suitcase, the photo is blurred, its edges torn, but Suzanne doesn’t hold it against him. The student is tightly gripping a ruler in his hands. He doesn’t look at Suzanne and responds with lowered eyes when she asks:

  ‘Where does this object come from, Arsène?’

  ‘From Rwanda, Madame.’

  ‘Whom did it belong to?’

  Arsène doesn’t answer, as if he’s incapable of speaking. His fingers clutching his ruler, blood no longer running through them. Suzanne touches his shoulder and puts the photo face down on the table. On the back she writes: ‘All in good time.’

  The students have all turned around now, aware that something is going on in the back of the room. Suzanne goes back to the front of the class and orders them to look at the blackboard again. One girl, Chiara, is told to read out loud the first segment of the work to be done.

  She gets up and confidently delivers the following words:

  OBJECT DATA SHEET

  Description of the object.

  Material of the object.

  Size of the object.

  Geographic origin of the object.

  Dating of the object (exact or approximate).

  Why did you choose it?

  Chiara turns around and goes back to her seat.

  ‘You will give this sheet back to me next week,’ Suzanne declares.

  She cautions them that she won’t correct any copy that is missing capital letters or periods. The sentences must be short but flawless. The bell interrupts this final warning.

  The students are crowded by the door, except for Arsène who stands at a distance, apart. Suzanne is tempted to speak to him but decides against it. The boy has already rushed off when Suzanne turns off the light and closes the door.

  You opened it abruptly, the act ahead of your thinking. A smell came from the leather interior and spread around the whole room. My God, how this smell reminded you of things… You closed your eyes and immediately images began to file by, flutterings of light.

  Sleeping in this valise had protected you from the cold, from wild animals, from torrential rains, and from the thick fog that surrounded you. Curled up, both your feet were wedged against the inside edges. You felt the sharp stones through the thick casing, but you slept anyway, skirting the depth, pins and needles in your hands and feet because they couldn’t move. Your head in the corner reminded you of the old bolster you used to share with your youngest brother. The memory of your filth came back, of your skin dried up from the red soil that was leading you nowhere. Instinctively you’d discarded the clothes that with a harried motion your grandmother had haphazardly thrown in. They cluttered up your new habitat, prevented your small body from bending its limbs inside.

  You have forgotten nothing, the days and days of walking, your hand numb, looking for something without knowing what. You’d obeyed your grandmother’s four instructions, respecting each of her commands, but had found yourself too quickly without any reference points other than the long rutted red clay road that seemed to get longer with every step you took. The trees were tall in a forest that was sparse across the hillside, they’d become a roof for you, familiar souls for lack of seeing any humans. Your instinct had directed you to sleep inside the suitcase. Waking up became harder and harder to cope with, it forced you back to reality.

  With both feet inside, you had to contort yourself into knots to get your small body settled. The suitcase had become a makeshift home in the landscape of a thousand hills. By going back to reality, you’d gauge your loss, loneliness, abandonment. Sometimes you’d choke, be forced to open the lid in the middle of the night, the stars in the sky your only light. Breathing fresh air into your lungs renewed your hope, with your mouth feeling all furry you’d call out for your parents, without really believing in it. The cold chilled your skin; sure, there was the lid that served as a blanket, but you were cold. Then you’d drop off to sleep again, once more slipping into forgetfulness. The leather was a skin like any other, a skin that had grown familiar.

  The suitcase no longer held any secrets for you. Having become entirely yours, in your eyes it had almost become a person, an intimate presence. The two clasps seemed to gaze at you with kindness, the curved handle that your hands wouldn’t let go of was clammy from your grip. You’d walk on the right side of the road, never on the left, and hold the suitcase on your right as if to protect it from a potential threat. Without it you were nothing, so you watched over it by day the way it watched over you by night. In a way, you were switching jobs, the time of changing shifts coinciding with the sunset, the appearance of the moon and the first stars.

  Several days without food, your eyes were on the lookout for plantations with sweet potatoes or fruit trees. Nothing came to interrupt the unrelenting road other than a few ficus or coffee trees, overgrown fields and some sparse plantings. It was the dry season, the winding, stony path seemed interminable. You’d suck on pebbles, just to have something in your mouth. Every morning, the same miracle would happen, drops of water were covering the lid of your suitcase, you’d nimbly slip out, gently opening the lid and lick it backward, forward, and sideways. You’d go from one corner to the other, eager, insatiable, careful to keep your shirt close to your stomach and not lose a drop. Gathering the water on its lid made the suitcase even more of a mother to you: it gave you something to drink every day at the same time, as if it were its duty to do so, a subsistence level so as not to lose you now, you who were only moving ahead unsteadily, quashed by exhaustion and despair. The two of you were together on this road. Alone, you wouldn’t have made it.

  Suzanne looks at the object data sheets to be corrected. This simple exercise in some way summarizes the article’s iden
tity and characteristics.

  The exercise requires no chatting, quite the contrary. The objects are original this year and Suzanne is thrilled to see the catalogue of old things that came out of their household anonymity. Intrigued, she searches for Arsène’s sheet and for the photograph of the suitcase he’s unable to bring in. The boy seems completely blocked, frozen. Suzanne reads his card. His cramped letters reveal effort, extreme concentration.

  Out loud she recites:

  The object I chose is a suitcase.

  This suitcase is made of tanned leather.

  It measures 113 x 80 cm.

  The object comes from Rwanda, my native country.

  It must have been made around 1970.

  The student’s answer to the last question ‘Why did you choose this object?’:

  I chose the suitcase because it is the only thing I still have of my biological family and of my native country, Rwanda. It saved my life.

  Suzanne holds the sheet of paper against her body and calls her student’s face to mind. His ankles wrapped around the two legs of his chair, he seemed so tense when she approached. The photo was lying in the center of his desk, on the plasticized map that lay on each table. He’d put the picture of his suitcase on the African continent, there where his story began.

  You ran without looking back. The dust rose above your village, a strangely shaped cloud rendering the roofs invisible. You’d never run this fast. The banana fields receding the more you pressed on. The suitcase was a hindrance, hitting the slender bones of your ankles like spurs. Breathless, your body couldn’t leave its course anymore, your right hand swept aside the tall grasses, clearing a furrow across the fields. Your breath shrouded the noise, you heard explosions followed by screaming and howling.

  The tears didn’t prevent you from pressing on, quite the opposite, you were running ever faster. Stopping was impossible, running had become your sole reason for living. There, hidden at the foot of the banana trees, you suddenly lay down on the ground. Having run out of steam, it took many minutes for your breath to slow down. You opened the suitcase, furiously riffled through its contents. You found some folded shirts, a pile of T-shirts, a few cookies, and your father’s metal flask. You were on the alert for nearby noises, convinced they were stalking you. The wind carried the clamor from the village back to you, then the racket was followed by silence, after which there was no sound to be heard anymore as if all life had vanished from the surface of the earth.

  You lay down on the ground, curled up under the banana tree, your head on the suitcase. You waited for the sunset, sleeping on and off, and in your daydreaming you imagined that all of this was merely an illusion. The touch of the suitcase at your neck reminded you that you had to obey your grandmother, her extended fingers having pronounced her almost biblical commandments.

  You grabbed the suitcase, finding the comfort of a human body there.

  A strange silence, you’d think a guilty silence. Even the wildlife couldn’t be heard anymore, as if it were forbidden.

  You resisted the urge to go back to the village just to see, but your grandmother’s voice kept you away. Yet, the temptation was so strong that at first your feet seemed to move forward without your even knowing it.

  You couldn’t resist, like a wild beast you tore across the many terraces that separated you from the village. Having arrived at the edge of the fields you gazed at your village. Familiar figures were dragging corpses, retrieving cattle, farm implements, and household objects. You saw your neighbor ransack the windows, bricks, and door of your own house. Others were collecting old pots and pans or making sure the harvest was being shared. It was also the time of accounting for the bodies. Yours was missing. Smoke diverted by the headwinds spiraled up from the houses, you saw bodies strewn about the ground, fallen, struck down. Your adobe house seemed mute, covering the corpses of your family like a shroud.

  You would like to have called out your father’s name, your mother’s and your grandmother’s names, you didn’t have the courage. Your head didn’t come up to the height of the leaves. You didn’t go there, your feet never crossed the stone boundary of the promontory your forefathers built.

  You are hungry and there is nothing to put in your empty stomach. The red clay road ended at the foot of a hill. You tell yourself it’s over, your grandmother’s commands no longer make any sense. The nature around you no longer resembles anything. You tell yourself that from now on you’re in another country, that the kilometers you’ve covered on foot have separated you from your people, from yourself. The animal cries in the distance terrify you.

  You remember the frightening tales that would be told at the end of the day, those stories your grandmother sprinkled into your and your siblings’ mind at dusk, which would then sprout in your sleep. Your father’s snoring in the adjacent room replaced the wild animal noises. Your mother’s caresses and the string of kisses on your forehead would calm your distress.

  At the foot of a tree your suitcase serves as a seat while the trunk supports your back. You sing to escape from boredom. There is the stone that no wind has managed to move: it glares at you like a foe. You fiddle with it and kick it with your right foot. You have defined the playground, the markers of this imaginary football field. Your small strides are followed by shots that unleash cries of joy in you. You challenge this desert of stones by populating it with jubilant supporters. The rain puts an end to the match, a torrent of water that you interpret as an offering from heaven to congratulate you on your courage. You get undressed, put each piece of clothing on a tree branch and doggedly rub your limbs. You are clean, you are good-looking. But everything around you is empty, you’re beginning to think you’re the lone survivor on the planet. You slept completely naked in your customary cubicle, waiting for your clothes to dry.

  Skin against skin, you felt safe in the folded angular arms of the suitcase. The days went by and you felt more and more affection for it. Opening it was like caressing its armpits, touching its lid like lightly rubbing its back. In the dark you’d whisper gentle nothings to it, play twenty questions with it without demanding to hear the sound of its voice. The heat of your skin warmed its leather, you’d turn around and around, wedging both your calves into strict alignment. When after hours and hours of immobility your legs had grown numb you’d poke your feet outside the cubicle. Lying flat on your back and stretching felt really good; despite everything, you still imagined that wild animals might come and devour your feet, so you’d move them and get back into your original fetal position. You stayed more than three nights in that spot where the road disappears, where the road rested at the foot of the hill. Leaving it and going back to the fields made you anxious, you told yourself that your grandmother Honirine’s eyes were studying you, controlling you, checking daily that the orders she’d given you were actually being followed. What you didn’t know is that there was no familiar eye that could see you anymore at all. Their bodies had been piled up not far from the village’s coffee trees, a pit blocked the ground like a deep scar inflicted upon the earth.

  Your mother, your father, your brothers and your little sister were scattered, not lying close to each other. Hardly recognizable in death, Honorine’s face had almost changed. You were the sole survivor but, as a skinny vagabond with only a suitcase and a pair of shoes with ripped up soles to your name, you weren’t much better off than they. You slept day and night. In these profound interludes between dream and reality, you’d forget your sad plight. Sleeping didn’t prevent you from hearing the sounds surrounding you. Sounds of wildlife, of rain and wind as they came echoing in the dark.

  Then there was that peculiar noise that made you gradually open your eyes, one at a time. The sound of a motor humming on the ribbon of asphalt. You didn’t budge, not missing a second of the vibration that made your heart beat feverishly. A jumble of voices, a brake biting the track, a metallic glare. In the darkness you reconstructed their gestures, their red eyes, their black glasses, and the broken lines
of their rifles planted there as if to pierce the clouds. You heard steps approaching that made the ground crackle, you even thought you saw their shoes drawing closer to the tree, to the suitcase, to you. You were no longer breathing, eyes wide open, ready to suddenly see the light of day. A huge hand seized the lid. Against the light you saw the face of a man who seemed surprised. He looked at the vehicle in the distance, his long pendant drawing wide circles a few centimeters from your mouth. You saw his jaw come to life, he spoke loudly, stood up, and dropped the lid with a bang.

  ‘It’s empty, let’s go!’

  The steps moved away, you could breathe again. For a few seconds you thought that not having breathed anymore had been enough to make you invisible.

  Your steps are steady, closely followed by the lurching of the suitcase tapping your right calf at regular intervals. You can’t go on this way without eating. Moving away from the road, you go off in search of a house. There isn’t even a church or a school, nothing but low, dense clouds. You tell yourself it’s a region of hell, that the dead must linger here between two stages before leaving forever. In the distance, a green grove, a few eucalyptus trees, and a small papyrus forest attract your attention, you’re hoping for a brook at last, a juice-filled fruit, so you run and your suitcase, too, runs as if it had been provided with feet. It’s not out of breath, in contrast to you who has to stop to inhale deeply. Both palms of your hands on your knees, you try to quiet your breathing, your stomach showing a glimpse of the bones of your pelvis. You’ve never been as thin as you are this day. Your elbows will soon pierce your skin, your knees are visible through your flesh. A few more paces and there you are in the place where the soil is no longer red.