The Great Agony & Pure Laughter of the Gods (23 page)

Within the darkness of the truck, hunger and thirst became unbearable as the truck drove for hours. Risto slowly went deaf and mute as his body weakened. He believed that one more hour in the truck would mean death. The Somalis were very quiet too. They were saving their energy, they said; the more they talked or cried, the more energy their bodies would lose and the closer to death they would be.

When the truck stopped, the boys couldn’t wait; they rushed to pull the wire on the doors. Both Risto’s body and his universe were spinning, hunger and thirst made him too weak for a quick jump. The driver had stopped for refreshment at a sugar-cane farm. The four Somalis and Merci rushed to the other side of the farm in search of food. Risto wanted to follow, but he did not have the strength to move. So he lay where he was in the back of the truck.

Before his friends could make their way back, the driver jumped back in and raced off again. Risto was now half-conscious, alone in a truck speeding towards an unknown destination. He could not jump from a moving vehicle; in his weakened state, this might have been deadly. But he could not close the banging door at the back of the truck either. He heard humming in his head and felt the world spinning. Even moving felt like an impossible task. His body was so heavy that in the end he let himself drift.

The driver eventually realised something was wrong with his truck doors and stopped to look. He was stunned when he found a boy sleeping inside; his endless complaints in Portuguese did not change a thing. He dragged Risto into the cab of the truck and shouted at him, his rage visible in his wrinkles. He smelled so strongly of beer that he almost made Risto drunk.

‘Nampula,’ Risto shouted back at the man. ‘Refugiado, refugee,’ he kept repeating, hoping it meant something to the driver with the long beard. The driver kept asking for money. When he saw how weak Risto was, he searched his pockets. But they were empty, and the boy had nothing valuable on him.

‘Money, money, money, money …’ the driver screamed, his veins awakening in his skin. Risto held his head in his hands quietly; he could hardly hear the driver. The screaming seemed to be coming from a faraway mountain. The voice was deformed by distance and came in vibrating echoes in his ears.

Eventually the screaming stopped and Risto felt the truck moving again. When he woke, he saw a scene like a play with the driver as the main character. He was standing in front of his truck, holding a bottle of beer like the stick of an angry soldier. On either side of him were two smart men in their mid-thirties, surrounded by an amazed crowd that cheered each word and movement of the driver.

‘My money … right now!’ screamed the driver, almost beating the head of the man on the right with his beer bottle. The crowd shouted with excitement.

‘I’ve brought you this poor thing … now pay back my petrol, food and water, or else!’ He swung his bottle at the man on the right, missed, and fell on the ground.

At this time, two boys, almost Risto’s age, came to open the truck cab and take him out. Fortunately, the drunkard driver had forgotten his key in the ignition. Risto was carried to a tent nearby and quickly given water and porridge. Later that day, he heard that the driver had wanted money for bringing Risto to the refugee camp. According to his account, he had found Risto dying by the road and decided to bring him to the Marathan refugee camp outside Nampula. He asked to be paid back what he had spent along the way to keep Risto alive: water and food, as well as money for petrol. The United Nations officials agreed to give him a reasonable amount to cover his expenses. Strangely, however, the man wanted ten times what they had given him, and that was what had caused the trouble and fighting.

But the story ended with the driver falling over. He was in such a state of drunkenness that he was unable to walk, so the people he was quarrelling with ended up watching over him. They sheltered him until late that afternoon. Once he had regained his strength and was sober, he asked for no more money, and drove off to Nampula in a hurry.

Later that evening Risto found himself placed with a host family in the camp. It was a cacophony of four-to-six-metre bungalows spread across a big flat open area, probably one kilometre square. Far away from Nampula town, it had no scenery to please the eyes, only tall indigenous fruitless trees.

At first glimpse, the refugee camp was a study in despair that a great painter would have rendered as a masterpiece canvas of misery. The houses were so small that a well-built, healthy and full-stomached woman would not be able to fit through the doors, that a tall man walking in his sleep would have touched the roof with his head.

Criss-crossing between the miserable muddy bungalows, Risto and his new hosts were followed by potbellied children with yellowish hair, who hoped that he might have something to give to them. He passed a few pitiful and over-exploited vegetable gardens and a tap surrounded by dozens of children with buckets and pots. Risto helped a little girl struggling to lift her five-litre container. He was surprised to hear that she was twelve years old; she looked eight or nine at most. She had lived in the camp for four years, and the yellowish hair said it all; she was suffering from malnutrition.

A boy who could not be older than twelve ran past them, breathing heavily; he was being chased by a woman carrying a child on her back. A little crowd behind them cheered with excitement. When Risto asked what was happening, a girl said that the boy had broken into the house of the lady and stolen her cooked food. Apparently, the boy, who was an obedient and respectful child, could no longer stand his hunger, so stealing the woman’s food was his only remaining option.

They came across many men hanging around, some in groups, some with their ears against a radio, listening and commenting on politics, while others played different games to keep themselves busy. It frightened Risto when he pictured himself seated under a huge fruitless tree talking politics or playing games to kill time; there wouldn’t be anything else to do.

Everyone in the camp was speaking about the boy who, after two weeks there, was still waiting for the outcome of his asylum-seeker application. Some people said he might be deported; others said a second interview had been scheduled. But the mystery of his story had everyone talking. He had come with the recent flow of refugees who had entered the camp; during his interview, he went dumb when he was asked his reason for leaving his country.

In the camp, Bi Maimuna was the lady who could tell what a dead man had forgotten to tell before dying, or if an unborn child really would look like his father. She was known in the camp as Mama
RFI
, the acronym for the International French Radio, because each morning she had fresh breaking news. She was a famous hair braider in the camp, although her popularity was the result of her unique news broadcasts rather than her professional expertise. It was said that the gossiping spirits of the camp whispered daily news in her dreams. Each morning she woke with a swollen mouth and swollen eyes that she had to unburden by delivering precious news to her clients. Next she went to the little open markets where news grew and travelled across the camp.

Because of her brownish skin with red spots burned on her face by antiseptic, people believed that each year she manufactured a new skin for her face so she could look young and beautiful. Even her name, Bi Maimuna, was a way of refusing to grow older and accept the custom of local names. Normally a mother would be called ‘Mama’ plus the name of her oldest child. As Mama
RFI
had no child, she should have been called Maimuna, as that was her name, but she had kept the prefix ‘Bi’, meaning ‘youthful’, to prove that she was still young and fashionable.

Women cried whenever their husbands familiarised themselves with Bi Maimuna. First they ended up in her bed, and then the entire camp would hear her review of these men. She would expose their weaknesses to the entire camp, and would criticise them to justify why she wouldn’t live with such a man.

Bi Maimuna always wanted to get to the bottom of any undying rumour, so she was very interested in the case of the boy who would not speak. She hurried to see him with a comb in her long braided hair, looking very busy, as if she had important work that she had abandoned for this emergency.

‘Boy,’ she addressed Risto, who sat at the edge of the yard under a tree. ‘Where are the people of this house?’

‘They went to the camp office; there is food distribution today.’

‘Why didn’t you go?’

Risto wondered why she hadn’t gone either.

‘I received mine two weeks ago.’

‘Yes … yes, you are from the group that arrived in the camp recently.’

Bi Maimuna wasn’t going anywhere; she moved closer to Risto, her eyes examining his body from head to toe.

‘You are Risto, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘From which part of Congo?’

‘Bukavu.’

‘Is your family in this camp or …’

Bi Maimuna asked a question to which she already knew the answer.

‘Still in Bukavu.’

‘Your mother must be very worried, without her fifteen-year-old son …’

‘Sixteen,’ Risto interrupted.

‘I heard that your interview was tough; why couldn’t you talk? There is a risk of you being deported from the country. Do you know that? What went wrong?’

Bi Maimuna’s ears were wide open, her eyes unblinking. She was craving Risto’s long story. ‘We have all gone through many things, and we manage to talk about them; talking about those tough moments brings peace; it heals one’s heart.’

Risto ignored her last sentence.

‘Are you hiding something? Don’t you trust me, boy?’ Bi Maimuna painted a fake smile on her face. Risto was busy drawing in the sand. She looked closely at his face; he had some scars from his beatings at the hands of the militia, and a birthmark on his chin. His hands bore scars too. Bi Maimuna peered, trying to guess where those marks had come from, wondering what was in the brain of the boy. Her eagerness to peep into Risto’s soul was huge. Yet she went away disappointed, with little to share with the camp.

In a camp where people could easily guess what was hidden in the depths of their neighbour’s mind, where people could sing the secrets of others in loud voices, Risto’s story was still a mystery. How did such a young boy cross so many countries, all alone, ending up in a camp without any close relative? Not even the scrutiny of the United Nations interviewers could reveal his secrets. He puzzled them all; the curious Bi Maimuna, whose stinging mouth could easily break a clay calabash; the flea market vendors; Balaba, the feared witchdoctor whose intricate bones revealed to him the secrets of souls – none of them could figure Risto out.

The only person Risto spoke to was his friend Merci, who had arrived at the camp a few days after him; a farmer had taken pity on him and had given him a ride most of the way, and he had walked the rest. The family that had first hosted them had allocated them a tiny piece of land where they had built a mud hut.

Unusual things happened in the little house, according to the stories. A snake was found sleeping behind Risto’s back, but it did not bite him. A whirlwind nearly blew him away when he was walking in the marketplace. All of these things were omens to say that the boy was hiding something that might hurt him. He should come clean, people whispered. Because Risto lived without disclosing the answers to the many questions about his hidden life, Balaba, the master of enchantments, told him the ancestors were not happy with his hidden secrets.

But Risto took all these experiences as part of his pilgrimage on earth. He enjoyed looking at things that didn’t have any human explanation. It was through these that he drew his wisdom; he followed the movement of the evening birds, the giant spaces of the skies, the whispers of the wind at dawn, the invisible fire of the hot Mozam-bican winds, the murmurs of the standing rocks that stared at the camp from afar. All of these talked to him. Their words soothed his soul; they brought the peace and quiet he needed, free from fear of bullets and omnipresent shadows watching him from behind. In these he found the wisdom to overcome the madness of the camp, which had taken away the wisdom of even the oldest and most respected people.

As food was there in theory, but not in practice, even the most respected ones lost their principles and learned how to steal from their friends’ gardens. At night, they would crawl into the vegetable gardens to take sweet potatoes and tomatoes to share with their families. To survive, they ended up stealing even the food of their own children, expecting them to have eaten from their friends’ gardens in turn. It was tormenting to see a woman close to the end of her pregnancy standing in the long queues, begging for sugar and maize powder, a few tea bags and a pinch of beans. Food distribution in the refugee camp was a contradiction. A family of five would receive so little food that it wouldn’t even make a full and balanced breakfast for them. Yet they were forced to make do with that ration until the following month’s food distribution.

Yet Marathan slowly came closer to Risto’s heart. It seemed to offer him the inner peace he was searching for, and there seemed to be a bit of acceptance from the people in the camp. Some loved his halting Portuguese spoken with a melodious French accent. Some women loved the shining black-brownish colour of his skin, and many enjoyed his optimistic spirit.

In this peaceful new world, Risto became a tomato cultivator. He worked on a little plot offered to him by a church. Merci followed in his steps. The camp, which looked like a desert, had little water for tomatoes, but the boys did not believe in impossibility, and were determined to cultivate tomatoes in the sandy soil of Marathan. They would wake up at around 4am to draw water from the communal tap. Then they carried watering cans to sprinkle their field. This was a daily exercise that could have been used for bodybuilding, as the tap was one kilometre away from their plot.

Their first harvest was moderate, but gave them a few meticais. Despite deciding to invest most of their money in seeds and more watering cans, they had enough to live on. Risto was able to phone home for the first time. There was no phone box in the camp, but a few big, old and battered cell phones lay on a three-legged table in a large mud house. The owner wore a huge white kanzu, and spoke polished Burundian Swahili. Risto picked up the phone as the owner concentrated on his large plastic watch to count the minutes.