A STRANGER AT HOME


The savannah stretched in monotonous coppertones, dotted here and there by blisterlike anthills, then tiny clusters of huts would unstring under the plane's tarnished wings. But the bush reigned sovereign and ubiquitous, as if between it and the atmosphere any other object or living particle became an intruder.

Lulled by the mechanical buzz, Fabien closed his eyes in an effort to resuscitate that part of his African soul which several years of absence had numbed.
The cabin's pressurized air made him feel suddenly gloomy; he couldn't get used to the cruel evidence of facts: the country of his birth, now an independent state, had gone through the bloodiest upheavals. A soft rustle drew him out of his meditations, the stewardess was passing a tray of toffees. She wore her hair in narrow braids and the whiteness of her teeth sparkled in contrast with her ebony features.
Fabien stared at her for a while, projecting his thoughts into the velvety pupils of the young Zairese, imagining her draped in a loin-cloth, generous and illiterate.
'Pardon me, Sir," she insisted with a Belgian accent which awakened him altogether, "will you please fasten your seat-belt?"

Large oil puddles glistened over the muddy tarmac. Someone unlocked the door and you could hear the propellers still puffing. Fabien's lungs filled up with that pungent smell of lentils which seemed never to have dissipated: his adolescence was reviving.
Khaki-clad soldiers were guarding the exits of the airport terminal, holding tight to their bayonets, a sign that the land's fresh wounds had a long way to heal. At the checking counter Fabien handed out his passport to a tall and heavily perfumed fellow who examined it with sustained attention. The functionary then turned to his colleague and, not suspecting that the European in front of him could understand, said in Kiswahili: "This Musungu must belong to the Technical Corps, look here, it's written 'profession: schoolteacher'. I'll let him proceed."
The other man acquiesced, wagging his chin slightly. As for the customs officer, he was so zealous he wanted to inspect everything and whistled in amazement when he discovered what he thought to be a spying device. His Bantu logic couldn't make out that it consisted of a plain sun-lamp. In order to convince the skeptical officer of its therapeutic effects, Fabien plugged it into a nearby wall-socket.
"You may now close your suitcase," the African acknowledged finally.

In the waiting-room stood aunt Adele, and next to her, Gerard. When the young man embraced them, a strange feeling ran through his limbs as if the present had crumbled all at once. Had he really ever left this place? That mawkish perfume, that prickly beard! Half dizzy, emerging from a whirlwind of images, Fabien tried to put some order in his mind ... this was the year 1966 ... he'd just arrived from Europe... he would spend a week with his aunt Adele and her husband in Lubumbashi, the town once called Elisabethville. He noticed the wrinkles on their faces.
They - his relatives - had partaken in Zaire's painful birth. Each pawn moving over the inextricable chessboard of politics had ominous repercussions on their every day life; the color of the skin had ceased to be a guarantee for some, a calamity for others.

During the car trip Fabien imagined that he was turning the moth-eaten pages of an old, familiar book. Outside the window however, things had changed, like the building plots covered up with brushwood, the unfinished constructions in the residential quarter and the houses he so well remembered. With their doors and windows barricaded against the chronic burglaries, they now looked like individual prisons. He asked conventional questions, yet, under that façade of absentmindedness, he was unrolling the film of his youth. Only the flamboyant trees enlivened the depressing landscape. An awful stench emanated from the rubbish-laden gutters, whereas rusted garbage disposals lay empty along the streets. Fabien caught himself grinning; he must have been eight or nine when his father, reversing the car, got them stuck in one of those irrigating canals. Nobody had been hurt; he remembered how much they had laughed, constrained as they had been to walk the rest of the way home in the dark. And that square block of buildings, wasn't it the school he'd attended for so many years? The bougainvilleas had almost reached the rim of the outer walls. His adult eyes deceivingly dwarfed every dimension. Seven kilometers separated the airfield from the center of town, seven kilometers during which fragments of the past were brought back to Fabien like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The black Chrysler stopped in front of the porch. There was Alphonse waiting for them with his eternal white apron. His hair though had turned greyish and his eyes were bloodshot. Moving forward, he grabbed the young man's arm with both hands. They seemed to be carved out of the bark of a kapok-tree. In a raucous, somewhat fretful voice he said: "Yambo Bwana, you're no more the small mutoto I used to accompany to school."
A stream of nostalgia invaded Fabien's body. He had the impression that all his pores suddenly opened and that he was being cast in a mould, the mould of Africa.
"How are your two wives and children keeping? You had five daughters and a son when I left, am I correct?" Fabien inquired as the old servant carried his luggage.
"I didn't go further than number nine, Bwana. My little tribe stays in the 'cite'; there at least, no harm can be done to them. If you only knew the plundering, the stealing that is going on! Life has become so hard for us, ordinary folk. The Ministers, they get fat and drive in luxury automobiles. The cost of manioc rises every month. If it wasn't for Monsieur Gerard and your aunt's kindness, I would have forgotten what meat tastes like. Fish too is rare nowadays."
This lament uttered so spontaneously moved the young man. it epitomized the pangs of a nation which was attempting to put together the broken pieces of its shell.
Instinctively, Fabien went to his erstwhile bedroom. An uncomfortable yet voluptuous moistness wrapped him up. He was sweating, but it wasn't that sporadic Mediterranean heat, nor that scorching dryness he'd experienced in the desert during a recent vacation. He unpacked, took a cold shower and joined the couple in the wire meshed verandah. Dear aunt Adele, always full of attentions and patient as a mother hen with her chicks. Her poor hearing often gave rise to the most hilarious marital squabbles. Without wanting to, she would play on words and shower her husband with unrequested answers like: "Take it in your stride, you won't change anything to the situation, for 'they' are the masters now!" The only pleasures left to Gerard were the table rituals, attested by his portliness. All these tropical dishes before Fabien - pheasant mwambe, corn on the cob, papaya and those fleshy mangoes - were a sheer delight.

Coffee was served in the contiguous lounge; large stucco slabs were missing from the distempered walls, now and then erratic ants lifted their antennas out of the crevices which formed a sort of maze in the waxed floor. This room, typically colonial in style, consisted of plaited armchairs, an old-fashioned couch, a heavy sideboard and a small glass-table resting on a pair of elephant tusks.
While chewing his after-lunch praline, Gerard scanned the local paper and groaned:"Three pages of party propaganda and advertisements with just a few columns dedicated to world news - they're at least a week old - and all the typos! What good can you expect from a country where French and foreign magazines have become luxury items? A country the Belgian authorities so cowardly abandoned!"
Gerard worked himself up with such vehemence that he swallowed the chocolate whole and had a fit of coughing. Leaping with the agility of an antelope his wife brought him a glass of filtered water: "This is what happens to people who refuse to accept reality. When will you learn to close an eye? You'd better have a rest instead of brooding over bygone days!" Moments later the sexagenarian sank into a snoring siesta.

Towards three o'clock the two men walked into Gerard's shop. After about a quarter of an hour, Fabien felt claustrophobic and the strong smell of wax prints made him sneeze repeatedly.
The young man strolled along the streets downtown. Not a leaf stirred and the trees themselves appeared as if they had been treated with a deadly coating. At the end of the square, Fabien recognized the central post-office, now riddled with bullets; farther on, where the town's best restaurant once stood, remained the skeleton of a building. Wherever he cast his eyes, there was the shadow of dusty vegetation, shrivelled from lack of care.
Fabien couldn't get accustomed to the surrounding elements and this gave him a sense of oppression. He suddenly felt ashamed, weak as an uprooted plant. Spinning from dizziness, he almost tripped over a stone. His head seemed to be padded with cotton-wool. Probably the beginning of a sunstroke. First evening in Africa. Africa revisited. Evening of fever.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 28.12.2009

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