The Great Agony & Pure Laughter of the Gods (2 page)

The sun rose with disregarding eyes, ignoring the bleeding canvas below. It didn’t wink or cough at the sorrow of the people, it shone as if nothing had happened, and Risto didn’t like it. Something had happened in his life that had changed the rhythm of his street’s heartbeat forever. The sun had risen from the side of the front door of Mama Ombeni’s house, where many people sat on chairs and mats, women weeping and singing while the men talked to one another.

Curiosity brought Risto to the scene. He felt it was his right to say his last words to his late friends Frank and Ombeni. He wanted to glance at their bodies to confirm what his eyes had seen the day before. He was quickly turned away with the excuse of his age. Too young to attend a mourning ceremony. Young children had to stay away while corpses were still in the house; that was what an old woman, one of Mama Ombeni’s neighbours, told him. She wouldn’t even allow him to go beyond her house, as it stood at the entrance to the place of the mourning ceremony. He wanted to insist, but the grey-haired lady with no teeth and a face tattooed with age hardened the banning order, her eyes fierce.

Mama Ombeni was Risto’s neighbour; the house he lived in was about a 100 metres uphill from hers. Bukavu is a hill-town, and Risto was able to see some of the things happening that morning at her house. He sat astride a tree trunk at the edge of his mother’s garden, watching, his feet floating as the tree was very tall. Sadness wasn’t enough to describe his pain; it was beyond what a man could take. These two friends had been brothers to him. There was a taint of fresh blood in the air. He smelled it, and it made tomorrow unclear, cloudy. The faces of Ombeni and Frank kept coming back to Risto’s eyes; the goalkeeper and the defender, the two brothers, his friends. Memories struck: his last trip with his late friends, a holiday to his grandmother’s village, a trip that he would always remember.

Risto’s maternal grandparents lived in a village called Bugobe. It was so peaceful that many called it the Kivu’s little Eden. There were fruit trees all over, and rivers that whispered at the foot of mountains covered with the greenery of ever-blooming trees. Ombeni, at twelve, was the youngest of the trio of brotherhood, while Risto and Frank were thirteen. Mama Ombeni considered Risto’s mother as her older sister, so she was quite content when her sons told her that they wanted to accompany Risto on holiday.

His grandparents stayed in a big compound surrounded by fragrant indigenous trees. Inside the compound were three houses and two huts. One house was where Risto’s grandparents slept, one was for their two children and relatives, and one had been built by their sons, Risto’s uncles, as their lodge when visiting the village. Risto’s grandparents had a special hut, a smaller one with a room where the fire never died; it was where the evening fire was usually set up. As special guests and spoiled grandchildren, they were offered the fire hut. The fire that never died was hidden beneath the ashes of a triangular stone fireplace.

In Bukavu, there were some fruit trees around the compounds, but here in Bugobe the boys couldn’t even count the number of fruit trees. Banana, avocado, mango, sugar-cane and many more, there were all the things children dreamed of having in their yards. They were on the trees like birds, eating as much fruit as their stomachs could bear. Each one, after cutting down his own sugar-cane with a machete, brought them to the compound and washed them. Then the grown-up girls, their older sisters as they had been told to call them, would divide the cane into four pieces for each of them. Then it was time to chew the sugar-cane and suck the juice. No one would talk, silence would reign, disturbed only by the noise of chewing.

Their holiday was about mid-June, right after the final exams. Almost every tree had ripe fruit between its green-yellowish leaves, and all the trees were theirs.

‘Climb on all of them,’ said their grandfather, ‘except for the papaya trees. They are too thin and weak.’

He warned them about the avocado trees; their branches were bigger, but easier to break. ‘Just be careful,’ was his refrain, spoken in a deep voice, his bald head reflecting sunrays like a mirror.

It surprised the three town boys to discover that everything that their grandfather told them seemed to be known by other children from the village. Many times when they saw something unusual or when they had questions without answers, the ones from the village had answers and explanations. They would be walking in a deserted place, to be surprised by Benny’s insightful analysis of sounds and smells.

‘Can you hear?’

His friends would pay attention in vain.

‘People are talking. Listen.’

They never knew if it was murmuring human voices they heard, or the wind.

There was no need for the village children to wear a watch to know the time. They spoke to the sun and it told them the time.

‘You have to stand in the sun, then look at your shadow; if you stand at the head of your shadow, then it means that the sun has reached the zenith,’ said Benny when Frank was asking passersby for the time.

Benny went on to warn that midday was never a good time to go to the river or to be in the bush. It was the time that ghosts and evil spirits went to the river to swim and drink. Others went to the bush and the forest to hold their meetings. Being in these places could be dangerous for the living. They might carry bad luck or even death back to their families.

Soon the trio from town realised that the village children knew more than they did, and they learned to trust them. The village carried its secrets in the depths of its lulling nights and warm days, things that made it a mystery to the outsiders. For the three who slept under thatch on hanging beds above a fire that never died, these mysteries unfolded with the wise voice of the forest they navigated.

Benny became their best friend in the village. He was kind and intelligent, and he had the compass for the villages and forest. He knew many secrets, not just of the bush, but of the village too. He was a little bit slimmer and shorter than Risto, precisely three months younger than him. When they stood up to measure their height, the top of Benny’s head reached the lower edge of Risto’s ear if Benny stood on his toes. When they argued, though, Benny always said he reached the top of Risto’s ears. Their grandfather told Risto that Benny was his cousin; he wasn’t sure, there were many cousins in the village.

Benny soon left his family house and joined Risto and his friends in the hut. Whenever they sat around the fire at night, he told them stories and sang too. Each story had its own songs, and each song had its meaning. There were songs to sing only at night, and songs that couldn’t be sung around noon or midnight. There was a song to be sung if one lost something that one wanted to recover, a song to sing when one knew that one’s parents were angry and planning to punish one.

Benny’s eyes lit up as he started a tale. ‘Listen … you were sent for, and didn’t come on time … you know a punishment is waiting for you. If you have been absent from home the whole day, take the kashisha flower, pull out a few eyelashes, and mix them together. When you arrive in front of the house, at the door, before you speak to any of your parents, you throw the mixture at the door. There won’t be any punishment anymore! Your parents will just warn you, and sometimes they might even forget.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Risto.

‘Go and try it, you will tell me.’

The three boys were astonished by Benny’s stories. He knew the answers to enigmas for which the boys had no answers. ‘But who taught him all these things?’ was the question that they couldn’t help asking, when he correctly predicted rain on a certain afternoon in the dry season, or when he sang a song to call crickets in the bush, and the crickets came.

One morning Benny promised his three friends a special trip to a beautiful spot by the river for a swim, and many surprising things, including mushroom harvesting. The eyes of his three friends narrowed. Benny never planted mushrooms, and refused to believe that mushrooms could be planted by people.

‘Tomorrow there will be some,’ he said confidently.

The three boys looked at each other with doubt.

‘How do you know that there will be mushrooms tomorrow?’ Frank asked.

‘I just know. You seem not to believe me.’

‘We will believe you tomorrow if we find mushrooms,’ Risto replied.

‘Okay then, be ready tomorrow at 5am sharp. We will go to pick mushrooms.’

The three town boys slept with their eyes wide open, afraid that the day might wake earlier than them. The first rooster sang. Then the second one and the third, which, as Benny had taught them, announced 4am sharp. At 4:30, the lamp had chased away the darkness in the small hut. Risto grabbed his toothbrush and his small cup, filled the cup with water, and went outside to wash his face and to clean his teeth. He was surprised to see Benny coming from the barn where the cattle stayed at night.

‘Where are you coming from?’ he asked.

‘From the cattle, I went to open up their compound. We might return late, better let them go in the bush alone; I will find them when I come back.’

Benny, like the other villagers, respected cattle very deeply. Cattle gave them milk and meat, and so they gave their cattle food and water.

‘Where are Frank and Ombeni?’ he added.

‘Still sleeping,’ said Risto.

‘No, we are awake!’ cried Frank as he came out of the hut.

‘Are you ready? It is time to go,’ Benny said.

The compound door flung open and swung slowly shut again as the four boys found their way into the cassava fields. The fields were wet with cold dew, a sign of the invisible dry-season rain that gracious heaven gave to the water-craving plants, a rain that softened soil and allowed vegetables to keep their green even in the baking sun. After five minutes, the boys were as wet as if they had been walking in the rain.

The cassava trees were taller than the boys, and as they walked slowly through them, they left the trees waving as if calling the land-owner to say that there were intruders in his field.

Benny warned his friends to walk cautiously, not to smash any trees, otherwise they would get in trouble. The owner of the field was a witchdoctor, a man who called thunderclaps and spoke with the wind. He might have been there in the fields; but he wouldn’t cause any trouble if his fields were treated with care.

Benny stopped at a point where different fields met and split into smaller fields. Wild fig trees and shrubs grew nearby. The other three boys stopped too, eager to see which way Benny would take. The many footprints on the ground revealed that the place received many visitors.

‘This is the place! Check near the shrubs. Everywhere you will find mushrooms, I promise you,’ Benny assured them.

Everyone went to search.

‘Here is one, two, and another one!’ It was Benny, in a low soft voice, like someone who didn’t want to be heard by many people. All the boys rushed towards him. Benny had three white mushrooms in his hands.

‘How did you get them?’ Ombeni asked, surprised and rather envious.

Benny laughed. ‘Haven’t you got any?’

‘We have searched, but we can’t find any.’

‘You know what, this whole place is full of mushrooms; open your eyes and you will find them.’

‘I won’t go alone, I will follow you. You know where to find them,’ Ombeni said, like someone who has lost something valuable.

Meanwhile, Frank was a little way off and keeping very quiet.

‘Have you seen something, Frank?’ called Risto.

‘Two big ones,’ he answered.

The boys ran to Frank’s side. He had two big mushrooms, opened like umbrellas.

‘No, no, don’t pick that one!’ Benny shouted as Frank reached out to pick another very small mushroom.

‘You know, when you pick mushrooms, you can’t take a small one like this,’ Benny explained. ‘It is the small one that calls the bigger ones. If you take it, you will never get mushrooms anymore. Leave it!’

Frank was reluctant to leave the mushroom, but did as Benny advised. He still had two big ones in his hands.

‘Now Frank, you have to cut off a small piece of one of your mushrooms and drop it on this ground.’

Frank’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’

‘Just do it, and then say, “Thank you, tomorrow I will come again,” ’ Benny insisted.

‘To whom am I going to say that?’ argued Frank.

‘It is up to you; otherwise you will never get mushrooms here anymore. This land doesn’t know you; this is the first time you have come to this place to get mushrooms. The land loves you, but you have to show that love as well, and thank the spirits of this land.’

Frank did as he was told.

The days went by as the moon appeared and disappeared, a fire-ball hanging in a blanket in a dark sky. The song of crickets was the regular evening lullaby in the quiet nights in Bugobe village. Risto and his friends became accustomed to the peaceful night pierced only by the whispering fire and the roaring of distant rivers. At dawn, they woke to the sound of the villagers’ footsteps tramping the rhythm of daily life. Risto’s holiday was a discovery of life without fear and boundaries. They went where they pleased and did what they wanted.

Months passed, and the school holiday was nearing its end. The sun’s early gleam one morning announced already the rage it would have once it reached its zenith. As usual at that time during the dry season, the soil was hot, like a pot on a stove. It burned whoever wasn’t wearing shoes. The town boys were used to playing soccer with their shoes on, but in the village, this wasn’t the case. The village boys were shoeless and so the visitors were obliged to take off their shoes in order to be part of the game. Playing barefoot wasn’t an easy thing for them. They could not stand the burning soil. They couldn’t understand how the village boys played with such ease on such hot soil; maybe their skin was burn-proof, the town boys thought.

The boys’ plan for that day was to bring the cattle to the river. There, they would swim and catch crabs. There were beehives to be harvested that night at Risto’s grandfather’s plantation. The meeting was set, the business of the beehives was not to be missed.