The Soccer War (8 page)

‘Brother,’ I said, ‘connect us with Europe. Connect us with the world. We have to send important dispatches.’ He took our texts and sat down at the machine. We returned to the car; the street was empty. We were on our way back to the hotel and it seemed that everything would go well when suddenly a jeep full of
gendarmes
pulled out from around a corner and we found ourselves facing each other,
eye to eye. I don’t know what happened, or rather, I think that what happened was this: the presence of whites in the street was so improbable that the
gendarmes
took our car for a phantom, an illusion—they were dumbfounded and they did not react. The confrontation lasted only a moment, because Jarda had the presence of mind to whip the steering wheel around and cut into the nearest sidestreet. We made a run for it. We hadn’t reached the hotel yet when Jarda slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a stop in the middle of the street. We jumped out, leaving the doors open behind us, and sprinted for the hotel. When we locked the door of the room behind us, we were all panting and we wiped the sweat from our foreheads.

There were also calm, peaceful days, when we believed that we could appear in the streets without being beaten up and set out into town without fear. We might go to the airport, looking for our airplanes that were supposed to bring help. At that time the Gizenga government, or rather the handful of people who had managed to get from Leopoldville to Stanleyville with Gizenga, was officially recognized by our countries as the legal government of the Congo. We, in turn, were the only people who had managed to come to Stanleyville from Europe and the local authorities—having no one else at hand—treated us more like ambassadors and ministers than simple correspondents, drudges of the pen. The government, however, did not have full control of the situation and our positions were not esteemed enough to protect us against the fists of the angry populace. There was a small consolation in the fact that the authentic ministers of the Congolese government were beaten up by
their own
gendarmes
, which we saw with our own eyes. And so, when a peaceful day came along, we repaired to the airport. We had found a spot on the porch of an abandoned house with a good view of the runway and we always went there. ‘Today they’ll come for sure,’ Jarda would say each time. We would sit staring for hours into the sunny sky in which an airplane was supposed to appear. But nothing moved in the sky; and there was silence in the air. I doubted more and more that an airplane would ever come, but I never said so aloud, suspecting that Jarda might have had some special information after all.

One day a patrol of
gendarmes
appeared at the hotel. They took us to headquarters, the army command post, located on the grounds of the barracks.
Gendarmes
with their women and children wandered between the barrack buildings; they were cooking, washing, eating, lying around—it looked like a big Gypsy camp. Sabo, a massive, reddish ogre, greeted us in the command post. He ordered us to sit down and then asked, ‘When is the aid going to come?’ I waited to see what Jarda would say because I thought he might know. Jarda told a story, that the airplanes were waiting in Cairo but had been refused the right to fly over the Sudan by its dictator and there was no other air route.

‘We have nothing left here,’ said the major. ‘We have no ammunition, no food. The commander of the army’—that was General Lundula—‘is himself distributing the last drops of gasoline. If nothing changes, Kobutu and his mercenaries will have us by the throat.’ And here the major quite literally grabbed himself by the throat, so that the veins on his temples stood out. The atmosphere was tense
and unpleasant; we felt helpless, weak. ‘The army is rebelling,’ the major went on. ‘They are hungry and riled up; they refuse to obey orders, they are asking whose fault it is that no aid has come. If the aid does not arrive, the general staff will be forced to hand you over to the
gendarmes
as the culprits. That will calm things down for a while. I’m sorry, but I have no other way out. We’ve lost control of them’—and with his hand he motioned towards the window, through which we could see half-naked
gendarmes
wandering about.

We returned to the hotel: the first Christians, about to be thrown to the lions. To me it was obvious that help would never come, and Jarda and Duszan were now starting to share my fatalism. We had only a few days left to live. We tried feverishly to figure out what to do. We had to escape. But how? Escape was impossible. There were no airplanes and our car would be stopped on the way out of town. We wondered whether we should hide out in one of the houses abandoned by the Belgians. But that would give us only a few days, and somebody was bound to spot us and denounce us or else we would die of hunger. There was no way out: we were trapped, and the more we struggled, the more the noose would tighten. One hope remained: that I could talk to H.B., who could help us. H.B. worked in the United Nations headquarters in Stanleyville. People from the United Nations form a club unto themselves. Many of them are pretentious: they look on everything and everyone from a global perspective, which means, simply, that they look down. They repeat the word ‘global’ in every sentence, which makes it difficult to settle everyday human problems with them. Nevertheless, we decided that we should go to
see H.B., who was an acquaintance of mine. He invited me to supper, since the UN always has enough to eat. I could not remember the last time I had eaten supper; indeed, for a long time, I had not eaten anything at all. During that feast, UN soldiers in blue helmets watched over us. Their presence enabled me to experience a blessed moment of security that evening, two hours in which I knew that no one was going to beat me, lock me up, or put a pistol to my head.

‘Commissioner,’ I told H.B. as he lay back in a colonial armchair after supper, ‘my friends and I must get out of here urgently. We’d be very grateful if you were able to arrange things for us.’ But in reply H.B. lectured me on the neutrality of the UN, which cannot help anyone because so doing would immediately lay it open to charges of partiality. ‘The United Nations can only observe,’ he said. I got the idea that my request had sounded rather unimpressive, and that I would have to bring up heavier artillery. At the same time, I could not let H.B. in on our reasons for having to clear out (and fast), because if he found out about our conflict with the Lumumbists he would immediately broadcast it to the whole world (that is, broadcast it globally).

‘Commissioner,’ I began in a new style, ‘I wish you a long life and we know that, unfortunately, life is full of changes and one day you might be on top and the next day you might be on the bottom. There might come a day when you need my help’—I didn’t believe it for a second—‘so let’s build a bridge. I will be the first to use it by crossing this raging torrent, but in the future, perhaps, this same bridge will allow you to cross a raging torrent of your own.’ And H.B. helped.

Two days later a car flying the banner of the United Nations carried us to the airport. We had left our Taunus in the street, with the keys in the ignition. On the runway stood a four-engined aircraft without any insignia or markings. We had no idea where it might take us, but the important thing was to get out of Stanleyville. The people at the airport were saying that we would be flying to Juba (which meant to the north-east), but after take-off the aircraft headed south-east and an hour later we found that we were looking not at the monotonous brown-grey of the savannah but at the intense green of the Kivu mountains, awesome and soothing at once. This was Africa the arch-beautiful, the fairy-tale Africa of forests and lakes, of a cloudless and peaceful sky. The change in direction was puzzling, but there was no one to ask about it: the crew was locked in the cockpit, and we were alone in the empty fuselage of the aircraft. Finally the transport began its descent, and a lake as big as a sea appeared, and, then, beside the lake, an airport. We rolled towards a building with a sign that said ‘Usumbura’ (now Bujumbura, the present-day capital of the republic of Burundi, then a Belgian territory).

Le Monde
, among other papers, later wrote about what was done to us in Usumbura. Belgian paratroopers were waiting on the airport tarmac. If they are soldiers from Belgium, I thought, they will treat us with humanity. But the units stationed in Usumbura were made up of Congo colonials—rapacious, brutal and primitive. They treated us not as journalists but as agents of Lumumba; they were
elated that we had fallen into their hands. ‘Passports and visas!’ a non-commissioned officer said sharply. Of course, we had no visas. ‘Aha, so you have no visas!’ he rejoiced. ‘Now you’ll see …’ They dumped all our baggage on to the ground and emptied out the entire pathetic contents of our suitcases. What does a reporter carry around the world? Some dirty shirts and a few newspaper clippings, a toothbrush and a typewriter. Then the body search began, with their fingering every fold and seam, our cuffs, our collars, our belts and our shoe soles—all the while pushing, pulling, prodding and provoking. They confiscated everything—including our documents and money—and returned only our shirts, trousers and shoes. The terminal had a central section and two wings, and we were led to a room at the end of one wing and locked up. It was on the ground floor. A paratrooper was put on watch under the window. In normal times our cell must have served as a storage room for chairs—in it there were metal chairs which are, I’ve concluded, the most dangerous piece of furniture to sleep on, since, with any movement during sleep, the chairs slide away from each other and you fall to the floor (concrete), incurring varied and painful injuries to the body. The advantage of the chairs over the floor, however, consisted in the fact that the chairs were warm and not constantly damp. Being locked up is a wholly unpleasant experience—particularly at first, during that transition from a free to a captive state, that moment of the echo of the closing door. Many things go through your mind. For example, after a few hours I had begun to consider the question: is it better to be in jail at home or abroad? The immediate answer should be: wherever you are beaten less. But, if you put aside the issue of being beaten, it is, I concluded, better to be locked up at home. There, you can be visited by your relatives, you can write letters, receive packages and hope
for amnesty. Nothing of the kind awaited us in Usumbura. We were cut off from the world. The paratroopers could do whatever they wanted with complete impunity: they could murder us, and nobody would be able to find out where or how we had been killed. We would simply have disappeared from Stanleyville.

We were interrogated. The interrogation was conducted by civilians, perhaps colonials from Stanleyville as they appeared to know the city intimately. They did not believe we were journalists. Of course. Nowhere in the world do the police believe that such a profession actually exists, often with some justice given the people who have become foreign correspondents. But we had little to tell them and finally they stopped tormenting us. The guards’ shifts changed at nine in the morning and nine in the evening, and the paratrooper on night watch brought us our meal. That was when we were fed, in the evening, once a day—one bottle of beer for the three of us and a small hunk of meat each. The paratrooper who arrived in the morning began the day by leading us outside to the toilet, one by one: there was no bucket in our room; for sudden emergencies we needed special permission, which was granted grudgingly. They did not allow us to wash—in tropical conditions, a form of torture: the sweaty skin quickly begins to itch and hurt. Jarda’s asthma then started up again. He had trouble breathing, and was choking from coughing fits. There was no doctor. From our window we had a view of the following: first, the helmet and shoulder of the paratrooper; then the flat ground that led down to the lake; and in the far distance the mountains ringing the horizon. From time to time airplanes landed and took off and we watched them. The days flowed by, one after the other, wearisome, monotonous, uneventful. The paratroopers said nothing. Not a single representative of
any higher authority appeared. Then one evening a new paratrooper took the watch. He spoke to us; he was trying to sell us hippopotamus teeth. We had no money—it had been taken from us during the search—but we promised that, if set free, we would buy teeth, when our money was returned. He would end up helping us a great deal. It was a different paratrooper standing guard when an African approached our window the next afternoon, a tall, portly Tutsi with a serious, intelligent face, who said quickly, before he was chased away, that he had overheard officers in the airport coffee shop saying that we were to be shot the next day. The guard came trotting over and the man disappeared.

What I am writing is not a book, but only the plan (and a plan is even less substantial than an outline or a sketch) of a non-existent book, so there is not enough space to describe what really goes through the mind of a person who has just heard repeated the conversation of officers in the airport coffee shop from a tall, serious Tutsi. The almost instantaneous symptoms, however, are these: a state of depressing emptiness, collapse, dulled inertia, as if he has found that he is suddenly under the influence of a narcotic, or an anaesthetic, a strong dose of some stupefying medicine. The condition worsens: he starts to feel utterly powerless and to realize, fully, that there is nothing he can do to change or influence his circumstances. All the strength suddenly empties out of his muscles, leaving him too little energy even to scream, slam his fist against the wall or beat his head on the floor. No, it is not his body any more; it is foreign matter that he has to drag around until someone frees him of the enervating
burden. It becomes stuffy, and you feel the stuffiness intensely—somehow, the stuffiness becomes the most palpable thing you know. Duszan and I sat there, not looking at each other: I can’t explain why. Jarda lay across the chairs, sweating, tormented by his asthma attacks.