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.
18
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.
19
A sleepless night.
20
The rain began falling during the night. At first light the rain was still falling; it was cloudy and damp and fog lay on the lake. At dawn an airplane emerged from out of the mist and parked on the side runway, not far from us. This was unusuaclass="underline" every other airplane (the few that had landed here) parked on the other side of the airport, far away; but this one — perhaps because of the poor landing conditions? — was sitting right there on our side, where there was less fog (this part was the farthest from the lake). Two white pilots got out and went straight to the main terminal, but a few black stewards remained behind, hanging around the airplane. We called out to them, waving our hands. The honest paratrooper with the hippopotamus teeth had taken the night watch — our man, a man who just wanted to make a little money and survive, in other words an ordinary man (I became convinced that the ones who want to pick up a few pennies are often more human than the formal, incorruptible ones) — and when he saw that we wanted to talk with the stewards he moved around to the other side of the building. A steward came over, and Jarda asked him where they were flying to.
Leopoldville, he replied.
Jarda told him briefly about our situation, that our hours were numbered, and then begged the steward (a white begging a black) to go to the local United Nations headquarters as soon as he arrived in Leopoldville and tell the people there that we were in prison, that they should inform the world about us because then the paratroopers would not dare kill us and that they should send the army to rescue us.
Looking at us, the black man would have seen the frame of the window, and in that frame he would have seen bars, and behind those bars three white faces, horribly dirty, unshaven, exhausted: Jarda’s face, round and full, and Duszan’s and mine, thin. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
21
The hours of torture began. The steward had tossed a crumb of hope into our cell and it jolted us out of our state of paralysis and overpowering depression, a kind of self-deafening that I now see was a defence against insanity. For those awaiting death as we were, passive and apathetic, on the verge of collapse, ready to hit bottom, it takes only one flash of light in the darkness, one lucky break, and suddenly you rise up again and return to the living. What you leave behind, however, is an empty territory that you cannot even describe: it has no points of reference or shape or signposts, and its existence — like the sound barrier — is something you feel only once you have approached it. One step out of that emptiness and it disappears. No one, however, who has entered this emptiness can ever be the same person he was before. Something remains — a psychological scar, hardened, gangrened flesh — a fact, finally more apparent to others than to himself, that something has burned out, that something is missing. You pay for every meeting with death.
We watched the airplane take off and then began pacing feverishly among the chairs, talking and arguing, although, for all of the previous afternoon and evening and night, the cell had been silent. Would the steward really inform the United Nations? And if he did, who would he talk to? To someone who will take him seriously? To someone who will wave his arms around and do nothing? And even if he is taken seriously, will anyone be able to free us? And if everything worked in our favour, it would take at least half a day for the steward to fly to Leopoldville and talk with headquarters, and then for Leopoldville to notify the Usumbura headquarters. Before anything happened, the paratroopers could take us out and finish us off a hundred times or turn us over to Muller’s hirelings. Thus came the nerves, the war of nerves, fever and agitation, but all of it inside, in us, because outside beyond the window it was always the same: the helmet and shoulder of the paratrooper and, further off, the plain, the lake (Tanganyika), the mountains. And today, in addition, the rain.
22
In the afternoon we heard a car motor under the window, and a screech of brakes, and then voices speaking in a language I did not recognize. We clung to the bars. Near the building stood a jeep flying the United Nations flag; four black soldiers in blue helmets climbed out. They were Ethiopians from the Imperial Guard of Haile Selassie, who formed part of the United Nations military contingent in the Congo. They posted their own guard alongside the paratrooper.