I put the report in a plastic bag and hid it in an abandoned house not far from where we live. No one goes there, except rats and dogs. Because of them I decided to dig a hole and bury the report. Then I went back home, like a nice good boy who’s come top of the class. Every day I was terrified they’d ask me: Michel, where’s your report?
The first week, Papa Roger was worried because he hadn’t seen my report, though my brothers and sisters at Maman Martine’s had all shown him theirs. I told my father that the teacher hadn’t finished filling them in yet. The second week, I said the same thing. The third week, I lied and said everyone else had had their reports but they’d forgotten mine.
Papa Roger was not pleased.
‘I shall go and tell your teacher that’s no way to treat my son!’
And off he went to the school. He didn’t go to work that morning, he considered it was too serious a matter.
We were in class when I saw my father peering through the window. The teacher went out to see him, they stood outside talking for a few minutes. Then the teacher came back into the classroom and pointed his finger at me.
‘Michel, stand up!’
I stood up, while my classmates behind me all murmured, ‘It’s a serious matter! A serious matter! A serious matter!’
As I was looking at the floor, the teacher lifted my head up.
‘Now then, Michel, just repeat what you said to your father! Is it not the case that I gave you your report over three weeks ago?’
I lowered my head again.
‘Repeat what you said to your father!’
My classmates, who’d heard the teacher’s voice, jostled each other at the window to see what was happening.
This time it was Papa Roger who lifted my head up.
‘Right let’s go. I want to see this report today! Go and get your school bag!’
I went back into class and collected my things while my classmates went on muttering, ‘It’s a serious matter! A serious matter! A serious matter!’
We walked down the street, me in front, my father behind. After half an hour or so we arrived at the deserted house. As soon as we pushed open the door the dogs started barking in their own complicated language and disappeared through the holes in the wooden slatted walls. Papa Roger put his hands on his hips and glanced around him. Then he turned to me.
‘Is this the place? Where’s your report then?’
I knelt down in a corner of the house and started digging, while my father watched. I went on and on digging. When I felt the plastic bag it was a bit wet, as though bags sweat too, like people. Papa Roger snatched it from my hands and undid the knot. There was the report, inside the bag. When my father started reading it I thought: I’d better run for it, soon he’ll get to the bit where the teacher writes remarks about the pupil’s behaviour.
I took two steps back, turned around and scarpered, like the rats and dogs living in the deserted house. Every now and then I looked back, but Papa Roger wasn’t behind me. As I ran I was thinking: Pretend I’m Carl Lewis, the black American that Roger Guy Folly’s been talking about. Carl Lewis is still only a student at lycée, but already he can run and jump like an adult, and within two or three years he’ll be the fastest runner in the world.
I got back to our house, panting. I went straight into my bedroom and hid under the bed, wondering, ‘Will Papa Roger thrash me? If he thrashes me it will be the first time ever since he decided I’m his son too, like the children he had with Maman Martine.’
‘Michel, come out of there! I know you’re hiding under the bed!’
I came out with my face covered in dust and spiders’ webs. I was already starting to cry. I could hear noise outside: it was Maman Pauline coming home from the Grand Marché. Since I was now standing there like a chicken waiting to have its neck wrung on New Year’s Day, my father signalled to me: ‘Sit down there, I need to talk to you. I am not pleased about what you’ve done.’
I sat down where I sit when we have beef and beans and I peer at the big shiny piece of meat on my father’s plate.
‘What is it this time?’ asked Maman Pauline, who had come to stand behind me.
‘I’ve found Michel’s school report at last.’
‘Where?’
‘He’d buried it in a deserted house, the one just on the edge of the quartier.’
My mother sat down while my father opened the report. Impatient, as usual, she said, ‘Well then?’
‘Michel has worked well. He’s made the grade, and the teacher has written, “Very assiduous pupil”.’
Now I was really confused. The reason I’d hidden the report was because I thought ‘Very assiduous pupil’ meant a pupil who behaves badly, who talks all the time in class and is stupid, like Bouzoba.
So now Papa Roger was congratulating me, and Maman Pauline was starting to prepare my beef and beans. But my thoughts were elsewhere. I had just realised that ‘very assiduous pupil’ meant a very good pupil, who behaves well, who turns up to lessons and listens to what the teacher says.
~ ~ ~
Whenever Maman Pauline goes into the bush for her business, like now, I go and stay in my father’s other house along with my seven brothers and sisters: Yaya Gaston is twenty-four, Georgette’s eighteen, Marius is thirteen, Ginette is eleven, Mbombie is nine, Maximilien’s six and Félicienne, the last of all, is two.
This is my home too, my sisters and brothers never say that Papa Roger’s my foster father, they consider me their real brother.
Yaya Gaston is the oldest child in the family. Even at twenty-four he already looks like a proper grown-up. He has a little moustache, which he clips, like on the film posters at the Rex cinema. He looks like Papa Roger, except Yaya Gaston is taller. They nickname him ‘the Frenchman’ because he always answers in French, even if you say something to him in munukutuba, lingala or bembé. Also, he only ever wears French clothes. He buys them at the port in Pointe-Noire, where he works in Customs. Sometimes he doesn’t buy his clothes, people give them to him, if they want to collect a big parcel from the customs office without paying anything. He has a big gold bracelet, which he wipes with a cloth dipped in something called Mirror. It stings your eyes like Flytox and smells stronger than wild cat’s piss. Every morning he polishes his bracelet standing outside the door of his little studio, which is on the side of the road, but attached to the main house where the rest of the family lives.
Georgette is very pretty, everyone’s always telling her, and since she knows already she spends all her time looking at herself in the mirror, asking her girlfriends what the boys think of her. She puts red lacquer on her nails at the weekend, but she has to take it off during the week because you’re not allowed it at school. Last year when she was seventeen, Papa Roger nearly sent her off to live for good with a young man who often stops outside the house to pick her up and take her for a walk in the dark. This guy’s called Dassin and he acts like the Lady Whistler who had the fight with Yeza the joiner.
Yaya Gaston got hold of him once and said, ‘Dassin, if you don’t stop hanging round outside our house, if I hear you whistling one more time to get my sister to come out, I’ll smash your face in.’
Dassin was trembling, there was sweat dripping down his face, because our big brother’s as strong as Tarzan. The whole neighbourhood is scared of him. But Dassin wasn’t born yesterday, or the day before. He’s found another way to confuse us: he sends the kids from round about, he pays them twenty-five CFA francs if they can get our sister Georgette out of the house.
Papa Roger isn’t a bad man, but this was serious, Dassin had got our sister pregnant. The only reason we never saw the baby was because it went straight to heaven, without ever coming to earth.