11
For an instant we are saved by chance or, more exactly, by the fact that our rooms don’t open on to the corridor but on to the terrace at the end of the building, and the gendarmes hadn’t taken the trouble to poke into every corner. They threw neighbours, now also beaten up, on to a truck and drove off. Immediately it grew as quiet as a graveyard. Jarda, who had come into our room, was carrying his radio. The Stanleyville station was giving government communiqués appealing to all the whites still in the city to stay off the streets and not to appear in public because of the behaviour of isolated elements and certain military groups which the government ‘is not able to control fully.’ Since there was no sense in sitting around in the room, we went down to the lobby, thinking that somebody might tell us what was going on. We were not tourists, but correspondents who had to work, and the more dramatic the circumstance, the more we had to work. There was no one in the lobby. We sat in armchairs, around low tables, facing the door. It was hot and we were developing a thirst for beer even though beer was not to be dreamed of. In the last few days we had become thoroughly famished. Our daily nourishment consisted of one can of Dutch sausages for the three of us. There were five little sausages to a can. We ate one sausage each and then drew lots: the one with the short straw didn’t get a second sausage. Aside from those two sausages (or that one) we didn’t eat anything, and on top of that, our supplies of sausages were running out. So we sat in the armchairs, thirsty and dripping sweat. Suddenly a jeep drove up in front of the hotel and a gang of young people jumped out with automatic rifles in their hands. It was clearly a hit squad, a vengeance patrol. Yes, you had only to look at their faces: they were out for blood. They came storming into the lobby and surrounded us, pointing their weapons at our heads. At that moment I honestly thought: this is the end. I didn’t move. I sat immobile not because of any courage, but for purely technical reasons: it felt as if my body had turned to lead, that it was too heavy for me to budge it. Just then, when our fate seemed already to be determined, the following occurred: the leader of the squad trotted into the lobby. He was young, a boy, mulatto, with a mad look in his eyes. He rushed in, saw us and stopped. He stopped because he spotted Jarda. Their eyes met and they looked at each other in silence, without a word, without a gesture. They looked at each other in this way for a long while and the mulatto seemed to calm down, as though thinking something over. Then, without a word, he motioned to his people with his automatic rifle and they — also without a word — turned away from us, got back into the jeep and drove away.
‘That’s Bernard Salmon,’ said Jarda. ‘He was once in Cairo as Lumumba’s envoy. I interviewed him.’
12
We went back upstairs to our rooms to write our dispatches about Lumumba’s death and about what the city looked like afterwards — the city where he once lived and worked. Each of us wrote something brief because, as a matter of fact, we had little information and what we had lived through that morning was not fit to appear as part of the next day’s official press coverage. There then arose the problem of taking our dispatches to the post office at the other end of town: we — that is, white people — would have to drive across a city terrorized by the gendarmes and the vengeance squads. I haven’t mentioned that immediately upon arriving in Stanleyville we had pooled our resources to buy a very used car, a Taunus, from an Indian. In this car (Jarda was driving) we set off for the post office. A very hot and humid afternoon. The city was so deserted that we did not see a single car or person. It was the model empty city, dead concrete, glass, asphalt. Dead palm trees. We reached the post office building, alone in an open space. It was locked. We started banging on the doors, one after another. No one answered. Duszan found a small metal shutter that opened on to the cellar below, and we slipped into the dark, musty passageway. At the end there were stairs that led up into the cavernously empty main hall, covered with litter. We didn’t know what to do next, so we simply stood there. At the other end of the hall was a door, and behind it were more stairs, leading to the second floor, and we went up to see if anyone was there. We started up to the third floor, the top one. If the police caught us in this place, deserted now but still strategically important, they would, we feared, treat us as dangerous saboteurs. Finally, going from room to room, we stumbled upon a hall with more than a dozen telex machines and a battery of transmitters. A hunched-over, dried-up African approached us from the corner.
‘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.
13
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.
14
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.