Breakup by Anjan Sundaram

Author:Anjan Sundaram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

BETRAYALS

ON BANGUI’S OUTSKIRTS, SOLDIERS SEARCHED OUR truck and made us step out. They were on high alert for two French mercenaries trafficking weapons to the rebels, according to Thierry. They waved us through. Our guesthouse in Bangui wasn’t far. Soon, I could rest.

PK100, the rebel headquarters, lay on National Highway 4, which led north from Bangui all the way to the deserts of Chad. The rebel territory started, however, at PK76, seventy-six kilometers north of Bangui, near the city of Damara. The rebel leadership had entrenched itself in this wine-producing region, famous for its peke, a specialty made by fermenting the sap of raffia palm trees.

We called Bangui’s officials as we drove through the capital. The spokesperson of the French peacekeeping contingent told us its soldiers had no immediate plans to enter PK100. We wanted their protection. “The rebels are too strong there,” the spokesperson said. “They don’t let anyone in.”

I called Nat.

“We’re doing interviews in Bangui,” I said.

She asked with whom.

“The government. To finish up our reports.”

“We’re waiting.”

I motivated myself by thinking that I would soon return home, to Canada, my journey’s destination.

So I didn’t tell Nat about our final movements across the country. My dependence on her, and my home, became private. I conjured up Nat’s face for comfort, but knew I shouldn’t call her for reassurance.

We rolled up our windows to keep out the city’s smoke. In the middle of a main road, men burned rubber tires and waved guns at the soldiers’ barricades. They goaded the soldiers to attack them. Stories of the small rebel victories in the countryside had been broadcast on the radio. The people had been stirred.

And the soldiers seemed on edge. At a checkpoint, a soldier took our ordre de mission and opened his shirt to show me his chest.

“The rebels can never kill me,” he said.

His chest was pockmarked by scars: closed-up skin. Inside each mark, he said, lay one of the small hunting pellets that the rebels used as bullets. The rebels had shot him dozens of times, but he had survived.

At our church guesthouse, Lewis and I heard gunshots. I stepped out of my room. The shots suddenly stopped.

“Did you hear that?” I said, waiting at Lewis’s window.

He said, “It was close by.”

At the top of the hour, on the radio, we learned that those shots had been fired by soldiers, who had assassinated an opposition leader, a lawyer named Modeste Martineau Bria. In Bangui, he had become a figurehead for the anti-government protests.

The soldiers had shot Modeste dead in front of a crowd, in the middle of the day, at a marketplace near our guesthouse, as the lawyer had stepped out of his vehicle. The government had made the killing a spectacle. And almost immediately, over the following hour, people swarmed the streets.

The two newborn kittens played in our guesthouse’s yard. Suleiman had taken his truck for servicing at a garage, while Lewis had holed himself up in his room to update his dispatch for Human Rights Watch.

I missed Nat, and called home.

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