Small Country by Gaël Faye

Author:Gaël Faye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

16

I was sleeping lightly when I felt something touching my head. At first, I thought that rats were chewing my curly hair, the way they used to before Papa laid traps all over the house. Then I heard a whisper: “Gaby, are you asleep?” Ana’s voice woke me. I opened my eyes to find our bedroom plunged in darkness. I tugged the curtain with my left hand and a beam of moonlight shone through the mosquito net at the window, lighting up my little sister’s petrified face.

“What can we hear, Gaby?”

I didn’t understand. It was a peaceful night. There was just an owl hooting in the false ceiling above our bedroom. I sat up and waited, until I heard several dull cracking noises ring out in increasingly rapid succession.

“It sounds like gunfire…”

Ana slid into my bed and huddled against me. An agonizing silence followed the noise of explosions and machine-gun fire. Ana and I were alone in the house. Papa often spent the night away from home, and had done so for a while now: Innocent claimed that our father was seeing a young woman who lived in the street behind his house, in the modest district of Bwiza. It made me sad because, since they’d started talking again, I still had hopes of Maman and Papa getting back together.

I pressed the button that lit up my watch: the dial said two o’clock in the morning. With each explosion, Ana clung to me even more tightly.

“What’s happening, Gaby?”

“I don’t know…”

The shots petered out toward six in the morning. Papa still wasn’t back. We got ourselves up and dressed before making sure our schoolbags were ready. Prothé wasn’t at home, either. We laid the breakfast table out on the terrace. I made the tea. The parrot was doing somersaults in his cage. I went to see if there was anyone about on our land. Not a soul. Even the zamu had disappeared. We ate and cleared the table. I helped Ana do her hair. Still nobody. I kept an eye on the gates, since Papa’s workers were due. Nothing stirred. We sat on the front steps waiting for Innocent and Papa to turn up. Ana took out her maths book from her schoolbag and started reciting her times tables. Not a single pedestrian or car on the road in front of the house. What was going on? Where was everybody? We could hear snatches of classical music nearby. It was Thursday, but the neighborhood was more dead than on a Sunday morning.

Finally, a car pulled up. I recognized the Pajero’s horn and rushed over to open the gates. Papa wore a serious expression and there were bags under his eyes. He got out of the car and asked if we were all right. I nodded, but Ana was sulking, she wanted to give him a hard time for abandoning us all night. Papa headed straight to the living room and switched on the radio. We heard the same piece of music that had been wafting in and out of earshot before.

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