In all this period, there was one group in Thiès that lived entirely apart, separated from both the workers and their wives and the closed circle of the company itself. It was the group of the apprentices, and because of them a series of momentous events was building up at the very moment when the deceptively calm city seemed just to be sinking deeper into the apathy caused by the strike.
Magatte, Doudou’s apprentice, had rapidly become the unquestioned leader of the little band. There were twelve of them, of whom the youngest was fourteen and the oldest seventeen. In the beginning, the strike seemed to them to be just a sort of prolonged holiday; the older people appeared to have forgotten them completely, and they savored their freedom as if it were a new and exciting game. Then, as money ran out and the days grew harsh, it occurred to their families that they could be useful, and they were sent out to search for chickens that had wandered off or to pick the ‘monkey bread’ of the baobab trees, the only fruit available at that season of the year. For a time it amused their elders to see them running and jumping from one compound to another, ferreting out anything that was edible and happy with the task; but soon there were no more chickens to be recaptured, and even in the ravine which led to the airfield the baobab trees had been stripped of their fruit. Every morning then their shouting and running through the courtyards was broken up with cries of, ‘Go and amuse yourselves somewhere else!’
On the outskirts of N’Ginth, the largest suburb of Thiès, there was an old baobab tree standing by a path that led into the fields. Its enormous trunk was completely hollow, and its leafless branches made it look like some gigantic old woman waving her arms in the air. No one knew exactly how old it was, but it was certainly the oldest tree in the district. The moment the apprentices discovered it they knew that this would be their future home. They scraped out the inside of the trunk to form a secret hiding place and built an elaborate ladder of huge nails up the side of the tree. They would sit in there for hours, talking or sleeping, but one of them was always on guard, astride a great branch just outside the entrance. Their discussions were invariably concerned with the same subject – the films they had seen in the days before the strike. They told the stories of every one of them over and over again, but never without feverish interruptions. ‘You’re forgetting the part where …’ or, ‘No, that’s not the way he killed the Indian!’ Next to Western films, war films were their favorites. Sometimes, as a change from their enforced inactivity, they played war games themselves. The old baobab became the enemy, and they bombarded it with stones, but after a time this became too simple and they turned their attention to the swarms of little snakes and lizards in the fields around them. Occasionally they had killed as many as a hundred of them in a single day. They would gather the dead animals together in one place, shouting to each other with each new addition to the pile, ‘That one didn’t say his prayers today!’ for they had always been taught that any serpent who neglected his daily prayers would die before the night.
One day, when they were playing idly with a hedgehog in the field beside the baobab tree, Souley came and sat down beside Magatte.
‘We ought to have some slingshots,’ he said.
Magatte chewed thoughtfully on a blade of grass. ‘Where would we get the rubber to make them?’
Sene, the son of Séne Maséne, joined them, carrying the hedgehog, which had curled itself into a spiny little ball. ‘It’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘We should have some slingshots.’
‘I saw some inner tubes for bicycles at Salif’s,’ Gorgui said, scratching his egg-shaped head. He still had a bad case of ringworm, and his forehead and the back of his neck were painted blue again.
‘Automobile inner tubes would be better,’ Magatte said.
‘Maybe we could find some at Aziz’s shop. He has a truck.’
‘That’s true – I saw it last week in the court behind his shop.’
‘But how could we get in it?’ Séne asked, rolling the hedgehog about in the palm of his hand.
‘Put that animal down,’ Magatte said, chopping at his wrist. ‘We have to make a plan.’
The hedgehog fell to the ground and vanished almost instantly, and the apprentices gathered in a circle around Magatte. Their conference went on all through the afternoon.
*
The next morning they set to work on the execution of their plan. The shop of Aziz the Syrian was located on one of the corners of the Place de France, and behind the shop was a large courtyard surrounded by a bamboo fence. Magatte opened a small gap between some of the stalks and peered through. The truck was standing in the center of the yard.
‘I’ll go in, with Souley and Séne,’ he said. ‘Gorgui, you stay in front of the shop and watch out for Aziz. If you see him coming this way, you whistle to warn us. The rest of you keep an eye on the square.’
‘Look out,’ one of the boys said suddenly, ‘there’s a policeman now.’
The group promptly improvised a noisy game to distract attention from Magatte and his two assistants, who were cutting a space in the bamboo wall large enough to pass through. The policeman, however, was watching the passers-by in the square. His red tarboosh was set precisely above his ears and he carried his heavy night stick with military precision. A band of noisy children was of no interest to him. At last he walked off, and the game subsided as quickly as it had begun.
Magatte finally succeeded in cutting through the wires that held the bamboo stalks together and crawled into the courtyard, motioning to his two lieutenants to follow him.
‘There’s no one here,’ he whispered hoarsely.
‘I’m scared,’ Séne said.
They made their way slowly across the courtyard, walking on their toes and holding their arms tautly at their sides, like tightrope walkers. The wheels of the truck, an ancient Chevrolet, had been dismounted, and the chassis rested on some large wooden cases, serving as blocks. They had almost reached it when the sound of an opening door made them hurl themselves to the ground. They scrambled on their stomachs into the shelter of the cases.
Aziz’s wife had come out on the porch at the back of the house. She was wearing no veil, and in the shelter of a flimsy mosquito net she began to take off her clothes. When she was completely naked she began to bathe her body with a glove of toweling material. The color of her skin, which was as white as chalk, was not the least of the surprises to the frightened boys. They were observing her every movement, in silent astonishment, when they heard a warning whistle, followed almost immediately by the sound of Aziz’s voice, talking to his wife from the interior of the house. The conversation seemed to last for an eternity, but finally the woman put on her robe and went back inside.
Gorgui breathed a sigh of relief. ‘There’s an inner tube in there,’ he said, gesturing to the driver’s compartment of the truck.
Magatte opened the door of their side of the truck, seized the rubber tube, and dropped back beside the others. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
The three lithe little bodies never stood up from the dust of the ground until they reached the fence. Séne, who was the last, kept glancing fearfully over his shoulder, but the porch was empty.
A half hour later the whole group was gathered again beside the baobab tree. They set to work in an atmosphere of lazy triumph, and that day the anatomy of the Syrian woman replaced the films as the topic of discussion.
The following morning a band of lighthearted apprentices went hunting, armed with brand-new slingshots and little balls of lead. Hummingbirds were the targets of their first expedition, and then it was the turn of the lizards again. Anything that showed itself in the grass of moved in the wind was fair game. At the slightest movement or sound, a dozen projectiles were zeroed in on the suspected enemy. By noon they had collected several crows, two magpies, and a bird none of them could identify.
‘We have to learn to shoot these things properly,’ Magatte said.
‘Yes, general,’ replied the eleven soldiers of an army whose lowest ranking member was a lieutenant.
The dead birds were hung from the branches of the baobab, and stones and lead pellets began whistling through the air in an organized drill. Each time a goal was scored, the victor marked a stripe on his naked arm with the point of a charred stick.
At night they would return to their homes tired but happy. Their parents, preoccupied with their own troubles, paid no attention to their wandering, and since they got their own meals out at their tree no one even bothered about feeding them. Sometimes they would be seen with the groups of the other children, but they rarely took part in their games any more. They wore the slings around their necks as though they were strings of prayer beads and behaved like guardians of a secret which had set them apart from ordinary humans.
One day, however, Dieynaba, who had noticed their constant absences, stopped her son as he was on his way to join the others.
‘Where are you going, Gorgui?’ she demanded.
‘I’m going to look for Magatte, Mother.’
‘What do you do all day, you and the others?’
‘Nothing much – we usually go walking in the fields.’
‘Well, instead of wandering around doing nothing, like a bunch of dumb animals, why don’t you do your wandering in the toubabs’ district? Some of them have chickens running around loose …’
It took Gorgui a minute to realize what his mother meant, but then he went off like a shot and didn’t stop running until he reached the baobob tree. The idea of raiding the chicken coops of the white men took their breath away at first, but the more they thought about it the more exciting it became.
‘Do we go, general?’
‘We go, soldiers!’
The first expedition was so successful that they didn’t even have to use their slingshots. They were back at home before noon, and each one of them was carrying at least one or two chickens. They were overwhelmed with praise for their daring, and their chests swelled proudly above the sharp-boned cage of their ribs. From that moment on they had found a new reason for their existence.
Each morning one of them would go out on a scouting trip, and that night the whole band would pay a visit to the selected spot. On their return, the women would be waiting and sometimes would even come out to meet them, crying, ‘Our men are back!’ Thus exonerated from any feelings of guilt, they redoubled their zeal in the hunt and only the failure of a mission caused them any misgiving.
Following their success with Dieynaba’s idea, Penda conceived another one. She summoned the apprentices to her cabin, and, when they came out after a long conference, their faces were marked with the expression of men who have embarked on a serious venture. Penda herself was carrying two large cloth bags. Dieynaba was sitting alone in the courtyard at the time, puffing at a new mixture of leaves in her pipe. She couldn’t help smiling as she watched the little band walk off in the direction of the shop of Aziz, the Syrian.
The shopkeeper’s father-in-law was stretched out on a chaise longue, sleeping, and Aziz himself was dozing behind the counter, occasionally inhaling deeply from a Turkish water pipe. The early afternoon heat seemed to have overcome him completely. Penda had chosen her time well. She went into the shop with her ‘crew’, as she called the apprentices, close on her heels.
Without moving an inch, Aziz said, ‘What do you want?’
Acting as if she had already made her choice, Penda indicated a pile of cloth on the shelf behind the counter.
‘The print?’ Aziz said, turning his head, but without removing the tube of the water pipe from his mouth.
‘No, the one next to it.’
‘The muslin?’
‘Is that really muslin?’
‘You can see for yourself, woman!’
While this dialogue was taking place, the ‘crew’ had wasted no time. Three of them stood behind Penda, forming a screen, and behind them Magatte had pierced a hole in one of the two enormous sacks of rice that stood between the glass doors of the shop. Into the opening he thrust a long tube whose other end he had placed in one of the bags Penda had been carrying.
‘Well?’ the Syrian said.
‘No – don’t bother getting up – but, tell me, is the muslin really good quality?’ Penda glanced over her shoulder in time to see one of the boys dash off, with a well-filled bag on his shoulder.
The shopkeeper looked at her irritably, and the water in the bowl of his pipe gurgled as he inhaled again. ‘Look, if you don’t want anything, at least don’t bother me.’
Séne had noticed that the shrinking sack of rice was beginning to fall off balance, and he gestured frantically. Penda took a few steps backward.
‘Well, never mind about it. I just wanted to know how much it cost.’
‘I don’t sell anything at this hour. Come back at two o’clock,’ Aziz said.
Penda had reached the door safely. ‘He doesn’t want to sell anything now,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, children.’
It was high time. Just as she spoke, the sack of rice collapsed completely and fell over on its side. The band scattered through the alleys like a flight of quail.
The rice lasted for two days of a feasting and gaiety they had almost forgotten, but the exploit of Penda and her ‘crew’ was talked about for a week, and the Syrian shopkeeper was the butt of all kinds of jokes. After that, however, Penda seemed to lose interest in the apprentices; she had other ideas in her head now and was working to create a ‘committee of women’. So the boys went back to the baobab tree, the hedgehogs, and marksmanship drills and boredom.
They had tasted the bitter fruits of danger and now nothing else had any flavor.
But one night, destiny, which has an infallible sense of timing, called out to them again.
The shadows were lengthening on the ground as the sun went down. From somewhere in the distance the mournful notes of a bugle could be heard, signaling the changing of the guard. The apprentices were walking across the field of the watchmen’s camp in the twilight. No one paid any attention to them, and at the end of the field they came to the district administrator’s house, standing in the center of a well-tended garden. Not far from them some automobiles were parked beside the gateway.
Souley, the smallest of the group, was swinging his slingshot back and forth in his hand. Suddenly he stopped, picked up a stone, and placed it carefully in the leather sling. The rubber strips on either side stretched taut, the stone whistled through the air, and a headlight on one of the cars shattered noisily. For an instant the other boys were dumbfounded, but only for an instant. Then they began searching through their pockets, and the air was filled with the whistling of stones and pellets of lead, and the explosion of headlights, windshields, and windows. The watchmen came running out of their tents to see what was happening, but the band had already scattered. An hour later the windows, the showcases, and even the electric light bulbs of the station were serving as targets.
They had found a game to replace all the others. They waited until darkness had enlisted on their side, and then, moving in little groups to throw the guards and the soldiers off their track, they invaded the European quarter. Hidden behind the trunk of a tree, flattened against a wall or crouched in a ditch, they adjusted their slings, fired, and vanished into the shadows. Everything that shone in the night was a target, from windows to lamp posts. At daybreak the bulbs and the glass might be replaced, but it was a wasted effort. The following night the ground would again be littered with sparkling splinters.
They even pushed their luck so far as to attack the police station. Some of the older people did not approve of this latest manifestation of the ‘crew’s’ activities, and there were even parents who forbade their sons to go out on the expeditions, with the result that General Magatte’s army was reduced to seven soldiers. Others, however, could not help thinking that every window that broke, every light that went out, helped to establish a kind of balance: they were no longer alone in carrying the burden of the strike.
As for the Europeans, the feeling of constraint and uneasiness they had known for weeks gave place to panic. The patrols on the streets were reinforced, but, in spite of this, fear was an unwelcome guest in every house in the quarter. It was not so much the stones or the little balls of lead themselves as the thought of those black bodies slipping through the shadows that transformed every home into a fortress as soon as darkness came. Native servants were sent home, and men and women went to bed with weapons at their sides. At the slightest sound, nervous fingers reached out for the trigger of a pistol or the stock of a rifle. And, in the meantime, the members of the ‘crew’, exhausted from their work, slept the sleep of the just.
In-between their nocturnal expeditions, they had acquired the habit of practicing their marksmanship constantly, since they were determined to remain masters of their craft. Anything, living or dead, that could serve as a target was put to use. It was as a result of this that one evening, as they were wandering along the siding which connected with the main line from Saint-Louis, little Kâ, the youngest of the group, happened to notice a lizard basking in the last rays of the sun. His sling was already in his hand, and the child pulled back slowly on the rubber bands, sighted through the branches of the stick, and fired. The lizard leaped slightly and fell over on its back. They saw its little white belly twitch for a second against the crushed stones between the rails and then lie motionless. A second lizard thrust his nose from behind the wheel of a car and arrowed in the direction of a nearby wall. Seven projectiles instantly smashed into the dust around him or clattered against the rail he had leaped.
It was at this moment that Isnard appeared from behind the same car that had sheltered the lizard. His hand went to his pocket, and three shots rang out. Little Kâ received the first bullet and dropped without uttering a sound. Séne fell while he was still in the act of turning around, and the other children fled, screaming. Isnard’s arm was trembling, but he continued firing until the magazine of the revolver was empty. One of the last bullets struck Gorgui in the leg, and he collapsed in the middle of the tracks.
For a moment Isnard just stood there, dazed, his arm still stretched out in front of him, holding the smoking gun. Then, with a mechanical gesture, he put it back in his pocket and began to run toward the European quarter, muttering breathlessly to himself, ‘They were shooting at me! They were shooting at me!’
Magatte ran straight to the union office to tell the men what had happened. Breathless, his lips trembling, his eyes swimming with tears of shock, he tried to explain how he and his comrades had been hunting lizards when Isnard had suddenly appeared with a revolver, fired on them, and killed them all. At his first words everyone in the office moved out to the street, where there would be room for the others to join them. Lahbib and Boubacar, Doudou and Séne Maséne, the father of one of the dead boys, were there already. They were joined almost immediately by Penda, who had taken to wearing a soldier’s cartridge belt around her waist since she had been made a member of the strike committee.
The news spread like fire through the courtyards of the district, traveling from compound to compound and from main house to neighboring cabins. Men, women, and children flowed into the streets by the hundreds, marching toward the railroad yards. The crowd swelled at every step and became a mass of running legs and shouting mouths, opened on gleaming white teeth or blackened stumps. The headcloths of the women fluttered convulsively, and a few lost scarves floated above the crowd for a moment before falling and being trampled in the dust. The women carried children in their arms or slung across their backs, and as they walked they gathered up weapons — heavy pestles, iron bars, and pick handles – and waved them at the sky like the standards of an army. On their faces, hunger, sleeplessness, pain, and fear had been graven into the single image of anger.
At last the crowd arrived at the siding, and the bodies of the two dead children were wrapped in white cloths, which were rapidly stained with blood. Gorgui was carried away, weeping and moaning, and the long cortège turned in the direction of home. This time the women were at its head, led by Penda, Dieynaba, and Mariame Sonko. As they passed before the houses of the European employees, their fury reached a screaming peak; fists were waved and a torrent of oaths and insults burst from their throats like water through a shattered dam.
In front of the residence of the district administrator the two corpses were laid out on the ground, and the women began to intone a funeral dirge. Watchmen, soldiers, and mounted policemen were hastily summoned and formed a protective cordon around the house. When the last mournful notes of the dirge no longer hung in the air, the entire crowd simply stood there silently. But the silence was heavier with meaning than the oaths or the clamor: it was a witness to the unlit fires, the empty cooking pots, and the decaying mortars, and to the machines in the shops where the spiders were spinning their webs. For more than an hour they stood there, and the soldiers themselves remained silent before these silent people.
At last the cortège formed up again, but the ceremony was repeated, and the bodies of the children laid out, four times again – in front of the station, in the suburbs of N’Ginth and Randoulène, and in the market square in the heart of Thiès.
It was not until almost nightfall, when the mass of this human river was already indistinguishable from the shadows, that the funeral procession ended and the remains of the two children returned at last to their homes.
Three days later, the directors of the company notified the strikers that their representatives would be received.