On the last day of the strike, the city of Thiès still wore the mournful look which had become its habit. Most of the children were still in the outlying villages, and a stranger might have wandered through the streets for a long time without encountering a living soul. Since their triumphal return from Dakar, the women had organized their lives in a manner which made them almost a separate community. Distances no longer inspired any fear in them, and each morning they left the city very early and walked the few miles out to the lake. There they installed themselves comfortably, bathed and did their washing, repaired the few shreds of clothing that remained to them, cooked their meager rations, and gossiped endlessly about the events of the famous ‘march’. When night came, they returned to the city and the homes of their husbands or fathers.
At the union office, only the six members of the strike committee knew that the director-general of the line had signed the agreement with the delegates. Fearing trouble, Lahbib wanted to avoid any kind of spontaneous demonstration in this city, which had been at the very heart of the strike, and where emotions were still keyed to a fever pitch.
He did not succeed in keeping the secret very long. The news became known during the night, and, as soon as the sun was up, the union building was invaded by questioning, excited men, and crowds began to form in front of the station and in the market square and all of the neighboring streets. There were still a good many skeptics among them, and the few who owned radios were given an opportunity to hold lectures and give out all sorts of details, true and false. Someone even stated that, in future, a representative of the union would sit on the board of directors of the Dakar-Niger. Little by little, as the day wore on and it became apparent that the news was true, the scars and the wounds, the horrors of hunger and thirst, began to recede into the distance and be lost in the forests of forgetfulness.
On a corner of the table in the union office, Lahbib was writing, setting down in a schoolboy’s notebook the principal events of the day, as he had done every day since the strike began. He ran the tip of his index finger along the line of his moustache. In spite of the victory, he was anxious, thinking of the things that remained to be done before the men returned to work the next day. Since Doudou’s death, a scant twenty-four hours after the departure of the women, almost all of the responsibility here had devolved on him.
His glance came to rest on Samba N’Doulougou’s bicycle, hanging on the opposite wall, its tires flat, its saddle askew. One of the marchers had brought it back, and they had hung it there, as a souvenir of the little man who had so often amused them and helped to keep up their spirits. Thinking of Samba, he thought of Penda. Penda, the girl of easy virtue; Penda, the warrior with a soldier’s cartridge belt around her waist. He wondered idly which of the two images would remain longer in his memory. ‘Bakayoko must know the news by now,’ he thought. ‘It will be best if he doesn’t come back here. We’ll take care of Dejean ourselves.’
He got up from the table as the other members of the committee began to arrive. He had asked them to come so that he could give them their final instructions.
‘Is everyone here now?’ he asked, and then, noticing Bakary in a corner, he added, ‘You can stay if you like, old man; we’ll be glad to have you.’
Bakary closed the door and found himself a chair. It was the first time he had ever taken part in a meeting of the committee, and he struggled to repress a fit of coughing, so that he would not annoy his comrades.
‘It’s the matter of Dejean and Isnard I wanted to talk to you about,’ Lahbib said. ‘Dejean may already have left for Dakar, where he will ask to be replaced here; but, as for Isnard, it was made an unofficial condition of the agreement that he would be recalled. I want to be sure, however, that everything is done correctly.’
*
Early the next morning the workmen began to gather in front of the gate to the workshops and the yards, preparing to return to work. Out of old habit, they grouped together almost automatically, according to their various trades and their separate crews. There were still many who were not there, those who had not yet returned from the villages, but the old atmosphere, the familiar framework of the past, was swift in re-establishing itself. A noisy, celebrating crowd thronged the adjoining streets and squares; the cohort of beggars, thinner than before, waited for the daily distribution of soup; and the flies and the dust were back. The great iron gates were still closed, and there were two soldiers standing guard, but no one paid any attention to them.
‘Where is Sounkaré, the watchman?’ an old workman asked. ‘Why doesn’t he open up?’
Lahbib arrived just then, followed by Balla and Boubacar. The soldiers opened the gate for them, and the men streamed into the yard. Three minutes later the siren shrieked out its long, familiar call, after almost six months of silence.
The mechanics discovered the corpse of Sounkaré – or, more precisely, what the rats had left of the corpse of Sounkaré – in the bottom of a pit in the motor repair shop, lying in a film of dried and blackened oil. A delegation was formed to carry the remains away, but the funeral service was brief; he had never been well loved.
The workmen did not really work, either that morning or in the afternoon. They lounged about the benches and the forges and before their lathes. The mechanics counted out their wrenches and their pliers; in the marshaling yards they experimented idly with the couplings of the cars; in the huts along the sidings the switchmen played with the giant levers; and in the offices the clerks moved a few papers around.
Toward the end of the morning, Isnard came to make a tour of inspection, but everywhere he went he found nothing but tight-lipped faces and stony backs. At last he gave up and left the shops, hurrying back to the administration building. He found Edouard there, and Pierre, but since they both knew what had happened they could only stare at Isnard as they might have at a man they knew to be condemned. They went together to Dejean’s office, and the director agreed to make one more effort. He picked up the telephone, called the shops, and asked for Lahbib.
‘So!’ he began angrily. ‘This is the way your union operates! I am told that the workers are doing nothing! They’ve got to work now – and work hard! You don’t think you’re going to be paid for doing nothing!’
‘Monsieur le directeur, you know the conditions of the agreement. We know that you are going to leave, but Isnard must go, too. As long as he is here, the men will be at their jobs, but they will not work.’
Just as Lahbib put down the telephone, the blast of a whistle shattered the silence, seeming to reach out from the horizon to embrace the city. A minute or so later, the train from Bamako, driven at reckless speed by Tiémoko, pulled into the station and screeched to a stop at the junction of the Sudan-Saint-Louis lines. It had picked up freight and passengers all along the line and now was just a confused jumble of cars of both kinds. As Tiémoko leaped from the engine, the passenger cars began disgorging clusters of humans, who seemed to vanish without trace in the enormous crowds already flocking through the waiting rooms and across the tracks and platforms of the station. The din was indescribable. Pickpockets and thieves had a holiday, and a woman’s voice managed to make itself heard, screaming, ‘Someone stole my hamper!’
Twenty minutes after the first train, two other freight trains came in, and then a third from Rufisque, where it had been held up for a long time before the tracks could be cleared. The engineers, shouting to each other joyfully, pulled out the stops on their whistles, and the workmen in the shops, drawn by the general hubbub, joined in the crowd. The combined efforts of the train crews and two squads of militiamen were necessary before the doors of the freight cars could be opened.
And then the women arrived. Having heard the screaming of the whistles, and wondering what it signified, they instinctively formed in the order of their march to Dakar and marched on the station. The compact mass of their column forced a way through the mob which now covered the square, and when they reached the veranda they found Lahbib and Boubacar struggling to restore some kind of order.
‘What’s happening, men?’ Mariame Sonko demanded. ‘The strike isn’t over?’ The tone of her voice implied, ‘If you still need us …’
‘Yes, Mariame, the strike is over, but there is still the matter of Dejean and Isnard. Dejean is gone – I saw his automobile leave a little while ago, and his family is already in Dakar, but Isnard hasn’t left yet.’
The women looked at each other.
‘Let’s go to “the Vatican”,’ one of them shouted. ‘We’ll dislodge that red-eared rat!’
‘Let’s go,’ said Séni. ‘When you can still see the toes after you have buried the body, you have to throw on a little more sand.’
‘Let’s go then,’ Aby laughed. ‘We’ll throw on some more sand!’
‘Don’t go into “the Vatican”,’ Lahbib said, ‘and stay away from the villas; there are soldiers there. Just go and get the drums and sing.’ He turned to Bakary and Boubacar. ‘Go with them, and don’t let them do anything foolish.’
‘Do you think they will listen to us?’
‘Yes, old man; just tell them you are speaking in the name of the union.’
The long procession of women turned around and retraced the path that had brought them to the station. They had begun to sing the chant of the march from Thiès to Dakar, and a large part of the crowd followed them.
When they arrived in the district of ‘the Vatican’, Boubacar and Bakary, who were walking at the head of the column, encountered a cordon of soldiers aligned along the street that led to the homes of the white employees of the Dakar-Niger.
‘Have no fear, men,’ said the native non-commissioned officer who commanded the group. ‘We have orders not to fire. Even if we did not, however, we would not fire. The honor you seek is our honor, too. But please, do not come any farther.’
*
All of the houses of ‘the Vatican’ were closed and barred, almost as if they were in a state of siege. The whistles of the locomotives, and now the singing and the beating of the drums, were an almost unbearable strain to nerves already taut.
In the villa of the Isnards, the curtains were drawn and the bolts on all the doors were firmly secured. On the dining- room table, two Mausers, a revolver, and an open box of cartridges gleamed softly in the light from the overhead lamp. Isnard himself was seated facing the door, with a high-velocity pistol thrust in his belt. His hair was tangled and matted, his forehead streamed sweat, and he seemed to be scarcely breathing. Edouard and Pierre were seated near him, waiting; not knowing for quite what they waited, annoyed at being forced to be present at the end of the drama. All evening long, Isnard had been telephoning right and left – to his friends, to all of the other ‘old hands’, even to Dakar. And the response had always been the same, ‘It’s too late – I don’t see what I could do now. Think about your own safety first, and we’ll see what happens later. You should have warned us before this. If you have been recalled, just do as you’re told – believe me, in your own interest…’
It was finished. He knew that he was going to have to leave, but he could not bring himself to move.
‘The swine,’ he muttered. ‘The swine. After all I’ve done for them …’
Pierre found himself wondering whether he meant the workers in the shops or the stockholders in the railroad.
Edouard interrupted Isnard’s rambling. ‘Look, I know it’s difficult, but there is nothing else to be done. I didn’t believe it myself, but it happened. Dejean is already gone. And the whole line is blocked by their men.
Bakayoko is in Koulikoro, Alioune at Dakar, and Lahbib here … The car is ready; all you have to do is go out the back way. We’ll take care of your furniture.’
‘But good God!’ Isnard burst out. ‘What’s happening, that they let these savages, these children, decide? They don’t even know what’s good for them! Most of them don’t know how to hold a hammer, and they call themselves workmen! You’ll see, if this goes on, it won’t be long before there isn’t a single European left in Africa! The first one of them that sets foot in here I’ll shoot in his tracks!’
‘Now, now,’ Edouard said. ‘You’ve got to calm down. It’s time to leave…’
In all the time they had been talking, Beatrice had been pacing back and forth, from one room to another, like a panther in a cage. When she heard the personnel director’s last words, she fairly hurled herself at him.
‘That’s it, that’s fine; you’re dropping us, too! You’re in a hurry to see us go, handed over as a sop to the Negroes! They’ve won, and because that makes you sick at your stomach, you’re taking it out on us! We’re the ones who built everything there is in this town. In the rain, in the wind, even when it was a hundred and twenty in the shade, Isnard was on the job. And the men knew it – they liked him! They all liked him, even the boys!’
She turned and ran out to the kitchen like a madwoman, returning in a moment, dragging the maid by the arm.
‘Tell them!’ she screamed at the terrified woman. ‘Tell them that you liked us! Tell them you liked Monsieur! Say it; in the name of God, say it!’
Suddenly she stopped, passed a hand across her sweating forehead, and released her grip on the wrist of the trembling maid. Before any of the men could have stopped her, or even known what she was contemplating, she had seized one of the Mausers from the dining-room table, thrown open the door, and gone out to the garden.
Two shots rang out, followed by a brief hysterical burst from an automatic rifle, and one of the soldiers clapped a hand to his thigh. Beatrice seemed to leap into the air and roll over, like a rabbit brought down in full flight, and then she lay stretched on the gravel walk of the garden.
The three men went out, picked up the motionless body, and carried it back into the villa, carefully bolting the door.
*
At the sound of the shots, an echoing silence had fallen on the crowd, as if they had written a brutal ending to a long, long story whose climax, until then, had been unknown. Even the drums were silent.
‘What happened?’ one woman’s voice demanded.
‘It was the wife of one of the toubabs,’ Aby said. ‘She has been shot.’
‘Oh, that poor woman,’ someone said.
As the crowd scattered into the shadows of the rapidly descending night, Lahbib heard someone singing. It was the ‘Legend of Goumba’, the old song of Maïmouna, the blind woman.
From one sun to another,
The combat lasted,
And fighting together, blood-covered,
They transfixed their enemies.
But happy is the man who does battle without hatred.