In the night my mother went out to fetch David and we all three of us slept in the room next to the kitchen. David was shivering and I did not know whether it was from fear or from cold. She put him next to the wall, with me in the middle and herself on the outside. We were silent, fearful and weary. She made both of us drink a hot infusion that tasted of lemongrass and David said thank you to her several times, in a shaky voice, as if he were not just thanking her for the drink but for something else. I have the impression that I went to sleep the second my head touched the mat and I do not need to look far to perceive that my mother was giving us drafts that specifically induced sleep and forgetfulness.
When I opened my eyes my father was already gone, the sun was making a pool of gold in the room, and I heard David talking to my mother. I went out and saw them squatting there, arranging some roots, leaves, and twigs that my mother had gathered at dawn into a particular order. My mother was slowly reciting the names of the plants and David was repeating them while pretending not to notice my mother’s swollen and closed eye. When he saw me he threw himself into my arms and his affection was a marvelous gift that morning. My body was full of aches and pains and my mother prepared a bath of saffron for me with leaves of lilac and some roots. As I remember it, that bath was like a balm anointing the whole of my body. We had decided to go and pick green mangoes for breakfast when suddenly we heard my father’s voice at the edge of the forest. My mother rushed over to David and pushed him into the shed we had tidied up the day before. She made a crude bundle of the plants she had just collected and thrust them at David’s stomach so that he had no choice but to hold them in his arms, as if he had just caught a football thrown at full speed. I had not known that my mother was so quick-witted. In her place I think I would have run around in circles like a mad dog, incapable of any decision, so much did the sound of my father’s voice at that moment affect me like a hammer blow to my head. My mother dragged me out to the vegetable plot and made me crouch down. She took one end of her sari, lifted it against her face to cover half of it, and gripped the fabric in her teeth. She set to work furiously and I tried to do the same. My father called her. She motioned for me to stay there and went back into the house. I glanced at the shed, at the corrugated tin door simply propped up against it, and told myself it must take a superhuman effort for David to remain squeezed in there while the slightest little movement threatened to dislodge the collection of tools, wood, and useless objects found here and there, which poor people like us could never resist picking up.
I heard my mother say “out the back” and I pretended to be digging in the earth and then a voice called out, “Is that you, Raj?”
It was one of the policemen from the prison. He was dressed in blue, he had kept his cap on and, seen at such close range in our vegetable garden, he looked like a giant. His nightstick was gleaming and thick. He stared insistently at me and I nodded my head.
“Come here.”
Galloping fear gnawed at my stomach, clearly he was there for David, they had found my hiding place beside the barbed wire, they knew everything, and just as I was about to collapse, he pointed his thick finger at my lip.
“What have you got there?”
My top lip was split open and my mother had applied a yellow paste to it. It was my father who replied.
“He had a fall, boss.”
His voice was the one I had heard at the prison, hesitant, a womanish voice, as thin as a thread. The policeman turned to my father abruptly and barked: “A fall? Like last time? What do you take me for, guard?”
My father lowered his eyes, laid both hands against his stomach, and trembled. It is certainly not pleasant to be reprimanded in front of one’s family, but for my father it was a disaster! At that moment I thought he would make us pay for it very dearly. The giant squatted down and, even in this position, he was still taller than me, awesomely impressive. Did he have a wife and son whom he terrorized at night with his hands as big as plates and his arms thicker than my thighs?
“Now then, little one. You were in the hospital a month ago, do you remember?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You made a friend, didn’t you? David, little David?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, good. You’re a good little boy. Guard! You’ve got a very good little boy here. Do you know that?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Hmm. Now tell me, Raj. David hasn’t come to see you in the last few days, has he?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you sure? You didn’t go for a walk near the prison a couple of days ago?”
“No, sir.”
The giant stood up, took a few steps around the vegetable plot.
“What a storm, eh? I can see you’ve been working hard. What are you planting there? Eh, young man? Do you know?”
“Yes, sir. There’s two rows of tomatoes. Yesterday we planted potatoes and onions. After that you need to ask my mother.”
“And you, Madame. You haven’t seen anything?”
“There are some beans as well, and beetroot. But only a few.”
“I was asking you whether you haven’t seen a little boy here in the last few days?”
“No, sir. What with the cyclone we’ve been doing nothing but cleaning up and replanting.”
I can picture my mother now, a fold of her sari covering her swollen eye, and I can hear her firm voice. This woman, who was always timid and fearful, lied that day with an aplomb I did not suspect in her. My father, who terrorized his family every day of his life, who lashed out with his feet and hands at us and blew our bodies sideways with his powerful tormentor’s voice, this father now stood beside her, shrunk into himself, his eyes on his sandals. How did my mother find such strength?
The policeman glanced at the shed and I prayed that David would make no sound. I looked at my mother and at that moment she turned her head toward me and my father spotted us. His face froze, slowly he turned his gaze toward the shed, and I was convinced that he could see right through the sheets of corrugated tin for his eyes grew wider and wider until it seemed to me that they would leap out of their sockets. He was breathing more and more heavily, his shirt rose and fell rapidly, beads of sweat appeared on his face and his fists were clenched.
He knew. He would make us pay very dearly.
The policeman observed the forest and then turned to me: “You’re not afraid here, Raj?”
“No, sir.”
“Good, good. You could be a policeman one day if you’re not afraid. Policemen are never afraid. Isn’t that so, guard?”
My father agreed, with a shrill burst of laughter, which the policeman cut off in a flash. This scene has often come back to me at times in my life when I have seen my father drunk and violent. How I have longed to be able to do that, to cut short my father’s gestures with a look and, through my presence alone, reduce him to a poltroon who laughed like a woman.
The policeman saluted my mother, touching his cap, and then, just like that, without addressing any one of us in particular, he said, in a strong, clear voice, “That little boy is sick. He needs to come back to be looked after.”
We waited for a long while after their departure to let David out. He still had the plants in his arms and he was ashen. My mother lifted him up and he remained upright, his body petrified like a tree trunk. I thought she was going to question me, scold me, but no, she knelt in front of David and asked him, “Where are you sick?”
My mother laid her hands on different parts of his body, the base of his neck, the hollow of his ribs, his heart, his groin, his wrist, the top of his head, and she must have gone into the kitchen to make a mixture of who knows what leaves and roots, ground up together, which she then steeped in water. David swallowed this thick concoction with a grimace. I could not stop thinking about my father’s face and it was then, at that precise moment, with David sitting there in a daze, his arms and legs numb, and my mother sitting on the ground too, the bowl empty and marked by a green streak around the rim, left by the mixture, it was at that moment that I decided to run away with David. My mother said nothing. She knew both everything and nothing. We were to some extent caught in a trap and it was my fault. My father would come home that evening, he would search the house and the shed, he would find David, he would take him back, I would be on my own once more. He would beat me until I begged for forgiveness, he would make me pay for everything, the death of my brothers, the shame of being called “guard” in front of us, the humiliation of having revealed to us the face of the affable, obsequious, unimportant employee he was at the prison, he would make me pay for his life of poverty.
It was David who spoke and aroused me from the dazed state I was in. Softly and calmly, he said he would return now, for back there at the prison they were waiting to go to Eretz. Eretz? my mother repeated, with a frown. Then David made a very curious gesture. He plunged two fingers into the earth, then laid them, all covered in soil, against his breast and, his hand upon his beating heart, said, Eretz. My mother began weeping softly, because she herself had probably understood that he was speaking of the promised land. I wonder if it was a gesture the Jews at Beau-Bassin regularly made when their hopes faltered as they waited for Eretz.
If my mother had known exactly what it was all about, I mean the war, the extermination of the Jews, the pogroms, if she had known all that, if she had been an educated person, a woman of the world who read newspapers and listened to the radio, if she had been that kind of woman, would she have let David go back? And if I, for my part, had known what David had endured for four years, what would I have done? My mother and I did not live in Europe, I know, we had no idea of what was going on, but then that was what a lot of people said: I had no idea of what was going on. Should my mother have asked herself questions? And what of my father in all this? He was a mere prison guard, but he was the first one to rush over to the gate when the bell rang, he was the one who displayed the most zeal when the prisoners had to be hustled back into their quarters… These questions haunt me to a degree that numbs me and I know I shall never find any answers.
My mother packed a bag with rice, green fruits to be left to ripen, water, a bottle filled with a green mixture that she made David promise to drink up in less than three days, telling him it was good for malaria. How had she known? Just by laying her hands on him, watching him eat?
I made my own preparations in secret. I took my canvas schoolbag, slipped three pairs of shorts into it, three shirts, an old sheet, my exercise book, my eraser, my pencil, a kitchen knife, a piece of my father’s soap. While my mother was giving her instructions, making copious gestures, and David was listening with the attentiveness of an angel, I went out and left my bag under a tree at the edge of the forest.
I went and sat down beside the vegetable plot and breathed in the forest with all my lungs, the green, ravaged scent of it, its strength as yet hardly resurgent following the cyclone, throwing my head back to open up my chest, and it seemed to me that I was inhaling the sky as well, the cloudless blue extent of it. I straightened up my back and let my eyes dwell on the forest’s hazy heat. I remember this moment as one of intense concentration, such as I had never known, a recentering of my mind around a single axis: flight. Perhaps, as I have later read in a book, I was determining the course of my fate for the first time.
When my mother and David emerged from the house I felt ready, ready not to cry in front of my mother, whom I was leaving for the first time, and whom I would come back to fetch. I was certain of this, as if it were as easy as fitting your handwriting into an exercise book with ruled lines—I was ready to set off with David toward what I knew best, what was most familiar to me at the age of nine, even though it had taken everything from me: the camp at Mapou.