HERE MONEY TRUMPS everything else. The smell of it wipes away principles, eliminates barriers, and sidesteps laws. Here, small change for the White man is a fortune for the Black. Historically, White men have understood this, and even today, they use that imbalance, sometimes without realizing it. And yet sometimes, it can be very useful.
The sun exploded into the room. Myriam was making coffee. Joseph phoned. He found Josué, and was with him. I took a shower and left without drinking any coffee. She kissed me. Apparently, she did hear my profession of love. I was happy and a little wound up, I hadn’t slept much and spent my time analysing. I weighed the pros and the cons, and believed I was right. In this country, money smells sweeter than revenge. Kabanga knew there were dozens of witnesses who had accused him, one more, one less, it’s all the same to him, but if he could make some profit off them, he would. I know the man. And God did I despise him! Ideas don’t motivate him, and he was following no political plan. He would accept ransom for Josué’s parents. And I would pay it.
The meeting makes me anxious. Josué isn’t a child anymore, he is nineteen. I know he had no childhood. I’d had a child’s childhood, and he had an adult’s. At thirteen, he had already killed a man. At that age, in disbelief I discovered death existed thanks to the TV, then I studied it in dictionaries and books. He knew the smell of rotting bodies, and the victim’s coagulated blood on his basketball shorts—because blood shoots out like a fountain when you slash a man’s throat with a machete—the death rattle, the lost look of someone who feels nothingness taking over. I knew nothing about that. All I knew about death was images and representations. It’s like Bunia: I know everything, but understand nothing.
Josué paced in circles around the room. He was already a handsome man, or would be one soon. He spoke very little about his pain. As soon as he felt danger, he stiffened. You could feel him ready to attack. He talked about his rap group, almost singing the words he used. He wanted to find a cassette to prove to us that he has talent. He’s positive he does. Self-assured and fragile, in equal measure. More self-assured than I was. Josué is a born leader. I know, because I’d read everything about him. I knew that at age six, he fought with his parents for the right to go to school. He refused to be poor the way they were. At school he was the head of his class. He excelled at soccer, and at ten, he started a rap group that took its inspiration from zouk music. At twelve, still head of his class and the top goal scorer on his team, he recorded a cassette and sold it in the marketplace. He had a remarkable sense of organization. A few weeks before he was kidnapped by Kabanga, his rap group started putting on shows in restaurants and bars in Bunia. He was thirteen years old.
“We’ll protect you, Josué, and we’ll find your parents. I know what you went through, I read your testimony for the Court, you and Kabanga’s other child soldiers.”
“I’m not the other child soldiers. I’m Josué, and you know nothing about my nightmares. The kind of sweat you have from a nightmare—do you know what that’s like? It smells bad, it smells like bodies rotting in the swamp. When I wake up, I stink like a corpse. I am a corpse.”
“We’re going to take care of you, Josué.”
“I’m not sick, sir, I’ve had a spell cast on me. The evil spirit lives inside me.”
The conversation wasn’t going anywhere.
I told him about my plan to free his parents. It wasn’t really a plan, it was an intuition, a theory, the kind I’m always producing. I construct reality from data, and when I hit it, I hope it will fit into the way I imagined it.
He was afraid to see his parents again. “Do you love your parents?” He froze and stared me down as if I’d insulted him.
There, now I know, that’s a question you never ask a child, even if he’s nearly twenty years old and, since the war started six years ago, he has lived the life of an adult. In this place, a child can’t say he doesn’t love his parents.
“You know everything, but you understand nothing. You talk to me like I was a kid. Take a look at this kid.”
He pulled off his Lakers t-shirt and slipped down his jogging pants that were too big for him, then dropped his underpants to the floor.
“Look. They cut off one of my balls when I was fourteen because I wouldn’t rape a girl I knew. ‘You’re impotent,’ the chief told me, ‘you don’t need both your balls.’ The scar on my arm, that’s from a machete, and the black spot on my shoulder, that’s a stray bullet, and I won’t tell you what the chiefs did to my ass for fun when they were drunk. Do you know the pain when someone sticks a lit cigar in your ass? Kabanga loved Cuban cigars.”
He got dressed calmly and sat on the gold-coloured couch decorated with mismatched cushions. He looked at me and waited. He was a mongoose, and maybe I was the snake.
“Do you want me to take you to a doctor?”
“My wounds are healed. But the wounds in my head—you know about those? You, you can sleep. And when you sleep, in your head do you see bloody faces, women’s parts staved in by sledgehammers, when you sleep, do you hear the rattling of dying animals, and when you look at them with their bellies slit open, do you see the faces you saw at the market? When you sleep, what do you see? I want to go back in time. I want to be thirteen even if I’m nineteen. Can you do that for me? Take me back?”
I know very well I can’t. Every study I’ve read has pointed out that the vast majority of child soldiers are forever rejected by the stream of normal life. They never manage to return to childhood, they move through life like a no-man’s-land. Never a child, never an adult. The past has been stolen, and the future forbidden.
“If you came to Bunia with us, with my wife and me, maybe we could help you find some sort of justice.”
As I spoke those words, I realized, without thinking, that I have taken on responsibility for a nineteen-year-old child. A child who will end up on the edges of society or, worse, again become a child who kills because that is all he knows. I was offering to adopt a potential psychopath.
Josué accepted my offer. I would protect him and help free his parents. He wasn’t so sure they will want to see him again because they are ashamed of him, but he accepted all the same.