NO HOT WATER today. I hate being cold. No eggs either. Someone forgot to deliver them. The boss expressed his regrets. He proposed Vietnamese cheese and a warm Primus because the refrigerator went off when the generator stopped. He could make me a cold Nescafé if I didn’t want to drink beer. “It’s on the house.” Myriam thought it was amusing since she had known much worse, but I was so irritated I surprised myself. I obviously had a long way to go before becoming African. No news from Josué. I went back to the room with a cold Nescafé. The lizard was waiting on the little table, and he seemed to be mocking me. In this unfinished universe, I was like a lost boat drifting on the current, lifted and tipped by mighty swells. Shipwrecked in Bunia.
I wanted to go home. What a ridiculous thought! Home has become the place where I settle temporarily. I imagined the word as I waited for the boss to tell me whether we could eat. Home could have been a room decorated with a favourite painting, a library full of books with words to guide me, a house with children, a neighbourhood with neighbours and merchants who sometimes get on my nerves, a city filled with strangers whose habits I know, but also a few friends I loved, whose faults are appreciated as much as their qualities. Home could be a park, a sidewalk, a woman, a forest. Yes, a woman like a dark forest into which one ventures carefully, but I knew it couldn’t be Myriam because I took her the way you choose a vacation destination, with excitement and emotion, of course, and affection too, but I was using her like a hotel room or a highway. I would always be somewhere else. So I waited. I had no other choice. Josué was still missing and that worried me.