14

The Ottawa train station, two hours later. His bag slung across his shoulders, Ito Baraka heads towards the bus platforms outside. Twenty minutes to wait for the 95 to the Rideau Centre, where he’ll make his regular stop at the liquor vendor, who must know him well by now, who must be used to his quick grab for the bottle of Martinique rum, always the same one, like a little boy snatching a favourite toy. While he waits for the bus, Ito Baraka rereads what he scribbled on the ride from Montreal to Ottawa.

***

I have quite a clear memory of that month of August when those students, the presumed leaflet makers, were arrested and locked up at the intelligence office. We spent the following days trying to assess the seriousness of their alleged actions and their consequences. Sika was constantly snivelling, Beno and Wali maintained the obstinate silence of hunted animals, and we spent the time while hiding out with the old priest trying to relearn our lines in Endgame. However, a few days after the media had announced the arrests, the majority of the detainees were released. Two of them were formally charged with distributing subversive leaflets, and rumour had it that they were not among those who had been released from the intelligence office. People who swore they had seen the released detainees said they were weakened, frail, mute, with empty eyes, as if they had spent their time in captivity drugged. I just remember that when we saw Gueule de Bois again, he appeared different, absent, bizarre. He didn’t say much about what he’d experienced, but he told us a group of police officers had been very inventive with their torture techniques, coming up with all kinds of innovations. I think, rather, that the torturers’ methods were traditional and brutal and refined. Gueule de Bois said nothing more about this, and a month later, the two accused were handed over to the city court for a first trial, which was quickly postponed because of a procedural error discovered by their lawyers.

The second trial took place two weeks later, in October, on a Friday morning. There was a crowd at the courthouse and dissent was in the air in the courtroom, which was packed with students, teachers, civil servants, merchants from the old market. The most enraged were brandishing slates denouncing this political trial. The women from the market were also there, they had distributed water to the crowd of onlookers who’d come to support the two accused. Outside, the human mass grew, and my father, who was surveying on a curb downtown, had to abandon his task and fold up his tripod, jostled and finally carried away by the tide.

My father would in spite of himself be immersed in history again that Friday when the echo of a chorus reached him from the courthouse. The crowd had begun to sing the forbidden former national anthem, which a lot of people had not forgotten, as would have been expected, since time had passed and a good part of the crowd around the courthouse had not known that song of fervent patriotism that the military had traded for a banal incantation calling on the people to reject troublemakers who undermined national unity. The crowd was convinced that the judges had been ordered to discipline the young miscreants, and everyone expected a speedy trial that would send the two rascals to the dungeons of the nation, where their parents would once a month bring them rotting fruits, since, as rumour had it, all fruits of the revolution were suspect. And my father, too, standing in the sun outside the courthouse, carried away by the general excitement, took up the old anthem. The electrified crowd, its volume increasing by the minute, was going to storm the courthouse and try to free the two accused.

The demonstrators pressed closer and closer around the courthouse, shouting and raising fists, placards, and rocks, and my father thought that at least at that particular time on that special Friday, fear had set sail across the stormy sea. Only the judges and the police were afraid. People said that was when the state prosecutor called for more police and soldiers. The crowd was now wild, and when the reinforcements arrived, they fired into the packed mass of people, emptying their clips into the forest of gleaming bare skin, reloading and firing again, opening breaches into the mass of flesh, and leaving rioters on the ground. The official media releases spoke of four dead. My father, with his tripod, found himself running away as fast as he could. The crowd scattered into the neighbourhoods, and there began a period of insurrection, pitched battles taking place in the streets between the police and the protestors. We joined the rioters in the heart of the city, where there were tires burning at the intersections, and later I learned that some police stations had been set on fire and so had the intelligence headquarters and some government vehicles, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was a hell of a mess. Columns of fire rose at the intersections and young men, bare-chested, threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the army vehicles, something that had, of course, occurred at other times and places.

A springtime born of a few words printed on pieces of paper, and some people had been killed and others had disappeared. In the streets of insurrection, against a backdrop of rising smoke, some stones landed on the windshield of an army jeep. Behind the jeep were three other vehicles, paddy wagons. Men in fatigues jumped out and surrounded us. A girl who had thrown a last rock at them was shot in the knee. I had lost sight of Beno, Wali, Sika, and my cousin Sefa, who sometimes joined our group, and who very often was more caustic in his diatribes against the government than we were. The soldiers shoved us into the paddy wagons, and while we crossed the raging city, more projectiles landed on the vehicles. We were held all night in the courtyard of an army camp in the city outskirts, sitting in the sand with no clothes but our underpants, under the watchful eye of a Kalashnikov that frequently poked us in the neck. I was cold. And at dawn, they threw us some old clothes, loaded us into jeeps, and hastily blindfolded us. We were driven away, and I assumed they were not taking us home.