“This is the day that you could be dead,” he says, and I feel the sudden coldness of the gun against my temple.
I very often have nightmares. Sometimes I think it’s because of the meds
I take for depression. Sometimes I sweat profusely in my bed and wake up
dripping and freezing cold. Sometimes the visions are vivid and I recall every
moment, every twist and turn of a sleeper’s story, but sometimes I can only
remember a single moment therein, or even nothing at all, I just remember I
wake up screaming, ululating, sometimes laughing too.
Last night I woke up screaming. I am in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
heading for Virunga, my driver whom I’ll call Samuel negotiating the potholes
in the road with great care and dexterity, hardly ever hitting more than twenty
on the clock. We are talking, sometimes about the heat though in the distance
there are clouds portending heavy rains. He tells me it’s a Rwandan legend that
when a person comes to visit and it rains it fetches good fortune, healthy
sustenance for the banana plantations. Sometimes we talk about what it’s like
to be a “muzungo” living in a developed country, and I explain
because he asks me. And then he wants to know about my children so I tell him
about them too. I regale him with stories about their mischief and he laughs. We
are getting along fine. But then
suddenly he pulls up the Toyota 4×4 and switches off the engine. Confused, I
ask what’s wrong? Is there something up with the vehicle or is he just tired
and needing rest? Or is there something more sinister? Are there Interhamwe
rebels lurking in the bushes? And it is
then that Samuel pulls out the gun and holds it to my head.
It isn’t easy to put into words how it feels. Cold I guess, not the actual
metal touching my skin, but my whole body, cold yet sweating once the initial
shock and confusion gives way to horrible realisation of what is happening
right there right then.
“Samuel?” I say, barely able to make the word audible.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I picture the horror on my face and weirdly it’s like one of those shots in a
film when they zoom in on a body yet the scenery around them shifts backwards.
The body here is mine and this is no film, this is real. Yes I am cold and yes
the sweat is dripping down my face as I start believing this is really it, this
is really the end.
“This is the day that you could be dead,” he says.
Nothing can prepare you for this moment, nobody ever said this is how you’re
expected to behave when someone points a gun at your head and tells you to get
out of the car. There are no pamphlets, as far as I’m aware, that deal with
this. But I’m almost certain that if there were, laughing would not be high up
on the list of do’s.
Because that’s what I do. I actually laugh. I don’t want to, I don’t mean to,
but my body just convulses into laughter. Nervous laughter? Maniacal?
Uncontrollable? Certainly.
I think the man is thrown. “Why do you laugh?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, truthfully. And in that moment I guess I know
instinctively that dialogue is the way, dialogue is the key to any hope of
survival. “Sam,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I won’t get out of the car. I can’t get out of the car.”
“You’re refusing,” he says.
“I am,” I say, “because I don’t want you to do this.”
“I don’t want to do it,” he says.
“So don’t,” I say, “You have children right?”
“Yes. I have four children.”
“Me too. And think of them should they lose you. Would they be upset,
heartbroken?”
“Of course.”
“Well of course mine would too, if they lost their daddy. Don’t you think
they’d be heartbroken at losing their daddy?”
I am not laughing now, I am just frozen in the moment, daring to believe I am
gaining control, consciously striving to keep this dialogue going for as long
as possible, prolonging the moment and my life as much as I can.
“So Samuel why are you doing this?”
“They told me to,” he says.
“But why? And who?” I wanted
to know.
“It is a warning. We cannot go on. We must turn back.”
“And if we don’t?”
“This is the day that you could be dead.”
At the time the politics are beyond me. I am naive I guess, I forget the advice I’ve been given, to cross-reference everything and trust nobody. I’d placed my trust in this man I barely knew and took him for the family man he said he was when he invited me to his house and gave me soda to drink and banana to eat and I hired him to take me to Virunga… not knowing that while he was a driver he was also a soldier and a spy.
But the politics are not important to this story because I like to think it’s really one of hope. My nightmare last night was vivid because it was real, it really did happen, and what got me through it was hope. I saw my children grieving for their daddy and hoped that wouldn’t happen, I hoped to see their faces again and run to them as soon as my plane hit the tarmac, pick them up and swing them around and never let go.
And that’s what happened, because I lived to tell the tale yet still wake up screaming, ululating. And yes, sometimes even laughing.
Mark Bickerton 