Good Morning Comrades Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  AFTERWORD

  FURTHER READING

  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Copyright Page

  Biblioasis International Translation Series

  General Editor: Stephen Henighan

  I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland)

  translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

  Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (Angola)

  translated by Stephen Henighan

  to Comrade António

  to all the Cuban comrades

  And you, Angola

  “Beneath the moist veil of rage, complaints and humiliations,

  I sense your presence, a rosy vapour rising and expelling

  the nocturnal darkness.”

  —Carlos Drummond de Andrade

  I

  “You, nostalgic sadness, make the past live again

  You reignite extinct happiness.”

  —Óscar Ribas, Culturando as Musas

  “But Comrade António, don’t you prefer to live in a free country?”

  I liked to ask this question when I came into the kitchen. I’d open the refrigerator and take out the water bottle. Before I could reach for a glass, Comrade António was passing me one. His hands left greasy prints on the sides, but I didn’t have the courage to refuse this gesture. I filled the glass, drank one swallow, two, and waited for his reply.

  Comrade António breathed. Then he turned off the tap. He cleaned his hands, busied himself with the stove. Then he said: “Son, in the white man’s time things weren’t like this. . . .”

  He smiled. I really wanted to understand that smile. I’d heard incredible stories of bad treatment, bad living conditions, miserable wages and all the rest. But Comrade António liked this sentence in support of the Portuguese and gave me a mysterious smile.

  “António, didn’t you work for a Portuguese man?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “He was a Mr. Manager, a good boss, treated me real good . . .”

  “Was that in Bié Province?”

  “No. Right here in Luanda. I been here a long time, son. . . . Even way back before you were born, son.”

  Sitting at the table, I waited for him to say something more. Comrade António was doing the kitchen chores. He was smiling, but he remained silent. Every day he had the same smell. Even when he’d bathed; he always seemed to have those kitchen smells. He took the water bottle, filled it with boiled water and put it back in the fridge.

  “But, António, I still want more water . . .”

  “No, son, that’s enough,” he said. “Otherwise there won’t be any cold water for lunch and your mother will be upset.”

  When he was putting away the water bottle and cleaning the counter, Comrade António wanted to do his work without me there. I got in his way as he moved around the kitchen, besides which that space belonged to him alone. He didn’t like having people around.

  “But António. . . . Don’t you think that everybody should be in charge of their own country? What were the Portuguese doing here?”

  “Hey, son! Back then the city was clean. . . . It had everything you needed, nothing was missing.”

  “But, António, don’t you see that it didn’t have everything? People didn’t earn a fair wage. Black people couldn’t be managers, for example. . . .”

  “But there was always bread in the store, son. The buses worked perfectly.” He was just smiling.

  “But nobody was free, António. . . . Don’t you see that?”

  “Nobody was free like what? Sure they were free, they could walk down the street and everything . . .”

  “That’s not what I mean, António.” I got up from my seat. “It wasn’t Angolans who were running the country, it was the Portuguese . . . It can’t be that way.”

  Comrade António was just laughing.

  He smiled at my words, and seeing me getting worked up, he said: “What a kid!” Then he opened the door to the yard, sought out Comrade João, the driver, with his eyes and told him: “This kid’s terrible!” Comrade João smiled, sitting in the shade of the mango tree.

  Comrade João was the ministry driver. Since my father worked in the ministry, he also drove the family. Sometimes I took advantage of the lift and got a ride to school with him. He was thin and drank a lot. Once in a while he showed up very early in the morning, already drunk, and nobody wanted to ride with him. Comrade António said that he was used to it, but I was afraid. One day he gave me a ride to school and we started to talk.

  “João, did you like it when the Portuguese were here?”

  “Like what, son?”

  “You know, before independence they were the ones who were in charge here. Did you like that time?”

  “People say the country was different. . . . I don’t know. . . .”

  “Of course it was different, João, but it’s different today, too. The comrade president is Angolan, it’s Angolans who look after the country, not the Portuguese . . .”

  “That’s the way it is, son . . .” João liked to laugh too, and afterwards he whistled.

  “Did you work with Portuguese people, João?”

  “Yes, but I was very young . . . And I was in the bush with the guerrillas as well. . . .”

  “Comrade António likes to say really great things about the Portuguese,” I said to provoke him.

  “Comrade António is older,” João said. I didn’t understand what he meant.

  As we passed some very ugly buildings, I waved to a comrade teacher. João asked me who she was, and I replied: “It’s Teacher María, that’s the complex where the Cuban teachers live.”

  He dropped me at the school. My classmates were all laughing because I’d got a lift to school. We gave anybody who got a ride a hard time, so I knew they were going to make fun of me. But that wasn’t all they were laughing about.

  “What is it?” I asked. Murtala was talking about something that had happened the previous afternoon, with Teacher María. “Teacher María, the wife of Comrade Teacher Ángel?”

  “Yes, that one,” Helder said, laughing. “Then this morning, over in the classroom, everybody was making a lot of noise and she tried to give a detention point to Célio and Cláudio . . . Oh! . . . They got up in a hurry to take off and the teacher said. . . .” Helder was laughing so hard he couldn’t go on. He was all red. “The teacher said: ‘You get down here,’ or ‘there’ or something!”

  “Yeah, and after that?” I was starting to laugh too, it was contagious.

  “They threw themselves right down on the floor.”

  We all burst out laughing. Bruno and I liked to joke with the Cuban teachers as well. Since at times they didn’t understand Portuguese very well, we took advantage by speaking quickly or talking nonsense.

  “But you still don’t know the best part.” Murtala came up to my side.

  “What’s that?”

  “She started crying and took off home!” Murtala started laughing flat out as well. “She split just because of that.”

  We had math class with Teacher Ángel. When he came in he was upset. I signalled to Murtala, but we couldn’t laugh. Before the class started the comrade teacher said that his wife was very sad because the pupils had been undisciplined, and that a country undergoing reconstruction needed a lot of discipline. He also talked about Comrade Che Guevara, he talked about discipline and about how we had to behave well so that things would go well in our country. As it happened, nobody complained about Célio or Cláudio, otherwise, with this business of the revolution they’d have got a detention point.
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  At recess Petra went to tell Cláudio that they should apologize to Comrade Teacher María because she was really cool, she was Cuban and she was in Angola to help us. But Cláudio didn’t want to hear what Petra was saying, and he told her that he’d just followed the teacher’s orders, that she’d told them to “get down here,” and so they threw themselves on the floor.

  We liked Teacher Ángel. He was very simple, very humorous. The first day of class he saw Cláudio with a watch on his wrist and asked him if the watch belonged to him. Cláudio laughed and said yes. The Comrade Teacher said in Spanish, “Look, I’ve been working for many years and I still don’t have one,” and we were really surprised because almost everybody in our year had a watch. The physics teacher was also surprised when he saw so many calculators in the classroom.

  But it wasn’t just Teacher Ángel and Teacher María. We liked all the Cuban teachers, because with them classes started to be different. The teachers chose two monitors to help with discipline, which we liked at first because it was a sort of secondary responsibility (after that of class delegate), but later we didn’t like it very much because to be a monitor “it was essential to help the less capable compañeros,” as the comrade teachers said to us in Spanish, and you had to know everything about that subject and you couldn’t get less than an A. But the worst part of all was that you had to do homework, because the monitor was the one who checked homework at the beginning of the class.

  Of course going to the teacher to tell who had done their homework and who hadn’t sometimes led to fights at recess. Paulo could tell you how he got taken away to hospital with a bloody nose.

  At the end of the day the comrade principal came to talk to us. We liked it when someone came into the classroom because we had to pay attention and do that little song that most of us took advantage of to shout: “Good afternooooon. . . . comraaaaade. . . . principaaaaal!”

  Then she told us that we would have a surprise visit from the comrade inspector of the Ministry of Education. She knew it was going to be some day soon and we had to behave well, clean the school, the classroom, the desks, come to school looking “presentable” (I think that’s what she said), and the teachers would explain the rest later.

  Nobody said anything, we didn’t even ask a question. Of course we only stood up when the comrade principal said, “All right, until tomorrow,” and that “until tomorrow” wasn’t so offhand because it would be different if she said, “Until next week.”

  So we stood up and said really loudly: “Untiiiiiiil . . . tomorrooooow . . . comraaaaade . . . . principaaaaal!”

  and then I saw that, in a country, the government’s one thing and the people are another.

  If, when I woke up, I remembered the pleasure of an early morning breakfast, I’d wake up in a good mood. Having breakfast early in Luanda – oh yeah! There’s a freshness in the air that’s almost cold and makes you feel like drinking milk with your coffee and lying in wait for the smell of the morning. Sometimes even when my parents were at the table, we were silent. Maybe we were smelling the morning, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  Comrade António had keys to the house, but sometimes I was on the balcony and I’d see him sitting out there in the greenery. My mother had already told him not to come so early, but it seems as though at times the elders don’t sleep much. So he’d stay out on the benches, just sitting there. When he heard movement in the house he’d approach slowly.

  “Good morning, son.”

  “Good morning, Comrade António.” I waited for him to close the front door. “You were here very early again, António.”

  “Yes. . . . I was just sitting out there, son.” He was smiling. “Is the lady of the house up?”

  Comrade António always asked this question, but I don’t know why. He knew that my mother was always the first to wake up. Maybe he didn’t expect an answer, but I only figured this out much later.

  “Did you come on the bus today, António?”

  “No, son, I walked; it’s cool at this hour.”

  “From the Golf neighbourhood all the way here?”

  “Twenty minutes, son . . . Twenty minutes . . .”

  But it wasn’t true. Comrade António liked to say “twenty minutes” for everything. The water just boiled twenty minutes ago, my mother went out twenty minutes ago, lunch would be ready in twenty minutes.

  I stayed on the balcony. In the garden there were some slugs which I figured had to be elders because they always woke up early. There were a lot of them. After breakfast, sitting on the balcony like that with the cool breeze, watching the slugs going wherever they were going, made me drowsy again. I even fell asleep.

  It was always the sun that woke me. It was totally impossible on my balcony to work out where it was going. My leg was hot and asleep, I had an annoying itch. I scratched. Afterwards I heard António’s voice coming from the kitchen.

  “Were you callin’ me, António?” I went into the kitchen.

  “Son, your aunt telephoned, son. . . .”

  “What aunt, António?”

  “The aunt from Portugal.”

  “Oh hell, António . . . and you didn’t even wake me up . . . I wanted to talk to her.”

  “She wanted to talk to your father, son.” He was smiling.

  “So . . . She wanted to talk to my father, but she would’ve talked to me. . . . And what did she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything, son. She just told me to tell your father she’d called, looks like she’s going to call again around lunch time.”

  “But what a time to call, António. I didn’t hear the phone . . .”

  “It wasn’t even twenty minutes ago, son.”

  The smell from the kitchen, the whistle of the pot, Comrade António’s movements: everything told me it must be eleven o’clock. I still hadn’t done my math and chemistry homework, and we were supposed to eat lunch at twelve-thirty. I decided I wasn’t going to take a bath because I had phys. ed. in the afternoon. The bath could wait until evening.

  I went upstairs and “did my lessons,” as we used to say. My mother had taught me to study the subject first and do the assignment afterwards, but when I didn’t have time, I took a quick look at the material and solved the problems right away. Cláudio, Bruno, and especially Murtala, always did their homework like that, and they said it worked. But Petra was always studying. That girl could drive you crazy, the next day she knew the material cold. When we weren’t sure about something during a test, we always asked her.

  My mother arrived. First she’d go to the kitchen to make sure that lunch was on the way, then she’d hang up the keys on the key-holder, then she’d come upstairs to ask me if I’d done my homework and she would go and have a bath. I might be wrong, but that was what she usually did.

  “Was it you who spoke to Aunt Dada?” She kissed me on the cheek, went into the bathroom and turned on the tap. (I knew she’d do that!)

  “No, I was doin’ my homework . . . It was Comrade António.”

  “But António said you were on the balcony.”

  “Yeah, I was doing my homework on the balcony.”

  “But I’ve already told you kids that when the phone rings it’s your job to answer it. Don’t make Comrade António leave the kitchen to answer the phone.” The tone of her voice had changed.

  “But he did it so quickly, Mum, I didn’t even have time . . .” She went into the bathroom. The sound of the water interrupted our conversation. So much the better.

  The telephone rang. I ran to answer it, convinced that it was Aunt Dada. I didn’t know her, but I’d spoken to her on the phone many times, which was kind of funny because I only knew her voice. Once she had passed me over to her son, and my sisters and I spent the whole afternoon laughing at the way he talked. I was hardly even able to reply, I almost fell on the floor from laughing so hard, until my mother finally had to say that I was in the bathroom suffering from colic. My aunt didn’t make me want to laugh so much because she spoke very slowly
, she had what the elders – and Cláudio could never hear me say this – called a “sweet voice.”

  But it wasn’t my aunt on the telephone. It was Paula from the National Radio station, and she wanted to speak to my mother. I said she was in the bathroom, but she decided to wait. Paula was another person who had a sweet voice, I really liked listening to her voice on the radio, but I was frightened the first time I saw her because I thought someone with a voice like hers would be tiny, and she was tall. When I heard my mother say, “Yes, I’ll ask him if he wants to. . . . ,” I suspected it was something to do with me.

  “Look, Paula’s going to do a program tomorrow about May Day and she wants to collect testimonies from Young Pioneers. Do you want to go?”

  “‘Testimonies’ means going there and talking?” I said, even though I knew what the word meant.

  “Yes, you prepare something and tomorrow she’ll come and get you and the two of you’ll make a recording.”

  “But it’s for a program?”

  “More or less. I think it’s going to run on the news, it’s a message from the children to the workers.”

  “So do I have to write an essay, Mum? Aw, that’s a lot of work.”

  “No, you don’t have to write an essay because they’re not going to let you read an essay, only a few words. . . .”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Not with the writing, son. . . . You write what you want. I can correct the mistakes, but the text has to be your own work.”

  “Okay. I want to go to the National Radio studio. Maybe she’ll let me see all their equipment.”

  “Yes, maybe, you’ll have to ask her.”

  It was already lunch time. My sisters arrived from school and my father arrived, too. The house got really noisy, plus the noise of the radio in the living room so we could hear the news, plus Comrade António’s radio in the kitchen, plus my younger sister who wanted to talk about everything that had happened at school that morning. She knew she had to hurry because at the stroke of one she would have to end her story to let my parents listen to the news.