The Soccer War

DISPATCHES

The fire stood between us and linked us together. A boy added wood and the flames rose higher, illuminating our faces.

‘What is the name of your country?’

‘Poland.’

Poland was far away, beyond the Sahara, beyond the sea, to the north and the east. The Nana repeated the name aloud. ‘Is that how it is pronounced?’ he asked.

‘That’s the way,’ I answered. ‘That’s correct.’

‘They have snow there,’ Kwesi said. Kwesi worked in town. Once, at the cinema, there was a movie with snow. The children applauded and cried merrily, ‘Anko! Anko!’ asking to see the snow again. The white puffs fell and fell. Those are lucky countries, Kwesi said. They do not need to grow cotton; the cotton falls from the sky. They call it snow and walk on it and even throw it into the river.

We were stuck here by this fire by chance — three of us, my friend Kofi from Accra, a driver and I. Night had already fallen when the tyre blew — the third tyre, rotten luck. It happened on a side road, in the bush, near the village of Mpango in Ghana. Too dark to fix it. You have no idea how dark the night can be. You can stick out your hand and not see it. They have nights like that. We walked into the village.

The Nana received us. There is a Nana in every village, because Nana means boss, head man, a sort of mayor but with more authority. If you want to get married back home in your village, the mayor cannot stop you, but the Nana can. He has a Council of Elders, who meet and govern and ponder disputes. Once upon a time the Nana was a god. But now there is the independent government in Accra. The government passes laws and the Nana has to execute them. A Nana who does not carry them out is acting like a feudal lord and must be got rid of. The government is trying to make all Nanas join the party.

The Nana from Mpango was skinny and bald, with thin Sudanese lips. My friend Kofi introduced us. He explained where I was from and that they were to treat me as a friend.

‘I know him,’ my friend Kofi said. ‘He’s an African.’

That is the highest compliment that can be paid a European. It opens every door for him.

The Nana smiled and shook hands. You always greet a Nana by pressing his right hand between both of your own palms. This shows respect. He sat us down by the fire, where the elders had just been holding a meeting. The bonfire was in the middle of the village, and to the left and right, along the road, there were other fires. As many fires as huts. Perhaps twenty. We could see the fires and the figures of the women and the men and the silhouettes of the clay huts — they were all visible against a night so dark and deep that it felt heavy like a weight.

The bush had disappeared, even though the bush was everywhere. It began a hundred metres away, immobile, massive, a tightly packed, coarse thicket surrounding the village and us and the fire. The bush screamed and cried and crackled; it was alive; it smelled of wilted green; it was terrifying and tempting; you knew that you could touch it and be wounded and die, but tonight, this night, you couldn’t even see it.

Poland.

They did not know of any such country.

The elders looked at me with uncertainty, possibly suspicion. I wanted to break their mistrust somehow. I did not know how and I was tired.

‘Where are your colonies?’ the Nana asked.

My eyes were drooping, but I became alert. People often asked that question. Kofi had asked it first, long ago, and my answer was a revelation to him. From then on he was always ready for the question with a little speech prepared, illustrating its absurdity.

Kofi answered: ‘They don’t have colonies, Nana. Not all white countries have colonies. Not all whites are colonialists. You have to understand that whites often colonize whites.’

The elders shuddered and smacked their lips. They were surprised. Once I would have been surprised that they were surprised. But not any more. I can’t bear that language, that language of white, black and yellow. The language of race is disgusting.

Kofi explained: ‘For a hundred years they taught us that the white is somebody greater, super, extra. They had their clubs, their swimming pools, their neighbourhoods, their whores, their cars and their burbling language. We knew that England was the only country in the world, that God was English, that only the English travelled around the globe. We knew exactly as much as they wanted us to know. Now it’s hard to change.’

Kofi and I stuck up for each other; we no longer spoke about the subject of skin, but here, among new faces, the subject had to come up.

One of the elders asked, ‘Are all the women in your country white?’

‘All of them.’

‘Are they beautiful?’

‘They’re very beautiful,’ I answered.

‘Do you know what he told me, Nana?’ Kofi interjected. ‘That during their summer, the women take off their clothes and lie in the sun to get black skin. The ones that become dark are proud of it, and others admire them for being as tanned as blacks.’

Very good Kofi, you got them. The elders’ eyes lit up at the thought of those bodies darkening in the sun, because, you know how it is, boys are the same all over the world: they like that sort of thing. The elders rubbed their hands together, smiled; women’s bodies in the sun; they snuggled up inside their loose kente robes that looked like Roman togas.

‘My country has no colonies,’ I said after a time, ‘and there was a time when my country was a colony. I respect what you’ve suffered, but, we too, have suffered horrible things: there were streetcars, restaurants, districts nur für Deutsch. There were camps, war, executions. You don’t know camps, war and executions. That was what we called fascism. It’s the worst colonialism.’

They listened, frowning, and closed their eyes. Strange things had been said, which they needed time to take in.

‘Tell me, what does a streetcar look like?’

The concrete is important. Perhaps there was not enough room. No, it had nothing to do with room; it was contempt. One person stepping on another. Not only Africa is a cursed land. Every land can be like it — Europe, America, any place. The world depends on people, needs to step on them.

‘But Nana, we were free afterwards. We built cities and ran lights into the villages. Those who couldn’t read were taught how to read.’

The Nana stood up and grasped my hand. The rest of the elders did the same. We had become friends, przyjaciele, amigos.

I wanted to eat.

I could smell meat in the air. I could smell a smell that was not of the jungle or of palm or of coconuts; it was the smell of a kielbasa, the kind you could get for 11.60 zlotys at that inn in the Mazury. And a large beer.

Instead we ate goat.

Poland … snow falling, women in the sun, no colonies. There had been a war; there were homes to build; somebody teaching somebody to read.

I had told them something, I rationalized. It was too late to go into details. I wanted to go to sleep. We were leaving at dawn; a lecture was impossible. Anyway, they had worries of their own.

Suddenly I felt shame, a sense of having missed the mark. It was not my country I had described. Snow and the lack of colonies — that’s accurate enough, but it is not what we know or what we carry around within ourselves: nothing of our pride, of our life, nothing of what we breathe.

Snow — that’s the truth, Nana. Snow is marvellous. And it’s terrible. It sets you free with your skis in the mountains and it kills the drunkard lying by the fence. Snow, because in January, January 1945, the January offensive, there were ashes, ashes everywhere: Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Szczecin. And bricks, freezing hands, vodka and people laying bricks — this is where the bed will go and the wardrobe right here — people filing back into the centre of the city, and ice on the window panes, and no water, and those nights, the meetings till dawn, and angry discussions and later the fires of Silesia, and the blast furnaces, and the temperature—160 degrees centigrade — in August in front of the blast furnaces, our tropics, our Africa, black and hot. Oh, what a load of shit — What do you mean? — Oh, what a lovely little war — Shut up about the war! We want to live, to be happy, we want an apartment, a TV, no, first a motor-scooter — what air! No clouds, no turning back, if Herr Adenauer thinks, too many graves. A Pole can drink and a Pole can fight, why can’t we work? What if we never learn how? Our ships are on every sea, success in exports, success in boxing, youngsters in gloves, wet gloves pulling a tractor out of the mud, Nowa Huta, build, build, build, Tychy and Wizow, bright apartments, upward mobility, a cowherd yesterday and an engineer today — Do you call that an engineer? and the whole streetcar burst out laughing. Tell me: what does a streetcar look like? It’s very simple: four wheels, an electrical pick-up, enough, enough, it’s all a code, nothing but signs in the bush, in Mpango, and the key to the code is in my pocket.

We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness. We know its configuration, but there is no way to make it accessible to others. It will never be right. Something, the most important thing, the most significant thing, something remains unsaid.

Relate one year of my country — it does not matter which one: let us say, 1957. And one month of that year — say, July. And just one day — let us say, the sixth.

No.

Yet that day, that month, that year exist in us, somehow, because we were there, walking that street, or digging coal, or cutting the forest, and if we were walking along that street how can we then describe it (it could be Kraków) so that you can see its movement, its climate, its persistence and changeability, its smell and its hum?

They cannot see it. You cannot see it, anything, the night, Mpango, the thick bush, Ghana, the fire dying out, the elders going off to sleep, the Nana dozing, and snow falling somewhere, and women like blacks, thoughts, ‘They are learning to read, he said something like that,’ thoughts, ‘They had a war, ach, a war, he said, yes, no colonies, that country, Poland, white and they have no colonies,’ thoughts, the bush screams, this strange world.