The Soccer War

PLAN FOR A BOOK THAT COULD HAVE STARTED RIGHT HERE

1

I have come home from Africa: a jump from a tropical roasting-spit into a snowbank.

‘You’re so tanned. Have you been in Zakopane?’

Will the Polish imagination never stretch further than Plock, Siemiatycze, Rzeszów and Zakopane? I’m working on Polityka. My current editor-in-chief, Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, sends me into the provinces — yes, I’m to go on living in the bush, but in our own, native Polish bush. Somewhere, perhaps in Olecko or Ornet, I read that a great, almost global, conflict has broken out in the Congo. It is the beginning of July 1960. The Congo — the most closed, unknown and inaccessible country of Africa — has gained its independence, and at once the army revolts, the settlers flee, the Belgian paratroopers arrive, the anarchy, the hysteria, the slaughter — it has all begun; the whole indescribable mélange is on the front pages of the papers. I buy a train ticket and return to Warsaw.

2

I ask Rakowski to send me to the Congo. I’m already caught up in it. I’ve already got the fever.

3

The trip turns out to be impossible. Everyone from the socialist countries is being thrown out of the Congo. On a Polish passport there would be no way of getting there. As a consolation, the travel committee allots me some hard currency and a ticket for a trip to Nigeria. But what’s Nigeria to me? Nothing’s going on there (at the moment).

4

I walk around depressed and heart-broken. Suddenly a glimmer of hope — somebody claims that in Cairo there’s a Czech journalist who wants to force his way into the Congo by the jungle route. Officially, I leave for Nigeria, but secretly have the airline ticket rewritten for Cairo and fly out of Warsaw. Only a few colleagues are in on my plan.

5

In Cairo I find the Czech, who is named Jarda Boucek. We sit in his apartment, which reminds me of a minor museum of Arabic art. Beyond the window roars the gigantic hot city, a stone oasis cut in half by the navy-blue Nile. Jarda wants to get to the Congo by way of Sudan, which means by air to Khartoum, and then by air to Juba, and in Juba we will have to buy a car, and everything that will happen after that is a big question mark. The goal of the expedition is Stanleyville, the capital of the eastern province of the Congo, in which the Lumumba government has taken refuge (Lumumba himself has already been arrested and his friend Antoine Gizenga is leading the government). I watch as Jarda’s index finger journeys up the Nile, stops briefly for a little tourism (here there is nothing but crocodiles; here the jungle begins), turns to the south-west, and arrives on the banks of the Congo river where the name ‘Stanleyville’ appears beside a little circle with a dot in it. I tell Jarda that I want to take part in this expedition and that I even have official instructions to go to Stanleyville (which is a lie). He agrees, but warns me that I might pay for this journey with my life (which later turns out to be close to the truth). He shows me a copy of his will, which he has deposited with his embassy. I am to do the same.

6

After a thousand problems getting a Sudanese visa, I change my Warsaw — Cairo — Lagos ticket for a Warsaw — Khartoum — Juba ticket at the United Arab Airlines office and fly to the Sudan. Jarda stays behind in Cairo to wait for another Czech. They will catch up with me in Khartoum and we will fly on together. Khartoum is provincial and nightmarishly hot — I am dying of boredom and the heat.

7

Jarda arrives with his colleague, Duszan Prowaznik, another journalist. We wait a few days for the plane, and finally fly to the southern Sudan, to Juba — a small garrison-settlement in the midst of an incredible wasteland. Nobody wants to sell us a car, but in the end we find a daredevil (in Juba, too, the opinion prevails that anyone who travels to the Congo is as good as dead) who agrees, for a large sum of money, to drive us to the border, more than 200 kilometres away.

8

The next afternoon we reach the border, guarded by a half-naked policeman with a half-naked girl and a little boy. They don’t give us any trouble and everything starts to look enjoyable and idyllic until, a dozen or so kilometres on, in the village of Aba, we are stopped by a patrol of Congolese gendarmes. I forgot to add that back in Cairo the minister of Lumumba’s government, Pierre Mulele (later the leader of the Simba uprising, murdered) had written out a visa to the Congo for us — by hand, on an ordinary sheet of paper. But who cares about that visa? The name Mulele means nothing to the gendarmes. Their grim, closed faces, half-hidden in the depths of their helmets, are unfriendly. They order us to return to the Sudan. Go back, they say, because beyond here it’s dangerous and the further you go the worse it gets. As if they were the sentries of a hell that began behind them. We can’t go back to the Sudan, Jarda tells them, because we don’t have return visas (which is true). The bargaining starts. For purposes of corrupting I have brought along several cartons of cigarettes, and the Czechs have a box of costume jewellery. We bribe the gendarmes with a few trinkets (beads, clip-on ear-rings), and they permit us to go on, appointing a sergeant named Seraphim to escort us. In Aba we also rent a car with a local driver. It is an old, enormous, entirely decrepit Ford. But old, enormous, entirely decrepit Fords are by nature unfailing and in them you can drive across the whole continent of Africa and a bit more.

9

At daybreak we start towards Stanleyville: a thousand kilometres of muddy dirt road, driving the whole time through a sombre green tunnel, in a stench of decomposing leaves, entangled branches and roots, because we are travelling deeper and deeper into the greatest jungle in Africa, into an eerie world of rotting, proliferating, monstrously exaggerated botany. We are driving through a tropical wilderness that fills you with awe and delight, and every so often we have to pull the Ford out of the rust-coloured clay or out of a bog overgrown with brownish-grey duckweed. Along the road we are stopped by gendarmerie patrols, drunk or hungry, indifferent or aggressive — the rebellious, undisciplined army that, gone wild, has taken over the country, robbing and raping. When stopped, we push our driver Seraphim out of the car and watch what happens. If he falls into an embrace with the gendarmes we breathe easy, because that means Seraphim has come across his tribal kinsmen. But if they start punching his head and then beat him with the butts of their rifles, our skin crawls, because the same thing — or worse, perhaps — awaits us. I do not know what made us want to keep going along that road (on which it was so easy to die) — was it stupidity and a lack of imagination, or passion and ambition, or mania and honour, or our folly and our belief that we were obliged now to do it even though we had imposed an obligation upon ourselves? — and as we drive on I feel that with each kilometre another barrier has come down behind us, another gate has been slammed shut, and turning back becomes more and more impossible. After two days we roll into Stanleyville.