The Soccer War

MORE OF THE PLAN OF A BOOK THAT COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

10

In this book that I haven’t written for lack of time and sufficient will-power, I would like to include the story of the few hours that we lived through after the night when Stanleyville learned that Lumumba had been murdered, and that he had died in circumstances so bestial that they trampled all dignity. We were wakened by someone’s piercing shout in the morning. We jumped out of bed — I was sleeping with Duszan in one room, and Jarda was next door — and dashed to the windows. In the street in front of our hotel (it was called the Reśidence Equateur), gendarmes were beating a white man to within an inch of his life. Two of them had his arms twisted back in such a way that the man was forced to kneel and stick his head out, while the third was kicking him in the face with his boot. We heard shouts from the corridor as other gendarmes went from room to room dragging whites out into the street. It was obvious that the gendarmes had begun a morning of spontaneous revenge directed at the white colonists whom they blamed for the death of Lumumba. I looked at Duszan: he was standing there, pale, with fear in his eyes, and I think that I too must have been standing there, pale, with fear in my eyes. We listened to hear if the sound of clumping boots and banging rifle butts against doors was headed our way, and, nervously, hurriedly, we started getting dressed because it’s bad to be wearing only pyjamas or a shirt in front of uniformed people — it puts you at a disadvantage right away. The one in the street was screaming more loudly and was bleeding profusely. In the meantime, more whites appeared, pushed out of the hotel by the gendarmes; I didn’t even know where these people were coming from, since our hotel was usually empty.

11

For an instant we are saved by chance or, more exactly, by the fact that our rooms don’t open on to the corridor but on to the terrace at the end of the building, and the gendarmes hadn’t taken the trouble to poke into every corner. They threw neighbours, now also beaten up, on to a truck and drove off. Immediately it grew as quiet as a graveyard. Jarda, who had come into our room, was carrying his radio. The Stanleyville station was giving government communiqués appealing to all the whites still in the city to stay off the streets and not to appear in public because of the behaviour of isolated elements and certain military groups which the government ‘is not able to control fully.’ Since there was no sense in sitting around in the room, we went down to the lobby, thinking that somebody might tell us what was going on. We were not tourists, but correspondents who had to work, and the more dramatic the circumstance, the more we had to work. There was no one in the lobby. We sat in armchairs, around low tables, facing the door. It was hot and we were developing a thirst for beer even though beer was not to be dreamed of. In the last few days we had become thoroughly famished. Our daily nourishment consisted of one can of Dutch sausages for the three of us. There were five little sausages to a can. We ate one sausage each and then drew lots: the one with the short straw didn’t get a second sausage. Aside from those two sausages (or that one) we didn’t eat anything, and on top of that, our supplies of sausages were running out. So we sat in the armchairs, thirsty and dripping sweat. Suddenly a jeep drove up in front of the hotel and a gang of young people jumped out with automatic rifles in their hands. It was clearly a hit squad, a vengeance patrol. Yes, you had only to look at their faces: they were out for blood. They came storming into the lobby and surrounded us, pointing their weapons at our heads. At that moment I honestly thought: this is the end. I didn’t move. I sat immobile not because of any courage, but for purely technical reasons: it felt as if my body had turned to lead, that it was too heavy for me to budge it. Just then, when our fate seemed already to be determined, the following occurred: the leader of the squad trotted into the lobby. He was young, a boy, mulatto, with a mad look in his eyes. He rushed in, saw us and stopped. He stopped because he spotted Jarda. Their eyes met and they looked at each other in silence, without a word, without a gesture. They looked at each other in this way for a long while and the mulatto seemed to calm down, as though thinking something over. Then, without a word, he motioned to his people with his automatic rifle and they — also without a word — turned away from us, got back into the jeep and drove away.

‘That’s Bernard Salmon,’ said Jarda. ‘He was once in Cairo as Lumumba’s envoy. I interviewed him.’

12

We went back upstairs to our rooms to write our dispatches about Lumumba’s death and about what the city looked like afterwards — the city where he once lived and worked. Each of us wrote something brief because, as a matter of fact, we had little information and what we had lived through that morning was not fit to appear as part of the next day’s official press coverage. There then arose the problem of taking our dispatches to the post office at the other end of town: we — that is, white people — would have to drive across a city terrorized by the gendarmes and the vengeance squads. I haven’t mentioned that immediately upon arriving in Stanleyville we had pooled our resources to buy a very used car, a Taunus, from an Indian. In this car (Jarda was driving) we set off for the post office. A very hot and humid afternoon. The city was so deserted that we did not see a single car or person. It was the model empty city, dead concrete, glass, asphalt. Dead palm trees. We reached the post office building, alone in an open space. It was locked. We started banging on the doors, one after another. No one answered. Duszan found a small metal shutter that opened on to the cellar below, and we slipped into the dark, musty passageway. At the end there were stairs that led up into the cavernously empty main hall, covered with litter. We didn’t know what to do next, so we simply stood there. At the other end of the hall was a door, and behind it were more stairs, leading to the second floor, and we went up to see if anyone was there. We started up to the third floor, the top one. If the police caught us in this place, deserted now but still strategically important, they would, we feared, treat us as dangerous saboteurs. Finally, going from room to room, we stumbled upon a hall with more than a dozen telex machines and a battery of transmitters. A hunched-over, dried-up African approached us from the corner.

‘Brother,’ I said, ‘connect us with Europe. Connect us with the world. We have to send important dispatches.’ He took our texts and sat down at the machine. We returned to the car; the street was empty. We were on our way back to the hotel and it seemed that everything would go well when suddenly a jeep full of gendarmes pulled out from around a corner and we found ourselves facing each other, eye to eye. I don’t know what happened, or rather, I think that what happened was this: the presence of whites in the street was so improbable that the gendarmes took our car for a phantom, an illusion — they were dumbfounded and they did not react. The confrontation lasted only a moment, because Jarda had the presence of mind to whip the steering wheel around and cut into the nearest sidestreet. We made a run for it. We hadn’t reached the hotel yet when Jarda slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a stop in the middle of the street. We jumped out, leaving the doors open behind us, and sprinted for the hotel. When we locked the door of the room behind us, we were all panting and we wiped the sweat from our foreheads.

13

There were also calm, peaceful days, when we believed that we could appear in the streets without being beaten up and set out into town without fear. We might go to the airport, looking for our airplanes that were supposed to bring help. At that time the Gizenga government, or rather the handful of people who had managed to get from Leopoldville to Stanleyville with Gizenga, was officially recognized by our countries as the legal government of the Congo. We, in turn, were the only people who had managed to come to Stanleyville from Europe and the local authorities — having no one else at hand — treated us more like ambassadors and ministers than simple correspondents, drudges of the pen. The government, however, did not have full control of the situation and our positions were not esteemed enough to protect us against the fists of the angry populace. There was a small consolation in the fact that the authentic ministers of the Congolese government were beaten up by their own gendarmes, which we saw with our own eyes. And so, when a peaceful day came along, we repaired to the airport. We had found a spot on the porch of an abandoned house with a good view of the runway and we always went there. ‘Today they’ll come for sure,’ Jarda would say each time. We would sit staring for hours into the sunny sky in which an airplane was supposed to appear. But nothing moved in the sky; and there was silence in the air. I doubted more and more that an airplane would ever come, but I never said so aloud, suspecting that Jarda might have had some special information after all.

14

One day a patrol of gendarmes appeared at the hotel. They took us to headquarters, the army command post, located on the grounds of the barracks. Gendarmes with their women and children wandered between the barrack buildings; they were cooking, washing, eating, lying around — it looked like a big Gypsy camp. Sabo, a massive, reddish ogre, greeted us in the command post. He ordered us to sit down and then asked, ‘When is the aid going to come?’ I waited to see what Jarda would say because I thought he might know. Jarda told a story, that the airplanes were waiting in Cairo but had been refused the right to fly over the Sudan by its dictator and there was no other air route.

‘We have nothing left here,’ said the major. ‘We have no ammunition, no food. The commander of the army’—that was General Lundula—‘is himself distributing the last drops of gasoline. If nothing changes, Kobutu and his mercenaries will have us by the throat.’ And here the major quite literally grabbed himself by the throat, so that the veins on his temples stood out. The atmosphere was tense and unpleasant; we felt helpless, weak. ‘The army is rebelling,’ the major went on. ‘They are hungry and riled up; they refuse to obey orders, they are asking whose fault it is that no aid has come. If the aid does not arrive, the general staff will be forced to hand you over to the gendarmes as the culprits. That will calm things down for a while. I’m sorry, but I have no other way out. We’ve lost control of them’—and with his hand he motioned towards the window, through which we could see half-naked gendarmes wandering about.

15

We returned to the hotel: the first Christians, about to be thrown to the lions. To me it was obvious that help would never come, and Jarda and Duszan were now starting to share my fatalism. We had only a few days left to live. We tried feverishly to figure out what to do. We had to escape. But how? Escape was impossible. There were no airplanes and our car would be stopped on the way out of town. We wondered whether we should hide out in one of the houses abandoned by the Belgians. But that would give us only a few days, and somebody was bound to spot us and denounce us or else we would die of hunger. There was no way out: we were trapped, and the more we struggled, the more the noose would tighten. One hope remained: that I could talk to H.B., who could help us. H.B. worked in the United Nations headquarters in Stanleyville. People from the United Nations form a club unto themselves. Many of them are pretentious: they look on everything and everyone from a global perspective, which means, simply, that they look down. They repeat the word ‘global’ in every sentence, which makes it difficult to settle everyday human problems with them. Nevertheless, we decided that we should go to see H.B., who was an acquaintance of mine. He invited me to supper, since the UN always has enough to eat. I could not remember the last time I had eaten supper; indeed, for a long time, I had not eaten anything at all. During that feast, UN soldiers in blue helmets watched over us. Their presence enabled me to experience a blessed moment of security that evening, two hours in which I knew that no one was going to beat me, lock me up, or put a pistol to my head.

‘Commissioner,’ I told H.B. as he lay back in a colonial armchair after supper, ‘my friends and I must get out of here urgently. We’d be very grateful if you were able to arrange things for us.’ But in reply H.B. lectured me on the neutrality of the UN, which cannot help anyone because so doing would immediately lay it open to charges of partiality. ‘The United Nations can only observe,’ he said. I got the idea that my request had sounded rather unimpressive, and that I would have to bring up heavier artillery. At the same time, I could not let H.B. in on our reasons for having to clear out (and fast), because if he found out about our conflict with the Lumumbists he would immediately broadcast it to the whole world (that is, broadcast it globally).

‘Commissioner,’ I began in a new style, ‘I wish you a long life and we know that, unfortunately, life is full of changes and one day you might be on top and the next day you might be on the bottom. There might come a day when you need my help’—I didn’t believe it for a second—‘so let’s build a bridge. I will be the first to use it by crossing this raging torrent, but in the future, perhaps, this same bridge will allow you to cross a raging torrent of your own.’ And H.B. helped.

16

Two days later a car flying the banner of the United Nations carried us to the airport. We had left our Taunus in the street, with the keys in the ignition. On the runway stood a four-engined aircraft without any insignia or markings. We had no idea where it might take us, but the important thing was to get out of Stanleyville. The people at the airport were saying that we would be flying to Juba (which meant to the north-east), but after take-off the aircraft headed south-east and an hour later we found that we were looking not at the monotonous brown-grey of the savannah but at the intense green of the Kivu mountains, awesome and soothing at once. This was Africa the arch-beautiful, the fairy-tale Africa of forests and lakes, of a cloudless and peaceful sky. The change in direction was puzzling, but there was no one to ask about it: the crew was locked in the cockpit, and we were alone in the empty fuselage of the aircraft. Finally the transport began its descent, and a lake as big as a sea appeared, and, then, beside the lake, an airport. We rolled towards a building with a sign that said ‘Usumbura’ (now Bujumbura, the present-day capital of the republic of Burundi, then a Belgian territory).

17

Le Monde, among other papers, later wrote about what was done to us in Usumbura. Belgian paratroopers were waiting on the airport tarmac. If they are soldiers from Belgium, I thought, they will treat us with humanity. But the units stationed in Usumbura were made up of Congo colonials — rapacious, brutal and primitive. They treated us not as journalists but as agents of Lumumba; they were elated that we had fallen into their hands. ‘Passports and visas!’ a non-commissioned officer said sharply. Of course, we had no visas. ‘Aha, so you have no visas!’ he rejoiced. ‘Now you’ll see …’ They dumped all our baggage on to the ground and emptied out the entire pathetic contents of our suitcases. What does a reporter carry around the world? Some dirty shirts and a few newspaper clippings, a toothbrush and a typewriter. Then the body search began, with their fingering every fold and seam, our cuffs, our collars, our belts and our shoe soles — all the while pushing, pulling, prodding and provoking. They confiscated everything — including our documents and money — and returned only our shirts, trousers and shoes. The terminal had a central section and two wings, and we were led to a room at the end of one wing and locked up. It was on the ground floor. A paratrooper was put on watch under the window. In normal times our cell must have served as a storage room for chairs — in it there were metal chairs which are, I’ve concluded, the most dangerous piece of furniture to sleep on, since, with any movement during sleep, the chairs slide away from each other and you fall to the floor (concrete), incurring varied and painful injuries to the body. The advantage of the chairs over the floor, however, consisted in the fact that the chairs were warm and not constantly damp. Being locked up is a wholly unpleasant experience — particularly at first, during that transition from a free to a captive state, that moment of the echo of the closing door. Many things go through your mind. For example, after a few hours I had begun to consider the question: is it better to be in jail at home or abroad? The immediate answer should be: wherever you are beaten less. But, if you put aside the issue of being beaten, it is, I concluded, better to be locked up at home. There, you can be visited by your relatives, you can write letters, receive packages and hope for amnesty. Nothing of the kind awaited us in Usumbura. We were cut off from the world. The paratroopers could do whatever they wanted with complete impunity: they could murder us, and nobody would be able to find out where or how we had been killed. We would simply have disappeared from Stanleyville.

We were interrogated. The interrogation was conducted by civilians, perhaps colonials from Stanleyville as they appeared to know the city intimately. They did not believe we were journalists. Of course. Nowhere in the world do the police believe that such a profession actually exists, often with some justice given the people who have become foreign correspondents. But we had little to tell them and finally they stopped tormenting us. The guards’ shifts changed at nine in the morning and nine in the evening, and the paratrooper on night watch brought us our meal. That was when we were fed, in the evening, once a day — one bottle of beer for the three of us and a small hunk of meat each. The paratrooper who arrived in the morning began the day by leading us outside to the toilet, one by one: there was no bucket in our room; for sudden emergencies we needed special permission, which was granted grudgingly. They did not allow us to wash — in tropical conditions, a form of torture: the sweaty skin quickly begins to itch and hurt. Jarda’s asthma then started up again. He had trouble breathing, and was choking from coughing fits. There was no doctor. From our window we had a view of the following: first, the helmet and shoulder of the paratrooper; then the flat ground that led down to the lake; and in the far distance the mountains ringing the horizon. From time to time airplanes landed and took off and we watched them. The days flowed by, one after the other, wearisome, monotonous, uneventful. The paratroopers said nothing. Not a single representative of any higher authority appeared. Then one evening a new paratrooper took the watch. He spoke to us; he was trying to sell us hippopotamus teeth. We had no money — it had been taken from us during the search — but we promised that, if set free, we would buy teeth, when our money was returned. He would end up helping us a great deal. It was a different paratrooper standing guard when an African approached our window the next afternoon, a tall, portly Tutsi with a serious, intelligent face, who said quickly, before he was chased away, that he had overheard officers in the airport coffee shop saying that we were to be shot the next day. The guard came trotting over and the man disappeared.

18

What I am writing is not a book, but only the plan (and a plan is even less substantial than an outline or a sketch) of a non-existent book, so there is not enough space to describe what really goes through the mind of a person who has just heard repeated the conversation of officers in the airport coffee shop from a tall, serious Tutsi. The almost instantaneous symptoms, however, are these: a state of depressing emptiness, collapse, dulled inertia, as if he has found that he is suddenly under the influence of a narcotic, or an anaesthetic, a strong dose of some stupefying medicine. The condition worsens: he starts to feel utterly powerless and to realize, fully, that there is nothing he can do to change or influence his circumstances. All the strength suddenly empties out of his muscles, leaving him too little energy even to scream, slam his fist against the wall or beat his head on the floor. No, it is not his body any more; it is foreign matter that he has to drag around until someone frees him of the enervating burden. It becomes stuffy, and you feel the stuffiness intensely — somehow, the stuffiness becomes the most palpable thing you know. Duszan and I sat there, not looking at each other: I can’t explain why. Jarda lay across the chairs, sweating, tormented by his asthma attacks.

19

A sleepless night.

20

The rain began falling during the night. At first light the rain was still falling; it was cloudy and damp and fog lay on the lake. At dawn an airplane emerged from out of the mist and parked on the side runway, not far from us. This was unusual: every other airplane (the few that had landed here) parked on the other side of the airport, far away; but this one — perhaps because of the poor landing conditions? — was sitting right there on our side, where there was less fog (this part was the farthest from the lake). Two white pilots got out and went straight to the main terminal, but a few black stewards remained behind, hanging around the airplane. We called out to them, waving our hands. The honest paratrooper with the hippopotamus teeth had taken the night watch — our man, a man who just wanted to make a little money and survive, in other words an ordinary man (I became convinced that the ones who want to pick up a few pennies are often more human than the formal, incorruptible ones) — and when he saw that we wanted to talk with the stewards he moved around to the other side of the building. A steward came over, and Jarda asked him where they were flying to.

Leopoldville, he replied.

Jarda told him briefly about our situation, that our hours were numbered, and then begged the steward (a white begging a black) to go to the local United Nations headquarters as soon as he arrived in Leopoldville and tell the people there that we were in prison, that they should inform the world about us because then the paratroopers would not dare kill us and that they should send the army to rescue us.

Looking at us, the black man would have seen the frame of the window, and in that frame he would have seen bars, and behind those bars three white faces, horribly dirty, unshaven, exhausted: Jarda’s face, round and full, and Duszan’s and mine, thin. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

21

The hours of torture began. The steward had tossed a crumb of hope into our cell and it jolted us out of our state of paralysis and overpowering depression, a kind of self-deafening that I now see was a defence against insanity. For those awaiting death as we were, passive and apathetic, on the verge of collapse, ready to hit bottom, it takes only one flash of light in the darkness, one lucky break, and suddenly you rise up again and return to the living. What you leave behind, however, is an empty territory that you cannot even describe: it has no points of reference or shape or signposts, and its existence — like the sound barrier — is something you feel only once you have approached it. One step out of that emptiness and it disappears. No one, however, who has entered this emptiness can ever be the same person he was before. Something remains — a psychological scar, hardened, gangrened flesh — a fact, finally more apparent to others than to himself, that something has burned out, that something is missing. You pay for every meeting with death.

We watched the airplane take off and then began pacing feverishly among the chairs, talking and arguing, although, for all of the previous afternoon and evening and night, the cell had been silent. Would the steward really inform the United Nations? And if he did, who would he talk to? To someone who will take him seriously? To someone who will wave his arms around and do nothing? And even if he is taken seriously, will anyone be able to free us? And if everything worked in our favour, it would take at least half a day for the steward to fly to Leopoldville and talk with headquarters, and then for Leopoldville to notify the Usumbura headquarters. Before anything happened, the paratroopers could take us out and finish us off a hundred times or turn us over to Muller’s hirelings. Thus came the nerves, the war of nerves, fever and agitation, but all of it inside, in us, because outside beyond the window it was always the same: the helmet and shoulder of the paratrooper and, further off, the plain, the lake (Tanganyika), the mountains. And today, in addition, the rain.

22

In the afternoon we heard a car motor under the window, and a screech of brakes, and then voices speaking in a language I did not recognize. We clung to the bars. Near the building stood a jeep flying the United Nations flag; four black soldiers in blue helmets climbed out. They were Ethiopians from the Imperial Guard of Haile Selassie, who formed part of the United Nations military contingent in the Congo. They posted their own guard alongside the paratrooper.

23

I have no idea what the Congolese who saved our lives was called. I never saw him again. He was a human being: that’s all I know about him.

24

And not only do I also not know the name of whoever it was at the UN headquarters in Leopoldville who saved our lives, but I never even saw him. There is so much crap in this world, and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.

25

I can’t say if there was actually any bartering between the Ethiopians and the paratroopers over our fates. I can say that they didn’t like each other, and they treated each other spitefully. They were competing for the prestige of controlling the Congo.

26

The next morning we took a Sabair flight out through Fort Lamy and on to Malta and then to Rome. In the great glass block of Fumicino airport, we watched the splendid and — to us, at that moment — exotic world of contented, calm, satiated Europeans on parade: fashionably dressed girls, elegant men on their way to international conferences, excited tourists who had flown in to see the Forum, meticulously preserved women, newlyweds flying off to the beaches of Majorca and Las Palmas; and, as the members of this unimaginable world passed by us (we were a disreputable-looking trio, three dirty, smelly, unshaven men in horrible shirts and homespun trousers on a chilly spring day when everyone else was in jackets, sweaters and warm clothing), I suddenly felt — the thought horrified me — that, sad truth or grotesque paradox that it might be, I had been more at home back there in Stanleyville or in Usumbura than here now.

27

Or perhaps I simply felt lonely.

28

The police looked us over suspiciously and I couldn’t blame them. We could not go into the city because we had no visas. The police phoned our embassies, which had been looking for us all over the world. The ambassadors came out to the airport, but it was already late in the evening and we had to sleep there because we would not have visas arranged for us until the next day.

29

I returned to Warsaw. I had to prepare a note on what I had seen in the Congo. I described the battles, the collapse, the defeat. Then I was summoned by a certain comrade from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘What have you been writing, you?’ he stormed at me. ‘You call the revolution anarchy! You think that Gizenga is on the way out and Kobutu is winning! These are pernicious theories!’

‘Go there yourself,’ I answered in a tired voice, because I still felt Stanleyville and Usumbura in my bones. ‘Go ahead and see for yourself. And I hope you make it back alive.’

‘It’s regrettable,’ this comrade said, concluding our discussion, ‘but you can’t return overseas as a correspondent because you do not understand the Marxist-Leninist processes that are at work in the world.’

‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve got some things to write about here, too.’

30

I went back to work at Polityka, travelling around the country, writing up what I saw. In the Congo things turned out the way they had to, which in the end had been obvious to everyone who was there. A few months later I received an offer to travel to Africa for several years. I was to be the first Polish correspondent in black Africa and was to open a bureau office for PAP, the Polish Press Agency. At the beginning of 1962 I was sent to Dar es Salaam.