Blue White Red. Alain Mabanckou

members of the milieu, notably by assuring them copious meals that they won’t soon forget, except for ill will on their part—and that would hardly surprise me.

      This was a miscalculation, openly trashed by the entire milieu after my grace period expired. It seemed that these deeds were nothing but a drop of water in the ocean and that I would need more enthusiasm if I wanted to see the end of the tunnel someday.

      Under these circumstances, one will understand that silence, observation, and sometimes contempt lived inside me. I thought that things would go in my favor, suturing the gaping wounds here and there of my disillusionment. I saw the distance sinking between my dirty past and the illusory cocoon of a future.

      I had no choice. I took the plunge.

      As soon as I look beyond my careless mistake, I can’t see anything except a cloud of dust. A plane takes off in a very low sky during the dry season and lands at dawn the next day at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. It’s as if I’d shut my eyes and found myself all of a sudden on the other side of the gate. It doesn’t surprise me anymore that my first reaction was to viscerally turn my back on all that. To deny reality and not take the place that awaited me, or to be more precise, the position I had been granted in this other universe.

      To be sure, those of my ilk will treat me like a coward—a débarqué, someone just off the boat—because I put up no resistance whatsoever when I saw the two men coming toward me in that little deserted street.

      The images come back to me, slightly blurry, one superimposed upon another. Those pigeons that took flight and perched on the rooftops when they were disturbed. Me, too. I would also have liked to have been a dove. To have wings and lift myself above those buildings so I could survey how the situation developed. I was suddenly paralyzed by some sort of guilty conscience. A sense of malaise. It was as if I first had to pay a fine to recover the freedom to exist, to be myself. But this kind of liberty can’t be bought. There’s the weight of conscience, the embarrassment in front of this mirror that weighs the pros and cons of our actions.

      I admit that I lack finesse, flair, and especially the scruples that made it possible for my companions to slip through the fine web of the net that awaited us. I don’t know how they always managed to have nerves of steel, especially to evade the traps placed along our route at the opportune moments. In fact, they don’t look at what’s happening behind them because, as they say, run for your life—you don’t have eyes in the back of your head. They adopt a blasé attitude and don’t think about what’s going to happen next; they act first. The rest doesn’t concern them and will be resolved when the problem is posed.

      These are the basic precepts of our culture. Tested and proven elementary principles for all situations at all times. A dogma to cling to with your eyes shut. To use without hesitation at the right moment. I should have adopted that philosophy. If I wanted to achieve my goal, that’s what I should have done. They made me understand that there was no other solution.

      I put up no resistance when confronted by the two men. How could I pump my legs to run for my life when they were paralyzed and wouldn’t hold me up anymore? Which direction would I have gone? I was rooted to the ground. Like a tree.

      No, I put up no resistance whatsoever, and I have no regrets about that.

      Escape? I fantasized about it.

      I felt the time was coming. I couldn’t foresee anything else happening. I certainly would have made the situation worse if I had done anything except give myself up. I wasn’t totally wrong, since I saw this behavior again, a little later, in other circumstances, before other men supposedly charged with setting me straight. The result, however bitter, still seems acceptable to me today, with a few qualifications. Escape, frankly, would have changed things.

      I stayed put.

      I still can’t get one question out of my head.

      It had already occurred to me when I was in the car watching the scenery pass by, those mournful willows, those spindly fir trees, those trees, wind-whipped and shrunken by the cold of full-blown winter: why was it the same men who came back to arrest me in Seine-Saint-Denis eighteen months later and put me in the same white car, a Mazda, this time without the black chauffeur who had been so overzealous in Château-Rouge, that working-class neighborhood in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris?

      Indeed, they came eighteen months later.

      They were waiting for that day. Or maybe they had been entrusted with the task to come back. They had to finish the job they themselves had started. I felt as if they had been assigned to track me from the beginning until the end.

      They came. Both of them. Without the black guy.

      They took me. Forced me into the Mazda. We drove all around the region. It seemed to me like we were turning around and around before picking up a boulevard on the perimeter (without letting anyone pass on our right), then the highway. We crisscrossed more regions than just Ile-de-France, but I wouldn’t be able to name them today, even if I were asked under torture. As for the other regions, from the time I arrived in France, I had never been to any. What I do remember is that the car went at breakneck speed, really fast. Some kind of race car with shot shock absorbers propelled us in fits and starts and lost its steering when the red needle on the speedometer clocked 160 kilometers per hour. The car spat blackish smoke every time the motor had a coughing fit. Nobody said a word. It seemed to me we had traveled a long way. A very long way. I would have guessed that we were traveling further from the region. The signs along the highway meant nothing to me at all. There was less housing, and it became more unusual with the passing of each kilometer marker, giving way to factories, to vast pastures without cattle, to rustic countryside under a thick fog that permitted nothing but ghostly shadows to appear. I guessed there was a plow here, haystacks over there, a combine, an old broken-down tractor in the distance, next to the highway; we were in backcountry.

      But we kept on rolling.

      After more than two hours on the road, we came to a silent place that, at first, I thought was a railway depot, because broken-down trains were parked all over the place. A mass grave for railway cars. I thought about elephants that go to cemeteries to protect themselves from prying eyes. Nuts and bolts and iron bars were strewn across the ground. Yellow safety helmets hung from the branches of the few trees in this spot. Railway workers’ overalls hung from the windows of locomotives. It was quite a deserted site. Nobody around. Not the shadow of a life. We got out of the car, my arms still handcuffed to the big guy.

      In the late morning, a dusting of white snow carpeted the ground and crunched under our feet. Mine were damp, frozen, and numb. I couldn’t feel them anymore. I wasn’t dressed for the weather. A blue cloth shirt over a black T-shirt. Jeans worn through at the knees, Spring Court sneakers on my feet. I shivered. The two men made great fun of this, decked out in military boots, heavy coats, lined gloves and hats that covered their ears as if they were crossing Siberia.

      We had walked several hundred yards on foot. The engines and railway cars were far behind us. A vast expanse opened before us with a horizon of antiquated buildings. We hurried toward them. Crows punctured the fog, cavorting high in the sky, in search of the tallest ledge of those buildings, their wings clenched in the cold.

      Four thugs pushed open the gate without batting an eye when we arrived. We crossed a large deserted courtyard marked by tracks of gigantic boots. This place had clearly been used before. I noticed a fenced soccer field on the other side, a few barbells, and just one basketball hoop. We headed straight for the tallest building and took the stairs that led to the basement. The two men dragged me down an interminable corridor. Our steps reverberated in rhythm, as if we had planned it. The silence gave the place the feeling of a decrepit penitentiary, abandoned if not outright haunted.

      Awakened by the heavy silence of the place, I started to get worried. What had we come here to do? Did I deserve this isolation? Moreover, to be treated like this, was I a prisoner?