Olga Stanisławska

De Gaulle Roundabout

About the book

The verdure already began in Guinea. The Guinea, that is, of green foothills half-saturated with water – it is the rainy season after all: the season for pushing a bus through the rapids of a stream coursing in the road, the season for getting bogged down in the mud, the season of torrents. The forest began. Alongside the reddish, waterlogged road grew a wall of foliage. A monstrous green barrier, undifferentiated, a formless mass of dark leaves, all identical. Extending all the way from here to the coast, where the waves of the Atlantic crash onto land.
Settlements appeared on the hillsides, dense clusters of houses with corrugated tin roofs. The rust on the roofs was the same red as the earth – everything here was the colour of the earth. Lichens started growing on the walls. Laundry stopped drying over night; and what had dried took on the odour of mould.
“No situation is forever,” says the sentence on the door of the taxi in Nzérékoré. With rain flooding the city for two days now, the generator broke down in the hotel where I rent my room by the hour. There’s no music, no clients; so the squat Liberian prostitutes spend the whole evening chit-chatting with me out of boredom. I can only hear their voices in the darkness of the courtyard. Josephine, Sarah, Love – they have names like artificial flowers left behind after a musical.
Josephine is the first to throw in the towel this evening; she stands up, hesitates one last moment, maybe something will turn up; she yawns, stretches her legs, which are numb from sitting so long, and pulls up her skirt to scratch her crotch. The others eventually follow her out.
Liberia is just outside the door, beyond that green wall that flanks the city, a nightmarish, godforsaken country where for years a civil war has smouldered.
The forest is quiet. People ate animals.

Altogether forty-one villages have been burnt and sixty-nine men, forty-five women and twenty-seven children killed… The soldiers crept into the banana plantations, which surround all native villages, and poured volleys into the huts. One woman who had that day been delivered of twins was shot in her bed, and the infants perished in the flames when the village was fired by the troops.
Those words are from a dispatch from Liberia prepared for the British government in 1935. The following year its English author Graham Greene set off through the country on foot. He was looking for danger, and in Liberia he expected to find an abundance of it. But ordeals never come made-to-order. “Children never cry here,” Greene observed, at least from his point of view. He did not see them being killed. People did not shout at each other. He journeyed safely through the highwayless country, where there were no police, and with porters who knew how much silver his trunks contained.
So what is it like? Greene had no answer. He returned to Europe and continued writing novels about everyday human downfalls, about atonement and other such occurrences.
But somewhere here, he felt, lay the whole mystery.
Two years after Greene returned from Liberia, the Second World War broke out in Europe. Danger permeated everything imaginable.

Now, all these little towns began, where I used to go in the evening. All of them the same, with market halls made of rough planks nailed together, where you could eat rice and kebab by the light of oil lamps. There was always someone to dish out that rice, a silent woman, a man lost in thought. Somewhere in the dim light children are squabbling, a name is shouted from the threshold of a house, a shoulder leans heavily into a doorframe. Behind his back shadows are dancing. ...
And then what? A room in a cheap hotel. The ceiling fan beating the air like an enormous bird. Cockroaches scurrying in the corners. On the cement floor of the bathroom in the hallway a bucket of water is waiting. I turn off the light and hit the edge of the iron bed. No one besides me knows where I am. I’m in Ghana.
Those who know how to build a home of night and solitude are apparently free from anything else happening to them.
Solitude has a face at first, someone’s face, someone’s shoulder. And then it doesn’t. Eventually it turns into a kind of equanimity.
I don’t regret those evenings spent adapting to solitude.

Translated by W. Martin