Ondjaki - Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret

“Hey, ¿ hay alguien aquí ?”

I heard the voice of the Comrade Doctor Rafael KnockKnock come up the stairs to find me seated in Granma Catarina’s dark, empty room, without Granma Catarina there to talk to me. To tell the truth, it’s not your voice that I wanted to hear, I thought, and I went downstairs.

“¿ Cómo estás, compañero ? I’m here to see your abuela . How is she?”

“She’s sleeping like a log.”

“Like a log?”

“That’s when a person is sleeping so that it’s really hard to wake them up.”

“Can you call your abuela ?”

“It’s still early, Doctor. She likes to sleep for a bit at this time and I can’t disturb the dreams she must be dreaming.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Could you wait a moment?”

“Yes. Why not?”

We went out onto the veranda. At that hour there was already a shadow close to the wall.

“Look, you know all this is going to desaparecer , no?”

“The Mausoleum? Yeah, it looks like it’s going.”

“No, no. Bishop’s Beach — the houses, todo . I’ve seen los planes . The fallout will be very beautiful.”

“Falling out, falling over…”

“ ¿Cómo ?”

“Of course, compañero … Of course.”

“What are you saying?”

“I wanted to ask you one more question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Can somebody do something a little bit bad so that they can do something good later?”

“ Bueno … I think so, sí .”

“And if the person were a child, could they still do it?”

“Listen, compañero .” Doctor Rafael laid his hand on my shoulder. I thought he was going to start making his “KnockKnock” jokes, but that wasn’t it. “There are things that one has to do that others will never understand. This happens. They are secretos that only your heart can understand.”

“‘ Secretos ’ are secrets?”

“Yes.”

“I like the word ‘secrets.’ It’s like something mysterious that lots of things fit inside.”

“ Me gusta your way of thinking. Maybe you will become a poeta .”

“I don’t want to, thanks. I heard that poets end up going crazy.”

“No, it’s not true. Los poetas are mad, but it is another type of madness. Do not worry…Do you think it is time to wake up your abuela ?”

“Yes, I’m going to call her. Sorry, I even forgot to ask if you want something to drink, comrade?”

“ Sí . What do you have?”

“A good glass of water, not chilled because we don’t have electricity.”

“That would be good, gracias .”

While Madalena brought him the tepid water, I went to wake up Granma Nineteen.

“Granma, Comrade KnockKnock is here.”

“He’s here already? I have to brush my hair. Tell him I’ll be down in a minute.”

While Granma was distracted in the living room, with the doctor examining her lesion, I went outside to see if anything was happening in the square.

The Comrade Gas Jockey, Foam and Comrade Dimitry were arguing with each other with worried faces around the gas pump.

“You don’t even know the rumours that are being spread.” 3.14 came out of the bushes.

“You frightened me.”

“Comrade Gudafterov has disappeared. Everybody’s at the construction site lookin’ for him. I mean, Comrade Dimitry’s lookin’ for him. The soldiers are all drunk and some of them have already gone home.”

“How did he disappear?”

“I don’t know, maybe he drowned.”

“Drowned? What kind of tale’s that?”

“I don’t think the blue lobsters know how to swim. How is it that they stand here every day sweating in that uniform, right next to the sea, looking at the bright blue water, and they never feel like jumping in? It must be that they don’t know how to swim.”

“It can’t be that. You may not know how to swim, but you can still jump into the foam, like Foam does.”

“But they’d be ashamed that we’d give them a hard time for the rest of their lives.”

“No…I figure this tale about Gudafterov has to do with the letters.”

“Hey, you must be right.”

“We’re gonna try to read it again.”

“Read it again? Only if you can read ashes. I burnt the letter.”

“It’s better if we don’t say anything to anybody. There might have been something important in the letter.”

The afternoon didn’t want to end. No sooner did the sun approach the sea so that blackness could come and we could carry out our mission, than I began to feel nervous about it, and about the strange things that were happening on Bishop’s Beach. Granma Catarina wasn’t there any more, Gudafterov had disappeared, and Doctor Rafael had confirmed all of the plans about making the houses of our Bishop’s Beach disappear.

“The afternoon doesn’t want to end, 3.14. Everything’s so slow.”

“Get a grip and calm down. The Mausoleum’s quiet, Gudafterov has disappeared, there’s just the man in the watchtower left, and he won’t leave there even to go pee-pee.”

“He’s the one who could see us.”

“Only if they turn on the big surge light. They didn’t turn it on last night. It could be burned out.”

“But do you say ‘surge light’ or ‘searchlight’?”

“You say, ‘That big light that lights up the area we want to get through without getting caught,’ you smart-ass!”

“Calm down. It was just a doubt I had about the Portuguese language.”

“You know, you’ve got a lot of doubts. I’ve been thinkin’— but I’m not going to give the idea to Comrade Dimitry.”

“What idea?”

“To find Gudafterov,”—3.14 started to laugh—“all they’ve got to do is follow the aroma of the b.o.-dorov! Ha ha!”

Time didn’t want to pass. It reminded me of that poem we read in school about the lazy train that didn’t want to keep rolling forward along the railway line because it knew that the line had been diverted and that at the end of the day it wasn’t going to reach a station; it was going to be taken, by the same engineer who had worked on it for years, to a huge garage where it would be dismantled.

“You remember that poem?”

“I don’t remember anything, and I’m guessing you’re makin’ stuff up.”

“I swear I’m not making stuff up. That tale even ended with the engineer abandoning the train on the track and being fired because he didn’t have the courage to take the train to the garage where they dismantled trains that couldn’t run anymore.”

“So was it a poem or a tale?”

“That’s not important. Now you’re the one who has too many doubts. What’s important, and what I don’t remember, is whether or not the train was dismantled.”

“My dad was fired, too.” 3.14’s voice was all sad.

“Seriously?”

“Yes. They fired almost all the workers at the Mausoleum construction site.”

When the sun approached the horizon, the wind that usually arrived with it did not come.

On the veranda, Granma Nineteen smiled as she chatted with Doctor Rafael KnockKnock, and from where we stood we could see Dona Libânia pressed against the wall of the veranda to hear the conversation better.

Sea Foam came running out of his house, passed by the other side of the garbage dump, his legs leaping along the shoreline like he himself were running as though he wished to fly, balancing with his bare feet on the white sea foam of Bishop’s Beach.

“What’s he got hanging from his body?”

“Aren’t those his dreadlocks?”

“That long? They look like ropes.”

The sun sank, yellowed, into the dark blue of the sea and invented a beautiful sunset of a mulatto colour no words could capture. We just stared.