Read Online Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuściński - Free Book Online Page A

powers entangle us in a succession of situations from which there is no way out, and from which we awaken every now and then drenched in sweat, more and more exhausted and devoid of will. At the front staff headquarters (a residential quarter on a hill), I was greeted by a young white Angolan, a political commissar. His name was Nelson. He greeted me with joy, as if I were a guest he had been expecting all along—and sent me at once to a near-certain death.
    Nelson had a restless, violent nature, mad ideas, and an impulsive, feverish manner. The first thing I told him was that I wanted to go to the front, and that was all it took for him to write out a pass for me. Before I could figure out what was going on he was pushing me outside, where a driver was just starting the motor of a big old Mercedes truck. I barely managed to beg Nelson to give me a cup of water, because I was ready to pass out from thirst. The truck was loaded to capacity with rifles, ammunition boxes, barrels of gasoline, and sacks of flour. On top of this cargo sat six soldiers. Nelson pushed me into the cab, where the driver was already seated—a half-naked black civilian, extraordinarily thin. A moment later Diogenes, the leader of the expedition, joined us in the cab, and we started off down the road immediately.
    We drove through town—in those days every town in Angola looked like a ghastly, corroding movie set built on the outskirts of Hollywood and already abandoned by the film crew—and the green suddenly ended, the flowers disappeared, and we entered a hot, dry tropical flatland, overgrown as far as the eye could see with thick, thorny, leafless gray brush. A low gray gorge cut through this bush and at the bottom of the gorge ran the asphalt road. This was the road we were driving along in the truck. The Mercedes was so old and overloaded that no matter how the driver exerted himself, it would not do better than sixty kilometers an hour.
    I was in a terrible situation, because I didn’t know where we were going and couldn’t bring myself to admit that I didn’t. Diogenes might think, How come he doesn’t know? What’s he doing here, and why is he riding with us? He’s riding with us and he doesn’t know where we’re going? Yet I really didn’t know. I had accidentally come across the plane in Benguela and so found myself in Lubango. It was an accident that the mulatto I met at the airport took me to headquarters. A strange man about whom I knew nothing except that his name was Nelson, and whom I was seeing for the first time in my life, had put me in the truck. The truck had immediately driven off and now we were rolling between two walls of thorny bush toward a destination unknown to me. Everything had happened quickly and somehow so categorically that I could neither think about it nor say no.
    So we drove along with the thin, anxious man clinging to the steering wheel at my left, me in the middle, and Diogenes on the right with his submachine gun pointed out the window, ready to fire. With the sun standing directly overhead, the cab was as hot as a furnace and reeked of oil and sweat. At a certain moment Diogenes, who had been looking steadily at the wall of bush on his side, asked, “Tell me,
camarada,
do you know where we’re going?”
    I replied that I didn’t.
    “And tell me,
camarada,”
Diogenes went on without looking at me, “do you know what it means to drive down the road that we’re on?”’
    Again I answered that I didn’t.
    Diogenes said nothing for a moment, because we were climbing a hill and the roar of the motor was deafening. Then he said,
“Camarada,
this road leads to South Africa. The border is four hundred fifty kilometers from here. The town of Pereira d’Eça is forty kilometers this side of the border. One of our units is there and that’s where we’re going. The cities, Lubango and Pereira d’Eça, are in our hands. But the enemy holds the countryside. The enemy is in this bush that we’re