A Narrow Escape
There was no mentionof the following story in the typed-up journal and I am pretty certain that I never told my mother about it. Siggi was real enough but I have no idea where we split. I know for a fact that I travelled into Zaïre by myself. This is the story of the night before the border crossing, told twenty years later and from memory:
Zaïre, 1984.
In town I met a Greek arms dealer who invited me to his house for dinner. Strange company, true, but in these kind of places you can’t be choosy and I was looking forward to an evening in the bossom of his large family — however, it turned out that did not have a wife and six children as he had claimed. What he did have was splintered glass on the high walls surrounding his house and a heavy iron gate with spikes on top which he locked behind me.
I kept off his advances while he got progressively more drunk during the course of the evening. Eventually, I managed to slip into my room. I quickly donned a traditional Sudanese dagger, worn on the arm, where it was concealed by the sleeve of my T-shirt. When the man followed me into the room and proceeded to stalk me around the bed, I mentally prepared myself to plunge the thing into him.
I realized that I only had one chance which lay in the concealment of the weapon, and that I would have to kill the guy. Suddenly, the thought of stabbing someone and then wondering what to do with the body seemed irresistibly funny — well hysterical. It reminded me vividly of a Louis des Funès movie I had seen on TV.
I started laughing and found that I couldn’t stop. The man froze in his tracks, aghast, as I pointed a finger at him and doubled over with mirth. Then he slowly retreated mumbling “Elle est fou, fou!” (“She is mad!”).
I piled all the room’s loose fittings against the door and went to bed. The next morning, just after dawn, I composed myself to look cool and aloof and entered the lounge where his teaboy had laid the breakfast table. He informed me that his master was still asleep. I told him that he had had a very hard night (wink, wink) and must on no account be disturbed, ate a hearty breakfast and caught a dug-out across the Oubangi river into what was then Zaïre.
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Denni