The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert Page B

Marcus say.
    â€œMake no mistake,” scoffed the minister of health, who met us there. “They’ll get it. One way or another. Even if they have to provoke it themselves.”
    * * *
    It was university students who took to the streets first, much to Senator Marcus’s bemusement. “They’ll take any excuse they can to cut class,” he said, flipping through the morning paper.
    He predicted they would grow bored of it soon enough.
    All that week, one could not drive through the capital without running into the students and their picket signs and their songs and the tracts they batted at every passing car. And everywhere one looked one saw sweaty white faces, tongues curling in concentration as they tried to write down every gritty detail. I learned that if I sped up when I saw the protesters coming, they knew enough to get out of the way.
    One night, as I was bringing Senator Marcus coffee, I spotted one of the tracts on his desk, a piece of shoddily mimeographed propaganda. They had replaced President Mailodet’s suit and derby with a general’s khakis and stripes, but the contrast between the outfit and the president’s milky expression was so extreme the image came off as not sinister, but absurd. The message accompanying it, that President Mailodet was maneuvering to secure himself a dictatorship, struck me as laughable. I was as likely a dictator as he.
    For most of the week, President Mailodet permitted the protests, allowing the schools to remain closed. Through radio broadcasts, a few of which I overheard while passing in the corridor outside Senator Marcus’s study, the president urged calm.
    At breakfast one morning, face hidden by the paper, the Senator confided warily to his wife, “I’m afraid it will get worse before it gets better.”
    He was not mistaken. When another week passed and the unrest still showed no sign of abating, the president called on the police to restore order.
    The morning the riot troops appeared on the streets, we were in the Senator’s office, two blocks away. Through the one small window facing the square we could hear the frenzied chanting, but we could see nothing other than a corner of the building next door. Still, the noise was enough to paint a picture of the mob of well-dressed students frothing with righteousness, and the smaller mob of their admirers, with sunburned faces bent over notepads ballooning with heroic adjectives. Out of the sea of sound an identifiable slogan would occasionally rise, but then it would be madness again. What was the point of such hysteria? Surely they could not have expected anyone who mattered to listen.
    When at last the police burst through the din with their bullhorn, the protesters only seemed to grow further inflamed.
    â€œIf you do not disperse, we will have no choice but to fire,” the same stern voice commanded three and then four and then five times. We heard it clearly. How could the protesters have not? Or did they not believe it? Or had they driven themselves into such a state that they were no longer capable of reason?
    The first shots must have been drowned out by the chants, and then by the screams. By the time the Senator opened his door, a few seconds later, all we could hear were the wails of police whistles. Here and there were pops, like a child running a stick along a picket fence. After the mania of the protesters, it was surprising how innocent the guns sounded.
    Senator Marcus glanced at us with heavily lidded eyes and shook his head. “What did they expect?” he asked no one in particular.
    Although there was nothing to see but a fog of gas slowly dissipating toward the roofline, no one in the office seemed willing to leave. We were still clustered by the window, perhaps twenty minutes later, when the one clerk who had briefly slipped outside returned.
    â€œThey say six of them are dead,” he reported, struggling to catch his breath. I thought perhaps