I trundled back, and the feelings from the day returned. I hoped Frida had left. My escape from the house had been fleeting, but now beyond its walled confines I clearly saw the greater problem: with practically no money I would not last long. I did not want to dwell on this sense of defeat. A solution, I told myself, would come tomorrow. But the streets, the people, Victoire, all seemed resplendent; I had the heightened awareness of details that comes from knowing one may soon be gone.
5
That night I went home and thought about the time I was still in America, preparing for my journey to Congo.
A strange thing had happened to me then, I recalled.
The closer I had drawn to my departure, the more I had needed to eat. Breakfast didn’t last until lunch anymore; I ate again mid-morning. And my purchases at the supermarket became calorific: cream cakes, donuts, snacks of processed cheese. I didn’t force myself to eat; I was just constantly hungry. There was a surprising physicality to my apprehension of the journey.
This happened in near loneliness. It was summer and New Haven was empty. I saw few people. My friends had all left. It gave a hermetic quality to my days: reading, note taking, packing. I put myself on a trial of mefloquine, the U.S. Army’s preferred antimalarial, but my dreams disturbed. And my anxieties were promoted by Annie, the bank teller who processed the last of my educational loan payments. She was black, and she spoke with an accent.
I asked where she was from.
“Zaire,” she said, using Mobutu’s name for the country.
I was stunned. “What a coincidence. I’m going there.”
Annie looked annoyed. “You can’t just go there.” She glanced at me derisively.
“Could I ask for your help?”
She paused, without looking at me, before again processing the checks on her table.
I visited her the next day. And the day after. Once I bought her lunch at Dunkin’ Donuts. Annie wouldn’t leave her desk—every hour was money. By 4:00 p.m. she was done at the bank, and she jetted home to check on her children; at 6:00 p.m. she was at her night-shift kiosk, guarding a parking lot on Chapel Street.
One night at the kiosk she dug into her voluminous handbag and drew out a photograph in which she had pinned up her hair. “What do you think?” she asked. I took a second. “Not your style.” She agreed. “That’s what I thought.” That weekend Annie took me to a Congolese party on the Upper West Side of New York—she told me to dress well, for the party was at the ambassador’s house. I made an effort but still failed: the men were all in three-piece suits. At the dance in the basement I hid among the last row of chairs, but a large woman in purple lipstick came over and swept me off the ground. We joined the dancing circle, shaking our buttocks. Annie later told me the woman was a Congolese senator. After that I became Annie’s companion on errands: I shuttled food to her cousin, accompanied her children on a lawyer’s visit. I met her husband, who wore a Subway hat and asked if I could landscape their garden. They were building a house on a plot near the golf course. Annie took me once. On the upper floor she showed me a rectangular hole in the ground, and I chose the Jacuzzi tub to be placed in it. Her master builder lay on the grass, a Jamaican with his palm on his tummy. He chewed a piece of straw. Rolled up nearby was a manual on plumbing. Annie had been twelve years building her house.
On these various drives Annie told me stories: about her youth in Kinshasa, her family, the coup that toppled Mobutu; but the vast majority of her stories were useless. I think she couldn’t get past thinking of me as an outsider. The stories were all shrouded in mystery and fear. They only occurred in the dark. The one happy story I remember was about when she first kissed her husband, on top of a Kinshasa hill near the old nuclear reactor. That too had happened at night. I thought perhaps Annie was trying to put me off: “It isn’t easy to get to America,” she would say. “You have a bright future. Why are you throwing it away by going to Zaire?”
I found it hard to answer her at the time. It was not easy to explain the feelings within me.
At one of our last meetings Annie said, “You’ll be staying with my family.” Jose was her husband’s brother, and she called him at once to inform him of my arrival and instruct them to take care of me. But I noticed, once in Kinshasa, that Jose and Nana seemed hardly to mention Annie. I later asked why; and I learned that the last time Annie had visited, she had found the dirt at Bozene so unbearable that she had taken a room at the Grand Hotel. Annie, who had been the family’s pillar and matriarch during the Mobutu dictatorship’s violent end; who had been seen as a true Kinoise. Her betrayal confirmed Bozene’s misery, its suppressed desire for escape. But the family only said, “That Annie, she’s become de-Congolized.”
In the summer of 2005, a week before I left for Congo, Annie dug into her handbag and produced a letter. It was an invitation from the U.S. government. “I’m becoming a citizen,” she said. We celebrated with a Dunkin’ milk shake. She told me not to share the news in Kinshasa. “They’ll want me to sponsor the whole family. Where will they stay? My house will become a camp.”
The days that followed the robbery were hard, as I was still trying to find employment. I started them early, waking to the 6:00 a.m. news bulletins, blinking open my eyes as I took notes. At noon I visited Anderson to check on Radio Trottoir. The bird flu story was written and pitched to several newspapers. No replies came. I began an account of the 25th Quarter—I knew it would be a more subtle report, harder to sell. Life slowly became restricted. I curbed my eating—it saved only a few dollars but it helped create an assurance that I was doing the maximum—and drank bottles and bottles of water, especially at night, when the house was asleep and I worked in the dark.
And at 32 Avenue Bozene, we seemed to sink together. Jose had begun to stay at the office longer, to try to “find” more money. Nana was no longer able to stretch her rations the full week. Meals became poor (more stomach); the condiments on the table diminished. But it wasn’t until Jose’s big misfortune that Nana cited the evil eye. It was looking, she then said, straight at us.
The cousin of Jose’s director had needed a position. We were, after all, in a year of elections, and god knew who would have power after that—someone else’s cousin. The shuffling that ensued shunted Jose near the airport, to a quarter called Massina. The shops there didn’t pay taxes, least of all to a man in a suit. Jose was too polite to extort. And Nana silently scolded him for it. Each evening when Jose came home, fatigued, she would ask what he’d found; he would not answer. She would say to the ceiling, “If we only had a few francs for the baby,” and retire to the bedroom. The couple lived in this muted tension. Nana didn’t have it easy either: inflation had risen again, all Victoire was hit. She told me the family of four next door had started to take turns at lunch; each day one of them ate and the other three scavenged.
In all this my troubles showed no visible end; the house and the street gave no respite. So it was a surprise when something good happened.
6
It came to pass on the least likely of days: Sunday, the jour de repos, on which as per tradition the family rose together for breakfast and Jose played high-decibel devotional songs. Pedestrians outside sang to our music. The street had a lazy feel: People ambled; they did not walk. Even the dogs seemed to sit quietly. Men and women gathered in clumps along the road. They discussed the events of the week past: a fortunate few mentioned what had gone well; this gave everyone hope; most wished it had been better. There were those who openly prepared for the week ahead: mamas fried stocks of beignets; the neighbor’s boy read his textbook. And for a few hours in the morning people seemed to set aside their troubles and make an effort to look their best. Jose wore his flappy brown suit on that day, and Nana a long red dress; Bébé Rhéma floundered in a blue frock. And the family joined the slow-moving procession of churchgoing people, all dressed like Christmas-tree ornaments and looking radiant.
I had decided to leave. Slowly, quietly, I was beginning to prepar
e. Sometimes I felt as if I had failed. It wasn’t my fault, I told myself.
And the slowness of the Sunday helped to soften the feeling.
I rolled over in the bed and flipped the radio switch. The headlines: A governor committed to reducing power outages before elections. Some workers complained about transport to a copper factory; the cycle-taxis had raised prices, citing the cost of oil. The Belgian ambassador magnanimously announced a new aid program for the colony his country had once ravaged. Then an intermission of pop music; but the beats were weary; even the jockey seemed to have just gotten out of bed.
Seeing everyone in their fancy outfits made me want to wear something nice. I hadn’t had a clean shirt in a week. Nana normally did the washing, but since our fight she had left my clothes soaking in a bucket. Clothes were important to the Congolese: people were judged by their dress, and I was no exception—I had noticed that my simple, crumpled clothes were not appreciated by the bureaucrats and politicians. But they helped me navigate Victoire: when vendors saw my Mexx shirt, so obviously purchased at the secondhand market and with stitches over its little tears, they did not bristle; some even treated me with deference.
I squatted between the pail and the toilet. The water was murky. I drew a shirt and started to scrub it between my hands. Then scrubbed with more vigor on a sock. But no matter the hardness of scrubbing I could not make suds. The detergent sachet was new; it seemed Unilever didn’t sell the same Omo in all countries. The “clean” clothes I hung from the showerhead, over the sides of buckets and over my shoulders and neck while the rest I washed; the detergent dripped; and my skin itched. As I strung all the clothes on the line outside a sock fell on the dirt. I rinsed it under the yard tap and pegged it with a clip. I stood there, sweating. The socks and underwear dripped. On the ground I noticed a small pit where a pipe was leaking sewage, the pressure of the liquid slowly digging into the mud.
I had asked to meet Mossi that day—ostensibly for him to look at my bird flu story and see how to make it commercial. “Selling to editors is a marketing job,” he assured me. “Completely different skill set from reporting.” I had not told Mossi of my decision to leave. I merely wanted to spend a little time together—I believed it could be one of our last meetings.
He was late, however, and it being Sunday, the internet café had not opened on time. I walked over to Anderson’s.
He sat like a stone. Perhaps it was part of the new persona: he’d obtained a new red kiosk, with Celtel mottos on all its sides. On the front he’d had a painter scrawl “Celtel Center” in cursive. The sassy wood was gone. Anderson had become an official agent—he was moving up. With a little money, he said, he would order a street cleaning, to give his business the proper ambience. “Look at the mess,” he said, pointing. Papers littered the ground. I saw the previous day’s edition of Le Phare with a headline about illegal uranium mining. The yellow cake was apparently being excavated with bare hands for exportation to North Korea and Iran.
Drawing a chair to the kiosk, I asked Anderson what news.
He showed me an Opposition Debout pamphlet, a cheap printout with smudged ink. Corruption in the ministries, political prisoners, angry threats to the government. “Same, same,” I said. He shook the paper so it stiffened. “Look.” At the page’s bottom was a report that some Americans would be visiting for a gorilla conference.
I said, “Conservationists.”
“No”—his gaze searched me, and he sounded patronizing—“the CIA. They think they can wear straw hats and khaki and pretend to talk about apes? Fools.” He drew a plastic sachet from under his kiosk and unwrapped a mayonnaise sandwich. “Every few years they come, always on time,” he went on, “to give a man a suit and call him our president. The elections are no coincidence.” He swallowed a piece of bread and rubbed his palm over the back of his pants. “But they won’t stop us.”
“The riots.”
“More, monsieur. An inferno.” His lips twitched.
And somehow it was easy to imagine our street, the houses and the cars in flames; the scene—of people sitting before broken walls and gates hanging from single hinges—seemed disjointed already, like a Guernica foreseen.
“Do you know The Matrix, Anderson? The movie?”
“I don’t like Hollywood, monsieur.”
“You’d like this one. You look like one of the actors.”
He mumbled embarrassedly, as though not knowing how to digest the compliment.
The internet café had at last opened. It was empty but for two workers dusting computers with yellow feather brushes. Four dirty fans, on long stems, circled slowly above my head, with the subdued hum produced by low voltage.
I took a seat and waited for the data to stream over the satellites and cables. It seemed a miracle that we had the internet in Congo, when it worked—which seemed another miracle entirely. Often at the cafés the power would die, and one would wait for hours, not leaving the computer for fear of losing one’s seat. There were also risks: Nana said the keyboards carried hepatitis. Her words always came to mind as I began typing. The internet was finally up. The image swam on the screen, as if it might slide off. The Guardian, the British newspaper, had replied.
I felt a wisp of hope. And then a sad relief. It was, like the others, a rejection. Mossi appeared in the chair next to mine and without asking began to read from my screen. When he finished he was frowning, shaking his head. “They have just two journalists for the continent and say don’t bother sending stories? They are not serious, these people.” I felt as he did, that they were at fault—and that we were on the margins, and did not matter.
The internet café boy Stella came by with his hanging macaroni hair and 501 Levi’s. I placed four hundred francs on the table. He scribbled a receipt. I could not yet confirm it, but something in his eyes gave me the idea that he was swindling the café. I quickly went through the news: there were a handful of stories about Congo, none about bird flu, and nearly all from the four big agencies (the AP, AFP, Reuters and the BBC), written by the same four reporters. I leaned back. Mossi squinted at my flickering monitor.
“That one writes in the Guardian, I think,” he said. “Yes, quite sure.”
“Who, Bentley? You know him?” He was an important correspondent—I had seen his reports in the press.
“Not at all. We only met once.”
I nodded, and perhaps spoke only because Mossi then stayed quiet. “Nice guy?”
He shrugged, as if he did not know.
But in that moment of inertia, and hopelessness—it seemed something of an audacity on my part—I decided to go meet the correspondent. Mossi had his number. Bentley said he might have time, if I came at once.
The taxis were tardy. They were also unusually full: I had to let two vehicles pass. It was getting late. A minibus slowed, and a crowd gathered—I ran to the door and grabbed a piece of the handle, attaching myself to the moving vehicle. Men and women pushed and crushed me but I held on, head inside, legs running outside the bus; then a woman let go, creating a space. I hauled myself in. The taxi had never stopped; it had only slowed long enough to fill itself with people.
In the relatively spacious Westfalia with windows that opened a fraction and old carpets draped over the seats, we sat face-to-face, our knees touching; the man hanging on the back of the bus screamed, “Gront Hotel! Gront Hotel!” And I began to hope in a small way that Bentley might be able to help me. Perhaps he would call the Guardian’s editors—and perhaps they would then accept my bird flu story, and also the one about the 25th Quarter. It might help me to stay in Congo a few more weeks. And this hope, this expectation that Bentley might solve some of my problems, made me feel as I did before a job interview. I worried about how I would introduce myself, and whether Bentley would like me. That he could help seemed beyond doubt; but would he?
The meeting was to happen at Bentley’s residence: the 422-room Grand Hotel, an epicenter of Congo’s wealth and the very antithesis of Victoire. The hotel
owed its name to the father Kabila, who after deposing Mobutu dismissed its American owners and claimed the hotel for his “grand country.” It was a place associated with many grotesque stories—many of killings—but also loved as a national icon. The taxi took us to the northwest district—to a point about equidistant from the railway station and Victoire, just before the president’s house—and left me at the foot of an imposing gray tower. The air inside was icy, and came in a blast as the sliding doors opened. A chandelier glittered on the ceiling, dripping with crystal. Waiters wore stiff jackets and carried bread baskets. The hotel seemed something like an oasis in the city. I made straight for the toilets: my biggest stress in the house. I washed my face purely for the experience of running hot water. I inspected myself in the mirror, and saw dirt gathered around my neck. A sullen Congolese handed out white towels. Upon exiting the toilets one came into curved marble corridors lined with boutiques where attendants stood beside bags of leather, fur, rings and bracelets of diamonds and lesser gems like emerald and ruby, and figurines of ivory that the staff would proudly point out as their last pieces—the sale of ivory now being illegal.
I explored the halls in a stupor and arrived at the outdoor café, where Bentley had asked me to meet him.
The foreign correspondent wore a white shirt, brilliant in the bright light. His sleeves were folded up to his elbows, revealing pale and stout forearms with little hair. He was beefy and wide breasted, and as he came through the doors he wiped sweat from his forehead; he carried a notebook and two large telephones in the palm of his hand. I felt the nervousness come up.
He offered me a beer. It seemed an appropriate drink. And almost as soon as we took our seats, I was jealous. He seemed too certain. Of course he did: he lived at the hotel. He hardly had to move to find his sources; he had air-conditioning; he surely slept well. “Do you know anyone who might buy my work?” I asked, hopefully. I mentioned the Guardian. Bentley frowned, as though thinking. Around our Swedish picnic table the space was nearly empty. In the air was the beginning of the afternoon warmth; one felt on the skin a picking sensation, as though one’s forehead and arms were being baked. Bentley idly cast his gaze about, and up and down the waitress. It became evident that he would not reply. I asked for advice, but he would not extend any. Only when I offered myself as his lackey—it was the most exploitative form of journalism—did he raise his head. I felt small. I imagined him as a buttery toad: with his small slit eyes, even when he blinked he seemed to stare.
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