Stringer

by Anjan Sundaram

  The longer I stayed at the hotel the more anxious I grew. The staff were beginning to recognize me, to look at me strangely. I drifted about the corridors, and the feeling came up, first slowly, then like a spasm. A sense of internal desertion, irrational, almost humiliating. I could not stand to be alone, and I could not bear to be around people. I walked to the back of the hotel, to an empty spot, and through a gap in the wall I watched a young man shampoo his head. He covered his scalp with a chalky paste and picked at it with a blade. I watched him for a long time, observing the curt movements of his hand, and the chips of hair that fell away.

  Two days before I had texted Natalie. I don’t remember what I had written: I had woken thinking of her, as if she had appeared in a dream. Her presence had felt unnatural. It was the first time I had thought of her since the day after the party. And all morning I waited for her reply, imagining how I would feel. What would I suggest? I had no reason to be nervous. Noon came and went. By night I had given it up. And I thought about it only in moments—to wonder if I had said something wrong. But now in the garden of the Grand Hotel I looked at my phone and found, the anxiety rising, that some hours ago she had written.

  The message, though long, was emotionless. Her hotel was nearby, not grand but decent. She had to travel early the next morning, so she could not be late to sleep, but if I would like to relax in the few hours that remained of the day she could afford the time. It was an offer of a quiet evening; it was what I needed. The worry dissipated from my body; I felt relieved; I no longer needed to inquire when she had received my message, or why I had not merited a reply sooner. The questions, now harmless, fell away. The day so far had been searing, a stretch of disappointments. I arrived at her hotel feeling it had been saved.

  I had always felt alien watching pools at night—they had an eerie glow and reminded me of hotel drownings. This one was shaped like a bean, lined with bathroom tiles and empty of people. Between the tiles the cement was uneven, as though smeared with a finger and left to dry in smudges. The water had a tinge of green. The short walk to the hotel had brought me to a sweat, and I was startled by the chill when I jumped off the pool’s cement edge and plunged into the water—my head submerged in the coolness—making a storm of bubbles that rose in a brilliant stream. The water felt warm in waves, the air cold against my skin. The world acquired color again: green geckos sitting like apostrophes on the wall, the red-tiled roof, Natalie’s yellow towel. She waved. I paddled with my legs and bounced. I turned on my back and floated, looking at the gray sky spread as one domed panel.

  The sky was now dark, and the lights in the pool gave the water, disturbed by the wind, a vibrating fluorescence. Natalie moaned, teeth shivering: “I’ve missed the sun.” Her sunglasses were large, like the eyes of a fly. She sipped a cocktail. The crisis of that afternoon had passed, and I was silent out of a kind of embarrassment. I was distracted. A group of muscular men and women jumped into the hazy water. They made thunderous splashes; the laughter rose. The men stepped out and dived on their chests. They somersaulted into the pool, screaming in Lingala. “It is their trauma,” Natalie said. Her words sounded less enigmatic in French.

  “These people?”

  The men had flirted with her the week before. “They made a fortune during the war,” she said, “buying diamonds from the rebels and selling in Antwerp. Then they lost their families to the violence. Every week they come here.” We watched. But our conversation was cut short when almost simultaneously with the splashing of the Congolese thick drops began to dot the ground. The rain made circular ripples in the pool. Light was blotted out. We ran in the gloom into a corridor. The shower grew heavy, then settled as a steady fall. A wind picked up. Natalie wrapped her towel closer. “How will you go home in this?” Dripping, we climbed the stairs of the hotel, leaving a trail of puddles that led to her door.

  She pushed me into the room. “The mosquitoes will come in.”

  The room had a square window. She wanted to show me the view. The window was not large, so we had to stand together. We watched water accumulate in the city. Trees shook in the torrent. Streetlights flickered and burned out. She pulled the curtains together. “It doesn’t look like it will stop tonight.” A few minutes later I heard water flow into her sonorous tub. I lay on the couch and closed my eyes, listening to the rain, the hush of the tap, the hum of her hair dryer. In a corner of the wall, near the floor, was a cluster of insects. And when Natalie emerged from the shower, head wrapped in cloth, she handed me a towel, as though it were now my turn to clean myself.

  The bathroom was poorly planned, making it seem smaller than it really was. The door was cut out at the bottom corner so it would not hit the tub as it opened. Everywhere was pitch-black tile, even on the walls. The tub had a sunflower shower that drooped over my head, as if to bless me. My bare feet gripped scabbed crust. And I soaped under the running water. The tub filled with gray foam, the oily mix whirling as a deep funnel over the drain.

  Entering the room again I felt fresh. “It’s nice to have hot water.”

  “Don’t remind me,” she said. “I’m going to be in the east from tomorrow, and I don’t know what the hotels will be like.” So she was leaving—and she was going to the war. I felt jealousy, and some resentment. I wanted to leave Kinshasa, even if I could not go with her.

  She lay under the sheets, holding a book. A place, where the covers were flat and taut, had been left for me. I saw the tip of her nightgown. I got in. An old air conditioner rumbled over our heads, dripping water from a corner. There was a sense of her bodily warmth. I felt her move, and my legs stiffened. I looked at the room’s wallpaper, shriveled, as though too much glue had been applied underneath. Natalie’s voice suddenly rang in my ear. “Why did you choose Congo?”

  I paused. “My bank cashier was Congolese. I’m living with her brother-in-law.”

  “And you just came?”

  “One-way ticket.”

  My fingers tingled and shifted an inch toward the bed middle. And I was transported to those initial passions, in America. It seemed a long time ago when I was in Steve Brill’s office. I didn’t know the man; I had found him in my university’s register of alumni. He was a journalist-millionaire in Manhattan, and he was late. “I’m so sorry,” his secretary said. “Something urgent just came up. I know you’ve traveled a long way.” In the waiting room I flipped through a nature encyclopedia. The secretary returned. “I read your correspondence to Mr. Brill,” she said. “And I thought you should have this.” She held out some pages.

  Mr. Brill finally received me. He was kind. He gave me some tips on journalism. The elevator slowly took me to the ground floor of his skyscraper office.

  On the train home I looked at the secretary’s pages. It was a copy of a magazine interview with a Polish journalist who had traveled extensively in Africa. This was in the 1960s, when Africa was breaking free from the colonial powers. It was a torrid time on the continent. The journalist, whose name was Ryszard Kapuściński, went from “revolution to coup d’état, from one war to another”; he witnessed “real history,” as he called it, “history in the making.” But on his travels something surprised him: he never saw a writer. “Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere?”

  When Kapuściński returned to Europe, he said, he found the writers. They were in their homes, writing stories about “the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage.”

  It was early spring in the United States, and everything was beginning to come out of the cold. I remember opening the heavy and tall library doors to a scene of boys and girls scattered across the manicured lawn. Hair flowed like waterfalls over books. Everywhere there was skin, stretches of shimmering skin, and hushed conversations about forbidden adventures. I had been reading the Pole’s descriptions of the African wars. I closed my eyes; I remember how red the sun made the backs of my eyelids. I watched the translucent shapes meander across my vision, floating, rising; ultimately dr
ifting. Natalie made a noise. I said, “Are you asleep?” She breathed, stirring her lips. The rain continued at uniform rhythm, falling at an angle. I closed my eyes and felt the softness of the cotton, the coolness of the air.

  “You know what,” I said. “I never thanked that secretary.”

  11

  I had chosen Bobby over Keith. I wanted to go to the east, to the war, but I could not afford it. Bobby’s proposal to travel upriver by barge had also begun to excite me. We would go somewhere that few people ever traveled to. And the story we were chasing was fantastic.

  I had already started to prepare for the journey, and was under no illusion about its ease: it would be lengthy—traveling cheaply meant traveling slowly—and physically demanding. I expected to be unreachable for nearly the whole time. Planning was essential. I conducted further research on Bobby’s land. Unsurprisingly, there were indeed reports of mineral riches in that area, none of them officially exploited. In the 1990s a French company had made investigations around Lake Tumba. The lake was known for being deep red, and it was conjectured that the lake obtained its color from leaky seams of petroleum. The outbreak of war in Congo ended that effort; apparently, the French equipment now rusted in the forest—perhaps they had intended to return. Roads in the region were few; the river was the main mode of transport. Équateur was only a few hundred miles from the capital but it seemed infinitely more remote. The government exerted little control on the territory. Much of it was virgin jungle overrun by nomadic tribes and animals. Large areas had never been seen by an outsider. But new visitors had recently arrived, sanctioned by the Kyoto Protocol. The developed world had invested millions of dollars to preserve Congo’s forest—thus buying, under the treaty’s conditions, the right for their factories to pollute in the West. Conservationists subsequently moved into the forest, cordoning off large areas and evicting tribes. With hunting deemed illegal, poachers multiplied. The police were brought in; rangers were armed. Trespassers were presumed to be hunters, sometimes shot. Numerous groups were reportedly masquerading as conservationists, secretly hiding illegal trades. In the middle of Congo, Équateur seemed like the sovereign territory of another country.

  Among my sources only Mossi expressed hesitation—but he was uncharacteristically vague. I invited him for a drink to talk about it. He called me to his house. This was also unusual, not only because we usually met at a bar but also because the address he gave was in a quarter behind ours. I had been sure that Mossi lived at the foot of Mont Ngaliema, near the ministerial neighborhood. But even then I suspected nothing—perhaps he had moved.

  The house was run-down and surrounded by pools of mud. Its yard accommodated at least three families. A child without a shirt played in a shed outside. Mossi’s room was sparse: a low mattress, an outdated telephone, a large computer. The walls were covered in green-black moss. The mattress had craters where it was worn out. An unwashed bowl lay in one corner. Mossi sat, still, against a wall. The floor was cold. He had only a thin rug. “Come now,” he said, “an old man needs your help.”

  He kept his hands between his legs. The exuberance was gone; his eyes contained sadness. He had not received a payment in three months, he said. But it was only a matter of time. The bank would call any day now. I remembered the grandeur with which he had introduced himself, and though I felt pity, I also felt let down. I didn’t want to see this.

  After this whenever we met it would feel odd: we would still get drinks at our bar in Victoire. “You’re a big man now,” he would say, laughing. But I always felt he also meant it as a taunt.

  The gloom from that episode tainted the rest of the journey’s preparations, which were done in an increasing hurry: supplies needed to be purchased, authorizations had to be obtained and we had to make final inspections before our departure. And Bobby had some good news: the barge we had been waiting for had finally anchored at port.

  He had taken charge of the planning. In his office we looked over a piece of paper that he had typed up, with “ORDRE de MISSION” at the top and a short paragraph of explanation. It said we would be inspecting his land, as per the deed number and the rights of the landowner in such and such law. The rest of the writing was obscured by stamps and approvals: from the Ministry of Migration, the Federal Investigation Authority, the Transport Ministry, the Ministry of Mines, the Department of Food and Water, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Environment, the Land Authority, the Department of Fish and Agriculture, the provincial government of Kinshasa, the provincial government of Équateur, the Ministry of Planning—but most important were the triangular stamps of the Ministry of Defense and the Security Bureau, with the officers’ signatures scrawled over the page. Our names were clearly marked. I was denoted as Bobby’s business partner. “It is good we are both Indian, they ask less questions,” he said, rolling out a map of the area.

  His office was barely lit by the sun and we used a tube-light table lamp to illuminate the map—a detailed copy about fifty years old, made by the Belgians. Most roads had since closed, and most cities had diminished—except Kinshasa, which had extended farther up the river, where the water was striped with long islands of sand. The river climbed northeast, narrowing and surrounded by bush; it turned into Lake Tumba, and a little higher, almost exactly on the line of the equator, afforded a view of Mbandaka, a colonial city at the mouth of the river Ruki on which the jungle encroached. Bobby’s land was in the vicinity, some distance to the southeast. “All of this is under the conservationists,” he said. “And there we have the mine.”

  I worried Bobby’s hatchback would break down as we weighed it with provisions. The old Peugeot was a rattling mass. Its seats were not original and had been welded on, and the gearshift was missing: Bobby shifted gears delicately, using a metal tube the size of half a pencil. Behind the backseats we filled the car with bags: tins of sardines, rusks, canned vegetables, La Vache Qui Rit. Bobby added some dried fruits he had gotten in Bombay; I brought water purification capsules and a CamelBak water bottle. We waited impatiently at the cash counters of expatriate supermarkets, watching people buy chicken sandwiches. The essentials we bought at an Indian shop that guaranteed, on an outside banner, the best prices in the ville. When I told Bobby another place sold bottled water for less, he said, “Those Congolese, always undercutting prices. And then they complain that they have to live like filthy creatures.”

  I wanted to register at the Indian embassy, so at the end of a day of shopping Bobby steered the loaded car onto the grounds, slowly passing between the gates, the rigid suspension making the car rise and fall over the rocks. The flag from Independence Day fluttered on the pole. The guard shut the gate and returned to his spot under a palm tree. The building was silent. An African had been left in charge. He used the consul’s office, a wide room with a view of the garden. “You are new here?” he said, clearing his throat as if he had just woken. The register was old, tattered and covered in plastic. He wrote the date. I listed my details while he made copies of my passport and visa; he signed my entry as an official witness. I asked if there was a number I could call should I have any trouble. He said the embassy was closed and no longer full-service.

  “Is there any benefit to registering then?” I said.

  “The embassy can confirm you as a missing person. Sometimes families need documents proving a death, which we can provide.”

  Bobby became my protector as well as co-conspirator and guide, and when the preparations were sufficiently under way to know they would soon be completed we drove to the port to purchase tickets. The harbor bustled with people. A barge had arrived from upriver; its goods were being unloaded. The quay was a slab of concrete that suddenly fell away, with no fence or protection. And across the water, in the distance, were towers and wide buildings: the city of Brazzaville. In another Congo, and a quieter world.

  Men plied our quay talking loudly and like ants they ran up and down a loose plank of wood leading to the barge. They rubbed shoulders and pushed past o
ne another, as if in a race, and the boxes on their heads seemed in a perpetual state of falling. Meanwhile our barge was being loaded: its long platform was being piled with wooden boxes. I walked the vessel’s length. The sheet metal was beaten like the surface of a golf ball. Muddy water lapped against its sides. Rivets had rusted in their cavities. But the barge floated, looking peaceful. “There are better,” Bobby said, but boats were irregular, and as I had learned with food at Jose and Nana’s, it was generally advisable to seize opportunities as they came. The barge was simple, without rooms for the passengers. A cage of iron rods stood at one end, with a cabin making a shelter over the captain’s quarters and the steering room, and a few huts in a cluster. A hole in the platform led to the hull, where more cargo—netted sacks carrying sheet metal and building materials and bicycles—was carried by the workers. The port once used to assist the loaders with cranes and motors. These now sat silently on the edge of the port. A giant hook hung above us in brown and green iron. I stepped aside.

  We entered the port’s one-story office complex. It smelled of whitewash and rice. The rooms were used as a depot for confiscated items, the barge captain said, from merchants who owed taxes or who had been caught shipping contraband. The Congolese Office for Control monitored the port. And new on its list was chicken—it was testing samples for bird flu. The captain smoked a pipe through broken red teeth. He wore old whites and his pants were an inch too short. He sat in a tall office chair wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck.

  “We are leaving in two days then?” Bobby asked.

  The captain chewed on his pipe. “Depends on when we finish loading. It could take a week.”