Stringer

by Anjan Sundaram

  “I’m playing to win.”

  Bobby got up from his seat, as if taken by an urge. He told me to wait and made for the back of the barge. The evening was coming to a close. The sun hung over the water, which glistened red and gold. Migratory birds skimmed the river surface, on their last legs before nightfall. Monkeys screeched across the water, their calls echoing. I could have waited half an hour; it felt too long.

  Then, over the crates, I saw Bobby with the captain. They were sharing a smoke. I was about to call out when Bobby looked over and waved, as though nothing had happened. At first I was perplexed. Then I felt cheated. I tipped over one end of the board. The act was involuntary—I was surprised that I had done it; but already on this journey I had begun to feel outside myself. In this strange landscape, with its strange people, the monotony had begun to make me feel detached, distant, and it was as though by that act I had for a moment removed years of manners and teaching, obeying a destructive instinct. It somehow satisfied me to see the counters scattered over the deck.

  The AP informed me that I was missing a number of stories in Kinshasa. The government had begun to make election announcements. Bentley had returned to Kinshasa and was reporting in a rush. The editors called to ask where I was—though they had known about my expedition. The line was crackly. They were annoyed. They asked how long I intended to travel. I realized that I had also missed the earnings from those reports. I thought of the family in Kinshasa. And I felt a creeping doubt—if I had not erred by coming to the jungle. The pressure on me grew—the fear of coming out of this empty-handed.

  Bobby became unfriendly to me. I would see him walk through the market, alone, to buy grilled fish. He carried them on hooks and ate in the tent, from the newspaper. In the evenings he would lean over the railings looking over the water, and the foam. When we met it was awkward, and I felt embarrassed—I feared he would bring up the game, though I felt it was he who should apologize for his rude behavior. As the days passed it became clear that neither he nor I would express regret. An impasse formed between us. And during this time the fever on the barge grew: the market, its goods and livestock and kiosks. As more and more city produce was exchanged for animals, the squawks and noises woke me even earlier in the morning. I felt stressed, on edge—and this stress was irreconcilable with the heat, which wanted to draw one into a stupor.

  Looking out on the river, often alert, as if searching for something, I one day became conscious of the disappearance of the beaches. The river was walled by jungle. And watching this green continuum, I felt lonely. It was not from a lack of company. I was constantly meeting people in Congo—and also leaving them behind. I came to new people, negotiated with them. I tried to move forward. But there was no continuity in this.

  I thought of Mossi. His support had been strange. Yet it had seemed to come from genuine concern and good-heartedness. Despite his precarious condition he had made himself my mentor. I felt I could not return what he had given me—the encouragement and confidence when I needed it most. And now I was moving on. The constant movement was grinding, fatiguing.

  The solitude swelled within me, creating a sense of abandonment and also an aggression. I somehow felt joined with my surroundings. I feared meeting one of the annoying poor men on the barge. I thought the anger and violence might come out if I were provoked.

  One of Mobutu’s many palaces appeared on the riverbank. Set on a mud cliff, it was a decrepit colonial-style construction: with pillars, a triangular roof, whitewash, paved verandas. The dictator’s palaces were legendary. Jose had told me that they were walled with jade, that the doorknobs were jeweled, and that he decorated them with Picassos and Fabergé eggs: unthinkingly spending wealth that belonged to the people.

  Though Mobutu had died nearly a decade earlier, one still felt his influence everywhere. Particularly here, in the jungle—an ancient part of Congo, and of the world. People here were remote, disconnected. The coming elections were meaningless; everyone of this area would vote for Mobutu’s clan. I was coming into an old place, with deep-rooted mentalities from Mobutu’s thirty-two-year rule of Congo. By the end he had made himself the Founding Father (le Père Fondateur), the Builder (le Bâtisseur), the Marshal of Zaire (le Maréchal du Zaïre), and a demigod who in videos materialized in the sky, among the clouds.

  But the man of these grand titles and visions had simple origins. Joseph Désiré Mobutu was raised by a single mother. Unlike many African dictators he was not the son of a chief or notable. He had been a troublesome child. He joined the army at a low rank. Footage from his years as a journalist shows him to be a scrawny young man, uncertain and deferential in the presence of Belgians.

  This was the same man who took it upon himself to restore—even create, for Congo hadn’t existed until the colonials—a national identity. Like most colonial nations the newly independent Congo was stuck in imitations: of European materialism, tastes, culture. The country as a whole aspired to be évolué. But Mobutu revolted against such dependency: with increasing force he transformed Congo, to the extent that over the years it became difficult to distinguish his willful design from whim and neurosis.

  Mobutu’s delusion was to create a certain “authenticity.” He changed Congo’s name to the older Zaire. The river and the currency were now also Zaire. He banned European dress. The official costume was now a half-sleeve suit called the abacost. He banned Christian names, even his own, Joseph Désiré. Henceforth the president was to be known as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga: the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.

  Gradually everything became “Africanized”—or Mobutized: all authenticity was his creation. He began to address the nation like a tribal chief from Équateur: “Nye Nye” (Can you be silent?). The crowd would reply: “Nye” (We are silent). “Na loba” (Can I speak?). “Loba” (Speak). “Na sopa” (Can I speak frankly?). “Sopa” (Speak frankly). “Na panza” (Can I speak openly?). “Panza” (Speak openly). The jungle was where Mobutu came from. This was the authenticity he knew. And he sought in many ways, through his policies, to return Congo to this bush. He didn’t build roads—ostensibly to protect himself from coups—but it had the effect of isolating the people and restricting their development. The population became stalled in his fabrications. So when Mobutu told the people that they loved him, it seemed that they did.

  There could have been something, in all this, of an attempt to rewrite a horrific past, to deal with the ignominy of history. For the province of Équateur, Mobutu’s inspiration for a return to African ways, was also the site of the Belgians’ worst massacres: of genocidal killings; of hands cut off for harvesting insufficient rubber. This jungle, along the river, was where Conrad placed his Mr. Kurtz.

  But Mobutu was no visionary: that was Lumumba, whose achievement had been to unite Congo and claim independence for all its people. He had created a genuine nationalism. And Mobutu’s ideas were from their conception absurd. “Authenticity” turned out to be just the replacement of one imitation with another: his name for the country, Zaire, was a Portuguese distortion of Nzadi, a tribal word for river. He “invented” the abacost after a trip to Mao’s China. The chieftain’s cane he carried—reputed to be a source of his powers—was said to contain fetish from India, obtained during his visit to Indira Gandhi. Mobutu, having nothing to lean on, became a mimic; he created a disconnected people, and a confused and conflicted Congolese identity—if one could call it that.

  The colossal Mobutu creation eventually crumbled. His palaces were pillaged. People turned his airplanes, homes and limousines into camp-like family dwellings. The exotic animals in his garden-zoos—tigers, orangutans, birds of paradise—were eaten. And sympathizers of Mobutu’s regime—like Annie, the bank teller in America, and her husband—became exiled. The dictator himself died in Morocco, a guest of the king. The revolution supplanted Mobutu’s whimsical order: figures of the new regime repl
aced his monuments. The country was renamed, along with the currency and the river. There were new fondateurs now, new fathers. So history was again destroyed and manipulated; memories were allowed to fade. The palace drifted past; it had begun to be buried by the jungle. A vendor pointed out that Mobutu had once lived there.

  I had seen the vendor before. He wore a black T-shirt and dark glasses. I had seen him behind a vendor who had covered his chest with fish, hanging on hooks, open-mouthed, like a coat of mail armor. Now the vendor squatted beside me and I saw his leg was limp; he had to half drag it along the deck. He held out his hand, as if to ask for money. “Go away,” I said, waving my hands frantically. But he didn’t want charity. “I have gold.”

  It began the harassment. The vendor would appear before me, by surprise, several times daily, flashing sand-like grains and yellow chips in his palm; he said his wife was in the hospital and he needed the money; he explained it was urgent to extract a bullet from his leg; he showed me a grotesque lump at his knee. I started to turn away from him. And for two full days I successfully avoided the vendor. But one afternoon I was peering into the captain’s control room, curious to see if the dials and speedometers on the rusty dashboard worked, and the vendor’s reflection appeared in the window. He climbed down a container with his arms, pulling himself closer, and from the inside of his pants he unraveled a crumpled sheet of carbon paper. He spoke with gravity. “I got it, you worried about customs people. Put the gold inside paper and X-rays can’t see.” And without waiting for my refusal he added, “I give you good price. I know you want better quality. In a big nugget, not small like this. I know, I know. You are my most difficult client!” and he dragged himself away, making a pitiful sight, to find these new objects he thought I wanted. I felt all worked up with an unbearable annoyance, a desire to be left alone. Meanwhile the captain had returned to the helm and he ordered the barge to speed up to avoid inclement weather; apparently the rains had come early. Once again the pitch of the engine rose, and I felt the barge momentarily surge.

  It had become more difficult to sleep. The tent had begun to smell of sweat and humidity, and we lay wrapped in our sleeping bags, with Bobby occupying most of the space. He refused to budge, even when I pushed him with my elbow. And his attitude to food was also changing. When I asked for sardines from our provisions he said we should save the cans. I began to suspect he was hoarding the supplies, or had perhaps sold a few. My nose itched from the dust, and I sniveled.

  “Stop that,” Bobby said.

  You stop smelling first, I thought. And then I found myself unable to sleep. I listened to the motor, the insects, the traders moving about at night. Each set of steps that approached I thought would stop at our kiosk. But these inconveniences, and my angst, disappeared once we arrived at port.

  It took only half a day for the traders to wrap up their wares. The stalls came crashing down. The noise made me tense. I stood against the railing. Lights on the pier made a glow that reflected in the water, giving it a dark shine. The jetty was not deep enough for the barge to dock so we moored at some distance. And a group of pirogues came from the village. They were loaded by the traders working in groups: sacks and crates passed from hand to hand and down into the boats. Progress was quick. But the moving machine of people suddenly stopped. Agents at the port were calling out to the rowers. That there were sanitary inspectors seemed itself remarkable, and now these inspectors were saying they had instructions for bird flu, and that our barge was teeming with live birds.

  The traders decided to cull half the livestock. Chickens were chosen for their plumpness. They tried to fly away, squawking, but were gripped forcefully by their wings. The few roosters were let be, and they watched, standing still, as off the edge of the barge the chickens’ throats were slit with old knives and the birds gurgled. Blood fell into the river in a spurt, then in drops. The dead birds were flung into piles, wrapped in fiber by the women and sent away on the pirogues. The birds still alive were marked with paint by their owners, separated by species, and quarantined in mud sheds onshore for seventy-two hours.

  The killing dramatically reduced the level of noise—the cages of flurried activity had become piles of dead meat, and the men and women at work did so efficiently and in silence. Passengers were not allowed off the boat until the inspectors gave a signal. So we waited several hours to disembark. Bobby, in a relaxed moment, pointed to a man in a tight suit jacket and hornrimmed spectacles and said, “He has the Look Baudouin,” referring to the Belgian king. Apparently Bobby could tell the man didn’t need glasses. It was a fashion that had become popular in the 1980s. And he began, of his own accord, to tell me about his past. He had inherited his shop from a cousin, he said—before that he had worked in Kuwait, and before that on a ship. The idea of running an electrical shop had never appealed to him: it was why he had invested in real estate. “Everybody told me not to do it—Africa this, Africa that. But I got a chance to buy this property and look at what happened. If I get even 20 percent of its worth I’ll be rich.”

  I asked what he planned to do with the money.

  “Retire, of course. And pay for my daughter’s marriage. She lost her mother, poor thing.”

  The captain announced we would stay the night in the village-town. It was called Irebu, and its residents were hospitable. Most passengers found places in villagers’ homes. Bobby negotiated a mattress for us in a storeroom that belonged to a man who seemed important, because he had a large yard. But when we lay down to sleep I saw the ceiling covered in bats all the way to the eaves and I convinced Bobby to move to the courtyard. Again we were in the tent. It felt unusual that the floor didn’t rumble. I wanted to return to the barge. Outside, familiar night insects clicked and chirped, each playing its part in the forest cacophony.

  In the morning we met the yard owner, a burly man called l’Américain (the name was a compliment in Congo, meaning innovator, and nonconformist). Within a few minutes of our meeting he urged me to have children; and he asked if I might possibly marry a Congolese. That afternoon l’Américain took us to the river. A funeral was taking place. Canoes studded the water, and slender girls with powdered-white cheeks sang beside long-oared fishermen. The girls resembled eerie dolls, and their singing sounded like moans. Bobby and I decided to leave. We looked around.

  The town of Irebu was organized like in the textbooks: around a market, with the fields at the periphery and houses in between. In places the houses blended with the forest, making it difficult to find a boundary. Passing through the market we inquired about prices; and we huffed indignantly when vendors tried to fleece us. Bobby and I seemed unconscious of our animosity.

  Near the river, at the far end of the market, I found some food being cooked (everything else was either raw or unclean). A woman stirred a metal casserole lodged in a mangled dead tree. The casserole contained a bath of leaves and chili, but its vegetarian aroma was polluted by the vendor next door who hung thighs of forest buffalo from iron beams.

  The market apparently contained crocodiles as well—they had been found by our captain. And the hides were now displayed prominently on the barge. The beasts had been emptied of flesh and their rutted skins, pale white on the inside, had been cut open and clipped to the clothesline, stretched to more than twice their normal width.

  The news came soon after: a routine inspection by the crew found a malfunction with the engine cooling system. The captain said he had known all along that something was wrong; he had sensed the engine’s strain. He ordered an investigation and after a few hours announced we would have to take apart the engine. The town sent its mechanic and together with the technicians among the crew they tried to fabricate a solution. They spent all day inside the hull, which became like a secret cavern. Boys were sent to the village to fetch tools and to bring platters of soft drinks and food. All of us waited, our plans on hold.

  The engineers said they could fix it in a day, that the problem was not serious. They worked for two days, then four.
And we began to wonder if they were intentionally delaying. The captain eventually delivered the outcome: the repairs had revealed a different problem, with the piping. We would have to wait for a barge to bring us spare parts. The town became downcast. The market stayed open later that evening; traders discussed alternatives. A barge could be weeks away. Our journey had run aground.

  For supper l’Américain’s wife gave us bowls of hot manioc and sugary tea. The night was humid and warm; I left the tent. The sky was covered in puffs and the moon danced behind the clouds, its light dimming and swelling like a strobe. Bats flew out of the attic, moving in wide circles and flapping among the trees. The village no longer seemed charming; the water lapped continuously against the mud, and I could only think of the dark depth of the river, which seemed impassable, and of our disabled boat.

  A small festival started on the barge. The doors to the hull were wide open and people swarmed the deck, dancing to music from the large speakers. Villagers joined. At the back, under his crocodiles, the captain emitted misty fumes from his pipe. The scene, and the music, seemed foreboding: our predicament would not be soon resolved.

  I felt the urgency of needing to move forward. I had staked too much on this journey. My irritation grew. During those days Bobby and I ate at a single restaurant (we called it “the shack”) because of a promotion running for barge passengers. The establishment seemed dubious, thrown together at the last minute, and one had the impression it would shut the day we departed. Lunch was advertised as a buffet, but the staff served meager portions. It was a murky place. The odd shaft of light shot through holes in the wall and roof, and a lamp without oil stood in the corner. The restaurant also appeared to never stock food—it possessed no refrigerator, and as soon as we ordered the owner would issue instructions and a boy would run out the back, returning with bags from the market. Even though our time was now worthless, perhaps because we were reduced to waiting for the barge I became annoyed at this slowness.