Stringer

by Anjan Sundaram

  “What happened?”

  Ali was hunched over the bedside table, chewing tobacco. I remembered the alarm of being moved, the sense of helplessness as my feet slid over the rocks and as the clothes were pulled off my body. My joints hurt. I was under a soft quilt in a back room without windows.

  “Relax,” he said, his smelly face close to mine. “You need to rest. Don’t ask too many questions for once.”

  19

  I took the medication for two more days, which passed in bouts of sleep and semiconsciousness. To this day I don’t know if I had malaria—I believe it could have been that those pills had decimated my immunity.

  But the illness, I felt, had protected me from some terrible fate: the room, the toilets, and then the troubles with the AP and Naro—the misfortunes had all seemed enchained, as though from a single cause, and somehow bound to my residence. I was relieved to be out of the convent and its austerity, so isolating.

  Ali made sure I was cared for. The domestic, a village girl who seemed about my age, and wore faded rags, made me baby-food porridge each morning. In the afternoons I had ginger tea; before bed the tea was of lemongrass. She followed me, as a precaution, a few paces behind, when I walked slowly down the house’s main corridor, bounded on one side by a wide mosquito net from the height of one’s waist to the ceiling; so one could look into the yard and upon its mango tree.

  The attention, excessive and relentless, soon made me uncomfortable. It made me feel a settler in the house, parasitic; I worried about overstaying. My room, clearly for guests, with only a bed, a cupboard of bedsheets and a shin-high table, provided some peace; but the slightest noise in the corridor would disturb me. I carried a fear of intrusion. On waking I would wait by the door, listen for movement, step out only if there was silence. And the recovery hardly gave respite: once fully cured, I felt intolerably ill at ease.

  Ali said the UN was trying to hide its illicit dealings in Fataki—it had not reinstated the right of civilians to fly. He did not bring it up again.

  And sometimes it was he who seemed to reach out to me, uneasily; like when he relayed a piece of gossip about the domestic’s sister, whose husband had stolen a quantity of money.

  One evening, when it was quiet and the shop had shut early, he suggested we have dinner together. He was excited—a new satellite dish had arrived, making the Indian selection of channels accessible. We watched Antakshari, a musical game show in Hindi that my parents used to follow. Ali hummed the tunes. The sofas on which we sat were of liver-brown upholstery.

  “Listen,” he said, chewing. “You should stay as long as you want. There is no problem. You are very quiet. And the house is very big.”

  I swallowed the insufficiently chewed food, quickly taking water, and thanked him, adding that I might not need to stay. But I was grateful for his offer.

  He pushed the bowl of meat toward me with the back of his hand. “Whatever. The room is there if you want.”

  “Are you making accounts these days?” I tried not to sound too cheerful. But already I felt obliged, that I should be nice to him.

  Ali had lately been writing for long hours, in the shop.

  “They are so boring,” he said, “I find them very boring, four times a year. Why don’t you do them for me?”

  “Sure.” Again, my chirpiness. It was a tone I despised. I could hear my voice become shrill.

  “You will mess the whole thing.”

  He licked two fingers and wiped them dry, staining the napkin in orange lines. The napkin, crumpled, fell next to his plate. “But maybe you can bring me a white girl.” He gave it some thought. “A young girl maybe. Sometimes I worry about AIDS . . . Do they have AIDS?”

  The TV lit up, making a brightness in the room.

  “Usually they are careful,” I said, uncertainly.

  “That is good. I like the UN girls, or journalists.” He sat up. “I want to do it without the condom. I never get the chance. These black girls,” he sucked on a finger, “they have infections. And they are always wearing strings. You know the line that goes between their asses? I hate to think of that string.”

  He ate a little, then chuckled to himself. “You know they use a powder, up and down. ‘Clean, clean,’ they tell me.” He laughed. “You know how they apply it? With a toothbrush. I tell them not to put it, but they say it is antiseptic or anti-fungus . . . It becomes white everywhere. I always make them wash, first thing. Otherwise you don’t feel like touching it.” He spoke almost with pity.

  The Antakshari contestants now sang an uplifting music. Their clothes were of embroidered silk; but the creases were too sharp, and one could see the dress had come straight from the shop—had been purchased specially for this appearance; then the singers seemed less splendid.

  Ali bit on the tip of a green chili.

  “White girls,” he said, “I don’t really know, except from the porn. They make a lot of porn. They like sex.” There was a pause. He looked at me.

  I hummed.

  “In Congo you can make a nice porn business. The girls are very simple that way. If you get angry they only think they did something wrong.” Ali seemed to become excited by this. “I like to make them scared. They look at you. You can make them do anything. I think they also like it.”

  And I felt, by his talk, that he must often converse in this way.

  “You have never taken a black girl,” he said.

  It was evident.

  “Why not? They are waiting for the young men. In Bunia you know, it is banana, the secret. Feed your girl banana fry every day. In two weeks she will become heavy, and big”—he tensed his oily, stained hand, showing how he would grab the breast, as though to hurt the girl. Then again he was calm.

  The domestic came in to take our plates, and as though oblivious she leaned over the table, her shirt falling so one could see, against her black chest, her white brassiere. And I could not help but, in my mind, to undress her, to see her breasts under the lace, their largeness, their points, and then see her face anxious, desiring.

  But Ali was looking over her form. The girl, silent and still bending, glanced at him, then at me. Without looking up again she collected all the plates and, the plastic rattling in her arms, left the room. I watched her behind, the quick movements of her bare feet. And I now felt that she had not been innocent, that she had deliberately dropped her shirt before my face.

  “She thinks after one night you will marry her.” Ali ran his arm under his shirt and scratched his chest. “She was married, in the village. Her husband ran away.”

  He was still staring at the television.

  “Don’t look again, even if she shows you.”

  The Antakshari hosts introduced a young couple who were to sing a 1970s song. The orchestra began again. But the people on-screen seemed unintelligent; the hosts’ low-cut dresses led the eye only to areas one did not want to imagine; the bodies seemed of loose flesh.

  “These TV shows are becoming too commercial,” Ali said. “Half of it is tamasha. Advertisements, talking. People sing for only twenty minutes, and they are more interested in looking like film stars. Look at their teeth. All tamasha.” Needless excitement.

  After a while he sighed, leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “So boring, nothing to do.” And that made all the talk, the tension, the descriptions of aggressive sex, seem like restless chatter about hobbies, like gardening or collecting stamps; they were ways to keep oneself occupied, to pass the time.

  The girl had however desired an end. The way in which she had offered herself: there was the realization of how the Congolese must feel they were seen. Her gesture had been unambiguous, coarse; she had applied the mood on me; she had seen me with vulgarity.

  I recalled Fannie and Frida, the girls Nana had thrown at me. The desire with which they had seen me, the ugliness of their approach—it became apparent.

  I wondered why Natalie came to mind. Was it because of the domestic? The feeling of frustrated desire, of a promise som
ehow corrupted. It seemed so. The aggression of this scene seemed to transfer easily to her memory. I had only crossed the boulevard, from one side to the other, but the people seemed so defiled. And somehow I felt infused with Ali’s energy—his excitement in seeking. I had moved far from the purity and charisma of the convent, with its beatific boy attendant.

  I would keep the room, freeing myself from the worry of needing to find a place and pay rent. But mindful of Ali’s reputation, I made adjustments—such as using the back door to leave the house. This alley was quiet, without traffic. I didn’t want people to think we were associates.

  From the gate I walked left, briskly over the mud, to the first left turn, which opened to a wider road, sloping up. Here was a corner café. Its picnic chairs were full. Customers ate chickens—Bunia’s food of choice, with the more expensive tilapia—with twisted legs, as though the birds had been cooked live and had tried to shrink away from the flame. I ordered fermented milk, which came in a beer glass. And I took a seat that became available.

  Across the road was a row of colonial-style houses, of the sort I now lived in with Ali, with narrow pillars on the red-oxide porches. Bunia had only these constructions; nothing had been built in ten years, perhaps twenty. Called dukkas, after the Indian word for shop, they had at the front a commercial space, and the owner lived either inside or on top. And today, even on this side street, the dukkas had a buzz about them. People emerged from one in special dress. During the days of illness I felt I had lost my bearings; I could not easily tell what was new and what was normal.

  But on walking farther I realized I had missed a transformation in the city: people thronged the boulevard. Cars were parked in long rows. A new wooden stage had been erected and strewn with banners. The vice president, Kabila’s main rival for the presidency, was due to fly in. His name was Jean-Pierre Bemba, and his chubby face was all over the crowd, plastered on white cotton T-shirts and blue flags.

  I pushed my way into the crowd, past the men, women and families, past the circle of women doing a bend-over-forward dance. The gathering swelled as the hour of arrival approached, until people occupied the full width of the street, from near Ali’s shop to the cafés. The money changers and the kaddafis, the men holding bottles of gasoline, were gone, but vendors were having a heyday selling lollies: mixtures of frozen milk and sugar wilting on wooden trays.

  The music, the beating of the drums and the dancing grew louder, reaching a crescendo. We looked up. But Bemba was not there. The noise diminished. This constant rising and falling put everyone on edge. People tussled for space. We were parched. And it was clear that the abnormally long wait, the surges of emotion, had been deliberately orchestrated.

  The crowd required agitation; Kabila was ahead in the polls; Bemba needed to create momentum: it was plausible. But the campaigns, the speeches, the T-shirts and the promises: it seemed too abstract and intellectual a contest for former warlords, who only a few years earlier had pledged to kill each other.

  But in these elections Kabila seemed the man of peace—to end their feud he had named Bemba his vice president. Kabila seemed willing to bring calm to Congo, though it was unclear how much of the country he would control. A victory for Bemba, on the other hand, seemed certain to plunge Congo into new chaos. Born into a wealthy family, he was willing to take great risks to win power. During Congo’s conflict he had left his mansions and servants for the forests, where he had made himself into a powerful warlord.

  As one of the milk lolly vendors said to me: “Power falls from the sky in Africa only once every twenty or thirty years. Each man becomes a dictator. He will do everything in his means not to lose his chance at the presidency.”

  Finally Bemba’s large form moved across the platform. “Welcome, welcome,” he boomed into a microphone, grimacing. Women cheered. The waving flags caught sunlight like glitter. Bemba seemed put at ease. He began to laugh at the crowd at his feet. “I will clean up your problems in six months.” Now there was clapping. “Who do you trust? Me or that liar?” But the clapping had been too quiet—and for a moment I felt that the people had come for the free handouts, the T-shirts, money and banners of cloth.

  Then the crowd gave a roar. Bemba was saying that he would prolong the war. “If I don’t win the elections I will return to the bush!” he yelled, his eyes filled with rage. “We will make a new army.” Arms in the crowd rose in the air, trembling, fingers spread out. Women quickened their circle dance, hooting through their hands. Bemba scanned the frenzied people. Slowly, he smiled. I could feel the violence in the atmosphere. The vice president had the power to incite this in the poor.

  The city was continually tense after Bemba’s appearance. The attacks diminished, then stopped. There was no news about the militias’ movements. I became suspicious. The wait was first strange, then intolerable. One felt something was being prepared. I fell into a strange depression—again I was eating a lot. Even Ali’s offer of having prostitutes over in the afternoons suddenly began to seem interesting. In an attempt to satisfy my agitations, and to avoid succumbing to Ali’s degeneracy, I decided to find a way to get out of the city.

  I planned a trip with an intrepid American, a middle-aged Massachusetts man whose office, next to the doctor’s clinic, I had walked into one day out of curiosity. He worked for a small NGO, and seemed as eager as I was to see what was happening in the countryside. He arranged a journey on the pretext of a field inspection, and had me join. We left Bunia four days before the elections.

  It was a quiet morning.

  From the outset we seemed alone, the only moving object in the landscape.

  Our first stop was about twenty miles from Bunia, in a field with goats. A few men stood around, under the occasional stooping acacia. These were former fighters who, under a special program, were being convinced to return to life as civilians. But the program was failing: many of them were returning to the militias they had previously deserted.

  They looked wary, if fatigued, and very black from working outdoors. The American left me to talk to a different group—but we constantly kept an eye on each other; one never knew whose side these men were on.

  And now they approached me. First they made clear that they wanted never to use a gun again. It was a line, I felt. I was then eagerly given a story, like a piece of village gossip, about the recruitment of two herders some days before. A plain-looking outsider, a Congolese, had come to the village and discreetly sought out the men. A few days later the men had snuck out, at night, abandoning their families.

  So the militias had passed through this area. There was no sign of them now. I don’t know what I had expected to see: a garrison-like encampment, perhaps, or some evidence of the military.

  The men said they could barely afford to eat from their herding. “It is not a life.” No doubt they had lived better by their weapons, plundering. But their main complaint was that the UN could give them more useful things to do: they wanted computer training. They asked if I could give them the internet.

  For lunch we stopped at a town called Iga Barrière. A short street was its marketplace, where vendors sold meat. As I had everyone else I met that day, I asked our vendor, while chewing on a brochette, if he had seen militias of late. He had not. But he said that the skewers from which I ate goat had carried human meat during the war. And he burst into laughter.

  Only a few miles away there was unease: at Kilo-Moto, a productive gold mine, the men hardly engaged me. They allowed me to watch from the edge of their holes, in which they stood, knee-deep in stagnant water; the blood fluke, which swelled one’s liver until the veins burst, was common here. Shovels scraped against rock.

  Above the pits men chatted and shook the golden clay through sieves. On their way out of these mines they would be strip-searched by the South African company that had hired them as day workers. And in the morning they would again be inspected; only the healthy would be handed permits. In this way the company was assured its gold.

  The min
es were exploitative, but the villagers were grateful—few other jobs paid two or three hundred dollars a month. They told me that they usually spent their earnings by sunrise, on alcohol and women. They called it “having a wife for one night.”

  We drove past fields, and over winding paths on hillsides. The light fell in shafts between clouds.

  Among the herders that day I had sensed not anger or resentment but boredom. Their asking for the internet in that field, where they did not have access to electricity and clean water—showed their desire for a life on the edge. I said, “You can get the internet easily in Bunia.” They felt I had misunderstood. “We want to have it here.”

  The extravagant, almost whimsical nature of Congolese demands—it was something striking about the people. It led to frustrations. And it perhaps, in part, had to do with the unreasonable expectations of life that Mobutu had created. His destruction had been exhilarating. For a while, in the Zairianization of the 1970s, Congo roared. That was a time of unbelievable wealth—a great carnival. Ordinary people accessed great sums without work. It was felt that Congo’s famed riches were, at last, in the hands of its people, and that because this was their destiny, their right, the carnival would not end. The labor of four or five decades was consumed in those few years. And the country was left exhausted. The carnival, however, is still remembered, and beloved. It is part of the nostalgia—perhaps society’s great nostalgia, proof of the Congolese achievement.

  And now the ex-fighters were being given fishing nets, reeds to weave baskets with and goats to herd. It was an offer of homogeneity, of the individual adventure without the individuality or the adventure. One fished, wove, farmed one’s plot. There could be no defiance in this, no drama, no impression of direction or conviction. The men, emerging from the bush, wanted lives; they were being offered jobs. They wanted a way to express themselves.