The sun’s golden glow fell on the curtains, which rippled from a slight opening in the window. I stepped to the view.
The city was utterly calm. Pillars of smoke billowed from places but I could not tell if they were due to the battle. In fact I was able to discern little about the urban expanse: the pedestrians seemed small, nearly absent. The shacks of neighborhoods were reduced to two-dimensional shiny roofs. I was too far away to hear the radios and pestles. The roads were filthy. I smelled an odor of citrus. Nothing corresponded: the room was a void and in it I felt severed. The city seemed grotesque, a noiseless machine moving urgently but without implication.
I spent the morning watching the street in front of the hotel; and just before noon, though the taxibuses had started to run, I hired a hotel taxi, a gray Mercedes, to take me to Victoire. The driver insisted I pay in advance. I sat in the back of the car, by a window, with one arm stretched over the length of the seat.
The day seemed to have begun with the typical fracas. On the Boulevard shops had shut, and outside a popular travel agency were haphazardly parked UN jeeps. But the roads were jammed as usual. Women walked in groups, bearing baskets of vegetables and sliced coconut on their heads. Children played with bicycle rims, propelling them forward with twigs. When the bureau called I was assured and brisk. “Nothing to report,” I said. “I’m on my way home. Kinshasa seems calm—”
“What?” the editor said. “Who told you to go home?”
“The fighting is over.”
“Do you have a flak jacket and helmet?”
“No.”
“Wait a minute.” He paused, muttering. “Don’t you live away from town? What made you think you could just go? Why didn’t you call us?”
“Man, I live in Victoire, not at the hotel. My money and passport are at home. What do I do if they shut down the roads?”
“The roads? Don’t you get it, Anjan? What do we tell your mother, that they shut down the roads?” He was shouting now. “You have no idea what’s going to happen in that city! There was a fucking battle last night! You should have stayed at that hotel!”
“Fine, all right—let me think,” I said. “I’m in the car already.” And I placed my phone beside me on the seat.
When we came to the turn for the Avenue des Huileries, which led to Victoire, I told the driver to keep going. “Tout droit?” His hands hesitated on the wheel. I made him go a mile or so and then turn, past the South African embassy, some distance away from the main road, toward the river, until we were driving past the low walls of the Indian margarine factory.
The factory belonged to the Rawji Group, the billionaire Indians. I had come here twice before, to do interviews for business stories. I did not know the owners particularly well—I was told they were wary of journalists. But they had operated in Congo for many generations, through the wars, coups and dictatorships; and they had much to lose from a prolonged battle: no business in Kinshasa matched this factory’s scale and investment (its margarine was almost a necessity in Congo). I only wanted to stop for a few minutes—I thought it would be worthwhile to gauge the level of vigilance here.
The factory was set in a colonial-style enclave whose walls were covered in paintings of tubs of margarine; and after these large images, several times the size of a person, the premises took on a miniature quality, like the buildings on a movie set. The road by which I entered—on foot, because the factory guards blocked the taxi from coming in—was narrow, with a tight turn to the parking lot full of cars. The bosses had an area set apart, in the shade of some green corrugated plastic. Everything looked flimsy, of cheap material. The main administrative building was claustrophobic. Its glass windows were splattered with dry white paint. Outside, around the tar-black grounds, were isolated clusters of low buildings and small triangles of grass: decoration. The trees were desert palms that reached a little over one’s head. And against the huge sky—the expanse of gray cloud made it seem vaster; I wondered if it had to do with our position in the Congo basin, a giant depression in the earth—everything in the enclave looked quaint.
I was just outside the main building, discussing the previous night’s shootings with some factory middle management—they dallied about, without urgency; some were promising to dock the pay of laborers who had not reported for work that morning; and I was disarmed by their ease—when a shot sounded so close above my head that I instinctively fell to the ground. For some time I lay there, not daring to move. Then, keeping my palms flat on the cement, I turned only my head: the path was covered in flattened bodies. It was the first time in my life that I had so reacted—I found myself surprised to have in me this instinct, of the action movies, to fall.
We crowded into the main building, the Indians talking rapidly—the dialects mixed: Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Marwari. They cursed their luck, the soldiers, the Congolese. Some stared at the grass indifferently. I took a seat on a concrete sill and waited. Sometimes when a shot rang out I looked at the sky, as though expecting to see the bullet. And a young man who had so far been squatting came to sit on the sill beside me. He introduced himself as a clerk in the accounting department; then his expression became listless. The shooting meanwhile grew in frequency until it was constant, like at the venue where the election results had been declared.
“Ho gaya.” “It’s happened,” said the clerk. And now everyone, nodding, adopted this posture of knowingness—no one showed surprise. It was bravado; but the pretense, self-conscious and false as it was, seemed to signal that we were in a place of security. The fear began to subside. I listened to the Indians talk. And their mockery of the violence even started to be entertaining.
After half an hour or so most of the workers had dispersed. The fighting had not stopped, and I had thought they were stepping out temporarily. But no one returned. The cars were still in the lot. I asked the clerk what I should do, as a way to bring attention to myself.
He hesitated, then went to the back of the corridor and called someone. I waited at the sill, trying to listen in. When he returned it was with purpose in his stride; he said I should follow him out—the blasts sounded, unnervingly, just beyond the enclave—to a cement walkway along a row of bright yellow doors in a one-story building. I understood that these were the factory’s guest quarters.
The clerk pushed open the last door; of lightweight wood, it flew open and banged into the wall. The room seemed like one of the temporary structures, imported whole, that one might find on a construction site. It had, by the door, a single bed. On the left was a bathroom. Before me, low on the wall, was a small air-conditioning unit. And alongside on a little table was a television. A small refrigerator was stocked with Coca-Colas. The clerk bent under the bed and found the cable for the internet. The stove even had a hot plate.
I said it looked fantastic.
He hummed in agreement. “Bhagwan saved you,” he said, waving his hand at the sky. “He diverted you from that chaos.” Diverted, chaos: I didn’t expect such words from him; they sounded too bookish.
I saw him off at my door, where I stood awhile. The view over the walkway was of a few stunted palms lined in front of the main building. At my feet, lining the cement, were flowering shrubs, sparsely planted, behind which ran a network of thick black water tubes. The garden was like the rest of the factory’s decoration—seemingly put there without consideration or care, out of some idea that plants and flowers were pretty.
I heard the adjacent door slam shut—and a paunched man came out, in singlet and shorts, carrying a computer in the crook of his arm, making straight for me. His feet, bare, landed on the cement with thuds. He looked extremely concentrated, and somewhat worried, as though he were about to deliver some difficult news. “Hello,” he said. “You know CAD?”
I looked at him oddly. He then made a horrified expression, cringing as if he had made a grave error. “I’m sorry sir, I’m sorry,” he said, taking his computer in hand. I told him I was only a guest, not a factory employee—he seemed relieve
d—but that I was stunned he could be programming at such a time. “What about that?” I said, pointing to my ear and then beyond the walls. He grimaced, but out of disbelief. “That?” And, now suddenly calm, as if I were an imbecile for asking, he said in a soft, melodious tone: “That will go on.” He craned his neck to glance about us, as though to, for the first time, survey our surroundings. He turned, and I noticed he made a slight shrug; his door clicked shut.
I took a last look at the view. The room was icy to enter. I wrote a dispatch for the AP to say that the fighting had resumed. I showered, and sat on the bed, my back to the wall, and watched TV—strangely, I could find almost no broadcasts about the battle. The channels were full of commercials: shaky footage of hangers holding rows of jeans; ecstatic women twirling out of changing rooms, holding their buttocks. We were given a tour of Mr. Felix’s house and shown his collection of shoes, his children, his waxed car and his wife—in that order. “Mr. Felix is a smart man,” the narrator informed us, “he is reliable.” It had seemingly not gone unnoticed that millions of people, confined to their homes, would be staring at their televisions. Congo’s wealthy were taking the opportunity to promote themselves.
National television screened a heart surgery video: a pair of scissors cut a slit into some pink tissue. Forceps picked at the pieces of flesh. Blood seeped over the beating muscle. Budup. Budup. The scissors then cut another slit. Hands began to sew with a needle and thread. It was an advertisement for Kinshasa’s Chinese hospital. Later the station ran old election campaign videos—profiles of politicians—and then a scene of Congolese aid workers in a dull room with foreign donors. The camera panned the room and zoomed in on a European. He bit his lips. He rubbed his nose and wiped his hands over his trousers. His eyes sometimes drooped. He looked this way and that; but the camera remained fixed, perhaps ordered to focus on the foreigners to show the meeting’s importance. I became mesmerized by the slow, almost unmoving images. Never before had I such an opportunity to observe, so unhindered, the intricacies of a person’s unconscious habits.
At about 8:00 p.m., dinner was delivered in a metal tiffin carrier, by a boy who was already at the end of the walkway when I answered his knock. He had brought chapatis, still warm, and a potato curry with coriander. Probably the clerk, I thought, though I had no way of knowing. I ate tentatively. And I got through about a fifth of the novel that I had tried to read at the election venue.
The setting should have seemed absurd; yet in the coolness, and after the neighbor’s intense reaction, I too felt cut off from the high-powered machine guns hammering the buildings outside. That seemed someone else’s business; my business was here; and it seemed possible, even easy, to become aloof like the Indians. I found I could get used to the blasts as a kind of background noise, and rather than waiting for it to stop I waited, when it stopped, for it to pick up again.
Before turning in I called Serge, to talk about coming to fetch me: if the situation did not change I felt I could return the next day. I also wanted Serge to share in my luck—I told him about the room, the air-conditioning, the internet; I suggested he spend the morning at the factory before we departed. But he said the soldiers had set up barriers on all the main roads, and there was now no way to pass between the cité and the ville. So I would have to wait. “And the ville is not my place,” he said. I felt suddenly unnerved. “It isn’t mine either, Serge.”
The fighting escalated. The sounds became harder and more powerful—now frightening. There were tanks on the road—presumably the new machines Kabila had received some months earlier from China. They were so close that I could hear their engines heave; sometimes, above the enclave walls, I could see a moving turret. Eight people had so far been killed in the violence, most of them during the previous day.
The factory’s location was unusual: not on the outskirts, as in most cities, but in one of Kinshasa’s wealthiest neighborhoods. (The factory had been built in the 1930s; the city had grown around it.) And around the corner from Bemba’s residence, this location put us at the center of the battle.
The neighbor had presumably been instructed to share his meals with me. When I opened my door that afternoon I found at my feet two bowls covered in tissue paper, on which had been placed some steel cutlery.
I heard a heavy boom not far away—I looked out, and saw a spiral of black fumes rise. The proximity was worrying. Kabila, I would learn, had shelled Bemba’s house and helicopter. Bemba had been in the house at the time—with diplomats from the UN and American, French, British and Chinese embassies. They all had to be rescued in UN armored cars. The meeting had apparently unnerved the president: he had feared the foreigners were switching sides, that they were conspiring to remove him.
Concerned now about whether we were protected, and also about a rumbling noise that had persisted all night, seeming to come from within the enclave, for the first time I left the room. I made my way off the walkway and, keeping close to the walls, to the front gate. I crouched behind a cement parapet near the gate: the guards were in their glass-and-aluminum cabin, huddled over their radios. Propped up nearby was a Kalashnikov with a worn wooden butt. When they saw me they frantically began to wave and indicate that I should not approach.
In the other direction were the factory’s installations. I passed the main building, where I stopped at a watercooler to fill a bottle to drink, and then the little triangular gardens, and proceeded along an empty road. There were no buildings here, no people. I came to an open pool, the size of my room, full of a black liquid—toxic effluent. Large metal pipes covered in a kind of aluminum emerged from it and led deeper within the enclave; I could not see their end. There was the throbbing noise of pumps, and an empty pulling sound—it surprised me that the machinery was still running.
It was in the middle of that night, my second at the factory and the third of the battle, that I began to become distressed. There was no obvious reason or trigger. I awoke in the middle of the night to the sounds of shooting, and immediately felt assailed by an anxiety.
Somewhere a mortar bomb fell and made a dull roar. It came back: the initial shock of the shots, their closeness. The illusion of safety had been shattered. I had realized we would soon be testing the infamous three-day rule, that on the third day of a lockdown the mobs became manic, uncontrollable. Several explanations for this had been proposed—hunger took over; or anger; some viral force emerged after three days. The rule had proven true over the years. And it began now to be mentioned on the radio. I imagined the enclave overrun with people; I noticed that my room’s door, which did not fit properly within its frame, made a ceaseless light thudding with the shifting winds.
I had thought the factory would arrange to clean the room, but since the boy had dropped off dinner I had not seen a person. I still had the tiffin carrier, which smelled so powerfully of food that I put it next to the shower. Water dripped from a bathroom tap. I ran my hands over the walls, which were cold. The air-conditioning had ceased to be stimulating and was now a source of discomfort. I had not taken sufficient care with the room: the floor was everywhere stained with ugly brown patches from my bare feet collecting dirt and stepping into puddles.
The blasts now made a fickle confinement: though the battle remained always near, its distance shifted; so that the relief was always temporary, false—and one entered a state of continual stress.
A grasshopper had gotten into my room, or had perhaps always been present. In the fading light, against a wall, it showed its crouched form, its ribbed abdomen. It also seemed to wait.
I felt I slept numerous successive nights, each beginning with slumber and ending with alertness—to the ebonized vicinity, my capsule-sized room—and followed by the distressed realization that the sleep had been brief and the awakening rude. The body, too agitated, sometimes fell into a numbness.
By morning the continuity of the blasts had begun to create an irrational, possessing anxiety that could be set off by the most trivial sights: my unmade bed, wat
er trembling in the bucket, slugs sliding over the wall outside the room. I could not see a bird; the small birds seemed to have all fled; I could no longer hear the chirps. I could think of nothing that reposed—my imagination seemed corrupt. The grass, the trees, the sky: all seemed tainted.
I began to make calls. The AP said it had no means to secure its journalists—the editor, sounding genuinely concerned, said I should try the embassies. I did not know many foreigners in Congo. I tried the UN, which said evacuating foreigners was not in its mandate. The Belgians asked if I was of European origin. Out of desperation I called Natalie. It was a difficult call—I was shrill, on the verge of breaking down. I cried out over the phone, screaming. But she showed genuine concern, and found for me the Canadian mission’s phone number. The person there told me to call the Americans, who said they could do little for noncitizens. The British said the same. Only the French took down my phone number in case they passed near the factory. Everyone asked for my nationality; everyone seemed to be planning an evacuation. The pity I had felt for Serge at the venue I now felt for myself. Serge said the roadblocks were still up; he promised to come as soon as it became possible. The Indian embassy—I tried it last—did not answer my call. I knocked on the neighbor’s door. He opened it, stretching his legs behind him, looking like someone on holiday.
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