Stringer (10 page)

8

A
t first I thought hard work would find me a solution. Propelled by the needs of the family, and my own hopes of going to the heart of the crisis, I doubled down, looking for every story, writing as much as I could, harassing my editors.

And with the hot season having officially arrived in Kinshasa the house became like a radiator. Outside was worse. Nana advised me to travel only in the morning and evening. “The heat hits your head like a baton,” she said, “you could faint in the road.” In the shade of my room, but sweating, I listened to the bulletins. The headline one afternoon was of women protesting abuse. Gathered before a UN base they had scuffled with the guards and tried to get in; the gate had nearly toppled.

“Four hundred rapes and the UN hasn't acted,” I told the editor. “One woman says she was raped on the road by six policemen but no one was questioned.” Hundreds of women had protested, I explained. There had been a spate of human-rights violations in Kananga.

“Where?”

“Kananga. It's near the middle of Congo.”

“Was there any shooting?”

“No.”

“Any fighting, clashes?”

“No.”

“Any violence at all?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So no dead.”

“Correct.”

He paused.

“Nah, not interesting.”

From the outside, as a reader, the world of news had seemed orderly, confident, authoritative. But on the inside I felt disoriented, lost. I could not understand why none of the following qualified as world news. It seemed half the country was going unreported:

Excerpts from my notebooks

Young girl killed by “savage mob” in Goma. Stones and pieces of wood were thrust into her vagina. No one in village able to say what she had done.

City of Butembo has plunged into “great psychosis.” According to the mayor, population is patrolling the city to combat would-be vampire.

Laurent Nkunda, dissident general, raided eastern village. Huts were pillaged and burned; some eighty people fled; three elderly found dead.

Drama in the Park of Virunga. A fifteen-year-old girl was seized by a hippopotamus. Park guards ordered to attack pachyderms. Girl is presumed dead.

Twelve children survived a rebel attack on Sunday. The children lost their parents and are still in shock. One boy is in coma.

Thirteen-year-old girl, deaf and dumb, was killed by two men in their twenties. According to the victim's parents, the men drugged the girl and raped her.

Death, as a rule, had the best chance of making the news. And in a country torn by war one might imagine such news would be abundant. But in Congo so many people died that, farcically, mere death was not enough: I needed many deaths at once, or an extraordinary death. A raid on a village—with a hundred people displaced—was only important if it involved the army or the UN. Rape was too frequent to be reported even six at a time. And the constant fear people lived in, if mentioned at all, was either in the penultimate paragraph of a news story or on the opinion page.

Then a sensation broke in Liberia—Charles Taylor was caught at the Nigerian border trying to flee—and it became impossible to sell Congo. The AP didn't take a story for more than a week (and since I was paid by the word, during this time I made no money). I heard three miners died digging a tunnel, and then that a rebel group was planning an attack, but after ten days of my incessant calling with such news the editor laid it out to me: I wasn't to phone unless it was serious. “We're busy,” he said. “And I don't have time to explain why we're not taking this.”

The editors had their own hassles. The bureau in Dakar covered twenty-two countries, and every day was a grind, a competition to beat the other agencies, to pursue tip-offs from dodgy sources, to edit and translate from patchy language, to identify what would be important to customers—for the AP, primarily Americans. “Think about what my grandmother in Wisconsin would want to read,” an editor told me. They were three in Dakar, working in shifts like prison sentries, toiling in front of computer screens . . . and the constant news of rape, death, child soldiers, it must all have blurred.

Lying in my bed I took copious notes, trying to make sense
of the bulletins, for myself and for the outsider. My notebooks filled up. I would become overwhelmed, and pace around the room, unable but to imagine the scenes. They made me numb.

The narrative that formed in those notebooks was disconcerting—for though it was broadcast across the country it remained strangely silent inside homes: Congolese didn't vocally acknowledge it; they didn't transmit or hand it down. They listened, quietly assimilated it and returned to their rituals; and when Nana told Bébé Rhéma a tale—the baby would stare, wide-eyed—it would be about a heroic Congolese warrior or the defeat of an evil king, or about a princess who sought a kind husband; her stories were about valor, hope, love. The news seemed divorced from the world Nana created for her child, from the world the Congolese inhabited.

Thankfully the tragic bouts of news were followed by music, and the BBC ran a nightly classical segment to which I often listened in the dark, lying in bed. In the evenings, after the sun had set but while the day still carried light, I would sit at the corner store with a glass of cold milk. Sometimes I saw Fannie there, buying fertility vitamins (Nana had told me, very casually, that she had found a British boyfriend). And I usually wrote at night; occasionally I frequented a bar on the main street; I found the beer helped me sleep, especially when the night was warm.

On one of those idle evenings I invited Mossi. We met at Bozene, in front of the house, and as soon as we started to walk Mossi slapped my back. “What, eh?” he said with a cheer. I smiled at my feet and basked. He walked with long, slow steps, taking his time. Mossi had just returned to Kinshasa from an assignment, and it was our first meeting since I had gotten the job. Sitting at the bar, we poured for each other from large bottles of frothing Primus and talked about his hometown, on the coast of South Africa, and how his family, opposed to the government, had needed to flee—to seek asylum in Congo, of all places.

Mossi frowned at his glass, sipped, gasped with contentment
and sat back in his chair. And I noticed how the gray hairs rose on his face in prickles, how they moved like a wave when he licked his teeth.

It was the first time he allowed me to pay for the beer. We walked back together, and he dropped me off near the church building, at Bozene's entrance.

I was relaxing in the living room. Music was playing, but beneath the melody I could hear Jose tell Nana about his boss at the tax department; he was tired of workplace politics—he had tried everything, he said. But Nana didn't seem to be in a sympathetic mood. “Why don't you ask to have your old post back? Just pose the question, that's all I'm saying.” Jose looked uncomfortable. Our eyes met and I felt I was intruding. I retired to my room, washed, changed into my pajamas and was about to catch the bulletins when Jose poked his head around my door. “Can I borrow your fan?”

“Of course. What for?”

“The funeral.” A boy in the neighborhood had recently died—crushed by a piece of cement that had fallen off an old building. Jose unplugged the fan and twisted the cable around the pedestal. He carried it with care through the doorway. “Remember to bring it back,” I called out.

“When the funeral is over,” he shouted back.

I followed Jose to the living room. “When will it be over?”

“In three days.”

“But I need the fan for the night. It's too hot.”

“Maybe you can buy another?” Nana muttered from the floor. It was the third time she had mentioned it.

“But we already told them,” Jose said.

“They need it at night?”

“For the preparations.”

“I thought this boy was fetish.” There had been accusations of occult happenings around the boy. “Why are we giving him my fan?”

“Electronics don't catch fetish,” Nana retorted, as if I couldn't know anything about such matters. Then she looked at her husband and said, with equal annoyance, “But someone at your office is talking against this house, Jose, and you're not doing anything about it.” The accusation seemed to take Jose by surprise and he stared, then grimaced. He threw his hands in the air. “
Why
do you want to provoke me?” His gentleness was gone; he marched into the corridor, and the bedroom's door shut with a thump. Nana looked unnerved. It was the first time I had seen them fight openly.

The baby coughed and Nana patted her back. She coughed again, and Nana slapped harder, and with a rhythm, as if beating the coughs out of the baby's chest.

The next morning Nana was still agitated. I woke early, and as I came out of my room stole a glimpse into hers—I was surprised to see her ready to go out. She stood in front of the mirror, picking at the shoulders on her dress, which glowed a resplendent yellow all the way to her ankles and was decorated with floral brown motifs. She hooked studs to her earlobes, looking tired, baggy-eyed, and reached for the counter, where small white boxes contained puffs of cotton. She lifted a wig. Over the black knots on her scalp she placed this piece of hair, which was dull red but shone brilliantly where it caught light. Her face was covered in talc, giving it a sheen. She straightened and looked in the mirror; briefly, she smiled; her shoulders sagged. She gathered her things; a box fell to the floor and pieces of metal rolled out. She clicked her lips and bent over, muttering.

I waddled into the living room, where the television blared. Sitting almost against the screen, Jose flipped between news and sports channels. It was the day of club football—and of two
much-awaited matchups. All week Jose had been anticipating this day.

He raised his voice to salute me.
“Ça va un peu.”
“It's going a little” (always “a little” in Congo, never just
ça va
). He had not shaved or changed out of his pajamas. It seemed he had forgotten the fight. But Nana, without addressing him, brought in the writhing baby, and taking the seat next to Jose she started to sing: “Bébé Rhéma, please don't cry / If you cry, so will I / Bébé Rhéma is a good girl / Then you and I will be happy.” The baby turned to hear her name called in Nana's gentle voice; she searched her mother's face.

The nervous song mixed with the excitement from the television. And Nana announced she would be going to the clinic—the one across town because it was the best, even if it cost a little extra. The baby had suffered all night. She would be late. Jose didn't respond. Nana turned to me and said there were groceries to be bought; the neighbors would send a boy who knew the place. She gave me a list. “I want you to help him carry the bags,” she said. “Tea is on the table.”

The thermos lid was wound too tight. It came off with a struggle, making a spill. The ants had found the sugar again.

It was in the middle of the afternoon and while I was reading a magazine that the neighbor's boy came bounding down the street. Look at him jump, I thought, as if we're going to the circus.

The streets did not seem unusually loud or quiet. We took a shortcut off Bozene and reached the main road, where the boy began to walk briskly. The wideness of the road made it seem empty though trucks and cars zipped by. A gentle breeze shook the boy's pants. On both sides of the road were sand and low dry bushes; the wind raised the sand and moved it over the road like snakes. We reached a bar and heard cheers. Men stood in beer-drinking clusters, fixed on a screen. The boy turned.

“Nana will be angry,” I said. “Let's go to the market and come back.”

“The market is just here,” he protested. “Can we only take a look? We have so many hours and later the game will be finished anyway.” He mumbled, “It is my favorite team.”

It
was
the biggest match of the season, almost a national event to the Congolese. “Ten minutes,” I said, and the concession reinforced my sympathy. We entered the bar.

The game was screened on a small television on a high ledge. The play was scrappy. A goal was scored. A man drinking beer asked whom I supported; he slowly explained the history of the teams, why the match was so crucial. At any small thing in the game—a trip, an off side—he would turn to give me commentary. Until a woman appeared on the pitch. There was a movement, and it was hard to tell, but she seemed to drop something. “Fetish!” the bar roared. The stadium seemed to combust: one half erupted in cheers and the other exploded with fury. Bottles were thrown on the pitch. Play was halted. Referees grouped the players and took them aside one by one. A newspaper would quote the losing goalkeeper as swearing he had seen the fetish. But the referee would say he could only call what he saw. And now the disorder—which seemed a greater entertainment than the game itself—had become too much. The men at the bar were raging, shouting over each other. It did not seem that the game could end normally. I had forgotten to keep an eye on the time. I called the boy.

The bright headlights of an oncoming car blinded me; the road led straight ahead and we had some distance to cover.

The boy said it was better to try a neighborhood shop; he had looked at the list and we would be able to get nearly everything Nana wanted. We now headed back the way we had come. And I felt he had played me for a fool. I tried to sound stern. “Hurry, okay?”

The first sign that something was wrong came at the shop. At the counter a group of women were harassing the vendor. They jostled for space and clutched money between their fingers; candles and oil flew from his hands. The vendor struggled to hear the shouted orders: “Give me the milk,” “I came first,” and “Why aren't you helping me? Can't you see I've been standing here for so long, old man?” He lost his calm. “Go manage yourselves!” He shut the windows that covered his shop. The women banged for him to open.