Stringer (19 page)

18

I
have it!” I yelled.

“Have you got it?” she yelled back, from the window.

The Italian nuns who ran the convent guesthouse were partially deaf. They were a pair, Mariana and Luigiana, who wore Mother Teresa blue-and-white tunics and lived in an apartment near the front gate, at the top of a staircase. It was Mariana who now came hobbling down. I had intended only to pay my bill (I had just picked up some money from the Western Union, discovering, on the way, Bunia's gold-industry apparatus—shacks that were purchasing and purifying counters, open-air truck garages, government offices that sold fifty-thousand-dollar permits), but it turned out Mariana had been looking for me. A guest was to arrive, a regular client from the UN who preferred the room that I had mistakenly been given. So the rooms were not all identical. I resisted, but Mariana was firm. “You must move.” And when I became silent she softened. “I tell you,” she muttered, “business is not my charisma.” I watched her slowly return to her apartment, pushing her hand on her thigh to climb each step.

The only vacant rooms were on the other side of the convent, near enough, I learned, to the toilets to receive their smell. And
as I packed my clothes and folded my sleeping bag—whether because I did not want to move, or because of the dust—I began to sneeze; the sneezes turned into coughs, and into a wheeze. My eyes teared, my cheeks puffed up, and my nose began to run; the reaction was asthmatic, and of a violence I had not experienced in years.

I spent the morning outside with a kerchief tied around my nose, to protect myself from the pollen. Then Naro arrived. I had forgotten—it was Sunday, and he had said he would bring lunch. In his bowl was couscous, some in a salad, and the rest in red sauce. He said we should eat while it was still hot.

At first I had thought Naro talkative, perhaps a little rash—not unusual for a man who spent his every evening at the bar. But I found it strange that he would choose to befriend me, an itinerant journalist. And the big smile on his face, the enthusiasm with which he had come—it made him seem lonely and bored.

We ate in the convent dining hall, beneath a wooden sculpture of a crucified Jesus. The tender, hot couscous did me good—it soothed the soreness in my throat. We tried to eat slowly, and repeatedly offered, out of politeness, to serve each other. Each eyed the couscous, hesitating to help himself. Soon the spoon rattled in the bowl. We slouched in our chairs.

Another attack was reported on the radio—even on Sunday, I thought, these militias have no pity. I did not see it at the time, but the recurrent attacks had already begun to follow a pattern that pointed to a serious threat to Bunia.

On the way out Naro and I stopped by my room. It was dark.

“What is this place, man?” he said. “It looks like a dungeon.”

“The other room is going to be much worse.”

“Man, Hotel Ituri is not so bad.”

“Their cheapest room is fifty dollars. That's a bit expensive for me.”

“Then stay at my house, no? It's small, but we can put a mattress in the front room.”

I picked up my bag, feeling buoyant, and locked the room. I would come back for the other things later. But halfway to his place Naro stopped at the Hotel Ituri—he had realized that he needed to inform his landlord. I took a seat outside at a white plastic table, waiting.

There was a crackle and flicker above me—a blue tube. An insect, mothlike, had been burned by electrocution.

On the street was a typical evening scene: palm oil vendors with yellow canisters on their bicycles; motorcycle-taxi drivers, mostly ex-militiamen, chattering in corners. Menial laborers walked by, having finished their odd-job shifts at the shops, restaurants and markets.

And the foreigners: UN personnel, civilian and military, in jeeps; aid workers from Belgium, Italy, America. There were also the entrepreneurs. A group of Indians passed, all nearly identical, in shirts and pants and oily hairstyles. I felt a sudden closeness, and was about to call out, but they seemed focused on themselves.

It had been less obvious in Kinshasa, because of the politicians and the corruption. Here Congolese society was plainly limp, poor; and every aspect of life was organized around the foreigner. And among the foreign employers the Indian had a special place: known as the most exploitative, rarely paying more than the “market wage”—meaning the minimum acceptable to the poor laborers, who were not in a position to negotiate.

The Congolese would complain and complain about the Indian, but they would accept that only one race treated them worse: the Congolese (the African, more generally). In this was a double compatibility: the African seemed to accept and imitate his ruthless masters by an extension of his colonial ideas; and the Indian naturally admitted the black man at the bottom of the castes.

But the Indian-Congolese relationship was more ambiguous than this, and also more intimate.

It was the difference between the two kinds of Indians one met in Africa: there were those who had been brought generations earlier by the British; and there were the new immigrants. The two bore little connection. While the former had built an India within Africa, with strict rules of marriage and gastronomy (it was they who had given Africa the samosa and chapati, now the poor man's staples), the latter lived as a hedonist, producing the
métis
, the half-caste.

This aspect of the Indians was considered a benediction by women, who knew that their
métis
children would have a status above the Congolese. Kabila's government was filled with
métis
.
Métisse
girls, with paler skin, were considered most desirable. And though the Indian
métis
fell below that of the European, he was still more likely to avoid the life of a laborer. He was more likely to survive.

The new immigrants surrounded themselves with Congolese. They were strangers in Africa, without friends or relations, invited by no one. They had been sent, as emissaries of the great immigrant-business communities: the Shiite Muslims, the Punjabis and Sindhis; the Chinese, Lebanese and Israelis. A senior community member, usually a wealthy individual, would hear of Bunia's profits, and front the capital to send a young agent.

Among people thrust into Congo in this way there could be little camaraderie. Naro and Ali knew each other but rarely met. The Independence Day celebrations in Kinshasa had been muted for the same reason. The traders' affairs demanded no collaboration; each created his own world. These were not individuals doing business—what mattered more was the intangible, foreign tribe of which one was an extension. Here, at the extremity of global commerce, each exile was made outcast in the other's society.

I felt a presence behind.

It was Naro standing at the hotel portico, with pursed lips. “I'm really sorry,” he said. “The landlord is not agreeing. It's nothing to do with you.” The meeting had apparently turned hostile: Naro had been bringing home too many girls, and the landlord wanted to charge for electricity, for water, for the unauthorized use of the house. It would be too precarious to have me stay. “I'm really sorry,” Naro repeated.

I don't know why, but that got me down quite badly.

And I was feeling cold—the fever was acting up. A breeze had begun to blow; the sun was setting. I asked Naro for some pills—Panadol, Tylenol, whatever he had. He ran inside to get me some. I returned to the convent with his medicine.

But in the morning I could not move. I awoke feeling giddy. The grill over the window faded and came into focus. My slippers, in the corner of the room, seemed far. I stayed in bed, watching my toes wiggle. There were other signs: my ears seemed blocked. I called out, and suddenly they popped; sounds were exceptionally clear; even the silence seemed present, as a bass static. And my sleep had of late become disturbed. The dreams had grown more vivid.

I gave an account of these symptoms to a doctor who ran a clinic on the boulevard. I remembered his place for its large red cross on the signboard, and because the adjacent buildings, Italian and American aid operations, were guarded and locked. But when I swung open the clinic's gate the yard was deserted. The doctor was on his second-floor balcony smoking a cigarette.

The office was a spacious hall furnished with a glass-topped desk and a long metal table, cold to lie on. Above me oscillated a
halogen lamp. In the corner was a pair of repaired crutches, and next to those, in a tall wooden cupboard, bandages, ointment and little bottles of medical supplies.

The doctor listened patiently. He pulled at my cheek and shone a light in my ear. He asked how the fever had felt. A stethoscope was coiled over his chest, and his white gloves stretched up to his elbows. His eyes, behind chunky lenses, were larger than normal. They looked me up and down with interest. “Do you have your own syringe?” he asked, almost hopefully.

“Don't you?”

“Sometimes foreigners like to bring their own,” he said, drawing a needle from his cupboard. It was new—he unwrapped its packaging—but its tip looked enormous. “Don't be alarmed,” he said, “it won't hurt.”

He pricked my finger and took blood on a swab. The diagnosis didn't take long: “I think you have malaria.”

I nearly sprang off the table. “Call a friend to take you home,” the doctor advised. But whom to call? He told me to use the malaria pills I had brought from America, still untouched in their box. “And try to take rest for a few days.”

But inaction was forced on me. That night, at the convent, as had happened all week, the electricity went out. I came to the front of the convent and yanked on a rusted metal bell; its vacant trill invaded the yard. The beatific boy attendant appeared, his face brilliant, as though covered in oil.

“There's no electricity,” I said.

“I am sorry, monsieur. It will surely return.”

“Why don't we have a generator? The other hotels all have one.”

“Monsieur can ask the sisters tomorrow. Jean-Paul is only a simple employee.”

We looked at each other, and I dropped my eyes. Jean-Paul still had his chin up. “Don't worry, Monsieur Anjan, after the
elections we will have electricity. We will be like America and France. We will have democracy.”

It was an extraordinary declaration. But a fever had begun to affect the country. The vote, which would pit Kabila against the vice president and former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba, was drawing closer and gaining proportion in people's minds—no longer was it simply an idea or a foreign-imposed aspiration. There was a sense of mobilization in society, a feeling of ownership. And now, only weeks from the polls, the expectations seemed to have become limitless.

It was bound to be a unique moment for the news. The world rarely turned to Congo unless the war flared up; and now, during the elections, for once Congo would be important. I felt I had to profit. I decided to start preparing. But just as I started to feel the excitement I came to face the bureau's power politics.

The AP called to inform me that senior correspondents were being flown in from London, Cairo and Johannesburg. Without warning I was given a list of stories that I wasn't to touch, stories that were fantastic: trips to the volcanoes, to see the gorillas; to the diamond mines in the heart of the country; to remote reserves that were home to the okapi, a rare cousin of the giraffe found only in Congo; and to the giant copper mines of the south.

The editor wanted me to team up with the correspondents. “As what?” I asked. He said I should continue working as I had planned to—I should know where to look for the news, I had been living in Congo. And the chief Africa correspondent wanted to chat before she arrived, “to pick your brain, share ideas.” It sounded as if she wanted to steal my stories. The head of African reporting was in a sense my boss, but before that day I'd never heard of her. Now suddenly I was important.

I had come to see the editor as a friend—and I wanted to be frank. So I told him the plan sounded suspect. He owned up. “I'm only trying to protect you,” he said. Once the correspondents
arrived the AP would buy fewer stories from me. “I know it sounds unfair but we pay them a salary, so we have to prioritize their work. Anything we spend on you we have to justify. If you collaborate at least it'll guarantee you some wordage.”

So that's how it was—Congo was becoming world news, and during this time I was surplus. The call felt like a stab.

I had not anticipated my own camp would become an obstacle. I had counted on the elections for extra money, to live better and for travel. The list rankled more—I had worked hard to earn my place with the AP in Congo; and now, in a stroke, a dozen stories were being taken from me. The correspondents had claimed the country for themselves. The big stories picked off, I foresaw battles with the editor, requests turned down. Areas of Congo, it seemed, would all but close.

There was also a feeling of loneliness. I had come to depend on the bureau. The editor was my most sustained link to the world—we spoke or wrote to each other almost every day. We had never met; he had only seen a copy of my passport; our link was imaginary. But we had, I felt, formed a trust—because the editor had once been a stringer in Congo. Moving about the country alone, I tended to share my impressions, what I marveled at, the emotions of the moment and the banal; often they went to him, for few people understood these places. He had seen and felt the jungle. With my family I had to make them imagine entirely, and often I abandoned my attempts, able to leave them only with half-formed ideas. The editor's sympathy therefore provided little consolation. I felt he had betrayed our alliance.

I became disturbed—more deeply than I immediately realized. I lost morale. There was a sort of mental paralysis. I fell asleep during the day, the bedsheet pulled up to my chin. I awoke, restless. The room seemed friendly; I feared losing it. A paranoia developed. The nuns threatened: another source of authority. Had the UN man arrived? I hid from footsteps, pretending to be asleep. People passed my door without stopping. I felt unknown,
secreted. I kept my radio beside me. My alarm was set to repeat at the hours of the bulletins. In this way I spent my energy, feeling futile, alone with my noises. But I could never relax: in the rustling of the trees outside my window, in the dormancy of the red tulips, and in the voices on the street, there seemed a quiet vigilance, a sense of suspended anticipation.