Stringer (23 page)

22

I
t had become logical to leave Bunia. The story of the elections would continue in other places. There was also a feeling that more violence was to come, and I was drawn to this. Kinshasa had erupted during the vote. Anderson and his fellows had cleverly calculated: their riots on the Boulevard had been forcefully repressed. Photographs had emerged of police lashing fallen men with metal chains. In a single day nearly a dozen demonstrators had been killed; the government's force had been plainly disproportionate. Something seemed to build.

Ali stood at the doorway as I left his house. He was resentful. He seemed to think that I was abandoning him—and he hardly said good-bye. Our journey he felt had been the beginning of our friendship, trust, and he had imagined we could have other adventures. That we might form a partnership. I too felt the sense of solitude, the pain of having built another relationship only to let it go. Even if Ali was an odd character, an unlikely friend. I didn't stay long in front of his house—as soon as the motorcycle taxi arrived I mounted it.

I looked forward to seeing the family again, though I worried
about their state. The dream still felt vivid. Mossi might be wretched. Kinshasa would not be easy to return to.

Outside Bunia's airport, by the entrance, a group of vendors hawked Gouda from the backseats of their bicycles. The cheeses were wrapped in plastic, ready for transport. I purchased two pies, and sent these over the conveyor belt, through the X-ray machine, at the airport entrance.

The check-in counter was a blue wooden desk that soldiers carrying heavy haversacks were streaming past—a Hercules aircraft had just landed, and from the aircraft's belly, over a hatch descended like a tongue, a single file of African soldiers marched onto the desolate yellow field. Hup!

PART III

MATTERS OF BELIEF

23

T
he mystery of the capital was gone. Coming from the countryside, I was able now to see it for what it was—a severed and self-contained chaos. The roads leaving Kinshasa, I knew, ended abruptly in the jungle. The people were receding, more and more isolated. The capital's importance was self-proclaimed.

I arrived with the impression of having been waited upon. An army major greeted me on the tarmac, introducing himself as a friend of the family and escorting me to the parking lot. I did not need to board the UN Japanese-made minibus, crammed with expatriates and going to town. Jose had skipped work to pick me up in a borrowed sedan. He received me with a warm hug, almost fell over me.

I sat in the car, my bag on my lap, wrapped in my arms. It was evening, and we drove down the long road that led from the airport, on one side bounded by a low wall, and on the other by fields dark like the sea.

We passed the lamp-lit markets, and a succession of burned cars stranded on the sidewalk. One felt the disturbance. We came to Massina. Jose did not mention his job. He had been
asking enthusiastically about Équateur and Bunia. But now he became distracted and I found myself trailing off to ask him if something was the matter. “It's going a little,” he said, pulling at the steering wheel with both hands to turn the car around a corner. I stopped talking, and he did not break the silence.

Bozene was expecting me. I was slapped on the back and shaken by the arm (my hands were holding the bags). Children followed me in a herd, football in hand and tripping over themselves. At our gate I was introduced to Jose's brother, Marcel, who had moved into a house on a parallel street; it was Marcel's son, a hefty boy with big feet, who carried my bags into the house. Nana was there. Frida as well. I felt I was coming into familiarities.

My room had not been cleaned. Nana asked for money to buy supplies. And in the house there was of course nothing to eat.

The hospitality had been reserved for morning. The girl from next door was sent to fetch eggs and bread, which Nana insisted on making for me. I waited at the table. Everything in the house seemed as I had left it. Jose sat on his sofa, showing nothing of the previous day's apprehension. I could discern no sign of crisis. A drumming noise came from outside: a bucket was being filled with water.

Then from the kitchen Nana gave a shriek. Jose ran in, and it was he who made the grim announcement: my toast had been burned. I said it wasn't a problem. But Nana looked distressed as she set down the plate with a clatter. I saw that she had scraped off the burns with a knife, leaving the bread pale, uneven.

On her way back she stopped at the corridor and turned to face Jose. “Can't you see I'm stressed?” It sounded like a plea.

Jose smacked his lips, without turning.

“You've done nothing all day. The clothes I ironed are still on the bed. You haven't even stepped out of the house.”

Jose stood upright. “Stop talking like you're solving world
problems. All women work the same and I don't hear them complaining.”

“Their husbands have jobs. Why do I have to go to the neighbors to borrow for our meals?” Nana lost control. She began to yell. “I should unplug the television and gramophone. What a man! Shameless!” That last word was spit off her tongue, as though she had been unable to say it calmly. She herself seemed stunned. And now she looked as though she would cry.

Jose, who had so far seemed embarrassed by my presence, ran up to my plate, overly skittish, and emitted a hiss through clenched teeth, as though appraising the toast and feeling sorry for my breakfast. “She didn't mean it badly,” he said. Nana stared with a puzzled and then disgusted face. She became hard. She turned her back to him. The confrontation was ended. Nana occupied the kitchen and Jose resumed his place on the sofa. They wouldn't so much as look up when they passed each other.

Silence, and again one became conscious of the wider space. I ate in this stillness, in the muffled light, smelling a mustiness, observing, absentmindedly, the darkened grains on the wood furniture, and then Bébé Rhéma, in her diaper of torn-up plastic bags, sleeping peacefully on the floor. Her limbs were spread in all directions. Occasionally, she quivered her yellow-mucus-crusted nostrils. She had appeared undisturbed by the argument, but now she made a growl. Jose stood. A deep grating noise followed. The baby rolled over and opened her eyes. Nana came running, but she appeared just as Bébé Rhéma turned quiet. Still in the vomiting posture, her mouth open, the baby breathed heavily. She closed her eyes. Her limbs relaxed. She returned to her erstwhile state of sleeping.

“Tired,” Jose remarked, looking over her.

“We need to take her to the hospital,” Nana said.

Jose shifted his tone. “She has been like this for one week.”

Nana glanced my way, looking weary.

“You will come, no?”

And it was clear that we would not otherwise be going.

Jose's brother had taken his car on an errand. His wife didn't know when he would return. Before the evening, she offered. But by then the day-duty doctors would have left. Jose said he could ask the man down the street—he had often helped the family—but that this man had lately begun to talk about his own difficulties. It was a way of requesting relief, or of complaining that too many were asking favors. “Does my family have to do everything in this house?” Nana said, to no one in particular.

We prepared with speed and in silence. Jose called out once to ask if Nana had the keys. Rudely she hushed him. Cupboards were opened, clothes and papers were scattered. Nana pulled a dress over Bébé Rhéma and packed a large handbag with two bananas, a feeding bottle, some towels and a few spare diapers. Bébé Rhéma wailed when lifted by Nana. Jose emerged from the bedroom in bloated pleated pants and with a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket. We waited, sitting, as Nana lulled the baby back to sleep. Eventually Corinthian's battered red car came around the corner. It rocked over Bozene's bumpy surface and stopped at our gate. We trooped through the neighbor's new restaurant; the lunch crowd was just leaving. I found the car's front seat broken, and I shifted over the wires of its inner frame to find a comfortable position. Jose sat behind with Nana. Bébé Rhéma, fully awake now, was securely wrapped in a bleached cloth. I was beginning to feel nervous about my role in this journey.

“Bé-bé!” Nana cooed.

As we departed the house, over the sand path leading to Victoire, our car was forced to plow through a stagnant pool stretching across the road. The fender pushed against the frothing turbid water. I worried that we would get stuck midway. Farther along our route, on the
ville
's wide roads, the pools were larger and more numerous, and the dull-gleaming expanses seemed to smother the city from below, reflecting the continuum of cloud
and draining color. One's eye became accustomed to the sudden contrasts. The concrete buildings were dark with moisture and vertically streaked bright green. The river—we caught a glimpse of it, busy with barges—glowed.

Soldiers patrolled the roads. Corinthian stiffened. Jose urged him to speed on. Nana tried to hide the baby between her legs; but the bundle was too large, and she fumbled. The roads around the hospital were congested; we found no convenient parking. Corinthian used a space marked for doctors. The family sat still a moment before emerging from the car. Jose and Corinthian straightened their shirts. Nana was weighed down by the bag and the baby. The family, exposed in the parking lot, looked exhausted and out of place in the
ville
. And here they began a conversation—as though making a plan. But the talk became casual. I began to feel impatient, that they were delaying.

I had my own discomfort about the hospital, from a previous visit. This was some months earlier when, seeking a story for World AIDS Day, I came to write about the “hospital of death.” The idea was not original, but it was the kind of simplicity—half-obvious, half-exaggerated—that I had seen sell in the papers. The doctors obliged, took me within. Thirty minutes later I terminated my visit, abandoning the hospital. The setting I was shown—women with flaccid breasts, tunics falling off, reaching out for me from their beds in a delirium; the doctors asked if I hadn't brought a camera—had felt deceitful, deliberate, obscene.

A nurse came to assess the baby. But suddenly she was summoned away. We stood with some uncertainty in the middle of the ward. Staff passed by without paying attention. Nana became agitated. She stroked Bébé Rhéma, as though it were she who needed comforting. The ward was large, like a dormitory, with two rows of metal beds around which, on the floor, sat patients' families with bags of green bananas on stems, tins of manioc and bunches of serrated medicinal leaves. Some empty beds were sheetless, gray. I stood near the ward's door and looked
out onto one of the gardens. A sign read, “Internal Medicine.” Another said, “AIDS”—the ward I had been to. Families lounged on the grass as though on a picnic.

Nana urgently called me in. The doctor had arrived. I stood behind the family as he tapped Bébé Rhéma's chest and listened with a stethoscope. Nana pushed me to the front; the doctor understood and led me to the accounting office. Jose followed. The costs were explained in French; Jose asked questions, in Lingala. After I had paid, the doctor returned to the family and announced that Bébé Rhéma would be hospitalized for fluid in the lungs. The nurse took over. The doctor continued on his rounds. The family moved on. Jose stayed behind; he was staring at a whitewashed wall, seemingly bemused. Nana called. He turned, and one saw from his face that in fact he was suffering.

It came as a grim satisfaction—there were so many waiting infirm in the hall—but I was relieved to see the doctor take charge of the baby with such assurance. And the family was now merrier. The drive home was fast, easy. Jose, as if reclaiming his authority, said he would ensure the baby was checked on every day—Corinthian and he discussed which relative might be called upon. Nana stared out the window, her cheek against the glass. At one point, when I had turned away, she gently touched my hand. I looked up, and she smiled briefly.

Jose had Marcel over that evening: the election broadcast was due, and there were rumors of news; but more than this, Marcel's family livened up the house. Nana, moving restlessly between the rooms, had already lamented the emptiness. She cut into the block of Gouda, whose thick creamy slices we ate with hot beig-nets. The girls chased one another in the corridor, almost asking to be admonished by the women. Nana pleaded with the youngest girl to be allowed to do her tresses; that diminished the noise. The men were on the sofas, drinking beer, shouting; the anxieties of the day had found new release.

I felt on edge. I needed company, and leaving the house I half
skipped down the street to Anderson's kiosk. His chair, set back, was empty. I turned in to the plot that was just behind the chair. Anderson had once told me he rented a storeroom here. On the exterior of the large house was a blue door, partly open.

The man was inside, on a stool, shirtless. His legs were apart. Slightly out of breath, I said, “Anderson.” On the floor, between the dirt and the dust that had come off the wall, were pipes and hand tools; he threaded a plastic tube through the pipes, which he held end to end, and applied a bolt to keep them together. I felt he had remarked the enthusiasm in my greeting, and that he was trying to be sullen, to maintain his unpleasant persona. He finished with a set of tubes. “Monsieur Journaliste, it took you so long to say hello to your friends. What is that you are carrying?”

“A gift,” I said, offering the Gouda. He dropped his spanner to receive it with both his hands. He stared at the pie, which measured the size of his stomach—and I felt his surprise was above all sensory, that he could at once be holding so much cheese.

“It is good.” His tone was offhand. But, again at his tubes, his hands and toes moved briskly.

I said it was nearly time for the election bulletin. He looked at his watch and shook his head in disbelief. He set down his tools and dusted his hands. I waited at the door. The evening was humid. He came carrying the Gouda, which he set on the kiosk—he said he would give it to a friend who owned a refrigerator.

Anderson set our radio to the correct station. Down the road other radios were set up, at other kiosks, by young men. The dials were turned in unison, raising the volume. The broadcast was thus forced on passersby. The act was aggressive. But it seemed without effect: people still ambled, chatting amicably, making their usual commerce; their insensitivity, too callous, made them seem familiar with and in a way participant, in communion with the anger; and from that moment on even the quiet on the street, I felt, concealed a menace. Anderson continually toweled
his face. And I now felt his serenity, the dullness I had taken to be for me, was his way of preparation for a nearing upheaval.

“The riots were a success,” I said.

He turned.

His face was shining from sweat.

“Monsieur”—he hesitated—“we were
magnifique
. Magnificent. More than ten thousand demonstrators in front of the presidential palace. Imagine.” He held his palm open before us, as though to show the palace's immensity, and that the crowd could confront it. “We proved our force.”

“Maybe you should have raided the palace, like Versailles, and finished it right there. Maybe that was your moment, Anderson.”

“Oh, Monsieur Journaliste, you shouldn't be talking like that. Wasn't Versailles raided for democracy? We will wait for the official results—if there is no fraud we will surely win.”

“Kabila is getting many votes in the east.”

He slammed his hand on the kiosk. “Are you taking money from them? To say such a thing.” But he had become agitated; his movements were tight. He pointed to a house on the row facing us. “See how he has raised his walls.” It was true—the enclosure was so high one could not even see the roof. “That Papa works for Kabila. I already told him, move out of this area. Please.” And at once I felt the fear that Anderson could so easily incite.