Stringer (24 page)

“That Papa should move,” I said.

But he was looking up and down the street, and making a guttural music to himself—it was my punishment—he was not letting me speak. From the kiosk I took the Gouda and felt the crosshatches on its crust. Its label, worn, was illegible.

I held it out. Again he extended both hands to receive it. “Anderson,” I said, as though mulling the sound of the word.

“Monsieur Journaliste—you should not betray us. In such times we are counting on our friends. Think about that Papa.”

Some people passed, hurrying.

Anderson opened his eyes wide.

The radio brought news: two cities had completed counting. And though the sample was too small to draw a trend from, there was such an air of expectancy in the country that the first results were bound to make a deep impression. The newscaster held his breath: Bemba had won both cities, by solid margins. Anderson stood up and raised his arms. He turned around like a boxer in a ring, pushing his chair away and shouting across the street to the other houses. “Bemba! Bemba!”

The cry spread down the main road and the avenue. Taxibuses honked madly. I heard feet running in the alleyways. The Opposition Debout rallied people from house to house, urging them to step out and celebrate. A gunshot. Then another. Anderson couldn't keep still. “I told you,” he said, vigorously shaking my shoulder and holding the back of my head. “I told you Congo is coming back to its people.”

24

T
here was fraudulence—as there perhaps is at the center of any belief. Two weeks later when Anderson defected to Kabila's party the street expressed shock but gave no punishment: he continued to operate his kiosk, at which the same friends gathered to banter every evening. Perhaps Anderson, and the others, had never believed in the cause; if I had known this at the time I would have understood my own apprehensions differently.

The feeling was of being in a kind of madness. Bemba, and his apparent success, seemed incidental to it; the communion grew, religion-like—out of an internal need. I felt that purity in the aggression, that deeper angst.

And it was this fraudulence that made anything seem possible, that made everyone seem to have secrets to which I was not privy.

From my room I heard the youths approach, their shrieks gradually decomposing into the constituent boys' voices. They passed the house. Again they became distant. Jose said it was the Kata-Kata, exploiting the unrest. Already some dwellings and shops had been damaged. Jose hung clothes over all our windows and over the grill door, and we began to pass the better
part of our days in these dark, familiar patterns, in the suffocating smells of the body and detergent.

Mossi stormed in one day. His place was no longer safe—his gate had been breached and the yard was now exposed to the riots. He wanted to sleep with us, even on the floor of the living room. But Nana threw him out without even hearing him out. I pleaded with her—telling her the man had nowhere to go. But she was hard. I felt myself shorn, as if something close to me had been lost. The scene was wretched, and reminded me of the time Nana almost threw me out—when her niece Frida had stolen my money. I watched Mossi leave, pulling his hat over his head, his long legs taking big steps over the dark earth.

I told Mossi to meet me in the city, at a center for counting and storing ballots. I thought the tension here might be acute. The gated compound was guarded by two policemen. Inside was a long row of rooms that resembled one of Bunia's
dukkas
, surrounded by a dusty yard, over which lay ballots stacked like bales of hay. Loose papers blew at my feet. Officials hurried between the rooms. Outside, at the compound's gate, people loitered: a policeman, unusually alert, tried to clear them off, swinging his baton. But the people scattered and returned, and merely their presence, it seemed, annoyed the policeman.

Mossi did not come. He told me over the phone that he had sought shelter on the city outskirts. I felt I had lost the man who had lived in my mind for so long in Congo. I tried to get Mossi a job, but the old journalist seemed to have gone off the deep end. The editor told me he filed strange stories—and was constantly talking about his personal problems.

Outside the center I was stopped and asked why I was walking alone. It was the Republican Guard, Kabila's personal army. I offered money; they took it, and made me wait on the side of the road. They seemed to have no plan for me. I stood beside the soldiers, and people passing would give me uneasy glances. An hour passed, then another. I began to panic. But when the others
left a soldier casually asked for a cigarette. I had none. He said I could go; I hesitated, and walked away uncertainly. I turned back to look at him; he waved me off with his gun. I broke into a run. Then I had a thought that he wanted to shoot me, so I ran faster, thoughtlessly. It became more and more difficult after that to leave the neighborhood: everywhere one saw the army deploying.

The election results came every couple of days, unpredictably, district by district—as long lists of numbers that took hours to sort through. And the Kata-Kata became my preoccupation. They visited now every night, moving more slowly, lingering. On hearing their cries I would move to the window and push apart the clothes. I got an oblique view of the youths, jumping against our gate, shaking the metal, jeering at us, taunting. They did not approach. And it was their sound, a fugue-like cacophony of similar phrases which could have been confused with the play of children, that was most disturbing.

I had in a way come full circle with the street children. I had seen Corinthian strike fear into the boy who had eaten Nana's hair cream. I had an idea of how the children were expelled. And I had experienced the abandon of the 25th Quarter, the cemetery. But only now, confined by the youths, and watching them—howling, in the safety of their numbers—from our grill window, did I think of the riot as a way for the children to return and confront the violence against them.

An opportunity to leave the neighborhood came at last when the electoral commission summoned the journalists. The results were ready. The street reacted as though it had already won—Anderson and his men raised their bravado, rounding up people, working them up. A large crowd had gathered at Victoire to chant for Bemba.
Mwana mboka
. The son of the country.

The family assigned Jose's nephew Serge as my escort for
the evening. Serge arrived at the house dressed in a suit and crocodile-skin shoes, a plastic pen in his pocket. We took longer than usual to find transport—fewer buses seemed to be running. From the start Serge adopted a grave face, fixed on the road.

The bus's slowness, dipping into puddles, made in me a kind of tightness in the chest. I tried to forget the tension, the street, and Victoire. I tried to observe the scenes passing. But in no person's expression could I find calm. And those pedestrians who seemed to show joy or to laugh I felt incapable of trusting.

Then, on the road near the stadium, some Chinese came into view; they seemed sedate, servile. They were repairing the road—it was the worst season to be doing so—and in some places tinkering with the wiring for streetlights. I thought: the elections are hardly over and already the foreigners are here. A supervisor moved along the workers, arms crossed behind his back, and I saw that it was a fashion in China to have one's sunglasses, when off the eyes, not raised over the forehead but lowered on the mouth.

Mercenary workers: China, like the West, was hungry for minerals, growth—instead of democracy, China offered construction. And the effect of those abject workers was clearly visible. Roads, stadiums, bridges—cement structures were creeping over Kinshasa, seeming to renew the city, to offer a way forward, as had, at various moments, the constructions of the Belgians, Mobutu and Kabila, and the ugly imitations of the
nouveaux riches
. Congo, still an outpost of progress, still with something to offer the powers seeking supremacy, had grown accustomed to such renewal by foreign structures (foreign, even when built by Africans); to this society, in fact, such renewal had become vital.

It was an attitude I had noticed at a party in Kinshasa. A wealthy Congolese journalist had invited me—the party was at his cousin's house, a Belgian garden villa, on whose large balcony the people mingled. The scene, of young men and women,
in Western clothes, drinking beer and martinis—it was without vitality. The youths seemed arrested. Merely to occupy that space, the clothes, the paraphernalia—this seemed the achievement. Inside the house, old, resilient, rain had seeped into the walls. The paint was coming off. The corridor smelled of fungus. The toilet did not flush; a barrel of water was provided, with a handleless rusted tin for a mug.

One could tell those youths were non-
évolué
: there was that lack of pride, that consumptive wrecking of the structure. It took my mind to photographs I had seen from just after Mobutu's fall, of Congolese with their livestock squatting in his palaces. And I felt I now understood something of Annie's fear—that her family, on coming to America, would turn her house into a “camp.”

The pillage—momentary, chaotic, exciting, growing horizontally by razing, leaving nothing material—was also ambience. So were the riots. It was part of the postmodernism, the Congolese excitement that needed to be appeased; and it could hold people in such heightened states. Ambience held together the street children's existences. It was in the wigged prostitutes at the bars. And it was in the self-flagellation at the churches, where the Congolese listened with rapt attention to the scolding, sweating priests.

One was surrounded, in Kinshasa, by darker ambiences. One did not have to seek them; rather, one could hardly find escape. The ambience could seem an escape, a refuge; but it was itself something to be escaped from—and it seemed as though while the individual pillaged the material, the ambience pillaged him.

Marcel had recently leveled his yard. He wanted to build himself an office cabin. But he was never allowed to: as soon as he bought cement requests came in from the neighborhood—for a wall, a toilet, a broken roof, a sick child. The requests were deemed more urgent than his outhouse office. Marcel lent out
his cement. I was at his house when some of the ragged men hauled out his sacks. Marcel was not paid. He did not expect to be: the implicit agreement was that when he needed help (that is, when he became poor like the ragged men) he could ask them to return the favor.

Clementine's restaurant, next door to our house on Bozene, was frequented by half a dozen men who ate every day for free. She did nothing: the men were of our community, some even of our street. It was their small way of hurting her, she said, so that she did not become “too independent,” “too capable.”

And I had always wondered if Nana's clothes business had been deliberately, even unconsciously, sabotaged by Frida. But surely Nana must have known that Frida would not repay.

It was the internal menace. Nana, Clementine and Marcel were docile in their misfortune; when I asked why he had given away his cement, Marcel said, “It is our custom.”
Coutume
: a powerful word. I got the impression that to succumb to custom was in a way to return to the simplicity, the safety of the old ideas: of man as weak, of survival in groups. Jose, perhaps because he was
évolué
, had the courage to try subversion. He had a little metal box, kept in the master bedroom, that I had seen him take out irregularly and call the “emergency fund” (I had only seen it near empty; still he indicated that I should tell no one). The fund was for Bébé Rhéma's hospital visits. Even this had to be saved in secret. Marcel later said, in a more reflective mood: “Our customs are without pity.”

Those who built large escaped custom—and existed in isolation. The
nouveaux riches
who raised mansions on the hills were said to have “eaten alone,” and they spent colossal sums to protect themselves from the societies they had abandoned. It was the price of independence. And besides the historical ideas, for this reason—of becoming menaced by one's own society, like the wretched on the street, who could die in their dwellings—it seemed also out of a fear of his own rise that the Congolese
was pointlessly creative. He turned bottle caps into imaginative, anonymous art; he played endlessly with words, inventing vocabularies; he pillaged; he made sexual art. He squandered his talents on such emotions. His creative activities, stunted, were without deliverance—a sort of wallowing in one's futility, one's chaos. One expected only to survive. A common complaint in Kinshasa was that the men in the mansions, eating alone, were “not leaving enough crumbs”: this matter of crumbs was the pressing grievance.

And to arrive at this idea of Congolese smallness is to gain a sense of the overwhelming crisis, of society's impotence—large ideas must live in smaller objects, acts, fantasies—and to see the urgency of the Chinese offer. The material world—the forest of things that the Congolese had inherited—decayed relentlessly. Society, internally ruinous, and reduced to ambience, was unable to build. The Chinese knew to build, and quickly; they had built before for Africans; their labor was cheap, their terms favorable. For thirty years the Americans, the West, had sustained Mobutu, but had built the people almost nothing. The Chinese, a last resort, seemed to offer to resolve the crisis—to renew the world, fulfill the fantasy. And already they were here; already they were at work—destroying Kinshasa's Boulevard, expanding its lanes and cutting down the ancient, broad trees on the sidewalks. Gone was the shade; the vendors could no longer squat over their wares. The people could no longer walk. The people were quiet. Such massive change seemed beyond them: a new destruction was being wrought; and the people were further severed, lost, hiding in the small and ephemeral.

The roads were now empty of people.

I had rarely traveled in the
ville
at night, and I was not accustomed to the sensations. In one section of the road, perhaps recently repaired, the streetlights made a repetitive flashing in the bus, over my lap—the experience, so familiar in a way, here seemed alien. The
ville
was almost totally desolate.

The Boulevard approached. The taxibus had at one point been full, but now Serge and I were the last passengers. The driver said something; Serge responded. Quickly their discussion became heated.

The driver pulled over and told us to get off.

“You had an argument?” I said, disbelieving.

“He won't take us any farther,” Serge said.

Apparently no taxibus was running the length of the Boulevard that night. Serge had not known this; and he had become agitated.

It happened too quickly—we got out, and the bus was gone.

The Boulevard, spread out before us, was smoky. And instinctively we moved behind the trees on the side of the street. The first half of the walk was quiet, and brisk—I felt we would reach the commission in time. Then two gunshots rang out from deep within the
ville
. Serge stopped and held out his arm to block my path. The shots had been single—probably not to kill. We walked along the canal, where it was darker. Someone came up on us so silently that we leaped to one side. It was a pedestrian, in a fur-trimmed coat, like the Congolese often wear at night. We had startled him. Serge watched the man leave, and then looked again. I too felt we were no longer alone. Small bonfires appeared on the side of the road, giving sudden warmth. “Kata-Kata,” Serge said. “We can still get a bus home.” But in the distance we could see the venue—an area of brightness.