The Pigeon Tunnel (24 page)

A steamy haze hangs over the lake. The border with Rwanda splits it longways. The toe of La Botte tips eastward. The fish are very small. The lake's monster is called
mamba mutu
and is half-woman, half-crocodile. What she likes best is eating human brains. Listening to my guide I scribble notes of all this, knowing I shall never make use of them. Cameras don't work for me. When I write a note my memory stores the thought. When I take a photograph, the camera steals my job.

We enter a Roman Catholic seminary. Salvo's father was one of the Brothers here. Its windowless brick walls are unlike anything around them in the street. Behind them lies a world of gardens, satellite dishes, guest rooms, conference rooms, computers, libraries and mute servants. In the canteen, an old white priest in jeans shuffles to the coffee urn, vouchsafes us a long, unearthly stare and goes his way. If Salvo's father were still alive, I am thinking, this is how he might look today.

A Congolese priest in brown habit is lamenting how his fellow African Brothers are at risk from penitents who confess their ethnic hatreds too eloquently. Inflamed by passionate rhetoric they are supposed to assuage, he says, they are capable of becoming the worst extremists of them all. Thus it was in Rwanda that otherwise good priests were known to summon all Tutsis in their parish to the church, which was then torched or bulldozed with the priests' blessing.

While he talks, I write in my notebook: not as he might suppose, his golden words, but rather how he speaks them: the slow, guttural elegance of his educated African-French, and the sadness with which he recounts the sins of his Brothers.

Thomas is so far removed from my version of him that again I abandon all preconceptions. He is tall and suave and wears a well-cut blue suit. He receives us with consummate diplomatic ease. His house, guarded by sentries with semi-automatic rifles, is spacious and representational. A massive television screen plays silent football while we talk. No warlord of my uninformed imaginings was ever like this.

Thomas is a Banyamulenge. His people have been fighting wars in the Congo ceaselessly for the last twenty years. They are pasturalists who came originally from Rwanda and over the last couple of hundred years settled the high plateaux of the Mulenge mountains of South Kivu. Famed for their battle skills and reclusiveness, hated for their supposed affinity with Rwanda, they are the first to be picked on in times of discontent.

I ask him whether the upcoming multi-party election makes things better for them. His reply is not encouraging. The losers will say the vote was rigged, and they'll be right. The winner will take all, and the Banyamulenge will be blamed for all of it as usual. Not for nothing are they called the Jews of West Africa: if anything is amiss,
it must be the Banyamulenge's fault. He was similarly unimpressed by Kinshasa's efforts to forge Congo's militias into a single national army:

‘A lot of our boys joined, then defected to the mountains. In the army they kill us and insult us, despite the fact that we have fought and won many battles for them.'

There is one chink of hope, Thomas concedes. The Mai Mai, who see it as their job to keep Congo free of all ‘foreigners' – and specifically the Banyamulenge – are learning the high cost of becoming a soldier of Kinshasa. He does not elaborate.

‘Maybe as the Mai Mai learn to mistrust Kinshasa, they will draw closer to us.'

We are about to find out. Jason has arranged for us to meet a colonel of the Mai Mai, the largest and most notorious of Congo's many armed militias, and the second of my warlords.

Like Thomas, the Colonel is immaculately turned out, not in a well-cut blue suit, but in the dress uniform of Congo's maligned national army. His Kinshasa-issue khaki drills are ironed and pressed, his badges of rank glisten in the midday sun. He wears gold rings on all the fingers of his right hand. Two cellphones lie on the table before him. We are sitting in an open-air café. From a sandbagged emplacement across the road, blue-helmeted Pakistani troops of the United Nations watch us over their gun barrels. Fighting has been my life, the Colonel says. In his day he commanded fighters as young as eight. Now they're all adults.

‘There are ethnic groups in my country that do not deserve to be here. We fight them because we fear they will claim our sacred Congolese land. No government in Kinshasa can be trusted to do this, therefore we do it ourselves. When Mobutu's power failed, we stood in the breach with our pangas, bows and arrows. The Mai Mai is a force created by our ancestors. Our
dawa
is our shield.'

By
dawa
he is referring to the Mai Mai's magic powers that enable them to divert flying bullets or turn them into water:
Mai.

‘When you are face to face with an
AK
47 that is firing straight at you and nothing happens, you know our
dawa
is authentic.'

In that case, I ask, as delicately as I may, how does the Mai Mai explain its dead and wounded?

‘If one of our warriors is struck down, it is because he is a thief or rapist or has disobeyed our rituals or was harbouring bad thoughts about a comrade when he went into battle. Our dead are our sinners. We let our witch doctors bury them without ceremony.'

And the Banyamulenge? How does the Colonel regard them in the present political climate?

‘If they start another war, we shall kill them.'

Venting his hatred of Kinshasa, however, he comes closer than he knows to sharing the views of his sworn enemy Thomas of the night before:

‘The
salauds
in Kinshasa have marginalized the Mai Mai. They forget that we fought for them and saved their fat arses. They don't pay us and don't listen to us. For as long as we're soldiers, they don't let us vote. Better we go back to the bush. How much does a computer cost?'

It was time to drive out to Bukavu airport for the action scene at the end of my novel. During the week we had a couple of riots in the town and sporadic shooting. The curfew was still running. The road to the airfield belonged to the Mai Mai, but Jason said it was safe to travel, so I assumed he had secured our passage with the Colonel. We were about to set off when we learned that, curfew or not, the centre of town had been blocked by demonstrators and burning tyres. It transpired that a man had mortgaged his house for four hundred dollars in order to buy his wife a medical operation, but when Kinshasa's unpaid soldiers got to hear about it they raided his house,
killed him and stole the money. Angry neighbours had seized the soldiers and locked them up, but the soldiers' comrades sent reinforcements to get them back. A fifteen-year-old girl had been shot dead and the crowd was rioting.

After a giddying drive at high speed through uneven back streets, we reached the Goma road and drove northwards along Lake Kivu's western shore. The airfield had recently seen serious fighting. A Rwandan militia had taken it over, and stayed several months before being thrown out. Now the airfield was under the joint
UN
protection of Indian and Uruguayan troops. The Uruguayans gave us a lavish lunch and urged us to come back for a real party soon.

‘What would you do,' I enquired of our Uruguayan host, ‘if the Rwandans came back?'

‘
Vamos
,' he replied without hesitation: get the hell out.

In reality, I wanted to find out what he and his comrades would do if a bunch of heavily armed white mercenaries landed unannounced, which was what they do in my novel. I am shy of putting my hypotheses so directly, but I had no doubt that, if he had known the true purpose behind my question, his answer would have been the same.

We toured the airfield, and headed back to town. The red clay road was struck by a torrential tropical downpour. We descended a hill to be met with a rapidly filling lake that hours earlier had been a car park. A man in a black suit was standing on the roof of his drowning car, waving his arms for help, to the entertainment of a fast-growing crowd. The arrival of our Jeep with its two white men and one white woman aboard added to the fun. In no time, a group of kids had set to work rocking us from side to side. In their enthusiasm they could have rocked us into the lake if Jason hadn't hopped out and, speaking their language, pacified them with their own laughter.

For Michela, the moment was so run-of-the-mill that she has no memory of it. But I have.

The discotheque is my last and most affecting memory of Bukavu. In my novel, it is owned by the French-educated heir to an East Congolese trading fortune, who later becomes Salvo's saviour. He too is a warlord of a sort, but his real power base is Bukavu's young intellectuals and businessmen: and here they are.

There is a curfew and the town is deadly quiet. Rain is falling. I recall no winking signs or bulky men checking us at the entrance to the nightclub: just a row of miniature Essoldo cinemas disappearing into the dark, and a rope banister descending a dimly lit stone staircase. We grope our way down. Music and strobe lights engulf us. Yells of ‘Jason!' as he vanishes under a sea of welcoming black arms.

The Congolese, I have been told, know better than anybody how to have fun, and here at last they are having it. Away from the dance floor a game of pool is running, so I join the lookers-on. Round the table, tense silence attends every shot. The last ball goes down. To hoots of joy, the victor is swept off his feet and carted in triumph round the room. At the bar, beautiful girls chatter and laugh. At our table, I listen to somebody's views on Voltaire – or was it Proust? Michela is politely discouraging a drunk. Jason has joined the men on the dance floor. I will leave him with the last word:

‘For all Congo's troubles, you meet fewer depressed guys on the streets of Bukavu than you do in New York.'