The Poisonwood Bible (54 page)

I struggled half awake and half asleep, and then suddenly, in the middle of my fevered, stolen nap, utterly awake. In dread, trembling. Lying on my side with my eyes open. I felt my cold hands. I was afraid. This is the new awful thing I cannot bear to feel. Afraid. This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me—The simple news that Nature told—With tender Majesty. Her message is committed to hands I cannot see—For love of her, sweet countrymen, judge tenderly of Me!

In spite of myself I have loved the world a little, and may lose it.

I sat up on my cot, ran a hand through my damp, tangled hair, felt bruises all over my arms in the shape of small footprints.The second hand on the wall clock made its steady, ludicrous progress: stuff, sluff, sluff...

Afraid of what, exactly?
   
                           

Suicidal idyll fratricidal. Afraid. That. Mother would choose Leah.

Perfect Leah with her adorable babe and husband. In a few hours it will be morning, they will dance around the tree with their little gifts from Mother, and they will stay, they will, after all. And the lure of grandsons will be too strong to resist, and Mother will be theirs. And then I will have to go to sleep. Sleep oh sleep thou certain knot of peace.

For many tedious seconds I sat on the edge of my cot, swallowing indecision and tears.Then I got up, wiped my face on the sleeve of my hospital coat, walked to the physicians’ lounge, and dialed the number I knew by heart. I called her. It was the dead-flat middle of the night. The night before Christmas and all through the house I am Adah who expects no gifts, Adah who does not need or care what others say. Yet I woke up my mother and finally asked her why she chose me, that day at the Kwenge River.

Mother hesitated, understanding that there were many wrong answers. I did not want to hear that the others could take care of themselves, nor that she felt she had no other choice.

Finally she said, “After Ruth May you were my youngest, Adah. When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.”

That is the bedtime story my mother made up for me. It was not a question of my own worth at all. There is no worth. It was a question of position, and a mother’s need. After Ruth May, she needs me most.

I find this remarkably comforting. I have decided to live with it.

Leah Price Ngemba

KINSHASA

You CAN’T GO TO LEOPOLDVILLE NOW, or to Stanleyville, Coquilhatville, or Elisabethville.The names of all those conquerors (and their ladies) have been erased from our map. For that matter you can’t even go to the Congo; it’s Zaire. We repeat these words is if we’re trying to memorize a false identity: I live in Kinshasa, Zaire. The places we’ve always used to position ourselves are suddenly unfamiliar — cities, villages, even rivers. Elisabet worries genuinely, in spite of our reassurances, that she and Anatole might have been assigned new first names, since theirs are European and “colonialist.” It wouldn’t surprise me, actually. Mobutu’s edicts are that far-reaching. The old couple next door seem to share her dread: they always forget and say “Leopoldville,” then cover their mouths with their hands as if they’ve let slip a treason.

In the evenings we quiz each other, searching out more and more obscure places on the map to trip each other up: Charlesville? Banningville? Djokupunda! Bandundu! The boys get them right more often than I do, mainly because they like to show off. Anatole never misses one, because his mind is that quick, and also I think the indigenous names mean more to him. They’re foreign to me, of course. After the boys are asleep I sit at the table in the flickering kerosene light, working my way slowly over the new map, feeling as if Father had found me out here to give me The Verse. We’re retraining our tongues to Mobutu’s great campaign of authenticite.

But what is authentic about it, I keep asking Anatole. Kinshasa’s main street is Boulevard the 30th of June, in memory of that great Independence Day carefully purchased by thousands of pebbles thrown into bowls and carried upriver. How authentic is that? What really became of that vote is another matter, not memorialized in any public place I can see. There is no Boulevard 17 Janvier Mort de Lumumba.

He points to the dirt path that runs between ours and our neighbors’ houses, down through a ditch where we clutch up our skirts and tiptoe over the sewage on oil drums to reach the main road. “This boulevard needs a name, Beene. Put a sign here.” Wise guy. He can’t wait to see if I’ll do it.

Our house is sturdy, with a concrete floor and a tin roof. We live in what would be called, in America, a slum, though here it’s an island of relative luxury in the outskirts of la cite, where the majority have a good deal less in the way of roofing, to say the least. Under our roof, we’re six: Anatole and me, our boys Pascal, Patrice, and the baby, Martin-Lothaire, and Aunt Elisabet, plus her daughter Christiane occasionally. After we came back from Atlanta we brought Elisabet down here from Bikoki, where things had gotten fairly desperate. I can’t say they’re any less desperate here, but she’s good company. I thought I’d learned resourcefulness, but Elisabet has given me a higher education in making soup out of stones. Mondek, she calls me, I’m her white daughter.Yet she’s hardly older than Anatole and looks just like him, minus the broad shoulders and narrow waist. (Her shape is somewhat the reverse.) With his same sweet patience, she works nonstop in our one-room house, singing in Lingala, her left hand always holding her outer pagne closed for modesty while her right does more alone than I could with three. She’s told me everything she can recall of her older sister, Anatole’s mother, and like a kid I make her repeat the stories. I’m hungry for any family I can get. I’m lucky if I hear from Mother and Adah twice a year. It’s not their fault. I know they’ve sent countless packages that are piled up somewhere in the great, crumbling postal edifice downtown. I expect the Minister of Post could build himself a second or third home out of undelivered boxes.

By some miracle, we did get a package at Easter time. The boys hooted and ran the length of our 17 Janvier lane brandishing their precious Mars bars. (Which, I heard Pascal boast to his friends, are manufactured on Mars.) I was tempted to do the same -with my own loot: five books in English! Also clothing, aspirin, antibiotics, hand lotion, thick cotton diapers, batteries for our radio, and long letters. I buried my face in the clothes for the scent of my mother, but of course they came from some American child who’s no kin to us. Mother does volunteer work in African relief. We’re her pet project, you could say.

In every package there’s one oddball thing from Adah, a sort of secret message is how I think of it. This time it was an old Saturday Evening Post she’d found in the bottom of Mother’s closet. I leafed through it, wondering, Did Adah want me to read about how Jimmy Stewart got his start, or to know that when a Philco moves in, your TV troubles move out? Then I found it, an article called “Will Africa Go Communist?”Adah retains her eagle eye for irony. It was all about how the U.S. ought to take better charge of the maverick Congo; the two photographs stopped my heart. In one, a young Joseph Mobutu looks out imploringly above a caption declaring his position in jeopardy. Next to him is a smiling, rather crafty-looking Patrice Lumumba, with a caption warning: “He may be on his way back!” The magazine is dated February 18, 1961. Lumumba was already a month dead, his body buried under a chicken coop in Shaba. And Mobutu, already well assured of his throne. I can picture the Georgia housewives shuddering at the Communist challenge, quickly turning the page on that black devil Lumumba with the pointed chin. But I was hardly any less in the dark, and I was in Bulungu, the very village where Lumumba had been captured. My sister married a man who may have assisted in his death-sentence transport to Shaba, though even Rachel will never know that for sure. We have in this story the ignorant, but no real innocents.

Adah wrote at the bottom of the page, “Remember ‘Devil One’ and ‘W I. Rogue?’ Our secret secrets?” She says there’s talk now of an investigation, that the Congress may look into past wrongdoing in the Congo or “any possible link between the CIA, Lumumba’s death, and the army coup that brought Mobutu to power.” Are they joking? Adah says no one is giving it any credence; here, no one has ever doubted it. It’s as if history can be no more than a mirror tipped up to show each of us exactly what we already knew. Now everyone’s pretending to set the record straight: they’ll have their hearings, while Mobutu makes a show of changing all European-sounding place names to indigenous ones, to rid us of the sound of foreign domination. And what will change? He’ll go on falling over his feet to make deals with the Americans, who still control all our cobalt and diamond mines. In return, every grant of foreign aid goes straight to Mobutu himself. We read he’s building himself an actual castle with spires and a moat near Brussels, to provide a respite, I guess, from his villas in Paris and Spain and Italy. When I open my door and look out, I see a thousand little plank-and-cardboard houses floating at every conceivable tilt on an endless ocean of dust. We hardly have a functional hospital in our borders, or a passable road outside Kinshasa. How can this be, a castle with spires and a moat? Why doesn’t the world just open its jaws like a whale and swallow this brazenness in one gulp? is the question I’d pose to Father these days. “Who gave him charge of the whole world? If you have insight, hear this: Can one who hates right govern?”Job 34:13, thank you very much.

The latest news from Mobutu is that he’s bringing two great American boxers, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, to the stadium in Kinshasa. The announcement came on the radio this afternoon. I only listened with one ear because of a larger drama unfolding in our kitchen. I’d just put Martin down for a nap on his mat and was boiling the diapers while Elisabet crumbled a papery onion and hot pili-pili into a bowl. She fries this with mashed tomatoes into a thin red sauce for the manioc. That’s the principal trick of Congolese cooking: rubbing two leaves together to give color and taste to another day’s translucent, nutritionally blank ball of manioc.

The pot for boiling the manioc was waiting in line for the stove, after the diapers, and after that would come the big laundry kettle with the boys’ shirts and our household’s three sheets and two towels. Here in Kinshasa we have a “city kitchen,” with the stove right inside the house, but it’s only a little bottle-gas burner, maddeningly sluggish after my years of cooking over roaring wood fires. A lot of people in la cite do cook with wood, which they have to nibble secretively from each other’s houses at night, like termites.

This was supposed to be a payday for Anatole, and it the school there’s been talk about the supplementaire, meaning the possibility of the government’s starting back payments on the wages they’ve been stealing from all public schools for over a year. This “supplement” is supposed to be a sign of good faith, to forestall a nationwide strike of university students, but some students walked out anyway, and the signs of Mobutu’s faith so far have been expressed with nightsticks. I worry constantly about Anatole. Although I know his capacity for self-restraint in a dangerous moment is uncanny.

Elisabet and I knew there would be no supplement but were still greatly enjoying spending it at tomorrow’s market. “A kilo of fresh eels and two dozen eggs!” I proposed, and she laughed at me. My craving for protein drives me to a singlemindedness she calls my momfele-hungries.

“Better, ten kilos of rice and two bars of soap,” she said, which we do need badly, but I despaired for an imaginary windfall that would bring nothing but more white starch into this house.

“Nothing white,” I declared.

“Brown soap, then,” she offered. “Oh! And some nice pink papier hygienique!” she added fervently, and we both laughed at that pipe dream. The last roll of toilet paper we’d seen, in any color, came from Atlanta.

“At least some beans, Elisabet,” I whined. “Fresh green ones. Mangwami, like we used to have in the country.”

Pascal’s best friend, a hearty girl named Elevee, had wandered in and sat down at the table opposite Elisabet, but was uncharacteristically quiet

“What do you think?” Elisabet prodded her with the blunt end of her knife. “Tell Madame Ngemba she needs a new pagne with some color left in it. Tell her she is disgracing her sons with the washing rag she wears to the market.”

Elevee picked at the short sleeve of her school uniform, evidently not desiring to talk about fashion. Her very black skin looked ashy, and she had the tired slump to her shoulders I recognize in my boys when they’re getting hookworm. I carried the boiled diapers outside, washed my hands carefully with our sliver of soap, and interrupted the afternoon’s procession of cookpots to make Elevee a cup of tea.
 

Suddenly she reported with a blank face that she was leaving school.

“Oh, Elevee, you can’t,” I said. She’s a smart little girl, though this guarantees nothing, of course.

Elisabet simply asked her, “Why?”

“To work at night with Mother,” she said flatly. Meaning, to work as a prostitute.

“How old are you?” I demanded angrily. “Eleven? Ten? This is a crime, Elevee, you’re a child! There are laws to protect you from that kind of work. It’s horrible, you don’t know. You’ll be scared and hurt and could get terribly sick.”

Elisabet looked at me with dismay. “Mondele, don’t frighten her. They have to have the money.”