Stringer (18 page)

16

I
felt spit out. On this sparse, bleached terrain, I felt exposed—not, as in Kinshasa, by the profusion of people and things, but by the alarming paucity. And the city, not at a lake or river or mine or port, without an obvious reason for existence, seemed spit out on this land as much as I felt spit out on it.

And what indolence. The people in the shantytowns seemed stagnant within their houses; a construction crew in front of the convent worked languorously, in an extremely restrained way.

As I walked around the city, looking for stories, searching in the broad spaces, my eye became fatigued, finding nothing to rest on, and always hesitating. The news that came over the radio was constant and straining. Some militias had become active, and every other day a village—of twenty or fifty people—was attacked.

The AP took these stories, which were painful to write; the war had come closer, and one somehow felt one knew the villages—they had become imaginable. I often became tired. And then one afternoon I was woken. It was the telephone. I reached for the counter; the room spun, blending. Outside, the convent workers sang loudly, tending to the flowers.

“Where are you? I've been calling all morning.”

“Sorry, what's the matter?”

“You haven't heard?”

“About what?”

“Man, how can you lose when you're there? Twenty dead in a militia attack outside Bunia. Bentley reported it two hours ago.”

I felt the enervation, and fell back on the mattress. The ceiling was matted by the cobwebs of long-legged spiders, crawling, moving ungainly as though on stilts. Watching them I fell asleep. When I woke it was late afternoon; I left the house berating myself. The UN spokesperson would not answer her phone. I climbed the slope to the base, but the guards said she was busy. So I hurried down the boulevard to Ali's shop.

Ali was a mysterious man. He was one of Bunia's important traders, from Pakistan. I had met him the week before, while looking in his shop for Indian tidbits. His main commerce seemed of face-whitening cream: bottles colored shocking pink stacked along the walls in pyramids like a Near Eastern monument. Chest-high shelves divided the shop into aisles of cigarettes, food. He stocked some higher-margin goods: a teddy bear with a forged Harrods tag, a Chinese video game. Two suits wrapped in plastic were pegged high on a wall, and hung without shape. The shop belied Ali's reputation. He was known as a loner, who had appeared in Bunia sometime during the war, and who received nightly convoys. Yet he seemed open with me—to talk freely. He seemed to know this part of Congo intimately. And so I wanted to make friends with him.

I rapped on his counter, rattling the glass. Ali came in hunched, a rag towel in one hand. “Was it you making that noise?”

“Did you hear about the attack?”

“Of course. I had to divert my supplies.”

He seemed pleased to see me. He was a small, wiry man. Coming to sit on his stool he drew a comb from his trousers and tapped it on the counter, discharging a black and white powder
over the glass. “I was wondering about you, actually. Do you want some roast chicken?”

I shook my head.

He laughed, but with hostility. “What's the problem? You're missing out. Roast chicken from Kampala is what the militiamen eat . . . the amount of chicken they have looted from me.”

“The UN doesn't secure your convoys? Or the roads?”

“They don't even buy my cream.”

The shop comforted, though my head felt heavy. The row of leather sandals on the ground seemed expected, familiar. A layer of dust over the toys and video games was now brilliant in the angled evening light. A client, a man in a soiled tunic, bought a tin of condensed milk. Ali packed this in a page from an old women's magazine.

It seemed his obsession—he wiped the countertop with the soiled rag. My mind returned to the news failure. But the feeling of urgency was gone. The tiredness had returned.

Perhaps Ali sensed my mood. “So you missed the story today.”

I thought he was trying to provoke me.

“You're sure you don't want roast chicken?”

I shook my head again.

“You want to meet the militias?”

It was my turn to be surprised.

“I can arrange a meeting. I don't want any commission.” He said this in a puritanical way—as though he would never think to take a commission—and also, I felt, with some reproach: as though I had given the impression of distrusting him.

“Where are these militias?”

“Fataki.” It was a northern town. “Powerful group.”

“You just want to help me?”

“You'll also find out a few things.”

I frowned.

“You know the problem here is the UN. The soldiers are all in illegal business. They take gold from the militias and send
to Karachi.” Much of the UN's force around Bunia was from Pakistan. “You'll see for yourself at the helicopter bases there are no X-ray machines. If I go around, even to supply milk powder, everyone will know. They don't want any competition. They are even selling their water, man. They are selling their rations to the militias.”

I said there might be a story in that.

“I am not lying to you. Even in Bunia you can buy the UN water. Where is it coming from?”

I passed among the aisles to look for some batteries for my radio. A noise came from outside: teenagers, arms interlaced and reaching inside each other's back pockets. I rolled together the batteries in my palm, making a heavy metallic sound. On the counter was a box of chocolates.

“You don't have Fruit & Nut?” I said.

But Ali had stopped listening, and was contemplating his pink bottles. “I hear there is a cream for whites,” he said. “It makes them orange even without the sun. You know it?”

“Who would buy that here?” I was again thinking of his proposition—Fataki, the name was itself explosive. And there was the excitement of discovering a different part of Bunia's warhit territory.

“Man, just saying!”

“I think I'm getting a fever.”

He held his hand against my forehead.

“Only a little.”

He went on, “You know Miss Ituri is going to come to Bunia. The beauty contest. We will go together and have some fun. Nice girls there, good music. I think you will like it.”

And he said he was going to close the shop for a few minutes; it was time for the evening
namaaz
. He yelled at a sentry outside to lock the grill.

17

T
he officers at the UN said it would be no problem to go to Fataki. There was a regular helicopter, and my papers were in order. They made me sign a new liability waiver. Ali gave me the necessary details, told me where to go. And on the evening before, I was all packed and ready.

But that same night I received a call—civilians were being prohibited from Fataki. The violence had escalated. It was the militias. But the timing of the announcement seemed suspect. And I felt too much on edge now to stay in Bunia. I confronted the UN logistics man, who seemed genuinely apologetic. He offered me a trip to Mongbwalu, the town made famous by the cannibalism story. The helicopter was due to leave the same morning—and a special UN patrol, he said, would take me on a tour. I was promised it would be worth my time.

I was the only civilian in the helicopter, among a dozen bearded soldiers with shaved upper lips. I squeezed between them into the oval compartment, our backs to the porthole windows. Yellow earmuff-like headsets were passed around. A high-pitched noise above our heads grew until it was deafening. The rotors began to shift. With the noise it was impossible to
make conversation, and we spent the journey alert, looking at one other.

Mongbwalu's base commander, a clean-shaven Pakistani, was a gregarious type. Before we could go anywhere, and though we had only a few hours, he insisted that we have tea. “One cup won't delay us.” The porcelain was brought out. We were seated in a gazebo. The commander talked with bravado, as Mongbwalu's overseer, about military strategy and politics. He asked who I was, why I had come. And quickly he seemed to decide that I was not of any use to him. He began to brood; the offer of tea seemed regretted; the invitation had been personal, too anticipated.

So the tour began with a bad feeling. The commander changed his mind and did not join; and this seemed to demoralize the troops. We quickly descended the hill, in our convoy of twelve jeeps loaded with troops and weapons, to face the pathetic and undernourished villagers. They stood outside their shacks, watching us. The Pakistanis hardly spoke to me. They showed me nothing. The tour seemed already spoiled; my presence, I felt, was resented.

And I was startled when we left town. The drive became long and wearying. The Pakistanis seemed only to be carrying out some duty by taking me on this drive, without slowing or stopping. From the backseat I looked at the hills—there was a wide, black gash in one; we seemed to head for it. The convoy suddenly stopped. But the soldiers hesitated. Half in a daze, I got out.

It was there, unexpected, among the tall grass, beside a mud hut—a charred white jeep. I cautiously moved toward it, attracted, and with half a mind that the convoy could leave without me.

So this was the jeep of the ill-fated UN officers. It had reportedly been their last refuge during that final attack. Their corpses were later found with the stomachs ripped open, and missing their livers and hearts. One of the bodies, according to news reports, was lacking its brain—it led one to imagine some kind of cannibalistic ritual.

The jeep was being used as a clothes hanger. Its wheels were gone, and grass and plants grew from under its axles. A rear door had the precise holes of bullets, around which in circles the paint had come off to reveal gray metal. The upholstery had been ripped out, with the seats, the engine, the piping and wiring. A heap of metal lay within. So the car was now a shell, with shirts and shawls and scarves of abstract flower motifs carefully laid out over its chassis. On the roof was a basin of washing soap and clothes clips.

In another country I might have expected this jeep—symbol of the historic moment of the UN's first military intervention in Congo's war—to lie in a museum. Like Mobutu's palaces, the jeep might have been preserved for viewing and memory. But the fates of both had been the same: pillage, decay and slow infestation by the jungle.

We returned to Mongbwalu, and again the emaciated people came out—their faces now seemed pocked, the scars seemed to run deeper; and I felt bitten by the air. I could not stare at them for long. I was returned to the field where the helicopter waited, its chopping noise audible, the grass set at a steep tilt. Children stood in a large enclosing ring—though the helicopter had been a weekly event in Mongbwalu for years. They seemed like the townspeople, never tiring of the convoy. I turned to look out as we were raised into the air. The children were now running onto the field, among the soldiers. Their small shirts blown back by the gust from the rotors, they frantically made signs at us.

Those children somehow softened the memory I would keep of that journey, and of the place.

I was glad when Bunia's shiny roofs appeared.

The town seemed still, oppressive. I decided to cool off with a beer at the Hotel Ituri—the place I had passed with the garbage company man. The lobby, also a bar, was like in a cinema: vast,
and dark. In a corner, under a bulb, glowed the green felt of a pool table. The walls were sparsely decorated with posters of beer. The tables were wooden and the tablecloths solid red; to one side was a shelf of drinks; the bartender wore spectacles but still poured outside the cups. Girls sat on high stools, sipping from straws; prostitutes seemed to stick to the walls and hover around anyone who looked as if he had a little money. Cracks and holes—seemingly from bullets—pockmarked the building. The toilet had been defaced by ballpoint pen with love and hate messages.

The man on the high stool next to me was a masculine sight, with a hairy face and thick eyebrows. His jeans hung low, on a wide belt, and his CAT sneakers had been washed. He fidgeted, shaking his leg. And it was he who struck up conversation: “I have met Angelina.”

“Who?”

He nodded knowingly.

He asked if I didn't believe him. “I have proof.” Without provocation he pulled out his phone—with half-closed eyes, taking his time and pretending to be careless, he pressed some buttons. The trembling instrument was thrust to my face. “Naro, you are so sweet. Xo. Angelina.” He let me hold the phone. But when I tried to scroll down he raised his arms—and I became nervous when he stood and stepped closer, talking fast. “Are you jealous, man? Trying to delete the message?”

His temper lasted all night. The bar grew more lively. The rumba became loud. A projector screened dancing girls on the wall. He announced us as bar partners. The bartender immediately refilled our beers. Naro was showing someone else his phone—but this man said he didn't believe it was Angelina Jolie. They got into a shouting argument. “Congolese are so stupid,” Naro said to me. The bartender said Naro was a Lebanese freight agent, that he exported gold to the Middle East. Naro again turned—“Tell me, do you think I am a liar? Do you?” I tried
to draw him away from the argument but he would not listen. The Congolese was now pointing at his face. Naro twisted his hand. The bartender raised his voice. The mood had become too intense. I rushed out.

The evening had instead amplified the anxieties of the morning's excursion—I felt burned, that over the day I had slowly been used.

Mossi called that evening to ask for help. He had become involved in a business venture with a politician—in an attempt to escape his poverty. The politician was suing him. He was being menaced. I called a lawyer I knew in Kinshasa, who promised to get on Mossi's case. By making the call I was committing to paying the lawyer. But I was glad Mossi had called me, I felt grateful to be able to help. I worried for him.