Stringer (7 page)

And the industrialist smiled, looking pleased.

I polished off a Coca-Cola while waiting for Corinthian outside Satwant's office. Mossi said he had to leave—to chase other stories. I watched him turn the corner. This used to be an industrial part of the city—few industries now functioned. The roads were wide, the buildings low and large. Some workers walked by, carrying muddy shovels on their shoulders. A child stooped under the weight of a cement bag. The world—with its drab people and trucks—seemed static in contrast to the charge of the last few hours. I waited inside the gated compound, between the silent office and the menacing city.

A taxibus swerved onto the road. From a window waved Corinthian's hand.

I sat out the afternoon glumly on my bed. As much as I had been motivated in the morning, now, waiting for the heat to pass and for Nana's meal of the day, I felt captive to inaction. I listened to sounds, scrutinized the room. Everything seemed remote, new; I felt suspicious of my surroundings. Any familiarity I had felt was gone. And I was taken by an urge to clean.

The room, whose clutter I had learned to ignore, suddenly
seemed a mess. The books on the shelf became especially intolerable. I pulled them down. The books were old, of literature and for self-training in computer languages. There were faded magazines of the intellectual variety:
Jeune Afrique, Le Monde Diplomatique
. I restacked them by size. I moved to the curtains, shaking them of dust. With my hands I picked the carpet clean. And as I uncovered the sheets and stacks of cloth left by Nana (my room was used for storage) I discovered odd items: a large black box I hadn't known was a speaker, a set of French vinyl albums, a Flemish Bible, and some wigs, sparsely haired. Soon I stood in a cloud of dust and my skin, normally dark, had turned a luminous gray. Nana appeared at the door. “Someone's here for you.”

My first thought was that the police had come with good news.

But Nana giggled.

Frida was Nana's niece. She was more forward than Fannie. “I love you very much,” she said, shutting my door. Her blue jeans were short, revealing porous-shaved skin at the bottom of her legs. Her top was fashionable and strappy. Her frizzy hair was pulled back and smothered down with gum. And she would have been a big girl even without her four-inch heels.

“I'm sorry. I like someone else,” I said.

“Who? A whitey? In India?” A smile. “But she is there,” she twirled her finger, tinkling her metal bracelets. “And I am here. You need someone here to keep you happy.”

What is this? The girl was clearly trouble, and more so because she was family. Opening the door, I said, “Wait for me in the living room.” But she stared. I went to fetch Nana.

Her smile was warm.

“Ask Frida to leave.”

Her eyes dipped. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I just want Frida to leave.”

“But what if she loves you?”

“I don't care.”

Her face shrank into a ball. “Ask her to leave yourself.”

“I did. She's your family. Do something.” I stood tall over her, and she looked down at the table. Frida was called. I returned to my room, happily remarking its new cleanliness. I peeled off the plastic wrapping from a new soap. I felt inside the pillowcase with my fingers. I lifted the mattress against the wall. One by one, I shook everything on the bed. I don't know what came over me, but I felt Frida had taken something. I returned to the living room.

Frida stood by the door. She looked away when I appeared, and she then smirked at the wall. “Nana, Frida took something from my room.”

“That can't be. Why don't you check your things properly?”

“I want you to search her.”

“It's not right to accuse people without knowing,” Nana said.

Frida looked surprised, as if she had just tuned in. “Something happened?” She adjusted her bangles. I said, “Give it to me and I'll buy you something.” Frida didn't reply. All the emotions of the robbery returned: the uncertainty, the sense of being violated. But now, in front of me, I had my perpetrator. I bristled uncontrollably.

“I don't want to see Frida in this house. Get out,” I said to her. “Get out.”

Nana clicked her lips. “Who are you?” She addressed me facing the wall. Her voice was filled with loathing. “
You
are not family.” I went up to her and pointed, close to her face. “I'm going to tell Jose.”

“Tell.” Nana smirked, and she loosened and tightened the cloth around her waist. “If you want to live in a better house I understand.”

Who said anything about a better house? And why is Frida smiling? Nana looked icy. I fled to my room, and turned on the radio. There was something about Tony Blair, and about the
elections. But I did not listen: I felt helpless. The distress rose sharply, as if it might choke me.

I hardly ate at dinner though it was my only meal that day. Nana served cow stomach. We usually ate the ribs or thigh. I didn't know one ate stomach. “It's a specialty,” she said. I tasted the meat's fingerlike projections; they tickled my tongue. I chewed on a piece for a full minute. It was disgusting. “I'll eat something else.” Nana pulled the plate from under my nose, muttering: “Whatever you like, monsieur.”

I knew I had been rude: I had transgressed the rules by blaming family (the rules of the Donut Society). And this time, unlike with Fannie, the punishment was harsh. I was also riven by doubt: about Frida's guilt, and about the force of my mad reaction. A trust between Nana and me had been broken.
Better house
I knew was a threat to have me evicted. I felt sorry, and suddenly scared. Jose too became cold to me—it hurt more; he had taken her side in the battle.

I called Mossi. The line was heavy with static. He was at a meeting on the other side of town. “What for?” I asked uncertainly.

“Local stuff. The chairman of a local coalition is changing. Did Mr. Singh call you?”

“No.” I checked my phone.

“He's invited us to a party at the Château Margaux. You should go.”

“You're not coming?”

“It's on the weekend. I have family responsibilities. But you should collect business cards for us.”

The Château Margaux was a posh restaurant in town. The party was sure to end late; taxis would be difficult—I wasn't sure. I had really wanted to talk to Mossi about all that had happened—to buy him a drink and spill everything. But he seemed rushed and scattered; and I felt a request for a drink that night would sound too much like a plea.

I could not bear to stay inside, so I left the house. The stars had surfaced. Warm air swirled over my face. At Victoire the multitudes sat around a white pillar with a hand at its top: a monument dedicated to the proletariat. Physically I felt liberated. The agitation in my mind began to lull. The crowd made me anonymous, unnoticed; the people were busy, animated; they made me feel secure.

It was odd that I should find myself under this pillar. The father Kabila had erected it after deposing Mobutu: the hand was to show that the people had won, over Mobutu's corruption, over his destruction. And as with each of Congo's previous uprisings—for independence, for Lumumba, for Mobutu—the Congolese had hoped this victory would bring improvement, and they had vigorously celebrated the father Kabila's troops storming Kinshasa in trucks.

Africa has a history of using geography as symbols: cities are named Freetown, Libreville; arterial roads are called Liberation, Victory; countries are named and renamed as Democratic and Free with each revolution, coup d'état and election. Congo bears these physical scars of its many upheavals, each of which had been seen as a liberation. But, and almost unbelievably, each regime was worse than the previous. Every change worsened life. It created a distrust among the people, and a perverse nostalgia, an idealization of past dictatorships and colonial regimes that, as punishment for poor labor, cut off hands and brutally massacred. This past was not only repressive, it was shameful; so the nostalgia, which gave so much comfort, simultaneously degraded the Congolese self-worth. At times, I felt it had crushed the people.

The nostalgia was public. In Kinshasa it was the “correct” attitude to have, especially before the foreigner: Congolese would readily sink into cloying soliloquies about Mobutu and Lumumba and the Belgians. The abuses, on the other hand,
were only awkwardly acknowledged, and usually with sullenness, humiliation, self-pity. So the two were kept separate: the disgrace in one consciousness was not allowed to taint the ideal in the other. And this is what crushed society: this constant need to switch between two worlds, the impulse to deny what had happened.

The distrust was a private phenomenon. I saw it in Nana's reflexive defense of Frida. The Congolese confined themselves to their Donut Societies and evaded the capricious, lawless world. For this world had possibility: it had a future. The Congolese, having learned to distrust the future, retreated to their families and clans.

The society that resulted seemed intellectually stagnant, half emerged from its history and only reluctantly moving forward. Only around Anderson, so far, had I got an idea of the Congolese potential. In his dissidence and rebellion he seemed to have a notion, a conviction, of how the future ought to be. But he was in a minority.

Congo's history is particularly repressive. And dictators can be hard to shake off. I grew up in a dictatorship—in Dubai—and I recognized in the Congolese elements from my own society: a certain acquiescence, a cloistering within small ambitions, of business and family hierarchy; a paucity of confidence in oneself, and an utter belief in the power of one man.

It startles me how steadfastly I believed, growing up, that our dictator was just, good and wise. I was never told anything to the contrary. The media only carried good news. I did not know that the slick British newsreaders could be censored; I did not know that the opposition had needles stuck in their noses. Out of fear my parents did not speak. My father, in the middle of conversations, would press his finger to his lips. But because the dictator gave my parents jobs, they chose to live in that society.

Congo, I sensed, was a victim of the dictator's myth. It is what I had experienced as a child: the indoctrination that holds up
the dictator as a savior, a sage, as all-powerful. Until recently this myth usually invoked God, a divine right to power. These days dictators have less need for mysticism: they use the tools of liberty—elections, business, schools, art, the media. The successful dictator creates at once a terror of his presence and a fear of his loss. But his myth, which can so profoundly shape society and is indeed shaped by society, is as destructive as it is powerful.

The father Kabila ruled for only four years before he was killed. His reign did little to improve Congo's condition. He began by professing his Marxist intentions, promising to restore to his people their riches. But he ended up spending most of the rule fighting off Rwanda, which had installed him as president. He attempted some economic reforms. But he had inherited a country so profoundly wrecked by Mobutu that it would take years to undo the damage. The father Kabila was an idealist: he had spent thirty years in the bush writing Marxist speeches. Heightening the sense of urgency, Rwanda invaded Congo again in 1998. Impatient, but able to achieve little, the longtime guerrilla fighter became confused, irrational and depressed. He lost his grip on the country and the economy. His allies defected. Inflation and corruption mounted. The story goes—and perhaps its truth is less important than its symbolism—that the father Kabila was assassinated with his hand in a bowl of diamonds, in the act of corruption. So the leader who once symbolized hope for this country was insulted even in death, the most sacred of life events to his people.

I have not lived through a dictator's fall but the Congolese tell me it is like malaria that ravages the body. It pierces the nation's consciousness. And the people, at the end of such upheaval—many times over in Congo's case—can be left quite broken, empty of belief.

The Congolese now mock Kabila's monuments, one senses, from bitterness; for by the same token they mock themselves, and their raucous cheers for Kabila's rebellion. The pillar under
which I sat had, after all, come to commemorate not a victory but regret.

Something darted against my leg: a lizard with a black tail snaked through the sand. I bought a boiled egg from a boy loitering nearby. The shell peeled easily. I scattered the little pieces on the ground, and in the evening light they took on an unearthly gleam.

I trundled back, and the feelings from the day returned. I hoped Frida had left. My escape from the house had been fleeting, but now beyond its walled confines I clearly saw the greater problem: with practically no money I would not last long. I did not want to dwell on this sense of defeat. A solution, I told myself, would come tomorrow. But the streets, the people, Victoire, all seemed resplendent; I had the heightened awareness of details that comes from knowing one may soon be gone.

5

T
hat night I went home and thought about the time I was still in America, preparing for my journey to Congo.

A strange thing had happened to me then, I recalled.

The closer I had drawn to my departure, the more I had needed to eat. Breakfast didn't last until lunch anymore; I ate again mid-morning. And my purchases at the supermarket became calorific: cream cakes, donuts, snacks of processed cheese. I didn't force myself to eat; I was just constantly hungry. There was a surprising physicality to my apprehension of the journey.

This happened in near loneliness. It was summer and New Haven was empty. I saw few people. My friends had all left. It gave a hermetic quality to my days: reading, note taking, packing. I put myself on a trial of mefloquine, the U.S. Army's preferred antimalarial, but my dreams disturbed. And my anxieties were promoted by Annie, the bank teller who processed the last of my educational loan payments. She was black, and she spoke with an accent.

I asked where she was from.

“Zaire,” she said, using Mobutu's name for the country.

I was stunned. “What a coincidence. I'm going there.”

Annie looked annoyed. “You can't just
go
there.” She glanced at me derisively.

“Could I ask for your help?”

She paused, without looking at me, before again processing the checks on her table.

I visited her the next day. And the day after. Once I bought her lunch at Dunkin' Donuts. Annie wouldn't leave her desk—every hour was money. By 4:00 p.m. she was done at the bank, and she jetted home to check on her children; at 6:00 p.m. she was at her night-shift kiosk, guarding a parking lot on Chapel Street.

One night at the kiosk she dug into her voluminous handbag and drew out a photograph in which she had pinned up her hair. “What do you think?” she asked. I took a second. “Not your style.” She agreed. “That's what I thought.” That weekend Annie took me to a Congolese party on the Upper West Side of New York—she told me to dress well, for the party was at the ambassador's house. I made an effort but still failed: the men were all in three-piece suits. At the dance in the basement I hid among the last row of chairs, but a large woman in purple lipstick came over and swept me off the ground. We joined the dancing circle, shaking our buttocks. Annie later told me the woman was a Congolese senator. After that I became Annie's companion on errands: I shuttled food to her cousin, accompanied her children on a lawyer's visit. I met her husband, who wore a Subway hat and asked if I could landscape their garden. They were building a house on a plot near the golf course. Annie took me once. On the upper floor she showed me a rectangular hole in the ground, and I chose the Jacuzzi tub to be placed in it. Her master builder lay on the grass, a Jamaican with his palm on his tummy. He chewed a piece of straw. Rolled up nearby was a manual on plumbing. Annie had been twelve years building her house.

On these various drives Annie told me stories: about her youth in Kinshasa, her family, the coup that toppled Mobutu; but the vast majority of her stories were useless. I think she couldn't get
past thinking of me as an outsider. The stories were all shrouded in mystery and fear. They only occurred in the dark. The one happy story I remember was about when she first kissed her husband, on top of a Kinshasa hill near the old nuclear reactor. That too had happened at night. I thought perhaps Annie was trying to put me off: “It isn't easy to get to America,” she would say. “You have a bright future. Why are you throwing it away by going to Zaire?”

I found it hard to answer her at the time. It was not easy to explain the feelings within me.

At one of our last meetings Annie said, “You'll be staying with my family.” Jose was her husband's brother, and she called him at once to inform him of my arrival and instruct them to take care of me. But I noticed, once in Kinshasa, that Jose and Nana seemed hardly to mention Annie. I later asked why; and I learned that the last time Annie had visited, she had found the dirt at Bozene so unbearable that she had taken a room at the Grand Hotel. Annie, who had been the family's pillar and matriarch during the Mobutu dictatorship's violent end; who had been seen as a true Kinoise. Her betrayal confirmed Bozene's misery, its suppressed desire for escape. But the family only said, “That
Annie
, she's become de-Congolized.”

In the summer of 2005, a week before I left for Congo, Annie dug into her handbag and produced a letter. It was an invitation from the U.S. government. “I'm becoming a citizen,” she said. We celebrated with a Dunkin' milk shake. She told me not to share the news in Kinshasa. “They'll want me to sponsor the whole family. Where will they stay? My house will become a camp.”

The days that followed the robbery were hard, as I was still trying to find employment. I started them early, waking to the 6:00 a.m. news bulletins, blinking open my eyes as I took notes. At noon
I visited Anderson to check on Radio Trottoir. The bird flu story was written and pitched to several newspapers. No replies came. I began an account of the 25th Quarter—I knew it would be a more subtle report, harder to sell. Life slowly became restricted. I curbed my eating—it saved only a few dollars but it helped create an assurance that I was doing the maximum—and drank bottles and bottles of water, especially at night, when the house was asleep and I worked in the dark.

And at 32 Avenue Bozene, we seemed to sink together. Jose had begun to stay at the office longer, to try to “find” more money. Nana was no longer able to stretch her rations the full week. Meals became poor (more stomach); the condiments on the table diminished. But it wasn't until Jose's big misfortune that Nana cited the evil eye. It was looking, she then said, straight at us.

The cousin of Jose's director had needed a position. We were, after all, in a year of elections, and god knew who would have power after that—someone else's cousin. The shuffling that ensued shunted Jose near the airport, to a quarter called Massina. The shops there didn't pay taxes, least of all to a man in a suit. Jose was too polite to extort. And Nana silently scolded him for it. Each evening when Jose came home, fatigued, she would ask what he'd found; he would not answer. She would say to the ceiling, “If we only had a few francs for the baby,” and retire to the bedroom. The couple lived in this muted tension. Nana didn't have it easy either: inflation had risen again, all Victoire was hit. She told me the family of four next door had started to take turns at lunch; each day one of them ate and the other three scavenged.

In all this my troubles showed no visible end; the house and the street gave no respite. So it was a surprise when something good happened.