The owner of the shack became excessively friendly with us—and one day we discovered why. It was the day the gold seller pounced on us while we waited for dinner; he said he was the owner’s cousin. Mon frère, mon frère—anyone in Congo could be your brother. He decisively pulled himself onto a chair and announced he had found a nugget. When I told him I didn’t want it his face darkened, and I thought he was going to be angry and leave; but his smile returned. “I know. Your friend want nugget.” Bobby stamped his feet, dislodging the bench, and the gold seller was about to say something, but Bobby stamped again and the gold seller was dragging his leg away. He appeared at our tent. Bobby threatened to beat him. But the man would not be dissuaded. Finally, tired of the evasion and realizing its futility, we agreed to meet the duo at the back of the restaurant. It was our intention to make clear that this would be our last discussion. But that would not be: it was the gold seller and his cousin who offered us the most viable exit.
They tried to sell us anything: promises of gold turned into promises of diamonds, into truffles and truckfuls of timber, into maps of hidden treasures left behind by Belgians. When the cousin learned Bobby traded with India he chattered with the gold seller, who drew a plastic wrapper from inside his pants. It contained a map, heavily stained and covered with what seemed to be the rectilinear shapes of buildings. “I need a metal detector,” he said gravely. Bobby asked to see the map but the cousin smiled knowingly. He said we could have it for a hundred thousand dollars. He tried to sell us a diesel generator—for light and cooking in our tent—and Bulgarian-manufactured Kalashnikovs; he said there must be something he had that we wanted; he asked where we had been going before the barge stalled. And he offered to take us by boat. The clamor rose outside our shed.
Boats were easily available. The cousin said we should have at least two engines. Canisters of gasoline were purchased, foraged from various houses and businessmen. Bobby was initially hesitant but the duo moved forward with such speed and conviction and when they spoke it seemed so utterly sincere—they asked for an advance of only half the money—that already it felt too late to refuse. We became accustomed to the idea, even optimistic. Bobby said if we were lucky enough to find good motors we could make the journey in two days.
I began to enjoy the port in my way. I bathed in the river, near the rocks, where the villagers said crocodiles didn’t swim. The water was cold and stagnant. I gave it iridescent patches of soap. Once my toe slipped on a slimy smooth object and I nearly fell. I waded out of the water, jumping, making big splashes. Later in a dark room packed with townsmen I watched Sholay, a Hindi movie from the 1970s—probably gotten from a trader—on a fifteen-inch television. The movie had no subtitles. The villagers clapped during the dances.
A strange event occurred one night when I was reading by a flashlight in the tent. Bobby and I were camped in the yard. A family of three arrived. The visitors were poorly dressed and without slippers. The skin on their feet was so cracked that it looked like dried clay. The father was the only one who spoke. He seemed simple enough, until he asked me to make his girl speak. She had been mute from birth, and he had heard of Indian magic. I shook my head helplessly. The father grew annoyed. He said he knew I could cure his girl. This was the reputation the Indians had in the country. The family sat by the gate for many hours, and left sometime in the night. The next day I told some villagers about the incident—the supernatural was daily conversation at the port. They said I had done right. It could have been a ruse. Those people were from the bush, and the village was at a delicate time. There had been a vampire visit some months earlier; it was said to have arrived with a terrific sound, terrorizing the people for weeks until it was slain by the shaman. Villagers shared their stories of misfortune: the vampire ate livestock; it caused a roof to implode; it emptied the fishermen’s nets of river fish; it infected their lungs. A fisherman’s boy told me he had found the dead beast. He wanted to show me. It was just outside the village, he said, near the fields. I tugged at his shirt as he climbed with agility over fallen trunks. We passed old dwellings without tops, shielded by tall grass, and we entered a clearing in the jungle where covered with creepers and leaves was the frame of an aircraft. The fuselage gaped open, half sunk into the floor. The boy, standing behind a tree, thought it could be worth a lot for its strangeness, that he could sell it at the port. I looked up—but the forest was impenetrable and I couldn’t make out the path by which the plane had come.
We left the carcass as we had found it. And on the walk back I learned the boy—whose name was Bahati—was a refugee from Rwanda. His family had been killed by the Rwandan army. A villager had adopted him. He said he liked international news, so before my departure, at his request, I bought him a small radio.
At the last minute I worried something would go wrong. Even Bobby sensed the precariousness. Over and over he inspected the boat—his marine experience showing as he scrupulously checked the hull, the engine and the safety equipment. We ran through our provisions and checked the maps, with Xs at landmarks so we wouldn’t get lost among the islands striping the river. We checked with l’Américain that the gold seller and his cousin were trustworthy. Everything seemed in order, and I felt vaguely satisfied.
The sky was overcast on our last night in Irebu. Only a strip of stars remained, in the northeast. It looked like the Big Dipper, but I fancied I could make a Big Dipper out of any seven stars. I felt heady, on the brink of new discovery: I had worried that our journey might end with us stranded in the village. Suddenly the starry strip made a huge circle and melted into the black. “Are you all right?” Bobby held my arm. I had fallen, tripped on a root. “Help me up.”
I was still uneasy the next morning when our party of three—the cousin came along but the gold seller did not—set off. The craft rocked less once we started moving. My nausea eased. It was a relief to see the forest pass with speed. The boat angled upward, and I sat at the bow to give myself a view from a little height. The shore grew distant and the river bloated. There were the familiar islands of reeds, called floating islands. We passed an area where the water was so wide that it extended to the horizon; we could see no land, and the river seemed an ocean. The cousin navigated our canoe through the marshes. Perspiration dotted our faces. The wind made waves on the water. And the rains arrived.
They first appeared as a white mist wrapped around distant trees. It made a beautiful sight: the water hit the earth and rose as pale fumes among the green. The trees were empty of monkeys, and eagles circled above, expecting invertebrate meals. A hush broke the silence. It sounded like rustling leaves; but too steady. The rain approached and grew louder and louder. Our envelope of water, from above and below, became complete. A howling wind rode the river and slammed into our boat. The motor whirred noisily, raised in the air, and plunged into the water. We pressed our legs against the boat’s sides. The rain had become a deluge that hit us like stones; the boat rolled; water climbed its sides and seeped into the hull; the river began to threaten. I was newly aware that we could drown. With a mug I scooped out the water, but it felt futile.
Night came more quickly because of the clouds. We moored the boat. The wetness made me cold and clammy. We were not alone: I saw figures flit among the trees. There was a glow: a torch carried its canopy of light into the jungle. And it occurred to me that we could have been followed. But by whom?
I had become dirty, and I had begun to itch uncomfortably on my legs and back. The constant rain gave no respite, and it was dangerous to sleep nude, but I was worried I could catch pneumonia. I wrapped myself in a damp towel and fell asleep, shivering on a raised plank of the boat. For as long as it rained we wouldn’t have to worry about the mosquitoes.
The next day we moved ahead, along eroded cliffs of black mud and between marshes and riverine reeds. Branches arched over the water, along with colonnades of green bamboo. Roots protruded from the cliffs of dissolving laterite, which made the river muddy. The rain poured, then slowed to a dr
izzle. Bobby passed around fruit; the bananas were mashed, and I scooped up the paste with my tongue. The cousin set up the tent like an awning over the boat’s rear; it was hardly effective because the rain came in from the sides. Our progress that day was meager. And at night for a long time I watched the blackness pass; shapes emerged, black on black; I seemed able to discern different shades; perhaps the forest gave the blackness new dimensions, new degrees, I thought. A mosquito came into the weak beam of my torchlight. It settled on my knee, stretched taut; the insect, brilliant in the light, spread its legs and probed. I smacked it. Poor mosquito, I thought, what a delirious death. I scratched my knee. We passed a house on the cliff. It had lights and seemed a bungalow. Yellow filled the doorway and window, and there was a form. Against the light we saw the silhouette of a person looking at us.
I tried to sleep but the motor roared all night. We were trying to outrun the weather. Some hours before dawn I was woken by a heavy thud. I sat up. The cousin cut the wailing engine. The boat was stuck. Bobby thought it was a sandbar. The water was too opaque to see. Leaning over, the cousin reached with his hands into the propeller blades and pulled out some knotted weeds. He pushed us out of the swamp with an oar. The boat budged by inch; the cousin slipped and fell. It had been two full days and we had not made a third of the distance. Sometime that night I asked if we should turn back.
Bobby thought we still had a chance. The cousin rubbed his bruise as though it weren’t his decision. The boat labored. The engine choked and we turned it off. Just before dawn the rain grew furious again. The currents swirled and the boat twisted. Visibility diminished. We became stuck in more weeds. The river turned violet. We stopped and passed the morning on a bank, eating bananas and canned sardines; there seemed no point in saving our stocks. Twigs and felled trees floated by, still alive, bearing green leaves. And in the torrential downpour we pushed the hull into the water; it made a splash. Bobby now held the rudder. And the boat moved more quickly, now aided by the current.
Only on our return did I notice how the rain forest bloomed. Everything seemed calmer. Lightning arced through the sky, but without thunder. The animal cries were muted by the sounds of rain. And the forest gained definition: details became visible against the green. Creatures leaped from the trees with outstretched arms. The throats of bullfrogs expanded into bottles. Monkeys hung by their tails and playfully touched the river. Areas of the shore were covered in white mushrooms. Lichen-colored tree barks glowed orange. Cicadas called at 6:00 p.m.
At the village a monkey had been imprisoned in a bamboo cage. L’Américain kept it as a pet, feeding it passion fruit. He was sitting in an open-walled hut. Half a trunk of wood had been lit and smothered, and smoke from the orange-glowing log rose through a hole in the thatched roof. L’Américain rested in the shade. His wife brought us a buffet of pineapple. The monkey licked its fingers. I ate so quickly I wasn’t aware when my hunger was extinguished, and I finished the meal moving slowly and giddily, like a bee that had feasted on honey.
The barge was still stranded, and the only sign of life on it was the clutter around the crew quarters. Another barge had passed in the interim and embarked most of the beached passengers, but it hadn’t had the requisite equipment to repair our barge. L’Américain proposed we borrow his motorbike. He offered to arrange a party on foot: local boys would serve as guides. If we waited a week it might be possible to rent a 4x4. But they seemed ideas of folly. The cousin backed out. We would soon reach the peak of inundation, he said, and any journey would be too risky.
Bobby rashly promised that we would return in a few months. The cousin said once the rains slowed he would be glad to join.
Bobby had contracted a cold. Solemnly, sniveling, he made for the bat room.
I sat on the riverbank for a long time. I felt exhausted. Our journey had clearly failed. I had made a mistake by taking such a risk. And I had now gone several weeks without writing a story. The money I had given the family would have been finished. I thought I would have to pick myself up and return to the old routine in Kinshasa. It would be a struggle.
But something happened that afternoon to change the course of my time in Congo. I heard a noise behind me, in the bush. It was Bahati, the Rwandan boy, who came to the water. He had brought his radio, and together we listened to the international news. I told him about our misadventure upriver. He had heard. And after we turned off the radio he said we could perhaps go cycling together. Two Pygmy settlements were located not far away, he said. If I was interested. I was not particularly hopeful—but it seemed a last possibility. So the next day we borrowed two bicycles from l’Américain and set out.
It was raining so the ride was difficult. The high elephant grass made it hard to see. We reached the village after half a day. It was a semicivilized settlement. A Pygmy chief with a brown civet-cat skin over his shoulder came to greet us. He held a slender shield, the wood carved with motifs.
From a pathway into the forest we saw some children return. They were not particularly short, as one might have expected from popular myths about Pygmies. Armed with bows and arrows, and with catapults hanging around their necks, the children had caught some small birds that they carried in bags of woven leaves. A woman appeared, her face bright red, colored with a pigment obtained from tree bark; in a wooden bowl she carried some nuts and leaves.
The chief said his ancestors had once worked on a colonial plantation. When the plantation closed the workers had nowhere to go, and they had become habituated to the settled life. Most crucially they no longer received the plantation company’s food shipments. The village was now destitute: like an urban slum set in the jungle. The wooden dwellings smelled of decomposition; food lay open on the ground, which was wet in places. The fields had long been reclaimed by the jungle. Some men emerged from their houses in ornamental headgear, thinking I was an important visitor, from the logging companies.
The Pygmies had lately been rediscovered by the companies. New Congolese forest laws—meant to conserve the ecology and their habitats—had given these tribes authority over traditional lands. The Pygmy chief had sold his rights to the loggers. He had given away a vast swath of land, and all he had asked from the loggers was some soap and bags of salt. It was painful to hear of his naive trade. I asked the chief why he needed salt. He said his ancestors had once known how to extract the mineral from plants, but his people from years of plantation work had forgotten how. The need for soap was evident, from the dirty children gathered before us. And the chief was certain the loggers could never wipe out the forest—“Just look,” he said, “it goes on forever.”
There was an odd moment when I asked if his ancestors might have allowed the woods to be given away. He seemed to become troubled. “I will tell the spirit of the forest that his trees must be cut down,” the chief said to me. “It is so his people can survive.”
I wrote a story for the AP about this extortionate logging. It was a story written with some passion—for the Pygmy chief showed me something about the world, and its crisis.
I had come to Congo with natural sympathy for humans living in the forests, stemming from a belief that these people practiced traditions that were thousands of years old, and that they had over the ages learned to exist in equilibrium with the animals.
But the Pygmy chief showed me that the tribes were no longer living in primitive ways. Globalization had reached even these villages—in the form of sneakers, guns and cigarettes, and most violently as demand for raw materials: wood, food, meat. Severed from the forest, the world consumed it rapaciously. The Pygmies were being encroached upon by this global need. These tribes lived in the forest, but they were no longer purely of the forest. They would not survive the change.
On the periphery of that village area I met a woman with a child on her back. Bending over, she was tilling someone else’s field. She said she worked from 6:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m.—a fourteen-hour workday. But she earned only enough to eat the leaves of beans. Her hut was tiny an
d dark. A white rabbit cowered in the corner. She squatted inside, waiting for the leaves to boil.
This woman struck me as something new in the world. She did not fall into any obvious category of African destitution: she was not a refugee or diseased or the victim of rape or violence. She was willing to work. It seemed to me that by any system of distribution of wealth—communist, socialist, capitalist—she had no reason to be poor.
When the leaves had finished boiling, the woman started to mash them into a paste. I asked the last of my questions. She replied listlessly, seeming too tired to listen or to tell me to leave.
In the hut the baby had begun to cry. The woman squatted up to him and put a sliver of raw sweet potato in his palm. He made a fist. And like that, holding this morsel of hardly edible food, he fell asleep.
This story about the forest, which in my excitement I called my editor at once to relay, struck a chord in him—and made the rounds within the agency. Months later it won a prize. My editor told me something personal for the first time since we had begun to work together: he too had begun his career in Congo. He had also struck out on his own to find his first stories. In this way we formed a small bond. I got the sense that he wanted to help me. It was the first success of the journey.
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