Jose smacked his lips, without turning.
“You’ve done nothing all day. The clothes I ironed are still on the bed. You haven’t even stepped out of the house.”
Jose stood upright. “Stop talking like you’re solving world problems. All women work the same and I don’t hear them complaining.”
“Their husbands have jobs. Why do I have to go to the neighbors to borrow for our meals?” Nana lost control. She began to yell. “I should unplug the television and gramophone. What a man! Shameless!” That last word was spit off her tongue, as though she had been unable to say it calmly. She herself seemed stunned. And now she looked as though she would cry.
Jose, who had so far seemed embarrassed by my presence, ran up to my plate, overly skittish, and emitted a hiss through clenched teeth, as though appraising the toast and feeling sorry for my breakfast. “She didn’t mean it badly,” he said. Nana stared with a puzzled and then disgusted face. She became hard. She turned her back to him. The confrontation was ended. Nana occupied the kitchen and Jose resumed his place on the sofa. They wouldn’t so much as look up when they passed each other.
Silence, and again one became conscious of the wider space. I ate in this stillness, in the muffled light, smelling a mustiness, observing, absentmindedly, the darkened grains on the wood furniture, and then Bébé Rhéma, in her diaper of torn-up plastic bags, sleeping peacefully on the floor. Her limbs were spread in all directions. Occasionally, she quivered her yellow-mucus-crusted nostrils. She had appeared undisturbed by the argument, but now she made a growl. Jose stood. A deep grating noise followed. The baby rolled over and opened her eyes. Nana came running, but she appeared just as Bébé Rhéma turned quiet. Still in the vomiting posture, her mouth open, the baby breathed heavily. She closed her eyes. Her limbs relaxed. She returned to her erstwhile state of sleeping.
“Tired,” Jose remarked, looking over her.
“We need to take her to the hospital,” Nana said.
Jose shifted his tone. “She has been like this for one week.”
Nana glanced my way, looking weary.
“You will come, no?”
And it was clear that we would not otherwise be going.
Jose’s brother had taken his car on an errand. His wife didn’t know when he would return. Before the evening, she offered. But by then the day-duty doctors would have left. Jose said he could ask the man down the street—he had often helped the family—but that this man had lately begun to talk about his own difficulties. It was a way of requesting relief, or of complaining that too many were asking favors. “Does my family have to do everything in this house?” Nana said, to no one in particular.
We prepared with speed and in silence. Jose called out once to ask if Nana had the keys. Rudely she hushed him. Cupboards were opened, clothes and papers were scattered. Nana pulled a dress over Bébé Rhéma and packed a large handbag with two bananas, a feeding bottle, some towels and a few spare diapers. Bébé Rhéma wailed when lifted by Nana. Jose emerged from the bedroom in bloated pleated pants and with a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket. We waited, sitting, as Nana lulled the baby back to sleep. Eventually Corinthian’s battered red car came around the corner. It rocked over Bozene’s bumpy surface and stopped at our gate. We trooped through the neighbor’s new restaurant; the lunch crowd was just leaving. I found the car’s front seat broken, and I shifted over the wires of its inner frame to find a comfortable position. Jose sat behind with Nana. Bébé Rhéma, fully awake now, was securely wrapped in a bleached cloth. I was beginning to feel nervous about my role in this journey.
“Bé-bé!” Nana cooed.
As we departed the house, over the sand path leading to Victoire, our car was forced to plow through a stagnant pool stretching across the road. The fender pushed against the frothing turbid water. I worried that we would get stuck midway. Farther along our route, on the ville’s wide roads, the pools were larger and more numerous, and the dull-gleaming expanses seemed to smother the city from below, reflecting the continuum of cloud and draining color. One’s eye became accustomed to the sudden contrasts. The concrete buildings were dark with moisture and vertically streaked bright green. The river—we caught a glimpse of it, busy with barges—glowed.
Soldiers patrolled the roads. Corinthian stiffened. Jose urged him to speed on. Nana tried to hide the baby between her legs; but the bundle was too large, and she fumbled. The roads around the hospital were congested; we found no convenient parking. Corinthian used a space marked for doctors. The family sat still a moment before emerging from the car. Jose and Corinthian straightened their shirts. Nana was weighed down by the bag and the baby. The family, exposed in the parking lot, looked exhausted and out of place in the ville. And here they began a conversation—as though making a plan. But the talk became casual. I began to feel impatient, that they were delaying.
I had my own discomfort about the hospital, from a previous visit. This was some months earlier when, seeking a story for World AIDS Day, I came to write about the “hospital of death.” The idea was not original, but it was the kind of simplicity—half-obvious, half-exaggerated—that I had seen sell in the papers. The doctors obliged, took me within. Thirty minutes later I terminated my visit, abandoning the hospital. The setting I was shown—women with flaccid breasts, tunics falling off, reaching out for me from their beds in a delirium; the doctors asked if I hadn’t brought a camera—had felt deceitful, deliberate, obscene.
A nurse came to assess the baby. But suddenly she was summoned away. We stood with some uncertainty in the middle of the ward. Staff passed by without paying attention. Nana became agitated. She stroked Bébé Rhéma, as though it were she who needed comforting. The ward was large, like a dormitory, with two rows of metal beds around which, on the floor, sat patients’ families with bags of green bananas on stems, tins of manioc and bunches of serrated medicinal leaves. Some empty beds were sheetless, gray. I stood near the ward’s door and looked out onto one of the gardens. A sign read, “Internal Medicine.” Another said, “AIDS”—the ward I had been to. Families lounged on the grass as though on a picnic.
Nana urgently called me in. The doctor had arrived. I stood behind the family as he tapped Bébé Rhéma’s chest and listened with a stethoscope. Nana pushed me to the front; the doctor understood and led me to the accounting office. Jose followed. The costs were explained in French; Jose asked questions, in Lingala. After I had paid, the doctor returned to the family and announced that Bébé Rhéma would be hospitalized for fluid in the lungs. The nurse took over. The doctor continued on his rounds. The family moved on. Jose stayed behind; he was staring at a whitewashed wall, seemingly bemused. Nana called. He turned, and one saw from his face that in fact he was suffering.
It came as a grim satisfaction—there were so many waiting infirm in the hall—but I was relieved to see the doctor take charge of the baby with such assurance. And the family was now merrier. The drive home was fast, easy. Jose, as if reclaiming his authority, said he would ensure the baby was checked on every day—Corinthian and he discussed which relative might be called upon. Nana stared out the window, her cheek against the glass. At one point, when I had turned away, she gently touched my hand. I looked up, and she smiled briefly.
Jose had Marcel over that evening: the election broadcast was due, and there were rumors of news; but more than this, Marcel’s family livened up the house. Nana, moving restlessly between the rooms, had already lamented the emptiness. She cut into the block of Gouda, whose thick creamy slices we ate with hot beig-nets. The girls chased one another in the corridor, almost asking to be admonished by the women. Nana pleaded with the youngest girl to be allowed to do her tresses; that diminished the noise. The men were on the sofas, drinking beer, shouting; the anxieties of the day had found new release.
I felt on edge. I needed company, and leaving the house I half skipped down the street to Anderson’s kiosk. His chair, set back, was empty. I turned in to the plot that was just behind the chair. Anderson
had once told me he rented a storeroom here. On the exterior of the large house was a blue door, partly open.
The man was inside, on a stool, shirtless. His legs were apart. Slightly out of breath, I said, “Anderson.” On the floor, between the dirt and the dust that had come off the wall, were pipes and hand tools; he threaded a plastic tube through the pipes, which he held end to end, and applied a bolt to keep them together. I felt he had remarked the enthusiasm in my greeting, and that he was trying to be sullen, to maintain his unpleasant persona. He finished with a set of tubes. “Monsieur Journaliste, it took you so long to say hello to your friends. What is that you are carrying?”
“A gift,” I said, offering the Gouda. He dropped his spanner to receive it with both his hands. He stared at the pie, which measured the size of his stomach—and I felt his surprise was above all sensory, that he could at once be holding so much cheese.
“It is good.” His tone was offhand. But, again at his tubes, his hands and toes moved briskly.
I said it was nearly time for the election bulletin. He looked at his watch and shook his head in disbelief. He set down his tools and dusted his hands. I waited at the door. The evening was humid. He came carrying the Gouda, which he set on the kiosk—he said he would give it to a friend who owned a refrigerator.
Anderson set our radio to the correct station. Down the road other radios were set up, at other kiosks, by young men. The dials were turned in unison, raising the volume. The broadcast was thus forced on passersby. The act was aggressive. But it seemed without effect: people still ambled, chatting amicably, making their usual commerce; their insensitivity, too callous, made them seem familiar with and in a way participant, in communion with the anger; and from that moment on even the quiet on the street, I felt, concealed a menace. Anderson continually toweled his face. And I now felt his serenity, the dullness I had taken to be for me, was his way of preparation for a nearing upheaval.
“The riots were a success,” I said.
He turned.
His face was shining from sweat.
“Monsieur”—he hesitated—“we were magnifique. Magnificent. More than ten thousand demonstrators in front of the presidential palace. Imagine.” He held his palm open before us, as though to show the palace’s immensity, and that the crowd could confront it. “We proved our force.”
“Maybe you should have raided the palace, like Versailles, and finished it right there. Maybe that was your moment, Anderson.”
“Oh, Monsieur Journaliste, you shouldn’t be talking like that. Wasn’t Versailles raided for democracy? We will wait for the official results—if there is no fraud we will surely win.”
“Kabila is getting many votes in the east.”
He slammed his hand on the kiosk. “Are you taking money from them? To say such a thing.” But he had become agitated; his movements were tight. He pointed to a house on the row facing us. “See how he has raised his walls.” It was true—the enclosure was so high one could not even see the roof. “That Papa works for Kabila. I already told him, move out of this area. Please.” And at once I felt the fear that Anderson could so easily incite.
“That Papa should move,” I said.
But he was looking up and down the street, and making a guttural music to himself—it was my punishment—he was not letting me speak. From the kiosk I took the Gouda and felt the crosshatches on its crust. Its label, worn, was illegible.
I held it out. Again he extended both hands to receive it. “Anderson,” I said, as though mulling the sound of the word.
“Monsieur Journaliste—you should not betray us. In such times we are counting on our friends. Think about that Papa.”
Some people passed, hurrying.
Anderson opened his eyes wide.
The radio brought news: two cities had completed counting. And though the sample was too small to draw a trend from, there was such an air of expectancy in the country that the first results were bound to make a deep impression. The newscaster held his breath: Bemba had won both cities, by solid margins. Anderson stood up and raised his arms. He turned around like a boxer in a ring, pushing his chair away and shouting across the street to the other houses. “Bemba! Bemba!”
The cry spread down the main road and the avenue. Taxibuses honked madly. I heard feet running in the alleyways. The Opposition Debout rallied people from house to house, urging them to step out and celebrate. A gunshot. Then another. Anderson couldn’t keep still. “I told you,” he said, vigorously shaking my shoulder and holding the back of my head. “I told you Congo is coming back to its people.”
24
There was fraudulence—as there perhaps is at the center of any belief. Two weeks later when Anderson defected to Kabila’s party the street expressed shock but gave no punishment: he continued to operate his kiosk, at which the same friends gathered to banter every evening. Perhaps Anderson, and the others, had never believed in the cause; if I had known this at the time I would have understood my own apprehensions differently.
The feeling was of being in a kind of madness. Bemba, and his apparent success, seemed incidental to it; the communion grew, religion-like—out of an internal need. I felt that purity in the aggression, that deeper angst.
And it was this fraudulence that made anything seem possible, that made everyone seem to have secrets to which I was not privy.
From my room I heard the youths approach, their shrieks gradually decomposing into the constituent boys’ voices. They passed the house. Again they became distant. Jose said it was the Kata-Kata, exploiting the unrest. Already some dwellings and shops had been damaged. Jose hung clothes over all our windows and over the grill door, and we began to pass the better part of our days in these dark, familiar patterns, in the suffocating smells of the body and detergent.
Mossi stormed in one day. His place was no longer safe—his gate had been breached and the yard was now exposed to the riots. He wanted to sleep with us, even on the floor of the living room. But Nana threw him out without even hearing him out. I pleaded with her—telling her the man had nowhere to go. But she was hard. I felt myself shorn, as if something close to me had been lost. The scene was wretched, and reminded me of the time Nana almost threw me out—when her niece Frida had stolen my money. I watched Mossi leave, pulling his hat over his head, his long legs taking big steps over the dark earth.
I told Mossi to meet me in the city, at a center for counting and storing ballots. I thought the tension here might be acute. The gated compound was guarded by two policemen. Inside was a long row of rooms that resembled one of Bunia’s dukkas, surrounded by a dusty yard, over which lay ballots stacked like bales of hay. Loose papers blew at my feet. Officials hurried between the rooms. Outside, at the compound’s gate, people loitered: a policeman, unusually alert, tried to clear them off, swinging his baton. But the people scattered and returned, and merely their presence, it seemed, annoyed the policeman.
Mossi did not come. He told me over the phone that he had sought shelter on the city outskirts. I felt I had lost the man who had lived in my mind for so long in Congo. I tried to get Mossi a job, but the old journalist seemed to have gone off the deep end. The editor told me he filed strange stories—and was constantly talking about his personal problems.
Outside the center I was stopped and asked why I was walking alone. It was the Republican Guard, Kabila’s personal army. I offered money; they took it, and made me wait on the side of the road. They seemed to have no plan for me. I stood beside the soldiers, and people passing would give me uneasy glances. An hour passed, then another. I began to panic. But when the others left a soldier casually asked for a cigarette. I had none. He said I could go; I hesitated, and walked away uncertainly. I turned back to look at him; he waved me off with his gun. I broke into a run. Then I had a thought that he wanted to shoot me, so I ran faster, thoughtlessly. It became more and more difficult after that to leave the neighborhood: everywhere one saw the army deploying.
The election results came ev
ery couple of days, unpredictably, district by district—as long lists of numbers that took hours to sort through. And the Kata-Kata became my preoccupation. They visited now every night, moving more slowly, lingering. On hearing their cries I would move to the window and push apart the clothes. I got an oblique view of the youths, jumping against our gate, shaking the metal, jeering at us, taunting. They did not approach. And it was their sound, a fugue-like cacophony of similar phrases which could have been confused with the play of children, that was most disturbing.
I had in a way come full circle with the street children. I had seen Corinthian strike fear into the boy who had eaten Nana’s hair cream. I had an idea of how the children were expelled. And I had experienced the abandon of the 25th Quarter, the cemetery. But only now, confined by the youths, and watching them—howling, in the safety of their numbers—from our grill window, did I think of the riot as a way for the children to return and confront the violence against them.
An opportunity to leave the neighborhood came at last when the electoral commission summoned the journalists. The results were ready. The street reacted as though it had already won—Anderson and his men raised their bravado, rounding up people, working them up. A large crowd had gathered at Victoire to chant for Bemba. Mwana mboka. The son of the country.
The family assigned Jose’s nephew Serge as my escort for the evening. Serge arrived at the house dressed in a suit and crocodile-skin shoes, a plastic pen in his pocket. We took longer than usual to find transport—fewer buses seemed to be running. From the start Serge adopted a grave face, fixed on the road.
The bus’s slowness, dipping into puddles, made in me a kind of tightness in the chest. I tried to forget the tension, the street, and Victoire. I tried to observe the scenes passing. But in no person’s expression could I find calm. And those pedestrians who seemed to show joy or to laugh I felt incapable of trusting.
Then, on the road near the stadium, some Chinese came into view; they seemed sedate, servile. They were repairing the road—it was the worst season to be doing so—and in some places tinkering with the wiring for streetlights. I thought: the elections are hardly over and already the foreigners are here. A supervisor moved along the workers, arms crossed behind his back, and I saw that it was a fashion in China to have one’s sunglasses, when off the eyes, not raised over the forehead but lowered on the mouth.
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