He told the chef of the “porters” that he wished to return to Bolobe to thank Bonanga. The man seemed not to understand. Kwame indicated his intention in gestures. The young man shook his head. Did he still not understand? Or was he blocking the way? Kwame managed a smile, raised his arms as if to ask for patience, and started toward the path to Bolobe. The porters blocked his way. The chef respectfully shook his head, said something that might have been “Bonanga dit non,” (Bonanga says no) and gently put his hand on Kwame’s arm, restraining him. Kwame realized that the young men were endeavoring both to show their respect, but also to prevent his returning to Bolobe.
Kwame suddenly realized that he might never see Kalima again.
Reluctantly Kwame followed the young men to Bikoro. After they replaced the equipment into his truck, he thanked them, entered the small guesthouse where he and Kalima had stayed, and got a breakfast of coffee and an omelet. As he ate, he could not quite believe what had happened. In their room in this very guesthouse he and Kalima had grown closer together than they had ever been. Although he was not entirely sure what the words meant to her, she had said she loved him. He had acknowledged to himself that he loved her. If she felt true affection for him, wanted to be with him, how was it that she would submit—cave in!—to her father’s demands? Obviously he did not understand African life!
Leaving the guesthouse, ready to start back to Mbandaka, he found the “porters” waiting beside his vehicle. Had they been instructed to make sure he left Bikoro? Bonanga certainly meant to see the last of him. Kwame took control of himself, opened his arms expansively, and exclaimed, “Ah, mes amis! Merci! Thank you for your help! Merci!” He shook the hands of each man and grinned at them. As he drove off, he hoped they would return to Bolobe, singing his praises.
DRIVING BACK to Mbandaka, Kwame stared at the road without seeing it. He functioned in a kind of limbo. The road was as empty as Kwame felt inside. There were no pedestrians, no traffic. He felt as alone as he had ever felt in his life. In the place inside him that Kalima usually filled, there was only hollowness.
He stopped the film truck at a bridge. He got out, the motor still running, checked the soundness of the bridge, returned behind the steering wheel and sat. He loved her. So what? What did his love signify for her family? Apparently nothing—except that he was yet another white man using her for his pleasure. He became aware of the motor’s sound. He drove forward.
American fathers might disapprove of their daughter’s boyfriends. But generally they did not oppose them, certainly not in the way that Bonanga was opposing him. In America opposition generally allied the daughter more strongly with the boyfriend. Jack Carlyle had tried to make Kwame his friend. If he opposed Kwame, it was because he and Livie had not married.
Kwame crossed a section of swamp where the surface of the road lay underwater. He told himself to pay attention to the driving. But he hardly saw where he was going. He kept thinking about the threesome with Odejimi. He could not blame Bonanga for determining to put a stop to shenanigans like those.
But he had intended to tell Kalima that he wanted an exclusive relationship with her. He expected to tell Odejimi that the competition between them was over. He had won. Kalima was his. He had been set to instruct Odejimi to find diversion elsewhere. But he had not yet informed Kalima of that. He had not yet sought her permission to take that step.
Kwame parked and left the truck. He walked the road in front of him. It was a decent section, needing no reconnaissance, but he had to stretch, had to think. What most haunted him was the prospect of Kalima’s future in Bolobe.
In Bolobe there was no role for a woman of Kalima’s age except as someone’s wife. With every step he took Kwame thought marriage, marriage, marriage. Bonanga would almost immediately try to set up a marriage for Kalima. That would not be easy. At twenty-three, which Kwame supposed her to be, she was past prime marrying age. Moreover she had some education and was accustomed to urban living. In the village, both of those, he supposed, would make her less attractive. She had beauty and presence, but as she herself had explained to him they counted for little in village life. They might even be seen, not as advantages, but as negatives. However the crucial negative was that, despite the earlier marriage to Vandenbroucke, despite relationships with other men, she had produced no children. Producing children was the focus of African marriage, the purpose of African life. Who would agree to marry a barren woman?
Walking back to the truck, Kwame wondered if she were destined to become the second or even the third wife of a man in middle life. Perhaps the man in Bikoro, about whom she had spoken, was older, well-established, and interested in a woman who could serve, less as a producer of children, than as an ornament of his success. This was the African version of the toy she had been for him and Vandenbroucke and Odejimi.
When he resumed driving, he tried to make peace with having lost her. When he returned to the Afrique, he thought, he would get drunk, smoke hemp, and wait for Odejimi to return from Kisangani. But as he rolled along, mile after swamp mile, he decided, “No!” As a penance for treating Kalima as he had, he would swear off whiskey and hemp, reduce his association with Odejimi, stay celibate for a time, and spend more work hours at the center.
It was late afternoon by the time he reached Mbandaka. He went to the center and replaced the film equipment on its shelves. When he entered the office, the whiskey bottle in his desk drawer called out to him. He marched himself out of the center and over to the post office. He collected the mail. He returned to the center, settled down at his desk, and fiddled with correspondence until the Mongo opened and he could get some dinner. The bottle in his drawer kept enticing him; he thought repeatedly of pouring its contents down the toilet. But although he had sufficient resolve to resist the bottle’s call, he lacked the strength to rid himself of it.
After dinner he drove back to the Afrique. He shut himself up in his room. If he had the force of character to forgo whiskey and hemp, he could not resist the items of Kalima’s clothing in his armoire. He took them delicately in his hands, fondled them, smelled them, carried them in his fist as he paced back and forth across the room, missing her, overcome with the sadness of losing her.
THIRTEEN
Following the plan for his postKalima life, immediately after he returned from Bolobe, Kwame spent long days at the center. Most of his work, however, was for his classes at Bomboko Congo. He avoided the Afrique terrace in the late afternoon.
Kwame did run into Moulaert. He had returned from Marike’s village so besotted with his teenage bride that he did not care about having spent all his zaires. He smiled incessantly. His skin glowed. His delight in Marike only made Kwame increasingly conscious of what Kalima’s defection to Bolobe cost him. He avoided the man.
Finally one afternoon Odejimi knocked at his hotel room door. When he opened it, the doctor urged, “Come have a drink with me, old boy. Where have you been keeping yourself?”
They repaired to the terrace. Kwame got a beer. Odejimi had his usual whiskey and a smoke. “How was Kisangani?” Kwame asked.
“Too close to that mess farther east. But I must say pleasant to be in a place larger than this. Mban is hardly more than a village, you know?”
“Tell me,” Kwame said. “I’ve been here all by myself.”
“What’s become of Van?” Odejimi asked.
“She’s gone to her village.”
“All this time? What’s happening down there?” Kwame wondered if by this time Bonanga had married her off. “You miss her, old chap?”
Kwame smiled sardonically and took a sip of his beer. “Don’t you?” he asked.
“Berton has gone to his plantations. So things are not so bad.”
KWAME GOT an urgent communication from his bosses in Kinshasa. Had he forgotten to submit the year-end reports congress wanted? Could he please indicate the number of people using the center; the number of books, videos, and films borrowed; contacts made; plans for future activities? How
did he expect to increase book and video usage? Kinshasa needed the report ASAP.
Kwame knew that honest reporting would fail to impress Washington bureaucrats or congressmen. True numbers would prove disappointing. He would look ineffective in his job. So he stalled. He soon received an urgent nudge from Pilar Cota. He fretted about his predicament just as he had done to Kalima the last time he had been pestered for a report.
“Tell them what they want to hear,” she suggested.
“I can’t do that,” he told her.
“Why not?”
“It’s not the American Way.” Kalima frowned. It was obvious that she had no idea what he meant. He did not want to explain that her suggestion was contrary to all his training. That in America truth was Truth. It marched with a capital T and even if unpalatable it must be stated. On the other hand, he reminded himself, it was also the American Way to massage the numbers.
He sat in his office, having a mental conversation with her.
“Why would you tell them something to make them unhappy?” she asked in his head just as she did one evening in his room. “They are far away. Tell them what gives them pleasure.”
Mulling this advice, Kwame wondered what he would accomplish by reporting true numbers. If Kinshasa were unhappy with them, people there would feel a need to do something. Check up. Visit. Give him a bad report. But he did not want to be checked or visited. At least for the moment, he wanted to be forgotten. So why not tell them what they longed to hear?
“I have been so busy with the program,” Kwame began his report, “that it has been difficult to find a moment to prepare the requested post assessment.” He exaggerated the figures for attendance, borrowings, showings. He reported his plans to present village film showings and gave a glowing account of the visit he had just completed to Lake Tumba. The roads were bad, he reminded Kinshasa, but he had managed to spend a night both in Bikoro and Bolobe, where he had shown films and met the local chef of Mobutu’s Mouvement Populaire Revolutionaire.
ONE AFTERNOON shortly after his return from Marike’s village, Moulaert joined Kwame and Odejimi on the hotel terrace. Bestowing wife-besotted smiles upon them, he poured himself a beer and attacked a pile of accumulated mail. He opened envelope after envelope, glanced at their contents, and tossed them into a box he used for trash. Finally he picked up an envelope, scanned the handwriting, and giggled shamefacedly. “My god,” he muttered. “This is from my wife.”
“Madame Marike Moulaert?” asked Odejimi. “A love note from her honeymoon?”
Moulaert did not reply. He looked at the letter.
“My darling husband,” Odejimi teased, doing a riff on what Marike might write. “I am so blissfully happy with you! The exquisite pleasures of your white worm—”
A cry leapt from Moulaert’s throat. Odejimi stopped his teasing. Kwame reached forward and took Moulaert’s arm, “You okay, copain?” he asked.
Moulaert slumped forward in his chair. His head fell into his hands. Kwame and Odejimi watched him carefully. He sat up. His eyes once again moved across the letter. “No, this can’t be! The Bon Dieu wouldn’t do this to me!”
“What’s happening?” Kwame asked.
“My wife is coming to visit.”
“Your Belgian wife?” asked Odejimi, unable to resist taunting him.
“She’s bringing my two sons.” He groaned as if wounded. “If it were only her, I might have the courage to tell her, ‘We’re finished. I’ve married an African woman and I’ve never been happier.’ ” He groaned again. “But my sons admire me. I care what they think of me.” He stared out at the river. “I will go to hell for this,” he whispered.
Marike now appeared on the terrace. Wearing a new cloth and bodice, new headcloth and sandals, she bore herself with supreme self-confidence. She walked across the terrace, her eyes lowered, with a seductiveness reflective of that confidence. Odejimi stood for her. “Madame Marike,” he said, “please join us.” Kwame rose to fetch a chair. Moulaert remained slumped in his place, staring at the river. Kwame held the chair while Marike sat.
“Merci, messieurs,” the young bride whispered, smiling with a trace of flirtation.
“Your husband finds his mail tiresome,” Odejimi told her. “The news from Europe is upsetting.”
“My little cabbage,” Moulaert purred to the young woman, the ecstatic smile returning to his face. “Nothing is upsetting when you are beside me.”
KWAME’S YEAR-END report with its fictitious numbers was so happily received in Kinshasa that Pilar Cota sent Kwame an attaboy. The rebellion in the east was preoccupying everyone in the capital, she reported. Génocidaires and Hutu refugees were still fleeing into Kivu jungles, moving toward the Congo River. At the same time Zairean rebels and Tutsis were both chasing the fleeing Hutus and heading south toward the Copper Belt. That a collection of ragtag rebels could mount effective actions against Mobutu’s army seemed improbable, but embassy analysts assumed that Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front officers were leading the rebels. There was a feeling that Mobutu, gravely ill in France with prostate cancer, might be all but finished.
“Keep up the good work,” Pilar encouraged. “This rebellion might end things for Mobutu. We are so busy in the east that we trust you to do the best you can in the quiet part of the country.”
In a postscript she announced that Kwame was now permanently assigned to Mbandaka.
ONE AFTERNOON Kwame was at work at his desk in his office at the center when a strange sense of Kalima’s force field enfolded him. A very welcome sensation, but one that carried sorrow. A knock came at the door. “Entrez,” he said. The door opened. He did not immediately look up from his computer. When he did, he saw Kalima.
She smiled. He leaped from his chair, knowing she had come back, pulled her into the office, closed the door, and wrapped her in his arms. They kissed so passionately that dizziness swept over them. Kwame kept them from falling by holding onto the wall. “God, I’ve missed you!” he said.
He led her to the film truck and took her to the hotel. They made love with eagerness and passion. They slept. When they woke and held one another, Kwame said, “I want you staying with me. Don’t tell Odejimi you’re here.”
Kalima stared at the ceiling, a shy smile on her face. “D’accord.”
Kalima put her arms around him as if she would not let him go.
“We should look for a house,” he said. “Get out of this hotel.”
“I would like a house.”
“When Odejimi finds out, can you get him another woman? Someone who’s clean?” Kalima nodded. Kwame kissed her. Had she left her parents for him? What did that mean?
They lay, staring together at the ceiling. Finally Kalima said, “The day after you left, my father had his great friend from Bikoro come to call. His son was with him. It was the beginning of marriage negotiations.”
Kwame said nothing.
“I refused to welcome them,” Kalima said. “I told my parents that my life was here. They did not stop me leaving.” After a moment she continued, “I did not want to insult our visitors. The man from Bikoro: he is also a friend. His wife died last year.”
“You know him?”
She nodded. “He was willing to take me although I may never have children.”
“He had children with the wife that died?”
Kalima nodded again. She added, “He worries what will become of me.”
Kwame felt exultant. She had chosen him. Was it a wise choice? Her parents thought not.
“I will try to make you happy,” Kwame said. He did not speak the further words that were on his tongue, “While I am here.”
THE NEXT morning Kwame went to the hospital and waited outside Odejimi’s office for the doctor to arrive.
When Odejimi saw Kwame, he asked, “Are you sick?”
Kwame followed the doctor into his office and closed the door. Odejimi looked surprised. “Anything wrong, old man?” he asked.
“Kalima came back from Bolobe yeste
rday.” Odejimi frowned, uncertain what Kwame was talking about. “She will live with me.”
Confusion passed across the doctor’s face. Then he grinned. “Kalima?” he asked. “You mean Madame Van?” When Kwame nodded, the doctor guffawed. “Did you burn that charm she gave you?”
“I don’t believe in charms.”
“Except ‘Kalima’s.’ ” Odejimi could not suppress his laughter. “Lovesick. You’re as bad as Moulaert.”
“Never.”
“Yes. And you do not want me to—” Odejimi turned away to spare Kwame his amusement. When he turned back, he went on, “—to ‘see’ her. Is that right?”
“You can look at her,” Kwame said, laughing now himself. “Just don’t touch.”
“You are so American!” the Nigerian said. “You can have her. Fine. But you know, old chap, it may happen that we—‘touch,’ as you call it.” He grinned, delighted by this improbable conversation. “We’re programmed that way.”
“Kalima will find you another girl,” Kwame said.
“I find my own women, thank you,” said the doctor. He studied Kwame rather seriously. “Don’t be too disappointed if—” He shrugged. “Remember where you are. African men are used to having any women they can get. They often test their luck. Taking another man’s woman can be a very amusing game. Be warned, old boy.”
Kwame nodded.
“I hope nothing happens to ruin our friendship.” Odejimi patted Kwame companionably on the shoulder. He declared, “I knew this would happen the day you beat her at mankala.” Kwame went to the center and paced back and forth across the library. Was he being a fool? An American fool? Did Africans never feel this way? Did Kalima herself not feel something for him? He was sure she did. She had defied her parents for him, hadn’t she? What more did he want? Finally he was able to calm down. You aren’t getting married, he told himself. You’re just going to live with her. And if she can’t stay away from other men, you better know about it.
The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Page 18