“It’s been sexual with Kalima,” Kwame acknowledged, returning to his original line of thought. He smiled at Livie. “But it’s always been sexual with us. My mother would be horrified at how easily I adapt to that. I’ve betrayed what she’s always contended about us.” He smiled; Livie smiled with him. “But here it’s sexual in a way I’d never experienced before.” He touched Livie’s cheek to reassure her. “The American Way of Sex,” he said. “It has that mix of prurience and Puritanism, predators and romantics, advertising, TV and entertainment media, permissiveness and repression. They’re all wrestling around with you in the same bed. It’s so complicated. So American.”
Livie agreed. “We’re all crazy.”
“It’s deeper now with Kalima,” Kwame said. “She doesn’t feel romantic love for me. But there’s a respect.”
“Lucky you two,” Livie said.
KWAME LEFT her at the hotel and went to teach his classes. When he returned, she had dressed. They had the hotel kitchen pack them a lunch and Kwame took her out onto the river, out behind the islands that lay off the town to the sandbar where the night tracks of crocodiles formed patterns in the sand. After they ate, they talked about American policy in Africa. They argued about Mobutu. Livie contended that he was a monster and American policy makers were the Frankensteins who had created him. Kwame insisted that position was much too simplistic. She stuck her tongue out at him and did a monster walk around the sandbar. He tackled her and pulled her into the river.
Once they had stretched out on towels, she said, “I’m feeling that I’ve damaged things for Kalima. And I don’t even know her.”
“You haven’t,” Kwame assured her. “She has the baby. That’s what she really wants.”
Livie frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, everything is different now. I see that Kalima’s people have been right all along. Why should a Mongo woman from the village of Bolobe marry me?”
“You’re a catch, that’s why.”
“No. I’m a black American man at the end of the American century. A professor with a shrinking vocabulary who’s lost the art of articulation.”
“You are so full of shit,” Livie said.
“Maybe,” Kwame agreed. “But it’s been fun to be with a woman again who makes a lot of the same assumptions about life that I do. Who’s been trained to be curious and question authority. Who assumes the individual has responsibilities to himself that transcend the group. Who thinks I’m more important than the children I can provide.”
“You are American, you know,” Livie said. “There are always times when we do not want to be what we’re stuck with being.”
Kwame nodded. “I can’t deny that it makes a lot more sense for me to marry an American woman, black or white, brown or yellow—and to make peace with being American—than it does to marry Kalima. And live a life that’s totally foreign to who I am. You’ve made me see that.”
Livie watched him. “But you’re unhappy about it.”
Kwame said, “I’ve sort of agreed not to take Kalima and the baby out of the Equateur for five years.”
“But in that time you’ll be transferred.”
“I’ll have to leave the service. Become an African. I’ve always wondered what that would be like.”
“Can you do it?”
“Maybe not. Maybe—” He gazed at the African sky, the enormous clouds floating in that depth of blue. He thought how much he would miss them if he ever had to leave the Equateur. “Maybe you’ve rescued me,” he said. “That’s why you said you’d come. Mission accomplished.”
“Do you hate me?”
“In a day or two I’ll thank you.” He pulled her to him and kissed her. “Without you I might have made the worst decision of my life. I really might have become Rip Van Winkle.” She gazed at him and smiled. “The only real question I have to answer now is: When do I go home? Now or at the end of my tour?” He challenged her. “Whattaya think?”
“You won’t like me saying this,” she told him. “But if you know you belong in the States, why not go back now?”
He nodded and stood up and ran into the water. He swam so far out into the river that Livie worried the current would sweep him away.
WATCHING PASSENGERS leave the Air Zaire plane, Kwame felt the contentment that came from having spent the two previous nights with Livie. He felt admiration and even a bit of sympathy for the man they had come to fetch, a man who had the courage—and the resources—to come to Africa to protect a young woman he thought he loved. Especially when there was a possibility that she would reforge a relationship with her former lover. All Mike would be able to do then would be to congratulate them both and return to Kinshasa where he might be inclined to slit his wrists.
Kwame recognized Mike as soon as he stepped off the plane. His sympathies deepened. Livie’s friend looked like an Armani poster boy: a smooth brow, hair cut long by a stylist, a strong chin lightly covered with manicured stubble, a pair of wire-rimmed, tinted glasses poised at the bridge of his nose. He had pale skin, the result of 100-hour workweeks at his computer and his phone. He looked like a rich American, determined to succeed at this business of vacation. His let’s-get-on-with-it manner had been carefully honed at Harvard B School. He carried a laptop and a copy of Vanity Fair and wore faded tailored jeans, a safari shirt, and hiking boots.
“He’s nervous,” Livie said. “Poor guy.”
Mike walked toward them with exaggerated casualness, trying to relax a frame held rigid as if expecting to receive a blow. He smiled at Livie, scrutinizing her beneath a tight smile for some clue as to what she was feeling, and embraced her. Then he looked at Kwame who had dressed in the clothes Kalima chose for him to teach in. Mike seemed uncertain as to whether this man was his rival or a Zairean driver Livie had engaged to take her around the town. But he sensed Livie’s affection for him.
“This is Kwame, Mike,” Livie told him. “Kwame, Mike Ackerman.” The men shook hands.
“Hi, Kwame,” Mike said, still forcing his smile. He realized that this black liberal arts guy, this government official stationed in the middle of fucking nowhere, had won his girl. The smile stayed frozen on his face. Black guys always got the girls, his expression seemed to say, but he was still determined that he and Kwame would be friends.
“You survived Kinshasa,” Kwame said. “What’s it like down there?”
“No shooting yet. But the tension’s so thick—”
“You could cut it with a tweezers,” Livie finished flirtatiously.
Mike looked miffed that she had swiped his cliché.
“We’re glad you got out of there,” Kwame said. “Welcome to the Equateur.”
“Kwam wants to chase down some rumors about refugees entering the region,” Livie explained. “So we’re going for a little drive in the bush.” Mike looked uncertain. Livie laughed and put an arm around his shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”
THEY DROVE four hours south of Mbandaka, sometimes creeping over rotting causeways across swamps, sometimes losing the road. At these times Kwame let Mike and Livie walk before the truck. Mike would talk to her quietly but with great intensity. Watching them through the windshield, Kwame sensed that Mike wanted to put everything into its proper box. He seemed to be demanding definitions when none could be offered. Had she and Kwame sorted out their relationship? If so, what was it? Where did he fit in? Livie was not thinking of staying in this godforsaken backwater, was she? Because he would not allow that.
As they drove on, Mike gazed at the landscape, then leaned forward, glancing at Kwame, and asked, “What exactly is it you’re doing out here? I’m not sure I ever got that.”
Kwame explained that he’d originally been sent to Mbandaka for a week. But the man operating the post had disappeared. “I later discovered he’d been killed.”
“Whoa!” exclaimed Livie. “No shit?”
Kwame shrugged. He had remained in Mban. He said, “Needs of the service.”
“Must’ve
been pretty important to have somebody here,” Mike remarked.
When he arrived, Kwame said, the embassy had concluded that the Mobutu era was ending. It seemed to want an officer in every part of the country.
“Just in case,” Mike said.
“As things have turned out,” Kwame noted, “all the action’s been elsewhere. More than anything, this post resembles a Peace Corps operation. The embassy people are watching a civil war come their way and preparing for the worst. If they’ve forgotten about me, who can blame them? I head up a small library and a film and video service and teach classes at a secondary school. The classes are the most important thing I do.”
Mike nodded, staring through the windshield.
“We’re all three Americans,” Kwame went on. “But I come from a different America than you guys do. It’s been interesting, being here, to wonder if a black American has any deep background connection with Africa. Since the embassy’s sort of forgotten me, I’ve wondered sometimes if I could just become an African.”
Livie watched him. Mike said, “And you’ve concluded …”
“Sometimes I think yes. Sometimes no.”
Under his breath Mike whispered, “Holy shit!”
They passed villages of mud-and-wattle huts, thatched with fronds. Sitting on stretches of bare, swept earth before the huts, villagers watched them pass. Naked children waved. Goats ran beside the truck, mesmerized by the vehicle’s motion. Chickens squawked into the road. “I didn’t know life could be so primitive,” Mike said. “I mean we’re in spitting distance of 2000.”
“If, as an intellectual exercise,” Kwame said, beginning at a place where he thought Mike and Livie could follow, “you thought about becoming African—at least the Africans here—you’d have to totally reorient your head.”
“How do you stick it?” Mike asked. “These people are absolutely hopeless. Their bovine expressions. They live at the level of instinct. If you want to develop Zaire,” he wondered, “where the hell do you start? What a management problem!”
“Kwame says there’s a stillness here that renews the soul,” Livie remarked.
Mike began to laugh, full of good humor. “I know you mean it,” he said. He leaned across Livie and slapped Kwame’s knee. “Because nothing’s moved here in 300 years.”
“Maybe if you get to know them,” Livie suggested. Kwame winked at her to thank her for coming to his aid.
“Bullshit,” Mike replied. He laughed cannily. “You’re shittin’ us, aren’t you, Kwame? You’re doing intelligence work. Right now we’re trying to hook up with refugees, right?”
“I just told you what I’m doing here,” Kwame said.
“You can admit you’re CIA,” Mike insisted. “Who would we tell?”
They drove along for several minutes without speaking.
“If the worst comes with these Hutu refugees,” Mike asked, “what happens? Some of them killed Tutsis and they’re being chased by Tutsi soldiers. There could be killings.”
Kwame nodded.
They passed a track heading west at a junction village called Kalamba. The track led to Bikoro and beyond it to Bolobe. Kwame gazed down the track, but did not say that Kalima whom he loved and who was carrying his baby lived in that direction. He did mention that he had shown videos in a village not far from here. He and Livie watched the track until it was out of sight.
Five miles beyond the junction, they encountered a roadblock. Two soldiers had stretched the trunk of a sapling across oil drums and now sat at one end of it on folding chairs they had commandeered from someplace. They brandished sub-machine guns and were drunk on local beer. When the film truck stopped at the roadblock, Kwame greeted the soldiers. They announced that the road was closed. It was impossible to get to Ingende. Kwame slid out of the truck. He shook hands and chatted with the soldiers. But they were adamant. No one could pass. Kwame wondered if the army commander at Wangata had set up roadblocks to prevent refugees from reaching Mbandaka.
Mike left the van. “Our friends here have been drinking,” Kwame remarked. He spoke with surface casualness, but in warning. Mike was not deterred. Kwame wondered if he intended to show Livie that he could settle a matter that stymied his rival. From the way he strode to the sapling, it was clear that he regarded the roadblock as a management problem, one that Harvard B School gave him the skills to solve. He was, after all, one of those superior men who untangled dilemmas and created the world. “Careful,” Kwame warned. Mike paid no attention. When he reached the sapling, Kwame said quietly, curtly, “Don’t touch it.” But he did.
The soldiers became immediately hostile. Possibly they were spooked by the paleness of Mike’s skin, a pallor that Kwame knew some Africans associated with ghosts and death. Or they were irked by the assumptions of white superiority that Mike exuded but had no consciousness of communicating. Kwame said quietly, “Put it down. Move away.”
“Pas de problème,” Mike said in tourist French. He stepped back. The soldiers raised their rifles.
“Get back to the truck,” Kwame suggested quietly.
“It’s okay,” Mike said. He asked, all geniality, what was happening down the road. The soldiers began to shout at him. He raised his hands to calm them. They shoved him. Kwame once more ordered him to be quiet.
When he kept on talking, a soldier raised his rifle and placed it against Mike’s forehead. The other soldier pointed his submachine gun at the truck. Suddenly pung, pung, pung. Kwame felt the warmth of the air, the humidity on his skin, the churning in his stomach; he tasted the dryness in his mouth. Time so slowed for him that he heard each bullet as it hit the truck, puncturing metal. The two soldiers looked at one another; they seemed drunkenly baffled by what had happened. Kwame pulled Mike away. He hustled him into the truck. Livie was crouched on the floor. Kwame got in, backed the truck away from the roadblock, and sped off in the direction of Mbandaka.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Mike said. “What was that?”
“You all right?” Kwame asked Livie. She said nothing, squirming onto the seat. As Kwame raced away, he watched the soldiers in the rearview mirror. Both men kept their weapons trained on the truck.
“What the hell’s going on down the road?” Mike asked. “That’d be interesting to know.”
Livie said, “Is the truck okay?”
“I think so,” Kwame told her. “They hit a fender. Hopefully not a tire.” And he thought to himself: These goddamn guys who create the world. What a pain in the ass!
THEY RETURNED to the hotel in time for a late dinner and ate it on the terrace overlooking the river. At length Mike said, “This place doesn’t have ‘tomorrow’ written on it.”
“It has ‘now’ written on it,” Kwame replied lightly. “Has to because you and Livie are here.” Mike smiled, pretty sure Kwame was ridiculing him. “I’ve always told Livie that wherever she is, that’s the center of ‘now’.”
“You’re right about that,” Mike said. Livie smiled at them both. “This place can’t nurture creativity,” he declared.
“Too much tradition,” Kwame commented.
“A woman refuses to marry you unless you give her father goats,” remarked Livie.
“No shit?” asked Mike. “That’s really—”
“The divorce rate here,” Kwame said, “is no higher than among ‘people of our class.’ ” He and Livie exchanged a glance.
“Should be less,” Mike interjected, “because tradition stifles ingenuity. It and creativity: they make for better lives. More comfort, convenience, efficiency. They flourish only where there’s freedom, entrepreneurship, exchange of ideas. You better get back to the States, man.”
“Otherwise,” Livie said with a twinkle, “we’ll think you’re balmy, Kwame.”
Kwame smiled at her. He understood that she was declaring to them both that she was siding with him. Mike reacted edgily, as if discovering that he had come all the way to Central Africa only to lose. But he said nothing.
“These people have wonde
rful social skills,” Kwame said. “They really do have soul.”
“I guess that’s why there was so much bloodshed in Rwanda,” Mike replied.
“I guess that must be why,” Kwame said. He smiled at Livie.
While they finished their meal, Mike talked about how Africa might be transformed. Maybe he was showing off for Livie, Kwame thought. But, in fact, the guy really was bright. For three days in the country he had grasped a lot.
Finally Mike said, “I guess I better go. Let you two guys say your good-byes.” He stood and shook Kwame’s hand. He kissed Livie lightly on the cheek and said, “I’ll sleep on the couch.” He was making it clear that he knew he had lost and it was no big deal.
Livie watched him go. “He’s really not a bad guy,” she said. “It takes a lot of courage for him to leave me out here with you. He’s afraid I’ll stay here in Mbandaka if you ask me.”
Kwame gazed off across the river, understanding that she expected him to announce his intentions. “You know what I don’t understand about American life?” he said. “We are so trained to ‘do,’ to struggle, to compete, that we always feel a sense of failure about not doing better. At the end of our careers, when all the struggle-struggle-struggle is over, we feel that if only we had worked harder, if only our timing had been different, if only things had broken our way … Then we would be wealthier. Or more famous. Or have found true love. Or helped more people. At the end of American lives there is always a sense of not having done as well as we should have.”
Livie shook her head. As usual, she did not agree with him.
“But it’s true,” he insisted. “Mike’s in your room right now, thinking, ‘If only things had broken my way …’”
“No, he’ll be working on some project. He doesn’t cry over spilt milk.”
“You know what else I don’t understand?”
Livie watched him a little impatiently. She wanted to talk about his coming back to the States with her, not this abstract stuff about a nonperfect world. Didn’t Kwame understand that no place was perfect?
The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Page 28