by Reif Larsen
“There were some low points,” admitted Radar. “But we made it.”
“I have lived through war, bombing, everything,” said Otik. “And I will never get on another boat again.”
“We’re getting on another boat, Otik,” said Lars.
“Nope. I will walk. I don’t care how far it is. I will walk until my legs break off, and then I will crawl.”
They stood in a cluster, like a group of cheerleaders with no team to cheer. Radar was still buzzing with the notion that he was actually in a place that could not be called New Jersey. Occasionally, embarrassed that someone might hear him, he would sing under his breath, “Af-frik-a,” in what was no doubt a highly dubious accent.
Shortly after their arrival, Captain Daneri had disappeared into the town, along with most of his Russian crew, save for two young sour-faced seamen left on watch. The captain had given no word of explanation or instruction. After such an ungracious exit, Radar wondered if they would ever see him again.
The day wheezed away like a deflated balloon. The sun slinked quickly behind the hills, leaving the river valley in uncertain shadow. The Aleph, a modest vessel in Newark Bay, here dominated the quay, leaving room for only one small feeder boat from South Africa, the Colonel Joll, which looked as if it had been here for some time. Unlike in the frenetic ports they had visited before now, there was no movement to get the dozen or so rusting gantry cranes to begin unloading the Aleph’s cargo. Radar was not sure what, if anything, was to be unloaded besides themselves.
“So what happens now?” he asked finally.
“We wait,” said Lars.
The great river flowed by them, carrying all and carrying nothing. A slight breeze brought the scent of burning down from the hills and into the river valley. Radar, despite having stable land beneath his feet for the first time in days, felt as if he were sinking.
Finally, a sweaty man in a beige uniform approached. He looked very, very tired.
“Vos papiers?” he said, although he did not look at them as he said this, but rather at a stain on the dock next to their feet.
Lars handed the man a bulging manila folder with all of their paperwork. He had spent months obtaining the requisite visas, permits, and transport permissions from various consulates, embassies, and government officials. What he could not obtain he had forged. He had even invented several Congolese intelligence officials who had given “Le théâtre de Kirkenesferda carte blanche absolue” to pass anywhere within the Democratic Republic of Congo unmolested. These papers contained many official seals. Radar thought it was impressive work.
The man glanced through the folder very quickly. Evidently, he was not impressed.
“Y’a un problème avec vos papiers,” he said.
“Quel problème?” Lars asked. His French was impeccable. “Tout est là.”
“Y’a beaucoup de problèmes.”
“Beaucoup?”
“Beaucoup de problèmes,” the man confirmed.
“Mais ça n’est pas possible.”
“Vous devez venir avec moi.”
“Mais que faire de notre conteneur?” Lars called after him, pointing at the boat.
“Il ne bouge pas.” The man turned and began walking toward a small, windowless building. What he said was true: the container did not appear to be going anywhere.
• • •
THE HARBORMASTER’S OFFICE WAS air-conditioned, but the air conditioner was not working very well. It would make a horrible chattering noise and then proceed to die a dramatic death before repeating the process all over again. The harbormaster took no notice. His desk was covered in a stack of large leather-bound ledgers. The office was completely empty except for the desk and a yellowing poster of the president tacked to the wall. There was no place to sit, so they stood.
The harbormaster selected one of the ledgers from the bottom of the stack and began to write in an entry.
“Qu’est ce qu’il y a dans votre conteneur?” the man asked without looking up.
Lars cleared his throat. “C’est indiqué sur le papier.” He pointed at the folder on the desk.
The man stopped writing. “Quel papier?”
Lars sighed. “Props. Des décors de théâtre,” he said. “Nous sommes des artistes.”
The man resumed writing. “Il y a un problème. Vous n’avez pas le permis nécessaire.”
“Le permis est là.” Lars pointed again at the manila envelope. “Tout était arrangé avant. Je vais vous montrer.”
“Avant, ce n’est pas maintenant.”
“Et c’est quand, maintenant?”
“Ce permis est périmé. Il n’est pas valide.”
“What is he saying?” Otik asked.
Lars rubbed his beard. “He’s saying he wants some money. Un encouragement.”
At this, the harbormaster looked up. His cell phone began to ring. Radar recognized the ringtone as a popular song, but he could not place the title or the artist. All he knew was that the song was sung by a sexy black woman in tall boots. Ana Cristina would know who she was. He longed for her then. Why couldn’t she just be here? They would go find a bar and share an ice-cold Coca-Cola. Maybe a Diet Coke if she preferred. They would talk about this woman in tall boots. They would talk about many things.
The harbormaster began to speak loudly into his cell phone and stride around his office, gesturing like a conductor. Radar understood that much of this show was for their sake. When he finally hung up, the phone immediately rang again. He answered and repeated his performance. They waited, watching as this man spoke rapidly in his native tongue. Though his demeanor was aggressive, he was not angry; he appeared perfectly content with this exhibition of verbal combat conducted through his small device. After a long while, he hung up. The phone immediately rang again, but he made a great show of not answering it, throwing it into a drawer before sitting down at his desk.
“Vous comprenez?” he said.
“Je comprends,” said Lars. “Combien pour le permis requis?”
The man was searching the drawers of his desk. “Vous avez de la chance que je vous aide. J’ai le formulaire ici.”
“Combien?” repeated Lars.
“Eh bien . . .” said the man. “Mille dollars.”
Otik snorted. “He is full of shit,” he muttered. It was nice to see him back to his old self.
“How much does he want?” whispered Radar.
Lars reached into his pocket and took out a little roll of money. He placed four battered American twenty-dollar bills on the desk.
“Voici, quatre-vingts. C’est tout.”
The harbormaster considered this meager pile of money as if it were an insect. He paused, then reached out and took the bills.
“D’accord.”
Radar watched as the man filled out the form with great care. Stamping and counterstamping both the back and the front. If this was a bribe, it was an elaborate, well-documented bribe.
“Dans notre pays, la forme triomphe de tout,” the man declared. “Nous avons appris cela des colons.”
He had become quite cheerful as he showed them outside. It was already dark. Captain Daneri and the crew were still nowhere to be found.
Lars turned to the harbormaster. “Qui est responsable des trains, ici? Nous devons envoyer notre conteneur à Kinshasa.”
“Ils sont morts.”
“Mort? Qui est mort? Les hommes ou les trains?”
“Tout est mort,” the harbormaster said, and he smiled in the way a man smiles when he knows more than he says but does not know how to say it. He bade them goodnight and walked off into the darkness.
7
Without anything else to do, they returned to the ship. Lars asked one of the pimpled seamen on watch where they might find the captain.
“Ya pokhozh na suku?” The youth smirked. Apparently, he did not k
now.
They were about to retire down to their den of bird parts for the evening when they heard a whistle coming from the docks.
“HELLO! WELCOME TO AFRICA! HELLO!”
They looked over the bulwark and saw a thin black man waving at them. He was dressed in a simple white tunic.
“Are you speaking to us?” said Lars.
“AFRICA IS THE FUTURE! AFRICA LOVES YOU!”
“Is he speaking to us?” asked Lars.
“YOUR CAPTAIN!” the man said from below. “YOU ARE LOOKING FOR YOUR CAPTAIN?”
“You know where he is?” Lars called down.
“Of course,” said the man. “Your captain is my friend. He is at the Hôtel Metropole. Everyone is at the Metropole. I will take you there.”
The man’s name was Horeb. He was a Muslim. They knew this because these were the first two things he said when they came down off the ship.
“My name is Horeb. I am a Muslim,” he said. “I love all people.”
“Well, I am atheist,” said Otik. “I hate most people.”
“It is fate that we met!” cried Horeb, hugging each of them. “How do you like Africa?”
“We haven’t seen much of it,” said Lars. “Mostly the docks.”
“The river’s very big,” said Radar.
“The river gives life.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Radar, trying to be complimentary.
“Of course. Africa is the most beautiful place in the world. And Congo is the most beautiful place in Africa,” said Horeb. He took a step back. “Are you a football team from Europe? No. You are too fat to be a football player. Maybe you are the coach?”
Radar remembered that they were still wearing their matching yellow tracksuits.
“Maybe we should change,” he said.
“We do not change,” spat Otik. “It is beginning.”
“You can take us to the Metropole?” said Lars.
“I can take you anywhere you want, my friends.”
Horeb led them to a motorcycle with a small rickshaw lashed to the back by several unsteady-looking cables. They piled into the cart, though Otik took up most of the seat by himself.
“Okay?” said Horeb. He kicked the motorcycle into gear. The engine coughed and spat and then settled into an uneasy putter.
“The fuel is no good here,” he said. “They have huge tanks of pure petrol right there, but do we get any? No. It is shipped far away.”
“You’re from around here?” Lars called up to him.
“I was born in Yaoundé. My father was from Cameroon. My mother was Senegalese, but she was born in Paris. I moved to Matadi when I was ten. In that time, there used to be many more Muslims here. Not anymore. My brother moved to Gabon three years ago. He became frustrated with Congo.”
“So you are Cameroonian? Or Congolese?”
“I am African. Most Congolese don’t think of themselves as Africans anymore. They only think about their tribe or their town. Or maybe their parents’ families. But this is a real problem. We must have a global mind. Only when we stick together will we defeat the forces against us.”
“What forces are against you?”
“I fill my moto with dirty petrol, and the tanks are right there. This is a case of bad management. This is a failure of vision. This is a form of warfare on the people,” said Horeb as he drove out of the marina. “Tell me, why do you think Islam has been so successful? Muhammad taught us to believe in universal humanity. It is not about being from Saudi Arabia or from Egypt or Tanzania. It is about being blessed with life. Africa is blessed with life.”
“Africa is blessed with many things—some good, some not so good,” yelled Lars against the sound of the engine. “It’s a big place.”
“Congo is a big place. They call it le serpent à deux têtes—‘the snake with two heads.’ Kinshasa in the west and Kivu in the east. But nothing connects the two. No roads, no trains, only the forest and the river. It’s a big place, but people’s heads are small. They cannot see past their village, so they turn inside, you understand?”
They wove through the darkened streets. They passed a bar, Chez Maman, with blinking Christmas lights overhead. Loud dance music was blaring from within. People watched them as they went by, but Horeb took no notice. He pointed out the buildings.
“That is the old tourist office. They used to have so many tourists here. L’entrée de l’afrique, they called it. And this was where they came . . . That is one of the banks, but it is closed now because they ran out of money . . . That is a Greek restaurant that used to be very good, but now it is very expensive and very bad . . . That is the church. It is the most important place in this town besides the petrol tanks. This is a Christian country now. People must believe in something. When you go to sleep hungry, you must believe in something so that you have a reason to wake up in the morning.”
Horeb stopped in front of a statue of a nearly naked man, a quarry hammer lifted above his head.
“He is the African Worker,” he said, pointing at the statue. “He built the railroad. Notice his hammer. It is always raised, but it will never come down.”
“What do you do when you are not driving us around?” asked Otik.
“I am lifting my hammer,” said Horeb. “But it will not come down.”
A group of men approached Horeb’s motorcycle. They quickly closed around it, placing their hands on the back of the bike and the canopy of the cart. Two of them began to argue with Horeb animatedly, pointing at the three of them sitting in the cart. Horeb shook his head and spat something back. He pushed one of the men away. The man pointed at Radar and then pointed at his own eye. Horeb revved the motor and nosed the bike through their midst. He waved for them to get out of the way. One of the men gripped the cart and started to jog alongside them. Radar thought the man would jump in and possibly kill him, but at the last moment Horeb accelerated and the man yelled and finally let go.
“What was all that about?” asked Lars when they were finally free.
“People don’t understand,” Horeb shouted back at them. “Everyone wants something, but they don’t understand that today is not the last day. There are many last days to come.”
• • •
L’HÔTEL METROPOLE was a three-story triangular stone building, an impressive colonial edifice whose elegance had dimmed over the years into a kind of ersatz melancholy; the place now felt like a theater set of itself.
“How much do we owe you for the ride?” asked Lars as they extricated themselves from the cart.
“What?” said Horeb, looking shocked.
“For the ride, how much?”
“Oh no,” he said. “You have given me the gift. Let me show you inside.”
Otik and Lars shared a look, but then they followed Horeb through the musty lobby into a large, open courtyard circumscribed by three walls. Inside this piazza was another world, completely removed from the dusty, squalid town that surrounded it. Against a backdrop of potted palm fronds, a mustached man in tails was playing ragtime at a piano that had no top. A white poodle sat by his feet. The floor of the piazza was tiled in a checkerboard pattern, and in the middle of the courtyard a little fountain bubbled away. There were a dozen or so candlelit tables draped in linen, each set for a full meal. The tables were all empty except for one cluster of patrons toward the back. Among them Radar saw Captain Daneri and several people he didn’t recognize.
As they approached, Captain Daneri spotted them and leaped to his feet. His face was glowing.
“Ah, welcome, welcome! Have you been exercising?” he said, seeing their outfits.
“We have not,” said Lars sharply.
“Never mind then, never mind. Estaba bromeando.”
“We weren’t sure where you’d gone.”
“Here, of course. The Metropole. It’s my old haunt. Just imagi
ne this place in its heyday,” he said, gesturing. “I don’t like to spend much of my time on land, but if I had to choose one place besides my home, it would be here. I’ve lost many a night in this hotel. But come over, come over.”
The captain eased them past the fountain. “Everyone, allow me to introduce miei passeggeri. They are theater—” He clapped a hand to his mouth. “They are here on official business—the nature of which I cannot disclose.”
Radar, terrified, looked over at Lars. He wondered if Lars knew that it was he who had given away the nature of their mission. But if Lars was perturbed, his face revealed nothing.
The captain gestured at a strange, withered man with incredibly pasty skin, who, despite the time of night, was wearing a sun hat and dark glasses. A folded parasol rested against his chair.
“May I present Brother Ireneo Funes. He is—”
“Professor,” said the man, in a strange, high-pitched voice. “I’m no longer in the order.”
There was something wrong with the man’s skin. It was stretched thin and almost translucent, as if two or three sizes too small. It reminded Radar a bit of Mikey Melange, the cart collector at the Stop & Shop, who had been burned badly in an auto accident as a child and spoke in a husky whisper.
“Of course, apologies,” said Daneri. “Professor Funes is from Uruguay, I am sad to tell you, though he does much to reverse one’s impression of that vulgar country. He’s a collector of rare books.”
“All books,” corrected the professor. “Rare or otherwise.”
“Yes, rare or otherwise,” repeated Daneri. He swiveled his attention. “And this, of course, is the very rare and very lovely Mademoiselle Yvette Michel.”
She was lovely indeed. Her short blond hair was covered in a sparkling blue headband, and a thin, lemon-colored evening frock hung from her shoulders. The headband and the dress belonged to another time, but on her it belonged only to this time.
“Enchantée,” she said, blinking through a tendril of cigarette smoke. In the candlelight, the color of her eyes was somewhere between blue and green, like the color of the sea on a cloudy day. She smiled and then frowned ever so slightly, and such a juxtaposition managed to convey both an innocence and a knowledge that this place, this evening, this hotel, this world, had been constructed as a stage for her and her alone. Radar could not tear his eyes away from her.