Congo Inc

by In Koli Jean Bofane

  1. Tintin is a well-known cartoon character created by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé.—Tr.’s note

  2. Operation Cast Lead is also known as the Gaza Massacre, an armed conflict between Palestinians and Israel from late December 2008 to mid-January 2009.—Tr.’s note

  3. Both are well-known Congolese musicians.—Tr.’s note

  4. The Five Pillars of Islam: Faith, Prayer, Charity, Fasting, and Pilgrimage to Mecca.—Tr.’s note

  5. WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol.—Tr.’s note.

  6. The region between the Congo River and the Kasai River.

  7. Allusion to a persistent legend concerning the Mongo people.

  ETERNAL DRAGON

  永存的龙

  Isookanga had finished his rounds. He deposited the cooler at the Great Market and went to see Old Tshitshi on the Avenue du Commerce.

  “Hello, Old One. Zhang Xia not here?”

  “He’s coming, he went to the cybercafé.”

  “To the cybercafé? But he was supposed to wait for me. I have what we need right here.”

  “He went to get some emails. He’s been thinking about his wife and son a lot these days. Have a seat.”

  The day was ending, and the hustle and bustle in the streets and stores was beginning to slow down. The night guards had taken over on the steps of the businesses that were already closed or about to be. At night the center of town became quiet while the more remote areas grew livelier, the sector reserved for the affluent and those who didn’t worry about rules. The common people, those on the fringes like the neglected of the shégué community, didn’t live there.

  Zhang Xia appeared.

  “How’s it going?” Isookanga asked.

  “Don’t know.” The young Chinese looked even more morose than usual. He handed his friend a sheet of paper. “Read that.”

  “I’m not a sinologist yet, brother, but I’ll get there.”

  “It’s an email from Gong Xiyan, my wife. ‘Dear husband,’ she writes, ‘the days are going by, I’m thinking of you. I try to live on with little Zhang Yu, who resembles you more and more. Despite his laughter, nothing can comfort me about your absence. My work brings me satisfaction and everything could be fine. The days are long, they go by slowly, the way the Chang Jiang River winds, which I see from the window of our house. A gentleman stopped by. Come back, my love, come back to us soon. Gong Xiyan.’”

  “And …?”

  “Don’t you hear something troublesome in this message?”

  “Listen, Zhang Xia, I know you think about your wife and your child all the time, but you’re here to work, my friend. If you want to get back to China someday, you’d do better not to fret so much. Everything’s fine with your family, there’s no need to worry.”

  At first sight there was, indeed, no reason to worry about Gong Xiyan and her little boy. The landscape in front of their apartment window varied very little from one day to the next. Despite the dust clouds the bulldozers stirred up, from the top of the hill on which they lived one could see in the distance the building site of a gigantic bridge covered with cranes, evenly spaced, like robots—arms outstretched—as far as the curve in the Chang Jiang River, which showed through the mist thanks to the shimmering reflections on its surface. And farther still, beneath a heavy sepia sky, the massive buildings of the city of Chongqing, slashed by the setting sun, were outlined in a gold-colored copper halo. The metropolis rose imposing and glorious—an autonomous structure like a plinth—in the steep, inaccessible province of Szechuan.

  The man spoke calmly, almost in a whisper. His glasses concealed the gaze behind them, but his smile seemed friendly. The hair parted on the side made him look like a serious student. Gong Xiyan was sitting in her modest living room on the sofa; he was on the edge of an armchair leaning slightly toward her so that their knees could have touched. His plain gray suit, its sleeves a bit too long, tried to reduce his stocky mountain peasant’s corpulence, but it was in vain. Having shown her his business card, the chief of police, Wang Lideng, declined the offer of some tea, but his tone remained courteous.

  “You said that your husband is in Congo?”

  “For more than a year now.”

  “Fine. But we think we know he was in China not long ago. Are you familiar with the company Eternal Dragon?”

  Gong Xiyan turned her face to the police officer and answered, “No, sir.”

  The man shook his head, seemed to think a few moments, and then informed her: “Madame, you say you don’t know Eternal Dragon and yet your husband was at the head of this company. We found the trace of several stays in China not long ago.”

  “I can’t tell you anything more. He isn’t here any longer and I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  “What do you know about a certain Liu Kaï?”

  Again Gong Xiyan looked at Chief Wang. The young woman’s eyes were on him, but her mind was miles away, far from everything else.

  Faced with her distraction, the chief no longer knew what to latch on to and suddenly found his thoughts were elsewhere—with Gong Xiyan. He kept staring at her for a moment, then snorted like a bull in the sudden dazzling brightness of the arena. He stood up and picked up a framed photo from the low television table. It showed Gong Xiyan and Zhang Xia on their wedding day.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Almost four years.”

  He picked up another photo, a portrait of Gong Xiyan this time. He looked at it for a long time before asking, “Do you have any proof of his steady presence in Congo since he left China?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll see if I can put together some pieces for you in the next few days. I’ll have to look.”

  Chief Wang Lideng was still contemplating the picture, then finally put it down. “I have to go now.” At the door he bowed respectfully, straightened up, and added with a smile, “It was a pleasure meeting you.”

  She closed the door behind him.

  The guest’s unexpected presence troubled Gong Xiyan. To refocus, she sat down at the dining room table to pick up her work, which consisted of stringing real pearls and creating geometric patterns with them. But she didn’t start right away.

  What was going on with Zhang Xia? He always told her everything. She didn’t understand these questions, nor what offense her husband could have committed to justify the visit by a figure such as the chief of Public Security. And how could Zhang Xia have risen from simple employee to being administrator of this Eternal Dragon company? She knew very little about Mr. Liu Kaï other than that he was the first one to have offered her husband a responsible job. He had made him his foreman. Zhang Xia was a gutsy and disciplined worker, and it was he whom Mr. Liu had picked to come with him to Africa, to a country named Congo.

  It was now almost a year ago that they’d left Chongqing. And four years since they were married. They’d come a long way together. Zhang Xia was a gentle soul. They both came from the north of Szechuan. They had met during their time of wandering, when they left the countryside and found themselves having to face the city, homeless and unemployed. Thereafter they’d managed to get some small jobs. Employment wasn’t the problem; construction was mushrooming. But it wasn’t until Zhang Xia met Mr. Liu Kaï that their insecurity had stopped and they were able to rent a little apartment on the edge of the city. They were married, and a year later Gong Xiyan brought Zhang Yu into the world.

  Every week she waited for messages from her beloved. He always wrote that everything was fine, but she realized today that perhaps he’d kept some things hidden from her—unless all of this was merely a misunderstanding. The chief seemed to believe her when she said that she knew nothing. In any case, it was important that she keep a cool head; she had a child to raise and work to get done. Gong Xiyan had received pearls in every color from a client; she was to string them according to a predetermined model. The patterns were then made into wedding belts and exported to a variety of Arab countries. She also sewed plastic cowries on s
mall leather squares to make trinkets for tourists in Burkina Faso and Senegal. The work didn’t bring in very much, but it suited her perfectly; it allowed her to get away from her everyday life, which was filled with interminable waiting.

  She spent another moment dawdling, then her eyes fell on the clock above the kitchen door. It was time to pick up her son from his nursery school. She took a lightweight jacket hanging from her chair and went out, her head full of questions. She promised herself never to be separated from Zhang Xia again; it was too painful. Outside she went down the few steps to the street level below. First the absence and now this story about the company, his presumed presence in China—it was all too much for her. Zhang Xia was not a criminal; this whole business would soon be cleared up. Chief Wang Lideng had had an empathetic look, but she hoped she wouldn’t have to see him again. A bus arrived. She raised her arm. The driver was slow to stop, and Gong Xiyan had to hurry to the door of the waiting bus, its motor purring patiently.

  Chief Wang Lideng was at his post in the skyscraper of the Office of Public Security of the city of Chongqing, with three-quarters of the staff gone. Wang preferred this atmosphere to any other. In this calm ambiance he could think, without being interrupted every other second by the phone or any number of visitors he had to satisfy when they came to him for an analysis, the reading of a report, or a signature. He liked this time right before nightfall: the light filtering horizontally through the wide bay window; the panorama composed of a series of buildings decked out with telecommunication antennas, spitting steam jets; the façades, tall as mountains, squared off in glass and metal; in the distance, that rusty hue covering all the structures, scaffoldings, tanks, chimneys; and then, too, the cement dust whose particles could be seen saturating the atmosphere, choking the city, like the veil of a much too jealous mistress. He, the chief, loved it; it was China’s setting and he wanted to contribute to it. Above the landscape, at the level of where he sat now, the sky had just finished glowing. Some clouds to the west still showed a few flames, but the main hue was dark blue. Looking even higher up, you could see the stars, one by one beginning to put on their evening gowns made of precious stones to show that whatever you did, the universe would always approve of everything, without restriction; it simply participated in the course of events.

  The chief worked at least twelve hours a day. It didn’t bother him and was essential to the smooth running of the city, which was growing in importance in the hierarchy of the cities of the People’s Republic of China. Besides, this influence could not have existed without him. Without him—and, most of all, without the new governor, Bo Fanxi—this new expansion would not have happened the same way. Before being propelled to the province, the latter was already seated in the highest bodies of the Chinese Communist Party. Shortly before, he’d been named as head of Szechuan, and he had accumulated one success after the other ever since. Together they began to drastically lower the crime rate in the city, once Wang Lideng was chief of police. Before, it had been rather messy, and well-organized crime caused major investors to flee. With the complicity of police and high-placed politicians, triads had flourished. At that time, building sites emerged anywhere and in any way—it was just a matter of knowing whose palms to grease—while authorizations and licenses were within arm’s reach. Entire sections of the city were contaminated by corruption. But all of that was over and done with—he and the governor had seen to that.

  It hadn’t been easy, but as soon as Bo Fanxi was installed, the new governor immediately summoned Wang Lideng very late one night. He had been frank with him and revealed that he’d been reviewing his file for a while now. He noticed that where solved cases were concerned, of all the high-ranking police officers Wang Lideng’s achievements were by far the most impressive. In doing his research, the governor had soon remarked that, paradoxically, Wang’s files were also those most frequently ignored or, if they did make it to the public prosecutor’s office, almost always ended up being dropped. Either it was a matter of incompetence on his part or there were people sabotaging him. The new governor was inclined to believe the latter.

  That wasn’t all. The scrutiny of Wang’s career showed that he’d climbed up the ladder, certainly, but less rapidly and less effectively than many of his colleagues. Wang Lideng admitted to himself that it had, indeed, been quite a few years that he had stagnated in the same position without complaining. The governor added that as far as he was concerned it was a question of jealousy.

  The light was deliberately low and soft in the office. It reflected on the paneled walls, on the few contemporary paintings, and on the avant-garde furniture but barely touched the faces of the two protagonists sitting in the semi-dark. Every now and then a minuscule spark of white flashed from the surface of Wang’s glasses but didn’t go far and stayed inside a circumscribed closed circle.

  Then the governor turned friendlier. “Frankly, what do you think of the organization of Public Safety in this city?”

  They were walking on eggshells here. Wang Lideng hesitated to answer. Having felt throughout his career that he was consistently dealing with envious people, he had always avoided pointlessly exposing himself by trotting out any old thing. At this moment, he told himself that for once he should just take the risk. Face-to-face with the most powerful man in the province limited this risk somewhat, since his response—whether he told the truth or not—would either make him or break him—there was no middle ground. The interview taking place in the semi-dark left him to believe there was a level of trust between them, of the kind that might exist between conspirators, for instance. Wang Lideng decided to jump in.

  “Mr. Governor, I do not usually voice any criticism concerning the departments or functioning of my administration, but to tell you the truth, it isn’t great. But who could do any better under the current state of affairs?”

  “The current state of affairs. I was expecting an answer like that, and I thank you for your honesty, Officer. In the near future I will need someone on whom I can count. I believe I was right to call on you.”

  The two men then began to speak ill of the head of the Public Safety Bureau, criticisms that were directed more at the individual than at the person in charge of a crucial component of the state, at the end of which Wang Lideng admitted to the governor that he had files on just about everyone, among which was the highest-ranking police commissioner. Thereafter it was easy. Included in the material that Chief Wang had been gathering for years was a video of the unfortunate commissioner with a girl of at most seventeen—in other words, the complete scenario of a sexual scandal-to-be in the news of a country that by itself had more than a billion potential TV viewers. To put in place a new safety strategy in the city, they inevitably had to cut the head off the department in question without too much gossiping, to be able to establish a new one, better adapted to the present context and more reliable above all. It wasn’t necessary to display the amorous prowess of the high commissioner of police to three hundred million homes with a television; he didn’t wait long to implode on his own, like an old-model screen. After him, Wang Lideng decapitated all the heads of administration, of justice, of companies, by connecting them with all sorts of affairs, one more disgraceful than the next.

  Finally, when one of the most sensational trials ever took place in the People’s Republic of China since the public trial of the Gang of Four, the triads no longer benefited from the protection that had been theirs for a long time. The reputation of the governor and the new police chief traveled around the country, and thanks to the freedom of speech and information that the constitution guaranteed, the news of their exploits in Chongqing and Szechuan was aired on nearly four hundred television channels; by more than two thousand newspapers, whose distribution consisted of a hundred million copies daily; on three hundred radio stations; by the Xinhua news agency and its hundred or more branches; by websites, blogs, the three thousand digital channels, the thousands of tons of magazines, by CCTV 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and so on
, broadcast live by Fox News in the United States, and then in many other of the world’s communities. From Heilongjiang to Yunnan and from Xingjiang to Jiangsu, passing through Qinghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, no one spoke about anything but the most gigantic blitz ever run within, and even beyond, the Great Wall toward the autonomous region of Tibet or the northern limits of the captive Diaoyu archipelago.

  Despite the victories amassed, the chief of the Public Safety Bureau, Wang Lideng, never for one moment lost his head. Mindful of the fragility of the human condition, he always managed to keep his composure—until this Eternal Dragon business. A strange feeling had come over him as soon as he had lifted the cardboard cover of the file, to the back of which the photographs of Liu Kaï, Zhang Xia, and Gong Xiyan were pinned. He was instantly attracted to the image of the young woman’s face. He spent many long minutes absorbed by the expression of tender melancholy her features exuded. He knew that a photograph was, by definition, just an instant in anyone’s life, but an expression didn’t come out of nowhere. And there, in those eyes, he read that kind of sadness generated by what fate sometimes keeps in reserve for a person. He had seen it on the face of the actress Gong Li, shedding tears in close-up in The Forbidden City, the marvelous film by Zhang Yimou. And this woman, Gong Xiyan, had the same features—exactly the same—as the adored actress. The same light emanated from both of them. Wang Lideng was almost bowled over by it.

  Ardent desire had driven him to pay her a personal visit. He wouldn’t put anyone else in charge of this inquiry. He owed it to himself to approach her. She had the same high, proud cheekbones; that mysterious hair that cast a shadow on her temples; that full lower lip, disillusioned, capable of enchantment and comprising the most burning emotions; those straight, severe eyebrows; and those eyes. Wang’s intuition turned out to be completely right when he was close to her in the small living room, for she, too, didn’t do more than glance at her interlocutor, out of modesty surely, as if she were aware of her ability to turn souls to ashes. There was such fever in her, visible in that limpid lake bordering her lashes, in which Wang felt the desire to drown himself so he wouldn’t have to feel the pain beating like a pulse, because of his organ that had hardened more than huaimu.1 Ever since then the sensation inevitably returned each time he started thinking about the very beautiful, tormented Gong Xiyan.