Stringer (2 page)

This area around Victoire was called the
cité
(pronounced with a spit, as opposed to the gentrified
ville
, spoken gently), and here for the most
part one
saw only Congolese: Victoire had a reputation for gangs and disorder, and expatriate and embassy workers (whose money made a substantial part of the consumer economy) were prohibited even from visits.

“Who wants those foreigners anyway?” said my supplier of
phone cards, Anderson, who operated one street from my house. “Their interest is only to rob this country, not to help us small people.”

“All right, all right.” I had heard this speech before. “I need a telephone,” I said, knuckling his wooden kiosk. “Mine was stolen by one of those
schegués
.”

When Anderson smiled his face became boyish. Otherwise, with his gapped teeth and balding head, he appeared very serious, and sometimes frightening. He always dressed simply—in a T-shirt, trousers and sandals—and he made a living selling cell phone credit. Two old telephones sat on his countertop, which was made of scrap wood. He sometimes talked about replacing the kiosk, but it seemed to have made its place: long use had formed depressions in the gravel, at the edge of the open gutter, where Anderson sat outstretched, surveying the street. This was his territory. He was a respected member of the Opposition Debout, an outspoken political movement headquartered in Victoire. He was also my antenna to Radio Trottoir, the underground news network.

“So you met the president,” he said to me.

I put a finger to my lips. Not so loud around the opposition! “He wouldn't see me.”

“But that's good, my friend! That's good!” Anderson raised his voice. “You are one of us. No use meeting those clowns.”

“But the clowns have the power. And the news.”

“You want news? Just wait a little. My friend, this country is going to blow up.”

“If the country explodes you procure phone cards for me, eh? Ten dollars won't do anymore.”

“When this country explodes
you
take care, my friend. We'll kill all the foreigners and burn this city.” His phone beeped. “Let's talk later”—he winked and flashed me a thumbs-up—“Don't worry, you're one of us!” And I picked up my fan-in-a-box and made the short march home, feeling sick.

I entered a grid of obscure and ruined streets that stretched away from Victoire, and I followed a group of children playing soccer. The ragged ball, of plastic and string, rolled toward where I lived, on Avenue Bozene. I passed a boy doing his schoolwork, and men huddled over low tables crowded with one-liter beer bottles. Inside gated compounds women chattered, slapping their plastic slippers against their heels. Cracked walls rose from the ground, smelling of moss and crowned with glass shards. The ball fell into a gutter; a boy reached in with his hands and threw the ball in the air; sewage scattered from above. The game passed in front of my compound, which carried no name, just the number 32.

My house was a one-story structure with dirty white walls ringed by blue paint at the bottom. An iron gate led into the courtyard, and first I passed the landlord's identical dwelling before, at the back of the plot and near a set of toilets, coming to our metal-grill door.

I stepped in and tried to smile. Nothing had changed. The bulbs waned, the cistern hissed, Bébé Rhéma slept in her crib and Jose and Nana sat at the table, napkins tucked in. The living room was long and divided into two areas: close to the door was the dining table, near some low cupboards against a wall. At the far end was a television surrounded by khaki sofas. The plot was connected to water and electricity, and also had a septic tank. These were the important things, and they made our house nearly middle-class. (In Congo there was no middle class: there were the sprawling bungalows and the serviced apartments, with their maids and armed guards, and there was this.) I rented a room from Jose and Nana, themselves renters.

Jose's eyes were droopy, and he stooped over his plate. He was a mild man who worked in the city tax department and wore only designer shirts, mostly secondhand. He was over fifty but had married only two years earlier. Nana was a housewife, though she had a certificate as a nurse and was constantly saying she
would soon return to a clinic: it was one of her frustrations. She was tall and heavy boned, and her short-sleeved blouse amplified the thickness of her arms (she had swelled after marriage, as the wedding photographs on the mantelpiece showed). “You are late,” she said, and then squealed: “What a beautiful fan!”

I had wanted to be alone that evening, but I did not expect it to happen—there was, it seemed, always someone around in the house; always some commotion.

“Look, it's a new one!” Nana chewed twice, then reached for the box. “Let him eat,” Jose said. Nana retracted her hands and hurried off, her heavy steps resounding on the cement, to find me a fork and a plate. At the end of the corridor she shook the cistern handle. There was a gurgle, and the tiresome hissing stopped.

I had rarely dined with the family—our routines had seldom coincided—and I had still not learned their ways. The stew was in a large casserole, and a ceramic bowl contained white rice. The place mats had drawings of fruits on them. Nana passed me the bowl, indicating I was the guest. I served myself a spoon of rice. Then Jose heaped a ladle of rice on his plate, protecting the falling grains; his fingers tickled the air. He hummed contentedly. I tried to pass the bowl to Nana, but Jose's hand reached again. Grains tumbled from the bowl. Then Nana tipped the dish over her plate and shook it empty, banging with her spoon. Jose mumbled a prayer.

“Amen.”

The family ate only one meal a day. Jose called it lunch; Nana called it dinner. And it was custom to serve oneself all at once, without expecting the food to pass around again. A small grilled fish was produced. Nana gave me a piece of tender meat, picking it off with her hands. We ate at a rapid pace—as though the meal were a stress and had to be consumed quickly, so that the house could return to its regular, foodless state. I finished my plate still hungry.

Jose said, “You met the president?”

“He was in meetings all day. An ambassador visited unexpectedly.”

Jose took a moment to chew. “Where did you buy the fan?”

“Here at the market. Twenty-five dollars.”

“Good price.”

His few words lifted my spirits, and after dinner, in the living room, together we unpacked the box.

Soon the fan stood on a tall metal pedestal with its plastic blades housed in an enormous cage. It looked magnificent, and Jose circled it excitedly. Nana was outside, telling the neighbors. At this time in the evening the neighbors were usually out and about, drinking beer and chatting up the ladies, but as word of the fan spread, our living room filled. People took turns putting their faces against the wind and delighted at having their coiled hair stretch behind like stiff wires.

“The twenty-first century has come to Bozene,” proclaimed Jose. And if the neighbors didn't seem jealous it was because Bozene shared all material possessions, especially items of technology. Except my computer, which, I had made clear to a perplexed Nana, was not for use by her nephews or friends. On that evening, however, everyone seemed to forget my foreign ways—and I was Mr. Popular during the half hour for which the fan spun and spun. I stood beside the fan, talking up my purchase. Until suddenly the house was plunged into darkness.

The neighbors moaned. The fan slowed until it hardly moved; it stopped completely. The neighbors squatted, as if it was as much their business as mine to wait for the power, to protect the fan and make sure Made in China survived the electric modulations. In the dark the appliance looked like a dead bird with caged wings; beside it Jose was sprawled on the sofa, half-asleep, his sweat-beaded head over his shoulder. From inside I heard Nana,
“Tapé tapé tapé,”
trying to distract Bébé Rhéma from the heat.

“Jose,” I said, testing if he was awake.

“Ouais,”
he drawled.

“You know they say the riots happen around here.”

“Hmm.”

“Where do these riots start?”

“Around Victoire.”

“Where, exactly.”

Jose rolled in his sofa, licking his dry lips. “You know where Anderson sits? . . . But now is not the moment for riots.”

I turned the fan's cage from side to side, making it move as if it were working. “The current will come,” he mumbled. “Don't worry.” The evening passed like that, until the neighbors lost interest or tired of waiting.

My room was in the middle of the hallway that led from the living room. Across from my door was the master bedroom, next to the bathroom-cum-toilet. The kitchen was at the end of the hallway. My room was small—about ten feet by five—and it had been made, but the sheets were thrown, without tenderness, over the bed; the rug on the floor was askew; papers were stacked untidily in the corner; the curtains were tied up near the rod. The welcome had been brief; the warmth was now gone. I felt only accommodated.

Lying in bed I looked at the ceiling, at the disfigured panel of patchwork plywood. The grain on the sassy wood—ash black, insect resistant—had expanded in the cycles of rain and heat, twisting its surface and making the panel sag like the skin of some large animal. Above my face the wood had rotted and split. I wondered if it could crack open, and if the roof would then fall.

Two weeks before, I might have moved my bed. But I had realized the futility of worrying in such a place: the threats were too many. And I took my new indifference as a sign that I was settling in.

I lay awake, thinking. Guy and his place had seemed so strange; the feeling of loss returned.

But at midnight the church bells sounded and the sopranos began at Bozene's evangelist choir; and I could no longer think. Mosquitoes buzzed my ears like little biplanes from a World War I film. I tried to swat them but hit myself. The fan stood beside my face. I pushed its plug harder into the socket, hoping to see the blades rise into action. Nothing. My head dropped to the pillow, and I heard my lips flutter as I softly blew air between them.

Sometime at night I went to the kitchen. Rats banged through the metal pots when I turned on the bulb. The fridge was empty but for fungicide creams. I wet a towel and draped it over my pillow, to keep down the dust and provide temporary coolness. The sopranos sang all night, without rest, and by morning I knew their songs so well that I hummed them in the cold and brown-water shower I made by emptying a bucket over my head.

The night had made me restless. I wanted to get out.

2

I
had left for Congo in a sort of rage, a searing emotion. The feeling was of being abandoned, of acute despair. The world had become too beautiful. The beauty was starting to cave in on itself—revealing a core of crisis. One had nothing to hold on to.

I was at the time at university in America.

The professor's eyes gleamed. His gaze penetrated, even frightened. Serge Lang, a legend of mathematical theory, sat behind his large desk, a black telephone to his one side and, on the other, a wall covered with yellow hardbound mathematics classics that he had written.

He was a fiery man, bursting with vitality. He screamed at his students, threw chalk at us in class. He shouted with his nose held to our faces. “Truth! Clarity!” He pressed his forefinger into our chests in the middle of arguments. But Lang and I got along. I liked his fury and candor. And he believed in my mathematical ability. When he saw me devour his classroom material he delightedly goaded me on. He wanted me to see more. Over three years he gave me more than two thousand dollars' worth of his textbooks. I cared for them as my small treasure. I
studied them in our stone department building, near his office, feeling pleasure and satisfaction—convinced that I was going to become a professor.

But on this day it was with those same yellow books, piled high in my arms, that I stumbled into his office. The professor's gaze set on me. I put the books on his desk. Lang frowned—he had understood.

“What happened?” he said. The anger was gone. He looked distraught. I felt as if I had betrayed him.

It was for the beauty that I had stayed. The beauty of the world in those symbols. The mathematics I loved was inspired by nature's exquisiteness: in crystals, corals, snowflakes; and by nature's grandeur in stars and oceans. It was the purity of the work that appealed. One was devoted to revealing the meaning of the symbol as well as the beauty of what was signified beneath. And my work at the best of times seemed an almost spiritual pursuit, for something elusive and universal—for a truth. Lang had shown me this.

In my field, algebra, we were devoted to generalization—a search for the universe's deeper rules. Our goal, indeed the ultimate triumph, was to reveal different things to be the same. And for this purpose we drew abstraction from abstraction, piled cleverness upon cleverness. Three dimensions became four, and five. One had to imagine in seven, seventy, impossibility. Objects grew too complex; new languages were invented. Conventional geometries became fully explored; other geometries, less imaginable, were brought about.

This was mathematics progressing. And Lang was now taking me to a place where nature's mysteries had extinguished, where man was surpassing nature. Fresh symmetries were being discovered, more complex, profound and elegant than in the world. This new mathematics was pristine, but it offered no stimulus to the senses. Its relations to the universe were numerous, but fortuitous. It was man's brilliance and vanity at play. I started to feel
lost. Our world seemed multiplied out into many worlds, like in some fantastical game. Sublime laws were substituting for life.

I shrugged at Lang.

I told him the textbooks would be better used by someone else.

I fidgeted, feeling a kind of anxiety wanting release. I was to leave university in two months. Lang had taken me far in a very short period: I should have been finishing my first degree, but in three years Lang had brought me to the point where I would begin a doctorate. I waited, not sure for what, and shuffled about.

“Where will you go?” Lang asked, staring at the wood of his wide table.

I was surprised by the preciseness of his question. “I've decided on Congo.” I added, “I'm going to try to be a journalist.”

“To play the fool.” He said it at once.

His face was stern. But he was smiling with his eyes, brilliant. Always those eyes. I would never forget their lucidity.

I glanced for a last time at the tower of yellow books I had placed on his desk.

Some weeks later I was in a Togolese shop in New York, buying khaki pants to take with me to Africa. Lang called me from California. He always used a fixed line. The professor asked what I was doing. It was a strange call. I wondered if he was feeling lonely. But I found the shop's music too loud, and asked, “Can I call you back?”

I forgot to call him.

A month later I received a message that Lang was dead. I contacted the university, but the mathematics department would tell me nothing more. Rumors were circulating that the professor had killed himself. I suppose he had called me to say a goodbye of sorts. I was devastated, shocked. But there was little more that I could do; by then, I was already in Kinshasa.

I broke with America. Congo consumed me. After Lang's calm world of mathematics, I felt here only impermanence, fear. I had to constantly push, fend. Around me the crowd ground like a windmill—now loudly bellowing, now whirling in silence. A volatility seemed exposed against the black terrain. It felt impossible to belong to this place. The houses, the paint, even the brilliant goldwork of new villas appeared to announce the coming of a jaded future. But it did not shock. I felt somehow alert.

The war in Congo was the world's worst in half a century. Already more than five million people had died in it. The war was monstrous, filled with stories of rape and massacre, and so exaggerated in its proportions that it had become absurd. People struggled to find words to describe this conflict, and were now calling it—despite the contradiction in the term—“Africa's World War,” to convey some sense of the number of armies it had drawn in and, more important, the scale of killing.

It was an unusual time in my life. The beauty in America and in mathematics had become cloying. I felt increasingly connected to a sense of being troubled, and I felt the need to grow into this, not escape. In America I was beginning to feel trapped and suffocated, and removed from the world.

Three strange things had happened in America to make me come to Congo. First, someone gave me, by chance, an interview with a Polish journalist, who spoke about the need to go to these wars in Africa, which he said few people took the trouble to witness, or to experience. Then I met a Congolese political refugee while paying my university bill; her husband's brother was Jose, and it was she who found me a room in Kinshasa. And finally, I was offered a job at Goldman Sachs that would have settled me for life.

The job only strengthened my desire to leave. My mother tried, naturally, to convince me to take it. She started to cry when I told her I was going to Congo. The interview with the Polish
journalist kept coming back to me. And listening to her weep, strangely, I felt I needed to go.

Journalism seemed a natural choice. I felt that the profession would immerse me in the world, and take me to the crisis. The world appeared to be uneasy about Congo, to turn away from it, and write its story from far away. I wanted to experience this place I read about in two-hundred-word news reports: those tiny stories seemed to describe events and emotions that were so large. I wanted to see how people responded to such crisis, what we could become. History was unfolding in Congo, in its war—our history. But such ideas became secondary as soon as I arrived. The apprehension was immediate, and assailing. I had come to Congo alone. I needed to survive. I needed money, a job. There was an urgency about this.

Congo was an unlikely place to launch a journalism career. Nothing about it was welcoming. And the world had largely rejected the country. Few cared for its news. Reporters were usually posted to Africa after several years in the business; and even among those who chose to start on the continent, the rule was to base oneself in Senegal or Kenya: safer, more ordered countries, with regular streams of tourists, and where the major newspapers stationed full-time staff.

But in my favor was the moment. Congo's elections, due in less than a year, would be historic, the country's first chance in four decades at democracy. It was a precarious time: old tensions had surfaced. Power could again be won or lost. I could feel the people's agitation. I could sense the threat—looming—of change.

The experience of Congo's last true elections was at the root of the apprehension. That had been in 1960, when the country had elected Patrice Lumumba as its first prime minister amid the violence of Congo breaking free from Belgium. Lumumba was subsequently betrayed by his handpicked protégé, Joseph Mobutu, among those he trusted the most. Mobutu had the
prime minister arrested and killed, and then installed a deeply repressive dictatorship.

There was now an additional risk. This vote was to be the final step of Joseph Kabila's peace process. Kabila had over the past three years managed to calm Congo's war, which had seen two major waves of violence. The war had begun in 1996, when Kabila's father was the front man of a Rwandan invasion that toppled Mobutu. But when the father then spurned his Rwandan backers, a power grab followed that saw another invasion by Rwanda, drew in armies from nine different countries, and engulfed Congo—as well as all of the heart of Africa.

Until three years earlier Congo in its entirety had been at war, divided between these armies. Kabila had brought together the warlords and made them his vice presidents. One of these, Jean-Pierre Bemba, would be Kabila's main opponent in this vote.

And the war still raged in the east of Congo. The main warlords had laid down their weapons, but particularly bloody militias spawned by the years of violence still killed, raped and pillaged. Adding to the five million victims, a thousand more were dying each day. And Kabila seemed more and more isolated—always seeming to fear that he would be assassinated like his father, and with few in his entourage whom he could trust. The elections would open him to attack. He was vulnerable. And there was a growing sense that the vote could cement the peace that had been gained, or again tear the country apart.

It gave me immediate purpose: I visited the election commission, a building on the Boulevard with an enormous orange voting box painted on its facade. The vision of Congo was different here: gleaming, organized, contemporary. I found the staff to be unexpectedly warm. I was given a front seat, as a foreigner, and a special-colored badge; my questions were answered graciously. Later local journalists came up to tell me the answers I had been given were wrong. They had their own explanations. They proposed
we collaborate. The atmosphere here, in the shiny halls, was more subdued than in the streets. I felt a sort of inclusion.

And then at home, with its anxieties and half acceptances, I was surprised by the hospitality. Nana had apparently decided to make me more quickly familiar with local culture. But she told me nothing. I found out only later that for more than a week she had been busy making arrangements.

The girl was an important figure in Congo. She cured moods, I had been told. She conveyed pleasure. She gave life to abundant families. She was coy, rebellious; tolerated, taught to be fickle and so cantankerous that it would seem nothing could possibly appease this girl until her man drew her closer, produced extravagant gifts and satisfied the restlessness. The acting was hyperbolic and overt. The girl knew to extract the maximum.

Anderson, who was thirty-five and still womanless, told me that at any given time the Congolese girl kept five men whom she referred to as “offices.” (Traditionally only men kept offices. Women had usurped the model.) Anderson had repeatedly been on the short list. The office that went the full distance, he said, was either the wealthiest or the most cunning—for the poor man could also win. Months later Anderson took me to a wedding; he was a friend of the groom, who was wearing a tuxedo and smiling toothily though he had spent his every last franc on the girl and steeped himself in debt.

But not all men were as clever, or foolish. And in Kinshasa there was a dearth of suitable males. So the outsider had become desirable; for his money, job and passport. Nana later confessed to me that families with “values” derided foreigners: as outcasts to tradition, as bearers of grotesque sexual fantasies about the African woman, and—most damagingly—as the masters of paltry families. Every child was negotiated, planned. But so dire
was the situation, Nana said, that good women were sending their daughters even to such men.

When Fannie came home I didn't remember that I had met her two nights before at Anderson's kiosk. And I didn't know she was Jose's niece. It was morning, and I was shaving in the bathroom-cum-toilet when Nana clanged the metal door. I started. Some hair fell on the toilet seat and became embedded in the yellow grease. The door shook again. “Someone's here to see you.”

“Who is it? Can you tell them to wait?”

I rinsed my face and with a towel wiped away the traces of foam from my neck. The mirror was cracked through the middle, in three diverging fissures, distorting my features. Carrying my shaving kit I returned to my room. Fannie was already there. She was looking at the fan with interest, touching its motor. I stepped out. Nana was holding a broom.

“I asked her to wait. But not in
my
room.”

“She wanted to see the fan.”

“Couldn't she wait a few minutes? I'm half-naked.”

“You don't understand,” Nana whispered and pulled me aside.

“How do I say it?” She looked a little confused. “She
likes
you.”

“What? You're joking.”

“Shhh . . . Don't tell her I said.” And Nana deposited her heavy frame on a chair at the dining table. “Go! Talk to her!”

“Fannie,” I called out. “Nana wants you in the living room.”

I crossed her in the corridor but couldn't look her in the eye. And I had hardly put on my shirt and tousled my hair and wondered what I should say when she was back. She was a tall girl, made to appear taller by pants that reached high up her wasp waist. Her full-sleeved white shirt was for men. Her features were fine, and she was of about marriageable age. She entered the room with confidence, sat down on my bed, and began to talk in a soft, melodic voice: she wanted a job, she said, but the employers were running her in circles.