The mission is a ghost town now, and the agricultural station also nearly deserted. The Simbas have cleared the place of Europeans without ever setting foot here. The plantation is mostly rubble. (I imagine it dismantled by the whacked-off ghost hands of all those rubber workers.) The one building left standing contains the very library where Anatole, as a young household servant, taught himself to read and write English. At my request we were married in that room by the village chief, in i ceremony that was neither quite Christian nor Bantu. I asked for God’s blessing and carried red bougainvillea flowers for my mother. Aunt Elisabet draped around our shoulders the traditional marriage cloth called mole, a beautiful double-sized pagne that symbolizes the togetherness of marriage. It also works as a bedspread.
Since its heyday as a planter’s mansion, parts of the house had been used as an army bunker, a birthing hospital, and a goat barn. Now the plan was to use it for a school. The department chief in Coquilhatville admires Anatole, so turned a blind eye to his prison record and hired him as headmaster for the regional hole secondaire. We’re also trying to keep open the agricultural extension program, training former rubber workers to subsistence farming. And I volunteer at the clinic, where a Guinean doctor comes once a week from Coquilhatville to immunize and diagnose babies. In spite of all we’d been through, Anatole and I stood together last fall and declared the word Independence out loud. We said it with our eyes on the sky, as if it were some fabulous bird we could call down out of the air.
It’s taken a lot to dampen our hopes. But everything has turned around so fast, like a magician’s trick: foreign hands moved behind the curtain and one white King was replaced with another. Only the face that shows is black. Mobutu’s U.S. advisors even tried to hold elections here, but then got furious when the wrong person won- Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba’s lieutenant. So they marched the army into parliament and reorganized it once again in Mobutu’s favor.
“If the Americans mean to teach us about democracy, the lesson is quite remarkable,” Anatole observed.
“Breathtaking,” I agreed.
He says I have different personalities: that my Lingak is sweet and maternal, but in English I’m sarcastic. I told him, “That’s nothing-in French I’m a mine sweeper. Which personality annoys you the most?”
He kissed my forehead. “The most, I love my Beene.” His absolute truth. Is that what I am? When the neighbors or students ask me my nationality, I tell them I came from a country that no longer exists. They can believe it.
In the last months our government paychecks have dwindled from almost nothing to nothing. We tell our coworkers that a mere lack of funds mustn’t discourage our hopes. We know that to criticize Mobutu, even in private, is to risk having your head cracked open like a nut, which naturally would discourage one’s hopes entirely. We live on what we can find, and when we’re offered news of friends, we take a deep breath first. My old friend Pascal and two other former students of Anatole’s were murdered by the army on the road south of here. Pascal had a kilo of sugar cane and a defunct World War II handgun in his backpack. We heard about it on Christmas Day, when we had a visit from Fyntan and Celine Fowles.They’re now staying at Kikongo, the hospital mission on the Wamba they told us about. I rejoiced to see them, but any reunion brings awful news, and I cried myself to sleep when they left. I’d nearly forgotten Pascal, his wide-set eyes and insolent smile, and now he comes creeping around my dreams, throwing open windows faster than I can shut them. What little scrap of audacity caught the attention of an army officer on the road? What if I marked him with some English word I taught him, as stupidly as we doomed our parrot?
This is the kind of crazy dread we live with. Our neighbors are equally terrified of Mobutu’s soldiers and their opposition, the Simbas, whose reputation is stalking northern Congo like a lion itself. The Simbas’ anger against all foreigners is understandable, but increasingly their actions aren’t. We hear of atrocities on the shortwave, then hear them exaggerated on Mobutu’s official newscasts, and it’s hard to know what’s real. I think about food, mostly, and occupy my mind by watching children. I don’t really fear the Simbas, even though I’m white. Anatole is very well respected; my alliance with him will save me, or it won’t. Justice moves in mysterious ways.
Father is still carrying on with his tormented Jesus Is Bangala church.This was the Fowleses’ other awful news: Father had walked or hitchhiked all the way over to the Kikongo mission in an agitated state, bellowing that his guts were on fire with venom. He claimed he’d swallowed a live snake. The mission doctor gave him quinine and vermifuges, which would give pinworms a run for their money, but likely not a green mamba. Poor Father. Now he’s left Kilanga altogether, vanished into the forest, it seems, or melted under the rain. Sometimes at night I think about how he might be dead and I haven’t heard yet. It’s a hard thing to live with in the dark, and I lie awake cooking up plans to go hunt for him. But in daylight a wall of anger pushes me in a different direction, roaring that I must leave Father behind me. I couldn’t strike out on my own, and even with help it’s not worth the risk. I understand that he’s dangerous to me now.
Dangerous to many people, and always was, I guess. Fyntan and Celine must have been alarmed by our misguided outpost in Kilanga, where we slept in their same house, antagonized their former friends, even turned their parrot out to nature’s maw. And that mission doctor at Kikongo must have found Father a sight to behold: a wild-haired preacher with a snake in his belly. That doctor has stayed on with his family, in spite of the danger-they’re from someplace in the South, Fyntan thought, Georgia or Kentucky. I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
It’s the only time I get homesick, when America lands on my doorstep in a missionary guise.There are others who didn’t go back, like me. But they seem so sure of being right here where they are, so rooted by faith-Fyntan Fowles, for one, and the strangers who turn up every so often to ask if I can help get a message through or keep a box of medicines safe till a boat is found to take it up river. I’ll happily invent a meal and make up a bed on the floor, just to hear the kindness in their stories. They’re so unlike Father. As I bear the emptiness of a life without his God, it’s a comfort to know these soft-spoken men who organize hospitals under thatched roofs, or stoop alongside village mamas to plant soybeans, or rig up electrical generators for a school.They’ve risked Mobutu and every imaginable parasite in the backwater places where children were left to die or endure when the Underdowns and their ilk fled the country. As Brother Fowles told us a long time ago: there are Christians, and there are Christians.
But visitors of any stripe are rare, and most days are exactly like the ones before. Funny to speak of boredom, I guess. If I’d tried in childhood to imagine my present life in the jungle, I’d have been struck numb with, the adventure of it. But instead I’m numb with the tedium of a hard life. We collapse into bed at night. I spend all day walking between the soybean fields, the kitchen house, the market, the clinic, and the nutrition class I teach at the agriculture school, wondering on any given day if I’ve given out more information than I’ve taken in. For sure that’s the direction the calorie count is going. We have manioc and yams to fill our bellies, but protein is scarcer than diamonds. I bargain high and low for an egg or beans, a precious chicken, some fresh river fish, or I’ll catch a ride into the Coquilhatville market to gaze at such treasures as tinned ham, for a king’s ransom. Sometimes I even manage to pay it! But Anatole has lost weight this winter and I’ve lost even more, eight kilos, so fast I’m a little scared. Probably I have whipworm again. I’m pretty sure I was pregnant at Christmastime, but now I’m sure I’m not, so there must have been a loss in there, but it’s easier not to mention it to Anatole. Easier not to count it, if that’s possible.