The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Read online

  “Chaos is what happens,” Judkins said. “With a capital K. We’ve already got it in eastern Zaire after the Rwanda massacres.”

  Kwame nodded, feeling the sun’s heat, the drag of time, the lethargy of Kinshasa in the early afternoon.

  “Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, both innocent people and thugs, fled into Zaire. The refugee camps, ostensibly managed by the UN? They’re actually controlled by Hutu gangsters, the génocidaires, determined to wipe out the Tutsis. Mobutu’s tried to turn them to his own purposes. With French help.”

  Kwame wished he were holding a cool drink, a gin and tonic chilled by ice. He remained standing in order to stay alert. But his throat was dry.

  “Europeans have fucked with this place from the very beginning,” Judkins said. “Most royally the Belgians. Now the French are playing their game.”

  After a moment Kwame said, “My impression is that the blame for Mobutu rests with us.” He was surprised to find himself expressing this opinion. Perhaps heat and drowsiness were lulling his wariness. He cautioned himself, let Judkins do the talking.

  “For a long time Mobutu seemed the best way for us to further American interests,” Judkins said. “That’s why we’re out here after all.”

  Kwame said nothing.

  “What happens once Mobutu goes,” Judkins asked, “if the eight countries surrounding this one all reach out to ‘eat’ Zairean territory? And start massacring tribal rivals? We could face an unimaginable catastrophe.”

  Kwame saw that the ferry was now well out onto the Pool, cutting through clumps of water hyacinths that floated on the current like islands.

  “What you’ve got in Zaire,” Judkins continued, “is Kinshasa, a modern city of the sort you’d visit in a nightmare, and behind it a huge hinterland that once boasted a bit of development, but has now collapsed back into something almost primeval. What infrastructure there was has been eaten by tropical vegetation. It’s jungle now, wilderness, a vacuum of spongy plant life.” He gave an ironic smile. “And we’re determined to preserve its territorial integrity. That make sense?”

  Kwame was feeling so drowsy that he was afraid he might yawn. “Do you suppose I could have some water?” Kwame asked. “My mouth feels like cotton.”

  While Judkins was gone, Kwame tried to shake himself awake. He peered down at the street life twelve stories below him. Some of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had happened right down there. Kinshasa was a village then. Jungle grew down to the beach, to the shacks where Belgian King Leopold’s Free State freebooters lived.

  “You know Heart of Darkness?” Kwame asked after he had drunk some water.

  “I do,” said Judkins. “Some of it took place right here.”

  Kwame felt fully awake now, even quietly excited.

  But Judkins was not thinking about literature. “We have no idea what the hell’s going to happen here,” he said. “But if Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis see a humanitarian tragedy on their TVs, they’ll insist we clean it up. When we can’t do the job in two weeks, the barbs will fly. The media will love that.”

  Kwame saw that the ferry was now almost all the way across the Pool.

  “We don’t know what’ll trigger the explosion or when it’ll occur,” Judkins said. “But we want to be prepared. Ambassador wants an American presence in every part of the country. Not an embassy presence, not a consulate. That shows our hand too obviously. And it’s too damned expensive. An Information Service presence. In the early sixties we had cultural centers in the six capitals of the old colonial provinces. We’re going back to the same places, reopening the centers.”

  Judkins watched him in what struck Kwame as a curious way. He started to speak several times, but didn’t. Finally he rose and came to where Kwame stood. “Ambassador thinks you should see one of these field operations before you get too involved in lecturing,” Judkins said. “He wants every one of our people to visit one.”

  The ambassador sounds very gung ho, Kwame thought.

  Judkins said, “We’re sending you out to do that tomorrow morning. A place called Mbandaka.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Judkins put his hand on Kwame’s shoulder. “The attaché plane flies up there every week. On its way to Kisangani. We got you a ride on that. Kent Mason, our man up there, meets the plane. He’s opening the center, been up there a couple of months, just long enough to receive equipment. He’ll be glad to have another American around. His French isn’t as good as it ought to be,” Judkins confided. “How’s yours?”

  “Pas mal,” Kwame said. (Not bad.) “Je peux me débrouiller.” (I can untangle myself.)

  “Bon.” Judkins patted Kwame’s shoulder. “Got any problems with that plan?”

  “Not at all,” Kwame said. “Most of my African experience has been in cities.”

  Judkins grinned. “Then Mbandaka’s just the thing for you.”

  AT THE USIS library Kwame discovered that Mbandaka lay virtually astride the equator at the confluence of the Congo and a tributary called the Ruki. He learned that a branch cultural center consisted of a library and a film service. Patrons could borrow works of American literature and books about America, most in French translation, and, more importantly, videos. They could watch videos at the center. once the film service got set up, African staffers of the center would take films into the bush to give village audiences a glimpse of America and the world beyond the jungle. Kwame wondered if it might not make more sense to offer books and videos about Africa. Wasn’t that what center patrons wanted to know about? But he held his tongue. He and Kent Mason could hash that one over. He e-mailed Mason that he would arrive early the next afternoon. But e-mail, he learned, was unreliable. Welcome to Zaire. In any case, Mason would meet the plane.

  Livie had not yet replied to Kwame’s earlier message. He sent her another, saying he was going to Mbandaka and might be out of touch for a week.

  TWO

  Like a tiny insect droning above an enormous snake, the plane flew low over the Congo. From the air the river, curling out of Africa’s heart, resembled a broad, flat boa with an island-dotted hide. A great eater of tributaries, it had gorged itself on them and now moved as a huge, unstoppable force.

  From the copilot’s seat Kwame looked toward the horizon. The land spread below him with unrelieved flatness. To his left it stretched to the Atlantic. To his right it extended beyond the range of his vision; it reached to the backbone of Africa, to the Rift Valley Escarpment and Lake Tanganyika, to the Mountains of the Moon and the refugee camps where Tutsis and Hutus were killing one another.

  “I love flying at this season,” the pilot said. He was the embassy’s military attaché, an army colonel named Kelly. “These days during the rains the air is clear as a lens.” He veered away from the river and flew over jungle growing out of swamp. Below them lay a dense, green sponge of vegetation. It extended like an endless thick-napped carpet over a space whose walls were the sky.

  Watching below, Kwame saw the patternless intertwine of plant life give way to textured design, to oil palms set out and tended in neat rows. A plantation. It was as if a referee had stopped the struggle among the trees for space. Along one edge of the tree rows, buildings hugged the water’s edge. Corrugated roofs glinted in the sun. Then abruptly the pattern of trees ended. The chaos of jungle resumed.

  A mission station appeared: a shabby school, a steepled church in the Italian style, a dormitory and refectory, all roofed in rust-pocked corrugated iron, all rotting into the orange-brown ground. Kwame caught sight of a black priest in a white soutane walking in the garden, holding a breviary. He was gaunt, otherworldly, a man out of place, out of time. Kwame watched him.

  “That’s your friend Mason in another month,” said Kelly with a grin.

  Kwame studied the priest. Why was he gaunt? From disease? Malnutrition? From realizing that Christianity was irrelevant in the jungle? Or from needing a woman? But many African priests considered celibacy an unimaginable arrogance. The Bon Dieu gave
men an obligation to procreate. The mission station disappeared. Kwame gazed out at the endless jungle and did not envy Mason his assignment.

  “Just shittin’ ya,” Kelly teased. “You’re going to love Mbandaka. The Las Vegas of Zaire.” He gave such a full-throated cackle that Kwame could not help laughing. “Casinos on every corner. Pimps and drug dealers to shine your shoes. And girls, girls, girls! They all want to marry a Yank.”

  “You think I’ll have a bride when you come for me next week?”

  “Two or three. With babies in the ovens.” Kelly added, “Ol’ Mason’s making out okay.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He gave me that feeling.” Kelly winked.

  Below the plane a dilapidated collection of buildings appeared. “Here’s home,” Kelly announced. Mbandaka spread below them, a once-town where nothing moved except the sluggish river. Kwame could make out potholes on streets that had once been paved. Two streets paralleled the river. A third led into the jungle. A paddle wheeler with “ONATRA” painted on the pilothouse rode at the docks. Mbandaka was a toehold of civilization clinging to the riverbank. A place engaged in a struggle against heat, jungle, and an endless succession of days, a struggle it was not winning.

  Kwame looked for the house leased for Kent Mason. But he saw nothing that fit the description Pilar Cota, the cultural officer, had given him.

  KELLY BROUGHT the plane in low over the jungle and set it down on the tarmac of Mbandaka’s airport. He taxied the plane close to the terminal. The paint on the building was peeling; the terminal looked blighted, deserted. Once he cut the motor, Kelly climbed out of the cockpit, scrambled across the wing, unzipped his fly, and urinated on the pavement. “Oooh! That feels good!”

  When Kwame emerged from the cockpit, heat assailed him. He dragged out his two duffels and stood on the wing to survey the landscape. Jungle lay all around the runway: silent, eternal. The shimmer of heat made it seem to dance. Nothing stirred but insects; they buzzed. Kwame watched the wall of vegetation, plants fighting each other to survive. He thought: Well, you wanted to connect with Africa. There it is! Embrace it!

  “Where the hell’s ol’ Mason?” Kelly asked. “Probably dallying. I shoulda buzzed the house.” Kwame said nothing. “That Mason,” Kelly said. “Seeing a lot of action with spike heads.”

  “Spike heads?”

  “Two weeks ago he was late coming out here. Had one with him. She couldna been fourteen. Her head looked like a field of radio antennas. He know you’re coming?”

  “I guess not,” said Kwame.

  “He’s probably in bed with her right now. Forgot what day it was.” Kelly looked about the airfield. “Shit. Where is he?”

  “I’ll go check the terminal,” Kwame said.

  But the parking lot beyond the terminal was empty. The terminal itself was locked. No flights this afternoon. By its smell Kwame found a men’s room. Its toilets contained such a collection of filth that he fled. To Kwame it did not seem quite the thing to arrive in a new place and immediately piss on it. But he felt the call of nature and relieved himself as Kelly had in the open air.

  When he returned to the plane, Kelly glanced pointedly at his watch. “I’m supposed to be in Kisangani,” he said. “It’s two hours up there. I better get flying.”

  Kwame choked down the uncertainty he felt.

  Kelly examined him. “You be okay?”

  “No problem,” Kwame replied, his face a mask. “This is Las Vegas in Africa.”

  “Why are we putting people into this place anyway?” Kelly stared at the decaying terminal and cocked an ear to the silence. “Listen. The roar of silence.” They listened for a moment. The weight of the absolute stillness did seem a kind of roar. “We put all this faith in technology,” the colonel said. “Our Father which art in technology. But our phones don’t work here. E-mail doesn’t work. If I were living here, I wouldn’t be praying to Our Father which art in technology.” He gazed at the jungle, the terminal, and the road leading to it. “Where the fuck is Mason?”

  “I’ll be okay,” Kwame said.

  “They got plans to get you and Mason out if this place implodes?”

  “That’s not on the sked for this week,” Kwame told the colonel.

  “When it goes, there’ll be a giant whoosh!” Kelly tufted his lips and sucked inward. “Whoooosh! You’ll have twenty minutes to get out. Then it disappears. It’ll whoosh you down with it like a toilet.” Kelly grinned. “You got a will?”

  “And I got a way. I’m a can-do guy.” Kwame hoped it was true.

  Kelly climbed onto the wing of his plane and stared at the jungle. “That stuff’s alive,” he said. “There are people watching us right now.”

  Kwame looked where Kelly was staring at the wall of vegetation.

  “Out there.” Kelly gestured toward the jungle. “After a while they’ll come out and stare at you.”

  Kwame examined the jungle. People were out there, in that immense silence, watching him? He didn’t think so. “I’ll ask ’em for a lift.”

  “Good idea.” Kelly offered his hand. They shook and the pilot climbed into the cockpit. “Good luck,” he said.

  When the plane hurtled down the tarmac and lifted into the sky, Kwame waved. He watched the plane move out of earshot and become a mere speck in the sky. When it finally disappeared, he was conscious again of the heat and of the immense silence of the jungle.

  KWAME STOOD on the tarmac, wondering what to do. Would Mason be along? If not, what? He couldn’t leave his gear. It would be hell to carry into town. He had no idea how far the town was.

  He turned slowly, scanning the jungle. He looked at the sky, at its varying shades of blue: azure and aquamarine, cobalt on the flat undersides of clouds that rode the heat shimmer like whipped cream. He marveled at the stillness, at the slow stir of the air and the cleanness of its smell, not like odorous Kinshasa. The stillness seemed to have a kind of music. He realized that he was responding physically to the jungle and its atmosphere. He did not feel frightened; he was elated. Gooseflesh had risen on his arms.

  Finally he sat on the tarmac. The sun beat down. Sweat and heat fogged his sunglasses. Thirst dried his mouth, thickening his tongue. He looked about him. He asked himself: What’s wrong with this picture? The terminal. The monument to technology. He thought: Get rid of the goddamned thing! Then the picture makes sense. With the terminal trying to dominate the jungle it all seemed wrong. Give it time, Kwame thought. The jungle will reclaim its own. Even the terminal.

  He waited. Got up to stretch his legs. Sat down again. That damn Mason.

  “I thought he was just the sort of officer we’d want in a branch post.” The words were those of Pilar Cota, the cultural affairs officer. A tall, chain-smoking Latina in her forties, number two at USIS Kinshasa after Judkins, she had taken Kwame to dinner the previous evening. “He was good-looking, a little arrogant, bit of a macho edge. Maybe too good-looking for government service. A guy to make the ladies swoon and conscious of it.”

  “Did he make you swoon?” Kwame asked with a grin. He felt comfortable with Pilar because like him she lacked the standard Foreign Service background.

  “He was a little young for me,” she admitted. “Like you. But I’m not immune. What interested me was Mason’s sense of adventure. You felt you could plop him down in the jungle and he’d make something of the experience.”

  “Is he doing that?”

  “We assume so. We don’t know.” Pilar looked steadily at Kwame and asked, “What about you? You have a sense of adventure?” Kwame assumed being in Kinshasa answered that question. “How does a Boston professor happen to be in the USIS Foreign Service?”

  “I took the exams,” Kwame said, “just like you did. I was in grad school, wondering why the hell I was there. So I sat for the exam. Passed it. Aced the oral. And,” Kwame added, “I was a very junior professor.”

  “They took one look at you in the oral and knew you’d work in Africa.”

  Kwame shrugged
. “My name got added to the list of candidates. Then I got a spot teaching at Boston University. When USIS offered me a job, I asked if they could wait till I got some teaching under my belt and they agreed.”

  “Is this a career for you? Or—Whatever.”

  “I’m interviewing careers,” Kwame said. He laughed heartily and Pilar smiled. Whether she was amused at the line—he’d used it before—or at the self-confidence, he couldn’t detect. “My career may be this. Or teaching. Or maybe I’ll be a rock star.”

  “There are too many rock stars.”

  “This work does have satisfactions,” Kwame acknowledged. “I’d like it better if we were trying to help the people in the countries where we serve instead of trying to manipulate them for our advantage.”

  “Mutual advantage.”

  “There are also satisfactions in teaching. But in an era of consumer education—which is what we’ve got now—a professor has to think about marketing himself, especially if he’s teaching African literature. So my marketing strategy is: really know Africa. I’ve watched South Africa shed apartheid. Now if I watch Zaire shed Mobutu—”

  “You’ll be a regular rock star among professors.”

  The derision in Pilar Cota’s voice was unmistakable. “Actually,” he admitted, laughing boyishly, “that sounds more calculating than I really am.”

  “Let’s hope so,” replied Pilar. “Is the French serviceable? Can you explain American positions on world affairs?”

  “If I have to. Will there be a lot of that in darkest Africa?”

  “You never know. You might run into Mobutu.”

  “And shit my pants!” They laughed together. “The truth is,” Kwame said, “I used to feel a little dumb when students asked if I’ve lived in Africa and I had to admit I hadn’t. So I’m living in Africa.”

  Pilar finished her chicken and pushed the plate away. Kwame set his knife and fork on the plate at four o’clock. Pilar watched this evidence of home training and allowed herself a private smile. “You done much reading about Zaire?”