The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Read online

  “What about children?”

  “Not if we get divorced.”

  “You shit. Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Your people divorce. Mine don’t.”

  He held her close and looked up at the stars, wondering if a marriage between them would work. It would be wonderful for a few years. Could one ask for more than that of an American marriage these days? But the time would come—fifteen, maybe twenty years down the road—when there would be concerns about money: about salary, retirement, and investment accumulation. He would come up short there; the women Livie had grown up with would have married entrepreneurs and international lawyers, arbitrageurs and investment bankers. Even if he did well as a cultural diplomat or in the academic world, he could not compete with them. Livie’s friends would be wealthy. She might inherit money, but never wealth. She might even make a good bit of money as an attorney. But they would always be behind. Kwame wondered how that would be.

  And he understood that her intention was that he should enter her world of privilege, her white world. Her friends would accept him in his protective coloration glow: always affable, no jarring opinions, Republican small talk. He would be one of those tiny drops of black in the can of white paint that Ralph Ellison had written about in Invisible Man; those few black drops made the white even whiter. But what about Livie’s moving into the black world from which he came? Could she do that? She had promised to meet his parents—his mother wanted very much to inspect her—but she was never quite able to make time for the trip. Would she accept him, but deny where he came from?

  He held her and looked at the stars. “You’re going to marry some church-going black girl,” Livie said. “I know you will. And she’ll always feel good about herself because she beat out the white chick.”

  “And you’re gonna marry some WASP with Mayflower ancestors and more money than I’ll ever see.”

  While he was packing the evening before he left, he looked up and saw that she was watching him. “We’ve been together almost two years,” Livie stated. “Haven’t we?” Kwame nodded and went back to sticking socks into odd corners of his duffel. “And they’ve given us great times, haven’t they, those two years?” she asked. He glanced up at her and smiled. “And we get on well.”

  He zipped the duffel closed and set it on the floor. He wondered: What was he doing? The Congo seemed an enormous black hole. Already he was missing her.

  He went to where she sat on the bed, her back against the headboard, a pillow in her lap. He took her hands and gazed at her.

  “I love you,” she said. “If you love me, would you say it please?”

  “I do love you. Kwame loves Livie.” She smiled. He asked, “What if we had Christmas together in Paris?” She grinned and leaned forward to kiss him. “You’ll have a break from law school and I’ll get leave.”

  “We’ll find a little hotel that caters to lovers.”

  They kissed. Kwame turned off the light and came back to the bed. Was he crazy to go to Africa, he wondered. If she found someone else to love, that WASP with the Mayflower heritage, would he ever forgive himself? They kissed again and looked at each other in the darkness. “What if we got married in Paris?” he asked.

  She held him close. If they married, he wondered, what would happen to them? Would they be together? Would she abandon law school? Or would he leave Zaire?

  “We won’t tell anyone what we’re planning to do,” she said. “We’ll just do it, get married in Paris at Christmas.”

  But when they made love that last night, they both wept as if they would never see each other again.

  KWAME GAZED at Livie’s photo on the bedside table and wished he could talk to her. He could not expect to e-mail her. He sat down to do what he had never done: write Livie an actual letter. As he began, he found that this was not so easy to do. Until recently people had written letters for centuries! Amazing! What would he write on? His mother had stationery in various colors and sizes, some with her name printed on it. She even used it—which he had laughingly told her made her a relic of a bygone era. Kwame had no stationery. He took a piece of computer paper and his ballpoint and began—But how did one begin? And was this a love letter? He could not recall ever writing a love letter. He had read them; that had been part of his education. But to write one? To lay naked longing and overwrought emotion on a piece of paper? “My darling, each whisper of the wind brings me thoughts of you—Livie, I long to touch—” He could not do it!

  He started out, scratching away—My god, but this writing by hand took a lot of time! He told “Hi, Liv” that he was in Mbandaka for a week, in the only non-brothel hotel in town, scribbling these odd curlicues of handwriting, hoping the town’s uncertain electricity would not shut down and hoping even more that Kent Mason, who might be more ghost than man, might show up. He read over what he had written. Labored. Stilted. Penned by an unimaginative drone used to writing academic monographs. My god, he thought, is my diss as dull as this?

  He plugged away, crafting what was more an amplified grocery list than a letter. He finished with a line about missing her, obsessing about Paris and Christmas, wondering how he’d last till then. These lines embarrassed him when he read them over, but he knew she would like them.

  When Kwame finished the letter, he really was missing her. The light had gone from the sky. He turned on the television, hoping to find out what was happening in Livie’s world. The TV set did not work. It was a reminder of the larger realms beyond Mbandaka, but not a means of access to them. He decided not to bother with dinner. He got another beer from the bar and ate crackers he’d brought in his luggage.

  FOUR

  The next morning while he had coffee and rolls on the hotel terrace, Kwame saw a man appear on his balcony to examine the day. His skin was as white as ivory, as spectral as a cadaver. After only a week in Zaire, Kwame’s eyes had grown accustomed to seeing only dark-skinned people. Whites looked sickly, ghostly. He wondered if that was how Zaireans regarded Mason. The white man quickly returned to his room. So there were at least two of them in town. Kwame wondered who he was.

  After mailing his letter to Livie, Kwame walked to the center. In Mason’s bedroom, he pulled the sheets off the bed and towels from the rope tied across the room and tossed them by the door. He searched for Mason’s laptop; certainly he had one. In the armoire he found a lone sport shirt draped over a hanger. That was all. No trousers, no boxers, no tee shirts, no shoes. And no laptop. Had Mason gone somewhere taking his clothes and his computer?

  When Tata Anatole shuffled into the building, Kwame told him to have his wife wash Mason’s sheets. As they attacked the crates of library shelving and furniture, Kwame asked if anyone had come to fetch Mason’s clothes. “No one,” Anatole said. To check the response, Kwame rephrased the question. Anatole gave the same answer. Kwame said, “You always lock this building, right?” Anatole nodded that he did. “Especially when you’re not here.”

  “Oui, M’sieur.”

  The men worked steadily throughout the day. Whenever a vehicle passed on the road, Kwame looked up, hoping to see Kent Mason appear. But he did not.

  At the end of the day, Kwame had Anatole show him where the mail was collected at the post office: in a large locked drawer below the smaller lock boxes that most patrons rented. Kwame estimated that Mason had not collected mail for about two weeks. He gathered it and started across town.

  Ordering a beer at the hotel, he took a table on the terrace to sort the mail, hoping to make contact with other residents. But no one joined him. He nursed the beer for an hour. Finally Odejimi crossed the terrace, leaving for a swim. “Come along,” he suggested. Kwame collected the mail, fetched his suit, and joined him.

  As they were driving through the old colonial quarter of town, Kwame said, “I saw a white man at the hotel. Who’s he?”

  “Moulaert, a Belgian school inspector.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Escaping his wife.” Odejimi laugh
ed. “She must be something, eh? If he’s come here to escape.”

  The pool had been built in the colonial era. Its tiles were green with moss, but the water, a golden color, looked at least as clean as the river. Like something out of Gauguin, a girl of perhaps fifteen lolled beside the pool on a towel. She wore only a bikini bottom and had remarkably attractive breasts. She waved to the men across the pool.

  Odejimi said quietly, “For a few zaires you can have her.”

  “I’ve never needed to pay,” Kwame observed.

  “Neither have I,” said Odejimi. “But it’s always part of an exchange, n’est-ce pas?”

  Kwame dove in and started swimming sixty laps in a three-lap rotation of breaststroke, backstroke, and freestyle. During one of the backstroke laps watching the phalanx of clouds march across the sky, Kwame noticed Odejimi and the girl disappear into a dressing room.

  As he was finishing his laps, doing sidestroke, the doctor swam up beside him on his back. “How was she?” Kwame asked.

  “I can’t stay away from those tits,” Odejimi confessed. “She puts them on display and waits for me.”

  “Is she clean?”

  “I’ve tested her. Warned her. These children need so much training.” The doctor sighed. “It’s not good for my health to go without.”

  “A man must be careful about his health.”

  “I’m taken care of now,” the doctor said. “My friend just returned from Bikoro.” He glanced at the teenager, shook his head, and expelled a deep-throated laugh. “I should be more disciplined.”

  Kwame observed, “Discipline always becomes a man.”

  The doctor guffawed. “What a load of shit! You’re a postmodern, feminist Yankee, aren’t you? You think I exploit that child.” Kwame laughed and kept on swimming. “This is Africa, my friend. She loves being a magnet for older men.”

  KWAME SPENT the next couple of days at the center, arranging materials, looking through files. Once again he spoke to no one except Anatole. Walking across town from hotel to center, center to hotel, he had mental conversations with Livie. In them he confessed that she had been right; he never should have come to Zaire. He did math exercises in his head: how many hours until Kelly returned with the plane. Kwame often thought of Mason, living at the center, speaking indifferent French and no African language. Could he have been so lonely he just took off?

  WANTING FRESH fruit, Kwame walked out to the town’s largest market. Drifting past the yabber of bargaining and the radios tuned to competing stations, past offerings of foodstuffs and spices, apparel, plastic sandals, fishnets, and oddments, Kwame noticed something curious. Whenever merchants and patrons caught sight of him, they fell silent and stared. He was wearing jeans, a polo shirt, sandals, and dark glasses. He looked no different from other men in the market. But he seemed to exude an aura that hushed the surroundings. Everyone knew that he was a white man. The silent stares unnerved him.

  He bought a pineapple and bargained for short, yellow bananas. As he crouched before gold-orange papayas, a market woman tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned, she unfurled a pair of chino trousers, labeled Dockers. Another market woman held out short-sleeved sport shirts. “Good price! Good price!” she jabbered. “You like? How much?” Kwame studied the garments. Light blue asterisks fluttered across an orange shirt. Hadn’t Mason worn such a shirt in a photo stuck in A Burnt-Out Case?

  “Where did you get these?” Kwame asked. The market women looked confused. “Who gave you these clothes?” Kwame demanded.

  The women did not understand. They yakked in Lingala. Kwame made an offer on the orange shirt. Bargaining began. Kwame walked away. The women followed, lowering prices. Eventually he bought the shirt.

  At the center he checked Mason’s photos. He found the one of Mason wearing the shirt he had bought and wondered what to think.

  THE NEXT morning, dragging Tata Anatole along as translator, Kwame took the shirt and the photo to the Commissariat de Police. The commandant listened to Kwame explain about Mason’s disappearance and concluded that he had not disappeared; he had merely left town. He had probably sold the shirts himself. If it was theft, well … Such things happened.

  At the headquarters of the gendarmerie, the commander, who spoke some French, confessed that he had no idea how to trace Mason. But as a blood relative of the president, for a hard-currency consideration—say, $500—he could bring Mason’s disappearance to the attention of Mobutu Sese Seko himself.

  Kwame went alone to the military camp. The major in charge handed Kwame over to a captain. The captain asked how he might get to Fort Benning, Georgia, for parachute training of the kind Mobutu had received. He explained that an inquiry about Mason would cost money. When Kwame failed to offer any, the captain referred him to a lieutenant. The lieutenant speculated that Mason had gone swimming off a sandbar and had been eaten by crocodiles. “That is how such a man would disappear,” he said. When Kwame thanked him for this opinion, the lieutenant said, “I give you information, but you give me nothing. How can we be friends?”

  At the Air Zaire office the chef de service assured Kwame that no European travelers had flown out of Mbandaka in recent weeks. But, he said, his twenty-year-old son had a long-time interest in America. Might Kwame employ him at the center?

  THAT AFTERNOON when Kwame went out on the Afrique terrace, carrying a bottle of Primus beer and a glass, he found Dr. Odejimi at a table overlooking the river. The Nigerian was smoking sweet-smelling hemp, a bottle of whiskey and a glass before him. Inviting Kwame to sit, he laid out a game of mankala, placing large seeds into two lines of circular cups carved in a board. “What’s going on?” Kwame asked. “Mason was here for a couple of months, but no one will tell me anything. What kind of guy was he? I’ve seen his photographs,” Kwame admitted. “I know he got girls to take off their clothes.”

  “Don’t we all try that?” The doctor smiled.

  “Would angry fathers have chased him out of town?”

  “You could ask around.”

  “Ask who?” Kwame enumerated the people he had seen. He complained, “Doesn’t anyone do his job here without getting tipped? What kind of country is this?”

  “An African country,” Odejimi replied. “The only way these blokes make it in Zaire is to exploit people like us. But you’ll never learn anything if you pay for information,” he cautioned. “Everybody will string you along.”

  “Is that what’s happening? Or is there some code of silence?”

  “Who are you?” Odejimi asked bluntly. “Why should anyone speak to you? Especially anyone in the military.”

  “Is the military involved?”

  Odejimi shrugged. “Who else is taught to kill?”

  “You think he’s dead?” Kwame asked, startled.

  “Soldiers plunder from their own citizens. So why not murder Mason for his truck?”

  Kwame considered this possibility, sipping beer and staring at the river. Suddenly the atmosphere on the terrace changed. It was as if electrons had started crackling and dancing about.

  “Eh bien!” exclaimed Odejimi, looking behind him. The men had been speaking English together. Now Odejimi switched to French. “Finally you’ve come.”

  Kwame turned. He saw the woman who appeared clothed in Mason’s photos. He had heard her called Femme d’un Blanc, white man’s woman; she had apparently been married to a Belgian who abandoned her. Barefoot and in European clothes, she moved toward them across the terrace. Odejimi turned back to the mankala board to demonstrate that he was tired of waiting for her. Kwame rose from his chair and watched the woman approach him. She seemed to exude a force field that caused his skin to prickle.

  Words tiptoed into his literature professor’s head. “A wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.” Conrad describing Kurtz’s woman. The passage surprised Kwame for it did not seem to fit this woman. Still the words were there: “She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent.” The woman was more beautiful than in Mason’s photo, mor
e inscrutable. Even so, strangely, Kwame had some inkling as to why Conrad chose those words.

  He set his beer on the terrace railing and offered the woman a chair. “Merci, M’sieur,” she said, her voice soft and melodious.

  “Van, this is Kwame Johnson from America,” Odejiimi said to her. He nodded at Kwame. “Madame Vandenbroucke, wife of a Flemish asshole who took her to Belgium, then left her high and dry. His family sent her back here. Lucky for us, huh?”

  The woman did not react to this recitation of her personal history.

  Turning back to the mankala board, Odejimi ordered, “Begin.” Madame Van picked seeds out of a mankala cup and proceeded to distribute them around the board.

  “Would you like something to drink, Madame?” Kwame asked.

  “Thank you.” She glanced at him with the slightest of smiles. Electrons started crackling; his skin prickled. “A beer, if you please.”

  Kwame brought Madame Van a bottle of Primus and poured some into a glass. Again she said, “Merci.” Kwame poured himself some beer and positioned his chair so that he could observe the game and at the same time without seeming to he could watch the woman. Fortunately he wore dark glasses; where he looked would be hard for the others to discern.

  Madame looked at him occasionally, her gaze as enigmatic as a sphinx. Her eyes disclosed nothing; he had no idea what she was thinking. Still he decided she epitomized grace. Embodied a dignity that was deeply sensual. Or was it a sensuality that was deeply dignified? He wasn’t sure. She had married a Belgian. She had known Mason and was a friend of Odejimi. So she was a woman who welcomed outsiders. That would be unusual in a place like Mban. Kwame tried not to stare at her. Odejimi would be watching too.

  The doctor studied the board and the seeds, shaking his head, his mouth tufted with perplexity. Madame Van glanced at him, amused. She picked up the seeds from one of the cups and, hardly watching the board, distributed them counter-clockwise. She dropped the last seed into a cup on the doctor’s side containing two other seeds. She scooped all three from the cup and tossed them idly into a saucer at her end of the board.