Читать книгу White - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 12

5

MEMOIRS OF THE LITTLE WITCH

I stood on a vast, misted river, staring for the far, dim shore with a longing as palpable as a bruised organ. Then a siren rang out and the dream vaporized to the electric blatting of the telephone. It sounded like a phaser in an old sci-fi flick.

The grenade was absent on the windowsill, and I now saw how different the room was—all the modernization I’d failed to notice upon my jetlagged arrival.

I coughed and cleared my throat, said, “Oui, bonjour,” into my shoulder as a test run to make sure my vocal cords worked, and then snatched the receiver.

“C’est moi,” a woman said—Sola, I realized, and was fully awake. “I’m heading over to meet the anthropologist and the girl. Would you like to join?”

“Yes. Of course,” I replied, pestered by my relief that she had yet to see him. She told me which neighborhood she’d stayed in and where the anthropologist lived, and we calculated that she was coming from a different direction. Picking me up would add an hour to her trip in Kinshasa traffic, so I said I’d take a taxi.

“If you get there first,” she told me, “please wait. It would be best if I introduce you.”

On the drive, I realized that I’d forgotten how difficult it was to hold Kinshasa in my mind—to see it fully. So much was constantly happening on all sides that, even as I stared out the taxi window, the city came only in glimpses: people talking, vending, bartering, arguing, relaxing, sleeping on the roadside, eating at tiny stands beneath patched beer umbrellas, or running through traffic.

The building I arrived at was a single story of concrete, with the drabness of a storehouse but not the height, the starkness of a public school but too few windows and doors. Only when my entrance interrupted Sola’s argument with the anthropologist, and I heard its subject, did I decide the ambience was that of a jail.

Bram Rees was dapper, with leather half boots, ironed khakis, a white linen shirt, and a blue bandana knotted at his throat. I checked my impulse to judge, since, had I the same boyish face, I might also have indulged in a little sartorial character building. He was a redhead, sprucely coiffed, but with large Raggedy Ann freckles so tightly clustered on each cheek they looked, from a distance, like a circle of rouge, such as you might expect on a porcelain doll.

“One second,” Sola told me when I came in the door, holding up a finger in my direction while still facing him. She was flushed, her curly hair loose, and she wore jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt.

“Sola,” Bram said, “can we not bring this up in front of our guest? He is after all”—and here his voice sounded like a stage whisper—“a journalist.” He opened his eyes wide in an expression I suspected had been with us since our simian days: a way of saying danger.

“She was—is—a child,” Sola told him, “not a test subject.”

“I don’t see your point. Plenty of children are test subjects.”

“You locked her up. You locked up a child, like a prisoner.”

“She was insane. Is insane. She had a demon in her. She pointed her finger at me like this.” He shaped his hand into a gun and flicked his thumb to show the hammer coming down.

“Of course she did. You had her locked up. You didn’t earn her trust.”

Bram dodged Sola, took a long step toward me as if lunging with a rapier, and clasped my hand in both of his. His fragile, sun-distressed skin revealed anxiety and the many fine wrinkles that would soon bestow upon him the gravitas he craved.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Welcome, welcome. Sola told me that you might be interested in my rather challenging work.”

The story I gradually composed from their argument and Bram’s flustered explanations was that a police officer he’d tipped off to look for street children accused of sorcery—his subject of study for the past year—had brought in the white girl after she and her friends had robbed a pineapple vendor. Her wrists were bound with a zip tie, and she was hissing like a feral cat. When she tried to bite the officer, he jerked away. According to Bram, who mimicked the bass voice often used by African figures of authority in films, the officer said, “She is a demon, and you are looking for demons, and she is a white demon, so there was nowhere to take her but here.”

“I paid him well,” Bram told me, “because I have foresight.”

“You hoped to work with him again?” I said.

“Indeed. She looked like a child who might escape, though she has done so more easily than I expected. I figured I’d encourage him to see a market in returning her. I’ve already called him, and he is on the lookout.”

Bram then motioned me across the relatively long, rectangular room containing a table and his laptop, to a door. It opened on a small, windowless chamber with a cot, some blankets, a bottle of water, and a bucket.

“She escaped from here,” he said. “There’s no way out. But she told me that Mami Wata—a water siren often depicted as a snake charmer—would help her transform into a serpent and get free. It’s hard not to wonder …”

He turned, eyeing me with clear wariness and jealousy—of his story and of Sola, I suspected—but perhaps also considering me as a potential ally against her, who was watching us, arms crossed and chin lowered.

I was trying to think of how to insert myself into this situation inextricably, and I said, “I know a pastor who might be able to help. He’s knowledgeable and connected, though I’m sure you can reach out to pastors yourself.”

“Actually,” Bram replied, “I can’t. I’ve bothered them so much for my research on street children that they’re, well, they’re rather sick of me. They won’t even take my money, and that’s saying something here.”

“I can call him now,” I offered, and he simultaneously shrugged and nodded.

On my way over, in the taxi, I’d stopped to buy a SIM card from a street vendor and had inserted it into my phone. I now dialed Oméga’s number, and he answered on the second ring. He recalled the story of the girl and said that he’d be honored to help and knew where to take me. He just “happened to be free”—a serendipity that made me suspicious of what I might have that he could want. I gave him directions, and he said he would pick me up in an hour or so.

I conveyed all of this to Bram, who nodded without thanking me. He placed his knuckles to his lips in contemplation and paced a few steps like that.

“If I agree to share my notes with you,” he said, “and if I agree to let you write about this, then we will have to come to an agreement.”

“What sort of agreement?” I asked, holding back a smile.

“We’ll have to sign a contract saying that I retain full intellectual rights and above all, film rights.”

I understood his concern. He was certain that he’d struck gold and was more likely to turn a profit if I wrote about him, but he didn’t want to lose control of the material.

“Wouldn’t the film rights belong to the girl?” I asked.

“She’s a minor,” he said.

“Or to her family then?”

“I am, or will be, technically, her guardian.”

Sola groaned behind us and walked out of the room, into the hallway.

Years ago, I’d read—in one of my mother’s many books on how to live more peacefully—that when someone annoyed me, I should picture the more mature and thoughtful individual they would grow into and speak to that person instead, but with Bram all I could conjure up was a goaty, desiccated, neurotic professor: calculating, ranking his life’s experiences, dividing them between wins and injustices.

I considered his proposal. He wasn’t the first interviewee to express concern that he might lose film rights, and I knew that without signing a contract, my access to this story would be limited to what Sola might share with me at some later time.

“Sure,” I said, and he snatched a notepad and began writing up the terms.

“Just something rudimentary,” he told me, “but enough to affirm that our handshake has a legal basis.”

We signed the basic condition that he would retain film rights to his story and the girl’s, though I was fairly sure no court would view him as the proprietor of her experiences. He gleefully hurried to the table and began sorting papers.

“Where do you think your article will be published?”

“It’s hard to say at this point. I’ll have to work up a pitch.”

“I’ve been translating and editing this all night. I’m basically trying to reduce hours of interviews with her down to a single coherent story.”

“She answered questions for hours?”

“It took a lot of candy …”

He handed me a sheaf of papers and led me to a room he’d decorated as a lounge, with cushioned chairs and a cracked terrarium empty but for some kind of palm growing in a lump of soil. He then left to find Sola, and their voices reached me, staccato at first before easing to the solemn tones of shared concern.

On the first page, a photo was printed on computer paper in black and white. It struck me as insensitive: the girl’s washed face, her pale eyes and stringy hair—the sort of image you’d expect of a child who’d been thrown into freezing water and was clambering out, looking up. The concrete room behind her blurred away, and her face seemed blank, waiting to be inhabited by the words I was about to read.

I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

That where my story begin, so stop asking. Never was a mother. Never was no father but the Father, and He won’t forgive me. Only the Demon want me. He hunt me in the street. Each time the preacher try to save me, God keep quiet, and I go back to the demon’s arms. There is human flesh in my belly. Preachers take it out, but an empty belly mustn’t stay empty, so the demon, he put it back in.

You not the first demon who catch me. Even if you trap my story in that little box, I will escape.

[…]

I was with Keicha and Marvine, on the edge of the market, in a comfortable piece of shadow when the fruit truck come. My stomach was in my eyes, and all it hold was those fat pineapples jiggling beneath the tarp. That’s why he see me before I see him—the demon. I turn to make sure no police was spying us eating free dinner inside our heads, and there he was, whiter than a dead man in the rain, staring with eyes the color of a dead eye, the color of the grease on a puddle you never drink from.

I see Awax and Eudes, little boys, not yet proud of their cocks, good runners but not like Marvine—she yanké.¹ She have lupemba² and speed so fast because she run in two worlds. You see just her scrap of skirt sailing and that pink bow in her hair. All of us go for different pineapple. The driver, he have wrench. He bang Eudes on the skull. Eudes always mbakasa.³ He the sweetest, like little brother, even if he yuma.⁴ He fall so fast I know he gone. The rest of us we get away, but I see the demon in the sunlight, watching.

We find place to eat. We eating and crying. We eat till there blisters in our mouths and each golden bite hurts. I have half a pineapple and I see some older girls and run to sell it. That when I get jumped. Comes fast like being knocked down by wind. A man on me. Police man from the look of the sleeve I bite. He push my face in dirt, tie my hands, pull me up on my knees. Just in front, there’s a dog drinking from a puddle, looking at me with Eudes’s eyes. ‘Don’t drink that!’ I shout as the man carry me past. Eudes have a weak stomach, always thirsty. Maybe that why he jump in this dog. To dog, even piss is whiskey. Except dogs don’t last as long as street kids.

I flipped the pages back to the girl’s photo. It now seemed to evoke the story I was reading—eyes so accepting of the faint light that they could be haunted or emptied to make space for determination.

I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

Demon tell me this first time he catch and turn me white. It was police again. They came in when we were sleeping. Police hand on my ankle like snakebite.

Then I’m in a room with the demon. White skin, white hair, white eyes. Nothing in him have color. He was white. White like a hot sky.

He was speaking words I don’t know. Then he talk le français, but like with half a tongue, half a tongue with a bonbon on it. He switch to Lingala. Quarter tongue now.

Where are you from? he ask first thing, the way you do, like only that matter.

Here.

But before? Where were you born?

In the sky, I tell him.

In the sky?

He don’t believe me.

I come from the sky. I live in Kinshasa, but sometimes at night I fly to the forests and I dance with the spirits.

So you live in Kinshasa? he ask, not dumb—demons aren’t dumb—but trying to trick me, to get me to say something he can use to enter me. But I come from the sky. That the kind of witch I am. Sky witch. Marvine took me to the old lady who told me that. She say that Mami Wata love sky witch because the wind makes the water move. Now we know. It give us power.

I bought you from the police, he tell me.

You not the first, I say.

It was expensive, he tell me.

Go cry blood, I say.

The demon, he undress me. He drag me in a room so small—small as my heart when he inside it—and he pull off my clothes. He throw me in water hot as rain from hell. He was cooking me. Staring. Big white hungry eyes. Like mean cat watching fat man at dinner.

But then, like he want to chat up his soup, he say, You’re white. He point. Where are you from?

I look down and scream. My color wash off. I scream and hold my skin. I scream for help. I scream for spirits. I even give scream for the Father, but He don’t answer, busy with the holy people. He already know I am witch.

The door creaked as Sola slipped in like a double agent. I jumped a little, so caught up that I felt guilty. I had goose bumps, and many thoughts—above all concerning who the man was. I couldn’t stop thinking of Richmond Hew, of what both Terra and the disaffected conservationist had said about his appetite for girls, and I wondered if he sometimes left the rainforest and spent time in Kinshasa.

“How’s the reading coming?” she asked.

“It’s disturbing.”

She sat down in the chair next to me and studied my face.

“The look in your eye,” she said, “please make it that of a man searching not for the next great story but rather for an abandoned child.”

“I know,” I said too quickly.

She put her hand on my forearm.

“This is a little girl, and she’s out there, being hunted down by police right now. She’s been sexually abused. She’s been a child prostitute. And when the police catch her, they might rape her before they bring her here.”

“I understand,” I said, though I hadn’t really. When I’d arrived, I’d wondered if Sola had a genuine interest in me or whether she’d invited me as a barrier against Bram. I realized that maybe none of this was about me.

“Bram is so fascinated with the demon,” she said, “that he doesn’t seem the least bit bothered that the girl saw her friend get murdered for trying to feed himself.”

I nodded gravely, embarrassed that this death hadn’t registered with me more—no doubt the fault of the text’s faux literary style. After a pause, Sola told me that she’d just listened to some of the recording in Lingala.

“The girl actually said ‘I came here on a knife.’ And then she changed it later, when Bram asked her about the ocean, to ‘I crossed the ocean on a knife.’ He asked, ‘What kind of knife,’ and she said, ‘I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife and I used it to cut open this little girl’s heart.’”

I ran my thumb along the edges of the papers.

“I was wondering about that. The translation’s dialect is hard to place.”

She laughed soundlessly, almost sadly.

“Years back, Bram spent some time in Jamaica, as a research assistant for a professor, and he fancies himself an expert on its culture and literature. He thought that translating the girl’s Lingala and street French into standard English would be a misrepresentation, and he decided that this”—she gestured derisively toward the papers—“this lewd approximation of Jamaican dialect would render her character.”

Though hushed, her voice conveyed so much emotion that I found myself wondering if she had some Jamaican heritage herself.

“Anyway.” She squeezed my arm. “Thank you for helping with this and for calling the pastor. I’ll let you get back to reading.”

As she stood to leave, my desire lurched within me, a bodily motion, though I held still. I hated attraction like this and often, in response, I worked my mind into a disciplined state and deconstructed my perceptions, convincing myself that I knew nothing about the person, that—in terms of raw data—she hardly existed behind my projections. But doing this also made me look more closely, and I wanted to look now, to ask questions, but the door was already closing.

I settled my gaze on the page: this slight connection to a child whose humanity seemed no more than the idea of a child and yet could connect me—if I made myself sensitive to it—to Sola, who herself was less a person in my mind than the idea of potential I loved so much.

There was the line again. It glowed like the light emitted from a bulb whose incandescing prevents you from seeing the object at its source.

I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

But I will never tell you the secrets of the streets. Magic is no choice. We do it to survive. Hunger get so bad your feet turn to roots so you can live on the juice of the earth. You walk past little trees and they are children. Skinny branches for arms. Heads a bush of leaves gobbling up sunlight. We do that for an hour or two, hoping no greedy cook come and cut us down to make fire in her kitchen.

You think I don’t know things. I live with my écurie.⁵ We have secret places. We have friends. The mokonzi⁶ love us and bring presents from far away. At night, we fly to jungle and dance with spirits. Or we fly to Europe. We drink blood from diamond cups, eat sweet pudding from human flesh, pudding so thick and strong it run into our bones and make them creak like the hot metal of old truck, when you hiding under it.

I tell you this story for your bonbons, but I will kill you, white demon. Mami Wata and I will cut your throat and pour your blood into a diamond glass, and we will drink it and laugh. She will turn me into a snake and I will leave through these walls.

I closed my eyes, commanding my brain to remember what Sola had asked of me—that I was reading about a twelve-year-old child abandoned here. It was hard to see her as blameless when she sounded so certain, so determined to kill.

Again I thought of the white man who’d bathed her—who’d maybe been trying to save her—and of Hew, and then of Oméga’s words about how the spirits left nothing to chance. But I was inclined to believe that the story we wanted to tell led us, shifting the focus of the world.

I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

The streets call me. My sisters dance and the spirits hear them. They bring me. They cut the sky in two and let me in.

I know you want to hear about the graveyard of souls, because you want to know how I will kill you. You should be giving me libulu ya mbongo.⁷ No? Some pelouse⁸ maybe? No? Then give me the whole bag of bonbons.

Okay, it’s easy. You do the business as usual. You spread the legs for mbongo, but you be sure to use the kapote.⁹ He do his thing fast. It always fast, not like the older boys in the street, the ones who like you, who have nothing to run home to. The mokonzi, they just want something extra. So we girls catch their poison in the kapote, and we knot it, and we take it to the graveyard.

We get down between the headstones and make sure no demon is close. We dig holes and then we stick crooked branches in the ground and hang the kapote.

At first, nothing happen. Those ugly bags of man sap hang in the dark. Then the moon shine in them, and the light inside the rubber start, like spark in dry grass. It get bigger until it bright like to blind us and we see the demon seed squirming inside. Then, from every side of the graveyard, the spirits of the mokonzi appear, walking like they have broken knees, arms out like this, like zombie, tripping and reaching …

My cell rang, followed by honking outside. Oméga had arrived. I didn’t want to stop reading, but making him wait wouldn’t be respectful.

I stood and called to Bram and Sola that I was leaving.

“It’s no problem,” he said, appearing in the doorway, “you can finish later.”

“Do you mind if I take this copy?” I held up the manuscript.

“I do. I’d like to retain control of the material until I have a polished draft and we’ve finalized our contractual agreement.”

I hadn’t expected this and glanced at the pages, unsure of what to say.

He came nearer and slid them from my hand. He smiled, standing uncomfortably close and showing two rows of small, straight, very white teeth.

“Be patient,” he said. “A cliffhanger is nothing more than an interruption.”

1. Strong, derived from the word Yankee. Despite the negative influence Americans exert on the Congo, Yankee has become a term for power. (All notes in this chapter are from the text of Bram Rees.)

2. Good luck, also whiteness. This juxtaposition is striking: whiteness as strength and whiteness as evil. In post-independence Congo, whiteness is seen as the source of harm—the force that has kept many Congolese in servitude, with Western powers manipulating the government so as to exploit the Congo’s resources. And yet whiteness also embodies savvy and power.

3. Weak and unable to find money.

4. Idiot.

5. Gang; literally “stable” in French, as in “horse stable.”

6. Big men; powerful men.

7. A whole lot of money (mbongo).

8. Marijuana, literally “lawn” in French.

9. Condom.