Love and Obstacles

Stairway to Heaven

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drums: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I could not tell.

I was sixteen, of the age when fear aroused inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug up a brand-new moleskin journal from my suitcase — the drums still summoning the vast forces of darkness — and wrote on the first page

Kinshasa 7.7.1983 only to hear my parents’ bedroom door violently open, Tata cursing and stomping away. I leapt out of bed — Sestra, startled, started whimpering — and ran after Tata, who had already flipped on the lights in the living room. I bumped into Mama cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms. All the lights were on now; a gang of moths fluttered hopelessly inside a light fixture; there were cries and screams; cymbals crashed all around us. It was terrifying.

“Spinelli,” Tata exclaimed against the noise. “What a dick.”

Tata slept in flannel pajamas far more appropriate for an Alpine ski resort than for Africa — air-conditioning allegedly hurt his kidneys. But before he left the apartment, he also put on a pith helmet, lest his bald dome be exposed to draft. When he furiously vanished into the drumming murk of the stairway, Sestra, now crying, pressed her face against Mama’s side; I stood in my underwear, my feet cold on the bare floor, a pen still in hand. The possibility of his not returning flickered in the darkness; it did not cross my mind to go after him; Mama did not try to stop him. The stairway light went on, and we heard a plangent chime. The drums were still rolling; another plaintive ding-dong fit snugly into the beat. Tata abandoned the bell and started pounding at the door, shouting in his stunted English:

“Spinelli, you are very crazy. Stop noise. We are sleep. It is four in the morning.”

Our apartment was on the sixth floor; there must have been scores of people living in the building, but it appeared to have been abandoned in a hurry. The moment the stairway light went off again, the drumming stopped, the show was over. The door opened, and a nasal American voice said: “I’m sorry, man. I absolutely apologize.”

By the time I went back to bed, it was dawning already. In the trees outside, a nation of birds replaced the blood-sucking bats and was now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life. Sleeping and dreaming were beyond me now, nor could I write. Smoking on the balcony, I waited for everything to make sense until it couldn’t. Down on the street a scarcely clad man squatted by a cardboard box with cigarettes lined up on it. There was nobody else on the street. It seemed that he was guarding the cigarettes from some invisible peril.

In the early eighties, Tata was absent, working in Zaire as a minor Yugoslav diplomat in charge of communications (whatever that meant). Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, I responded to the infelicity of adolescence and the looming iniquity of adulthood by retreating into books; Sestra was twelve, oblivious of the ache sprouting inside me; Mama was midlife miserable and lonely, which I could not see at the time, my nose stuck in a book. I read compulsively, only occasionally reaching the surface of common reality to take in a fetid breath of other people’s existence. I would read all night, all day, instead of doing my homework; in school, I would read a book hidden under the desk, a felony frequently punished by a junta of class bullies. It was only in the imaginary space of literature that I felt comfortable and safe — no absent father, no depressed mother, no bullies making me lick the book pages until my tongue was black with ink.

I met Azra checking out books at the school library, and I immediately liked the readerly quietude on her bespectacled face. I walked her home, slowing down whenever I had something to say, stopping when she did. She had no interest in The Catcher in the Rye; I had not read Quo Vadis, feigned interest in The Peasant Uprising. It was clear, however, that we shared a passion for imagining lives we could live through others — a necessary ingredient of any love. Quickly we found a few books we both liked: The Time Machine, Great Expectations, And Then There Were None. That first day we talked mostly about The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country. We loved it, even though it was a children’s book, because we both could identify with a small creature lost in the big world.

We started dating, which meant that we often read to each other on a bench by the Miljacka, kissing only when we ran out of things to talk about, making out cautiously, as though letting it all go would have spent the quaint, manageable intimacy we had accrued. I was perfectly happy whispering a passage from Franny and Zooey or The Long Goodbye into her hair. So when Tata announced, upon his returning to Sarajevo on leave, that we would all spend the summer of ’83 in Africa together, I felt a strange relief: if Azra and I were apart, we could resist the torturous temptation and eschew the taint that the body inescapably inflicts upon the soul. I promised I would write to her every day, in my journal, as letters from Africa would arrive long after my return. I would record every thought, I promised, every feeling, every experience, and as soon as I came back, we would reimagine it all together, reading, as it were, the same book.

There were many things I wanted to note down that first night in Kinshasa: the west ablaze, the east impenetrably dark as we crossed the equator at sunset; the perfect recollection of the smell of her hair; a line from The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country that we had both liked so well: I have to find my way home before the fall, before the leaves cover the path. But I wrote nothing and assuaged my conscience by ascribing it to the drumming disturbance. What I didn’t write stayed in the back room of my mind, like the birthday presents I was not allowed to open until everyone had left the party.

In any case, the following morning Sestra was in the living room, looking with vague fascination at a puny man in a T-shirt depicting an angel shot in midair. Mama was sitting across the coffee table from him, listening intently to his high-pitched warbling, her legs crossed, the hem of her skirt curved over the northern hemisphere of her knee.

“Svratio komšija Spinelli,” she said. “Nemam pojma šta pria.”

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good afternoon, buddy,” Spinelli said. “The day is almost over.” He exposed a set of teeth evenly descending in size from the center toward the cheeks, like organ pipes. Sestra smiled along with him; he had both of his hands parked on his thighs, and they were calmly immobile, resting before the next task. Which was to push apart the two curls parenthesizing his forehead. The curls instantly returned to the original position, their tips symmetrically touching his eyebrows.

That was the first time I faced Spinelli, and from that moment on, his face kept changing, although all the changes are unified now in the two wrinkles between his eyes, parallel like an equation sign, and that delicate, snarly smile that always came at the end of his sentences. He said: “Sorry for the noise. A bored dog does crazy things.”

At sixteen I spent a lot of energy affecting boredom: the eye-roll; the terse, short answers to parental inquisition; the practiced blankness of expression in response to some real-life saga my parents were imparting. I had built an ironclad shield of indifference that allowed me to escape, read, and return to my cell without anyone’s noticing. But the first week in Africa, the boredom was real. I could not read; I kept scanning the same — twenty-seventh — page of Heart of Darkness and could not move beyond it. I tried to write to Azra, but found nothing to say, probably because there was so much to say.

There was certainly nothing to do. I was not allowed to go out alone into the human jungle of Kinshasa. For a while I watched TV, broadcasting Mobutu’s rants and commercials featuring cans of coconut oil floating in the blue sky of affordable happiness. Once or twice, in the middle of the day, I even felt a rare, inexplicable desire to be with my family, but Tata was at work; Sestra guarded her budding sovereignty with her Walkman turned way up; Mama was remote, interned in the kitchen, probably crying. The ceiling fan spun sluggishly, incessantly, cruelly reminding me that time here passed at the same mind-numbingly slow speed.

Tata was a great promiser, a fabulist of possibilities. Back in Sarajevo, he had projected on the vast, blank canvas of our socialist provincialism the Kinshasa that was a hive of neocolonial pleasures: exclusive clubs with pools and tennis courts; diplomatic receptions frequented by the international jet set and spies; cosmopolitan casinos and exotic lounges; safaris in the wilderness and Philippe, a native cook whom he had hired away from a Belgian by increasing his wage to a less piddling amount. That first, uneventful week these promises were drably betrayed — not even Philippe showed up for work. When Tata came home from the embassy, we had humdrum dinners Mama improvised from what she had discovered in the fridge: wizened peppers and sunken papayas, peanut paste and animal flesh that may have been goat meat.

Determined to dispel the cloud of tedium hanging over us, Tata finally put a call in to the Yugoslav ambassador and invited ourselves to his residence in Gombe, where all the important diplomats lived. The mansions there were large, the lawns were wide, majestic flowers bloomed in impeccably groomed bushes, the venerable Congo flowed serenely. His Excellency and his excellent wife were polite and devoid of any human vigor or storytelling talent. We sat in their receiving room, the adults passing around statements (“Kinshasa is strange”; “Kinshasa is really small”) like a sugar bowl. Exotic trophies were carefully positioned around the room: a piece of Antwerp bobbin lace on the wall; an ancient Mesopotamian rock on the coffee table; on the bookshelf, a picture of Their Excellencies on a snow-capped mountain. A servant with an implausible red sash brought in the drinks — Sestra and I were each given a glass of lemonade with a long silver spoon. I dared not move, and when Sestra, abruptly and inexplicably, rolled like a happy dog on the ankle-deep Afghan carpet, I feared our parents would renounce us.

As soon as we returned home, I went up to Spinelli’s place. He opened the door wearing the shot-angel shirt and shorts, his legs stilt-thin. He did not seem at all surprised to see me, nor did he ask what brought me around. “Come on in,” he said, smoking, a drink in his hand, music blasting behind him. I lit up; I had not smoked all day, and I was starved for nicotine. The smoke descended into my lungs like feathery silk, then out, thickly, through the nose; it was so beautiful I was breathless and dizzy. Spinelli was playing air drums along with the loud music, a half-burnt cigarette in the center of his mouth. “ ‘Black Dog,’ ” he said. “God damn.” In the far corner, right under the window, was a set of drums; the golden cymbals trembled under the stream from the air conditioner.

Playing imaginary drum solos and bridges, Spinelli made unsolicited confessions: He had grown up in a rough Chicago neighborhood and beat it as soon as he could; he had lived in Africa forever; he worked for the U.S. government, and could not tell me what his job was, for if he did he would have to kill me. He started each sentence sitting down, then finished standing up; the next one was accompanied by banging of the invisible drums. He never stopped moving; the space organized itself around him; he exuded so much of himself I felt absent. Only after I had, exhausted, left his place could I really think at all. And so I thought that he was a true American, a liar and a braggart, and that hanging out with him was far more stimulating than the shackles of family life or the excellent diplomats in Gombe. At some point during his streaming, restless monologue, he christened me, for no apparent reason, Blunderpuss.

I went back upstairs a couple of days later, and then again the following day. Mama and Tata seemed fine with that, for if I took my boredom away, we could all avoid long stretches of crabby silence. They must have thought also that engaging with the real world and its inhabitants without actually going out was good for me, and I got to practice my English too. As for me, I smoked at Spinelli’s as much as I wanted; the music was much louder than my parents would ever permit; he poured whiskey in my glass before it was half empty. He even showed me how to play drums a bit — I loved smashing the cymbals. But most of all I enjoyed his narratives: he delivered them slouching back in the sofa, blowing cigarette smoke toward the fast-spinning ceiling fan, sipping his J&B, interrupting his delivery for a solo in a Led Zeppelin song. There might be a taint of death, a flavor of mortality, in lies, but Spinelli’s were fun to listen to.

He had run a cigarette-selling business in high school, and had regularly had sex with his geography teacher. He had hitchhiked across America: in Oklahoma, he drank with Indians who fed him mushrooms that took him to where their spirits lived — the spirits had big asses with two holes, which smelled equally of shit; in Idaho, he lived in a cave with a guy who watched the sky all day long, waiting for a fleet of black helicopters to descend upon them; he smuggled cattle from Mexico into Texas, cars from Texas to Mexico. Then he was in the Army: avoiding rough deployment by applying onion to his dick so as to fake an infection; whoring around in Germany, cutting up a Montenegrin pimp in a disco. Then Africa: sneaking into Angola to help out Savimbi’s freedom fighters; training the Ugandan special forces with the Israelis; setting up a honey trap in Durban. He told his tales laterally, moving across his life without regard for chronology.

Afterward, I would lie in my bed, trying to organize his stream of consciousness in my giddy head so that I could write it down for Azra. But I failed, for now I could see the loopholes in the texture of his tales, the inconsistencies and contradictions and the plain bullshit. The stories were unimpeachable when he was telling them, but would have been obvious lies if written down. Once I was out of his proximity, he made little sense; he had to be physically present in his own narratives to make them plausible. Therefore I sought his presence; I kept going upstairs.

One night I went up, but Spinelli was all dressed and ready to go, wearing an unbuttoned black shirt, reeking of shower and cologne, a gold chain dangling below his Adam’s apple. He lit a cigarette at the doorstep, inhaled, and said, “Let’s go!” and I followed without a question. It did not even cross my mind to let my parents know where I was going. They never came to check on me when I was upstairs, and the boredom I had endured certainly entitled me to some adventure. It turned out we were going to a casino around the corner.

“The guy who owns the casino is Croatian,” Spinelli said. “Used to be in the Foreign Legion, fought in Katanga, then in Biafra. I don’t wanna know the things he did. We do business sometimes, and his daughter likes me pretty well too.”

I could not see his lips moving as we walked, his voice was disembodied. I was vibrating with curiosity, but could not think of anything to ask him: the reality he implied was so solid as to be impassable. We turned the corner, and there was a splendid neon sign reading PLAYBOY CASINO, the S and O flickering uncertainly. A few white cars and military jeeps were parked on the gravel lot. On the stairs stood a few hookers in ridiculously high heels, neither climbing nor descending, as though afraid they might fall if they moved. But move they did as we passed them; one of them grabbed my forearm — I felt her long nails bending against my sweaty skin — and turned me toward her. She wore a helmetlike purple wig and earrings as elaborate as Christmas ornaments, her breasts pushed up by her tiny bra so I could see half of her left nipple. I stood petrified until Spinelli released me from her grip. “You don’t fuck much, Blunderpuss, do you?” he said.

Three men were sitting at the roulette table, all plain drunk, their heads falling on their chests between the revolutions of the wheel. The heavy fog of masculine recklessness hung over the table, the green of the felt fractured by the piles of colorful chips. One of the men won, snapped out of his torpor to take the chips with both of his arms, as if embracing a child. “Watch the croupier steal from them,” Spinelli said with delight. “They’re going to lose it all before they get another drink, then they’ll lose some more.” I did watch the croupier, but could not see how the stealing happened: when they won, he pushed the chips toward them; when they lost, he raked the pile toward himself. It all seemed simple and honest, but I believed Spinelli, fascinated with abomination. I started composing a description of this place for Azra. The hallway of hell: the cone of smoke rising to the light above the blackjack table; the hysterical flashing of the two slot machines in the corner; the man standing at the bar in the attire of a plantation owner, light linen suit and straw hat, his right hand hanging down from the bar like a sleeping dog’s head, a ribbon of cigarette smoke slowly passing his knuckles.

“Let me introduce you to Jacques,” Spinelli said. “He’s the boss.”

Jacques put the cigarette in his mouth, shook Spinelli’s hand, then looked me over without saying a word.

“This is Blunderpuss, he’s Bogdan’s kid,” Spinelli said. Jacques’s face was perfectly square, the nose perfectly triangular; his neck was less like a tree stump than a stovepipe of flesh. He bespoke the chummy ruthlessness of someone whose life was organized around his profit and survival; as far as he was concerned, I did not exist in the world of straightforward facts. He put out his cigarette and, in English marred with clunky Croatian consonants, said to Spinelli: “What I am going to do with those bananas? They are rotting.”

Spinelli looked at me, shook his head in bemused disbelief, and said: “Put them in a fruit salad.”

Jacques grinned back at him and said: “Let me tell you joke. Mother has very ugly child, horrible, she goes on train, sits in coupe. People come in her coupe, they see child, is very ugly, they cannot look, they leave, go away, disgusting child. Nobody sits with them. Then comes man, smiles at mother, smiles at child, sits down, reads newspapers. Mother thinks, Good man, likes my child, is real good man. Then man takes one banana and asks mother: ‘Does your monkey want banana?’ ”

Spinelli didn’t laugh, not even when Jacques repeated the punch line: “Does your monkey want banana?” Instead, he asked Jacques: “Is Natalie here?”

I followed Spinelli through a bead curtain into a room with a blackjack table and four men sitting at it; they all wore uniforms, one of them sand-khaki, the other three olive-green. Natalie was the dealer, her fingers long and limber as she dealt the cards; her pallor was luminous in the dark room; her arms were skinny, no muscles whatsoever; she had bruises on her forearms, scratches on her biceps. On her shoulder she had a vaccine mark, like a small-coin imprint. Spinelli sat at the table and nodded at her, slamming a cigarette pack against his palm. Her cheeks rose, quotation marks forming around her smile. Having dealt the cards, she raised her hand, gently, as though lifting a veil, and scratched her forehead with her pinkie; her hair, pulled tightly into a ponytail, shimmered on her temples. She blinked slowly, calmly; it appeared that pulling her long eyelashes apart required effort. I stood in the dark enthralled, smoking, my heart beating fast, but calmly. Natalie was from out of this world, a displaced angel.

From thereon in, for a while, there were the three of us. We went places: Spinelli driving his Land Rover reeking of dogs and rope, drumming on the wheel, slapping the dashboard instead of a cymbal, calling Natalie his Monkeypie; Natalie smoking in the passenger seat, looking out; me in the back, the breeze from the open window blowing the cigarette smoke intoxicatingly mixed with her smell directly in my face. The three of us: Spinelli, Monkeypie, Blunderpuss, like characters in an adventure novel.

On July 27—I remember because I made another attempt at writing — we went to the Cité to look for Philippe, who still hadn’t shown up for work. Presumably, this was a means for Spinelli to expiate his drumming sins, arranged between Tata and him. Spinelli and Natalie picked me up at the crack of dawn; the light was still diffused by the residues of the humid night. We drove toward the slums, against the crowd marching in antlike columns: men in torn shorts and shreds for shirts; women wrapped in cloth, carrying baskets on their heads, swollen-bellied children trotting by their sides; emaciated, long-tongued dogs following them at a hopeful distance. I had never seen anything so unreal in my life. We turned onto a dirt road, which turned into a car-wide path of mounds and gullies. The Land Rover stirred up a galaxy of dust, even when moving at a low speed. Shacks misassembled from rusty tin and cardboard were lined up above a ditch, just about to tumble in. I understood what Conrad meant by inhabited devastation. A woman with a child tied to her back dipped clothes into tea-colored water and slapped the wet tangle with a tennis racket.

Soon a shouting mob of kids was running after the car. “Check this out,” Spinelli said, and hit the brakes. The kids slammed into the Land Rover; one of them fell on his ass, others backed off and watched, scared, the Land Rover moving on forward. “Oh, stop it!” Natalie said. As soon as the car caught some speed, the kids were running after it again; they didn’t see a Land Rover in the Cité too often. Spinelli hit the brakes again, slapping his thigh with glee. I could see the face of the tallest boy smash against the back window, blood blurting out of his nose. Spinelli’s laughter was deepchested, like the bark of a big dog, ending with a sucking noise. It was infectious; I was roaring with laughter myself.

We stopped in front of a church, where a choir was singing: thorough, somber voices. Spinelli went in to leave a message for Philippe; Natalie and I stayed behind. He pushed his way through the kids, who parted, murmuring: “Mundele, mundele.” I wanted to say something that would delight Natalie, but all I could think of was to ask: “What are they saying?” “It means ‘skinless,’ ” she said. The tall boy was still bleeding, but could not take his eyes off Natalie. She took a picture of him; he wiped his bloody nose and turned away from the camera; a few other kids covered their faces with their hands. I didn’t know what to say, so I closed my eyes and pretended to nap.

“You gonna have to get yourself a new cook, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli said, climbing into his seat. “That’s Philippe’s funeral they’re singing for. The man’s happily dead.”

From the Cité we went to the market — Le Grand Marché—and wandered around; it was too early to go home. All the smells and colors, all the stuff of the world: snakes, bugs, rats and rodents, clucking chickens and plucked fowl, flat fish, long fish, square fish, and skinned mongrel creatures that seemed to have been slapped together in hell. Spinelli bartered in Lingala and English, plus hands and grimaces. He pretended to be interested in a dried monkey, whose hands grasped nothingness with unappetizing despair; he picked through yams but didn’t buy any. Natalie took pictures of terrified goats waiting to be slaughtered under the counter, of eels still fidgeting in a beaten pot, of worms squirming in a shoe box, which the woman who was selling them protected from the lens with a newspaper.

These people had no abstract concept of evil, Spinelli said, like we did; for them it was black magic coming from a particular person, so if you wanted to get rid of the evil spell you eliminated the guy. The same thing with the good: it was not something you could aspire to, like we did; you couldn’t get it, either you had it or you didn’t. He delivered his anthropological lecture while bargaining over an enormous, baroque cluster of bananas; he bought it for nothing and loaded it on his shoulder. You could not die of hunger here, he said, ’cause bananas and papayas grew like weeds everywhere. That was why these people never learned to work; they never had to harvest and store food to survive. And their blood was thicker too, which explained why they slept all the time.

Nobody slept in the Grand Market; everybody was yelling, heckling, bargaining. A mass of people followed us, offering things we could not possibly need: toilet brushes, knitting needles, figurines carved out of what Spinelli claimed was human bone. I ventured to buy a bracelet made of elephant hair and ivory, but only after he had inspected it. It was supposed to be a gift for Azra.

Later that same day, we went to the InterContinental. We trod the leopard-patterned carpet to the lounge, where a ponytailed pianist played “As Time Goes By.” We got colorful cocktails with tiny umbrellas stuck in unknown fruit. There were men in Zairian attire: wide collars, no ties, bare chests with a lot of gold, hands bejeweled. Spinelli called them the Big Vegetables; they liked to stick out of Mobutu’s ass. And those expensive white whores with them came from Brussels or Paris; they spread their legs for two or three months, then took a little pouch of diamonds back home to live it up for the rest of the year. And that man over there was Dr. Slonsky, a Russian who had come twenty years earlier, when you had to import ass-wipes from Belgium. He used to be Mobutu’s personal physician, but currently he did only the Big Vegetables — Mobutu had a Harvard graduate taking care of him. Slonsky was constantly depressed, because he liked to shoot up.

Natalie sucked at her straw, not listening, as if she had heard it all already. “Are you okay, Monkeypie?” Spinelli asked her. I wanted to show, in solidarity with her, that I could not be fooled by Spinelli’s gossip, but in truth I was mesmerized.

Then there was Towser the Brit. His was a garden of earthly delights, with flowers you could not begin to name; his wife worked at the British embassy. And that scruffy youngster sitting next to him was their Italian boyfriend. They were talking to Millie and Morton Fester. They were New Yorkers, but liked to spend time in Africa; they dealt in tribal art, that kind of crap, most of it pilfered away from the natives by the Big Vegetables. Millie wrote fancy porn novels; Morton used to be a photographer for National Geographic, trawled the dark continent for images of bizarre animals. He had a full head of hoary hair, and huge glasses that extended beyond his sunken cheeks; she had the yellow teeth of a veteran smoker. Spinelli actually waved at them, and Morton waved back. Somehow, the waving confirmed Spinelli’s stories; he conjured them into existence with the motion of his hand.

Then we were joined by Fareed, a Lebanese whose head was smooth like a billiard ball and whom Spinelli affectionately called Dicknose. He bought us a round of drinks, and before I could even agree to it, we went up to Dicknose’s room, where he opened a black briefcase for us. There was a velvet cloth in it; he unwrapped it and proudly exhibited a tiny heap of uncut diamonds, sparkling like teeth in a toothpaste commercial. The diamonds had just arrived from Kasai, Dicknose said, fresh from the bowels of the earth. Natalie touched the heap with the tips of her fingers, worried that those nuggets of light might vanish; her nails were bitten to a bloody pulp. “All you need to make your girl-friend here happy, Blunderpuss, is twenty-five thousand dollars,” Spinelli said. Natalie looked at me and smiled, confirming the price.

From the InterContinental, we drove to Spinelli’s place through the haze of my exhilaration and the local humidity, past the American embassy, an eight-story building surrounded by a tall wall. Bored guards smoked behind the iron-grille gate. On the top of the embassy was a nest of sky-begging antennas. I imagined a life of espionage and danger; I imagined letters I would send to Azra from behind enemy lines; they would be signed with a false name, but she would recognize my handwriting: When you get this letter, my dear, I will be far beyond the reach of your love.

“This is where I defend freedom so I can pursue happiness,” Spinelli said. “One day I’ll take you there, Blunderpuss.”

As we climbed the stairs of our building, I walked by the apartment where my family should have been having dinner, but it felt as though they were not there, as though our place were empty. It could have been frightening, the absence, but I was too excited to care.

Straight from the doorstep, Spinelli went to his magneto-phone and turned it on. The reels started revolving slowly, indifferently. “Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Immigrant Song,’ ” he hollered, and then howled along with the music:

“AaaaAaaaAaaaaaaAaaa Aaaa. .”

I put my hands on my ears to exaggerate my suffering, and Natalie laughed. Still screaming, Spinelli rummaged through the debris on his coffee table until he found what I instantly identified as a joint. He interrupted his howl to light it up, suck it in briskly, and pass it on to Natalie. I was innocent in the way of drugs, but when Natalie, holding her breath so that her eyes were bulging and, somehow, bluer for that, when Natalie offered it to me, I took it and inhaled as much as I could. Naturally, I coughed it all out immediately, saliva and phlegm erupting toward her and Spinelli. Her laughter was snorty, pushing her cheek apples up, dilating her nostrils — she had to lie down and hold her tummy. A chenille of snot hung from my nose, nearly reaching my chin. “If you can’t stand the heat, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli whinnied, “stay out of the oven.” Well, I was enjoying the oven, and once the cough subsided, I sipped the smoke out of the joint and kept it in my lungs, resisting the devilish scratching in my throat, waiting for the high to arrive.

Spinelli sat at his drum set and grabbed the sticks. He listened intently to a different song now, waiting, only to hit the timpani hard, playing along with the music, biting his lips to express passion.

“The greatest goddamn bridge in the history of rock ’n’ roll,” he said. He attacked the timpani again, even though the song moved on, and he kept doing it. I recognized the beat: it was what had frightened us the first night.

“What’s the name of that song?” I asked.

“ ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” Spinelli said.

“It sounds so African.”

“That ain’t African. That’s Bonzo, white as they come.”

Natalie took the joint from my hand; her fingers were soft and cold, her touch eerily gentle. I leaned back and stared at the fan revolving frenziedly, as if a helicopter were buried upside down in the ceiling. Spinelli stopped drumming to get a hissy puff.

“See,” he said, exhaling, “you’re just an innocent kid, Blunderpuss. When I was your age I did things I wouldn’t do now, but I did them then so I don’t have to do them now.”

He was rewinding the tape, pressing the Stop and Play buttons alternately, trying to find the beginning. The tape squealed and yelped until he pinpointed the moment of silence before “Stairway to Heaven.”

“There’s so much you don’t know, son. Do you know what you don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You have no idea how much you don’t know. Before you know anything, you have to know what you don’t know.”

“I know.”

“The fuck you do.”

“Leave him alone,” Natalie said, dreamily.

“Shut up, Monkeypie.” He took another puff, spat on the minuscule butt, and flicked it toward the ashtray on the coffee table, missing by a yard. Then he asked me:

“Why are you here?”

“Here? In Kinshasa?”

“Forget Kinshasa, Blunderpuss. Why are you here on this goddamn planet? Do you know?”

“No,” I had to admit. “I don’t.”

Natalie sighed, suggesting she knew where it was all heading.

“Exactly,” Spinelli said, and smashed a cymbal with the sticks. “That’s exactly your problem.”

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Natalie asked me, extending her hand to touch me, but she couldn’t reach me and I couldn’t move.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“Listen to him: ‘Yeah, sure,’ ” Spinelli said. “He sounds like an American.”

“Let him be.”

But “Stairway to Heaven” was picking up, the drums kicking in. “That’s the way.” Spinelli leapt in excitement. “There is always a tunnel at the end of the light.”

By this time he was leaning over me, blocking the view of the ceiling fan.

“Steve,” Natalie said without conviction. “Leave him alone.”

“He is alone,” Spinelli said. “We live as we dream. Fucking alone.”

“That’s Conrad,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s Joseph Conrad.”

“No, no, no, no, never, sir. That ain’t no Joe Conrad. That’s the truth.”

He played the “Stairway to Heaven” bridge over my head, closing his eyes, curling his lower lip. Natalie leaned away from me, slipped her hand between her cheek and a pillow and closed her eyes, producing a celestial smile. He dropped next to me, his back to Natalie’s stomach.

“There’s a tribe here,” he went on, his voice lowered, “that believes that the first man and woman slid down from the skies on a rope. God let them down on a rope, they untied themselves and the boss pulled the rope up. And that’s exactly what happened, my friend. We were dropped down here and we wanna go back up, but there’s no rope. So here you are, Blunderpuss, and the rope is gone.”

He spread his arms to point at our surroundings: the coffee table with a pile of formerly glossy National Geographics, on top of which was Natalie’s camera; an overflowing ashtray and a bottle of J&B; ebony sculptures of stolid elephants and twiggy warriors, one of them draped in his T-shirt.

“But we can at least try to get up as high as possible,” he said, and excavated a tinfoil nugget from his pocket, unwrapped it with delectation, and showed me a lump of olive-green paste at its heart. “That’s why God gave us Afghanistan.”

The day I smoked pot for the first time was also the day I smoked hashish for the first time. Spinelli chipped slivers off the lump, then stuffed it down the narrow asshole of a clay pipe, murmuring: “Yessiree, Bob!” to himself. This time I had no trouble inhaling and releasing the smoke impressively slowly.

“I’m here,” Natalie said, and I passed the pipe to her. She smoked on her back, her eyes still closed. The smoke crawled out of her mouth, as though she were not breathing at all.

“See, I was much like you when I was a kid. I looked for hours at the map of South America, and Africa, and Australia. I thought: There the fuck I go,” Spinelli said.

He stared at me for an endless moment, as though he were looking at the map again. His eyes were dim; I had a hard time keeping my eyes open.

“And here I am. Because I believe in something. Everybody’s gotta believe in something. You gotta know your way.”

He leaned back into Natalie, who sneezed like a cat but remained impassive. My head and stomach were completely empty. I tried to inhale some air to fill the vacuum inside me, but it didn’t work. I was gasping, rapidly deflating, and it sounded like a giggle — I heard myself as someone else.

“You might wanna munch on a banana or something,” he said. “You are pale as shit.” Abruptly he stood up, startling me, and charged off to the kitchen. Natalie’s face was ashen, her lips pink; a single hair stretched from her forehead to her mouth, where it curved toward the right corner. Before I could make any decision, I inhaled and leaned toward her, planting a kiss where the hair touched her mouth. She opened her eyes and widened her smile until I could see her tongue tip protruding between her teeth.

I retreated into my throne of stupor just as Spinelli came back with a huge, blazingly yellow banana in hand. He offered it to me and said:

“Would the monkey like a banana?”

The monkey ate the banana, promptly passed out, and dreamt of two women, one fat, one slim, knitting black wool to the rhythm of drums, chanting angrily: “Spinelli! Spinelli! Spinelli!” Whereupon I woke to see Tata in his pith helmet and flannel pajamas yelling at Spinelli and shaking an enraged, ruddy finger before his face. Spinelli had his hands on his hips, and they slowly curled into fists; he was about to punch my father. I wanted to charge to Tata’s defense, but my limbs would not move. Natalie sat up and said: “Steve, let it go, let Bogdan take the boy home.” The bunched-up hair on the right side of her head had the shape of a harp, or half a heart.

“All right, man, I apologize. We were just partying a little,” Spinelli said. “Hopefully, it’s all bridge under the water.”

Walking downstairs was much like crossing an underwater bridge: an invisible stream pushed against my knees, I could not feel the solid concrete under my feet. Tata practically carried me, his hand grasped my flesh ungently, sternly. He talked to me, but I could hear only the tone of his voice: it was angry and quivering. Downstairs, Mama and Sestra sat on the couch like a two-member jury; Sestra watched me with slumberous amusement; Mama’s face was awash in tears. For some reason, it was all funny to me, and when Tata dropped me into the armchair across from them, I slid down to the floor and convulsed in laughter.

Later, in the middle of the night, I tottered to the kitchen, found the trash bin in the darkness, pressed the pedal to open the lid, and then pissed a thick, pleasurable stream into its mouth.

There was no talk given by my parents, no warnings about drugs and alcohol, no lectures about self-respect, no complaints about cleaning up the piss lake on the kitchen floor. They just stared at me, mute, across the dinner table: Tata worrisomely pouted, contemplating the troubling questions of my future; Mama pressed her hand against her cheek, shaking her head at the extraordinary bad luck in having me for a son, tear gems forming in the corners of her eyes.

I was forced to go everywhere they went: to Lolo La Crevette, where we devoured shrimp with Vaske, a malarial Macedonian prone to delivering unhurried reports on his talkative cockatoo; to the Portuguese club, where I watched two decrepit Frenchmen ineptly play tennis and scream at a skinny boy fetching their scattershot balls; to the Belgian supermarket, pristinely overlit, where everyone was immaculately white, as if the place had been magically transported from the pallid heart of Brussels. I often carried Heart of Darkness around and tried to read when no one was talking to me, which was very far from often enough. All I wanted was to be alone.

But I was alone only when I smoked on the balcony in the tarrish heat, hoping to see Spinelli or Natalie on the street, and I never did. There was no shuffling of the feet upstairs, no slamming of the door, no drumming or hollering along with Led Zeppelin. When I thought of our time together, I could not recall our doing anything or being anywhere. All I could recollect was his voice, mouthy and squeally, reciting his adventures: Spinelli going up the Congo with a crew of mercenaries, looking for a fallen Soviet satellite; Spinelli running into cannibals who thought he was a god because he produced a coin from behind the ear of a warrior; Spinelli in Angola, submerged in a shallow river up to his eyes, like a hippo, invisible to the Cuban patrol searching for him; Spinelli with a defector-to-be in a Durban restaurant, spooning raw monkey brain out of a cut-open skull.

One Sunday we went to the Czechoslovakian ambassador’s garden party in Gombe. There was beer and champagne, maracujá juice and punch; there were piles of nibblets and fruit, offered on vast trays by a couple of humble servants; there were the blonde twin daughters of the Romanian ambassador; there were Our Excellency and his wife; and there were a lot of wily communist kids scurrying around and taunting the angry chimpanzee in a cage by the garden shed. I wanted to find a quiet spot and read, but Tata compelled me to join a volleyball game. We played on the sandlot between two enormous palms whose leaves, like monster quills, hung high over the net. We were on the same team with a squat Bulgarian whose many gold chains rattled every time he swung to miss the ball, and with the Romanian twins, who leapt for the ball gracefully and fell down on their asses stupidly. Fortunately, there was also a Russian named Anton, tall and lanky, potato-nosed, gray-eyed. He was by far our best player and handily destroyed the other team. He showed me how to make my fingers flexible so the ball floated high enough for Tata to smack it into our ambassador’s excellently flabby flesh.

Anton was the only man who did not smoke or drink after the game; indeed, he did not even drink water; he knew how to retain control. I followed him and Tata to a table under an enormous umbrella; they spoke Russian to each other, and Anton’s voice was deep and curt, used to giving orders. He tapped on the table with his agitated finger; Tata threw his arms up; they looked at me every now and then. I did not understand what they were talking about, but I could hear the name Spinelli rising out of the Slavic gibberish. A flare of hope went up in my chest, and when I turned around I saw Natalie walking barefoot toward me in a diaphanous white dress, the sun transforming her tresses into a halo. But it was in fact one of the Romanian twins, guzzling beer out of a large mug, two streaks curving from the corners of her mouth toward her bepimpled chin.

Soon thereafter we went east for the promised safari. A man was waiting for us on the tarmac of the Goma airport; we saw him as soon as we stepped out of the plane. He wore dark shades, a white shirt, and a black tie; he walked up to Tata and shook his hand diplomatically, as though welcoming a dignitary. He spoke to him in French, then switched to English for us — or me, rather, even if he was looking at Mama — welcoming us to Goma and wishing us a pleasant stay at the Karibu Hotel, as well as a successful safari. His name was Carlier; he assured us he was at our service, and kissed Mama’s hand while she tried to extract it from his grip. He stroked Sestra’s hair and nodded at me, as if he thought I was tough and he respected it.

Carlier was slurring his words, and I could not figure out whether that was his accent or he was drunk. Except for his shades and a large diamond ring on his middle finger, he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood: a heavy, fat-rounded head, large ears with meaty earlobes, blood speckles on his mercilessly scraped face. He bribed our way through the ovenlike airport, extending his money-stuffed hand to uniformed officers and importantly frowning Small Vegetables. Outside the airport, he chased away a swarm of cabbies and crap-hawkers and led us to a van next to which a man stood at attention in a full suit with a tightly knotted tie. Carlier barked at him and he leapt like a leopard to open the door for us.

The streets of Goma were enveloped in roiling clouds of black dust. In an uncanny, disturbing moment, I recognized that everyone in sight was barefoot, and I could not remember what the purpose of shoes was. But then I saw booted policemen standing on the porches, leaning against the walls, like idle villains in westerns, and the world of straightforward facts was restored. When we stopped to let a skittish herd of goats pass, nobody approached the van to offer us carved human bones or knitting needles.

“You make a right turn here,” Carlier said, “and you are in Rwanda.”

We turned left, got out of town, and drove through the fields of black lava rock surrounding intermittent islands of jungle verdure. A gray mountain beyond the green-and-black landscape exuded smoke; the earth appeared unearthly. “Nyiragongo,” Carlier said, as if the word were self-explanatory.

The Karibu Hotel consisted of huts scattered along the shore of Lake Kivu, which, Carlier told us gleefully, contained no life: the last time Nyiragongo had erupted, the volcanic gases killed every living creature in it. Sestra and I shared one of the huts, redolent of clean towels, insecticide, and mold. As she unpacked, humming to herself, I stared out the window: a pirogue glided unhurriedly on the wave-less water; the sky and the lake were welded together without a joint; a pale moon levitated in the haze. The sun was setting somewhere; everything was returning to darkness after an unhappy day out.

The ban on my wandering seemed to be suspended here; I left Sestra sprawling on her bed, happily attached to the Walkman. Heart of Darkness in hand, I took the uphill path going past other bungalows. I was hoping to escape dinner with my family; I needed to be elsewhere and alone. On the way from the airport they felt foreign to me, not unlike hired actors mindlessly performing gestures of care and kinship: Tata in his absurd pith helmet; Mama smirking, routinely scared of the future; Sestra approaching everything with useless curiosity — I could remember that I used to love them, but I could not remember why, and I was terrified.

The carefully trimmed hedges were moist with dusk; low, mushroomlike lanterns flickered by the path. I walked onto a terrace extending from a vast restaurant hall. At its center, like an altar, was a table laden with food and flowers. And there, with his back to me, picking slices of meat and chunks of fruit, mounting them on his plate, was Steve Spinelli. I recognized his triangular torso and narrow hips, his claw curls and cowboy boots. For a blink, I considered sneaking out, but then he turned — a veritable hillock of victuals on his plate — and looked at me with no surprise whatsoever.

“Look what the bitch dragged in,” he said.

He walked out onto the terrace, and I went with him to his table; he offered me a seat and I took it, determined to leave as soon as possible, before Father caught me here. Without being asked, I said:

“We are going to Virunga National Park tomorrow, for a safari.”

“It’s a fun world, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli said. “Getting funner every day.”

“Is Natalie with you?”

“She is.”

“Why are you here?”

He dug into the foodstuff with a spoon and chewed heartily with his mouth open, ignoring me. Between spoonfuls, he puffed on a cigarette, then put it back in the ashtray.

“For a vacation,” he said. “And while I am here, I might as well discuss an important matter with your father.”

“Like what?”

“You, maybe. Or maybe not. We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

I grabbed his Marlboros and lit up. The possibility of a drug-laced cigarette crossed my mind, but it tasted good. He seemed to speak to me from a space in which no life mattered — all the roles and purposes had already been assigned, and I did not know what mine were. I fidgeted and tapped the ashes from my cigarette until the ember broke off.

“I hear that you are a good volleyball player,” he said. “Did you like Antonyka?”

“How do you know him?”

“I know a lot of people. Anton is a remarkable gentleman, as well as a communist cocksucker.”

He waved at Carlier, who was just walking into the restaurant hall accompanied by a tall man with sideburns and a scaphander Afro. Carlier spoke to the man brusquely, pointing at the meat tray, then at the flowers — there was some disorder to be redressed. “I know Carlier too, for example,” Spinelli went on. “We used to run guns to Angola together.” The tall man took notes, looking at Carlier with dismay, which tightened the muscles and sinews in his forearms. I envisioned him suddenly punching in Carlier’s face, blood spraying onto his white shirt, Carlier falling to the ground and screaming for help.

“Your dad also played with you and Anton, didn’t he?” Spinelli said. “I bet you played pretty good together.”

Carlier left the tall man to deal with the problem at hand, and dropped into the chair next to Spinelli. He pulled a pipe out of his breast pocket, with his pinkie picked some detritus from its mouth, but didn’t light it.

“Whipping would be too good for Monsieur Henri,” Carlier said peevishly.

“One day, Carlier, he’s gonna slit your throat,” Spinelli said. “And I’ll cry over your corpse till I can piss no more.”

Scoffing with approbation, Carlier picked up my book, looked at it without interest, and put it down. I took it from his hand and bade them good night.

The mushroom lamps cast a feeble light on the path, but on nothing else. The lava gravel crunched under my feet. Obscure creatures rustled in the black trees and bushes. The sky was splattered with stars, smeared with the Milky Way. I was lost; I could not remember the number of my hut, identical to all the others; the path seemed to be a circle.

I don’t know why I behaved like a lunatic. I heard footsteps coming down the path behind me; I stepped off into the darkness and ducked behind a tree with a precise clarity of action; somebody had already done it once and I was just repeating the exact motions. I dropped my book; whatever was concealed in the tree shuffled its way higher up, and I did not dare pick up the book. The tree bark was smooth and fragrant, my hand sweating against it. The footsteps stopped.

“Come out, Blunderpuss. I can see you.”

I was afraid to move or look at him, exhaling to the end of my breath, then inhaling through my nostrils, getting air-headed and elated as if that were the way to make myself invisible. Something fell on my head from above — a leaf, an insect, monkey hair — but I did not brush it off. It was so easy here to forget everything, to lose all bearing. An army of insects screeched at a high, buzzing pitch, as though cutting through a steel cable; then they stopped. I stepped out on the path.

“Let’s go and say hi to Monkeypie,” Spinelli said. “She’d love to see you.”

“Maybe later,” I said. “I must go.”

“She’s crazy about you, you know. She talks about you all the time. She’d love to see you.” He put his arm around my shoulders; I felt the weight of his forearm on my neck, as he softly pushed me forward.

Their room smelled of burnt sugar; the ceiling fan was dead. Natalie lay on her side, her hand tucked between the pillow and her cheek, a tranquil smile on her face lit by the bedside lamp. Around her biceps, a loose rubber rope twisted. On the nightstand were a syringe and a spoon and a burning candle. I was an instant behind myself: I saw what it all was, but the thought could not encrust itself with meaning. Spinelli caressed her forehead with the back of his hand and moved a stray hair from her cheek.

“She is beautiful, isn’t she, so peaceful,” he whispered. “Would you like to fuck her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“She’s a little out of touch, but she’d love it, believe me.”

“No, thank you.”

“What’s your problem, Blunderpuss? When I was your age I had a hard-on twenty-four/seven.”

He stood above her with his hands on his hips. I couldn’t move, until my knees got so weak I sat down, my back to Natalie. In her oblivion, she did not budge when I leaned on her belly. I had reached the farthest point of navigation. Dear Azra, the leaves have covered my path. I do not know if I will ever see you again.

“You can’t get it up, can you,” he said, chortling. “You can’t get it up. Let me show you something.” He quickly unfastened his eagle-buckled belt and let his jeans drop down. His dick leapt at me and stood in my face like an erect cannon. Its head was perfectly purple; the blue veins seemed to be throbbing.

“A solid torpedo, and ready to explode,” Spinelli said, and stroked it. “Do you wanna touch it? C’mon, touch it.”

Natalie sighed but did not open her eyes; the candle flickered, nearly going out. With indescribable effort, I finally stood up and pushed him away. “Hey!” he said, stumbling backward with his pants at his ankles. Still, I expected him to grab me from behind as I was walking out, I was ready for him to smash my head against the door until I blacked out, but nothing happened.

Outside, a tremulous lightwake stretched itself toward the cataractous moon. My heart was playing the bridge from “Stairway to Heaven,” but beyond the noise in my veins, beyond the limp limbs, beyond the cold-sweating skin, was a serene flow carrying me away from everything that had been me. Up the path, past an oddly azure pool with a school of insects drowning in it, I walked back toward the restaurant.

And at the restaurant there would be my family: my sister picking the green beans off Father’s plate; Father slicing his steak, still wearing his pith helmet despite Mother’s nagging; Mother parting the mashed potato and carrots on Sister’s plate, because Sister never wanted them to touch. I would take my place at the table, and Father would ask me where I had been. Nowhere, I would say, and he would ask me nothing more. You’d better eat something, you look so pale, Mother would say. My sister would tell us how much she looked forward to our safari, to seeing the elephant and the antelope and the monkey. Tomorrow is going to be really great, she would cry, clapping with joy, I simply can’t wait. And we would laugh, Mother, Father, and I, we would laugh, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, hiding desperately our rope burns.