Zaïre, Part 1

The thing you most noticed about Zaïre was also the first thing you noticed: the hammer blow of stepping out of the airplane door and onto the ladder.

The air made you stagger slightly, as if you had just plunged into a hot river and were involuntarily inhaling a lungful of it. The thickness of it, the absolute, drenching humidity of it, was simultaneously oppressive and uplifting. It bore upon it the myriad scents of an unknown land: of jasmine and lianas and red clay and thunderstorms.

As you walked down the ladder and struggled to breathe, you felt a pervasive strangeness that would eventually become part of you and then disappear into familiarity: the sweat began to ooze in every pore of you and your clothes drank it in as though parched until they were sticking to every pressure point, becoming laden and heavy and clinging.

And then you noticed the greenness, the sheer untrammeled growth of life all around you. The airport was seemingly carved out of the jungle itself, calm and placid and grey in an ocean of green.

As you shuffled along the tarmac towards the terminal, the sun hung in the sky; hung, because that is the only word that describes it. It hung reluctantly, brassily beaming through a languid halo of haze without clouds, and reflected up from the concrete into your eyes with implacable determination.

Like participants in an ant trail, you and the other passengers slowly shuffled across the tarmac, blinking and bewildered, not wanting to think about what was coming. But before you could summon the reconsideration of the wisdom of this whole affair you were inside the terminal building and in the line with the rest. Fans sprouted like snapdragons as the line shambled towards the dilapidated booth that housed the lone customs officer.

This fellow, his blue-black face covered with a fine sheen of sweat just like everyone else, made a grand show of examining each passport carefully, licking his forefinger as he leafed through each page, then looking up imperiously, his left hand hovering over the only stamp on his desk. “Vous restez combien de temps?”

When it came your turn you murmured and the hand made a well-practiced grab of the stamp and the sound of it on the pad and then onto your passport echoed thuddingly throughout the dim room.

You were in Zaïre.

There were always people hanging around behind the customs booth, seemingly scouting out the new arrivals for their potential reward quotient: taxi drivers, luggage touts, a loose rabble that had the faint air of organization, of inevitability, as if every one of them had done this exact thing yesterday, the day before and the day before that, going back into antiquity. They were dressed with a shabby elegance, their odd print mix-and-match collared short-sleeve shirts faded but meticulously creased, as if they might be going to a wedding later that afternoon, after taking your bags to the taxi.

Since you invariably needed a taxi, you would select the guy who managed to push all the other guys out of his way and muscle up next to you and he’d grab your bags away from the other hands that were tugging at them and lead you, smiling as if he knew what he’d be doing with the few notes you’d be paying him with, later on, and you’d accompany him to his slightly battered Peugeot and he’d slam the bags in the back while you gratefully slid onto the vinyl seat and lit a cigarette.

You were particularly grateful that morning because you were going home.

Kinshasa from the air was quite beautiful, especially at night, which is the only time you flew in from Brussels. And you always flew in from Brussels.

Orange streetlights cast limpid circles in a patternlike grid, criss-crossing the capital city as you approached the airport, but ominously, from the vantage point of several thousand feet, the lights ended abruptly at many points all across the horizon, like some sort of military perimeter. Past that, there was only a complete velvet darkness.

But from your taxi, the Kinshasa from the ground during daytime was a wonderland of life.

On the ride from the airport you mainly zipped through developed areas, ones that involved concrete. There were no mud huts. Mobutu had seen to that. Kinshasa on the surface evoked a small European city, complete with wide boulevards that bore revolutionary names—the central Boulevard Trente-juin, among others—and on the ground you would have felt that you might be in any small city of Belgium, except that the inhabitants were all black and most did not not wish to participate in this grand illusion.

Indeed, as your taxi swept past the banks of trees on the highway you felt as though all this was temporary, as if this human encroachment were merely the whim of a laughing god that had, for whatever reason, decided to permit it . . . for the time being.

And then, finally, there was home on Avenue Lippens. The taxi pulled into the drive of the white colonial mansion and you gazed at the decaying building that was where you lived while you put out your second cigarette and fumbled for the local currency, aptly named Zaïres, worth about two dollars each at the time, to pay the waiting driver.

And then you walked from the car, dragging your two small suitcases, up to the steps that led onto the terrace. There, under the portico in their easy chairs, smoking and reading the newspaper, were your parents.