Stringer by Anjan Sundaram Read Free Book Online

to help overcome it. That may have partly been true. But I also felt that the Congolese in their delirium truly forgot the misery, that they spoke in verse and caricatured their misfortune in genuine comic spirit and not for farce; it was their way of taking distance, I thought, of suspending the destruction of time. To a degree that exceeded any people I had known I found the Congolese able to isolate the present, and be satisfied. Theirs was a sort of amnesiac solace.
    â€œFockoff! Fockoff!” The children’s last words to me kept coming back.
    I woke up scratching the blisters on my shoulders. They had bled. The night had been a frenzied experience, and all morning the nostalgia lingered, making the house seem dreamlike, dreary, looming, like a part of the Quarter, or as though I were still there. That was my first adventure. Good morning, Kinshasa.

3
    A fter this, Nana changed to me. Bébé Rhéma had been woken by my door-rattling in the night. Jose had escaped to the living room but Nana had been forced to stay up and feed her. Angry and tired, she reproached me at the dining table, in full view of the courtyard. The neighbors listened. I apologized. But Nana’s irk seemed to run deeper. Whether she now thought I was infected by a diabolical spirit or if it was simply that I had been irreverent and naive, she became morose and began to behave as if she needed to prove that evil lurked in children.
    Her behavior was unusual—for she had a child and a nurse’s training. But this belief in evil seemed to be something Nana was taught not to reason with, and in which she believed so powerfully that even having a child did not change her.
    The new frustration showed one day as I watched a cartoon. It was a Portuguese production dubbed into French about a schoolboy who turned into a superhero and saved the planet. But to Nana it was proof of her convictions—for the boy, transformed, could fly and laser blast a giant octopus. From behind my sofa she hissed, “Turn that off, it’s fetish!” But I stayed at the television,watching cartoons, until Jose came home and switched to the news channel.
    Nana took me aside and told me tales about her nephews and cousins and the children of her friends—a cast of characters who had caused miscarriages, orchestrated poisonings and magically dissolved marriages by infecting fathers with lust for girls. Nana had experienced the evil when she was young. She said children could grow large at night, into giants, and come and eat us. I asked questions—she answered excitedly, as though hoping I would agree with her. Then she overheard me discuss the Quarter with Mossi. She loudly snorted. I began to ignore her remonstrations.
    But the standoff was broken one week later when Nana found an opportunity to make a scene. It was a day on which I had woken late and then spent an hour in bed. As I walked to the front of the house, passing the tiny storeroom extension, I saw Nana’s two nephews and Corinthian, her preacher cousin, ironing socks. How nice of her to give me a full room, I thought. But I decided not to thank Nana for as long as she was displeased with me—in case she took it away. Then the neighbor’s boy, who was again waiting in the living room while Nana grumbled about having no money no sugar no milk, was found eating her hair cream.
    The boy seemed in some ethereal happiness. His fingers were covered in the pale-green fluid and he smelled the cream pot, smiling, as though pleased with his discovery. And ignorant of the danger approaching he turned about, hands in the air, searching, presumably for a cloth. Nana came into the living room, her hair undone, stiff, scattered like the rays of a sun. And her eyes opened large with satisfaction. “There! Look at him!” In a shrill voice—urgent and authoritative—she summoned Corinthian.
    The preacher appeared: calm, humming a choir song. Hisclean white chemise was