Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

The boys alternated between homesickness and frenzy. There were some American things they developed appetites for that alarmed me, and things they ignored, which alarmed me even more. For example, the way well-intentioned white people spoke to my trilingual children (they fluently interchange French, Lingala, and English, with a slight accent in each) by assaulting them with broad, loud baby talk. Anatole’s students did essentially the same, displaying a constant impulse to educate him about democracy and human rights-arrogant sophomores! With no notion of what their country is doing to his. Anatole told me these stories at night with a flat resignation, but I cursed and threw pillows and cried while he held me in the vast comfort of our married-student double bed.

The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks. On the streets, from a distance, they’d scowl at us, thinking we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed-the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisement of our sins. Drawing nearer they would always stare at Anatole as contempt gave way to bald shock. His warrior’s face with its expertly carved lines speaks its elegance in a language as foreign to them as Lingala.That book was closed. Even my mother’s friends, who really did try, asked me nothing of Anatole’s background or talents-only, in hushed tones when he left the room, “What happened to his face?”

Anatole claimed the stares didn’t bother him. He’d already spent so much of his life as an outsider. But I couldn’t stand the condescension. Anatole is an exquisitely beautiful and accomplished man in his own country, to those who appreciate intellect and honor. I already spent a whole childhood thinking I’d wrecked the life of my twin sister, dragged after me into the light. I can’t drag a husband and sons into a life where their beauty will blossom and wither in darkness.

So we came home. Here. To disaster. Anatole’s passport was confiscated at the airport. While Pascal and Patrice punched each other out of exhausted boredom and Martin leaned on me crying that his ears hurt, my husband was brought down without my notice. He was a wanted man in Zaire. I didn’t understand this at the time. Anatole told me it was a formality, and that he had to give our address in Kinshasa so they’d know where to bring his passport back to him the next day. I laughed, and said (in front of the officials!) that, given our government’s efficiency, it would be the next year. Then we crammed ourselves into a battered little Peugeot taxi that felt like home at last, and came to Elisabet’s house, to fall into sleep or the fitful wakefulness of jet lag. I had a thousand things on my mind: getting the boys into school, finding a place to live, exchanging the dollars from Mother at some Kinshasa bank that wouldn’t give us old zaires or counterfeit new ones, getting food so we wouldn’t overwhelm poor Elisabet. Not one of my thoughts was for my husband. We didn’t even sleep together, since Elisabet had borrowed the few small cots she could find.

It would have been our last chance. The casques-bleus came pounding on the door right at dawn. I wasn’t completely awake. Elisabet was still modestly wrapping her pagne as she stumbled to the door, and four men entered with such force they shoved her against the wall. Only Martin was really awake, with his huge black eyes on the guns in their belts.

Anatole behaved calmly, but his eyes were desperate when he looked at me. He mentioned names of people I should find right away-to help us get settled he said, though I knew what he meant-and an address that seemed to be backward.

“The boys,” I said, having no idea how I meant to finish the sentence.

“The boys love you more than their own eyes. Planche de salut.”

“They’re African, for always.You know.”

“Beene. Be kind to yourself.”

And he is gone. And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief.

At least I know where he is, which Elisabet says is a blessing. I can’t agree with her. They took him immediately to Thysville, which is about a hundred kilometers south of Leopoldville over the best road in this nation, repaved recently with a grant of foreign aid. The prison is evidently that important. I had to go to eight different government offices to get information, submitting like an obedient dog to carry a different slip of onionskin paper from one office to the next, until I met my master with his chair tipped back and his boots on his desk. He was startled to see a white woman, and couldn’t decide whether to be deferential or contemptuous, so he alternated. He told me my husband would be in detention until formal charges were filed, which could take six months to a year. The charges are in the general nature of treason, which is to say anti-Mobutism, and the most likely sentence will be life imprisonment, though there are other possibilities.

“At Camp Hardy,” I said.

“Le Camp Ebeya,”he corrected me. Of course. Camp Hardy has been renamed, for authenticite.

I knew not to be encouraged about the so-called “other possibilities.” Camp Hardy happens to be where Lumumba was held, and beaten to within an inch of his life, before his death flight to Katanga. I wonder what comfort my husband will get from this bit of shared history. We’ve known several other people, including a fellow teacher of Anatole’s, who’ve been detained more recently at Camp Hardy. It’s considered a prolonged execution, principally through starvation. Our friend said there were long periods when he was given one banana every two days. Most of the cells are solitary, with no light or plumbing or even a hole in the floor. The buckets are not removed.

I was told I couldn’t visit until Anatole was formally charged. After that, it would depend on the charges. I glared at the empty blue helmet sitting on the desk, and then at my commandant’s uinprotected head, wishing I might cause it to explode with the force of my rage. When he had no more to tell me, I thanked him in my politest French, and left. Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.

At least he isn’t shackled under the stadium floor, Elisabet keeps saying, and I suppose even my broken heart can accept that as good fortune.

I’ve never known such loneliness.The boys are sad, of course, but Pascal and Patrice at fifteen and thirteen are nearly men, with men’s ways of coping. And Martin is so confused and needs such comfort he has nothing to give me.

We did find a house right away, recently vacated by a teacher’s family who’ve left for Angola. Its a long way from the center, in o›ne of the last little settlements on the road out toward the interior, so we have at least the relief of flowering trees and a yard for growing vegetables. But we’re far from Elisabet and Christiane, who work long hours cleaning a police station and attached government warehouse. I don’t have the solace of daily conversation. And even Elisabet isn’t truly a kindred spirit. She loves me but finds me baffling and unfeminine, and probably a troublemaker. She may lose her job because of familial association with treason.

I never bothered to notice before how thoroughly I’ve relied on Anatole to justify and absolve me here. For so many years now I’ve had the luxury of nearly forgetting I was white in a land of brown and black. I was Madame Ngemba, someone to commiserate with in the market over the price of fruit, the mother of children who sought mischief with theirs. Cloaked in my pagne and Anatole, I seemed to belong. Now, husbandless in this new neighborhood, my skin glows like a bare bulb. My neighbors are deferential and reserved. Day after day, if I ask directions or try to chat about the weather, they attempt nervously to answer me in halting English or French. Did they not notice I initiated the conversation in Lingala? Do they not hear me hollering over the fence at my sons every day in the habitual, maternal accents of a native-born fishwife? The sight of my foreign skin seems to freeze their sensibilities. In the local market, a bubble of stopped conversation moves with me as I walk. Everyone in this neighborhood knows what happened to Anatole, and I know they’re sympathetic-they all hate Mobutu as much, and wish they were half as brave. But they also have to take into account his pale-skinned wife. They know just one thing about foreigners, and that is everything we’ve ever done to them. I can’t possibly improve Anatole’s standing in their eyes. I must be the weakness that brought him down.