In about three seconds flat, I was thoroughly pissed off—partly at Art for being so blind and partly at Luk for being whatever he was being. I totally lost my temper, and when that happens, I’m capable of doing very stupid things. What I did next may look spunky and courageous to some people, but I don’t have any such illusions. It was stupidity, plain and simple.
I said I understood that he and his brother had different fathers.
He was clearly disconcerted by my introducing this personal element into our conversation, but he admitted it was true.
I said, “Art’s father must have taught him manners.”
Luk sat absolutely still for about twenty seconds as he tried to get the right of this remark, then, when he did, his black face turned ashen, like dead coals.
Instantly I wished I was dead. Instantly I wished I was back home, or at least back on that helicopter. Instantly I imagined being taken away and shot. He glared at me as if he too was imagining me being taken away and shot. I glared back—at least I know that much. If you run, that’s when people attack.
“How dare you,” he finally said coldly, “come into my office and insult me.”
“How dare you,” I said icily, “be so inhospitable to a friend of your brother who has traveled eight thousand miles to ask a favor.”
Was I really inspired to the extent that I used the word inhospitable? I won’t swear to it, but I was certainly inspired.
He stared at me and I stared back. Soon the feeling grew in me that our positions had reversed. It was now he who was gradually beginning to wish he was dead.
He dropped his eyes, and I knew that, incredibly, I’d won. I may not have made a friend for life, but I’d pushed him harder than he’d pushed me.
We sat there. Clearly he didn’t know what to do, and certainly I didn’t have the vaguest idea what to do. I had just delivered a mortal insult to a man powerful enough to have me killed—and forced him to swallow it. And neither one of us knew how to proceed from there.
Finally, desperately, I said, “Your brother asked me to tell you that he misses you—and Africa.” This was a total fabrication, of course. He had never expressed such a sentiment or anything remotely like it.
“That,” Luk said, “is hard to believe.”
I shrugged as if to say, “What can one do with someone so stupid?”
“He is well?”
“He’s doing well,” I replied ambiguously. His question and my reply meant that outright war had been averted.
After another longish pause, he said, “Please accept my apology … and do me the favor of explaining to me what this business with the gorilla is all about.” I thought it was neatly done, to put the apology together with the request this way. It spared him the additional humiliation of having to sit there and receive my forgiveness.
All the same, it was clear from his tone that he assumed “this business with the gorilla” was camouflage for some more important matter. This forced me to shift slightly from the ground I’d come to Bolamba to occupy. If I told Luk the truth, that Art’s interest was nothing more than resettling a gorilla, Luk might well shrug it off as unworthy of his attention. That was certainly the impression I was receiving. In order to avoid this outcome, I turned everything around and explained that it was I who was interested in resettling the gorilla. In other words, instead of making myself out to be a tool Art was using to achieve his purpose, I made Art out to be a tool I was using to achieve my purpose. It was a bold and potentially disastrous move, since I had no more than five seconds to wonder if it made any sense at all.
It made a kind of sense to Luk that I couldn’t have predicted if I’d had six months to wonder about it. I saw it leap into his eyes. I saw it flash across the surface of his whole body as every molecule in his body realigned itself to this new reality. Art, he saw in this electrifying instant, had gone crazy. Specifically, Art had gone crazy over me. In a split second I had been transformed in Luk’s imagination from a grubby, travel-worn kid into an alluring nymphet.
There was nothing I could do about this—and nothing I particularly wanted to do about it. It clarified everything in Luk’s mind. I had a gorilla (God knows how or why) that I wanted to resettle in the rain forest of central west Africa. Art was powerless to resist helping me get what I wanted. Art couldn’t come to Zaire in person to make the arrangement, so here I was. All this tremendous fuss and expense was not for the sake of a gorilla—that would be absurd. It was for the sake of me. This was something Luk could understand … so I let him understand it.
After my meeting with Luk, I was shown to my room, which was nothing to write home about either way. I hung up the dress I’d be wearing the next day to meet Mokonzi Nkemi and tried to brush out some of the more obvious wrinkles. It was a pretty dressy little thing, a type I’m not big on, but I was told (again and again) that jeans and T-shirt would be hideously mal à propos for meeting the president of the republic. There was a bathroom down the hall with a tub almost deep enough to swim in, and I took a wonderful long bath, followed by a nap.
Since there were not that many English speakers on the premises, Just Glen had appointed himself my mentor for the evening. There would be a vast buffet dinner in what passed for a ballroom, but I was relieved to hear this wasn’t in my honor. On the contrary, it was just Nkemi’s style to provide a nightly blowout for what was basically the whole government. He and Luk were seldom on hand, as it was felt that the presence of the big bosses might put a damper on the lower orders. Tonight (as on most nights) thirty or forty people were expected to show up—workers and their families, from infants to great-grandparents.
Glen warned me that, like it or not, my entrance would create a sensation, and it did, especially among the kids and young adults. A solid wall of questioners formed around me, and Glen told me I might as well satisfy their curiosity as a group or they’d pursue me individually all night, asking the same questions over and over.
Naturally they wanted to know why I was there, and I explained that I was there to see the president. Naturally they next wanted to know what I was seeing him about. After translating the question, Glen advised me to say I couldn’t discuss it, and I took the advice. They wanted to know exactly where I was from and what it was like there, with all the details. They wanted to know what I thought of Zairean food and Zairean music and Zairean roads and Zairean weather. They wanted to know what could be seen on American television, and I got stuck trying to explain what a situation comedy is. I asked them what could be seen on Zairean television, and
that got a big laugh. Glen explained that Mobutu was crazy about professional wrestling, so that’s what’s mainly seen on television. Some of the older questioners wanted to know if I approved of U.S. policies in places like Libya and Israel and Iran. When I said I was keeping an open mind and told Glen to explain that I was joking, he said they wouldn’t get it, and he was right, they didn’t. I made up for it by being (for a visitor) unusually knowledgeable about the history of the Republic of Mabili, which obviously pleased them very much.
After an hour or so Glen called a halt so we could get something to eat. He took me around the tables, where there looked to be about fifty different dishes—most of it being stuff even Glen couldn’t identify. He picked out five or six things that he recognized and thought I’d like, then made me take dabs of another five or six, just to try—nothing weird or terribly exotic, so I didn’t get to find out if fried termites really taste like popcorn. All of it was very tasty. I mean it was unusual to encounter food that actually has a taste, as opposed to most American food, which has no taste of its own, so you make it taste like something else—salt or pepper or soy sauce or mustard or lemon juice. One of the things I took on Glen’s recommendation turned out to be smoked monkey, which I guess he thought would freak me out. It was nothing to rave about, but it didn’t freak me out.
Mokonzi Nkemi
The purpose of my interview with Luk Owona on Wednesday afternoon had been clear enough. In the fiction we were trying to sell here, it was his role to “find out what I wanted” so he could prepare Mokonzi Nkemi for our meeting Thursday morning. As far as Nkemi would know, my request had not the remotest connection to Art Owens, who was persona non grata and not to be mentioned by anyone. The meeting with Nkemi was supposed to be very simple. I’d walk in, exchange a few pleasantries, and explain what I wanted. Nkemi would say, sure, why not, then I’d say thanks, good-bye, and be on my way home. It made perfect sense to everyone that it would happen this way.
Nkemi had a reception area with an actual receptionist in it. After being delivered there by my faithful Lobi (whose name, Glen claimed, was a Lingala word meaning both “yesterday” and “tomorrow”), I sat down for a ten-minute wait and then was shown into the presence. Nkemi’s office was suitably bigger and more elegant than Luk’s, but the real surprise for me was the man himself. For no good reason, I’d been expecting someone upright, short, and blocky—a generalissimo, in other words. On the contrary, Nkemi was a tall, lanky, slope-shouldered scholar in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He too wore glasses, but he took them off to wave me to a chair in front of his desk.