Traveller_Levin's Blog

Stairway to Heaven

by Aleksandar Hemon October 23, 2006

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burned 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 above my bed, a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees below my window. But the most troubling thing was the ceaseless roll of drums: a sonorous, ponderous thudding that hovered around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I couldn’t tell.

I was sixteen, at the age when fear arouses inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug a brand-new Moleskine journal out of my suitcase, and had just managed to write, on the first page, “Kinshasa 7.7.1983,” when I heard my parents’ bedroom door slam open and Tata cursing and stomping away. I leaped out of bed and followed him into the living room, where he had already flipped on the lights. I bumped into Mama, who was cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms; Sestra was there, too, pressing her face into Mama’s side. 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. “What a dick.”

Tata slept in flannel pajamas that were far more appropriate for an Alpine ski resort than for Africa—air-conditioning allegedly irritated his kidneys. Before he vanished into the thrumming murk of our building’s stairwell, he put on a pith helmet, lest his bald dome be exposed to drafts. I stood in my underwear, my pen still in hand. The possibility that he might not return flickered in the dark, but it did not occur to me to go after him. The stairwell light went on and we heard a plaintive chime. The drums continued to roll. Tata abandoned the bell and started pounding on the door, shouting in his stuttering 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. As soon as the stairwell light clicked off, 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 dawn already. In the trees outside, a nation of birds had replaced the bats and were now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life. Sleep seemed beyond me; nor could I write. Smoking on the balcony, I waited for everything to make sense. Down on the street, a barely clad man squatted by a cardboard box with cigarettes lined up on top of it, as though he were guarding them from some invisible peril.

In the early eighties, Tata was mostly absent from Sarajevo, working in Zaire as a minor Yugoslav diplomat in charge of communications (whatever that meant). Meanwhile, back home, I responded to the infelicities of adolescence and the looming iniquities of adulthood by retreating into books; Sestra, not yet a teen-ager, was oblivious of the aches sprouting inside me; Mama was mid-life, miserable and lonely, though I could not see this at the time, with my nose stuck in a book. I read compulsively, only occasionally surfacing to reality. I read all night, all day; at school I kept a book hidden under my desk, a felony frequently punished by a junta of class bullies who made me lick the pages until my tongue was black with ink.

I met Azra while checking out books from 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 whenever she did. She had no interest in “The Catcher in the Rye”; I had not read “Quo Vadis,” feigned interest in “The Peasant Uprising.” We shared an interest in “The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country,” even though it was a children’s book. And it was clear that we also shared a passion for imagining lives that we could live through others—a necessary ingredient in any love. We started dating, which meant that we often read to each other on a bench by the Miljacka, making out only when we ran out of things to talk about, kissing cautiously, as though letting ourselves go would have exhausted the quaint, manageable intimacy we had accrued. So when Tata announced, on returning to Sarajevo for a 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 temptation and eschew the taint that the body inflicts upon the soul. I promised I would write to her every day—in my journal, as letters from Africa would have arrived long after my return. I would record every thought, I told her, 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 that I wanted to note down that first night in Kinshasa: the west ablaze, the east impenetrably dark as we crossed the equator at sunset; my perfect recollection of the smell of her hair; the line from a book that we had both liked so much—“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 this failure 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.

The following morning, I found Sestra in the living room, staring with vague fascination at a puny man in a T-shirt with an image of an angel pierced by an arrow in midair. Mama was sitting across the coffee table from the man, her legs crossed, listening intently to his high-pitched warbling.

“Svratio komsija Spinelli,” she said. “Nemam pojma sta prica.”

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good afternoon, buddy,” Spinelli said. “The day is almost over.” He exposed a set of teeth that descended evenly in size, like organ pipes, from the center toward the cheeks. He had both of his hands parked on his thighs, and they were calmly immobile, as though resting before their next task—which was to push apart the two curls parenthesizing his forehead.

“Sorry for the noise,” he said. “A bored dog does crazy things.”

At sixteen, I spent a lot of energy affecting boredom: the eye-roll; the practiced blankness of expression; the terse, short answers to parental inquisition. I had built an iron-clad shield of indifference that allowed me to escape, roam, and return to my cell without anyone’s noticing. But that 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 could come up with nothing to say, probably because there was too much to say.

There was certainly nothing to do. I was not allowed go out alone into the human jungle of Kinshasa. For a while I watched TV, broadcasts of 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 had her Walkman turned way up, and Mama was remote, interned in the kitchen, probably crying. The ceiling fan spun sluggishly, a cruel reminder that time here passed at the same mind-numbing speed.

Tata was a great promiser, a fabulist of possibilities. In Sarajevo, he had projected onto the vast, blank canvas of our socialist provincialism a 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 Phillip, a native cook whom he had hired away from a Belgian by increasing his piddling wage to a slightly less piddling amount. That first uneventful week, these promises were drably betrayed; Phillip didn’t even show up for work. When Tata came home from the Embassy, we had humdrum dinners that Mama improvised from what she had discovered in the fridge: wizened peppers and sunken papayas, peanut paste and some kind of animal flesh that may have been goat meat.

Determined to dispel the cloud of tedium hanging over us, Tata finally put in a call to the Yugoslav Ambassador and invited himself and us to the Ambassador’s residence in Gombe, where all the important diplomats lived. The mansions there were large, with wide lawns and majestic flowers blooming in impeccably groomed bushes; the venerable Congo flowed serenely. His Excellency and his excellent wife were polite and devoid of any human vigor. We sat in their receiving room, and the adults passed around statements (“Kinshasa is strange”; “Kinshasa is really small”) as if handing around 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 snowcapped 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 didn’t dare to move, and when Sestra, abruptly and inexplicably, rolled like a happy dog on the ankle-deep Afghan rug I feared that our parents would renounce us.

As soon as we returned home, I went up to Spinelli’s place. He did not seem surprised to see me, nor did he ask what had 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 my nose; it was so beautiful I was breathless. Spinelli was air drumming along to the loud music, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “ ‘Black Dog,’ ” he said. “God damn.” In the far corner, under the window, there was a set of drums; its golden cymbals trembled in the stream from the air-conditioner.

Between his 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 and finished it standing up. He never stopped moving. Space organized itself around him; he exuded so much of himself that I felt absent. Only after I had left his apartment, exhausted, could I really think at all. And then 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 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; if I removed my boredom, we could avoid long stretches of crabby silence. They must also have thought that engaging with the real world and its inhabi-tants without actually leaving the building was good for me, and I got to practice my English, too. As for me, I could smoke as much as I wanted at Spinelli’s; the music was much louder than my parents would ever have permitted; and he poured more whiskey into my glass before it was even half empty. But most of all I enjoyed his stories: he delivered them slouching back on the sofa, blowing smoke toward the ceiling fan, sipping his J&B, interrupting his delivery for every drum solo. There may be a taint of death, a flavor of mortality, in lies, but Spinelli’s were fun to listen to.

In high school, he’d run a cigarette-selling business and had regular sex with his geography teacher. He’d hitchhiked across America: in Oklahoma, he’d drunk with Indians who fed him mushrooms that took him to where their spirits lived—the spirits had big asses with two holes, both of which smelled equally of shit; in Idaho, he’d 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’d smuggled cattle from Mexico into Texas, cars from Texas to Mexico. Then he’d joined 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. Only then could I see the loopholes in the texture of his tales, the inconsistencies and contradictions and the plain bullshit. 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 when I went upstairs, Spinelli was all dressed and ready to go, wearing a black unbuttoned shirt, reeking of cologne, a gold chain dangling below his Adam’s apple. He lit a cigarette in the doorway, inhaled, and said “Let’s go!” and I followed without a question. It did not even cross my mind to tell my parents where I was going. They never came to check on me when I was at Spinelli’s. It turned out that 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 here, 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. We turned the corner and there was a splendid neon sign that said “PLAYBOY CASINO,” the “S” and the final “O” flickering uncertainly. A few white cars and military Jeeps were parked in the gravel lot. On the stairs were several hookers in ridiculously high heels, neither climbing nor descending, as if they were afraid they might fall if they moved. But move they did as we passed; one of them grabbed my forearm and turned me toward her. She wore a helmetlike purple wig, and earrings as elaborate as Christmas ornaments; her breasts were pushed up by her tiny bra, so that I could see half of her left nipple. I stood petrified until Spinelli released me from her grip. “You don’t fuck much, do you, Blunderpuss?” he said.

Three men were sitting at the roulette table, all plainly drunk, their heads falling on their chests between the revolutions of the wheel. A heavy fog of masculine recklessness hung over the table, the green of the felt fractured by piles of colorful chips. One of the men won and snapped out of his torpor long enough to gather up the chips with both arms, as though 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 the players 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. I had already started composing a description of the place for Azra: 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—a light linen suit and a straw hat—his right hand hanging down like a sleeping dog’s head, a ribbon of cigarette smoke passing slowly between 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, his nose triangular; his neck was a stovepipe of flesh. His expression bespoke the chummy ruthlessness of someone whose life was organized around 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 him, “Is Natalie here?”

I followed Spinelli through a beaded curtain into a room with a blackjack table and four players; 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 placed the cards; her pallor was luminous in the dark room; her arms were skinny, with no muscles whatsoever; she had bruises on her forearms, scratches on her biceps. On her shoulder she had a vaccination mark, like the imprint of a small coin. 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. She raised her hand gently, as though lifting a veil, and scratched her forehead with her pinkie. She blinked slowly, calmly, as though pulling her long eyelashes apart required effort. I was enthralled. Natalie was from out of this world, a displaced angel.

From then on, for a while, there were three of us. We went places: Spinelli driving his Land Rover, drumming on the wheel, slapping the dashboard, calling Natalie his Monkeypie; Natalie smoking in the passenger seat, looking out; I in the back, the breeze from the open window blowing her smoke, her intoxicating smell, directly into my face. The three of us: Spinelli, Monkeypie, Blunderpuss, like characters in an adventure novel.

One day, we went to the Cité to look for Phillip, 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 still diffused by the residue of the humid night. We drove toward the slums, against a crowd marching in antlike columns: men in torn shorts and shirts; women wrapped in cloth, carrying baskets on their heads; swollen-bellied children trotting by their side; emaciated dogs following at a hopeful distance. I had never seen anything so unreal in my life. We turned off onto a dirt road, which became a car-wide path full of mounds and gullies. The Land Rover stirred up a galaxy of dust, even when moving at low speed. Shacks misassembled from rusty tin and cardboard were lined up above a ditch, about to tumble in. I understood what Conrad had meant by “inhabited devastation.” A woman with a child tied to her back dipped clothes into tea-colored water and beat the wet tangle with a tennis racquet.

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 back of the Land Rover; one of them fell on his ass. “Oh, stop it!” Natalie said. As soon as the car got up some speed, the kids were running after it again; they didn’t often see a Land Rover in the Cité. Spinelli hit the brakes again, slapping his thigh with glee. I could see the face of the tallest boy smash against the glass, blood blurting out of his nose. Spinelli’s laughter was deep-chested, like the bark of a big dog. It was infectious; I was roaring with laughter myself.

We stopped in front of a church, where a choir was singing with sombre voices. Spinelli went in to leave a message for Phillip while Natalie and I stayed in the car. He pushed his way through the kids, who parted, murmuring, “Mundele, mundele.” “It means skinless,” Natalie said. The tall boy was still bleeding, but he could not take his eyes off Natalie. She took a picture of him; he wiped his bloody nose and turned away.

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

From the Cité we went to the market—Le Grand Marché—and wandered around; it was too early to go home. Bartering in Lingala and English, Spinelli 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, of eels still fidgeting in a beaten pot, of worms squirming in a shoebox.

These people had no abstract concept of evil, Spinelli said. 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, the way we did; you either had it or you didn’t. He delivered his anthropological lecture while bargaining over an enormous, baroque cluster of bananas, which he bought for nothing and loaded onto his shoulder. You couldn’t die of hunger here, he said, because bananas and papayas grew everywhere like weeds. That was why these people had never learned to work; they’d never had to harvest and store food to survive.

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 bought a bracelet made of elephant hair and ivory, a gift for Azra.

Later that day, we went to the Inter-Continental and sat in the lounge, where a ponytailed pianist played “As Time Goes By.” We ordered colorful cocktails with tiny umbrellas stuck into unknown fruit. There were men in Zairean attire: wide collars, bare chests adorned with gold, hands bejewelled. Spinelli called them the Big Vegetables; they liked to stick out of Mobutu’s ass, he said. 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 ago, when you had to import ass-wipes from Belgium. He used to be Mobutu’s personal physician, but now he only did the Big Vegetables; Mobutu had a Harvard graduate taking care of him these days. Slonsky liked heroin and boys, Spinelli said.

Natalie sucked at her straw, as if she had heard it all already.

Then there was Towser the Brit; 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, New Yorkers who dealt in tribal art, 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, trawling the Dark Continent for images. Spinelli actually waved at them and Morton waved back. Somehow, the waving confirmed Spinelli’s stories, as though he had conjured them into existence with the motion of his hand.

Then we were joined by Fareed, a Lebanese whose head was as smooth as 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. Inside was a velvet cloth, which he unwrapped, proudly exhibiting a tiny heap of uncut diamonds, sparkling like teeth in a toothpaste commercial. They had just arrived from Kasai, Dicknose said, fresh from the bowels of the earth. Natalie touched the heap with her fingertips; her nails were bitten to a bloody pulp. “All you need to make your girlfriend here happy, Blunderpuss, is twenty-five thousand dollars,” Spinelli said. Natalie looked at me and smiled, as if confirming the price.

From the Inter-Continental, we drove to Spinelli’s place, past the American Embassy, a large building surrounded by a tall wall. Bored guards smoked behind the iron-grille gate. On top of the Embassy there was a nest of sky-begging antennas. I imagined a life of espionage and danger; I imagined the 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 passed the apartment where my family was likely having dinner, but it felt as though they were not there, as though our place were empty. The absence could have been frightening, but I was too excited to care.

Spinelli went straight to his magnetophone and turned it on. The reels started revolving slowly, disinterestedly. “Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Immigrant Song’!” he hollered and then howled along with the music: “Aaaa Aaaa Aaaaaaa Aaaa Aaaaaa!”

I put my hands over my ears to signal my suffering, and Natalie laughed. Still screaming, Spinelli rummaged through the debris on his coffee table until he found what I believed was a joint of marijuana. He interrupted his howl to light it up, suck on it briskly, and pass it on to Natalie. I was innocent in the ways of drugs, but when Natalie, holding her breath so that her eyes were bulging and somehow bluer for that, 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 from me. Her laughter was snorty, pushing her cheek apples up, dilating her nostrils. 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 from the joint and kept it in my lungs, 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, biting his lips to express passion. “The greatest goddam bridge in the history of rock and roll,” he said, and attacked the timpani. I recognized the beat: it was what had frightened us on our first night in Kinshasa.

“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 though a helicopter were buried upside down in the ceiling. Spinelli stopped drumming to take a 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 the “play” buttons alternately, trying to find the beginning of the song.

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

“No,” I had to admit. “I don’t.”

Natalie sighed, as though she knew where it was all heading.

“Exactly,” Spinelli said. “That’s exactly your problem.”

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

“I feel nothing,” I said.

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

By this time he was leaning over me, blocking my 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, no, 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 slipped her hand under her cheek and closed her eyes, producing a celestial smile. He dropped down 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 sky 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 its pile of formerly glossy National Geographics; an overflowing ashtray and a bottle of J&B; ebony sculptures of stolid elephants and twiggy warriors, one of them draped in a T-shirt.

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

The day I smoked pot for the first time was the day I smoked hashish for the first time. He chipped slivers off the lump, then stuffed it down the narrow bowl of a clay pipe, murmuring to himself, “Yessiree bob!” 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,” Spinelli said. “And here I am now.”

My head and stomach were completely empty. I tried to inhale air to fill up the vacuum inside me, but it didn’t work. I was gasping, as though rapidly deflating, and it sounded like a giggle—I heard myself as someone else.

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

I retreated into my throne of stupor just as Spinelli came back with a huge, blazingly yellow banana. He offered it to me and said, “Would the monkey like a banana?”

The monkey ate the banana, promptly passed out, and dreamed of two women, one fat, one slim, knitting black wool to the rhythm of drums, chanting angrily, “Spinelli! Spinelli! Spinelli!” Whereupon I woke up to see Tata in his pith helmet and flannel pajamas shaking an enraged, ruddy finger in Spinelli’s face. Spinelli had his hands on his hips and they slowly curled into fists; he was about to punch my father. Natalie sat up and said, “Steve, let it go. Let Bogdan take the boy home.” The hair on the right side of her head was bunched up in 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 hands grasping my flesh sternly. He was talking to me, but I could hear only the tone of his voice: angry, 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 with 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 with laughter.

Later on, 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 pissed a thick, pleasurable stream into its mouth.

There was no talk given by my parents, no warning about drugs and alcohol, no lecture about self-respect, no complaint about having to clean up the piss lake on the kitchen floor. They just stared at me, mute, across the dinner table: Tata pursed his lips, contemplating the troubling question of my future; Mama pressed her hand against her cheek, shaking her head in disbelief at her extraordinary bad luck in having had such a son.

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

I was alone only when I smoked on my balcony in the tarrish heat, hoping to catch sight of Spinelli or Natalie on the street, but I never did. There was no shuffling of feet upstairs, no slamming of doors, no drumming or hollering along to Led Zeppelin. When I thought of our time together, I could not recall our doing anything or being anywhere. All I could recollect was the sound of Spinelli’s voice reciting his adventures: Spinelli going up the Congo with a crew of mercenaries, looking for a fallen Soviet satellite; Spinelli in Angola, submerged in a shallow river, like a hippo, invisible to a Cuban patrol; Spinelli in a Durban restaurant, spooning raw monkey brain out of a cut-open skull.

One Sunday, we went to the Czech Ambassador’s garden party in Gombe. There was beer and champagne, marakuja juice and punch; there were piles of niblets and fruit, offered on vast trays by a couple of humble servants; there were the blond twin daughters of the Romanian Ambassador; there was our Excellency and his wife, and a lot of wily Communist kids scurrying around and taunting an angry chimpanzee in a cage by the garden shed. I wanted to find a quiet spot to read, but Tata compelled me to join a volleyball game. We were on the same team as the Romanian twins, and a squat Bulgarian whose many gold chains rattled every time he missed the ball. 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 that the ball would float high enough for Tata to smack it into the Ambassador’s excellently flabby flesh.

Anton was the only man who did not smoke or drink after the game; he knew how to stay in control. I followed him and Tata to a table under an enormous umbrella; they spoke Russian together, and Anton’s voice was deep and curt, used to giving orders. He tapped on the table with an agitated finger and Tata threw up his arms; I thought I heard him say Spinelli’s name. When I turned around, I saw Natalie walking barefoot toward me in a diaphanous white dress, and a flare of hope went off in my chest, but it was just 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. His name was Carlier; he assured us that he was at our service and kissed Mama’s hand as she was trying 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 tell whether it was his accent or whether he was drunk. Except for his shades and a large diamond ring on his middle finger, he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood: he had 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. Outside, 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 suit with a tightly knotted tie. Carlier barked at him and he leaped to open the door for us.

The streets of Goma were enveloped in roiling clouds of black dust. In an uncanny moment, I realized that everyone in sight was barefoot and, for a moment, I could not remember what the purpose of shoes was. But then I saw booted policemen standing on the porches, leaning on 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 seemed 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 had killed every living creature in it. Sestra and I shared one of the huts, which was redolent of clean towels, insecticide, and mold. As she unpacked, humming to herself, I stared out the window: a pirogue glided unhurriedly on the waveless water; the sky and the lake were welded together seamlessly; a pale moon levitated in the haze. The sun was setting somewhere; it seemed as if everything were 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 her Walkman. “Heart of Darkness” in hand, I took an uphill path past the other bungalows. I was hoping to escape dinner with my family. On the way from the airport, they had felt as foreign to me as if they were hired actors mindlessly performing gestures of care and kinship: Tata in his absurd pith helmet, Mama smirking, routinely afraid of the future, Sestra approaching everything with pointless 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 along the path. I walked onto a terrace extending from a vast dining hall. At its center, like an altar, was a table laden with food and flowers. And there, with his back to me, picking up slices of meat and chunks of fruit, mounding them on his plate, was Steve Spinelli. I recognized his triangular torso and narrow hips, his clawlike 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 before Tata caught me there. Without being asked, I said, “We are going to the 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 chewed heartily, with his mouth open, ignoring me. Between forkfuls, he puffed on a cigarette.

“For a vacation,” he said. “And, who knows, there might be some business to be done.”

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

“I hear that you’re 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 dining hall, accompanied by a tall man with sideburns and a scaphander-like 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 man took notes, looking at Carlier with dismay that tightened the muscles and sinews in his forearms. I envisioned him suddenly punching Carlier’s face in, blood spraying onto his white shirt.

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

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

“Whipping would be too good for Monsieur Henry,” he 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 and bid them good night.

The mushroom lamps cast a feeble light on the path, but not on anything 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, which was identical to all the others; the path seemed to go in circles.

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, as though somebody had already done it once and I was just repeating his motions. Whatever was in the tree shuffled its way up; I dropped my book. The footsteps stopped.

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

I was afraid to move or look at him, exhaling until I was out of air, then inhaling through my nostrils, getting light-headed and elated, as though 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. I stepped out onto 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 burned sugar; the ceiling fan was dead. Natalie lay on her side, her hand tucked between the pillow and her cheek, her tranquil face lit by the bedside lamp. Around her biceps a loose rubber rope twisted. On the nightstand there was a syringe and a spoon and a lit 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 said. “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 next to Natalie, my back to her; she did not flinch 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. His dick stood in my face like an erected 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. I was ready for him to smash my head against the door until I blacked out, but nothing happened.

Outside, a tremulous wake of light stretched itself toward the cataractous moon. My heart was playing the bridge from “Stairway to Heaven,” but beyond the noise in my veins, beyond my limp limbs, beyond my clammy skin, there 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 dining hall.

At the dining hall there would be my family: Sestra picking the green beans off Tata’s plate; Tata slicing his steak, still wearing his pith helmet; and Mama separating the mashed potatoes from the carrots on Sestra’s plate, because Sestra never wanted her foods to touch. I would take my place at the table, and Tata 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,” Mama would say. My sister would tell us how much she was looking forward to the safari, to seeing the elephants and the antelopes and the monkeys. “Tomorrow is going to be really great,” she would cry, clapping her hands with joy. “I simply can’t wait.” And we would laugh, Mama, Tata, and I, we would laugh, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, desperately hiding our rope burns. ♦