Scenes from a War
If people are said to radiate an aura, then why not cities as well? Or at least an abiding impression, sometimes of promise, sometimes of intimidation. Certainly the quintessence of one city is encapsulated in its very name: Kinshasa. This aura is enhanced through newspaper photos and old pieces of reportage on the place, and encounters with people who came from there, whose faces would take on a very particular look at the mention of their distant home city: pained, saddened, forbearing, fatalistic, and fighting to suppress a feeling of rage.
Kinshasa’s aura is a dark one, in which the prevailing tones are the hues of colonialism and military drab. And there was also a time when Kinshasa stood for boxing shorts, for the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, for soukous or Congolese Rumba Rock. Following the triumphal success of this musical genre, the style of dress associated with it also became popular. By contrast, the Belgian colonial power’s legacy here consisted of manufactured goods, architectural styles and companies.
Yet the recent war has virtually erased even these images and instead imposed its own: twisted bodies in roadside ditches, marauding bands of soldiers on the city outskirts, looting, rape, mutilation and murder, the unleashing of violence, and a bloody assault on the capital, at the conclusion of which a strong man called Kabila seized the reins of power.
‘No photos, please’, the flight attendant says, taking it upon herself to push my camera down. For a moment, through a gap in the clouds, I’d caught sight of what looked like a vast spa town, green, cut through by the delta of the River Congo, and overrun with sprawling development: Kinshasa in a state of war, charming but clearly to remain incognito.
‘We are duty bound to advise you against undertaking this trip,’ was the way the German Foreign Ministry had put it. But that sounded to me like a standard-form response. They were ‘unwilling’, indeed ‘unable’, to assume a responsibility that they did not have. ‘Worst city in the world, multiplied by ten,’ an Australian colleague told me, and now here was this stewardess, acting like she had to protect the place from paparazzi from an altitude of three thousand feet.
Forget the romanticism of Gorillas in the Mist, or the euphoria of the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ or the hope embodied in the Lusaka Peace Accord. The gorillas were butchered during the war, the splendour of the stadium where Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman is now faded and the treaty has been violated several times. In a city that has been fought over now for years, no one expects law and order any more, but instead vigilantism and anarchists, rebels, freebooters, child soldiers, occupiers, tribal enemies, petty criminals and their godfathers. You just have to come to terms with the law of the street, with landmine victims and the survivors of years of torture, broken prisoners and the mentally disturbed; in short, the whole spectrum of human flotsam and losers of history. And resign yourself to a country with 80 per cent unemployment, widespread malnourishment and shortage of medicines – this is the home of the Ebola virus.
You only need to see the Congolese people, who hang out of the compartment windows of suburban trains every morning like umbels, or those who patrol up and down on the roofs of these trains, touting their wares, bartering or playing cards as the train rumbles slowly through Kinshasa’s commuter belt. Try not to overlook the fates of any of these individuals, whose image sears itself on to your retina between two blinks of your eye, and empathize with them! Oh, forget it then – you’re too slow and too sentimental!
You make your way from the aircraft to the terminal on foot, following a series of yellow markings. You’ll come back this same way when you leave, but changed, that much is certain already, but what will stay the same? People will still be there on the viewing deck, looking down on the airfield and thinking of all the places that we, down below, are flying off to. One of them keeps waving.
The porters at the baggage reclaim carousels are heaving down pieces of upholstered furniture, wrapped in what seems to be kilometre-long strips of bubble wrap, beneath which pink floral designs run riot like frost patterns. After a long journey here from some cheap manufacturing site somewhere on the planet, this three-piece suite has finally arrived at the Heart of Darkness. But at the same time, on the far side of the arrivals hall, some very similar furniture that has been produced on the streets of Kinshasa is being flown out. The porters stand between the carousels, monitor this senseless exchange in the international movement of goods and keep watching a television lounger that’s being exported, long enough to be able to picture the far-off living room in which this little piece of their homeland will be nothing but another item of seating furniture.
I’d come to the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaïre, to meet a musician. I wanted to make a film profile of the country’s most famous musical artist, the spiritual father of Congo’s urban, cosmopolitan youth who danced to his tunes in the clubs of Kinshasa, and whose one dream was that he might one day leave his exile in Paris and come back to his homeland, as less of a fellow sufferer but as more than just a tourist: Papa Wemba, the co-founder of soukou, that pan-African style of music, also known as Rumba Rock, which originated in Kinshasa in the 1970s and went on to conquer the entire continent – the musical language of self-expression for a youth that now, two wars later, had nothing left except their music.
I wanted to know what had happened to music in the Congo during this period and was keen to see how this largerthan-life musician would fare when he entered the orbit of this conflict, and to hear what this world ambassador of Afro-Pop, who was travelling in the full glare of publicity in the music-loving world, had to say about the president’s politics. How much license would this untouchable personage allow himself, and how much of that freedom would he ascribe to his music?
The clouds were hanging low and colourless over the airport, and a cluster of baggage handlers dashing past forced me to take refuge beside a pickup truck, against which a friend who’s been waiting here for me for the past two days is now leaning, ashen-faced. On the way here, the minibus he’d originally been travelling in had hit a pothole at eighty kilometres an hour, breaking both its axles, and sending the camera it was carrying flying four metres through the air across the vehicle, where it gashed open the head of the front seat passenger. My friend – and cameraman – was left with a nasty head wound, while our bodyguard sustained a compound back injury; the driver fled the scene of the accident. Three days later, the vehicle was still lying there by the roadside, by now stripped of its interior.
On the hotel bed, we gingerly turn over our bodyguard’s massive body at which his groans grow louder, and by now even my friend is having trouble turning his head. Six hours later, both of them are lying side by side on trolleys in a hospital awaiting treatment. Then, one of them at least is fitted with an ivory-coloured neck brace and discharged. But by the time they get round to rolling the bodyguard into the bowels of the hospital, he’s already spent three hours crying, even occasionally screaming, this colossus of a man. A cracked vertebra, the doctors think.
All the while, Papa Wemba, the country’s most renowned singer, is waiting at the bar of the Hotel Memling, though ‘waiting’ isn’t the right term; it would be more accurate to say he’s in residence there, bidding those who come to pay homage to him on bended knee to stand up, having his hands and cheeks kissed, ordering newspapers to be brought to him in which his arrival in the city is Page One news, and perusing the cocktail menu.
As a young boy, he used to accompany his mother, who was a Pleureuse or professional mourning singer, to funerals, learning from her the high, melancholic timbre and the soft mellifluous intonation which no musical training has ever managed to spoil. He moved to Kinshasa, became a singer with the group Zaiko Langa Langa and steadily acquired the status of a god of African pop music. The then-president Mobutu indirectly helped his rise to fame by proclaiming ‘L’Authenticité’. This policy promoted indigenous music at the expense of Cuban music, rock, Western pop and R&B, which were banned from the airwaves; musicians were arrested, and the Congolese were encouraged to think of their national roots. At this time, the nation’s top musician Papa Wemba blended folk music with dance rhythms, a style that became such a hit he was soon more popular than any president.
Whatever he touched turned to gold. People in the West sat up and took notice, and his records began to be produced in Paris. An optical illusion – perfectly understandable from the perspective of Kinshasa – made Papa Wemba appear to be seated at the right hand of Michael Jackson in the eternal musical firmament. Then someone – very possibly Papa Wemba himself – hit upon the idea of referring to his so-called ‘magic touch’. He had the phrase printed on his business cards, and soon gained a reputation for being some mythical seer or guru. At the same time, thanks to the extremely flamboyant clothing he liked to wear, which made his concerts into fashion happenings, this pop star also came to be seen as a trendsetter in Central African couture. But he’s not so keen on that label nowadays.
For in his own estimation, he is an important man of small physical stature, and with measured gestures and a talent for pathos. His indigo-blue silk blouse is embroidered with golden appliqué designs, his generously-cut trousers elegantly crumpled, and even his fly-whisk blesses every insect it shoos away. Wearing a jacket by Yamamoto, spectacles by Mikli, and with his mobile to his ear, he briefly puts the phone down and extends his left hand:
‘Welcome to the Congo! Nuts? A cocktail?’
We sit and wait, in a way that one can only wait in Africa. Something will come, a messenger will bring something or some bit of news will arrive. Arrangements will be made, meetings fixed, both sides will smile and nod, both fully aware that everything discussed and agreed here is just so much waste paper.
Papa Wemba keeps telephoning incessantly. Delegations arrive at his desk. They bow, he sits. I enquire about a likely date for us to start filming.
‘Garçon, more nuts!’ he calls out to a liveried hotel employee, waving the empty dish at him. There’s clearly no question of fixing a definite date.
‘Where are the others?’ Papa Wemba asks me.
I tell him about our accident; after all, we could use him putting in a good word for us at the hospital. He pushes the replenished dish of nuts across to me.
‘Let me have a look at your work permit,’ he says.
That’s impertinent of him. Even so, I’m happy to present him with the quarter-pound of paperwork in my possession, all the exchanges of correspondence that have shuttled to and fro over the last few months between embassies, authorities and offices on both continents just to make this meeting over a cocktail in the bar of the ‘Memling’ possible in the first place. He shakes his head at all the letterheads, stamps and signatures, and continues shaking it as he pulls out a small piece of paper from the pile. This document, as it turns out, is missing the personal signature of the minister. So he shoves the whole pile back to me and, with no sense of the irony of the scene, adds the bill for the cocktails and nuts on top.
‘First thing you need to do is get hold of that signature!’
In the lounge, a group of men in safari jackets are gathered around a television. President Kabila is addressing the nation. On screen, he looks even fatter than on his posters or the lapel pin sported by the customs official at the airport.
Foreign commentators see him as a weak man who was elevated to his present position at the last moment by a group of marauding guerrillas, who are now fighting in opposition to him. Currently it’s a state of complete anarchy, with militias from Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda occupying parts of the Congo. Kabila’s troops have already been disarmed in the north of the country.
But the way he’s talking there on the television makes him appear presidential, that’s clearly one of the first tricks you learn in power.
‘We want to involve Mobutu’s supporters in government,’ he’s saying, ‘but we won’t tolerate a Nazi Party!’
The camera pans to show a view of the supporters of the ‘Nazi Party’, that is, the party of Mobutu’s supporters. They’re just sitting there looking stunned. They’re evidently no longer opponents who are to be taken seriously, at least to far less a degree than the rebels who are fighting against Kabila’s people in the countryside and even making Kinshasa unsafe.
The president now turns his attention to the occupation forces, though he doesn’t call them that. How can he possibly countenance three mini-states numbering some six or eight million inhabitants apiece as serious aggressors within his realm of fifty million people? How could he allow them to maintain their long-running control over certain parts of his country? Condescendingly, he accepts the President of Botswana as an ‘arbitrator’. But scarcely has this man left the room than he starts mocking him. The UN observer standing to my left shakes his head in disbelief. That’s how this president is. Two weeks ago, he invited a camera crew over from New York for the first time to interview him. He kept them waiting for eight days. Yesterday, they flew back to the States empty-handed.
As it happens, at that moment the only other Western camera crew in the country apart from us is just checking out at reception.
‘Have fun at the Ministry of Information,’ the cameraman says to me. ‘They don’t appreciate the concept of information here, still less how much we love their country. Go on, have a guess how much footage we’ve managed to get after seventeen days here: eight minutes. That’s the last time I come to the Congo!’
He’s already heading out the door when he suddenly stops and comes back to tell me another anecdote:
‘Just you be careful. There’s a woman here who is friends with the Médécins Sans Frontières people and who’s got a little flat in the city. Well, one time she let an acquaintance go out onto the balcony and view the town through his binoculars. For that, they both spent a fortnight in gaol on suspicion of spying. I’m telling you: never again!’
Meanwhile, I’m trying to find a new angle on the war. Articles in Western newspapers customarily begin with sentences like: ‘Dopka is a dead village. The smell of burned thatch is everywhere.’ Or: ‘Night was falling when Dzara Dzeha caught sight of her murderers storming into the village.’ Or ‘The church is full of the bodies of the dead.’ Instead of an analysis of policies, all we get is a scrapbook of massacres – that’s the Africa of the Western media.
So, there’s never any mention of the fact that the Congo is an occupied country, and that the relatively small neighbouring states of Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda have encroached and seized control of land as far as two thousand kilometres into Congolese territory. In 1996, after the dictator Mobutu had been toppled, Rwandan rebels were responsible for staging the victorious entry of the current president Laurent Kabila into the capital. Public opinion cautiously applauded this move at the time. Rumours that the rebels had murdered their original candidate just outside Kinshasa and only latterly appointed Kabila have scarcely had an airing outside the country’s borders. In any event, the man who came to power in this way quickly fell out with the rebels, who in the meantime were able to disarm his troops in the north of the country but who, as a drunken freebooting rabble, have no prospect of seizing the reins of government. On the other hand, the political opposition has retreated so far underground for fear of reprisals that even if the people wanted to choose an alternative, they wouldn’t know where to find one. So, the only alternative to Kabila is Kabila.
He, this unloved lame duck of a president, looms threateningly over the city’s streets on high billboards. Yet however distant the war might seem in Kinshasa, the brutality of a president on a war footing is omnipresent. Seven people are rumoured to have been shot dead by his henchmen for simply failing to get out of the way of his motorcade quickly enough at a crossroads. There is a deep-seated fear of his despotism.
The first thing we learn is that Western eyewitnesses to the war or investigators of massacres are not welcome. But haven’t we come here in the service of music? Only later do we learn our second important lesson: namely, that a reversed racism is now rife here. Whites are despised, harassed and subjected to increasing bureaucratic chicanery, with their passports deliberately being dropped in the mud at border crossings before being seized and retained for hours on end, and sometimes only retrieved by paying a bribe. Any white person who’s still prepared to live in the country under such conditions is often here for altruistic reasons, and not infrequently even has some sympathy for the these acts of belated revenge. Yet even this painfully acquired sense of understanding, stoutly defended against the resentful criticism from their fellow whites, is held in deep contempt.
Papa Wemba, though, is loved. In his conversations with friends, local musicians or fans, the war is never mentioned and nor is the president. Instead, Wemba cruises through the city in his air-conditioned Mercedes, telephoning Paris, letting people pass him fruit and newspapers through the window, listening to his own albums, and sometimes even waving at the neverdiminishing throng of enthusiasts on the street, who almost pull his car to pieces in their sheer ecstasy.
‘You should film this,’ he says.
Yes, sir! From now on, we spend our time taking hours of footage of his triumphal procession through the outskirts of Kinshasa, protected from harm by his fame. Now he’s waving more frequently, too.
Does music work in opposition to the war or is it another world entirely? Does it represent a line of continuity in the history of the country, or has its bloodline now run its course? Does it speak of the victims and the poor, or just aspire to be bought by them?
‘The poor should be left in peace,’ pronounces Papa Wemba.
The sad truth is, though, that of course they’re not left in peace, but instead have to pay the price for this war. Yes, that bothers him too, he says, brushing some bits of fluff off the flamboyant floral pattern of his boubou.
‘I may be an artist, but I still read a lot about politics,’ he adds. Yet when I try to probe deeper, he clarifies his position: ‘However, that doesn’t mean I’m about to take a political stance.’
‘So there’s no link between music and war?’
‘Music should inform people about the war, and we have to win this war.’
He didn’t say what he meant by ‘information’ in this context, or what winning the war would entail.
‘I’m proud of my country,’ he rhapsodized, sitting back snugly in the upholstery of his limousine, but I wonder whether he’s only really proud of it because it spawned him. He doesn’t mention the name Kabila once.
There are barely any Europeans, or any whites at all for that matter, left in Kinshasa. But one female BBC reporter is sticking it out. The authorities tolerate her presence because her reports are filmed but never broadcast, so at least she’s maintaining the outward appearance that international reporting can go on here. Her office is on one of the upper storeys of the Intercontinental. We ask her if we might be allowed to film a swift panning shot over the city from the hotel roof? No, much too dangerous, she tells us. Everything here is political, she explains. Even our visiting her office is politically charged – was the meeting prearranged, is there some conspiracy afoot here? It’d be safer if we just left again straight away. We feel our way down through the seamy, rundown building, which seems to breathe through its pile carpets; the heat is oppressive, the atmosphere no less so. We’re in a place where no one would want to be.
But when all’s said and done, life has this blind urge to keep on going somehow, and if there’s still any dancing and singing taking place in Kinshasa, then it’s a reflex reaction. In the courtyard of his town house, Papa Wemba stands in front of the guard of honour formed by his own youth band and instructs them, his brow knitted in concentration. The voice training of one of the two albino singers is a pet project of his. This whitehaired giant of a boy with his pink-lidded eyes produces sounds such as I’ve never heard before in a high falsetto; his voice is as clear and pure as those of the castrati, and the gold-bedecked star of Rumba Rock really does stand there dumbstruck for a moment. Then he nods, asks to hear a vibrato and promptly turns his attention to the ‘Fioti Fioti’, the ensemble of shortskirted stage dancers and their new dance routine. All of them, boys and girls alike, tense up when they look into Papa Wemba’s face. They’re respectful, but timid with it, and anyone addressing a question to him doffs his cap first.
We drive with him to the church where he used to sing in the choir as a boy, and now goes to attend Mass, strolling up to the altar in flip-flops and an Adidas tracksuit and telling the widows, the old ladies, the social rejects and the downtrodden day labourers that they can all make it if they really want to. This jars like it’s been churned out by some party sloganeering machine in the US presidential election. Make ‘it’, indeed! – no one standing in this church nave looks like they understand the foggiest about this phrase, unless it has something to do with salvation.
So, is he going to reveal anything to the Congolese population except his own fame? Doesn’t he have anything for them but his waving hand? Isn’t he going to make any pronouncements about the war, except that it must be won?
The security barrier outside the Ministry of Information is manned by a group of adolescent boy soldiers. Two of them have stumps where there had once been arms. You couldn’t exactly say that these young war invalids look like prematurely aged children. It’s far worse than that. There’s no hope for the future evident in their faces, it’s like they’ve been indelibly brutalized. The childlike aspect of their features hasn’t been erased, but all the tenderness has vanished, leaving only an impression of abrasiveness and ruthlessness. They’ve adopted this air of assertiveness among other soldiers, who like them simply had a gun pressed into their hands and were told to go off and defend their country. The first thing they had to do was prove themselves at some front or other, and now they’re allowed to guard the propaganda headquarters with the grim faces of battle-hardened veterans. If they find themselves involved in some misadventure where a person mistakenly meets his death at their hands, President Kabila is wont to say: Look, they’re still so young. What can I do to curb their excesses?
The ministry complex is deserted. The press hotel has also been empty for some time now, and fungus has started to grow on its walls. But in the basement of the main building, a few local journalists and cameramen are still hanging around, playing cards and flirting with the office girls while they wait for their next assignment. Most of the women are gap-toothed. Many of them have deliberately had their incisors taken out because men enjoyed oral sex with them more that way. Their faces are also disfigured by scars; repeatedly, they come over, wink at you for a second and incline their heads as if to say ‘Come on, then!’ But where – there’s nowhere to go here.
At least there’s a kiosk in the courtyard where they sell Fanta Orange, and where there are also a couple of young women sitting in the shade and waiting. They’re too heavily made-up to be government employees, wearing a thick foundation that’s plastered on like a mask to hide the signs that they’re infected with AIDS. The illness has left scars on their faces but the women have just covered these up. Now their eyes, highlighted with kohl and eyeliner, are gazing out of their sockets with an even greater intensity of expression, and their cheeks glow feverishly from the thick layers of rouge they’ve applied, which looks wholly out of place on their dark skin. But there’s something in that look that never focusses on what it’s ostensibly directed at. They seem to stare into their own frailty, unable to disengage their inner attention from the prospect of dying.
We’ll be able to obtain the permit we need, we’re told, on the tenth floor of the ministry, the all-important permit without which our filming becomes a criminal act. Every day, I return to the ministry in search of the relevant official and his signature. As I wait for the lift on the ground floor, a workman keeps lugging cement sacks in on his back.
‘You building something?’ I ask him, after he’s slammed the sixth sack down on the top of the growing pile.
He laughs, then giving me a conspiratorial look; bending down, he opens up a rip in one of the sacks with two fingers.
‘No, it’s just money,’ he replies, his fingers riffling the corner of a stack of banknotes.
‘All in cents?’
‘Yep, this is the employee’s salaries I’m bringing here. They’re all payable in cents.’
The cash travels up in the lift with us. But at every floor we stop at, the doors open onto blackness. People get out and disappear into the total darkness, the sacks of money likewise. From office to office, the bundles of cash will be weighed with scales – given the rampant inflation here, this is the easiest way of counting money.
‘So, you earn a pound?’
‘About that.’
There’s not a sound, not even a telephone ringing. Even on the tenth storey the smell of decay hasn’t dissipated. The workman with the barrowload of money sacks has vanished into the depths of the dark corridors. I feel my way along the deserted passageways, navigating by the occasional rectangle of light that spills out from an occupied office.
Finally, in an administration office at the end of the corridor, I manage to track down the entire ‘case’ that has my name on it. It’s hard to imagine what tortuous journey our documents have been on before ending up in this drawer. In the process, they’ve got covered in a light dust and dirty fingerprints. But it’s all to no avail anyway. More documents, more passport photos are required, and more money will need to change hands.
Over the ensuing days, I find myself having to drop in daily on the ministry, where I drink weak coffee with a secretary, make some new friends, provide lists of topics I’m planning to cover, show immunization certificates and other official-looking bits of paper, forge a signature, and even hold out the prospect of a visit by Papa Wemba. And all the while, I’ll know exactly where the information minister is at any given time, though he certainly won’t have any idea how persistently I’m dogging his every step. Even so, it will ultimately prove impossible to bring the minister and my documents into contact with one another at any point.
On one occasion, I catch a glimpse of his face on a black and white TV screen, where he’s sitting in the audience at a parliamentary debate. The secretary points out his face with her index finger:
‘There! There he is! Now all we need to do is bring that man and these papers here together, and you can get started!’
I wonder if he ever got to learn of our request? For some days already, we’ve been filming illegally, sticking to Papa Wemba like glue, because we’re guaranteed to be safe around him. For his part, he’s adopted the camera as one of his trademarks; he likes to show his countrymen that he’s travelling in the glare of global media attention.
We drive to his house on the city outskirts, and film him up on the veranda from our vantage point on the far side of his swimming pool. He waves to us. Then we set up the camera behind his back up there and look down into the garden. He waves again.
‘As a small boy from the country, could you ever have dreamt that you’d end up here one day?’
‘I always knew I would. Always. It’s no coincidence – it was predestination. Always. And one day, I’ll explode across the entire globe, too.’
‘Predestination!’ scoffs a local musician when I tell him the story that evening. ‘He was fired from Zaiko Langa Langa. So he goes off and cries on the shoulder of his best friend, some loopy diplomat’s son, who went out and bought him Western clothes, some really outlandish gear. And Wemba caused a sensation by appearing in this clobber on stages here. Ever since, he’s been linked with fashion, though he can’t stand it. Thing is, he owes too much of his success to it.’
Is it the case, then, that war brought the president to power, and fashion put the musician where he is? One of them dreams about ruling the country, the other about ruling the world music market. And the most intimate connection between them resides in the fact that the president, in refusing to grant us permission to film, is suppressing the production of images of the pop star, while he in turn is careful not to formulate any opinion about the president. So in their intimate state of separation, they cosily feed off one another.
I keep going back to the Ministry of Information on a daily basis for a while, and see the money courier with his sacks of cash again and walk past the empty offices and sometimes sit on a chair in the corner of the administration office, but I don’t even get to discuss my request again. I become nothing but an applicant in a dingy ministerial corridor in war-torn Congo, a castaway who’s been forgotten about and who months later might simply go feral and end up getting filed under ‘any other business’. All roads end here, I can’t go a step further.
A couple of years later, political reality caught up with both of them: Kabila was executed in his presidential suite by his supporters, his palace guard, the security services, maybe even members of his own family. No reliable account of what happened is forthcoming, and his son Joseph Kabila comes to power.
Papa Wemba’s musical trajectory doesn’t ultimately go global. Although he continues to present himself in interviews as a political force for integration, his influence has been outstripped by the passage of time. Instead, he’s arrested in Paris when it emerges that he’s been arranging for Congolese compatriots to enter France illegally in return for large bribes and has allegedly been at the head of a major people-smuggling operation.
But when we leave Kinshasa on that autumn afternoon, the president and the pop star are still secure in their positions. Never have I been so glad to get out of a country, and consequently at the airport the world begins to fall back into its familiar old pose: there are the furniture packers once more, reliably sitting on the edge of the baggage carousel, ruled over by Kabila, soundtracked by Papa Wemba. Their labour helps feed both of them. But one certainty remains. As we follow the yellow markings back to our plane, I turn around. How comforting: someone up there is still waving.