Mobutu telephoned at six in the morning, his gruff, gravelly voice rumbling over the flimsily patched telephone lines, and invited him to breakfast. Mobutu sounded jovial and full of energy. Mornings were his good times; he rose long before daybreak and liked to receive over breakfast around the long table on the front terrace of the presidential residence above the rapids.
Jacques dragged himself out of bed and started his shower. The house was built so far out onto the river bank that he could hear all the familiar sounds of the morning fishermen down at water’s edge singing and shouting as they prepared their nets for the day. Along the marshy banks the reeds swished and crackled as the fishermen poled their pirogues through the shallows.
Jacques stared glumly at his reflection in the mirror as he shaved. Lubumbashi had not been a reassuring experience. He would have to return in another week or two. Perhaps he ought to think of taking on a partner, someone to share the grind.
Jacques drove himself out to Mont Ngaliema since Louis lived far out in the cité and would not appear for work for another hour. At the crossroads in Kitambo, with its jumble of tin shanties and drink and cigarette stands and gasoline stations, already thick with cars and trucks and pedestrians on their way to work in the textile factories and in the villas of the wealthy, he turned a sharp right up the road to Mont Ngaliema and Camp Tshatshi. He passed the little park where, as a boy, he and his sister Isabelle had raced around the tidy footpaths on Sunday afternoons in search of their friends. In his memory it was still a place of green mystery and enchantment, even though now most of the animals had died and the exotic plants and shrubs had disappeared into a tangle of undergrowth. Only a few antelope, a scrawny, mangy okapi, and a male lion with faded and patchy tufts of fur stared forlornly at passersby.
At the gates of Camp Tshatshi, soldiers of the Presidential Guard, as colorful as tropical birds in their green uniforms with épaulettes and cuffs of red and yellow and fez-like leopard-skin hats with plumes of red, yellow and green feathers, leaned against the gatehouse smoking cigarettes. The sergeant recognized Jacques and, grinning expansively, bobbed and waved him through, while a young soldier at his side bent down and peered curiously as Jacques drove through the gates. He followed the road past the barrack houses, more and more dilapidated with every passing day, doors dangling from broken hinges, ragged curtains knotted at windows, rusted tin roofs, debris strewn about the bare yards. Here and there a woman sat listlessly pounding manioc in a wooden bowl. For a while Jacques drove toward the river then turned left past the front of the president’s compound to the parking lot.
There were only a few Mercedes, five or six, parked in the lot. A small group at table, then. In the old days, with his father, when Mobutu had been in power for only a few years, there was no formality, no protocol. They sat around the huge table and ate cold cuts, cheeses, omelets and fresh jam, homemade jams of mangoes and watermelon and figs. It was like a big family gathering every morning with the disorderly table and children scrambling to give all the adults good-bye kisses before climbing into the minibus that would take them off to school. And Jacques’ father and Maman Mobutu, Marie-Antoinette, the first Maman Mobutu, grumbling and scolding her husband for eating too much and gaining too much weight. Both of them gone now, Maman Mobutu, dead in her thirties of heart disease and Albert Delpech swallowed up in the rain forest.
Jacques heard laughter in the antechamber. “You’re expected,” one of the president’s guards said, nodding toward the long hallway. In the antechamber off the entrance foyer three guards were watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. A cardinal sat in a highback Louis XVI chair squinting at Paris Match, his glasses dangling from his mouth, the magazine held up close to his pink face.
The small rooms to the left and right of the long hallway were empty. Jacques walked through the enormous room where the president officially received and out onto the terrace.
“Don’t get up, please, don’t get up, citoyen Président,” Jacques said, as he always did, but, also as usual, Mobutu rose and took his hand. Mobutu smiled mysteriously and cocked his head to one side.
“Mon frère,” Jacques heard someone say behind him. Boketsu Bika stepped out onto the terrace, and Jacques wondered why he had not anticipated the president’s little surprise.
Mobutu laughed as Boketsu and Jacques embraced, then clapped his hands and ordered pink champagne. “Just a little,” he said, “to celebrate. It is good to celebrate, n’est-ce pas, when a brother comes home again?”
They drank to the brother who had come home again, and talked in generalities, as Mobutu preferred to do now, about the country. Two days before, a copper barge in tow had broken loose and had smashed up on the rapids just below the residence. “We will go and have a look later, if you like. The carcass is still there. A nesting place for crocodiles. With all our problems we have to lose a load of copper! Nasty luck.”
They listened for a moment to the rumble of the rapids, for Jacques a curiously exhilarating sound that he remembered from so many such mornings long ago with his father.
“Bika, now it is your problem. You are my new Minister of Mines. Give Gecamines a lesson in river currents. It’s your problem now.”
They all laughed. Jacques noticed that Mobutu used the familiar “tu” with Bika, and that Bika was smiling a great deal and doing a lot of anticipatory nodding. Watching the two of them, Jacques felt weary and sick of heart. Who could ever have predicted this? Bika, the perfect courtier. Jacques began to wonder when he could take his leave without giving offense. He wanted to weep with anger and sorrow at seeing his once proud and noble Bika bow and scrape.
Behind his tinted glasses Mobutu was observing them. He wore a gabardine abascos of dark iridescent mauve gray and a silk ascot of purple and white polka dots. He looked relaxed but wary. Jacques tried not to look at Bika, sitting forward on his chair, a fixed, fatuous grin on his face. He felt a flood of intense, vicious hatred of Mobutu. What kind of deal had he struck with Bika to get him back behaving like a puppet on a string? Behind the French windows Jacques could see a dozen or more flunkies—spear carriers as his father had called them—peering out, following every gesture of the Man, waiting for their turn to petition, to wheedle, to beg. The champagne glasses, only half emptied, made wet circles on the glass table.
Mobutu shifted in his chair.
“I mustn’t keep you from your work,” Jacques said, rising from his chair. “Excellent champagne, citoyen Président.”
Mobutu and Boketsu got to their feet. Boketsu took Jacques’ arm and murmured his good-bye to the president.
“Ah, Jacques, you are a good boy,” Mobutu said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Keep an eye on this brother of yours. Make sure that he is a good boy, too. Will you do that, hein? Will you do that for me, Jacques?”
Boketsu squealed with laughter as if he had never heard anything wittier in his life.
They stood next to their cars in the naked sun. Boketsu wanted to ride with Jacques, his driver following them into town, but neither made the first move to get into the car.
“I’m sorry about your little girl,” Boketsu said after a long silence. “Suzanne was . . .”
“It was Sabine. You never knew her. She was only three.”
“I’m sorry.”
A white Peugeot pulled into a parking space. A chauffeur in a navy blue abacos held the door for a short, wiry white man in a tennis outfit who headed up the walk to the entrance.
“And Janine?”
“In Brussels.”
“Ah,” Boketsu said. “I’m sorry.”
Jacques burst out laughing. “Oh, for God’s sake, Bika! Don’t be so pious! You hated the bitch.”
“Of course I did. Disgusting flamande!” Bika spat to one side, then slapped his thighs and bent over laughing. “I hope she rots in Brussels! I’m giving a party on Saturday. I’ll send my driver with a pour mémoire. Come, mon frère, it will be like old times.”
“Will it?” Jacques asked, feeling weary with memories and loss.
“Of course. Why not?”