Those who live in Africa think of bush pilots as down-on-their-luck drifters, a sophisticated order of bums, rejects from the modern technological world of Europe, and usually recovering alcoholics. Johann Verhaegen, Jacques Delpech’s pilot, conformed to the cliché perfectly, although he would have had trouble qualifying as a recovering alcoholic. At some point during his forty-two years Verhaegen must have been a handsome man, for there was a vestige of refinement in the features of his tanned and weathered face. A typically blond and blue-eyed flamand, he pulled his long, graying blond hair into a thick ponytail tied with a leather thong at the back of his neck. Grog blossoms sprouted over the end of his nose and across his cheeks. He had turned up in Africa in the late seventies and flown for Baptist missionaries in eastern Zaïre until he crashed one of their light cargo planes after a late night at the Big Boss Club in Goma. In the dry season of 1980 Verhaegen drifted into Kinshasa shortly after Albert Delpech and his pilot had gone down in a rain forest twenty kilometers beyond the end of the runway at Kisangani, having for two hours failed to raise a response from the tower where the controller slept soundly after a heavy meal of cassava and fish-head stew and beer. After his father’s disappearance Jacques bought a Beechcraft A-200 and hired Verhaegen to fly it.
Jacques and Sarah stood with Johann Verhaegen in the shade of the tin-roofed cement block building that served as a kind of terminal and watched the porters who hung around the small airport waiting for jobs load Jacques’ gifts for the village elders into the plane. The day before Jacques and Sarah had made the round of the tradings, the local stores frequented by market mamas who came down river into town to stock up on everything from tin basins and tin dishes to hair straightener and school notebooks and crayons, coffee pots and bolts of wax print cotton and candles and matches to take back up river to peddle. The tradings occupied long, low buildings with tin roofs and cement floors where merchandise was stacked or piled on the floor. The merchandise was cheap stuff, mostly from China, and there were no fancy displays, few shelves, only a waist-high counter covered in cracked and patched linoleum where the customer displayed his purchases before paying for them. Broad flyspecked ceiling fans whirred overhead. A thick layer of dust covered everything, especially in the dry season. Cypric Jews who had lived in Zaïre for five generations and Pakistanis had grown immensely rich from the humble goods that cluttered the floors of their stores.
Amused, touched by Sarah’s excitement over the trip, Jacques had lingered in the dusky mote-filled air of the tradings watching her wander through the maze of articles.
“Look at this,” she had said, holding up a pair of eyelash curlers. She studied the curlers solemnly. “Think of it. One of these days, these lash curlers will have traveled all the way from China, up hundreds of miles of the Congo River into a primitive village.” She made a face suddenly and put the lash curlers down.
At the end of the day Jacques had bought two fifty kilo bags of rice and four cases of tinned mackerel, and as they stood waiting for Boketsu and his entourage, a Simba truck arrived with cases of beer.
Verhaegen pulled a cigarette from a black John Player pack and slowly swept his sleepy eyes over Sarah. She was wearing slim cut khaki slacks and a white linen blouse. As a joke she had borrowed a cream-colored straw Panama hat from Phil Olmstead. To her surprise, with her thick crown of hair, the hat, slanted slightly over her right eye, was a perfect fit.
The Simba truck pulled away, and Jacques started back toward the hangar.
“What time did you set?” Verhaegen asked him. The rutted tarmac, weeds pushing up through potholes, had begun to shimmer in the heat.
“Eight,” Jacques said.
“Zaïrian time?”
“Yeah.”
“We can always hope. Might as well start my final check,” Verhaegen said.
“He looks like Willie Nelson,” Sarah said, as Verhaegen headed toward the plane. His dark blue uniform with gold epaulettes was immaculate, his captain’s hat cocked smartly at an angle over his ponytail.
Jacques smiled blandly as if he knew who Willie Nelson was. A bit of hypocrisy, a habit he had acquired while growing up with foreigners who passed through his life as they drifted in and out of Africa. He was suddenly aware of Sarah’s foreignness and worried that she would be disappointed with the trip. After all, she had never seen an African village. Movies and books passed over the dirt and sickness and ugliness there. It would be a privilege to go, she had said, to meet your friend Bika, to see where you and he grew up. A quaint idea that he found endearing, in spite of himself. A privilege. He looked at her—her face was still blemished by peeling, patchy skin with shiny pink spots—and he was overwhelmed with such love for her that his right hand flew unconsciously to his heart, as if some simpering, fat cartoon cupid had suddenly flung a handful of arrows into it. They would make love for the first time in Iyondo, he had decided as soon as Bika proposed the trip, and he was not at all embarrassed by the idiotic romanticism of his idea. It was perfect. In every way.
“I hope you won’t be disappointed,” Jacques said.
“Disappointed? Why should I be?” She looked genuinely surprised, even affronted by the question.
“The dry season. It’s not ideal for flying,” and as he said it, he thought for the first time of the dangers of the flight, which he was so accustomed to that he never gave them a second thought. “You won’t be able to see much. It may be boring up there.”
“Don’t worry,” she said.
Boketsu did not apologize for arriving at the airport over an hour late. “In a little over two hours, we are in Mbandaka,” he said. “We have all the time in the world.”
He was accompanied by his petit frère Bula and three other kinsmen and Liliane, in native dress, who stood twisting and tightening her pagne nervously as her four pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage were taken from the car to the plane. At first, Bika seemed startled at the sight of Sarah. Then, in a flurry of mannerisms, he introduced Liliane and flirted with Sarah in a genial African way.
“I knew you would handle the rice and beer,” he said to Jacques. “You always remember, and I always forget.”
In the plane Jacques sat in the co-pilot’s seat to assist Verhaegen with the navigating. As soon as they cleared the runway and circled over the corrugated iron roofs of the huge, sprawling central market of the city, the small plane disappeared into the clouds.
Liliane sat to one side with Bula, who was trying to teach her to inhale cigarette smoke. She was more interested in watching Sarah, who sat just behind Jacques with Boketsu. Liliane wore a green and orange wax print with a large cameo picture of President Mobutu in a leopard skin hat scattered at intervals over the material. At the seams on the back and front of the bodice, the two halves of Mobutu’s face had not been matched up evenly and were sewn together so that his face was unusually thin and his eyes very close together, one higher than the other. The Mobutu staring out from the dress looked thin, distressed, and slightly cross-eyed.
“You like Liliane’s patriotic dress, don’t you?” Boketsu asked, grinning at her, somewhat nastily, Sarah thought.
“It’s very nice,” Sarah said. “That’s the symbol of Zaïrian independence, isn’t it?” She pointed toward the large yellow circles with a brown fist holding a flaming red torch. “The flaming torch?”
Boketsu inhaled deeply and studied her face for a moment, his broad nostrils flaring. “Hardly,” he said. He stared out the window and seemed temporarily to have forgotten her. “It’s the emblem of the President’s party. The MPR,” he said, turning to her. “The MPR,” he repeated, with a nasty smile. “Mort Pour Rien. Dead for no reason at all.”
Boketsu shrugged and turned back to the window. “Liliane’s a little patriot,” he said.
Jacques had been right. It was impossible to see anything below; a murky, yellowish light surrounded the plane. Sarah grew restless, and it was awkward sitting there next to Boketsu, who was smarmy one minute and cold and withdrawn the next. Sarah unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward and squeezed Jacques’ shoulder.
“Bored?” he asked. Verhaegen, too, had turned and was looking at her. The radio crackled and emitted a short burst of static.
“Not really. A little, maybe.”
“Fasten your belt. We’ll go down for a minute and let you have a look at the rain forest.”
Verhaegen brought the plane down so fast and so low that Sarah thought that at any moment Jacques would yell or pull up or do something that would keep them from piling into the lurid green jungle rushing up to meet them. Instead they came down very low and leveled off for a few minutes over a mesh of green, as blank and unvarying as the chalky clouds above.
Then, suddenly, in a modest circle of cleared ground alongside a stream, the jungle below came to life. Children came running out of a large low mud-brick building with a thatched palm roof, sitting off to one side of the clearing next to a compound of mud huts with pens of chickens and goats and pigs. At the edge of the clearing, on lines of wire and vine, manioc, like freshly laundered clothes, dried in the sun. Two women with nursing babies sat in the shade of a tree. Heads bent back, the children flailed their arms and waved, their mouths open wide. The plane flew so low that Sarah thought for a moment that she could hear their shouts. As they swept skyward, she saw a tall white man come to the door of the low building. With one hand on his hip, he leaned against the doorway. He did not look up. He watched the children as they waved and shouted at the plane. A solitary white man leaning against the crude doorway.
“A mission school,” Boketsu said. He seemed bored. He yanked frantically at his small ears as the plane gained altitude.
“Are there many mission schools?” Sarah asked, to be polite, thinking of the man in the doorway, the tilt of his lean body. He looked like a young man. It could have been Michael. Michael would do something like that. Michael would have done something like that. Michael, too, could be idealistic, especially if the cause seemed hopeless and had more than a possibility of self-destruction involved.
“Enough. Enough to teach a few to read and to write.” After a while, he said, “I went to a mission school myself. Before les évènements, before the fighting broke out and Jacques and I left for Belgium.”
“The President did, too, that is, he was educated by the missionaries, I believe I read that he was. Anyway, it was interesting to see what’s down beneath this murky stuff.”
“It’s the smoke. That’s why you can’t see anything. In the dry season the people clear and burn the land to plant crops in the rainy season. They burn the trunks for potash. To fertilize the soil. It’s the smoke from the trees burning.”
“Slash and burn? Isn’t that bad for the land? I mean, aren’t the people told . . .”
“The people have to eat. You won’t find many supermarkets in the bush,” Boketsu said.
“Of course not. I know that. I didn’t mean anything so ridiculous. I only meant that it’s very destructive to the land. Slash and—”
Boketsu yawned and looked at his watch. “Twelve thirty. We’ll be landing soon.”
From the quiet, dilapidated airport in Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur, they raced in two Mercedes sedans down a rough laterite road, throwing up thick mauve-red clouds of dust behind them. Marshlands with only here and there a black pool of stagnant water lay off to one side of the road. Occasionally a clump of four of five mud huts crouched in the distance in a grove of banana trees. Farther out from the city huge stands of bamboo, squeaking dryly as the cars sped past, and sparse clumps of desiccated tall grass lined the road.
Bula, his small round head hunched down between his shoulders, drove with intense concentration, stomping on the brake and sending up a shower of laterite when he caught up with the dust of the front car carrying Boketsu, his three cousins, and Liliane. In the back seat, absent-mindedly holding Sarah’s hand, Jacques said little and stared watchfully out the window, as if a moment’s inattention would mean losing forever something precious, something vital. Sarah, still irritated by Boketsu’s remarks, sank into a resentful lethargy as the sage-green landscape whirled by. Jacques was in a distant, inaccessible place: his African childhood with Bika. She was jealous, and she knew it.
“Hey, you look cross,” Jacques said finally in English.
“Do I?”
His smile was broad and generous, his hands were dry and warm and firm as he took her hand in both of his. She wondered how she could ever have been so lucky, finding her way from Lincolnville, Maine, to the center of Africa, to this car, to this strong man whose simple touch made her happier than she could ever have imagined. “I’m like the eyelash curlers,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m not cross.”
“Good. I don’t want you to be cross, my darling Sarah,” he said, taking her in his arms.