The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (2 page)

“But then I noticed that he was looking at me, as if he knew me and didn’t quite dare talk to me. I smiled, because maybe I did know him, I know just about everybody in the neighborhood now. But he was a stranger. And dirty. And I could see that he had been drinking for days.

“So I smiled and said to him, ‘You want help, mister, don’t you?’ He needed a shave, and his clothes were filthy and all ripped, and his hair was a mess. His eyes, though, something pathetic about his eyes made me want to talk to him. But honestly, Russell, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. He was so… I guess dirty and all.

“Anyhow, when I spoke to him, just that little bit, he sort of came out of his daze and sat up straight for a second, like he was afraid I was going to complain to the manager and have him thrown out of the restaurant. ‘What? What did you say to me?’ he asked. His voice was weak, but he was trying to make it sound strong, so it came out kind of loud and broken. ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing.’ And I turned away from him and quickly finished my breakfast and left the restaurant.

“That same afternoon, when I was walking home from my baby-sitting job, I went to the restaurant to see if he was there. But he wasn’t there. And the next morning, Thursday, I walked all the way over there to check again, even though I never eat breakfast at the Pancake House on Thursdays. But he was gone then, too. And yesterday, Friday, I went back a third time. But he was gone.” She lapsed into a thoughtful silence and looked at her hands.

“Was he there this morning?” I asked, thinking that a mild coincidence was perhaps the point of her story.

“No,” she said. “But I didn’t expect him to be there this morning. I’d stopped looking for him by yesterday.”

“Oh. Why did you tell me the story, then? What’s it about?”

“About? I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I just felt sorry for the man. And because I was afraid, I shut up and left him alone. And then he was gone.” She was still studying her tiny hands.

“What were you afraid of?”

“You know, sounding dumb and naive. And making him mad at me.”

“That’s only natural,” I said and put my arms around her. “Everyone’s afraid that way.”

She turned her face into my shoulder. “I know, Russell, I know. But still…”

Djinn

Some years ago, before I married and took a position with a company whose entire operation was domestic—before I came home, as it were—I was employed by a Hopewell, New Jersey, company owned by a multinational consortium based in Amsterdam. We manufactured and sold women’s and children’s high-style rubberized sandals, and our assembly plant was located in Gbandeh, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Katonga, then a recently de-Socialized West African nation. With an area the size of Vermont and a population just under that of Spain, Katonga in those Cold War years was a capitalist pawn on the African chessboard and was thus the recipient of vast sums of U.S. foreign aid, which, as usual, financed a thuggish oligarchy of connected families who sent their children to private schools abroad and drove about the country in fleets of Mercedes-Benzes and Land Rovers. Thanks to American military engineers and civilian contractors, roads were paved, electric and gas utilities were reliable, and the Gbandeh airport could handle the air traffic of a city the size of Toronto or, if necessary, launch a fleet of B-52s against targets from Libya to the Seychelles. Also, there was the inevitable undisciplined but well-armed police force that kept order over an impoverished population of displaced rural peasants eager to assemble Western goods for a few dollars a week.

I don’t apologize for these conditions, nor do I judge them. Simply, they were, for me, working conditions, just as they were for our Katongan assemblers and managers. History created the conditions, and I, like my African cohorts, saw myself as merely an ordinary man with a small job to do, a job that could have no effect on history one way or the other.

As the newly hired head of the company’s research-and-development division, I was obliged early in my tenure to visit our assembly plant in Gbandeh and make the acquaintance of the company representatives and local managers, ostensibly to facilitate future communication between the New Jersey home office and its African outpost, but mainly to evaluate the Katongans’ ability to adapt to the fast-changing demands of our sales force. The design and materials for our product were subject to the shifting whims of American and European women and children with disposable incomes and self-images easily manipulated by advertising. We were working, therefore, in a very competitive field. Our people, all our people, from manufacturing and assembly to advertising and sales, had to be extremely adaptable: we had to be both creative and reactive in equal measures. In Africa, I stood at the crossroads of the two.

From the day I arrived, I was fascinated by the nature of my assignment, which was essentially to be a translator, not of languages—the national language of Katonga was English, after all—but of economic customs and procedures. My goal was to replace inefficiency, corruption, and indolence with competence, honesty, and service. To that end, I had to find ways for the Africans to adapt to us and ways for us to adapt to them. Both parties had to change. For years my predecessor had ignored this difficult task, but, luckily, I found the work at once wonderfully engaging and even began to wish the job were a permanent one. I had no desire to return home to New Jersey anytime soon.

Then, early one evening, when I had been in Gbandeh for nearly three weeks, I took my now customary stroll around the sadly neglected Binga Park, named for the assassinated national hero, Henry Binga, and things unexpectedly changed. Bordered by stately royal palms, the rectangular park was faced by the five most important buildings in town: the modernist, black-glass, local branch of Citibank; the slat-windowed police bunker; the crumbling, neoclassical manse that served as a municipal office building; the Masonic temple, a forbidding, yellow brick ziggurat; and my neobaroque hotel, the Gbandeh Grande. At the end of the day, when the sun drooped behind the western hills, and the cooling shadows of the buildings and royal palms began to lengthen, it was pleasant to walk the square, nodding to the guards, doormen, peddlers, and lounging taxi drivers whose faces I had come to recognize, and end my stroll at a quiet café located in a narrow cul-de-sac off the square a short block from my hotel. There my habit was to sit alone at an outdoor table and drink two chilled bottles of Rhino, the national beer, and over dinner enjoy the sight of the locals trickling into the square from the nearby tenements, rooming houses, and crowded worker-hotels. At such times, even after only three weeks, I felt almost at home in Africa.

Since my arrival, most of my days had been spent out at the assembly plant, a dozen kilometers from downtown Gbandeh. Our plant was one of three low, cinder-block cubes in the optimistically named Gbandeh Industrial Park, which was less a park than a permanent construction site, a huge, windblown plain burned and bulldozed out of the equatorial rain forest a decade ago. There were small camps of squatters growing like dingy coral along the far edges of the park—clusters of corrugated tin huts, cast-off shipping containers, and abandoned cars, trucks, and buses. Some of our workers came from these camps; the rest lived in Gbandeh in conditions not much better. All had once been subsistence farmers who had abandoned their rural land holdings for wage-earning jobs in the city.

Inside the factory, which was not air-conditioned, everyone sweltered, management and assemblers alike, and red dust from the eroded plain blew without letup through the open windows, covering materials, tools, packaging, and people, whether on the assembly line or behind a desk in the manager’s office, with a powdery skin of ferrous oxide. I had a driver and car at my disposal and consequently at every opportunity slipped back to Gbandeh to my air-conditioned hotel room, where I showered, changed into clean clothes, wrote my reports for the home office, and, before heading out for my afternoon stroll, briefly recovered in the familiar comfort of solitude from the dissonant, invasive company of the Katongans.

Not that I disliked the natives. In general, they were decorous and intelligent people, friendly to foreigners, especially Americans. I liked them. But they possessed a puzzling type of ethnic and national pride. It flew in the face of their social and political realities, which were hardly the realities that inspire and justify a true pride, the things, for instance, that make Americans proud: independence, the work ethic, cultural and economic achievement, and so on. Perhaps it was only false pride that made the Katongans seem querulous and loud and self-admiring—a defensiveness fueled by generations of colonial and post-colonial dependency, deracination, poverty. Nonetheless, I found it irritating. They blew their own horns, as it were, continuously, especially to strangers, and loudly sang the praises of the most trivial expression of their national character and culture—their affection for the roasted flesh of chimpanzees, for instance—as if it were something to be universally admired and imitated.

Katongans generally, and Gbandehans especially, socialized outdoors and at night, when it was finally cool enough to eat a large, lingering meal of rice and beans, hot peppers, and bits of what they called bush meat, and drink cheap liquor distilled from palm wine, talk politics and religion, and later dance and make love. Every evening, the Gbandehans, rich and poor and young and old alike, shed their work clothes, washed their red-ocher skins, and dressed up—the men, sockless in American running shoes, wearing dark, sharply creased slacks and starched, white guayabera shirts; the women in high heels and provocative, colorful rayon dresses, their oiled black hair elaborately plaited and pinned into thick, uplifted wings and blades—and headed for the cafés, bars, and restaurants that crowded the alleys and side streets off Binga Park.

I was halfway through my first Rhino, waiting for the local people to start appearing, when I glanced up and noticed in the distance a strangely contorted figure pass along the square, his shape silhouetted sharply against the yellow glare of fading sunlight off the park. Dressed in a few scraps of dark cloth, barefoot, filthy, and hunched over like an ape, he lurched more than walked, and then suddenly he glanced in my direction, straightened, and, stiff-legged, lumbering like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, turned off the square and entered the cul-de-sac, where, at the far end, at what had become my usual table, I sat staring.

The street was narrow, a cobbled walkway barely wide enough for a single car to enter. The attached, three- and four-story, unpainted, wood-frame buildings that lined the street dated from early in the colonial era. On opposite sides of the street, tilted balustrades and balconies loosely attached to shuttered French windows nearly met each other overhead. The buildings once housed the waiting rooms and offices of the home country’s clerks and administrators. Now these dusty, unlit, high-ceilinged rooms were used mainly for the permanent storage of empty file cabinets, rotting rolltop desks, glass-fronted bookcases, and countless cartons of moldering, mouse-eaten colonial records. The only commercial action on the street nowadays took place at ground level, where the numerous small repair shops, grocers, barbers, and other native businesses had drawn down their slatted metal shutters for the day. My café was the only business open for business, and at the moment I was its sole customer. The barman and a waitress were lounging inside, flirting with each other and smoking American cigarettes in the shadows.

When I first sat down, I had felt sociable, a citizen of the town, practically. But now, with this strange creature bearing down on me, I suddenly felt alone and cut off and, for the first time since entering the country, vulnerable. Even at a distance, I could see that he was just another madman, a dust-covered, ill-coordinated, mumbling man of indeterminate age. Such a figure was not an unusual sight in the cities and towns of Katonga, where there were no insane asylums, no mental health services of any kind, for that matter, and where a large segment of the adult population still suffered from the horrors of the 1960s revolution and the civil war a decade later. The thousands of young men and women who had been maddened by the savagery of the wars and had survived into middle and old age were generally homeless and either alcoholic or drug-addicted. But nonviolent. One did not have to fear them. They seemed to have a place, a niche, in the community, as in a family, and were gently tolerated and even cared for by the people.

This madman, although much taller and more muscular than others I had seen, was typical. His hair and beard were matted into thick, unkempt locks, and, except for a torn undershirt and a single filthy rag that partially covered his private parts, he was naked. What was unusual was the light that appeared in his face when he first saw me and that increased steadily in brightness as he neared my table. His heavy brow was lifted, and his large eyes glowed like coals. His nostrils flared with expectation, and his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a happy grimace. I had never anywhere encountered a look like that before. His expression was that of a man who, after years of seeking wisdom, had been surprised by it mere seconds ago; and the simple, overwhelming pleasure of at last having obtained wisdom was temporarily keeping him from applying it.

He seemed to be looking straight at me—understandably, I suppose, since I was the only person in his line of sight—but his gaze made me uncomfortable in the extreme, as if he thought somehow that
I
had made him mad and not the wars. As he neared my table and locked, not just his face on to mine, but his eyes on to my eyes as well, my discomfort grew worse. I tried to look away, but could not. I reached into my pocket for coins—an old reflex when approached by mad people and beggars, whether I mean to give money or not—but he shook his massive head, swirling his heavy locks like boas, and indicated with a scolding forefinger that he did not want money. Strangely familiar was his face and expression, as if we were old friends much altered, meeting unexpectedly after many years, or lost childhood cousins suddenly reunited as adults—yet he was, of course, an utter stranger to me. He couldn’t have been more a stranger to me, this African man who had endured what I could not even begin to imagine: years of hallucinatory butchery, immeasurable loss, grief, and pain, and, for the rest of his life, poverty and woe, helplessness and ridicule, charity and invisibility. Yet I knew him somehow. And he knew me.

He finally lurched to a stop before my table and stood there, his ecstatic expression unchanged. He towered over me unsteadily, as if he were about to fall upon my neck and embrace me or else give me a terrible beating. And still I couldn’t break his gaze. I was afraid to look away, to seek out the barman, for instance, and signal him somehow to come and help me, free me from this man’s rapt attention, distract him, scold him, send him on his way. It was as if the madman had cast a spell upon me, or as if I were dreaming and struggling vainly to wake myself.

Finally, I managed to address him, my voice quavery and fearful. “What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”

At that, the man’s face seemed to break its hold on mine, or my face broke its hold on his. His brow slipped lower, and the light behind his eyes slowly dimmed and went out. His mouth loosened. He licked his cracked lips with a large, pink tongue, and he put his fists to his ears like a baby about to cry. In a high, thin voice, an embarrassed tenor’s voice, he said, “I know you, mistah! I know you longtime. You back this time to stay wit’ us, mistah?” he asked, and cackled derisively.

Suddenly, he reverted to his earlier ape-walk and bolted away from my table. He grabbed a ceramic Cinzano ashtray from the adjacent table and placed it on his head like a sailor’s cap, until, finally, the barman, whose name was Andrew, noticed his presence and came running from inside the café. Andrew was a slender, fawn-colored young man with a pencil mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles, and he managed the café as well as ran the bar. “Hey, Djinn!” he said, laughing. “Gimme that!” He held out his hand for the ashtray.

The madman removed the ashtray from his head and slowly passed it over to Andrew, who gave him a twenty-pence coin, as if in payment.

“G’wan, now,” Andrew said. “Don’t bother the gentleman.” He placed a hand on Djinn’s shoulder and turned him back the way he had come. Slowly, with unaccountable sadness, the madman, still hunched over and lurching side to side, walked away. I watched him, as unable to remove my gaze from his bent form as when earlier he had captured me with his enraptured face. Who was he, really? And how had he gained such power over me, even if only for those few seconds?