The Poisonwood Bible
Page 165
It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness. I mentioned this to Anatole, who’d long since taken note of it, of course. “The air is just blank in America,” I said. “You can’t ever smell what’s around you, unless you stick your nose right down into something.”
“Maybe that is why they don’t know about Mobutu,” he suggested.
Anatole earned a stipend from student teaching, an amount the other graduate students called a “pittance,” though it was much more than he and I had ever earned together in any year. We lived once again in married student housing, a plywood apartment complex set among pine trees, and the singular topic of conversation among our young neighbors was the inadequacy of these rattletrap tenements. To Anatole and me they seemed absurdly luxurious. Glass windows, with locks on every one and two on the door, when we didn’t have a single possession worth stealing. Running water, hot, right out of a tap in the kitchen, and another one only ten steps away in the bathroom!
The boys alternated between homesickness and frenzy. There were some American things they developed appetites for that alarmed me, and things they ignored, which alarmed me even more. For example, the way well-intentioned white people spoke to my trilingual children (they fluently interchange French, Lingala, and English, with a slight accent in each) by assaulting them with broad, loud baby talk. Anatole’s students did essentially the same, displaying a constant impulse to educate him about democracy and human rights—arrogant sophomores! With no notion of what their country is doing to his. Anatole told me these stories at night with a flat resignation, but I cursed and threw pillows and cried while he held me in the vast comfort of our married-student double bed.
The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks. On the streets, from a distance, they’d scowl at us, thinking we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed—the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisement of our sins. Drawing nearer they would always stare at Anatole as contempt gave way to bald shock. His warrior’s face with its expertly carved lines speaks its elegance in a language as foreign to them as Lingala.That book was closed. Even my mother’s friends, who really did try, asked me nothing of Anatole’s background or talents—only, in hushed tones when he left the room, “What happened to his face?”
Anatole claimed the stares didn’t bother him. He’d already spent so much of his life as an outsider. But I couldn’t stand the condescension. Anatole is an exquisitely beautiful and accomplished man in his own country, to those who appreciate intellect and honor. I already spent a whole childhood thinking I’d wrecked the life of my twin sister, dragged after me into the light. I can’t drag a husband and sons into a life where their beauty will blossom and wither in darkness.
So we came home. Here. To disaster. Anatole’s passport was confiscated at the airport. While Pascal and Patrice punched each other out of exhausted boredom and Martin leaned on me crying that his ears hurt, my husband was brought down without my notice. He was a wanted man in Zaire. I didn’t understand this at the time. Anatole told me it was a formality, and that he had to give our address in Kinshasa so they’d know where to bring his passport back to him the next day. I laughed, and said (in front of the officials!) that, given our government’s efficiency, it would be the next year. Then we crammed ourselves into a battered little Peugeot taxi that felt like home at last, and came to Elisabet’s house, to fall into sleep or the fitful wakefulness of jet lag. I had a thousand things on my mind: getting the boys into school, finding a place to live, exchanging the dollars from Mother at some Kinshasa bank that wouldn’t give us old zaires or counterfeit new ones, getting food so we wouldn’t overwhelm poor Elisabet. Not one of my thoughts was for my husband. We didn’t even sleep together, since Elisabet had borrowed the few small cots she could find.
It would have been our last chance. The casques-bleus came pounding on the door right at dawn. I wasn’t completely awake. Elisabet was still modestly wrapping her pagne as she stumbled to the door, and four men entered with such force they shoved her against the wall. Only Martin was really awake, with his huge black eyes on the guns in their belts.
“Maybe that is why they don’t know about Mobutu,” he suggested.
Anatole earned a stipend from student teaching, an amount the other graduate students called a “pittance,” though it was much more than he and I had ever earned together in any year. We lived once again in married student housing, a plywood apartment complex set among pine trees, and the singular topic of conversation among our young neighbors was the inadequacy of these rattletrap tenements. To Anatole and me they seemed absurdly luxurious. Glass windows, with locks on every one and two on the door, when we didn’t have a single possession worth stealing. Running water, hot, right out of a tap in the kitchen, and another one only ten steps away in the bathroom!
The boys alternated between homesickness and frenzy. There were some American things they developed appetites for that alarmed me, and things they ignored, which alarmed me even more. For example, the way well-intentioned white people spoke to my trilingual children (they fluently interchange French, Lingala, and English, with a slight accent in each) by assaulting them with broad, loud baby talk. Anatole’s students did essentially the same, displaying a constant impulse to educate him about democracy and human rights—arrogant sophomores! With no notion of what their country is doing to his. Anatole told me these stories at night with a flat resignation, but I cursed and threw pillows and cried while he held me in the vast comfort of our married-student double bed.
The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks. On the streets, from a distance, they’d scowl at us, thinking we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed—the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisement of our sins. Drawing nearer they would always stare at Anatole as contempt gave way to bald shock. His warrior’s face with its expertly carved lines speaks its elegance in a language as foreign to them as Lingala.That book was closed. Even my mother’s friends, who really did try, asked me nothing of Anatole’s background or talents—only, in hushed tones when he left the room, “What happened to his face?”
Anatole claimed the stares didn’t bother him. He’d already spent so much of his life as an outsider. But I couldn’t stand the condescension. Anatole is an exquisitely beautiful and accomplished man in his own country, to those who appreciate intellect and honor. I already spent a whole childhood thinking I’d wrecked the life of my twin sister, dragged after me into the light. I can’t drag a husband and sons into a life where their beauty will blossom and wither in darkness.
So we came home. Here. To disaster. Anatole’s passport was confiscated at the airport. While Pascal and Patrice punched each other out of exhausted boredom and Martin leaned on me crying that his ears hurt, my husband was brought down without my notice. He was a wanted man in Zaire. I didn’t understand this at the time. Anatole told me it was a formality, and that he had to give our address in Kinshasa so they’d know where to bring his passport back to him the next day. I laughed, and said (in front of the officials!) that, given our government’s efficiency, it would be the next year. Then we crammed ourselves into a battered little Peugeot taxi that felt like home at last, and came to Elisabet’s house, to fall into sleep or the fitful wakefulness of jet lag. I had a thousand things on my mind: getting the boys into school, finding a place to live, exchanging the dollars from Mother at some Kinshasa bank that wouldn’t give us old zaires or counterfeit new ones, getting food so we wouldn’t overwhelm poor Elisabet. Not one of my thoughts was for my husband. We didn’t even sleep together, since Elisabet had borrowed the few small cots she could find.
It would have been our last chance. The casques-bleus came pounding on the door right at dawn. I wasn’t completely awake. Elisabet was still modestly wrapping her pagne as she stumbled to the door, and four men entered with such force they shoved her against the wall. Only Martin was really awake, with his huge black eyes on the guns in their belts.
