“Why, Rachel,” Leah would say, “you run this place with such genialness and vivacity! I never knew you had such an exemplary talent for the hospitality business!

“Adah would, of course, say something more droll, such as “Why, Rachel, your interest in personal hygiene has truly become a higher calling.”

If you ask me, that’s exactly why they don’t come-they’re afraid they would have to start respecting me finally. I’m sure they’d rather go on thinking they are the brains of the family and I am the dumb blonde. They have always been very high up on their horses, which is fine, although if you ask me they have shot their own career ladders in the foot. Adah evidently got famous for being a brain in college and going to medical school (Mother sent me newspaper clippings for Adah winning some prize practically every time she took a crap), and she could have done very well for herself as a lady doctor. But what I gather from what Mother writes me now is that she works night and day wearing a horrid white coat in some dreary big-deal place in Atlanta where they study disease organisms. Well, fine! I guess somebody has to do it!

Now, Leah, though. That one I will never understand. After all this time I can certainly work with the Africans as well as anybody can, mainly by not leading them into temptation. But to marry one? And have children? It doesn’t seem natural. I can’t see how those boys are any kin to me.

I wouldn’t say so to her face, of course. I swear I haven’t said a word in all these years. Not that it’s hard, since we don’t write all that often. She only sends Christmas cards, which generally get here just in the nick of time for Easter. I think the mailmen over in Zaire must be lazy or drunk half the time. And when I do get a letter, it’s always a great disappointment. Just: Oh how are you, I had another baby named whatsit or whosis. She could at least give them names in plain English, you would think. She never asks about the hotel at all.

We’re all keeping our hopes up for family relations, I guess, but our true family fell apart after Ruth May’s tragic death. You could spend your whole life feeling bad about it, and I get the idea Mother especially is still moping around. And Leah’s decided to pay for it by becoming the Bride of Africa. Adah, now she could probably get her a halfway decent boyfriend since she’s finally gotten her problem fixed, but no, she has to throw her prime of life down the test tube of a disease organism.

Well, that’s their decision. What happened to us in the Congo was simply the bad luck of two opposite worlds crashing into each other, causing tragedy. After something like that, you can only go your own way according to what’s in your heart. And in my family, all our hearts seem to have whole different things inside.

I ask myself, did I have anything to do with it? The answer is no. I’d made my mind up all along just to rise above it all. Keep my hair presentable and pretend I was elsewhere. Heck, wasn’t I the one hollering night and day that we were in danger? It’s true that when it happened I was the oldest one there, and I’m sure some people would say I should have been in charge. There was just a minute there where maybe I could have grabbed her, but it happened so fast. She never knew what hit her. And besides, you can’t possibly be in charge of people who will not give you the time of day, even in your own family. So I refuse to feel the slightest responsibility. I really do.

In the evenings here at the Equatorial I usually wind up the day by closing down the bar all by myself, sitting in the dark with my nightcap and one last cigarette, listening to the creepy sounds of a bar with no merriment left in it. There are creepy little things that get into the thatch of the roof, monkey squirrels or something, that you only notice at night. They scritch around and peep down at me with their beady little eyes till I just about lose my mind and scream, “Shut the hell up!” Sometimes I have to slip off my thongs to throw at them before they’ll pipe down. Better to keep this place filled up with businessmen and keep the liquor flowing, is what I always say. Honestly, there is no sense spending too much time alone in the dark.

Leah Price Ngemba

KINSHASA RAINY SEASON, 1981

ANATOLE is IN PRISON. Maybe for the last time. I get out of bed and put on my shoes and force myself to take care of the children. Outside the window the rain pours down on all the drenched, dark goats and bicycles and children, and I stand here appraising the end of the world. Wishing like hell we hadn’t come back from Atlanta. But we had to. A person like Anatole has so much to offer his country. Not, of course, in the present regime, whose single goal is to keep itself in power. Mobutu relies on the kind of men who are quick with guns and slow to ask questions. For now, the only honorable government work is the matter of bringing it down. So says Anatole. He’d rather be here, even in prison, than turning his back on an outrage. I know the dimensions of my husband’s honor, as well as I know the walls of this house. So I get up and put on my shoes and curse myself for wanting to leave in the first place. Now I’ve lost everything: the companionship of his ideals, and the secret escape I held in reserve, if my own failed completely. I always thought I could fly away home. Not now. Now I’ve pulled that ace out of the hole, taken a good look, and found that it’s useless to me, devalued over time. An old pink Congolese bill.

How did this happen? I’ve made three trips back now, more as a stranger each time. Did America shift under my feet, or did it stand still while I stomped along my road toward whatever I’m chasing, following a column of smoke through my own Exodus? On our first trip, America seemed possible for us. Anything did. I was pregnant with Patrice then-1968, it would have been. Pascal was almost three, picking up English like the smart little parrot he is. I studied agricultural engineering at Emory, and Anatole was in political science and geography. He was an astonishing student, absorbing everything in the books, then looking past them for things his teachers didn’t know. The public library he mistook for heaven. “Beene,” he whispered, “for everything that has ever come into my mind, there is already a book written about it.”

“Watch out,” I teased him. “Maybe there’s one in here about you.”

“Oh, I fear it! A complete history of my boyhood crimes.” He came to feel derelict about sleeping at night, for the sake of all the books he’d miss reading in those hours. He retained some reticence about speaking English, refusing for example ever to say the word sheet because to his ear it’s indistinguishable from shit, but he read with a kind of hunger I’d never witnessed. And I got to be with my family. Adah was well along in medical school then, so was terribly busy, but we practically lived with Mother. She was so good to us. Pascal prowled over her furniture and napped on her lap like a cat.

I went back the second time to recover from Martin’s birth, since I’d gotten dangerously anemic, and to get the boys their booster shots. Mother raised the money to fly us over. It was just the boys and me that time, and we stayed on longer than we’d planned, for the exquisite pleasure of enough food. Also to give Mother a chance to know her only grandchildren. She took us to the ocean, to a windswept place of sandy islands off the Georgia coast. The boys were wild “with all their half-composted discoveries and the long, open stretches for running. But it made me homesick. The shore smelled like the fish markets in Bikoki. I stood on the coast staring across an impossible quantity of emptiness toward Anatole, and whatever else I’d left behind in Africa.

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.”