Endangered (4 page)

Sometime during my six years in the States, I began to hate the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For starters, it majorly failed to live up to its name. It was, in fact, the least democratic place on Earth. For fifty years the country had been headed by dictators and warlords, guys who led the country into civil wars and then barricaded themselves into their estates while they waited for dinner to be flown in from Europe.

In Lingala,
yesterday
and
tomorrow
are the same word:
lobi
. That had begun to capture so much of Congo to me, that there was only a now and a not-now, that moving forward was much the same as moving backward, that what we were heading into could easily look the same as our past. Back in the 1940s, there were over a hundred thousand kilometers of road in the country. Under the dictators they had all gone to ruin, and now there were fewer than a thousand. (An old joke: What did Congolese use before candles were invented? Lightbulbs.)

Things had gotten a little better in recent years, but anything that happened to the rest of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s never really made it here. Cell phones, yes. But landlines, not really. MP3s, yes. But videos or cassettes, eh. You'd come across movie posters glued to abandoned buildings, but they would be for black-and-white films. There weren't any movie theaters anymore.

Kinshasa residents with money lived like colonists in a hostile land, shuttered into manor houses with guards stationed in front.
Everywhere they went, drivers accompanied them. Once, when I was six or seven, my friend's driver hit someone and couldn't stop, because a mob could have formed and pulled them out of their car. I had to cancel my eighth birthday party because of
le pillage
, and spent it on the floor of my bedroom with Mom and Dad, our lights out so as not to attract attention, singing “Happy Birthday” in hushed voices, the birthday candles the only illumination in the room.

Not that I'm complaining about a ruined birthday party — I was lucky to be fed and alive. The ruling forces of Congo had been fighting wars for years. When it wasn't the Rwandans, it was the Ugandans. When it wasn't the Ugandans, it was the Zambians. When it wasn't the Zambians, it was other Congolese. On average, twelve hundred Congolese had been killed every day since 1998.

Five point four million. And it wasn't nearly over yet.

I knew there was great stuff about Congo. The second-largest rain forest in the world, wildlife everyone else gets to see only in the alphabet animals that hang over children's cribs. Brilliant greens, blues, and reds only your imagination could match. A lively, loving people. It was just that those same people occasionally took up their machetes and chopped one another up by the millions, and those vibrant red shades weren't only from blossoms pouring off sun-soaked tree branches. During my childhood, Congo was the best place in the world because it was the only place in the world. Now I really got why someone would want to live somewhere else if she had the option.

On a morning like this, though, when Otto and I walked through the nearby woods to pick him some gourds so sweet that they dripped sugar over our fingers, when a blanket and the hot sun were all we needed to feel the earth turning deliriously under our bodies, I found it easy to forget the bad parts. Maybe I was thrilled that after two months, Otto was finally getting better, and my happiness lapped over to Congo itself. Otto had grown a layer
of soft black down, and his swollen malnourished belly had shrunk. He pooped and peed like you wouldn't believe, and it put me in a good mood every time he did.

The lab in Kinshasa ruined his first blood sample and asked us to send another, so the results on what diseases Otto might have weren't in yet. He seemed all good to me, though. With daily scrubbing, his skin had cleared up, and he didn't scrunch up his face from cramps anymore. But we had to keep him out of direct contact with the other nursery bonobos until we knew for sure, so for the time being he and I were each other's only company.

The first week of that summer, my mother and I had been inseparable. Then sanctuary business consumed her, and I saw her only occasionally throughout the day. We tried to have dinner every night, but it was often rushed, and when we did talk, it was usually about work. If she was guilty of not noticing me, I was guilty of letting her get away with it. She was so passionate about her bonobos that it seemed selfish to speak up about myself.

Otto and I spent one morning lounging on the bank of a pond outside the sanctuary's administration building. We were reading a bonobo coffee-table book. Well, I was reading, and he was trying to hump the pictures. I wasn't sure what to do with him, since if I walked around with him for too long my back began to hurt — as he got healthier, he also got heavier.

He got bored of the photographs and started snoring away. The moment I budged, though, he would be awake and staring around in panic. His voice was back, and he sounded like any other baby bonobo as he cried until I held him. I wondered what went through his mind that wrenched him awake.

By late afternoon he'd filled up on sleep, and we played airplane. I'd seen the adults in the enclosure play that way with their infants, lifting them into the air with their feet and holding on to
their arms as the babies whizzed around. My legs weren't nearly as agile as a bonobo's, but Otto didn't know what he was missing and was blissed out, closing his eyes in giddy pleasure and wheezing noisily. He even smiled once. A smile!

Everything still wasn't in tip-top shape in his stomach, apparently, because he grimaced if my toes pressed too hard on his abdomen. So I thought it was better if we quit after a few minutes. We lay there together, sweating in the sun, listening to the birds make their rapid calls over the drone of the insects, to the singing coming from the farmers from the nearby village. I decided our lives needed a little excitement, so I stood up to go to the office to see what I could find for us to do. I thought I'd leave Otto in the grass for the few seconds it would take, but he immediately murped and pulled himself up me, settling around my torso.

In my mother's office was a cupboard full of old games. I was hoping to find a ball inside, but they'd been lost long ago. I'm a total fiend for Scrabble, so I pulled it off the shelf. Otto shifted to my back to get a better view of what I was doing as I set up the board on my mother's worktable. I placed Otto in one chair and me in another and gave each of us a letter rack. Otto immediately picked his up, nibbled on one end, tossed it across the room, and scampered over to retrieve it.

I poured out the letters. Otto loved the noise, smiling and making the raspy noise I was coming to recognize as laughter. So I took up the tiles and poured them out again. He loved it even more this time, jumping onto the table and clapping. I did it again, and he beamed at me and plunged his fingers into the letters, sifting through them like sand.

Apparently Otto was a Scrabble fan, too.

I placed a word, which he promptly demolished. Eventually he stopped wrecking my words, instead watching me with a very
serious expression as I placed them. Within half an hour we'd worked out a system. On my turn I'd get whatever score my word was worth, and on his turn he'd get twenty points if he hadn't chewed any letters.

Eventually my mom came in and called us to dinner. She and the workers ate on the patio outside of the administration building. The sanctuary chef was pretty amazing, so in my two months here I'd made sure not to miss a single meal. Normally bonobos weren't allowed near the offices, since they tended to make a mess anywhere they went, but since Otto was attached to me for the time being, we got special permission. Besides, I liked to think he had good table manners.

I knew my mom had something unusual planned, since she made sure Otto and I sat beside her, and grinned mischievously as the food came out.

Emile, the chef, was already laughing as he brought out steaming plates. Patrice and the mamas clapped wildly. Because I had to lean back in my chair to keep Otto from pressing into the table, I couldn't see what the joke was until the food was in front of me.

It smelled delicious and looked weird. Mounds of meats and vegetables in rich and fragrant sauces. Something was unusual about them, but what …

“Now,” my mom said, “this is actually Mama Brunelle's idea. It wasn't hard for us to see how much you're missing the States, so we brought some of the States to Congo.”

Emile was beside himself with pride as he pointed to various dishes. “We have barbecue manioc, tilapia-in-a-blanket, and goat cheesesteak.”

“Thank you, everyone,” I said, my voice hiccupping.

I'm sure the food was great, but I couldn't taste it. I was too moved. I'd been condescending to them; I thought it was in secret,
but they'd been aware of it the whole time — and instead of holding it against me, they'd indulged it.

To top it all off, Otto even ate a tilapia-in-a-blanket.

 

Later that afternoon, Otto and I were video chatting with Dad when I heard bicycle tires grind the gravel out front. A man's voice I didn't immediately recognize called out. Through the barred glass I could see my mother's bright dress, and Patrice next to her, shaking his open hand at someone. I hastily said good-bye to Dad and brought Otto outside.

The minute I saw the man, I froze.

It was him — the trafficker who'd sold me Otto. He was wearing the same torn and oily smock, had the same rusty bike leaning against a tree. On the back was a crate, covered with a cloth.

No one was speaking when I came outside, but I recognized a look of outrage on my mom's face, and the familiar stance of Patrice trying to calm her down.

When Otto saw the man, his body went rigid. Then he was pushing against me and was down from my arms and on the ground. He started making his high-pitched cries. His lips parted and he gave that same awful terrified smile I'd last seen the day I'd found him on the side of the road. Otto made a few steps toward the man and then stopped, looking at him, then looking back at me. Crying piteously the whole time, he held his arms out for me to lift him, even as he was walking away from me and toward the man.

“Sophie!” my mother said. “Take Otto inside, right now.”

I quickly stepped to Otto and lifted him from the ground. He wrapped his arms around me without complaint, even as he kept his eyes trained on the man, crying in a strangled tone I hadn't heard from him before.

The trafficker seemed genuinely glad to see Otto. His face brightened. “You are looking so healthy, my little friend! Do you like your new home?”

“Sophie,” Mom repeated sternly. “Inside, now.”

“
Te
, don't go!” the man said. “I want to say hello!”

I hesitated, not because I wanted to hear anything the trafficker said, but because, as much as it made my stomach drop to see him, I would have felt even worse if I gave up a chance to give him a piece of my mind. “You,” I said, “have to promise you won't sell any more bonobos.”

Sensing the tension in my voice, Otto went rigid and cried louder.

“It is not that way, mademoiselle,” the trafficker said. “He is my friend! We like each other, don't we,
mon p'tit
?”

“His name,” I said icily, “is Otto.”

Patrice beckoned me to go inside.

“
Malamu.
His name is Otto. Please do not go away yet, mademoiselle!” the trafficker said to me. “I have more friends for you.”

For a moment I didn't realize what he meant; then the world narrowed and wobbled. “What do you mean?” I asked.

The man yanked the cloth from the back of the bike. There, clutching each other and shivering in a cage, were two baby bonobos. They'd been caught much more recently than Otto: They looked healthy and still had their hair and voices. Their limbs stuck out at awkward angles through the wooden bars of the cage, and at the sudden sunlight they cried loudly, scrambling over each other to try to get out. One of them made an arms-swaying motion I recognized from Otto when he wanted to be picked up.

My mom had her arms around my shoulders, trying to force me away.

“Do you like them?” the trafficker asked. “They are adorable, no? There are two, so it is more expensive, but maybe one
hundred twenty-five dollars for them both? They need a home, they need someone to take care of them like my lucky little friend there. Of course I'm willing to bargain,” he added, seeing my stunned expression.

The cries of the infants made Otto shriek louder.

“Sophie, go back inside,” my mom said one last time.

Despite myself, I thought about my bank account in the States. It had over two hundred dollars in it. If I convinced the man to give me enough time to get into town, and if by chance one of the Kinshasa ATMs was actually working today, I could get the money out and then come back here … but no. It was my buying Otto that encouraged the man to come here with these two more bonobos. I sat down, right where I was. My legs refused to hold me up.

I hadn't fainted, but nonetheless I couldn't get my body to move. I'd pinned Otto's arm under me as I fell, and I sensed from somewhere remote as he pulled his arm away and crawled onto my chest, staring worriedly into my eyes. Screeching softly, he stroked my face, pulled my lips with his fingers to get them to talk. Somehow I marshaled the concentration to lift an arm and pull him close. I turned my head to the side and watched my mom.

She stopped being a person and became something like weather, lifting her body to all its formidable height and, with one blow, knocking the man to the ground. She stood over him.

“These creatures are nearly human, and to kill them is murder! Do you want to spend your life in prison? I have friends very high up, and they will take you away and you will simply disappear from the world. I called them the moment I saw you coming up the walk. Maybe you will not be lucky enough to make it to prison. Maybe I will have them slit your throat and feed you to the zoo crocodiles.”