The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (3 page)

When at last he rounded the corner at the end of the street and disappeared, I flagged the barman and asked for my check.

“You don’t want your second Rhino, sir?” he asked. “And then to eat dinner, same as every night? We got a special native meat ’n’ vegetable pie tonight, sir, something English peoples like more’n anybody else.” He feared he was losing a regular customer. He assured me that Djinn was just a harmless madman and rarely came here this time of day anyhow and would probably not come tomorrow or any other day for as long as I stayed in Gbandeh. He, Andrew, would guarantee it personally.

I said no, the madman hadn’t bothered me. I had a difficult week, I explained, and was rather tired and would be eating in my hotel this evening. “Don’t worry, friend,” I said to him. “I’ll be back again.”

The truth is, for the remainder of my stay in Gbandeh, I did not return to that café. Nor to any other. Nor did I take my daily stroll around the square. Instead, I kept to myself and took my meals in my room or in the hotel dining room and drank my Rhinos at the hotel bar, where the only other patrons were a half dozen European tourists and four or five American and Asian businesspeople. I made friends with none of them. Also, my contacts with Africans from then on were pretty much limited to my driver and our employees out at the assembly plant, people whose private lives I pointedly did not try to imagine. Even the Gbandehans I passed in the street now seemed faceless and nearly invisible to me. I checked daily at the hotel desk for the call from the home office to return to New Jersey, until finally, at the end of my fourth week in Gbandeh, it arrived. The next morning, I fled the country.

In April of the following year, nearly fifteen months after my anxious departure from Katonga, I returned, sent over this time to open and bring into full production a second assembly plant at the Gbandeh Industrial Park. The Dutch consortium that owned our company had recently purchased from a bank in Frankfurt a failed Japanese furniture maker’s defaulted mortgage on one of the two buildings out there by ours on the eroded red plain. Of all our American employees, I was thought to be the most capable of dealing efficiently with the Africans and thus had recently been promoted to manager of foreign operations. My assignment this time was to purchase the machinery and hire and train the workers so that by summer the second plant would be running smoothly alongside the first. This would double our sandal production and bring it into line with our projected sales figures for the upcoming fall and winter.

It was near the end of the rainy season, and while the air had been cleared of the ubiquitous red dust of my previous visit, now the ground, streets, alleys, and courtyards, even the floors of locked interiors, were carpeted with thick, red mud. Other people, entering the room after you had departed, picked up your mud on their shoes, clothing, and hands and carried it to new places. Cars, donkey carts, bicyclists, and pedestrians splashed it over your shoes and trousers, and you carried the mud from the streets onto tiles, rugs, and polished mahogany floors, accidentally rubbing it against drapes, chairs, and sofas. If you touched your face or hair or your clean white shirt, you left behind a red stain resembling an unhealed wound.

This weather and its unpleasant consequences were sufficiently different from those of my previous tour that Katonga seemed an altogether different country from the one I had left fifteen months earlier. In addition, I had pretty much forgotten by then my unsettling encounter with the madman, Djinn, and the subtly alienating shifts in attitude and consciousness that I underwent afterwards. I remembered only my early enthusiasm for the place and the people, my first impressions, as it were, and my still unsatisfied curiosity about their lives, along with the self-examination occasioned by my passing irritation with one or another of their, to me, incomprehensible native ways. I remembered, in other words, having been a good traveler, little else.

Then one evening a few weeks into my stay, at last the rain let up for a few hours, signaling the approach of the close of the rainy season, and for the first time I went out from my hotel without an umbrella and, as in the old days, circumambulated Binga Park. Inadvertently, at the end of my walk, I found myself at the same cul-de-sac close by the hotel and strolled into the café at the end of it, the place where I had met the madman. The barman, Andrew, was still there and remembered me at once and, surprisingly, was even able to hail me by name and, without my asking, brought me an opened bottle of Rhino beer, nicely chilled.

“You arrive in Katonga at the perfect time, sir!” he said in a loud voice. “The rain is over, and the heat not yet begun. That’s the reason we call this time the season of in-between! The whole city, sir, the entire country, gets washed clean like a newborn baby! We get rid of the mud and get ready for the dust,” he proudly declared, as if announcing an elaborate rite of spring practiced only here in Katonga. “Will you be ordering your dinner with us, sir? We got excellent grilled fish. Fresh-netted fish floated by the rains down to us from the mountains.”

The café was filling with newcomers, local folks who, like me, were out for the evening to socialize for the first time in weeks. I decided to stay awhile, to order dinner and watch the natives take their pleasure. The idea of eating a scavenged fish rain-washed from a stream onto the muddy floodplain did not especially appeal to me, however, so I asked Andrew if he still offered the meat and vegetable pie that the English were said to be so fond of.

He was very happy to say that, yes, indeed, he had that pie ready to be placed into the oven this very minute, a pie for me and me alone, he said, made with all the native vegetables and various meats from the countryside. Which included chimpanzee, I assumed, but, on reflection, decided not to verify one way or the other and hoped instead for wild pig, or at least something with a texture and taste that would let me pretend I was eating wild pig.

I had finished my second Rhino and was about to order a third, when the waitress delivered my pie, steaming hot and smelling for all the world like a delicious roasted pork loin. I asked for a glass of South African red wine, usually quite reliable, and proceeded to eat. It was pig, I was sure of it. And yams, groundnuts, bitter greens of some sort, peppers, and onions. And the wine was more than adequate. Very good, I signaled to Andrew, and he smiled broadly.

The café was nearly filled by now with neighborhood men and women of various ages, most of them in groups of four or five, happily drinking and intensely exchanging political news and sexual gossip—the two were often the same here. The women flirted with the men, who competed with one another for the attention of the women: all the old erotic and social moves of the species on display again, now that the rain had ceased. My attention wandered from one table to the next, finding some more amusing and interesting than others, conducting the sort of private, anthropological research that had always engaged me, regardless of where I found myself, even at home, in Hopewell, New Jersey.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I noticed off to my right a figure turn into the cul-de-sac from the square, a large, dark person hunched over in a familiar way and lurching erratically from side to side as he made his way down the narrow street toward the café. It was Djinn, and instantly the same fascination and fear I’d experienced before fell across my shoulders like a heavy woolen cloak. No one else in the café seemed to notice him; everyone continued to talk, drink, and eat normally. I, however, at once put my fork down and stared at the man. He looked about the same as he had the first time—large and muscular, nearly naked, with long, matted locks and beard. But now he was covered with caked red mud, instead of dust. It was a coating rather than a skin, as if he’d been basted with it over a fire, and it made his body seem somehow more fierce than it had before, more potentially violent. He wore on his face the same strange expression of near-ecstatic clarity of feeling as before, an almost transcendent look, one we associate with the god-intoxicated.

I looked around me. Did no one else see what I saw? It seemed somehow grandiose to ask, but was I the only one here open to the meaning of this man’s expression? When he drew near, one or two people glanced up, then quickly resumed their previous activity, as if the madman were no more diverting than a stray dog wandering into the café. Everyone else simply treated him as if he weren’t there at all or, if there, as if his presence weren’t worthy of comment. This time, Djinn did not come to my table, nor did he lock eyes with me. Instead, he ignored me altogether, and, to my surprise, I found myself disappointed by it and, in a childlike way, saddened. What was
wrong
with me? I wondered, and simultaneously wondered how I might regain his attention. I could wave my hand, perhaps, or call out to him, notions I dropped at once, for it would have looked absurd to the others, a foreigner inviting contact with the madman, Djinn.

He passed within a few feet of my table—smelling of wet hay and overripe fruit, like a horse or other large domestic animal—but didn’t acknowledge me. Or anyone else, for that matter. He seemed on a mission, focused and directed, as he moved clumsily between the tables to the far side of the café, where suddenly he reached up and with one hand grabbed onto the support of a second-story balcony and pulled himself up to the first railing and climbed over it. Now he had everyone’s attention, no longer just mine. An odd silence came over the café, as everyone turned and stared at the madman, who was climbing up a rainspout from the second story to the third. He swung himself from the pipe out along a narrow ledge, then stood on the ledge and inched his way along it to a place from which he could reach a wrought-iron window balcony. Turning his broad back to the crowd below, in the process casually exposing his buttocks to us, he grabbed the balcony and pulled himself up to the shuttered window, turned, and faced us like a pope.

At the edge of my awareness, while the madman was climbing the side of the building, I had half-observed a bulky man with a handlebar mustache get up from his crowded table and step alone to the spot where Djinn had begun his climb. The man wore the dark blue guayabera shirt that I had learned to associate with members of the plainclothes police force, and when he slipped his right hand under his shirt, I knew that he was reaching for a gun. In a second, he had it out and aimed at Djinn, who was almost directly overhead, three stories up. Now everyone’s attention was on the policeman’s nickel-plated gun, not the man at whom it was aimed.

“All right, Djinn,” the policeman said in a harsh, but utterly relaxed voice. “Come down now. You know the rules.”

I looked for Djinn’s reaction, hoping against hope that he would immediately descend. I nearly called out to him myself. But I couldn’t. His face was still lit by a knowledge or emotion or memory that was more powerful and clarifying than anything we here below had ever experienced. He looked like a man to whom everything had at last been elucidated. There was something new there, however, something that he seemed to have obtained only in the last few moments, or possibly obtained only from his perspective on high.

This must be the true face of
love
, I thought, and in that instant felt myself transformed, not into a beloved object—which, when viewed by a lover, would more normally be the case—but into a beloved
subject
. Which is dramatically, even metaphysically, different. Djinn’s large brown eyes gazed down on all of us with a compassion and humor that could not help but make us feel truly beloved—most of us for the first time in our lives. I know that I was not alone in this. Many of the people around me had left their chairs just as I had and were staring up at Djinn, wide-eyed and slack-mouthed, struck dumb with awe and inexplicable gratitude.

“Come on down now, Djinn, or I’ll have to shoot you! Last chance!”

Djinn climbed to the top rail of the balcony and balanced there momentarily, then nonchalantly reached above his head and grabbed onto the clay tiles of the roof with both hands. He swung free of the balcony, caught the top ledge of the French window with his toes, and hefted himself toward the roofs, when the policeman fired, once, then a second time, the bullets jarring Djinn as they hit him in the middle of his back. For a second he clung there, unmoving, as if he might have actually absorbed the bullets into his body and rendered them harmless. But, no, he let go of the roof tiles, his toes slipped off the window ledge, and he tumbled backwards, off the building, down to the cobblestone street, where his body slammed against the stones with bone-breaking force. We heard the bones break and the flesh rip and tear like rotted cloth. All of us. Not just me. And yet not one of us, not even me, acted as though anything untoward had happened. The policeman walked slowly back to his table, and the others returned to their seats, and everyone seemed to pick up eating, drinking, and talking where he had left off.

Andrew, looking sour and impatient, hurried from his kitchen with two teenage helpers in tow, dishwashers or busboys, and the three of them swiftly lifted the body of the madman and dragged it up the street, disappearing with it around the corner at the square. I watched, aghast, bewildered, astonished. What had happened? When, a few moments later, the barman returned, he stopped next to my table and untied his bloodstained apron with evident irritation. He started to move on, and I grabbed his arm. “Where did you take him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The madman! Djinn!”

“Oh. To the police station,” he said, and headed toward the bar, where customers were awaiting his return. Over his shoulder, as an afterthought, he called to me, “The police will take care of the body, sir. Don’t you worry yourself.”

I sat a long time, stunned and very confused by what I had seen. Finally, I paid and left the café, hoping that I had at least partially imagined what I had seen tonight. Or maybe I had imagined
all
of it. That would be even better.

I wanted to be alone and to sleep. I very much wanted to sleep.