Love and Obstacles

Stairway to Heaven

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drums: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I could not tell.

I was sixteen, of the age when fear aroused inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug up a brand-new moleskin journal from my suitcase—the drums still summoning the vast forces of darkness—and wrote on the first page

Kinshasa 7.7.1983

only to hear my parents’ bedroom door violently open, Tata cursing and stomping away. I leapt out of bed—Sestra, startled, started whimpering—and ran after Tata, who had already flipped on the lights in the living room. I bumped into Mama cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms. All the lights were on now; a gang of moths fluttered hopelessly inside a light fixture; there were cries and screams; cymbals crashed all around us. It was terrifying.

Spinelli, Tata exclaimed against the noise. What a dick.

Tata slept in flannel pajamas far more appropriate for an Alpine ski resort than for Africa—air-conditioning allegedly hurt his kidneys. But before he left the apartment, he also put on a pith helmet, lest his bald dome be exposed to draft. When he furiously vanished into the drumming murk of the stairway, Sestra, now crying, pressed her face against Mama’s side; I stood in my underwear, my feet cold on the bare floor, a pen still in hand. The possibility of his not returning flickered in the darkness; it did not cross my mind to go after him; Mama did not try to stop him. The stairway light went on, and we heard a plangent chime. The drums were still rolling; another plaintive ding-dong fit snugly into the beat. Tata abandoned the bell and started pounding at the door, shouting in his stunted English:

Spinelli, you are very crazy. Stop noise. We are sleep. It is four in the morning.

Our apartment was on the sixth floor; there must have been scores of people living in the building, but it appeared to have been abandoned in a hurry. The moment the stairway light went off again, the drumming stopped, the show was over. The door opened, and a nasal American voice said: I’m sorry, man. I absolutely apologize.

By the time I went back to bed, it was dawning already. In the trees outside, a nation of birds replaced the blood-sucking bats and was now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life. Sleeping and dreaming were beyond me now, nor could I write. Smoking on the balcony, I waited for everything to make sense until it couldn’t. Down on the street a scarcely clad man squatted by a cardboard box with cigarettes lined up on it. There was nobody else on the street. It seemed that he was guarding the cigarettes from some invisible peril.

In the early eighties, Tata was absent, working in Zaire as a minor Yugoslav diplomat in charge of communications (whatever that meant). Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, I responded to the infelicity of adolescence and the looming iniquity of adulthood by retreating into books; Sestra was twelve, oblivious of the ache sprouting inside me; Mama was midlife miserable and lonely, which I could not see at the time, my nose stuck in a book. I read compulsively, only occasionally reaching the surface of common reality to take in a fetid breath of other people’s existence. I would read all night, all day, instead of doing my homework; in school, I would read a book hidden under the desk, a felony frequently punished by a junta of class bullies. It was only in the imaginary space of literature that I felt comfortable and safe—no absent father, no depressed mother, no bullies making me lick the book pages until my tongue was black with ink.

I met Azra checking out books at the school library, and I immediately liked the readerly quietude on her bespectacled face. I walked her home, slowing down whenever I had something to say, stopping when she did. She had no interest in The Catcher in the Rye; I had not read Quo Vadis, feigned interest in The Peasant Uprising. It was clear, however, that we shared a passion for imagining lives we could live through others—a necessary ingredient of any love. Quickly we found a few books we both liked: The Time Machine, Great Expectations, And Then There Were None. That first day we talked mostly about The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country. We loved it, even though it was a children’s book, because we both could identify with a small creature lost in the big world.

We started dating, which meant that we often read to each other on a bench by the Miljacka, kissing only when we ran out of things to talk about, making out cautiously, as though letting it all go would have spent the quaint, manageable intimacy we had accrued. I was perfectly happy whispering a passage from Franny and Zooey or The Long Goodbye into her hair. So when Tata announced, upon his returning to Sarajevo on leave, that we would all spend the summer of ’83 in Africa together, I felt a strange relief: if Azra and I were apart, we could resist the torturous temptation and eschew the taint that the body inescapably inflicts upon the soul. I promised I would write to her every day, in my journal, as letters from Africa would arrive long after my return. I would record every thought, I promised, every feeling, every experience, and as soon as I came back, we would reimagine it all together, reading, as it were, the same book.

There were many things I wanted to note down that first night in Kinshasa: the west ablaze, the east impenetrably dark as we crossed the equator at sunset; the perfect recollection of the smell of her hair; a line from The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country that we had both liked so well: I have to find my way home before the fall, before the leaves cover the path. But I wrote nothing and assuaged my conscience by ascribing it to the drumming disturbance. What I didn’t write stayed in the back room of my mind, like the birthday presents I was not allowed to open until everyone had left the party.

In any case, the following morning Sestra was in the living room, looking with vague fascination at a puny man in a T-shirt depicting an angel shot in midair. Mama was sitting across the coffee table from him, listening intently to his high-pitched warbling, her legs crossed, the hem of her skirt curved over the northern hemisphere of her knee.

Svratio komšija Spinelli, she said. Nemam pojma šta pria.

Good morning, I said.

Good afternoon, buddy, Spinelli said. The day is almost over. He exposed a set of teeth evenly descending in size from the center toward the cheeks, like organ pipes. Sestra smiled along with him; he had both of his hands parked on his thighs, and they were calmly immobile, resting before the next task. Which was to push apart the two curls parenthesizing his forehead. The curls instantly returned to the original position, their tips symmetrically touching his eyebrows.

That was the first time I faced Spinelli, and from that moment on, his face kept changing, although all the changes are unified now in the two wrinkles between his eyes, parallel like an equation sign, and that delicate, snarly smile that always came at the end of his sentences. He said: Sorry for the noise. A bored dog does crazy things.

At sixteen I spent a lot of energy affecting boredom: the eye-roll; the terse, short answers to parental inquisition; the practiced blankness of expression in response to some real-life saga my parents were imparting. I had built an ironclad shield of indifference that allowed me to escape, read, and return to my cell without anyone’s noticing. But the first week in Africa, the boredom was real. I could not read; I kept scanning the same—twenty-seventh—page of Heart of Darkness and could not move beyond it. I tried to write to Azra, but found nothing to say, probably because there was so much to say.

There was certainly nothing to do. I was not allowed to go out alone into the human jungle of Kinshasa. For a while I watched TV, broadcasting Mobutu’s rants and commercials featuring cans of coconut oil floating in the blue sky of affordable happiness. Once or twice, in the middle of the day, I even felt a rare, inexplicable desire to be with my family, but Tata was at work; Sestra guarded her budding sovereignty with her Walkman turned way up; Mama was remote, interned in the kitchen, probably crying. The ceiling fan spun sluggishly, incessantly, cruelly reminding me that time here passed at the same mind-numbingly slow speed.

Tata was a great promiser, a fabulist of possibilities. Back in Sarajevo, he had projected on the vast, blank canvas of our socialist provincialism the Kinshasa that was a hive of neocolonial pleasures: exclusive clubs with pools and tennis courts; diplomatic receptions frequented by the international jet set and spies; cosmopolitan casinos and exotic lounges; safaris in the wilderness and Philippe, a native cook whom he had hired away from a Belgian by increasing his wage to a less piddling amount. That first, uneventful week these promises were drably betrayed—not even Philippe showed up for work. When Tata came home from the embassy, we had humdrum dinners Mama improvised from what she had discovered in the fridge: wizened peppers and sunken papayas, peanut paste and animal flesh that may have been goat meat.

Determined to dispel the cloud of tedium hanging over us, Tata finally put a call in to the Yugoslav ambassador and invited ourselves to his residence in Gombe, where all the important diplomats lived. The mansions there were large, the lawns were wide, majestic flowers bloomed in impeccably groomed bushes, the venerable Congo flowed serenely. His Excellency and his excellent wife were polite and devoid of any human vigor or storytelling talent. We sat in their receiving room, the adults passing around statements (Kinshasa is strange; Kinshasa is really small) like a sugar bowl. Exotic trophies were carefully positioned around the room: a piece of Antwerp bobbin lace on the wall; an ancient Mesopotamian rock on the coffee table; on the bookshelf, a picture of Their Excellencies on a snow-capped mountain. A servant with an implausible red sash brought in the drinks—Sestra and I were each given a glass of lemonade with a long silver spoon. I dared not move, and when Sestra, abruptly and inexplicably, rolled like a happy dog on the ankle-deep Afghan carpet, I feared our parents would renounce us.

As soon as we returned home, I went up to Spinelli’s place. He opened the door wearing the shot-angel shirt and shorts, his legs stilt-thin. He did not seem at all surprised to see me, nor did he ask what brought me around. Come on in, he said, smoking, a drink in his hand, music blasting behind him. I lit up; I had not smoked all day, and I was starved for nicotine. The smoke descended into my lungs like feathery silk, then out, thickly, through the nose; it was so beautiful I was breathless and dizzy. Spinelli was playing air drums along with the loud music, a half-burnt cigarette in the center of his mouth. ‘Black Dog,’ he said. God damn. In the far corner, right under the window, was a set of drums; the golden cymbals trembled under the stream from the air conditioner.

Playing imaginary drum solos and bridges, Spinelli made unsolicited confessions: He had grown up in a rough Chicago neighborhood and beat it as soon as he could; he had lived in Africa forever; he worked for the U.S. government, and could not tell me what his job was, for if he did he would have to kill me. He started each sentence sitting down, then finished standing up; the next one was accompanied by banging of the invisible drums. He never stopped moving; the space organized itself around him; he exuded so much of himself I felt absent. Only after I had, exhausted, left his place could I really think at all. And so I thought that he was a true American, a liar and a braggart, and that hanging out with him was far more stimulating than the shackles of family life or the excellent diplomats in Gombe. At some point during his streaming, restless monologue, he christened me, for no apparent reason, Blunderpuss.

I went back upstairs a couple of days later, and then again the following day. Mama and Tata seemed fine with that, for if I took my boredom away, we could all avoid long stretches of crabby silence. They must have thought also that engaging with the real world and its inhabitants without actually going out was good for me, and I got to practice my English too. As for me, I smoked at Spinelli’s as much as I wanted; the music was much louder than my parents would ever permit; he poured whiskey in my glass before it was half empty. He even showed me how to play drums a bit—I loved smashing the cymbals. But most of all I enjoyed his narratives: he delivered them slouching back in the sofa, blowing cigarette smoke toward the fast-spinning ceiling fan, sipping his J&B, interrupting his delivery for a solo in a Led Zeppelin song. There might be a taint of death, a flavor of mortality, in lies, but Spinelli’s were fun to listen to.

He had run a cigarette-selling business in high school, and had regularly had sex with his geography teacher. He had hitchhiked across America: in Oklahoma, he drank with Indians who fed him mushrooms that took him to where their spirits lived—the spirits had big asses with two holes, which smelled equally of shit; in Idaho, he lived in a cave with a guy who watched the sky all day long, waiting for a fleet of black helicopters to descend upon them; he smuggled cattle from Mexico into Texas, cars from Texas to Mexico. Then he was in the Army: avoiding rough deployment by applying onion to his dick so as to fake an infection; whoring around in Germany, cutting up a Montenegrin pimp in a disco. Then Africa: sneaking into Angola to help out Savimbi’s freedom fighters; training the Ugandan special forces with the Israelis; setting up a honey trap in Durban. He told his tales laterally, moving across his life without regard for chronology.

Afterward, I would lie in my bed, trying to organize his stream of consciousness in my giddy head so that I could write it down for Azra. But I failed, for now I could see the loopholes in the texture of his tales, the inconsistencies and contradictions and the plain bullshit. The stories were unimpeachable when he was telling them, but would have been obvious lies if written down. Once I was out of his proximity, he made little sense; he had to be physically present in his own narratives to make them plausible. Therefore I sought his presence; I kept going upstairs.

One night I went up, but Spinelli was all dressed and ready to go, wearing an unbuttoned black shirt, reeking of shower and cologne, a gold chain dangling below his Adam’s apple. He lit a cigarette at the doorstep, inhaled, and said, Let’s go! and I followed without a question. It did not even cross my mind to let my parents know where I was going. They never came to check on me when I was upstairs, and the boredom I had endured certainly entitled me to some adventure. It turned out we were going to a casino around the corner.

The guy who owns the casino is Croatian, Spinelli said. "Used to be in the Foreign Legion, fought in Katanga, then in Biafra.