The Angel on the Roof Read online

  “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.

  The following day, I arrived early at the Industrial Park, distracted and cross. From the start of the day to its end, I couldn’t seem to cope with the usual difficulties of training the natives. I could not accept those difficulties as being natural and legitimate. This was not like me. I was trying to teach them to operate the German-made lathes that turned the heels of our sandals out of mahogany that we imported at great expense from the Cambodian highlands, milled in Goa, and transshipped here to Katonga. For hundreds of thousands of years, these people, our Katongan employees, had been equatorial rain-forest hunters and subsistence farmers, and I probably should not have expected them to adapt as quickly as nineteenth-century New Englanders to working with industrial machinery, day in and day out, year in and year out, on assembly lines manufacturing products that they themselves would never use or even see used by others. Ordinarily, I understood the obstacles they faced and, without prejudice, scaled my expectations accordingly. But today, for some reason, I was baffled by their ineptitude and inattention and consequently found myself screaming at them for the slightest offense or oversight. By midafternoon, whenever I approached the line, the workers looked down or away, and when I retreated to the office, the clerks and managers started shuffling through their files as if searching for a lost letter. Finally, I gave it up and called for my driver and returned to town.

  I asked to be let off at Binga Park, and walked straightaway to the café at the end of the cul-de-sac near my hotel. When I reached the corner of the narrow street, and from the square peered down its length to the deserted café and bar at the end, where Andrew calmly washed yesterday’s mud and Djinn’s blood off the cobblestones of the courtyard that surrounded his tables, something turned me away—a felt, rather than heard or seen, warning was issued to me. This place is terribly cold, I thought. Quickly, I walked on and went directly to my hotel room, where I poured myself a tumbler of whiskey and sat by the window, looked out on the park, and waited for dark.

  Several drinks later, night had arrived. From my window, I saw the lights of the town come up—strings and chains of lights brightening rooms and lobbies and public spaces and along streets and alleys, illuminating in strips and spots the lives of the people who lived with one another in the cramped tenements and worker-hotels, the boardinghouses and restaurants and outdoor cafés of Gbandeh. My gloom lifted somewhat then, and, for the first time since the previous night, solitude and difference eased their grip on my sense of myself. I left my hotel for the street, and made for the café.

  At the crowded bar, I signaled to Andrew, who broke off his conversation with an attractive young woman, Japanese or Korean, in jeans and T-shirt and, without being asked, he brought me an opened Rhino and glass. “Welcome back, sir,” he said.

  “Andrew, I have to ask you something. About Djinn.”

  “No problem, sir. What about him?”

  I said that I had been shocked by what had happened to him. And shocked even more that no one had objected or even seemed to care when he was shot and killed. “Killed for what? For climbing the wall of a building? For refusing to come down when the policeman ordered him to? Andrew, that hardly deserves shooting,” I said.

  “He broke the rules, sir. He never should have climbed the wall.”

  “But he’s a madman! That could have been you!” I said. “Or me! Any one of us could be mad. Maybe we are mad, and he’s the sane one. Who can say for sure?”

  “Doesn’t matter, sir. It’s the rules that matter, and he broke them.”

  “But they were small rules that he broke. He was killed for it!”

  Andrew shrugged, then abruptly asked me how I had enjoyed my meat and vegetable pie.

  “What? Well, fine,” I said. “I mean, it was actually delicious.”

  Did I wonder about the meat? he wanted to know. He no longer looked at me, but seemed to be trying to catch the eye of the Asian woman at the far side of the bar.

  “What has this to do with Djinn, may I ask? And by the way, Andrew, I don’t want this beer, I want a whiskey. Neat.”

  He smiled graciously and poured from the best bottle in the place, and when he set the glass before me, he said, “I hope you’re not upset there was no bush meat for it, sir. No chimp.”

  “Upset?” I laughed. “Certainly not!”

  “Green monkey can taste just as fine, you know, if you cook it right. But you probably noticed the difference, since you are a smart man mighty familiar with our nation. So my apologies, sir, for having to replace the bush meat with the green monkey.”

  I backed away, staring at him in disbelief. He kept a thin smile on his face and poured my untouched beer into the sink, wiped the counter, and returned to his pretty Asian customer.

  I didn’t feel it, but I must have been drunk, because I have difficulty otherwise explaining my actions then. At the time, though, everything I did made great good sense and had a strict purpose. It was only afterwards that it made no sense and seemed purposeless. By then, however, it was too late. By then, my actions had filled me with feelings that would not leave me, just as a dream will, and those feelings I would eventually be forced to act upon, for they had already begun to act deeply upon me.

  I walked through the crowded café directly to the place where Djinn had started his fatal climb the night before. Reaching up, I grabbed onto the wooden support of the balcony and swung myself up onto the balcony itself, and from there, just as Djinn had, shinnied up a rainspout and inched my way along a secondary drain to a further balcony on the left and just above me. By now, the café and bar customers had spotted me and were watching from their tables, giving me the same rapt attention they had given Djinn the night before. I quickly scanned the crowd for the policeman, but didn’t see him. With one hand, I grasped the bottom rail of the balcony overhead, and, with the other, clung to an adjacent ledge, and in that way managed to swing myself from the drainpipe up and onto the balcony. I was three stories high now, over forty feet from the cobblestoned street. I was sweating, but it was more from excitement than exertion, and breathing in rapid gulps, like a tiny, trapped animal, and my heart drummed loudly against my ribs. This was the strangest, most unpredictable thing I had ever done in my life, and while it thrilled me to be doing it, it also terrified me. I had no reason for doing it, only a compulsion.

  I climbed atop the upper rail of the balcony, as Djinn had, and, balancing there, turned and looked down upon the people, many of whom had left their tables and had gathered excitedly below me, staring up with the same awestruck, slack-jawed gaze they had given the madman, as if they saw in me tonight what we had seen in him the night before, as if I were transforming them into beloved subjects.

  Now I saw the policeman—not the same man as last night: this was a taller, darker man with
a nearly bald head. He wore the same blue shirt and retrieved his pistol from under it. Slowly, almost casually, he aimed the gun at me and called out, “Sir, you must come down now! You cannot climb these walls!” I laughed in response, a laugh of sheer hilarity, of great good humor. I felt nothing but warmth and affection toward this man with his gun, and for that reason alone the absurdity of his command delighted me.

  I was three stories from the ground now, with only the tile roof above and, beyond that, the African night sky. I turned away from the crowd and, exposing my back to them, reached up and grabbed hold of the lip of the roof, swung both feet onto a narrow wall molding, where I managed a toehold, and drew myself slowly into the air, moving my body inch by inch toward the roof. I was dangling from the edge of the roof, with my shoulders and head above it, but just barely, and most of my weight still suspended out there in the air. I heard the policeman call to me, “You must come down, or I’ll have to shoot you!” Then he said, “Come down, Djinn, or I’ll shoot.” I know he said it; I know he called me that. It meant many things, but at that moment, it meant to me only that, if he could kill me, he would.

  It was impossible now to turn back. If I groped blindly in the air behind me with my feet, trying to find the railing of the balcony below, in seconds I’d surely lose my grip on the roof tiles and fall, as good as shot. It was taking all my strength just to hold on to the tiles, just to stay where I was. Somehow, though, I found enough strength in my hands and arms to draw my body slowly, agonizingly, up and over the lip of the roof—first my chest, then belly, pelvis, and thighs, and finally one knee—when I heard the crack of a gunshot. The bullet ricocheted off the tile closest to my face, stinging my cheek with bits of clay, and I made one final lunge to safety, over the edge entirely and onto the sloped roof, out of the shooter’s line of sight.