that I’d forgotten how difficult it was to hold Kinshasa in my mind—to see it fully. So much was constantly happening on all sides that, even as I stared out the taxi window, the city came only in glimpses: people talking, vending, bartering, arguing, relaxing, sleeping on the roadside, eating at tiny stands beneath patched beer umbrellas, or running through traffic.
The building I arrived at was a single story of concrete, with the drabness of a storehouse but not the height, the starkness of a public school but too few windows and doors. Only when my entrance interrupted Sola’s argument with the anthropologist, and I heard its subject, did I decide the ambience was that of a jail.
Bram Rees was dapper, with leather half boots, ironed khakis, a white linen shirt, and a blue bandana knotted at his throat. I checked my impulse to judge, since, had I the same boyish face, I might also have indulged in a little sartorial character building. He was a redhead, sprucely coiffed, but with large Raggedy Ann freckles so tightly clustered on each cheek they looked, from a distance, like a circle of rouge, such as you might expect on a porcelain doll.
“One second,” Sola told me when I came in the door, holding up a finger in my direction while still facing him. She was flushed, her curly hair loose, and she wore jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt.
“Sola,” Bram said, “can we not bring this up in front of our guest? He is after all”—and here his voice sounded like a stage whisper—“a journalist.” He opened his eyes wide in an expression I suspected had been with us since our simian days: a way of saying danger.
“She was—is—a child,” Sola told him, “not a test subject.”
“I don’t see your point. Plenty of children are test subjects.”
“You locked her up. You locked up a child, like a prisoner.”
“She was insane. Is insane. She had a demon in her. She pointed her finger at me like this.” He shaped his hand into a gun and flicked his thumb to show the hammer coming down.
“Of course she did. You had her locked up. You didn’t earn her trust.”
Bram dodged Sola, took a long step toward me as if lunging with a rapier, and clasped my hand in both of his. His fragile, sun-distressed skin revealed anxiety and the many fine wrinkles that would soon bestow upon him the gravitas he craved.
“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Welcome, welcome. Sola told me that you might be interested in my rather challenging work.”
The story I gradually composed from their argument and Bram’s flustered explanations was that a police officer he’d tipped off to look for street children accused of sorcery—his subject of study for the past year—had brought in the white girl after she and her friends had robbed a pineapple vendor. Her wrists were bound with a zip tie, and she was hissing like a feral cat. When she tried to bite the officer, he jerked away. According to Bram, who mimicked the bass voice often used by African figures of authority in films, the officer said, “She is a demon, and you are looking for demons, and she is a white demon, so there was nowhere to take her but here.”
“I paid him well,” Bram told me, “because I have foresight.”
“You hoped to work with him again?” I said.
“Indeed. She looked like a child who might escape, though she has done so more easily than I expected. I figured I’d encourage him to see a market in returning her. I’ve already called him, and he is on the lookout.”
Bram then motioned me across the relatively long, rectangular room containing a table and his laptop, to a door. It opened on a small, windowless chamber with a cot, some blankets, a bottle of water, and a bucket.
“She escaped from here,” he said. “There’s no way out. But she told me that Mami Wata—a water siren often depicted as a snake charmer—would help her transform into a serpent and get free. It’s hard not to wonder …”
He turned, eyeing me with clear wariness and jealousy—of his story and of Sola, I suspected—but perhaps also considering me as a potential ally against her, who was watching us, arms crossed and chin lowered.
I was trying to think of how to insert myself into this situation inextricably, and I said, “I know a pastor who might be able to help. He’s knowledgeable and connected, though I’m sure you can reach out to pastors yourself.”
“Actually,” Bram replied, “I can’t. I’ve bothered them so much for my research on street children that they’re, well, they’re rather sick of me. They won’t even take my money, and that’s saying something here.”
“I can call him now,” I offered, and he simultaneously shrugged and nodded.
On my way over, in the taxi, I’d stopped to buy a SIM card from a street vendor and had inserted it into my phone. I now dialed Oméga’s number, and he answered on the second ring. He recalled the story of the girl and said that he’d be honored to help and knew where to take me. He just “happened to be free”—a serendipity that made me suspicious of what I might have that he could want. I gave him directions, and he said he would pick me up in an hour or so.
I conveyed all of this to Bram, who nodded without thanking me. He placed his knuckles to his lips in contemplation and paced a few steps like that.
“If I agree to share my notes with you,” he said, “and if I agree to let you write about this, then we will have to come to an agreement.”
“What sort of agreement?” I asked, holding back a smile.
“We’ll have to sign a contract saying that I retain full intellectual rights and above all, film rights.”
I understood his concern. He was certain that he’d struck gold and was more likely to turn a profit if I wrote about him, but he didn’t want to lose control of the material.
“Wouldn’t the film rights belong to the girl?” I asked.
“She’s a minor,” he said.
“Or to her family then?”
“I am, or will be, technically, her guardian.”
Sola groaned behind us and walked out of the room, into the hallway.
Years ago, I’d read—in one of my mother’s many books on how to live more peacefully—that when someone annoyed me, I should picture the more mature and thoughtful individual they would grow into and speak to that person instead, but with Bram all I could conjure up was a goaty, desiccated, neurotic professor: calculating, ranking his life’s experiences, dividing them between wins and injustices.
I considered his proposal. He wasn’t the first interviewee to express concern that he might lose film rights, and I knew that without signing a contract, my access to this story would be limited to what Sola might share with me at some later time.
“Sure,” I said, and he snatched a notepad and began writing up the terms.
“Just something rudimentary,” he told me, “but enough to affirm that our handshake has a legal basis.”
We signed the basic condition that he would retain film rights to his story and the girl’s, though I was fairly sure no court would view him as the proprietor of her experiences. He gleefully hurried to the table and began sorting papers.
“Where do you think your article will be published?”
“It’s hard to say at this point. I’ll have to work up a pitch.”
“I’ve been translating and editing this all night. I’m basically trying to reduce hours of interviews with her down to a single coherent story.”
“She answered questions for hours?”
“It took a lot of candy …”
He handed me a sheaf of papers and led me to a room he’d decorated as a lounge, with cushioned chairs and a cracked terrarium empty but for some kind