Our Hearts. Chapter Five. Spirals and Lines

Mbanza-Ngungu breathed in the thick mist of the foothills.

Here, in the west, hundreds of kilometers away from the scorched red quarries of Upper Katanga, the air was supersaturated with moisture, carrying the heavy aroma of eucalyptus groves and the rotting bark of giant ficus trees. A white dampness crawled along the cobblestones of the Belgian streets, clung to the rusted cast-iron fences, and sluggishly seeped into the open windows of old colonial villas that had long ago surrendered to the onslaught of eternal jungle green.

Imani walked up a steep, stone-paved path. Her steps were noiseless, almost weightless. The hem of her white cotton dress absorbed the morning dew, growing wet and heavier with every hundred meters of the ascent.

Time in her grandfather’s house moved according to entirely different, otherworldly laws. It settled on the carved mahogany panels as dense wood dust, accumulated in the corners alongside the pearlescent wings of dead night moths, and seeped into the yellowed photographs on the walls. The house was a true archive of shadows. Here, into this damp coolness, the surviving members of the Ngoy family had brought from the southern provinces only old trunks secured with padlocks, and a long, unbroken memory.

But the most somber ghosts of this house belonged to distant Katanga.

Imani knew them all. She remembered the spicy scent of heated copper, forever sewn into the folds of her late grandmother’s dress—a woman who was born on that toxic, ore-rich earth, who breathed its dust all her life, and who came to rest there beneath a heavy layer of loam. She remembered the night, smelling of burnt gasoline and fear, when the scrape of a machete against corrugated iron cut short her parents’ voices. Barely any memory of their faces remained; only fragments survived: the dry, calloused palms of her father, accustomed to digging the earth, and the final cry of her mother, severed by the nocturnal silence. Katanga had taken them, digested them, and turned them into gray ash, from which new trees now grew.

Imani pushed open the wooden gate. The iron responded with a high, thin creak that remembered her great-grandfather, who had installed this fence in the early nineteen-thirties.

Paluku Ngoy sat in a deep wicker chair on the covered veranda. He was approaching eighty. No one knew the exact date: the parish registry had been eaten by termites back in the days of the Belgians, or so the late Padre Nicanor used to tell, and therefore he measured his age not in years, but in great wars, plagues, and the succession of rulers in the capital. Her grandfather resembled a statue of bog oak, sculpted by millennia of rain and wind. His eyes, clouded by the thick, milky film of cataracts, gazed out over the garden, piercing the mist. Clear, physical sight had abandoned him long ago, giving way to a different, frighteningly precise perception of the world.

“The children in the parish school have been reading prayers off an empty chalkboard for three days,” Paluku said, without turning his head. His voice rustled like dry grass in the wind. “The chalk remained untouched on the desk. The headmaster sent a boy. I told him you were ill, but he didn’t believe it. A man accustomed to lies takes the truth for deceit.”

Imani sank onto a low wooden bench at his feet, smoothing the folds of her damp dress. The bench was warm with the ancient wood, having preserved the sweat and moisture of several generations.

She touched his calloused, gnarled hand.

“I should have warned you I would be gone so long,” she apologized. “How do you manage here alone? Without my eyes.”

Paluku offered a barely perceptible smile, and for a second his face lost its granite sternness, becoming the face of an old, tired man.

“An old man in Mbanza-Ngungu is never truly alone. The neighbor, the widow Kabemba, brings me hot fufu and fish in the evenings. She thinks I don’t notice she puts too much palm oil in it,” he let out a short, cracked chuckle. “And her eldest son sometimes drops by to fix the radio or play a game of macao with me.”

“And you let him win?” Imani smiled faintly.

“Never,” her grandfather shook his head. “The boy cheats. He assumes that since I can hardly see the cards, I cannot hear his sleeves rustling. But he is a good lad. Brings me tobacco from the market. It is peaceful here, Imani. Too peaceful for you to worry about me.”

He sighed, and the everyday softness suddenly left his voice again, replaced by the measured cadence of an elder.

“The headmaster didn’t believe me,” the old man continued. “I wasn’t offended. People who believe everything ultimately believe nothing… But you didn’t answer.”

“I went to Kinshasa, Grandfather.”

“Kinshasa,” he repeated the word the way one pronounces the name of a disease… “Why?”

“At my husband’s request.”

Paluku shook his head slightly. His thick white eyebrows twitched a little, catching the vibration of her voice.

“A man whose bed you shared at my command rarely sends a woman to the capital for no reason,” the old man folded his long fingers, resembling dry roots, in his lap. “There is always a reason for his actions, and most often it is woven from fear. What is he afraid of now?”

“He says the earth has awakened,” Imani answered quietly. “He is truly afraid. He asked me to find an outsider. Someone from the World Health Organization. A doctor. The local people at the Bata Kolé mines are grumbling, Grandfather. They whisper in their huts, collecting old amulets. They believe the white machines have unearthed something in the hills that was meant to sleep, and now the foreigners want to cleanse the land of our people by letting death ride the water. The locals think the curse has awakened, and they will lose everything. He needed eyes in the capital before the doctors flew to the mine.”

Paluku nodded slowly, as if listening to some internal music audible only to him.

“Doctors give ancient things new names. Ebola?”

“Yes. They will gather their test tubes and slides to call it that,” Imani looked at her thin, dark palms. “They search for the cause in blood and saliva… But they know nothing yet.”

The silence on the veranda deepened. From the wet leaves of the bougainvillea, sparse drops fell onto the stone steps with a quiet ring. Imani went into the house.

When she returned to him with a freshly brewed, fragrant tea made from local herbs, the old man leaned forward, turning his half-blind face toward his granddaughter.

“Your right arm sounds different,” he said. “The wind is blowing over skin that has been hidden by metal since you lost your first baby tooth. I no longer hear the weight. Where is your bracelet?”

Imani lowered her eyes. Her right wrist was bare. Only an even band of slightly lighter skin served as a reminder of the massive copper hoop.

“I gave it away.”

“Gave it away,” Paluku repeated. There was no surprise in his voice—only a profound measuredness. “To the American?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he is the one?”

Imani closed her eyes. For a moment, the twilight of Saint Peter’s church reappeared before her, the colored rays passing through the stained glass, and the stranger’s fingers touching her hand.

“I don’t know, Grandfather. He is different… But when I placed the copper on his arm, I felt something. As if a thread had been drawn tight between us. The metal accepted his warmth. Not the kind of warmth the sun gives, but the kind that lives deep within… True warmth. Human warmth.”

Paluku leaned back in his chair. His palm ran over his dry chin.

“The woman whose blood you carry spoke of this the night before she went into the earth,” the old man said quietly. “Your grandmother sat on a veranda just like this in that house of ours, weaving a pattern out of beads. She said: ‘A stranger will come from afar. His heart will sound with a hollow, unfamiliar rhythm, but he is the one who will close the door.’ She always forbade me from giving you to a local household. Forbade tying you to the people whose ancestors mine this copper.”

“She had visions,” Imani uttered softly, and in those words there was no doubt—it was a form of long-standing, customary agreement, the way one agrees that the sky is blue and water is wet.

“Your grandmother saw what she saw,” Paluku cut in. “And she spoke plainly: do not marry her off in Katanga. Not because Katanga is bad. No. Because Katanga is a lock without doors. Whoever goes there, stays. And whoever stays, never leaves. The earth does not let go.”

Imani lowered her head, looking at the stone floor and the teapot resting upon it.

“The Mboko family gave us shelter, Grandfather. They protected us when the house in Katanga burned down. It was a good union. You did what an elder of the lineage had to do, left with another’s child in his arms.”

“Doubt is a heavy burden for an old man,” Paluku’s voice echoed with slight bitterness. “The House of Mboko was rich, their men were armed, their word meant much in Lubumbashi. I thought I was building a fortress for you. But a fortress that protects you from the world simultaneously shuts you off from your destiny. Perhaps I was wrong to insist on your betrothal. We tried to deceive the pattern, but the pattern was biding its time all along.”

“You were right, Grandfather.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps,” he paused, “I was wrong. Because a shield that closes you off from the world also closes the world off from you. And you, Imani… you are not one who can be kept closed away.”

“You wanted what was best for me,” Imani replied.

A breeze swept through the courtyard, kicking up a pillar of orange dust. It swirled at the threshold—slowly, beautifully, precisely—the way something swirls when it knows exactly where it must settle.

“Then you must return there,” Paluku turned to her and pointed in the other direction, to the southeast, where beyond the hills and rivers lay the jungles of Bata Kolé. “Not because your husband gives orders. And not because the American is waiting. You must follow your copper.”

“I know.”

Yes, Imani knew. She knew it the way one knows things that are remembered, not learned—the way one remembers the road home when walking it at night, without a lantern, by touch, by the smell of the earth and the direction of the wind.

Paluku sighed. Something gave a dry creak in his chest, like a beam in an old building before the rain.

“Tell me about that day again, Grandfather,” Imani asked quietly. “About the dried-up well.”

The old man fell silent for a long time. Drops continued to fall from the leaves, counting the moments. But when he had unhurriedly finished his tea, he spoke:

“On that day, villages were burning in Katanga. Men from Shaba came with torches and iron. You were four years old. Your father managed to bring you there, to me, but he went back for your mother. I never saw them again. Their names are written in the priest’s book, which the dampness later ate away. But you I lowered on a rope to the bottom of the well behind the shed, the one your great-grandfather dug. It had been dry for five years by that day; the water had retreated deep down.”

“I remember the darkness,” Imani said quietly.

“You sat there for two days and nights. Without a single cry. I lowered maize and water to you in a basket. You were very small, but when I pulled you out into the light, your fingers were clenched into a fist.”

“I was holding a stone,” Imani reminded him.

“Yes, a stone,” Paluku nodded. “A dark, smooth, round pebble that you found by touch in the clay at the very bottom. It was warm. Always warm. No one knows where it came from in the wooden cribbing made of tali wood. But you didn’t let it go for another three days.”

“But the water came back, didn’t it, Grandfather?”

He smiled faintly with the wrinkles around his eyes.

“It came back… Later. Much later. On the very day your grandmother closed her eyes and stopped breathing. The water rose by three meters. Clear, cool. Since then, I drink only water from the well.”

“What was it about that water, Grandfather?”

“I don’t know,” Paluku answered. “But your grandmother knew. Your grandmother knew many things. She was born in that house, on that land, and when she died, the earth took her back, but left the water. As a gift. Or as a reminder.”

“Come,” he told Imani, rising.

They walked to the backyard, behind the shed, where the old well housing of the well stood in the shade of a sprawling tree. The stonework, laid down back in the thirties, had darkened and grown covered in thick moss.

“Your great-grandfather dug this one, too. And I lowered that stone into it.”

“What kind of stone was it?”

Paluku pulled back slightly. Looked at her. A long, heavy gaze with dim pupils that reflected the reddening sky.

“It was what was there before you,” he said. “And what will be there after. Your grandmother called it the ‘bone of the earth.’ I don’t know what it is. I only know that it came to rest at the bottom of the well long before your great-grandfather dug it. It was there before us. And it will be there after us.”

Imani leaned over and peered into the dark maw.

A few meters down, the water stood still. Absolutely motionless, as smooth as polished black glass. It did not reflect the overhanging branches; rather, it seemed to draw the light into itself. A faint, incomparable aroma wafted up from the well—the scent of a night flower, the beautiful costus, which grows only in the deepest and darkest ravine bogs.

“Take it with you,” Paluku whispered, standing behind her.

“Why?”

“Perhaps the doctor will need this water,” the old man replied. “Not his medicines, not his papers. Water from the well that guards your stone.”

Imani went into the house, found an empty glass bottle, washed it thoroughly, and returned to the well. She lowered the bucket on a braided rope.

The metal touched the surface without a single splash—dully and softly, as if sinking into a thick, oily medium.

She drew the water and poured it into the bottle, pressing the stopper in tightly. The vessel felt surprisingly heavy in her hands, as though inside were not merely a transparent liquid, but something akin to molten dark silver.

Paluku had also gone into the house, and when he returned, he held out a small cloth bundle to his granddaughter.

Imani unfolded the fabric. On her palm lay a second copper bracelet. It was more elegant and thinner than the one she had given Leo. There were no spirals on its surface—only thin, strict parallel lines with tiny dots stamped between them.

“Your grandmother’s bracelet,” Paluku murmured. “Put it on. The left wrist should not remain mute.”

Imani clasped the hoop around her left arm. The metal responded with a clear, cool pulse, traveling from her wrist all the way to her shoulder.

And in that very second, she distinctly felt her right wrist—bare, harboring a phantom trace. Between her left and right arm, traversing hundreds of kilometers of jungle and mist, stretched an invisible, humming string, reaching straight into the laboratory block of Bata Kolé, to the man wearing her first amulet.

“It is time,” Imani said.

Paluku Ngoy stood on the threshold, drawn up to his full, towering height. His dim eyes were fixed on the distance, where the brick-red disc of the sun was rising above the forest.

“Go,” the old man said with detachment. “Let the earth recognize those who are returning home.”

Chapter Six. The Peacemaker →
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