Our Hearts. Chapter Two. Stained Glass

Her shelter smelled of overheated palm oil, burnt onions, and the sweetish smoke of charcoal.

Behind the torn canvas awning of the street brazier, where a heavy-set woman turned golden accra balls in boiling deep fat, Imani was completely hidden from prying eyes. A thick curtain of fumes and steam reliably separated her from the noisy street.

She stood absolutely motionless. She wore a long, austere white dress made of thick cotton with a high, closed collar. Her head was covered by a white headscarf, tied in the tradition of the Catholic parishes of Haut-Katanga—tightly, completely hiding her hair and neck. In this attire, her slender silhouette seemed carved from ivory, and her face, in contrast with the snow-white fabric, looked even darker, deeper, and more expressive, like the dark water of a forest lake before a thunderstorm.

She was waiting for him.

This state of waiting existed outside of logic and decisions. It lived in her very breath, in the beating of the pulse at her wrists, in that incomprehensible feeling that had driven her here early in the morning through the wet, lazily waking city. And this waiting was corporeal: the way a lung cannot help but breathe, the way a heart cannot help but beat.

She stood on the corner of Avenue Kasa-Vubu, observing the facade of St. Peter’s Church, and watched as the hot sun leisurely ignited its neo-Gothic towers. First, an orange reflection touched the upper cornices, then a golden wave descended to the foot of the steps, and finally, the stained-glass rose window above the entrance flared from within with a thick, blinding light.

At eight-fifteen, Gonzalez appeared. Leo.

Imani recognized his step even before she made out his face. The fast, focused, precise stride of a man accustomed to crossing the thresholds of hospital wards. He walked in a light-colored shirt, with a backpack slung over his shoulder. From behind the canvas awning, Imani peered at his features and marveled at what she saw: in his appearance, there was no trace left of the mad, sleepless night and the consumed alcohol. He looked absolutely fresh, put-together, washed, with his dark hair still damp from the shower. This flawless fearlessness of his body, this ability to look clean amidst the tropical chaos, made her heart clench.

When Leo stopped at the foot of the stairs and raised his head toward the rose window, the morning sun struck him right in the face. His skin immediately flared with an improbable bronze and gold, as if in an ancient fresco.

Inside Imani’s chest, a thin, taut thread snapped. In its place came a wave of previously unseen tenderness—deep, deafening, almost sacrilegious. It was an entirely new feeling, unlike anything she had known before. She had never felt anything like this toward her own husband: there, everything was built on duty, shadows, and silenced pain. But here, facing this unfamiliar white doctor, a wild, desperate impulse awoke within her. She felt an unbearable urge to run out of her dark shelter, cross the street, hug him with all her might, press his head to her chest, and hold him like that, not letting go for a single centimeter.

It was the exact same embrace with which her grandfather had once held her. In those distant, terrifying days, when her grandmother silently gathered her things, belonging to her alone, and left the house into the pitch darkness, toward the jungle, leaving behind only the smell of dug-up earth and dried herbs. On such days, her grandfather would sit on the wooden threshold, place little Imani on his lap, and press her to himself with such force, as if trying to shield her from the whole world with his body. In that old grandfatherly warmth, there were no words or promises—only a blind, saving protection.

Now Imani wanted to become that same protection for Leo. She felt an invisible ring of danger closing around him, the center of which was herself. And this desperate thirst to keep him safe burned her from the inside.

She waited until the bulky oak door of the church swallowed the American’s figure. Waiting for three minutes, Imani stepped out from behind the canvas and silently headed toward the church.

Inside, a blessed, echoing coolness reigned. The thick stone walls held the night’s freshness, protecting the space from the approaching midday heat. But the main thing in the church was the light. The morning sun had already risen high enough, and the narrow lancet stained-glass windows ignited in full force. Tall pillars of color—sapphire blue, deep ruby red, amber gold—pierced the gloom, slicing the air with sharp, pulsating blades. Motes of dust danced in these rays, turning the interior space into a radiant, prayerful well.

Leo sat in the second row from the altar. His head was bowed, his fingers clasped in a tight lock. He was praying, immersed in the Catholic canon familiar since childhood, finding in it his sole anchor amidst this strange Congolese world. Next to him on the polished pew lay a scuffed black backpack with a hand-sewn, slightly crooked WHO emblem—in this uneven stitching, a touching human exhaustion showed through.

Imani approached without making a sound and quietly sank onto the pew beside him.

Leo flinched. His prayer broke off. He turned his head, and in his brown eyes, illuminated from below by the colored reflection of the stained glass, flared pure, stunned amazement.

“Imani?..” he exhaled.

“Hush,” she whispered barely audibly, gesturing with her eyes toward the altar. “We are in the house of God.”

“How did you… where did you come from?”

“You asked me yourself last night,” her voice sounded quiet, but it filled all the space between them, like water poured into a crystal vessel. “You asked where one could pray here at dawn. I answered: St. Peter’s Church, at eight in the morning.”

Leo frowned, vainly trying to fish this memory out of the murky gaps of his mind:

“I asked? When? I don’t remember that…”

“I know.”

The stained-glass windows continued to pour their piercing light. Blue and red rays crossed right on her white dress, dyeing the fabric purple. Leo’s gaze slid to her neck. There, over the austere collar, in the place where the collarbones meet in a V, where the skin is thin and a pulsation is visible beneath it, hung an amulet on a dark cord that hadn’t been there the night before.

It didn’t look like a cross. It didn’t look like an icon. It was different, ancient, alien—and at the same time, Imani wore it over her white dress, over her white scarf—and this layering was not a challenge, not a contradiction, but a natural coexistence: two worlds, two views, two understandings, living in one body, on one neck, side by side, together, without interfering with one another. It was a small wooden cylinder, polished by time, wrapped in dry sinews and inscribed with fine carving, a pattern—a circle with a dot inside, and a spiral around the dot.

Leo peered at the pattern, and his voice dropped to a professional whisper:

“Is that a Nkisi?”

A lively, astonished spark flashed in Imani’s eyes:

“You know that word?”

“I read about the Congo before the trip,” Leo answered, maintaining his distance. “Nkisi is… A spirit? An object of power? A guardian? I read different interpretations.”

“A guardian,” she repeated softly, and in her intonation sounded a deep, ancient respect for a man who had tried to understand her world. “Yes. You could call it that.”

“A guardian,” Leo repeated. He looked at the amulet. Then back at her. Into her eyes. “And what does it guard?”

Imani did not answer. She reached into her small palm-fiber handbag and extracted a massive object from it. It was a thick copper bracelet, covered in engravings darkened by time—the same spirals and dots as on the wooden amulet. The metal felt surprisingly warm, as if it harbored a living human breath within it.

Imani took Leo by his right hand—on his left, the steel case of his watch gleamed dully. Her movements were fluid, but absolutely unyielding. His skin was slightly reddened by the morning sun, dry, with fine dark hairs on his arms, with a visible blue vein pulsating evenly, calmly, and Imani thought (not with her head, but with her fingers, her fingertips, the pads of her fingers—her fingers thought on their own, the way separate beings think) that this pulse was beating in a rhythm, a rhythm familiar only to her, which she had heard before, since childhood, there—at home… And pressing her fingers against his wrist, she slipped the copper bracelet onto his skin.

The metal wrapped tightly around the joint. Leo felt a strange, deep impulse travel first from his wrist to his shoulder, and then further—down his spine.

“Where you are going, it can be dangerous,” Imani said, holding his hand in her palms. “It can be truly dangerous.”

“I know,” Leo replied, not taking his eyes off her face, which was bisected by a violet beam from the stained glass.

“You don’t know,” she tilted her head slightly, and this gesture, that very same one from the bar, forced Leo into silence. “You think you know. You read your papers, looked at maps, studied protocols. But paper has no smell. Maps don’t breathe. Protocols don’t cry at night.”

She fell silent, looking somewhere forward, past the altar.

“Is there Ebola in Katanga?” she asked, looking at him.

“We don’t know. There is no exact data yet. That is why Gaillard and I are heading there.”

Leo paused, peering into her dark pupils, around which amber rims emerged in the sunlight:

“Why did you delete your number from my phone?”

“I didn’t delete it.”

“It’s not in my phone…”

“Enough, Leo,” she interrupted him, and a sad, wise smile appeared on her lips. “Where you are going, mobile networks don’t work. There are no towers. No satellites. No nothing. A phone is an object. And objects—” she paused, “—objects lose their meaning when they step outside the bounds of what they were made for. A phone is made for connection. And there, connection is established differently.”

She slowly rose from the pew. The white cotton fabric glided over the polished wood.

“I will come there,” she uttered quietly, looking toward the glowing crucifix. “I am originally from Haut-Katanga. I’m sorry I didn’t say so right away… That is my land, Leo. Sometimes you have to return home.”

Before he had time to answer, Imani leaned in, grabbed his right arm—the one on which the dark copper shone—and squeezed it with such passionate, desperate strength that it caught Leo’s breath. In that grip of hers was all the unspent tenderness, all the anxiety, and all the wild, inexplicable bond that had formed between them. And from this squeeze, he felt the blood in his wrist slow down, his pulse calm, his body relax—and this could not be explained in physical, chemical, or medical terms.

“Take care of yourself, white doctor,” she whispered.

She turned and walked toward the exit. Her light dress moved through the colored pillars of stained-glass light, dissolving in the golden dust until the oak door closed behind her without a single sound. Only her scent remained in the air—dark, nocturnal, smelling of night flowers and damp earth.

Leo slipped his arms through the backpack straps, crossed himself, and stepped outside.

The morning heat of Kinshasa hit his face in a dense, humid wave. At the foot of the steps, leaning against a battered yellow taxi, stood Rémi Gaillard.

The Frenchman was eagerly devouring a local shawarma—that specific Kinshasa kind, wrapped in oiled newspaper, with minced meat, fried onions, green peppers, and a yellow, spicy sauce that ran down his fingers and dripped onto his trousers, and Rémi paid no attention to this whatsoever, because for him, eating was a process of self-assertion in the world, a kind of action, a form of presence—to eat meant to be here and now.

Next to him on the hood lay a second shawarma, wrapped in the same kind of newspaper.

“Ah, here’s our righteous man!” Rémi mumbled with a full mouth, handing Leo the second wrap. “Here, Gonzalez. Hot meat, a bunch of pepper—the best cure for a hangover. It’s time to head to the airport, the UN charter flight is already warming up its engines.”

Leo took the wrap, feeling its scalding heat with his fingers. He abruptly turned and cast a glance over the square, the brazier, the colorful crowd of passersby. The white dress was nowhere to be seen.

“Did you see her?” Leo asked quickly.

Rémi stopped chewing and wiped his chin with the back of his hand:

“Who?”

“The girl. Imani. She came out of the church a couple of minutes ago, right in front of me.”

The Frenchman frowned in bewilderment, glancing at the empty steps:

“Leo, I’ve been hanging around here for ten minutes. Only one crippled old man crawled out of those doors. Are you sure you slept it off?”

Leo said nothing. A cold, unearthly draft ran down his spine. He silently stepped toward the open door of the taxi and tossed his backpack onto the seat.

“Wait a minute,” Rémi suddenly narrowed his eyes and sharply grabbed Leo by the shoulder, spinning him around. “Damn it… Looks like your night really was wild. Where did you get blood on your back?”

“What?” Leo tried to twist away.

“Turn your back! Lift your shirt!”

Leo complied. Rémi carefully lifted the thick cotton fabric of the light gray shirt, which half an hour ago in the hotel had been flawlessly clean. Fresh scarlet spots were blooming on the fabric.

“Four scratches,” Rémi stated, examining the wounds with the meticulousness of an experienced doctor. “Parallel, from the shoulder blade all the way to the ribs. The skin is swollen, oozing blood. As if a wildcat slashed you.”

Leo carefully reached his hand behind his back and touched his shoulder blade. His fingers felt hot, stinging furrows and a wet, sticky warmth. In the morning, when he stood under the shower in the hotel and dried himself with a towel in front of the mirror, his back had been completely clean. Not a single abrasion. Or was it that local booze after all?

Rémi grunted, shaking his head, and climbed into the front seat of the taxi:

“Alright, don’t worry about it, Romeo. No one will see anything under the protective suit anyway. Just make sure you treat it with antiseptic on the plane.”

Leo finally took a bite of the shawarma. The meat was roasted, spicy, hot; the sauce sharp, sweet, viscous; the bread thin, crispy, oily—and all this together exploded in his mouth, filling it, flooding it—and he thought that already twice in the last twelve hours his body had been filled with heat—her yesterday, the shawarma today—and the difference between these two fillings was immeasurable, disproportionate, insane.

“Get in, it’s time to go,” the Frenchman interrupted his thoughts.

Leo got into the back seat. The taxi roared, enveloped itself in blue-gray smoke, and pulled away.

“Rémi,” he said.

“Mhm?”

“Do you believe in what you can’t explain?”

Rémi looked at him. Long. Heavy. Then he turned away, looking out the window.

“Leo, Leo. I don’t believe in anything,” he said. “But I see what I see. And what I see, Gonzalez—” he paused, “—is sometimes far too much.”

Leo looked out the window at the receding towers of St. Peter’s Church, at the colored stained-glass windows blinking in the already distant openings. On his right wrist, the copper pressed down like a massive, icy ring, his own inexplicable blood dried on his fingers, and in the air of the scorching car, overpowering the smell of roasted meat and gasoline, there still hung the distinct, persistent aroma of church incense and her body.

Chapter Three. Cartography of a Wound →
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