We drove through the streets of Monrovia. On both sides jutted forth the black, charred stumps of burned, demolished houses. Not much remains here of such destroyed buildings, because everything — bricks, tin, and surviving beams included — will be instantly dismantled and plundered. There are tens of thousands of people in the city who have fled the bush, have no roof over their heads, and are just waiting for a bomb or a grenade to strike a house. When it does, they descend upon it at once. With the materials they are able to carry away, they will erect a hut, a shack, or simply a roof to protect them from the sun and the rain. The city, which was probably built initially of simple, low buildings, is now cluttered with these haphazardly knocked together structures and looks even more stunted, having assumed the appearance of something makeshift, impermanent, recalling more than anything an encampment of nomads.
I asked John and Zado to take me to a hotel. I don’t know if there were any choices in this matter, but without a word they drove me to a shabby, two-story building with the sign El Mason Hotel. The entrance was through a bar. John opened the door, but could go no farther. Inside, in the artificial colored twilight and hot stagnant air, stood prostitutes. To say that the prostitutes “stood” does not begin to convey the situation. There were maybe a hundred girls in the small room, sweaty, exhausted, and so tightly pressed together, squeezed, jammed in, that one could scarcely push one’s hand in, let alone enter. It worked this way: if a client opened the door from the street, the pressure inside the bar propelled one of the girls, as though from a catapult, straight into the arms of the surprised customer. Then another girl took her place near the exit.
John retreated and looked for another way in. In a small currency-exchange booth next door sat a young Lebanese man with a sunny, kindly appearance — the owner. The girls belonged to him, as did this disintegrating building with its slimy, mold-covered walls, on which long black water stains arranged themselves into a mute procession of elongated, thin, and hooded apparitions, chimeras, and ghosts.
“I don’t have any documents,” I confessed to the Lebanese, who just smiled. “That’s not important,” he said. “Here, few people have them. Documents!” he laughed, and looked knowingly at John and Zado. To him, I was clearly a visitor from some other planet. On the one called Monrovia, the main preoccupation was how to survive from one day to the next. Who cared about papers? “Forty dollars a night,” he said. “But food is not included. You can eat around the corner. At the Syrian’s place.”
I invited John and Zado for a meal. The old, distrustful proprietress, looking constantly at the door, had only one dish: shish kebabs with rice. She stared at the door because she never knew who might come in — customers, to eat something, or robbers, to take everything from her. “What else can I do?” she asked us, setting the plates down in front of us. She had already lost all her nerve and all her money. “I lost my life,” she said, without despair, matter-of-factly even, just so that we would know. The restaurant was empty, a motionless fan hung from the ceiling, flies buzzed, one beggar after another stopped in the door and held out his hand. More beggars crowded on the other side of the dirty window, staring at our plates. Men in tatters, women on crutches, children whose legs or arms had been blown off by land mines. Here, at this table, over this plate, one didn’t know how to behave, what to do with oneself.
For a long time, we were silent; finally, I inquired about my documents. Zado answered that I had disappointed the airport personnel, because I had all my papers. It would have been best if I had had nothing. Unregulated airlines fly in various con men and adventurers here — this, after all, is a country of gold, diamonds, and narcotics. Most of their ilk do not have visas or vaccination records; they pay to be let in. The airport staff live off this, because the government has no funds and does not pay them their salaries. These aren’t even particularly corrupt people. They are simply hungry. I will have to buy back my documents. Zado and John know from whom and where. They can arrange it.
The Lebanese came and left me the key. It was near dusk, and he was going home. He advised that I too should go to the hotel. In the evening, he said, I will not be able to walk around the city by myself. I returned to the hotel, entered through a side door, and walked up to the second floor, where my room was located. By the ground-floor entrance and along the stairs I was accosted by ragged men, who assured me that they would guard me during the night. Saying this, they stretched out their hands. From the manner in which they looked at me, I understood that unless I gave them something, in the night while I slept they would come and slit my throat.
The only window in my room (number 107) gave out on a gloomy, fetid air shaft, from which a revolting odor arose. I turned on the light. The walls, the bed, the table, and the floor were black. Black with cockroaches. I have encountered throughout the world all imaginable types of insects, and have even developed indifference toward the fact, even come to accept, that we live among countless millions of flies, roaches, and ticks, among ever-replenished swarms of wasps, spiders, earwigs, and scarabs, amid billows of gadflies and mosquitoes, clouds of voracious locusts. But this time I was stunned; not so much by the number of cockroaches — although that, too, was shocking — but by their dimensions, by the size of each one of these creatures. These were roach giants, as big as small turtles, dark, gleaming, covered in bristles, and mustached. What made them grow so large? What did they feed on? Their monstrous proportions paralyzed me. For years now I had been swatting flies and mosquitoes, fleas and spiders, with impunity; now, however, I was facing something of an entirely different order. How should I deal with such colossi? What should I do with them? What stance should I adopt toward them? Kill them? With what? How? My hands shook at the very prospect. I felt that I wouldn’t know how, that I wouldn’t even have the courage to try. More — because of the cockroaches’ extraordinary dimensions, I felt certain that if I leaned over them and listened, I would hear them emitting some sound. After all, many other creatures their size communicate in a variety of ways. They squeal, croak, purr, grunt — so why not a cockroach? A normal one is too small for us to be able to hear it, but these giants? Surely they will make noises! But the room remained absolutely quiet: they were all silent — closed, voiceless, mysterious.
I noticed, however, that when I leaned over them, straining my ears, they rapidly retreated and huddled together. Their reaction was identical whenever I repeated the gesture. Clearly, the cockroaches were revulsed by a human being, recoiled with disgust, regarded me as an exceptionally unpleasant, repugnant creature.
I could embellish upon this scene and describe how, infuriated by my presence, they advanced on me, attacked, crawled over me; how I became hysterical, started to tremble, fell into shock. But this would not be true. In reality, if I didn’t come near them, they behaved indifferently, moved about sluggishly and sleepily. Sometimes they pattered from one place to another. Sometimes they crawled out of a crack, or else slid into one again. Other than that — nothing.
I knew that a difficult and sleepless night awaited me (also because the room was inhumanly airless and hot), so I reached into my bag for some notes about Liberia.
…
In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell — for six muskets and one trunk of beads — the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors — to Africa.