The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks Read Free

from him and quickly finished my breakfast and left the restaurant.
    “That same afternoon, when I was walking home from my baby-sitting job, I went to the restaurant to see if he was there. But he wasn’t there. And the next morning, Thursday, I walked all the way over there to check again, even though I never eat breakfast at the Pancake House on Thursdays. But he was gone then, too. And yesterday, Friday, I went back a third time. But he was gone.” She lapsed into a thoughtful silence and looked at her hands.
    “Was he there this morning?” I asked, thinking that a mild coincidence was perhaps the point of her story.
    “No,” she said. “But I didn’t expect him to be there this morning. I’d stopped looking for him by yesterday.”
    “Oh. Why did you tell me the story, then? What’s it about?”
    “About? I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I just felt sorry for the man. And because I was afraid, I shut up and left him alone. And then he was gone.” She was still studying her tiny hands.
    “What were you afraid of?”
    “You know, sounding dumb and naive. And making him mad at me.”
    “That’s only natural,” I said and put my arms around her. “Everyone’s afraid that way.”
    She turned her face into my shoulder. “I know, Russell, I know. But still…”

Djinn
    Some years ago, before I married and took a position with a company whose entire operation was domestic—before I came home, as it were—I was employed by a Hopewell, New Jersey, company owned by a multinational consortium based in Amsterdam. We manufactured and sold women’s and children’s high-style rubberized sandals, and our assembly plant was located in Gbandeh, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Katonga, then a recently de-Socialized West African nation. With an area the size of Vermont and a population just under that of Spain, Katonga in those Cold War years was a capitalist pawn on the African chessboard and was thus the recipient of vast sums of U.S. foreign aid, which, as usual, financed a thuggish oligarchy of connected families who sent their children to private schools abroad and drove about the country in fleets of Mercedes-Benzes and Land Rovers. Thanks to American military engineers and civilian contractors, roads were paved, electric and gas utilities were reliable, and the Gbandeh airport could handle the air traffic of a city the size of Toronto or, if necessary, launch a fleet of B-52s against targets from Libya to the Seychelles. Also, there was the inevitable undisciplined but well-armed police force that kept order over an impoverished population of displaced rural peasants eager to assemble Western goods for a few dollars a week.
    I don’t apologize for these conditions, nor do I judge them. Simply, they were, for me, working conditions, just as they were for our Katongan assemblers and managers. History created the conditions, and I, like my African cohorts, saw myself as merely an ordinary man with a small job to do, a job that could have no effect on history one way or the other.
    As the newly hired head of the company’s research-and-development division, I was obliged early in my tenure to visit our assembly plant in Gbandeh and make the acquaintance of the company representatives and local managers, ostensibly to facilitate future communication between the New Jersey home office and its African outpost, but mainly to evaluate the Katongans’ ability to adapt to the fast-changing demands of our sales force. The design and materials for our product were subject to the shifting whims of American and European women and children with disposable incomes and self-images easily manipulated by advertising. We were working, therefore, in a very competitive field. Our people, all our people, from manufacturing and assembly to advertising and sales, had to be extremely adaptable: we had to be both creative and reactive in equal measures. In Africa, I stood at the crossroads of the two.
    From the