by Nina George
I count to five, swallow hard once, twice, count again, and then force myself to go inside.
“Have you done your homework, Sam?” my mother shouts out. Her glass is empty.
When did I have time? I want to call back. When? I go to my room without answering.
A few minutes later she’s standing by my door, her body shrouded in a dressing gown. She smells of pancakes, with a whiff of alcohol. “Have you practiced your French vocab?”
“Hmm.”
“The tests are in three weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You know what that means, don’t you, Sam?”
“Yes, Maman.”
It’s the same dialogue every day, and we already had this conversation earlier in the car when she picked me up from Kister Jones’s. My mother is terrified that I might lead an unstructured life.
“Sam, those tests are really important if you want to make something of yourself and have a good career.”
“So Steve didn’t pass the tests back in his day?”
A sharp intake of breath from my mother. I have no idea why I said that. It wasn’t fair, and she can’t help the fact that I’d rather be somewhere else—anywhere but here. Anywhere but living this square life with Steve calling me Fanman.
“I know you missed school this afternoon, Samuel.”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Where were you?” My mother looms over me.
“Here and there,” I mumble. “I was at Forbidden Planet. The new Pratchett just came out.”
“Samuel,” she says, “you skipped school. And you weren’t at Forbidden Planet because I rang them. They know you there. So…where were you?”
My mother would feel betrayed if I told her the truth and said that I was at the hospital, as I have been every day for the last two and a half weeks. It’s always been this way. Every time I suggested I had any hint of love for my father, my mother would act hurt and say nothing for days on end. That’s why I keep lying to her now. “Scott and I were smoking.”
Scott would laugh his head off at this, as the only time I took a drag on one of his Lucky Strikes I felt dizzy and had to lie down for half an hour.
The volley of abuse that rains down on me now is infinitely better than the inevitable gloomy, disappointed silence that would have met an admission that I’d been visiting my father at the hospital. Her tirade is followed by a strict ban on buying any more of those dreadful fantasy books and ends with an announcement that there’ll be no pocket money or television for a while.
My mother looks around one more time before leaving the room. “You’re ruining your life, Sam!”
She shuts the door behind her and I sit there, longing to shout after her, Nothing’s the way you think it is! My father rescued a child and he’s wearing the scoobie and was dead and is in a coma. And there’s a girl at the hospital called Maddie whom I want to be with me forever. My life can never be as ruined as hers. She’ll never sit any tests and never have any opportunities. But instead I sit silently at my desk and press my fists into the tabletop.
My mother’s a wounded woman. Ever since I came into the world, I’ve been aware of a shadow hanging over her soul. There’s no need to hurt her. Sometimes I want to protect her from everything. I want to tell her I love her, but I don’t know how to go about it.
I hear Steve zapping through the channels and then my mother calls to him to come to bed. A short while later I hear a rhythmic scraping from their bedroom. It’s the head of their bed rubbing against the wallpaper as Steve and my mother make love. Nine minutes every time, followed by the sound of the toilet flushing.
Malcolm comes into my room. He doesn’t yet understand the cause of these noises. He gets into my bed, studies my face, and says quietly, “You don’t smell of smoke at all, Sammy.”
I don’t immediately answer. Malcolm is on their “side”—a member of the happy family. That’s nonsense, of course, but every time I look at him I see myself as an intruder in this family. A nuisance. Yet I also know that I’d do anything for my brother. He’s one of those people who can never understand why other people might lie or be nasty.
Malcolm sits down on my bed. “You weren’t smoking, Sammy. Where were you?”
Where was I? Good question. My life has been hacked and reformatted. Into the life I “really” ought to lead. With a father who’s lost his entire family.
Or what happens when everything changes? If your life isn’t being hacked but the world is seriously out of kilter? Maybe I’m like the barrister who steps through a secret door in his office and roams through his different lives until he can’t be sure which is the real one.
I stop chasing my thoughts through this labyrinth and count to five hundred. My brother has fallen asleep, and I’m trying to figure out if I’m still in the real world or not.
I quietly fetch two ski-boot boxes from my wardrobe to help me decide. They contain two heavy files. I open the first one and flick through the headlines of the newspaper articles inside.
LOST IN EUROPE: THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN OF THE BALKAN WAR
THE GIRL WITH A BOMB IN HER RUCKSACK
THE PHONY WAR: HOW THE US ARMY CENSORS JOURNALISTS
KIDNAPPED BY REBELS: REPORTERS AS BARGAINING CHIPS
And so forth. Frontline reports, essays, photos. Until my birth thirteen years ago my father was a war correspondent, and I have virtually every article he ever published. I printed them off the Internet or cut them out of old magazines I found at flea markets or on eBay. I also wrote to newspaper offices from school with requests for back issues.
The second file contains a portrait piece published in Time in 2002. My father’s face is on the front cover, surrounded by the famous red frame. The headline below the photo is “Mr. Fearless.” My father’s staring past the camera. His blue eyes suggest he’s probably gazing at something in the distance. His skin is deeply tanned and cracked, and his square chin is dotted with silvery stubble. A scar slashes across his left eyebrow, and no hair grows there. He says in the interview that he sustained the wound from a knife belonging to a drunken soldier in Vukovar. My father had to kneel in front of the soldier for two hours, being peed on and beaten, before being allowed to continue his journey. He’d hidden a Serbian orphan in his car and smuggled the boy across the border.
I once told Scott that story. He was silent for a long time and then something unusual happened: tears welled up in his eyes.
“Your father’s a real mensch, mon ami. Not showing off, not playing along with all that shit, like ‘I own this, I do this, I can afford such-and-such a watch.’ Your dad, my little smart-ass sidekick, is someone who lives life to the full.”
Time magazine had named Henri M. Skinner its “Person of the Year” to represent all the war correspondents worldwide who risk their lives to report on grim events.
My father stopped reporting from war zones when I was born. My mother said it had nothing to do with me, but it might have. She hasn’t read the interview in Time. I have. I can recite it by heart, including the passage in which my father says, “No war correspondent should have a family.”
I flick back a few pages to a report about child soldiers in South Sudan. There’s a photo of a man slumped forward in a jeep. In the background my father is crouching down beside a boy with a rifle in his hands. In the foreground lies a shattered cowrie necklace. My mother took this photo before she began to fear for her life.
I’ve calculated. That would be about right. It might have happened out in Africa. My mother never talks about when she met my father and what happened afterward. Nor does she say why she came here from Paris when I was four.
Malcolm asks drowsily from the bed, “What are you reading?”
I pick up the file, sit down on the edge of the bed, and show him the Time cover with my father’s face on it.
&
nbsp; “Is that Daniel Craig?” he asks.
“Close,” I answer. It’s true that my father does slightly resemble Daniel Craig, a serious loner who gives the impression that he doesn’t know how to laugh, but his hair is darker than Craig’s.
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s sleeping, like you.” Malcolm obediently closes his eyes and within seconds he’s asleep.
When, in my state between waking and sleep, the letters start to blur before my eyes, I carefully replace the files in their boxes and push them to the very back of the wardrobe.
Write about the world to understand it. Write about people to make them visible. Write down my thoughts to stop myself from going mad. I bought myself a notebook last year to do all those things, but there it lies, unopened, as if to suggest, What have you got to say anyway?
I gently roll Malcolm a little closer to the wall and lie down on the narrow strip of bed beside him.
What would have happened if my father and my mother had stayed together? I imagine that he wouldn’t be in a coma now. I don’t know how Eddie fits into this picture, but maybe, somehow, she’d be here regardless.
Still attempting to cram my father, my mother, Malcolm, Maddie, and Eddie into one picture, I fall asleep and dream of the little comatose girl. Her face is floating under a thick layer of river ice, staring up at me against a backdrop of black sea. The sea parts, and I fall into a dream I used to have even before I went to school—a dream that the pediatrician said was a pavor nocturnus, a night terror, and that the child psychologist described as a stress reaction to a traumatic experience.
But I’ve never experienced what happens in my dream. A train approaches from a long, black tunnel, and I’m terribly scared because someone’s lying on the track bed below and the train’s going to run him over. I have this dream over and over again, and when the train arrives and its headlights shine in my face, I wake up and lie there in the dark with blood pounding in my ears.
Henri
I tumble out of the moving jeep and cover Marie-France’s body with mine, shielding her head with my hands. She’s screaming beneath me, and the sand is hot and burns my knee through my trousers.
The jeep rolls a few yards farther and crashes into a wall. Nelson, our driver, is slumped over the steering wheel. The two Blue Helmets lie dead, their faces turned to the sun, on the scorched grass beside the road through Wau in the Bahr el-Ghazal region.
The boy with the machine gun staggers out of the hole where he was crouching when he shot Nelson. A hole with a strip of cardboard over it.
Marie-France is whimpering now.
The gunman is young, perhaps thirteen, but his eyes are as old as death. He is just as scared as I am. The boy crouches down, cradling the rifle loosely in front of him, and shuts his eyes.
“Don’t go! Don’t go!” Marie-France yells as she notices my weight lifting from her body.
I stand up and walk slowly toward the boy, displaying the palms of my hands. He doesn’t even glance at me and offers no resistance when I relieve him of the rifle. I empty the magazine and toss it as far away as I can, then squat down beside him. His upper body is rocking back and forth, back and forth, and all around us is silence. Sudan is paralyzed by horror and heat, and I’m thirty-one and have spent far too long in war zones. I’ve also seen far too many of these aged children. UNICEF flew two thousand five hundred of them out of here last week, and others are congregating in hastily erected SOS Children’s Villages in the savannah. The objective is to disarm them and provide them with new papers and identities. They would no longer be known by the weekday on which they were born. But what, after all, is in a name? You’re nothing without your community.
At the SOS children’s camp we would like to talk to the demobilized child soldiers who can neither read nor write but are capable of aiming a gun, pulling a trigger, and locating mines. None of the laws we know apply here; the only law is the law of the gun.
Marie-France rolls herself into a ball behind the jeep, from which I pushed her at the sound of the first gunshots. Our newspapers in London and Paris teamed us up, but we don’t get on.
At some point I see her grab the strap of her green camera bag and pull it over the sandy, dusty ground toward her. She lies on her side and holds up the camera to create some distance between herself and the horror she sees. She takes a photo of the bodies of Nelson and the Blue Helmets, with me crouching beside the child killer with one hand on his trembling shoulder.
I have the impression that I’ve seen this picture before, as if I’ve seen myself from the outside in the photo Marie-France is currently taking. Nelson’s cowrie necklace lying bloodied in the foreground, the child soldier and me in the background.
The heat flickers before my eyes, and the momentary déjà vu—a certainty that I have lived through these seconds before and know exactly how the photo is going to turn out—fades.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He looks at me, quietly says, “Boy,” and averts his gaze again.
I crouch beside him as the shadows shift and Marie-France takes photographs. Otherwise, nothing moves in this street, as if we were the last living people in this corner of Africa. In the whole world even. Flies and goats, gutted vehicles, plastic bottles, rubbish, and nothing else.
Sometime later Boy tells me that his father used to call him Akol. His father is dead and so are his mother and younger sister, but his elder sister’s still alive. She cooks for the commanders. At night she’s allowed to sleep in the leaders’ huts while he curls up under a plastic sheet suspended from two dead tree trunks.
I ask him if he knows that UNICEF helps boys like him.
“But what happens to her?” he asks. “What happens to her?” He’s scared that the militias that trained him will sell his sister to Italy if he doesn’t fight.
I can’t do this any longer, I think. Over and over again I have tried to take realities like this home with me and to expose them to people who have only ever seen war on the television. They avert their eyes, as they always do when they’ve seen their fill of life’s atrocities.
I can see why.
I let Akol run away, and now have an unloaded rifle; Marie-France, whose heart seems to have partially turned to stone; and a two-hour trek back to the camp. Marie-France refuses to take off her heavy protective vest printed with the word “Press” and let me carry it, but she’s grateful when I shoulder her green camera bag.
Fear grips us and drives us out into this all-too-real world. The only thing we have in common in this lawless warring environment is our horror, like a terrible disease from which neither of us will recover.
* * *
—
That night Marie-France doesn’t want to sleep alone under a camel-hair blanket on the camp bed in the press tent lit by two thin candles.
“I want to make love one last time before I die,” she says.
“You’re not going to die here,” I reply.
“So don’t you want me, you arrogant prick?”
I don’t know why love is so important to people that it comes to their minds when they’re in mortal fear. I’d rather have a bulletproof vest and a bottle of whiskey. I say that, and Marie-France hits me. She slaps me in the face and punches me in the chest until I grab her wrists and clasp her body to mine. Marie-France starts to weep. There’s so much misery and hatred in the look she gives me that I end up kissing her.
It’s one of those moments. What moments?
The thought fades as Marie-France’s lips respond to mine. She kisses me, and it seems as if every kiss makes it easier for her to breathe. I answer her kiss and take her in my arms. I stroke her back and it begins to relax at my touch. I put my mouth to her ear and hum into it, and I kiss her neck. Just as I’m about to stop because her sobbing has ceased, her hands seize me and pull me closer.
�
�Make love to me,” she whispers.
And because her caresses tear open my loneliness and communicate hers to me, because I don’t want to hurt her and humiliate her again, and because I have the same furious urge to live, I obey.
I feel her body relax, feel her relent and forget herself in lust. I kiss away her fear, I move very gently inside her, I hum and, cheek to cheek, sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” to her. She lets go. Sensing this softness, the enticing, inviting lust between her legs, I glimpse Marie-France’s soul. For a second I am ineffably close to her.
“Don’t go!” she says when she feels my body pulling away from hers after no more than a minute. Her hot hands push on my lower back to bring our bodies together again. There’s something comforting about resting inside her like this, but I nevertheless feel an urge to withdraw before I lose myself completely. It’s a reflex and we’re unprotected in three senses: we’re naked, we’re young, and…
“Come,” she whispers. “Come inside me!”
This is one step further than we planned. Only one. This time, I think, I’ll do things differently. Then I stop thinking. I stay inside her as I come, and it’s like a long, profound, cathartic exhalation.
“I still hate you,” Marie-France moans in despair, clinging to me, and I know that we’ve never loved each other and never will.
For a few moments, snuggled against Marie-France’s back, I fall into as deep a sleep as is possible in this heat and the constant oppressive vigilance of the camp, and I dream that we have a son. He asks me if I’ll come to the Fathers’ and Sons’ Day at his school. Because he’s never met me. I say yes, and after that I die, drowned in a river whose waters taste of the sea.
I don’t tell Marie-France about this absurd dream or my previous déjà vu, that strange sensation of having reached a fork in the road. As if I already lay on this camp bed and had the option of kissing Marie-France or not, of coming inside Marie-France or not.