I allowed Paris to become my lover because I wanted you. I needed you.
I trained to be a nurse to keep pain close. Yet I soon found that the profession (as practised day-to-day in a general hospital) wasn’t nearly intense or trying enough. Mr. So-and-So’s saggy bottom that needed changing. Lecherous old doctors. Hours spent entering every scrap of pointless detail into a computer. Lecherous young doctors. In the final hours of a matriarch’s life, her family declaring the sad, emotional wars fought over a whole lifetime permanently unresolved. At least you have a mother, I’d mostly wanted to spit at them.
I was a bird with new feathers. Why did the sky not open up before me?
I felt that I must make it do so. This was the urge I followed, my baby. The feeling that only the young have, that they are destined for greatness if they could only free themselves of their past, or that they are invincible and there is no one else quite like them. Another morning truth: delusional uniqueness—a condition that resolves untreated with age.
Is this why I ran away and find myself sitting, writing in a diary at this window? Because I wanted freedom and was naive? Is this why I went nursing in war zones: to ensure the pain I had about me was not bourgeois, democratic, and mediocre, but rather was devastatingly poor, lawless, and catastrophic?
No, it was more than simple youthful adventure that drove me here. I understand it now as a kind of mental illness—a way to avoid having love for others, a way to keep people at a distance. Either literally through all this reckless travel. Or by insisting on professional boundaries. The selflessness others saw in me was, of course, calculated selfishness of the worst kind. I wasn’t giving myself to the care of others. I knew, more or less, what I was doing. I was forgoing my life to pursue God, in a kind of living martyrdom—a state of emotional numbness. Some choose drugs, others a bullet I suppose. Don’t think I didn’t consider the various other options as a teenager. In the end, I chose high-risk nursing. This is my daily overdose attempt. My open cry for God’s love. It keeps me free and others away. See, peanut, the truth speaks at dawn.
Will you be born in a tent at night on the edge of a desert? I can picture you coming in waves, the heat leaching out of the sand about me. The night cold swelling in a sudden shock. Above the stars are all out, pricks of light that burst with each of my contractions, I squeeze handfuls of sand and rock, then a single star becomes a focal point as I push, crushing earth to dust between fingers and palm. I reach for Paris but not even he can help me here. You come with a fight, the Milky Way smearing. Propped against the coarse bark of a tree I try to control myself to the end, in case last-minute refusal might be my first and final act of motherhood. But the more you come, the further I get lost. I curse Paris under each breath. You did this. You left her in me; now she is leaving me. Everybody leaves me.
What else do I imagine? Do I see my nursing colleagues close by? We have been through so much together—famine, flood, war. We have witnessed so many moments of death, consoled those still sentenced to live. We are bound. But as I push you into this world, all I see is a lone midwife from a local village. There is no one else in attendance. Has a bomb gone off an hour earlier? Did my colleagues say, We’ll be back, climbing into jeeps? Breathe, they sing together, breathe.
I am going to refuse to tell them the name of your father. Paris—there he sleeps so soundly—will be the one most suspected, of course. But were there other men? Trysts, affairs? Where do I go, when I do not go with him? They have always wondered. Their conjecture will be restless.
Why will I not tell them? We are sisters! They will plead, over beers at a restaurant on a week off in a city, the name of which I will never recall. I will sit there eating steamed fish wrapped in a banana leaf with rice—oh that I will remember, so good—but I will maintain my silence, withhold the story.
Increasingly it will become clear to them I cannot be trusted.
You might think this hard of me, or them.
Ours is a sorority of survival though. Solidarity and absolute trust, the kind of honour code you might expect among front line soldiers going into battle. But this was what was demanded of each nurse. In unison, we would not break, not be weakened. There are interloping men of course. Doctors such as Paris come and go. Taking pieces of each of us with them, back to their lives, their wives. There are other NGO workers stationed at a camp, or the one-night stand with a local man met on a day off that starts as no more than a smile across a restaurant. If we open our legs, it is only to feel something—a soothing, a hurt—to have or to lose even the texture of power, for a precious few moments.
There. See. I am alive.
Paris stirs under the mosquito net. He is a decent, kind man. But I have not fallen in love with him yet. I am sorry to write so starkly. For your sake I hope to, I do.
I wonder if you will have my eyes?
Will we travel about together? How can I continue working in the field? You will be in harm’s way, just in the way, despite my best intentions. The others will assist as they can for a while but in having you I will fail these women and the organization’s mission. Rightly, they will see my bond with you as unbreakable. How can I give episodic care to many when you will require total care from me? Milk from my breast. Crying. Sicknesses. I know they will grow to hate me for having you. For the first time in my life, the choices before me will really matter to me—because it will matter even more to another person I love: you.
I will get us out of here, of this life, to protect you. Paris will understand. He will follow and keep us safe. Yes, it’s clear. This is the journey before us now.
You are only a peanut, but you have already begun to change me.
* * *
Paris
THE FIRST SOLDIER THROUGH THE hotel café’s door banged his machete blade three times against the metal pillar by the glass pastry display. I caught Helen’s eye. There was urgency in her look. The soldier spoke hurried words in the northern dialect that sounded angry and directive. If any of the foreigners in the room understood what he asked of us, none let on. Again he rapped his machete. A man in a group toward the front raised both his arms, palms facing forward. The rest of his group followed his lead, lifting their hands in the air. With compliance as the only available choice, table after table did the same.
Helen then mouthed a local word. It was one I knew, but had never said myself. It was the word the children in the camps cried out at night, as their dreams turned sour. It was the word their mothers used as a curse or a way to damn the moment, or person. It was the word that meant them, the people from over the mountains to the north. Those who did all this. Those at fault. Those responsible for raping their sisters and daughters. Those who took their land and killed their husbands. It was an acidic word that named both a people and, at the same time, said I accuse. I had learned this word, this word for them, within a day of my arrival. And I knew what it meant as it soundlessly formed in Helen’s mouth. Our hands were now in the air. Other soldiers entered, ordering and gesturing.
I had also learned that the local word meaning blindness was the same as the word for a foreign person with white skin. To them, we look all the same. The term, it had been explained to us, meant literally erased by the light. We were white on white—ghostlike. It was an old, weighty word, and we heard it daily. It had been whispered throughout the camps, as we walked past women warming themselves at fires by night, or in the streets of the capital as we passed bars where the men drank and smoked or chewed in the afternoons. The children worked the word into songs in ways they believed were clever enough that we would not know or understand.
This word, now being thrown about by the soldiers, was spoken differently, in an accent or a regional dialect. Helen and I picked it out easily. The tone they used was the same.
Sources speculate that they will soon cross the river. This was a line I had just read in the newspaper.
Khaki shirts. Blac
k boots. The sweat and smoky smell of fiery, rural men, made fit from the harvest but left poor after the southern government’s tariffs. I knew the basic facts from the newspapers, from camp gossip, about a rising discontent in the North.
Sources confirm that northern recruitment continues to be strong. Signing up is especially popular with young men from towns negatively affected by the government’s crop taxes enacted in the last budget.
Why did this report not immediately resonate with me? The shifting politics had not been properly monitored by either prosperous governments or by our own organization. How could I have failed to recognize such a warning? More soldiers strode in through the front door while others blocked the back.
My daughter, the events of the next twenty minutes are not always clear in my memory. I recall the soldiers pointing and ordering. Helen pivoted away from me, and spoke to the woman at the next table. I didn’t catch what she said. Then, in a voice that sounded annoyed, the woman responded by saying something like: why didn’t we know this was happening today? From her accent, I knew she was from back home.
He said I was a day late for our meeting, Helen then replied, all but under her breath.
They’ll press on toward the camps, said the woman.
Down the street bullets cracked out erasing all other sound. I smelled smoke. I felt faint and colours separated, returning to their primary roots, filling my field of vision. We were ushered out of the café in a line of the blind—they shouted the word at us again and again. Their machetes glinted in the sun. The street was empty of traffic and people. Only the leather vendor was still out, standing beside his stall, watching, a lone witness.
The woman from the café was ahead of us. Both she and Helen were staring at the leather vendor. I ask myself still, did they seem less scared than me?
We were all taken. They arrested us. We were abducted.
Over there was the bougainvillea, a lizard, an unfinished coffee, a picked-at brioche. My newspaper was left open in the sun. These details remain fixed in my mind, as if I might return to the hotel today and find everything as we’d left it, untouched. I was wearing a freshly ironed cotton dress shirt that was white with pale green stripes. Helen led me by the hand as we formed a line and boarded a large military transport truck.
The jolt of the flatbed shook us forcibly. We were livestock, the town’s colonial buildings receding in flashes through breaks in the oily canvas covering the back of the truck. We drove until midday, diesel fumes, dust in our mouths, lurching. No one much spoke—except for a woman who muttered in French, repeating the Lord’s Prayer. Helen’s hand was still gripping onto my own. For a time she leaned over and had a whispered conversation with the other woman. I could not hear the words.
Does she know what’s going on? I asked Helen.
My daughter, I have to explain that in the years that followed, to the core of my being, I stayed clutching onto Helen’s hand. I denied those bare threads of evidence. That a few simple words exchanged with an apparent stranger could suggest she was other than Helen, a nurse—the woman I loved. How could a person known intimately be something other? So I held onto her hand, in my mind, always pushing away any suggestion that there was more I did not know. Never asking the question, was she not wholly honest? Were there two Helens?
Daughter, these are the crimes I witnessed that day. It was long ago. It was during a civil war. I describe them knowing how horrible they are, that these are not the pictures and memories with which a father should burden his daughter. I do not judge. I know the whereabouts of a few of these men, and many like them, today. Some are good fathers, or else they work hard and pray. Others still are no longer here, having started new lives afresh in other parts of the country, or elsewhere around the world. Maybe you pass them on the street on the way to school or eat next to them at a restaurant. You wouldn’t know. Who am I to present my feeble memories as evidence? And what if I am biased? Possibly my memory is faulty.
I have reconstructed this day over and over, for so many years. Have the details faded until I have changed them to keep it feeling as fresh as when it first happened? I mustn’t think so. I must believe this is what occurred around me. What I cannot say, or explain, is why. Why did my life take this turn? At what precise point did I make the wrong choice? Possibly there are too many moments to choose from.
My daughter, I cannot name these men. Please understand, and share in my attempt at forgiveness. Can we ever appreciate the hurts and injustices that another has experienced? That, in turn, led him to speak or act? Was there ever a true beginning, a first stone cast? I hope for there to be no new violent beginnings. There can be ends.
My dearest girl, that day I saw only culminating pieces, horrible deeds committed against human sanctity. Sadly, there is still more to come. That was just one savage day in a decade-long civil war where two different, ever-advancing scores were being kept. Today there is peace. There is government. Men work, and women again have children borne of love. But the paint is fresh on the houses, as they say here. While the wind blows it dry, please accept that my writing this must be a subtle exercise in case it is ever read by someone other than you.
I’ll come back, but let me skip ahead because Helen and I were taken from one another this day. I can still see Helen searching for my face as the jeep drove her away. Daughter, you likely ask, what did my heart say when I lost my lover? That is simple. It said, Helen, I am here, love. Over here! Look this way.
And then? I will her to leap from the moving jeep and fly to me, employing the logic and physics of unsettled dreams. I imagine us lifting off, and fleeing this scene, this region, until we reach the coast where we catch a plane to safety. We are together then, in a familiar place that is perfectly ordinary, with families and children, parks, hospitals, and schools. It is a normal place—where we can raise you, the child growing in her belly.
Daughter, this is how I know of you: our last night together, before being arrested and taken from the hotel’s café, Helen came to me in those thick, hotel sheets. She took my hand and placed it on her stomach.
Eventually, we will need to make some plans, she said.
A baby?
It’s a girl. She’s the size of a peanut.
How could you know this, out here? That it’s a girl, I mean.
An old woman at the camp came up to me. I was playing with some children, under that forked fruit tree by the school tent. She said some words in their language and smiled, placing her hand here as I’m doing with you, then on my forehead, like this. I looked at her deeply, Paris. I just knew what she was doing, what she was telling me. One of the youngest girls, the one with the cleft palate, was close by and overheard. She giggled. She said in English, Girl—she says you have girl baby inside.
* * *
Helen
I WOKE STARTLED. IT IS still night and a sliver of moon hangs low in the sky. In the streets below there is a rumble of trucks and cars. It is the sound of fleeing. The people of the city are heading farther south. The roads cannot be safe. We are not yet surrounded but their positions must be growing stronger in the low mountains that lie between here and the capital on the South Coast. Military trucks from the North are arriving hourly, bringing ever more troops and supplies. I am back in the room at the Colonial Hotel, at the same window where I wrote only yesterday morning. It seems weeks ago. I am tired, but my heart races.
Paris’s belongings are here. I tore through them earlier tonight. What was I hoping to find? Perhaps just something to focus all this raw emotion I have. At the bottom of his duffel bag of clothes were two books—both that I gave him, Rilke poems and a gag gift, a handbook of slang and swear words from home. I flipped through his photograph album, which he had shown me before. There are a few shots of his father and an aunt, a childhood dog. A picture of a girlfriend he had in university—she is quite pretty but he left her. Apparently his studies took priority. No snap
s of himself. In his toiletry kit were the usual items and I’d seen them before. He has an old straight razor that he occasionally uses—his father’s. There were some drugs for himself, just in case I suppose—a course of penicillin, various painkillers. He travels lightly in every way.
There’s not much to Paris. What’s confounding is that for someone so intelligent, so confident and sure-footed, he doesn’t have the worldly wounds that would normally be required to make up such a person’s stoic character. He’s never been in love, before now. Once hurt, a person protects himself. Paris guards nothing.
Gunshots again, they snap and fly off into the night. I am controlling my breathing to stay calm. I can see a car on fire in the distance. The other two women who were released with me are staying in the room next door. I wanted to be alone in a room. Why do I value my privacy more than my safety? It gives me room to pray, yes, but there is something more too. Earlier, downstairs, we found bottles of water and food in the kitchen. The soldiers had been through but had not taken much. The power is out. The old refrigerator was still cool inside. We helped ourselves to yesterday’s bread still on the counter, to some local fruit and soft cheese. We drank the last of the raw milk, which was thick, still cool, and delicious. We gathered up whatever else that would keep in a tea towel—the cured meats that hung in the pantry, tins of sardines, a dozen small mangoes. We have enough supplies to last a week if we eat with restraint; however, I expect the Colonel will be back in the morning.
My daughter, despite what I said about not yet loving Paris, tonight I am thinking mostly of him. Is he safe? Surely he knows that if he saves lives they will spare his. I will get word out as soon as I am able. They will know what to do, how to get him back to safety.
We are telling the truth here, right, peanut? This was our agreement.
I make too many agreements. I don’t negotiate deals though. Rather, I bind myself to people, or work, or causes, without ever really being definitive or setting limits or boundaries. I know I do this. Yet I continue to act in this way. How? The next step is presented as an extension of what I have already agreed to, so to say no would seem small-minded, arbitrary, or mean. And how do I know that this is not simply God’s will at work? So I carry on, the obligations pointing my way forward. I have no overarching plan. I’ve always been like this; it’s who I am. I need to feel attached and purposeful. As a result, I am used as a means to an end. I loathe this about myself, but I don’t know how to stop. I apply all my faith. I keep pressing on faster, directly at the nearest danger. Then there is no time for shame. No time for me to simply be here in the moment. Like this. Yes, I hate this. I am doing this for you. I can’t even remember the name of this town. It was unpronounceable in any case. I never know where I am led. I just show up and go to work, inject those who scream in pain, change dressings, say happy things to brand new orphans.
The Colonial Hotel Page 2