After about two hours the bus stopped at a village. I’d been there before. It’s the last place to refuel and rest at the edge of the plains before tackling the roads through the southern mountains. A crowd had gathered in the town’s square. There were many who had fled and had reached this village before us. We stayed on the bus, opening the windows to let in air, to hear. The mother beside me spoke English well. She worked for the oil company, she told me.
Everyone on this bus has some connection to the company, she said. We are servants of employees and their families mostly. What is your connection to the company? Do you work for it?
I told her the truth. That I was a nurse from the camps, caught up in the town when the soldiers arrived.
The crowd was becoming agitated, arguments erupting. I asked her what they were saying. Her baby was fussing. She strained to hear.
They do not believe what is happening, she said. They are asking Oenone if they should continue on through the mountains in their cars or on their donkeys. What about those on bicycles or on foot? They are concerned they will not make it, and are questioning how bad things back in the town really are.
After a time Oenone got off the bus and addressed the crowd. She was animated and used her muscular arms as she talked. At first I didn’t need a translation. She spoke slowly and through gesture and the few words I knew, she made clear that everyone should continue on to the capital. Oenone carried gravity and seemed used to being in front of crowds. Then she sped up her speech.
What now? I asked the mother.
She is saying that no matter how long it takes, we must all go. Nowhere on this side of the mountains will be safe before long. But it’s our home, some in the crowd are pleading. The soldiers will return to the North after they take what they need from us! But Oenone says, No, they will not leave. They will stay.
Next a man spoke for some time. Don’t believe her, he said. Our government will soon be here to push them back. He said more, but the woman was unable to hear.
Oenone remained commanding. She was not a bus driver I understood, but a leader of some sort. The crowd knew her. They listened when she climbed up on a fruit cart and demanded silence.
She is saying that our town and the entire plains region have fallen into the hands of the northerners. She is saying that everyone must flee. We are at war.
Then I heard Oenone, with raw emotion in her voice, use the word for them.
A man then pointed at her and spoke accusingly.
What, what? I asked the woman.
He says that her husband is behind all this.
Oenone then shook her head. She said that the Colonel is no longer her husband. He is a northern traitor. She then climbed aboard the bus and started it up. We sprang forward and before long were making our way up the first gentle incline of the foothills.
When the woman’s baby settled down I asked about the driver. She’s the government official for the city, said the woman. Oenone is a healer. An organizer of opinions. She has one child. Her former husband was the government official before her, but he broke her heart when he sided with the northerners whose army was becoming ever more powerful with money from the oil company. When she found out about his dealings, she ran him out of town. It was Oenone who the people really loved all along.
Where is he now?
He is the leader of the northern army. They are our enemies. This was his bus, said the woman. He used to fix everyone’s cars and he ran the only buses across the plains to and from the town. Then he ran for government leader of the plains region. She was the reason he won. He said No corruption! But all the time the oil company paid him with money and fuel for his buses. They are powerful. Then Oenone found out that her husband was taking oil company money. She stood before the town and told everyone. They made her the leader. Her husband escaped into the night. But it is said that before he did, he held her down one last time, leaving her with his seed. She carried the baby inside her proudly anyway. This is my baby, she said. Not his. Oenone is the mother of our town. We are all her children.
The woman shared her lunch with me. I gave her some money. For your baby, I said when she tried to refuse. At the front of the bus, Oenone pressed on and on.
Peanut, my own mother gave me my name, and then gave me up. Or, if I could hear her tell it, would she say that she gave me a name and then was not allowed to give me anything more? I am part indigenous. If you know the look, you can see the history in my face. Many back home do. They are forced to see it even when they are not looking for it. I notice a quiver come over them, a goose crossing their grave, or their ancestor’s grave, perhaps.
Ours is a bloody and shame-riddled history too. Which country’s isn’t?
Confronted with my face, even if I am happy and smiling, the fact of it implies agony. Mine is a face of loss. So they are sorry and sometimes they ask outright after my story, and other times they weakly mind their own business. In my face, my skin, my body, they take in the full Pyrrhic victory. I am stolen land, erased language, an echo of rapes long ago. And the men especially continue to stare, taking in my looks, which I understand to be beautiful. Some can’t shake me. I become an idea of myself, of Helen, and I haunt them, poison their dreams. At first they think it’s love, of the mad, obsessive kind. But these are simply the aftershocks of our joint violence. It’s not love they feel, but the burn of disgrace.
When Paris sees me it’s different. His love is free of politics. Which is shallow, I suppose. But it’s also love that is particular, just for me. The ghosts cannot find our bed.
I grew up in foster homes and, near the end, in a group house run by an agency. I lived under the care of kind women and drunken men, or drunken women and kind men. My faith was my companion, my consolation. Before I began nursing for the organization, I’d rented a ground floor flat on the esplanade. It was not far from the happiest place I’d lived during my whole childhood. While I lived there, I often visited Mum. The only woman I ever named as such. It was my choice to call her Mum. And I still do. She kept me with her as long as she was able. Then she needed to care for her husband fulltime. They were old—too old to be my parents then. She’s eighty now. I miss her tonight as I write this. I pray you’ll meet her someday.
The flat I lived in had yellow brick. Neighbours looked after one another. I got up early in the mornings. I’d be just sitting and looking out, taking in the horizon. I worked at the hospital, many night shifts. One neighbour in particular would see me there and often pop round with a cup of tea, or call out a bright good morning to me. This is how I went on. It was all so beautiful and so painful, too silent and too safe. I knew I had to go. I looked out at that horizon, thinking of what lay beyond it, and how I could get there. How I could get rid of this aching pain I had deep inside me.
Peanut, this is your mother speaking. I was given up—and I don’t know why. What kind of mother will I be? How will I know what to do? I don’t mean the simple things, like feed, clothe, and shelter. I mean the deeper attachments. How do they begin? Do you trigger them, or do I? If it’s me, if that’s my job, will I? Can I? What if I’m no different than her, my biological mother? What if I see you and hand you away, simply saying, No. No, this is not mine, I do not want her, I didn’t mean for her to come, take her away. What if this kind of cruelty runs deep, or is God’s will. What if it can’t be helped?
* * *
Paris
MY DAUGHTER, I CONFESS, I can feel your presence. I have always believed that you were born and that you do live. But what about Helen, is she alive too? Did she tell you my name? Do you ever look into your own eyes and wonder if they are your father’s? Do our ears make a similar shape? Do you have a cowlick that goes like mine?
I have lived an incarcerated life, removed from the world and burdened with so much deadly time. I have held you, in my mind, at every age. I have imagined soothing your infant cry. I cared for you when
you were teething and feverish. I caught you as you took those first steps. As a young girl I helped you learn to ride your bike and together we baked cookies. When you became so cross and announced that you intended to run away, I walked to the corner with you and helped you cross the road—and yes I scooped you up, wiped your tears away, and carried you home.
I have had so much time.
All those fatherly duties and joys, and a thousand others I have invented for us. We know one another as if it had all occurred, just as it should have.
There is one matter though that I cannot decide upon. One agony that has resided in my heart because, despite having tried, it is a fact I cannot allow myself to err on, much less invent. If you would, sweet daughter of mine, please, tell me your name?
Along with a half dozen other men I was walked in a line through dense bush, a soldier at each end. The track was narrow and muddy. I wore brogues and still had on my white and green shirt. After an hour we came upon a large clearing in the forest that overlooked a valley. The clearing housed a recently built prison compound. An established local village with mud-walled houses and several larger community buildings was farther down the hill. There was a sign for Pepsi-Cola, and a sleeping goat tied to a post. It was dusk.
Once inside, for a time we were tied to a fence, our hands lashed behind our backs, the rope knotted through the wire. A cool mist ebbed down the mountain. In the courtyard of the compound, huddling together, fifty men pressed against one another, against the damp. The night sky, now filled with stars and a half moon, blinked between rolls of barbed wire. We were untied and walked into the compound proper. A generator motored on. The electrified fence hummed. We stayed together, sitting in a similar fashion to the others, in a closed group. Improbably, I slept.
As dawn came, inky and hesitant, the guards encircled the yard, carrying three naked flame torches that gave unstable light. Some held guns, their faces grinning and righteous. They were boys—no more than twelve—obviously new recruits. How different was this than a child’s game to them? They were swollen with confidence and it seemed effortless and magical that they had traded poverty and boyhood for instant manhood and power. Several others, those carrying the torches, were more reserved, older, serious, and in charge.
We were untied and instructed to lie on the ground, clasp our hands together in front of us. Our faces were flush against the dirt and many men with whom I lay whimpered and shivered as I did. Some of those captured in the compound were police, still in uniform, from the South.
Three police patrolling the petrol station by the river have not responded to radio contact since Tuesday. They are presumed captured, or killed, during recent skirmishes with soldiers from the North, say government sources.
Why, as I read the report that morning, did I not imagine that a compound such as this could be their fate?
Some frenzied shouts and whoops erupted from just beyond the electric fence. The early morning smelled first of fuel and then of burning flesh.
It reminded me of a burn victim I’d once treated in the hospital’s emergency room back home. A different tragedy, a lifetime ago. We’d air lifted him to a specialized burn unit in another city.
Then the early sky was brightened by a pyre of bodies, a chorus of mouths aghast in disbelief, a crowd of faces cinched and lips stricken, a congregation of arms stiff with their fingers rigid pointing upward—at what, God? We could do nothing but look on as the burn of humans and kerosene went shushing out into the open, wet morning. Is everything as it was elsewhere, I wondered; was I still among the living?
For days we were held in that yard. Those closest to the kitchen window caught and repeated sentences, mouth to ear, eagerly snatched from the cook’s gossip. All news was interpreted, and reinterpreted, however banal. Our bodies craved information as much as calories. During the day we smelled the onions being cut and cooked. Hot orange water from boiled root vegetables was thrown out the back door of the kitchen and it washed through the compound. They handed out cups of food twice a day.
In the beginning, the end had seemed certain. That in a matter of hours we would be lined up and shot, that we too would be burned as a group. Yet, as one day came and went, from the cook’s gossip, from the loose lips of one of the guards, we learned that instead we would be made to work. A new jail was to be built. The captured police would be enslaved. The dozen or so blind would be kept too, held for ransom, when the conditions were right.
My daughter, let me go back. I was not without my mind. Helen and I became one, the way lovers do. Drawn together easily enough. She chased war zones and hot spots, the taste and thrill, the adrenaline and fatigue of it, the righteousness and purposefulness of it all. Those were her reasons, I believe.
We could really use you, in an ongoing way, the organization’s executive director had said to me on the phone at the conclusion of my first assignment. It was supposed to have been a onetime mission, a learning and growth experience for me.
Helen and I met and worked together on that first mission. Her looks were impossible to ignore. I was self-conscious around her. But that was all. Did I know then? That I would develop such love for her? That I was even capable of such desire? My thought though was that I was returning home to my clean and safe apartment. I’d been away for three weeks.
I understand, the executive director pressed on, that you are a fine doctor, that you’re making friends, and suit the work. What can I offer you to lure you back? I cannot pay more than the pittance I do, I’m sorry. Anyone in particular that you enjoyed working with, that you would choose, given the option, to be paired up with on reassignments?
I had been on a team working with three nurses. Helen was one of them. Was she implying I could choose the most attractive of them to work with? I turned the executive director down. Needing to make more money and restart real life, I returned home.
Helen wrote me an email. First, just the one. But we soon, and easily, began a correspondence. I remember some of what she wrote—the essence. Her voice in them is still clear to me.
Paris,
Yesterday I pulled out a tire iron lodged in a boy’s leg. We were deep in a field. The screaming will stay with me for weeks. The girls say hello. Tomorrow we are all going to a movie. A movie! It won’t be in English, but who cares, a story to take me away to some other place for a few hours.
Yours, Helen
There would be none for weeks while she worked on the front lines, then seven in three days as she rested and needed to write and tell some of what she’d experienced. They were always short but never shied away from the horror and reality of the work before her.
Paris,
Do you know much about Dengue Fever? We are seeing it a lot down here. We have not had a physician with us for this past week—neither Bill nor Donna is available. People presenting in such pain, high temps, the rash etc. We are all doing what we can to stay away from mosquitoes. Sleeping under nets. Burning local herbs even. I’ve never seen such poor drinking water. It looks like dishwater after curry. The locals all play instruments in the evenings and dance. They are very colourful. Not a penny among them, but stunning artists, determination, ingenuity, and much joy. They tear at my heart. God must love them.
Yours, H.
I wrote her long emails after my shift at the hospital, deep into the night. I would try to keep them light, telling of world news and pleasant touches that happened during my day. I began to think about her more often than not.
The executive director mailed me a photograph of Helen with some of the other nurses on the team. They had been taken as a part of a professional photo shoot that the organization was using to fundraise. On the surface it operated similar to all the NGOs. At its roots, however, it was a splintered-off faction of a fundamentalist Christian organization. I had struggled with that aspect—assumed that its mission was to first save the life, then save the soul. But they never prose
lytized on the front lines. They said grace at mealtimes, and some would offer short prayers at the bedside of a dying patient, but the conversation among the nurses was as frank as I’d come to expect anywhere. I was left to my agnostic and scientifically minded self.
An idea grew in me. I kept thinking about it, about her. I did miss the thrilling importance of the work; I ached to be nearer to Helen. I contacted the executive director.
Changed my mind, I said.
I guessed right about you, she said. Bless you.
May I tell you, my daughter, of how Helen and I finally came together? Is it awkward? Some children do not want to hear of these moments. If you are like me, you will always be hungrier for more information, and that will smother any schoolgirl embarrassment.
Helen and I became one through exhaustion. We had connected while we worked with a group of children at a bombed-out church. We taught them math for an afternoon and created a false world of normalcy in the middle of their horror. See, we tried to say, even at the world’s end, there is school, there is boredom, there is free time and space to play in a yard. We took this small gesture on together without thought as a task ordered by no one and overseen only by ourselves or, for Helen, perhaps by God. Instead of looking in vain for their parents buried in rubble, the children came and practised addition, subtraction. Something about this day, or perhaps it was an accumulation of days, drew us closer together.
We needed to escape, a break. I urged Helen to come with me—although I would not have left without her—and she agreed. We took a long truck ride across a guarded border, then a passenger train. Finally, we emerged as two educated, privileged adults, showered and preened, in a room at a Hilton. We were safe. We lay down together.
The Colonial Hotel Page 4