It wasn’t like she’d planned it. She didn’t even know it was possible, nor had she made the connection between her pregnancy and the time they’d spent together in the hills or the nights they’d shared at the camp. No one had explained it to her. And she hadn’t known, either, that she could hold him accountable. He was very upset. He asked her why she hadn’t told him sooner. According to the doctor on site at the camp, they couldn’t do anything about it now, not in her condition. Why hadn’t she said something earlier, like the other girls, so they could’ve gotten rid of it? How hadn’t she noticed? Hadn’t she realized she was suddenly throwing up all the time? Yes. But she’d thought it was something she’d eaten. It happened often enough. Her stomach had always been delicate, just like her maternal grandmother’s. And the dizziness? It could’ve been the long treks they went on or the scant food they had to eat. Sometimes the sun was too strong and the heat unbearable. She hadn’t said anything because they’d already scolded her for complaining. They’d said that she wasn’t on vacation and she couldn’t go making demands like this was some kind of hotel.
They had to explain to her what a hotel was because she’d never been to, seen, or heard of one. They also had to explain that she’d have to follow a different training regimen because of her condition. Since she was pregnant, they said, she couldn’t run like they did, even though she’d been running that way for over five months and eating the same as the rest of them. It wasn’t good for her or for the boy or girl she was carrying.
Her baby girl’s dad asked her father to scold her for what she’d done. But he said it wasn’t his responsibility. It had been while his daughter had slept by his side and followed his instructions. But once she started heeding the man’s flirtations, accepting his invitations to go on strolls with him when things were quiet, sneaking around to be with him, and avoiding her father so she wouldn’t be found out or have to explain herself, his job was done. His little girl was a woman now. She had a partner and would soon be giving birth. It was up to the new father to amend their situation. Had it been an official matter, concerning the troops, he might have intervened. Had she been on trial for treason or negligence, he’d have sided with command. But this was about their personal relationship. He’d rather not get involved. If he’d allow him, he’d also like to say that he, his daughter’s partner, was an adult, a city man (though he’d never mentioned this to him, he could tell because he’d once worked in the capital and seen what men there were like) who knew about these matters and could have asked the supply sergeant for contraceptives—though he’d have to take it up with God later—or restrained himself a little and not spent every available moment chasing after his daughter. They might be in a relationship, but they weren’t about to start a happy home together. They were at war. He had to realize this and take responsibility. He should carry on just as he had when he didn’t ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, or request permission to go out with her and take her as his woman. But the father of his granddaughter didn’t allow him. It wasn’t necessary either. He’d taken the matter straight to command, who decided to send the fifteen-year-old girl down to the village to be looked after until her daughter was born and had turned two months old. At that point, she would return to her position, start taking better care of herself, and not get them into another mess like this one. They couldn’t afford to lose people or resources. He ought to know this. They’d do their part to help by sending him to another camp. They weren’t trying to keep him away from her. They could carry on their relationship whenever their paths met or their missions brought them together. It was his responsibility to tell her.
By the time she returned, two months after giving birth and nursing her daughter, he was already with somebody else. She didn’t tell her daughter this, or that he hadn’t asked after the baby or requested any details, or that she’d been told she couldn’t blame him for behaving the way he had: he’d been given a serious punishment on her account. He was lucky to have kept his position in the group.
Though she hadn’t been tried before a committee, as happened in cases of disobedience, she felt they’d punished her enough by separating her from her child. She’d begged them again and again to let her stay and raise her daughter in the village. She even offered to cut out her own tongue, if they were afraid she might say something. She pleaded with them to let her spend a little more time with her daughter, just one more year, just a few more months, a couple of days at least. They reminded her she had a mission to carry out and needed to obey orders. She shouldn’t worry about the girl, they said: she’d be safe. She’d stay in a home and be looked after by their allies until the war ended. Then she could come down from the mountain to be with her daughter, to take care of her and brush her hair like she did with the dolls she liked so much, and be with her for the rest of their lives. Right now, all she had to worry about was staying alive. By fighting in the hills, she could give her daughter a better life. The best way to protect her was to not visit, because the soldiers might follow her, find the girl, and kill her as a way of getting to her mother.
She would have taken the risk and come down the mountain to see her. There was a very beautiful girl at the camp, who was very tall and different from the rest of them, who sometimes snuck down to see her goddaughter for a couple of hours. She could have done that, too. She was clever and it would’ve been easier for her to blend in with other villagers. Which is why they decided to move her daughter from where she’d been born and then refused to share any information with her about it. They swore they’d take her to her baby once the war ended. But they didn’t. The moment everything was officially over, she asked to see her daughter. It had been a long wait and she’d kept herself alive, just like they’d wanted her to. It was their turn to keep their end of the bargain—that very instant. She couldn’t and wouldn’t wait a moment longer.
On orientation days, and while she was in the rehabilitation camp where she and others were sent to help them readjust to civilian life, she only ever asked one thing: when she’d see her daughter. They said the day would come, that the process took longer than anyone liked, but that her turn would come soon enough. She watched as, one by one, children were returned to other mothers. She also collected the second girl she’d given birth to, the daughter of the partner she was with the day the war ended.
He was the one who told her what no one had wanted to until then: that her daughter wasn’t where they said she’d be. He didn’t know exactly where she was, but he promised to find out. He’d help get her back. Where from? Didn’t she know? It’d been decided that as punishment for the couple’s offense their firstborn daughter would be given away to help fund the cause. He supposed her partner hadn’t wanted to tell her, to keep her from hurting. Maybe he didn’t think she’d last long in the war, that she wouldn’t see it through to the end.
9
She doesn’t tell her daughter the whole story. She thinks it might make her feel even worse. But she doesn’t deceive her either. She doesn’t say her dad has been looking for her all along, too, for fear that her white lie will be exposed if her daughter asks for information she can’t make up because she doesn’t want to mislead her, and also because the things people on this side of the world ask aren’t the kinds of things she’d think of herself, and even though her daughter was born on her side, she behaves like someone from this one. She gives her a terse, straightforward version of events, and says her sisters are so happy the priest’s organization found her. For a time, they thought it wasn’t going to. But she always knew she’d figure out her whereabouts. Even when she’d been told to stop looking because the girl had died in a military raid on the village where she was supposedly being raised by a trusted family, even when she’d been shown the cross under which she’d been buried, something in her heart said she was still alive.
The daughter looks a lot like her father. She has his gaze. His way of breathing. She also believes, as he does, that it’s best not to draw back the v
eils of time. In a way, she was happy just as she was, though she wasn’t joyful all the time and hated a great many things. Her dead mother and nonexistent father gave her a reason for being how she was. Now she’d have to come up with another justification for the feeling that had been shadowing her for years. She was past the age of blaming them for what happened, but she could always blame genetics. One of them must have passed on to her this thing which, though it had a name, neither cowered before it nor vanished when it was spoken. At first, she thinks she might have gotten it from this woman: her face bears the same marks of sadness that have started etching themselves on hers, despite the creams and care her adoptive mother provides her with. She thinks the woman who claims to be her biological mother could use some, too. Though young, her skin is already worn. She doesn’t like the texture it’s gotten from her diet. She wonders whether she’d have eaten anything but corn, day in day out, if she’d grown up with her. She wants to feel somehow fortunate.
Living in that city helps. Her biological mother doesn’t like it. Nor has she seen much of it. It’s clean and much larger than she’d ever imagined a city could be, that much she’ll admit, but she doesn’t find it pretty or charming. In her mind, it will always be connected to the distance her daughter has put between them. She can’t fathom how the creditor she went to ever thought she’d consider staying there. The daughter, on the other hand, can’t imagine living anyplace else, even though, in just a few years, she’ll be packing her bags and crossing the Atlantic to live in her biological mother’s corner of the world, though not with her or her sisters. Not even in the same country. She’ll move with her boyfriend, with the daughter they’ll have together, and with the daughter she’ll have had by then with another boyfriend she’s yet to meet. Work in the colonies pays better. It will give the new family a chance to make a better life for themselves, even though they’re not used to the things they glimpse around them, and nor are these the things they want. The recession will make the decision for them. They’ll say they moved to keep from ending up in a shelter or begging on the streets for money to feed their daughters.
She won’t call, not even when she’s only two time zones away, and will be slow to respond to the messages her sisters send on the computer. The biological mother will console them as she had once been consoled, saying: She’s always been the absentminded, silent type, and time’s always getting away from her. As a girl, whenever she went out to play, someone would have to be sent to fetch her. Even though it was dark out, she never realized it was time to go home.
The girl will use the same excuse to the daughters—what with all the time they demand of her and how tired it makes her—as a way of keeping her distance. And the language. The fact that her sisters speak no French, nor any English, is a plus. She knows the interpreter seated in her living room can’t spend every hour of his life helping them solve their problems. She’ll say that internet translations are completely hopeless for their purpose, that she can’t make out what they’re trying to say. I don’t understand, will be the phrase she most uses. I can barely hear you, she’ll also say. She’ll say the connection is awful between the country and the colony, whose weather she never gets used to. It makes her sweat too much and is bad for her skin. She needs new skincare products. Beauty had never been her main thing, but it became a cause for concern after she arrived there. She doesn’t want her skin to become like her mother’s. She doesn’t want them taking after each other in any way. Almost immediately, she cuts her hair in an entirely different style so it bears no resemblance to hers. She doesn’t go as far as dyeing it because that seems over the top, ridiculous. She doesn’t understand why anyone would do such a thing.
And yet her second sister can’t help herself. While her mother’s visiting the daughter they didn’t grow up with, she’s persuading the señora looking after them to dye her hair another color. She wants it lighter. She thinks it’ll look better. Her mother has never let her do it. She says she’s lovely just the way she is, that she has to learn to accept herself. And that the chemicals will wreck her hair. What’s more, it looks ridiculous and, in the long run, would be an expensive whim to keep up. She knows they don’t have money to spare. Even with the cornmill they bought, they don’t always have enough for food and bills. The upside of the mill is that they can cook up a meal out of the dough that gets stuck in the blades. In between customers, they clean it, removing the masa. They say they do it so the mill will work better, so one person’s masa doesn’t mix with another’s and spoil the flavor, but really it’s for the food. What they grow in their plot isn’t always enough for the year. Sometimes, the mother won’t eat. She’ll say she isn’t hungry, that she feels like she’s gained weight since she stopped training and living rough in the mountains, that she has to slim down a little, but the truth is she knows they’ll all want seconds. It’s a question of arithmetic. She can get by with the leaves she tears off in the bush. She’s known which are edible and which aren’t since before she went to the mountains. Her parents taught her as much when they lived on the farm named after a horse. From then on, there was never any extra food in the house. She never saw anything spoiled or thrown away. It’s not that she wants her daughters to get into the habit of being wasteful, she just wants them not to go hungry.
The second girl under her roof doesn’t care. She purchases the dye with the money her mother left for school expenses. With some change she earned herself, she pays the señora looking after them to help. The señora warns her she won’t be held responsible for whatever happens when her mother gets home. She won’t intervene when she’s scolded, or when she’s disciplined. The girl thinks it’ll be worth it, no matter the punishment. This is how she’s always been. She’d like to share this anecdote with her distant sister so she knows who the girl she’ll have one day takes after. But the daughter doesn’t ask, nor does she seem to want to know. When the time comes, she’ll think her daughter is the way she is by chance or because of the years spent in the colony. She won’t brood over her puzzle of physical traits or dissect any of her gestures, like those people who want to find similarities with their loved ones at any cost.
Her adoptive brothers are the ones who ask after the woman’s other daughters. They’re delighted by stories of their mischief-making. They wonder if they had done the same before being taken to that city, or if they’d have been more active had they stayed in their hometowns. They ask about their interests so they can buy them a souvenir, or anything they might want or need. They ask if they can write them a letter, or at least a card. In it, they say that even though they aren’t siblings, they could have been. They ask the girls to think of them as family. They’ll consider them a part of theirs, if that’s all right. They ask the same of their mother. If she’d rather not see them as her sons, maybe she could see them as nephews, neighbors, or village kids. They also want to buy her a telephone card, if she’ll let them, so she can call home. She must want to talk to her girls, if just for a minute or so, to let them know she’s doing well and make sure they are, too. They can teach her how to use it and help her figure out the best time. It’s no bother. Why would she think it was? They notice that she never asks for anything. The adoptive parents feel bad for thinking she was coming to the city to extort money from them. She won’t even let them lend her change for the train. She gets by on what her friends were able to raise when they found out she was traveling. Otherwise, she’d have walked to wherever her daughter happened to be. She didn’t want them to think she was taking advantage. She only lets the adoptive boys fuss over her, no one else. Their concern for her feels genuine. They’re constantly asking if she’s eaten. She always says yes, even though she hasn’t. They insist that she’s yet to take them up on their invitation. Will she have lunch with them sometime? They want to hear more about her and her country. They know she’s there to see their sister, but maybe they could spend some time together, too, either before or after visiting hours, seeing as she’s in hospital again. T
hey don’t want to intrude on her time with her daughter. They’d be happy to share more information on the girl’s comings and goings at the medical center. They know that neither the girl nor their parents will want to go into it, but they feel she ought to know. It’s only fair: she’s her mother. It’d bring her some peace of mind.
The adoptive parents are the ones feeling uneasy. They ask their kids to behave as they were raised to, and not to wear the woman out or be indiscreet: they know their sister doesn’t like to share details of her affliction or her life. They can’t believe they’ve suddenly forgotten all that. The brothers say it’s no secret: the girl’s in hospital. She checked herself in the day after she met her biological mother. She’d thought nothing she saw or did would move her, that it’d be like crossing paths with a stranger in the street, but in the end she found she couldn’t go on.
The newly arrived woman was not entirely to blame. For some days now, the girl had been having trouble with her live-in boyfriend. The relationship was coming to an end. Anything might be used as an excuse. Even her arrival. The boyfriend was grasping for reasons. She was trying not to give him any. The woman didn’t understand why she insisted on staying in a relationship that brought her pain. When she asked, the girl told her not to stick her nose in. She’d agreed to see her out of courtesy and because she’d been pressured to, but she wouldn’t let her pretend there was anything between them. She shouldn’t get confused or take liberties. She asked her to please not badger her anymore. She’d enough on her plate with seeing her at home, and now she had to see her in hospital, too? But she didn’t stop her from coming in. If she had, the woman would’ve waited at the entrance and asked the girl’s adoptive parents or brothers for details of her progress. She’d have spent night and day in front of the center hoping she might glimpse her through the window. For her, being in the waiting room already felt like a victory. That she agreed to see her, if only for a couple of minutes, was cause for joy, even if she pulled faces or made awful accusations and said hurtful things. Her brothers told her to take no notice: the medication she took was very strong and always made her say horrible things, especially to the people who cared about her. They’d been on the receiving end before. It could be exhausting. They told her not to let it stop her from sleeping, or make her lose her appetite. Their lunch invitation still stood. Would she accept? She could choose the place or let them take her to one they thought was good.
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