Slash and Burn

  Her daughter at university said she didn’t think there was anything else. What more could there be?

  The daughter who was helping pay for her sister’s schooling from far away was worried about her.

  Worried why?

  Her sister had said she’d never seen her cry like that. None of them had ever seen her cry at all.

  Sometimes she cried while they were sleeping or at school. Mostly when something had happened to them or when she hadn’t yet found her daughter. But she didn’t say this or explain that it wasn’t easy to say goodbye to her mother and daughter on the same day. There were certain things she was still too young to understand. All she said was that she was sad.

  Wanting to make her happy, her daughter told her what she’d heard: the firstborn was returning to the country. She didn’t know if the conversation in which she’d called her dumb had anything to do with it, but the girl had decided to split up with her partner and bring her two daughters back to the country where she was raised.

  She would’ve liked to say she’d asked after her, but she knew her mother could sniff out a lie. She didn’t want to bring her any more sadness, so she offered to do the only thing she could: to get in touch with her once they were both on the same soil. Maybe she could bring her to her house sometime.

  The mother doesn’t cry as she tells her daughter not to worry about her or pester her firstborn. This is when the daughter understands that the lost baby had been buried that day. She offers her condolences a second time. The day she finally sees her sister, it’ll be as a fellow countrywoman in a foreign land. She’ll be pleasant, but distant. She thinks of how fortunate the firstborn’s adoptive brothers were, amid everything, to have been taken into arms that made them want to return. She decides she’ll go home when she’s asked to. Or maybe earlier.

  39

  The day the first daughter returns to France, she will tell her adoptive mother that she feels much better, as if she’d shaken herself free of a shapeless, rootless weight. The woman will think it has something to do with the sunny weather in the country where she’s been living, her medication, the passage of years, the change in her body’s life force after giving birth to her daughter, or the way her mind’s threads have settled after she left the man she was with—and who the adoptive mother had never liked. She’s glad to see she’s better, and to have her back in the home she’s provided for her ever since she was a child, even though she’s decided to move to the southern part of the country, at least for a while. She doesn’t say so, but she’s also grateful she didn’t decide to run to her biological mother, even though she hadn’t been far from the country where she lives. That day, she feels what the biological mother would’ve felt had she recovered her. She bursts into tears. It touches her to see her eldest granddaughter again and to finally meet the girl born across the water. They’re her first granddaughters. She wants to see them grow up. She’d also—if she doesn’t mind—like to send photos of them to their biological grandmother. She doesn’t mean to pressure her or to give the woman on the other continent any false hopes, she just wants to bring her a little tidbit of joy. She heard from her sons that the woman’s mother had passed away. She thinks it’d be a kind gesture to let her know they’re sorry for her loss.

  Does she think she ought to call?

  She doesn’t know if it might be too much for her.

  Her brothers think it’d be cruel to call, unless she’s planning to permanently change her attitude toward her. They know her. They know she might have a change of heart or change her mind at any moment. If winter settled into her body again, she might end up gravely hurting a woman who’d already suffered plenty. Why didn’t she let her heal in peace?

  Why were they saying this now, after so much time spent insisting she get close to her, accept her? Had the woman said anything she should know?

  Nothing.

  Had the daughter who lived in the same country as them hinted at anything?

  No. She hasn’t even asked after her, even though they’d told her she was on her way back and had shared her flight information. Maybe she doesn’t want to bother her or insist.

  Has she not called them either?

  She won’t in the following days. The people who employ her and put her up are concerned. They think she must’ve loved her dead grandma a great deal. They try to cheer her up with the sorts of dishes that had once seemed curious and exciting to her, but to no avail. Now, the food tastes more like her mother had said it tasted. They offer to take her to Paris any day she likes, to meet her sister.

  That doesn’t work either.

  The girl seems to have lost interest in her. She doesn’t answer her sister’s calls to the mobile phone she now owns. When her sister calls the house where she lives, the homeowners explain her present condition and ask her to understand, to give the girl a few days to recover.

  A few days earlier, the friend of her mother’s ex-compañera-in-battle asks the same of a man who arrives wanting to speak to her. He doesn’t relent, not even when her friend says the woman has just buried her mother. He says it’s urgent. He also asks who she is and what she’s doing there.

  Why does he want to know?

  He’s the community leader. He has an important matter to discuss with her. He can’t tell it to a stranger. Where’s she from? She doesn’t look like she’s family.

  She asks him to wait outside. She’ll go fetch her. She’ll tell her she’d best confront him right then.

  He’ll say he’d have liked to have waited until her pain has passed, but the matter that’s brought him there can’t.

  Really it was he who couldn’t wait. For a while, he’s known of plans to build a road that will connect them to the town and the main thoroughfare. Ever since, he’s coveted her land, a plot that during distribution had been the worst, but that would benefit the most once the road was built.

  It would have suited him if she’d left voluntarily, so that he could have purchased her land at a better price, but now that the yet-to-be-announced construction work was around the corner, he was willing to pay a higher sum, which, if he was the first to offer, might still not be exorbitant. He was worried the woman at her house had gotten there first. He hoped she was only there for the funeral and would soon return to her city affairs, much like the ex-compañera-in-arms from the reintegration camp and the daughter at university had. He figured he could close the deal by telling her he wanted to help, that some minor construction work had been planned which would cut into part of the land she’d received after the war. They’d pay her whatever they fancied for it, a miserly amount. He knows she’s got financial worries. She can’t rely for ever on the daughter who’s abroad; she might be deported at any moment or get married and start a life that didn’t allow her to send money home. How would she carry on covering the costs of the girl who was studying for a degree that took a long time and that she couldn’t afford? How would she pay for the glasses and special shoes that her littlest one needed? How would she account for the cost of the girl who’d come home to live with her, and the granddaughter she’d brought with her? Babies might be lovely but they consumed an enormous amount of resources, which she couldn’t generate at her age and with a body that was growing weary. He doesn’t want to come off as pessimistic, but he’s not sure the meals her daughter makes and sells will be enough to keep a house. He doubts her granddaughter’s father will support them given that they’re not under his roof. Her land doesn’t seem to produce much either. Does it not strike her as strange that her brood of chickens isn’t growing like everybody else’s? Did she know people have been stealing from her?

  She knows. She took the matter to the board he presides over. Doesn’t he recall? He’d said that that sort of thing didn’t concern their group, that people had to resolve their own personal issues.

  Had he really said that?

  Several times.

  He must’ve been mixed up, on those many times she’s referring to. He certainly doesn
’t recall them. Maybe he’d been overwhelmed by bigger problems than the ones she’d submitted for consideration. Was she aware they dealt with issues she knew nothing about?

  Such as?

  He can’t say. Certain subjects are confidential. But, generally speaking, they relate to development. Everything he does is for the community’s benefit.

  The distributions, for example?

  What’s she insinuating?

  He knows what she’s talking about now.

  No. She’s the one who doesn’t understand. Their priority is to help those who need it most first. If there’s enough to go around, then there’ll be some left over for the strongest, for those who can make do on their own. She’s always been one of the strong ones. Or hasn’t she? During the war, she wasn’t only the sort of woman who carried a weapon, but also the kind who wore pants. She could carry on wearing them, if she liked. Did she still have them?

  What had he come for? What did he want?

  To help.

  Why?

  Why didn’t she trust him? What had happened to her? He got that she might not want to vote for their party anymore, but he didn’t see how she could be suspicious of people who’d always been on her side.

  The conversation is over, as far as she’s concerned. She won’t discuss it again. She isn’t selling and, if she ever does, it won’t be to him. She asks him to leave. The dirt over her mother’s body is still loose. She needs to rest. She hasn’t in years. She has to recover her strength and come up with a plan to get ahead.

  The friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat asks if that plan includes applying for the ex-combatants’ pension.

  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  Hadn’t the community leader said anything? She’d assumed that was what he’d come to discuss. Now that the group they’d both fought for at different times was in power, they were supporting the war wounded. It wasn’t much, but it might help her cope with the issues troubling her.

  She said she wasn’t wounded.

  The friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat eyed her with admiration. She asked if she really wasn’t aware of her scars.

  Everybody had them.

  It struck her then that she should look in a mirror. There being none in the house, she’d be one for her. One by one, she listed the marks she had on her body and counted the pains she’d seen her suffer without complaint. She spoke to her, too, of the marks her mind bore. Of the nights she woke her daughters up with words she spoke and screamed. She mentioned her difficulty hearing and the way they all had to raise their voices to get her attention.

  It was the result of a bomb that had exploded very near her. She hadn’t said anything because she hadn’t thought it mattered. After her father had been blown to pieces impossible to reassemble and so many of her compañeros had gotten by despite their severed limbs, she figured what she’d gone through was nothing.

  Her ex-compañera’s friend insisted she qualified for a pension and that she ought to go claim it. If not for the money, she should do it because it was fair. But she thought others in her community deserved it first. Her friend didn’t see why this should stop her from requesting it, too. If she liked, she could go on the same day they did. Why didn’t she mention it to them and see about planning a trip together to the nearest regional capital?

  Everyone had already gone. The community leader had told them about the benefit the day it was introduced. He’d even provided transport and someone to help fill out their paperwork. They’d always wondered why she hadn’t gone. Some had admired her for deciding she could manage on her own. Others thought she couldn’t and that she was probably getting help from a source she hadn’t wanted to name so as not to have to share it, as the community leader had insinuated. At one point, he’d suggested she had joined the opposition party. Had they not seen how she chose not to accompany them when they all went to vote together, wearing the insignia of the party their combat group had become? What else could it be, but that she’d switched sides? How else could they explain that she had one daughter in the capital and another abroad, and that she had traveled there herself without a husband to give her a boost? Which of their wives could’ve done something like that? At least she was sound enough not to lay claim to something she no longer deserved.

  The friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat said the pension was for what she’d fought for and lost during the war, not her loyalty after it. She knew of cooks who had received it after seemingly suffering lesser injuries than she had. She suggested she let the evaluating committee decide whether to deny or approve her request. Neither she nor her neighbors could determine the level of damage they’d each suffered.

  40

  There comes a time when she’s had enough. She decides not to go to any more sessions at the local committee that grants pensions to the wounded. She doesn’t care about losing what she’s invested in all the travel back and forth. Nothing justifies the way they treat ex-combatants. She doesn’t expect to be applauded, but she doesn’t think she deserves to be examined like an animal either, or to have everything she says questioned after being forced to confess everything she’d long kept quiet.

  Over the phone, the friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat and camp asks her to try and understand. She doesn’t think they’re behaving that way because of anything to do with her, but because of people who might show up to swindle them. When it comes to money, there’s always someone trying to claim what isn’t theirs or what they don’t deserve.

  How is it they can’t tell them apart?

  They should be able to. Presumably they’ve been trained to.

  Really?

  The psychiatrist who saw her nearly succeeded in doing what no one had during the war: to make her cry in earnest. She’d asked why she was there when she was obviously fit enough to work for her food, and for that of the daughters she’d irresponsibly given birth to. She’d said they weren’t a charity, that the fund they managed wasn’t for people who’d lost children, that her loss was no one’s responsibility but her own, and that her restless nights were the product of a weak mind, which wasn’t something they could help her with. She didn’t think they should have to pay her for it.

  She felt sorry for what the brother who’d been captured during the war had gone through. She had a clearer understanding now of why he’d refused to speak of it till the day he died, and wonders if she did right in pulling him from the hospital where she’d found him. She also thought of a news article she’d read some time ago about an embassy guard who, after repeated insults from one of the employees, had walked in and emptied his weapon into everyone there who’d ever humiliated him. She wondered if the psychiatrist she’d been assigned could detonate the time bombs some of those people might be, and if she really was what the white-coated woman had said. Would she protect her, as a civilian, if something like that happened while she was there, or would she let the offended person settle their outstanding issues with her however they saw fit?

  The truth was she’d rather not go back there. She didn’t care whether she was given the benefits or not: she never wanted to feel that way again. She couldn’t fathom how her neighbors had put up with it.

  They couldn’t fathom how she’d received notice to collect her pension on the first of the month when some of them hadn’t even gotten a date for a second interview. They thought it unfair: they’d gotten there first, their scars were bigger. What had she done differently? How had she managed to get her pension earlier? How much had they given her?

  Very little. The notice explained that the damage she’d sustained didn’t merit full coverage, but that the fund recognized the difficulties that might have resulted from her partial hearing loss.

  The people at the local committee had thought it suspicious that the applicant could remember neither the year nor the location of the event in which her hearing had been compromised. They thought the woman might be faking her war wounds: they didn’t believe a girl of her age and wei
ght could endure what she said she had at the age indicated on the form, when stronger and more experienced men had succumbed to less. Even so, to give her the benefit of the doubt, they’d decided to authorize the minimum amount for her impairment.

  The woman she can now refer to as her friend, not just as the friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat, asked the members of the commission in what other situation they thought she could have lost her hearing while also getting those scars on her body.

  She’d rather not think about it anymore.

  Her friend asks if she’d like to appeal the committee’s decision. She could help her fill out the forms if she decided to submit her case for further consideration. Or, at least, join her on the day, just as she had when she’d gone to complete the form that would ensure she’d be seen to, since she couldn’t bring herself to assert her own rights.

  Did she think there was any point? They’d just say she was trying to get money out of them by any means possible. There was nothing less dignified.

  Except the amount they had given her.

  Some hadn’t even gotten that much. The soldiers, for example, had spent years calling for compensation that never arrived. It didn’t matter if her neighbors said they’d been paid for their services while with their battalions or if it had been their duty to their country, she still thought they should be eligible for a similar benefit—war wounds were war wounds, no matter whose side you’d fought on.

  Her friend couldn’t give her that: the military had killed her younger sister’s husband and the police had ended her older sister, the one who’d been on every honor roll at the nun’s school. She told her this when she saw her again. She said he’d fallen on a mountain path and she’d been rounded up during a raid on a neighborhood in the capital. She’d been raped, tortured, and then dropped on the beach with the other organized students who’d been with her at the house they were taken from. If some fishermen hadn’t mentioned the bodies that had shown up near where they worked to a woman at the market whose daughter was their mother’s student, they’d have thought her disappeared.