So it’s now been five years in the Sudan, Jason Matus, and you’ve been given a Dinka name: Majok dit. A black bull with a white crown on its head. You’ve been offered gifts—ivory walking sticks and golden pipes made from bullet casings and goats, more skinny goats than you would ever know what to do with. They might be starving, but the Dinka will give you, an American, their last goat.
You came into the country as an innocent, and now you’re experienced. The fish has grown strong even as some of your coworkers have been killed. You’ve waded through thick crowds at hundreds of food drops, reached out to clasp thousands of reaching hands, lost your mind in the heat, pushed and yelled for people to clear the drop zone, and been trampled in riots from the Hunger. You’ve sat in the dirt, covered in red dust, trying to assess caloric intake and the nutritional value of shea butter nut, lalob, wild rice, cassava, tubers, yams, and tamarind. You talk slowly, like Boris Badenov, yeah? Understand, my brother? Listen, what I say might save you.
Five years, the biggest airlift in history, and yet it’s the same famine, the same war as when you arrived. The same starving people, fleeing their oppressors; the same boll weevils in the dust at your feet, kids scrounging for maize; the same skeletons at the feeding centers and shrivel-breasted women holding dead babies. You yourself have run for your life, sought refuge from the bombs out in the bush for two days until you waved your Mylar blanket at a search plane. Thought you might drown out there in all that nothingness. At one food drop, you were called away by some Dinka. They took you a short distance and pointed at something in the dust near a fallen woman, and you nearly threw up. She had miscarried trying to lug a 110-pound bag of maize. That stayed with you. That made you wonder: Are we doing any good here?
Some of your comrades don’t think so. They say you’ve all grown cynical and tired. They say the rest of the world, those people sending money because of a commercial, are really funding the Stone Age, allowing these half-mad militia leaders to blow one another apart, keep everyone else down. Food has become a weapon, the reason for war. And no one wants to end the fighting, because everyone is power tripping and making good money on this thing. Everyone gets to be a hero. Even you, Jason Matus. Even you.
But … no. That makes you grimace. Sure, you’re paid for this. But it’s not as if you’re pretending to be Mother Teresa. No, what pisses you off is the alternative: What happens if everyone packs up and goes home, leaves the Dinka and the Nuer and the Luo without maize and sorghum, unimix and high-energy biscuits? More people starve, more die. Is that the answer?
Sorry, you believe. It’s been five years, and there will be more. See, there’s a book you carry with you everywhere in your mind, by this guy Paulo Freire, who says conflict is the midwife of conscience, yeah? And that the ideal of freedom isn’t just some chimera, isn’t some bauble located outside of us, floating around like satellites in space. No, it’s something we have to reach out and grab, something we must ingest and then, our stomachs full, use for our own completion. This isn’t about money or heroes, my brother; this is about capturing freedom. This is about laying it down for the people.
And it’s finally about this: the end of another long day. A strong, dusty wind has picked up. You’re tired, Jason Matus, bone tired. You’re feeling mortal beneath this African sky, this slow, heavy tide of silver clouds closing in over your head. Passing through villages on your way home, you feel beaten, alone, an outsider. Evening fires are lit. People are gathered by their tukels, circled around bags of food you helped give them earlier. They’re placing great, golden handfuls of maize in huge, hollowed trunks that they use as mortars and pestles.
So lost in thought, you almost don’t notice that the people are smiling at you. They’re smiling and speaking to you. Mothers and fathers in fluttering djellabas. Mali madit. Big peace, my brother. And from somewhere below, armies of naked kids grab your fingers and carry you along, cheering and laughing, bellies blown out. They’re excitedly jabbering in Dinka, asking you, this white ghost, to be their friend, and you’re jabbering back in English, asking them to be your friend.
And that’s when the pounding begins: these heavy, magnificent thuds—these thick, rounded branches pulverizing the maize. Crushing it for soup. There’s pounding all through the country tonight, echoing like beating hearts. You can hear it now—everywhere. Listen. The fires are lit; the children are dancing. Do you know how good that sound is? Do you know how that feels, the way it moves the earth that moves your body? How deep and real? See, that’s what a little night music can really sound like. That’s when you know you’ve earned this night of sleep. So lay it down now, my pure brother. Lay it down and sleep.
CITY OF DUST
THE ONES LEFT BEHIND, THE SURVIVORS, remember it as a sound that had no context: the thunder of hoofbeats, thousands of them, or the strange, grinding gears of some monstrous runaway truck.
At Police Headquarters in Port-au-Prince, the chief of the National Judicial Police, a tall, slender man named Frantz Termilus, sat in a meeting with his boss, the superintendent, discussing the city’s nagging kidnapping issue. Termilus was a tireless man who loved his job, whose forthright manner and faith made him a force for good. It wasn’t just the number of medals he won; it was his attitude every day: He truly believed that with humility and industriousness the wild city could be tamed. And now, in midsentence, that otherworldly grinding came and drowned out his voice. Then Termilus was lifted and thrown hard, the office lurching abruptly—the floor levering illogically—tossing him, and the furniture, into the far corner.
The police chief pressed his hands against the wall to hold himself in place, even as everything crumbled and calved. It went on and on. And when the building stopped spasming, and he knew himself to be alive, Termilus reflexively shouted, “Praise God.” He crawled, then, until he was free of the earthquake’s rubble, a regal man on his knees. Like the others who were caught out—at their offices or schools, in their cars or the market or returning to their families—like everyone who couldn’t know what was waiting for them beyond what they’d just survived, Frantz Termilus instinctively started walking home, his uniform powdered in a white chalk.
You could immediately tell a terrible thing had happened. Above him, the sky had gone almost entirely black from all the dust and dirt blown upward, like a shroud drawn over the city. A burning smell filled the air; the heat of the day felt hotter. The stunned silence had given way to wailing, a collective animal keening. The city that lay cupped in the palm of a hand was crushed. It had taken less than sixty seconds.
Termilus had a wife, two daughters, and a son. That morning, his daughters—Emmanuella and Talitha, who were eleven and twelve, and whose preternatural intelligence had caused their teachers to promote them to the seventh and eighth grades—had dressed their three-year-old brother, Benedict, each slipping a shoe on a foot and tying it for him. They shared everything like this. They were the kind of girls, pigtailed and smiling and outgoing, for whom an excursion to the beach, or for ice cream, often meant packing the car with friends; Frantz at the wheel often marveled at the sweet jabber of children.
Now the city existed as a parking lot of hastily abandoned cars—some with their engines still running. Hurrying along one avenue after another, Termilus saw arms and legs dangling from the compacted buildings, limbs set at oblique angles, the dust-covered dead appearing as ghosts, some staring with open-eyed vacancy or grimaced expressions. The wandering survivors, too, were caked and stunned. To pass one was to see your own reflection, some strange mix of horror and elation. Two houses in a row might have been leveled while a third might have remained untouched, the line between life and death a couple of feet. And everywhere Termilus saw the living frantically digging, often with bare hands, for their kin or neighbors, hoping to pull a miracle from the mess.
Around each new corner came new horrors. Up the mountain, in the wealthier section of Pétionville, the Hotel Montana—one of the ritziest in town—collapsed, instantly
trapping hundreds, including many Americans, some of whom had just arrived, on their way to the patio bar to watch the sunset. In the Bourdon neighborhood, beneath the collapsed seven-story United Nations complex, nearly one hundred others were lost, a multinational corps of diplomats and workers. In the poor neighborhood of Carrefour, the bowls formed by the mountain had given way, and the packed-together houses dominoed one into the next, taking entire families as they went. Meanwhile, in downtown Port-au-Prince, the National Palace looked like a flattened soufflé. Nearby the cathedral had split like a ship on the shoals, the facade collapsing first, stained glass shattering, then the roof, falling on a dozen members of the choir as they sang inside.
Termilus walked two miles, then three, then four, seeing sights that even a year later would make him tremble and weep. In his house, the daily routine was always the same: The family woke—or he woke the girls, who loved to sleep. They ate breakfast, and Frantz went to work. His wife ferried the children to school, the day unfolded, and when school was out in the late afternoon, his wife picked everyone up. Then Frantz returned, and they were a family again. Now, he oriented himself toward that normalcy: It was late afternoon. He was returning home.
When Termilus came upon his own house, he saw that it was still standing and felt a palpitation of hope. But when he opened the door, he saw only his wife. There is a French word for someone whose mind has been destroyed. Fou. She looked gone already, hovering before him in a trance. Benedict, she managed to say, was accounted for at his preschool. But she had been running late all afternoon, having gone to register the girls for English-language classes. She’d left them with the principal of the school. “You picked them up, right?” she said.
He left her then, wordlessly—and started walking again, with new purpose, another eight miles across town to the girls’ school. Talitha and Emmanuella: It would be enough to see them—alive, injured, even dead—just one last time. It was getting dark, and there was no wind, or traffic, to envelop the wails. It would be months before the dead could be counted. And even then estimates would vary, but at least one hundred fifty thousand people were killed.
Downtown at the ministry of justice, Micha Gaillard, one of Haiti’s leading politicians, was buried alive beneath pillars and stone, where he would stay for almost two days—like so many others who were unextractable—dying slowly, as his friends and finally his teenage son came to converse through the rubble, to say their goodbyes. Meanwhile, the archbishop, a man devoted to the poor, a man whose shyness sometimes caused him to stutter, had been indecorously pitched from his balcony. And the vicar-general, a natural joker, had been trapped beneath the same building, sending a cell-phone message saying he was alive, but was later found dead, sitting in a chair, a eucharist in one hand, a cross clutched in the other. At another church, the Brazilian humanitarian-aid worker and pediatrician Zilda Arns Neumann, whose work focused on children and pregnant women (and led to a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, as well as comparisons to Mother Teresa), had just given a speech, after which she was erased by falling debris. She was found the next day, identified by a sandal.
Grief is a walk to the ending you already know, and during the seventh and eighth miles, a feeling overtook Termilus, a wish for only one thing: that he might stumble upon someone he knew in the streets—anyone—just to grab hold of the living and tell them the truth: that he loved them. Why hadn’t he ever said so before?
When he came to the school, there was no school. All four stories had come down. And everything all at once left his body—all the hope and energy he’d mustered to match the horror—and even now he couldn’t say how long he stood there, gazing upon the gravestone of that school.
He still stands there.
But that night, when he finally walked back through the city—now all the survivors, fearing aftershocks, were in the streets, some singing by candlelight, preparing for night, forming circles around the children to keep them from the loups garous, or werewolves—when Frantz Termilus took his place in the street and survived that first night, and the first light of morning broke over the carcass of Port-au-Prince, and he saw the other mothers and fathers, some of them digging again in the rubble for their own children, he picked himself up. His wife would go on believing for weeks that the girls were alive, somewhere, and though their bodies wouldn’t be recovered for seven months, he knew that God had taken them. And left him.
There was no phone service, but it wasn’t hard to know that the city was bedlam. Word of mouth traveled: Hospitals had been destroyed. There were no services, no potable water. The prison had broken open—and now five thousand inmates were loose, including all the kidnappers. There were caches of weapons that needed to be secured. And there were more children, trapped, orphaned, injured. He was on the verge of being consumed by memory, but instead of mourning before that pile of rocks, he dusted off his shirt—his badge, the epaulets. He straightened his uniform and went to work.
THE SUICIDE CATCHER
THE BRIDGE ROSE UP AND AWAY from the city’s northwest quadrant, spanning the great Yangtze River. And yet, from the on-ramp where the taxi let me off that Saturday morning, it seemed more like a figment of the imagination, a ghostly ironwork extrusion vanishing in the monsoon murk, stretching to some otherworld. It was disorienting to look at, that latticed half bridge leaving off in midair, like some sort of surrealist painting. It gave off a foreboding aura, too, untethered and floating, and yet it couldn’t have been more earthbound—and massive. Later I’d find out it was made from five hundred thousand tons of cement and one million tons of steel. Four miles long, with four lanes of car traffic on the upper deck and twin railroad tracks on the lower, it transferred thousands of people and goods to and from the city every day. But now the clouds clamped down, and a sharp scent of sulfur and putrid fish wafted on a dank puff of air. Rain slithered from the sky. There, before my eyes, the bridge shimmered and disappeared, as if it had never been visible in the first place.
Its formal name was the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, and it served one other purpose for the masses: At least once a week, someone jumped to his or her death here, but a total was hard to come by, in part because the Chinese authorities refused to count those who missed the river, the ones who’d leapt and had the misfortune of landing in the trees along the riverbank, or on the concrete apron beneath the bridge, or who were found impressed in the earth like mud angels, two feet from rushing water. Perhaps such strict bookkeeping came in response to the fact that China already posts the highest sheer numbers, about two hundred thousand “reported” suicide cases a year, constituting a fifth of all the world’s suicides. For a long time, the Communist government simply ignored the problem, hoping it would go away, or maybe thinking in the most Darwinian terms of suicide as its own method of population control. One recent case highlighted just how the Chinese bureaucracy tended to deal with prevention. In the southern city of Guangzhou, workers had been ordered to smear butter over a steel bridge popular with jumpers, in order to make it too slippery to climb. “We tried employing guards at both ends,” said a government official, “and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked—and so now we have put butter over the bridge, and it has worked very well.”
In Nanjing, the bridge remained butterless, even as the city spit out its victims. Nanjing was now just another one of your typical six-million-person Chinese metropolises, one of the famous “Three Furnaces” of China because of its unremitting summer heat. Daytime temperatures regularly topped ninety degrees here—due to hot air being trapped by the mountains at the lower end of the Yangtze River valley … and, oh yeah, because all the trees had been chopped down—and the sun rarely shone. Meanwhile, the city continued to explode in the noonday of the country’s hungry expansion. The past was being abandoned at an astonishing rate, the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings replacing the old neighborhoods. Everything—and everyone—was disposable. Schisms formed. The bridge loomed.
Loss led to despair, which in turn led to Mr. Chen.
I’d come through thirteen time zones just to see him. Once free of the taxi, I began trudging, a quarter mile or so, the bridge trembling under the weight of its traffic, piled with noisy green taxis and rackety buses, some without side panels or mufflers. Unlike the suspended wonder of Brooklyn or the quixotic ponts of Paris, this couldn’t have been mistaken for anything but stolid Communist bulwark: At its apex, the bridge was about 130 feet above the water; was built with two twenty-story “forts,” spaced one mile apart, that from a distance had the appearance of huge torches; and contained two hundred inlaid reliefs that included such exhortations as Our country is led by the working class and Long live the unity of the people. A brochure claimed that the bridge was both the first of its kind designed solely by Chinese engineers, and also “ideal for bird-watching.” People teemed in both directions. Umbrellas unfurled, poked, and were ripped from their rigging, leaving sharp spiders dangling overhead. As I registered the passersby—their eyes fixed downward—everyone seemed a candidate for jumping, marching in that mournful parade.
He was close now. I could tell by the banners and messages—some were flags, some were just scraps of paper—that fluttered earnestly from the bridge. Value life every day, read one. Life is precious, declared another. His cell-phone number was emblazoned everywhere, including graffitied stamps he’d left on the sidewalk, ones I tried to decipher beneath the blur of so many passing feet. And then Mr. Chen came into view, conspicuous for being the only still point in that sea of motion … and the only one sporting a pair of clunky binoculars, the only one watching the watchers of the river.
Love and Other Ways of Dying Page 26