by Helen Thorpe
In the end, we required documents to answer my question. Beya got up and returned bearing everybody’s Social Security cards. She also retrieved a sheet of paper given to her by the IOM, the agency that handles transit of refugees between countries, which listed everybody’s official birth dates, as the aid workers understood them. Using these pieces of paper, eventually we pieced together that Beya had given birth ten times but had nine living children. At the moment when they had left their home village, eight births had taken place, and she had lost one child, so there had been seven living children. Plus, she had been carrying her next child in her womb, for she had been pregnant when they started walking. That child, Ombeni (“prayer”), and the one who followed, Zawadi (“gift”), were born after the family crossed over into Uganda. In 2008, when they had begun their odyssey on foot out of the Democratic Republic of Congo at two in the morning, the children she had already delivered who were still alive were, in order of birth: Gideon, Timoté, Elia, Solomon, Methusella, Innocent, and Sifa (“praise”).
Only after I went home and mused about our meeting did I realize that the family had told me nothing about any of the difficult experiences they must have had while living in a village beset by various armed groups. Essentially, Tchiza and Beya had been living in a battleground. But they had not described one incident of violence that they had witnessed personally. Not one attack, when there must have been dozens, or hundreds, over the years. Instead of pushing for more, I decided to honor their habit of not talking about painful subjects. Meanwhile, I would read books about the Congo.
Because the history of the Congo was hard to understand, and because I felt it was my duty to instruct myself instead of relying upon a family in the middle of trying to resettle in the United States to explain their part of the world to me, I read dozens of books about the region from which they had fled. In novels such as Heart of Darkness and in nonfiction including King Leopold’s Ghost, I learned how Belgium had inflicted upon the Congo a particularly brutal colonial regime that resulted in the deaths of millions of Congolese, and how Belgians had gotten rich trafficking in gold and diamonds and rubber taken from the Congo. From old, out-of-print, hard-to-find travel memoirs, such as Back to the Congo and East Along the Equator—sent to me by an old flame, a former war correspondent—I learned about the iniquities of the Mobutu regime. He was our man in Africa, propped up at critical junctures by various American governments, because he was anticommunist. And he violated his own country just as thoroughly as the Belgians had, stealing billions of dollars from the Congo’s rich deposits of gems and ore. Then I read the truly dark books, about the DRC’s recent history. They were filled with descriptions of atrocities that I still have trouble putting out of my mind. From Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and Congo: Between Hope and Despair, I got the full sweep of the two civil wars that Tchiza had referenced, and the story of the involvement of Rwanda and Uganda in the demise of the once viable Congo as a governable place. And then I could see why this family had to leave.
Because North Kivu is positioned on the far eastern side of the Congo, right along the border with Rwanda and Uganda, that province had caught the brunt of it all. In sum, it became clear to me that if any family I was speaking with had witnessed horrific suffering, and must be living with extraordinary levels of grief, it had to be Tchiza, Beya, and their wary, gentle children. Yet they never spoke of these things. They never mentioned one atrocity, they never spoke of a single death, they never alluded to rape, which I knew from those books was epidemic in North Kivu. Our conversations about the DRC had the flavor of a dry history lesson, bled of emotion. Why was this?
* * *
Over a long period during which I visited the family often but did not interview them much—visits in which we shared many merry moments and a lot of fantastic food—I learned that by not talking about the horrible things they had endured, the family managed to maintain an extraordinary level of dignity. I did not want to make the mistake of generalizing too much from my experiences with one family, but I came to believe that there was something essentially Congolese about this manner of preserving dignity—something cultural behind the stoicism. Negative emotions, anyway, seemed to be a private matter. You could share joy with a visitor, but not despair—I thought this might be one of their taboos. It would take dozens of meetings, three interpreters, and much more research before I felt I had anything close to the outlines of their journey, and even then, some of the difficult parts remained untold.
If somebody had died, for example, there was a tendency to not even mention that person by name; it took multiple conversations before I would learn that a deceased person had even existed. I was in the middle of Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, a book about a survivor of one of the major genocides in Burundi, when I came across a passage about cultural beliefs in Central Africa around discussing difficulty. “Keep it in the kitchen” was one of the admonitions that Kidder cited. Another could be used against a person who said too much: “You talk like you were raised by a widow.” When I read these sayings, I thought of the incredible reserve of Solomon and Methusella’s family. I felt that I had a duty to tell their story, but for the time being I relinquished the idea of sitting down at their table and eating their food and saying, Great! Tell me about your nightmares!
Instead I would try to follow their ways. I gave up asking Tchiza about what he might have witnessed and simply tried to get to know him better. Largely this involved my being open to discussing subjects that Tchiza wanted to talk about, which were generally practical matters. One day, for example, we spent a lot of time trying to get an old printer to function. This was after the family had moved into the two-bedroom apartment in a housing complex also located close to my home. The complex consisted of about two dozen rectangular buildings arranged around a series of grassy courtyards, and featured a pool, a gym, and a movie room. The apartment walls were painted tan and the countertops and the carpet were neutral shades as well, but Beya had strung garlands of silk flowers along the ceiling and placed bouquets of them in vases all over the living room, making the room blaze with color: purple, gold, maroon, magenta. I wondered how ten members of the family squeezed into the two bedrooms, and Solomon gravely escorted me upstairs to show me the room that he shared with Methusella, Elia, and Timoté, their four twin mattresses taking up the entire space. There were clothes all over the floor. (Messy! Hadn’t expected that.) The smaller children shared the second bedroom, while their parents slept in an alcove off the living room. By this point, I had dispensed with interpreters. Either Solomon or Methusella—or their precocious younger brother Innocent, or their hardworking older brothers Elia and Timoté—served as interpreters for their parents as needed.
We were seated at the kitchen table when Tchiza got up and disappeared into the alcove where he and Beya slept, ducking behind the fabric curtain that marked off their sleeping area. He emerged with a dusty black printer. Tchiza asked in Swahili, and Methusella repeated in English: How do you turn it on? It happened that this was not possible. Tchiza had acquired only the printer itself, not the all-important power cord. I asked Methusella where his father had gotten the printer. Goodwill, he said. We went online and looked up the type of power cord that this model required. I wrote down the name of the store where they could buy a power cord: RadioShack. “Where is this place, RadioShack?” Methusella asked on behalf of his father. I said there was a RadioShack on Colfax Avenue, quite nearby.
“He wants to know, can we go there?” Methusella said.
“Can we go there right now? Go together?” I checked.
“Yes,” said Methusella.
“Sure!” I declared.
It would be interesting to see what the family would make of RadioShack, I figured—a quintessential immigrant-in-America moment. Methusella chose to stay at home, while Solomon elected to come with us. By this point, both boys could do a decent job of interpreting—in the classroom, Solomon lagged behind Methusella, and I coul
d tell that this was galling, but the competition meant that Methusella constantly pulled his older brother forward. I thought Solomon was probably learning twice as much as he would have without the spur of his younger brother’s astonishing performance to goad him on. When I visited them at home, Methusella sometimes deigned to interpret and sometimes preferred to play games on his phone, but Solomon always hung around, listening closely to what was said. I saw that he showed unflagging kindness to his younger siblings, who took turns gluing themselves to his legs. He also had an endearing habit of smiling very widely and saying, “Oh!” anytime he felt an inkling of surprise or embarrassment, which was often. That’s what he had said when I had asked to see the boys’ bedroom: “Oh!”
Solomon and Tchiza and I got into my Volkswagen and drove over to RadioShack. Tchiza tsked-tsked about the revealing attire worn by young women walking the streets—halter tops, short shorts, lots of cleavage, lots of leg. I cringed for him, about the general lewdness of America, and also noticed that Solomon, in the backseat, was busy saying nothing. Inside RadioShack we wandered around for a while, admiring gadgets and doodads. Finally we enlisted the help of a thoughtful employee in finding the right power cord. The employee had a question: Did they need a second cord, the one that would connect the printer to their computer? Or did the printer have the capacity to talk to the computer wirelessly? Solomon conferred with Tchiza about this in Swahili for a while, the employee and I conferred about this in En-glish for a while, then Solomon joined our conversation and told us that Tchiza said we should buy this cord. The employee said the connecting cord came in various lengths. Which one did they want? Solomon conferred with Tchiza about this in Swahili for a while, I conferred about this with the employee in English for a while, and then Solomon said his father wanted the shortest cord. The employee wore a big smile as he listened to Solomon laboriously exercise his newfound English. At the cash register, the employee told Solomon how much they owed in English, and Solomon told his father the amount in Swahili, and Tchiza paid.
Mission accomplished. I was about to take them back to the apartment when Tchiza said something.
“He wants to know, where can you buy paper?” Solomon asked.
“Office Depot. Want to go there?”
They did. First, though, we took a brief detour. We were close to my home, and I offered to show them where I lived. They were curious to see it, so we drove over there and I pointed at the small, two-story, redbrick house that I owned.
“That’s where I live,” I announced.
“Miss,” said Solomon, “I have a question.”
“Yes, Solomon.”
“You live here?”
“Yes.”
“You and your son?”
“Yes.”
“Just the two of you?”
“Yes. Just the two of us.”
Oh, right. By global standards, I occupied a lot of real estate. This house seemed small to me, because once upon a time I had lived in a much bigger house. I didn’t think of my current house as too small—to my mind, it was perfect. Cozy. But it wasn’t cozy, as far as Solomon was concerned. To him, the house was enormous. We had two whole stories for just two people. I could feel him wondering, in the backseat: What did we even do with that much space?
Then Tchiza said, in carefully constructed English, “I want . . . to buy . . . a house.”
I remembered Hussen, from the African Community Center, telling me that endorsing the idea of borrowing money was a big adjustment. I explained to Tchiza that I had a mortgage and joked that in reality, the bank owned my house.
Tchiza thought of something else. “I want . . . to buy . . . a car,” he said. “A big car! Because I have a big family.”
“Yes,” I told him. “You will definitely need a really big car. Maybe a minivan.”
We headed toward Home Depot. Tchiza’s English was improving, I noted.
“Have you ever driven a car?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Never?” I asked, surprised.
“No. Not ever.”
People in Buganza walked wherever they wanted to go. Or caught a bus.
Other days, we discussed mail. Methusella or Solomon would sit beside me, and their father would hold up one letter after another, and we would decipher the correspondence together. He had gotten a letter from a bank, Tchiza said, it must be very important! I read the letter. No, I explained. He could throw this in the trash. It said that the bank knew he had signed a lease, and might be new in the neighborhood. People who worked at the bank were wondering if he wanted to give them his earnings for safekeeping. They would earn a fee, if he did this. The letter was a piece of advertising.
“Oh!” Solomon said.
What about this letter? Tchiza asked. It was also about money, and seemed extremely significant. It said he might win $1 million!
“This letter is from a place calling themselves Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes,” I told him. “They will not pay you $1 million, I don’t think—in fact, they might even come up with sneaky ways to get you to pay them money.”
Tchiza protested. The letter said $1 million! If he entered this competition, there was a chance he might win!
“Believe me, we used to get letters like these at my house when I was growing up,” I told Tchiza. “I used to fill them out myself, and we never got $1 million.”
Sheepishly, Tchiza admitted that he had already mailed back the form, betraying personal information to the company.
“Oh, well,” I told him. “That’s okay. You’re just going to get a lot more junk mail, that’s all.”
One of Solomon’s older brothers had a question about this entity, the one calling itself Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
“He is like a sorcerer?” asked Elia.
“Um, yes,” I said. “This company is like a sorcerer, pretty much. They are trying to trick you, I think. They are trying to make you believe in something that is not true.”
Sometimes, we parsed other American ideas, such as the words written on their clothing. One day I arrived to find Innocent wearing a T-shirt that said STUD. Underneath that word was a picture of a muffin.
“Oh, stud muffin!” I said to Innocent, smiling broadly at his T-shirt.
Consternation on his face.
“Is it something bad?” Innocent asked me, innocently.
From his pained tone, I gleaned that perhaps his older brothers had been teasing him about the meaning of his T-shirt. I suspected they had not understood the significance of the muffin.
“No,” I assured him. “It is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. It means . . .” How to translate the term “stud muffin” into family-friendly, Congolese-ready terminology? “It means, like, important man.”
The tight muscles in his face relaxed. He was not wearing an evil T-shirt.
And other days, I learned things without any discussion. For instance, I learned that the United States was profoundly exhausting on the day when I dropped by to find Tchiza stretched out, shirtless, lengthwise on the long sofa, with one arm thrown over his eyes, blocking out the daylight streaming through the windows.
I said, softly, “Hello . . .”
Then I said, not so softly, “Hello!”
And I said, quite loudly, “HELLO!” But he never stirred.
So I stepped outside and played with the small children and their well-loved toys, which were strewn up and down the outdoor staircase. Probably Goodwill again. We ran dented plastic trucks and little metal cars with chipped paint jobs up and down the staircase, up and down my arms, sideways across my chest, all over my face. Then we each tried on my glasses. Ombeni and Zawadi did most of the truck driving, as Sifa bossed us around in English and Swahili. The children were alternately merry then squabbled and then grew merry again, like a day with clouds scudding across the sky. We had been playing for a while when Beya stumbled out of the apartment wearing a jogging bra and another floor-length cotton skirt. Her belly—it
was a glorious, striated testament to childbirth.
My own grandmother had been proficient at birth. My mother’s mother had married a bachelor nineteen years older than she and had borne him ten children. Then she had lost one, leaving nine. It was the same math that Beya had lived through. The farmhouse where my mother had grown up was considered big by standards of rural Ireland, because it had two stories; neighbors still lived in one-story thatched cottages. One of my mother’s brothers had taken over the farm, and he had five children. When my cousins Geraldine and Caroline were young, Granny had moved into their bedroom. She didn’t sleep well, and she didn’t like to be awake by herself in the lonely part of the night. She kept a thermos of black tea stashed under the bed, as well as a roll of biscuits, and she would poke Geraldine and Caroline to wake up to join her for some caffeine and sugar at two in the morning. I never saw Granny’s tummy, but it must have looked like Beya’s—the language of birth scribbled over and over again on the same patch of flesh.
Beya looked sleepily refreshed after her nap. She laughed at the sight of us, playing with toys all over the stairs, and said something that sounded half scolding and half loving, in words I didn’t understand. We obediently followed her back inside. Then Sifa taught me how to say, “I do not speak Swahili,” in Swahili.