by Alan Cumyn
Joanne comes back grey-faced, her gait unsteady.
“Are you all right?”
She sits hard, puts her head down immediately, fingers on her temples.
“What is it? Have you got a headache?”
An old Mediterranean-looking man gazes across the aisle at Joanne then looks away. Joanne pushes her hands between her knees and keeps her head down.
“Joanne! What is it?”
I reach across to put my arm around her and in a minute a stewardess is kneeling in the aisle beside her.
“Are you all right, ma’am? Is there something I can help with?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m just getting worse and worse on airplanes, that’s all.”
She refuses juice, ginger ale, water, a warm blanket. “It’ll pass,” she says.
And it does, slowly. Somewhere over the Pacific, after the movie has ended and most of the passengers have gone to sleep, the colour comes back to her face, she breathes easier. I ask her if she’s feeling better and she nods, gets up, takes a walk. Some minutes later she comes back carrying a cup of tea.
“Just a few more hours,” I say. We’re changing flights in Hong Kong, will head south to Santa Irene after that.
“Yes.” But she doesn’t look at me.
“It’s a long trip.”
She picks up her book, reads a few pages. I close my eyes.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she says suddenly.
Oh no. “What?” I say. “We discussed this.”
“Look at me, I didn’t even get my hair cut. I hate long hair in the tropics. I always get it cut before I go. But I didn’t think you’d actually carry this through. It might be right for you but it isn’t right for me. I’ve had this bad feeling for a while. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Are you worried about your mother?” I ask.
“It’s that and other things,” she says.
“What other things?”
The drone of the engines; a stewardess wanders by with extra blankets.
“I’m just not supposed to be doing this now,” she says.
“What are you supposed to be doing?”
Sips of tea, fingers drumming slowly on the plastic tray in front of her. This drowsy, light, nowhere state.
“I have a weakness for running off,” she says. “It’s a bit of an addiction. The next crisis. All that adrenaline, it’s a real high until you crash. Like Rwanda, that was a crash for me. I decided to change my plan after that. I wasn’t going to run off. I was going to stick things out back home.”
“This is only for three months,” I say. “Besides, we discussed this.”
“I know.”
“You’re mostly worried about your mom.”
“No. Yes, of course. But she’ll be all right.”
Then it’s someone else, I think. I’ve been so stupid.
“There’s always the phone,” I say. “You can send e-mails.”
She doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s her private life, why should she? I’ve railroaded her into going, taken her for granted, been so self-centred.
Time crawling, endless clouds passing below. I try to think of what to say.
“You said you wanted to stick things out,” I say. “Is there anybody in particular? Besides your mother?”
“There was the wrong guy,” she says, still not looking at me. “I tend to go for the wrong guy.”
I wait for more but she glances at her book, flips another page.
“What kind of guy is the wrong guy?”
She thinks about it for too long, until I’m not sure she’s going to answer. Finally she says, “Boyish, unstable, dangerous types, into adventure, hardship. Impatient for the next flight out. Not good father material.”
“So you want to have kids?”
Another thoughtful pause, before her reluctant reply. “Sure, I want to have kids.”
She goes back to reading her book. I flip through a glossy in-flight travel magazine.
“I’ve got four younger brothers,” she says after a while. “We were terribly suburban. My parents used to pile us into a station wagon at night in our pyjamas and we’d ride around looking at the lights. Everybody’s normal except for me. Regular jobs, spouses, houses in the suburbs, their own kids growing so fast. I was the one who had to go off. But now I’m thirty-five and I don’t want to miss out. You know, huddling over mouldy rations in a little tent in a cholera-infested corner of the world is not the best way to raise a family. Aid workers live the life for a while and then either it consumes them or they go on to something else. I thought I’d gone on to something else.”
It’s all she wants to say, so I get up and stretch my legs. This quiet, sleeping warehouse of people. The shades are drawn except for one window near the washrooms, bright sun beaming in.
When I get back she says, “I wasn’t in Rwanda for the real horror.” Her face tight, eyes on mine for a moment then shifting away. “You asked about it so I’m going to tell you.”
“All right,” I say. I didn’t really ask, I think, but stay quiet.
“Things had calmed down when we went back in. There was a lot of … silence, really. Psychological clamping … because life keeps going, right? The rivers flow blood for a while but then you have to eat, you need a roof and somewhere to sleep. The darkness passes like something else you dreamed. Babies.” She pauses at the word.
“Babies?”
“Well,” she says, her voice faltering just a bit, “they keep getting born, don’t they? The darkness comes and everything’s turned upside down and it seems like the end of life as you’ve known it – the end of life, period, for so many …” She takes a deep breath. “The babies keep pushing out. They demand to get here. It’s what I was doing in our little hospital outside Kigali. Delivering babies. Tutsis mostly, genocide survivors, now pushing out babies. It was like seeing the first green growth in an area flattened by forest fire. You know? It seems so desolate. And yet the next season there they are, the seedlings.”
“Yes.”
“I remember one birth, a breech, the mother was in terrific pain. I’ve never sweated so much, I felt like I’d given birth. She came out finally, backwards and purple, the cord wrapped round her neck. I don’t know how she survived, or the mother, for that matter. A beautiful young woman, strong as rain. I remember she moaned. The African women I know didn’t make a peep while giving birth, they were silent. So to have that woman moan … It really felt like we were on the edge of life and death.
“Oh God,” she says. “Some nurse I turned out to be.”
“You’re a magnificent nurse. Where do you think I’d be without you?”
She looks at me briefly, turns abruptly away. “The local women usually gave birth in their homes. Without help, or just with their mother or sister or someone. I made it an issue to have them come to the hospital. Too many were dying, or the babies weren’t getting their shots. There was one night we had fourteen babies with us. Fourteen. All collected together.”
I just stay quiet.
“It was so stupid of us. Of me. We were thinking of security all the time and yet weren’t thinking. I was so proud. Fourteen babies.” Tears come down now and the words stop for a time.
“So in the night some men came. Probably it was men. With machetes. They weren’t particularly quiet about it and yet no one saw them. Or no one would say they saw them. Someone must’ve. There were so many rumours. That it was the Interahamwe militia attacking because these were ‘genocide witnesses.’ They were babies, for Christ’s sake, they weren’t witnesses. That it was the Patriotic Army attacking because they thought our guard had worked for the former government. Johnny. Jean Batiste Mbyanuwama. They hacked off his arms and legs.”
Wiping her eyes. It always comes back to bad news, I think.
“And the babies?” I ask. Because I have to.
“They laid them out on the dirt road in front of the hospital,” she says. “Their bellys had been split open a
nd their guts pulled out.”
I try to put my arm around her but it’s awkward in these seats, and she has large shoulders. “I’m all right,” she says. “I’m all right.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I blurt. “You can go home if you want.”
“And what would you do?” she asks, smiling suddenly, her face still soaked.
“I’d go back with you, of course. You know I could never do this without you.”
“Well then, I’m screwed,” she says softly. She goes quiet again, then says, “We need a safe thought for you. For Santa Irene, in case you feel a twister coming on. You’ll need something to grab onto for protection, a mental life preserver. Have you got something?”
“Nothing that will work. A twister coming on is unstoppable. Once you reach a certain point–”
“But before you get there. One safe, rock-solid thought. Don’t tell me, don’t tell anyone, but fix it now in your mind. Just hang it up where you know you can reach it in an instant. Can you do that?”
The only protector is Joanne. I look at her, her red hair and those gentle eyes. Joanne walking with me by the Ottawa River, Joanne coming through the door, Joanne any time, Joanne right now.
Joanne.
14
The heavens are unloading on us. Tumultuous rain on a black night, the sound almost more unsettling than the water. The air is sweating hot, heavy with the smell of rotting vegetation, of diesel fumes, and soaked black jungle soil, of too much life. Not the cold, raw, deadening wind of an Ottawa October. They’ve packed us in a military Jeep, the plastic flaps that pass for windows keeping out only part of the spray. Our driver laughs with every jolt. The guard beside him, a thin, sleepy-eyed man named Nito, smokes idly and drums his fingers on the doorframe. My personal protector! He looks as if he’d have a hard time fighting off a dragonfly.
But I feel surprisingly calm. It might be because of Joanne, who now has returned to her old self, laughs along with the driver and throws up her hands as if she’s thirteen and this is a roller coaster. It might also be because we’re in a convoy of about thirty military vehicles bristling with weapons.
Almost anything – the darkness, the slashing rain, the smoke from Nito’s cloved cigarette, the mysterious flow of Kuantij in male voices – could trigger a twister in me. And yet all is still so far.
“Sorry we could not send you a limousine,” Mr. Tjodja says. He’s squashed in the back, his black suit getting rumpled, muddy, and wet. I’ve already forgotten his title – minister of reconciliation? Perhaps that’s it. He stood waiting for us at customs, waved his hand once and we were through. A small, broad man in tiny black Italian shoes. “Many of the government vehicles were burned in the uncertainties,” he says. “The luxury ones, I mean.”
“This is better than a limousine!” Joanne yells back at him. “Does it always rain like this?”
“We will soon be in the rainy season,” he says. His hair slicked back, his purple tie flashing in the night, the tight twists of his mouth when he speaks and when he stays silent.
“Has there been any more violence?” I ask him.
“Very peaceful now!” he says. “I think you will find it quite a change. We’re all pulling together. Suli has brought new co-operation to the people!” A gleam of near-malice in his eye – hard to see in the dark, so maybe I’m imagining it from the tone of his voice, parroting slogans. He seems cultured, looks rich enough to be part of the upper-class lumito, for whom everything was going great until the assassination. Maybe the collapse in the economy has meant he’s had to snag a government job.
I’d forgotten the totality of this darkness at night, our headlights carving shallow tunnels, small buildings emerging then disappearing. No streetlights yet, though there is a sudden sign for Marlboro cigarettes and another for Kalio, the local soft drink. The company is owned by one of Minitzh’s sons and was given a monopoly. The last place on earth untouched by Coke and Pepsi? Perhaps not for long.
The last time I arrived it was daylight. Peter from the embassy drove. Maryse sat still, holding herself, and Patrick watched everything, especially the guards at the checkpoints. The checkpoints are still here but we’re just speeding by them.
Into the city now. I think we’re passing through a section of Welanto. When I ask Tjodja he nods his head and starts telling us about the fires. We can’t see anything in the black but there is an acrid smell, lessened but not quite washed out by the rain.
Nearly midnight local time, I don’t know what time by my body clock. I’m longing for the solitude of the hotel room. Just a few hours to collect my wits. But at the hotel, the Merioka (“Prosperity,” I whisper to Joanne), there’s a reception planned.
“Don’t worry. Nothing elaborate!” Tjodja says when he sees our faces. Then in a low voice, “You know it is our custom to have a ceremony on every possible occasion.”
“We can’t. I’m sorry. It’s too late, we’ve had a very long flight.”
“Yes. Yes, of course!” Tjodja says, as if he agrees completely. But then he insists. “It is just for a few minutes. Everyone has been waiting. It would be a terrible disappointment.”
The Merioka is a gleaming high-rise down by the harbour, the most expensive part of town. I silently try to calculate the cost of our rooms. It used to be four hundred U.S. dollars a night, but those were better days for Santa Irene. With the violence and uncertainty tourism has disappeared and prices collapsed, I imagine.
Through the lobby, which looks subdued, or maybe it’s only the hour.
“We can’t go to the reception. Perhaps another time would be better,” I say.
“Yes, yes,” Tjodja says.
“You should show us our rooms.”
“Of course.” And we follow him … to a glitzed reception hall crowded with slow-moving people wrapped in smoke.
“No!” I say at the door. “I told you–”
“Bill,” Joanne says, “I’m fine. If it’s just for a few minutes.”
“Yes! Yes!” says Tjodja, pinching my elbow, dragging me in.
“Mr. Burridge! What a pleasure to see you again! Happier circumstances, happier circumstances!” exudes a short, burly man in a tuxedo. He looks like he’s been drinking for two days. Most of the others look that way as well. It’s a debauch, an attempt at the old style, but far more tired and tawdry. “So fine to see you!” the man exclaims. “So fine!” Pumping my hand. “So…. fine!” He turns to Joanne. “And your wife, Ms. Lorraine – lovelier than ever!”
“Uh – this is my nurse, Joanne Stoddart,” I say. “Joanne, this is–” And I pause because I haven’t a clue, although I should remember, I’ve seen him before. But the burly man doesn’t take the hint. He’s grasped Joanne’s hand and gazes longingly into her eyes.
“–this is, uh–”
No help. Finally I say, “I’m sorry, sir, your name has slipped …”
“Of course it has!” he says too jovially. “I’m a slippery fellow. Burridge, I have to tell you, you do surround yourself with striking women!”
And you lumito men are still arrogant jerks, I think.
There are drinks on little trays held aloft by waiters who seem only slightly less intoxicated than many of the guests. A ragged-haired man in white tearfully renders “Love Me Tender” on the karaoke machine in the corner of the large room, by the velvet curtains. Several of the women in long gowns have formed a protective circle on the other side of the room and talk amongst themselves. A large semicircular banner in fluttery gold lettering near the bar reads, WELCOMMING YOU MR. BILL BURRIDGE.
“We have had a month of solid terror and uncertainty,” the burly man says in a low voice, suddenly thoughtful and morose. “Everything was turned upside down! But now you’re here,” he says, emptying his glass. Cognac?
The crowd slowly awakens to the fact that the guest of honour has arrived. Several more tuxedoed men shuffle towards me and Joanne. Her red hair is like a flag of sexuality to them on this island of black hair. Dri
nks are thrust at us; twelve conversations start at once. The karaoke machine gets louder and a different drunken voice launches into “The Impossible Dream.”
“Bill?” Joanne says to me, looking over several heads. “Is our two minutes up yet?”
“It must be!”
But we can’t leave. An enormously wide man in a sloppy black suit wrestles with the microphone until the karaoke singer finally gives up. What follows is a twenty-minute soporific in Kuantij that the burly drunk sums up in just a few sentences. “He is welcoming you. You are such a hero to our people. You suffered so terribly the last time you were here. But now everything has changed.”
“Mr. Alijo,” I say, remembering his name.
“Franja,” he says, correcting me. “Alijo has gone to Switzerland. No doubt he’s climbing mountains as we speak!”
I met them both at a diplomatic reception at Minitzh’s Pink Palace in the days before I was kidnapped. It seems a hundred years ago. Franja. He was a parasite then, like so many of Minitzh’s hangers-on. Smiling, cultured, wealthy, spoiled men and women – who stage sudden, tumultuous, drunken applause. Hands push me forward. “No,” I say, definite this time. I do not want to speak. It’s too late, I’ve already stayed longer than I’d agreed. Where’s Tjodja? I need to tell him, but he’s disappeared.
“I’m not going to make a speech,” I say, craning to find Tjodja.
“Please – just a brief few words!” Franja says, pushing me forward. “We’ve all been waiting!”
After a while it doesn’t seem worth the fight. I wade through the crowd, shake hands, get thumped on the back. At the front I make a short meaningless speech thanking them for their welcome, asking for their help in the days ahead. It comes out as automatic jargon, barely better than Tjodja in the car. “And now,” I say to their uncomprehending stares, “I look forward to some quiet rest, then the beginning …” The beginning of what? Several phrases present themselves: the first step in the long road … the difficult process … the march towards healing and a chance at justice … A chance at justice? I’d like to think it’s more than that. I ponder some more and the phrase hangs incomplete – the beginning – until Franja starts the applause and everyone joins in and I don’t have to worry about it. The beginning of what? Of what I’ve gotten myself into.