Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen

by Lisa J Shannon

  Papa Alexander waded through the shallow cassava toward the hut, Mama Cecelia no longer visible behind him. The hut was untouched. He boiled water for coffee and scanned the stored food, making a pile of peanuts and other goods that they could carry on the days-long journey by foot. Coffee ready, he fumbled with the key to lock the hut. Gunshots cracked through the air.

  That was close, very close.

  He grabbed his bundle and ran back to the cassava field.

  At the spot where he left Cecelia, there were only the uncertain patterns of young cassava leaves and dirt. No wife. He tried to figure it through. She wanted to go to Sudan. Maybe she was angry, maybe she decided to just leave me, and escape on her own. The way to Sudan was the road where the execution shots were just fired. Maybe they killed her.

  The road was abandoned and splashed with fresh blood. Not drips, but gushes and pools, dragged in long trails off into the bushes. Some victims had managed to get to the bushes to bleed out alone. Blood-soaked cloth was strewn around. He lifted pieces of it with a stick to see through the blood stains, looking for the familiar ladies wax pattern of Mama Cecelia’s dress. He hovered over the pools of blood, trying to intuit any clue that the blood in the pool was Cecelia’s.

  He scoured another road nearby and then went back to the fields. Morning into afternoon, he wandered, looking, trying to decipher if she would leave him, if she could make it to Sudan on her own, or if she was bleeding out with the rest of the unfortunate.

  Alexander ground over the question How long do I look? If she doesn’t come today—no, by tomorrow—I’ll go to Sudan after her. Or could she have gone to Dungu? In the late afternoon, he thought, I give up. He went back home and pulled a lounge chair into the wide-open yard, and slept.

  Alexander shuddered awake after a few minutes. I can’t give up… . I’ll go again, he thought. The forest. I could check there. Exhausted, he pried himself up again. Back to the bloody cloth, more blood, not hers. In the forest, he found bloody shoes that looked familiar. They looked like hers. But she left her shoes back with the LRA… .

  The forest had been turned inside out again, and he couldn’t find his way. He was lost, again.

  As late afternoon faded to evening, with all options exhausted, Alexander dreaded a new round of executions at dusk and returned to the shallow cassava fields, pulled up a chair among the bushes, and again drifted to sleep, swimming in images from the last two days, and in the question of where he might go in the morning.

  He opened his eyes. Slowly, across the field, Mama Cecelia waded toward him. In hushed tones, they murmured to each other.

  I thought for sure you were dead.

  I saw all that blood on the road.

  Mama Cecelia had waited for Alexander in the cassava, until she heard the gunshots. They sounded like they’d come from their home. She thought they’d killed Alexander. She ran into the forest and found a place to burrow in. Twigs snapped behind her. Slow and gingerly she inched out of sight, hiding from whomever was walking only a few feet away. Snap, snap, closer. Sniffing and heavy breath. Humph. Humph. Humph. She looked behind her: A wild pig, caught in a homemade trap, paced back and forth.

  As night approached, Cecelia went back to the house, and found Alexander’s looping footprints all over the field.

  Now, reunited, they needed a plan. Papa Alexander had no fantasies of help on the way.

  It was already getting dark. They spent their second night in the field. In the early morning, when it was still dark, they gathered their things and set out for the days-long walk to Dungu.

  On the main road, they saw two figures running toward them. Men, crazed and screaming: Where are you going! Those people behind us are LRA! Run!

  The men cut into the bush. Alexander strained to see the people coming. They were still at a distance, but he could make out thirty or forty of them. He and Cecelia veered off the main road, into the bush, the grasses, the forest—far, farther—-as far as they could possibly go that day.

  Propped up by a tree, they tried to sleep. Alexander wanted to get an early start, but Cecelia insisted they wait. By one o’clock, they were back on the main road. As soon as they began to make their way up the road to Kpayka (pronounced “pi-ka”), they heard screaming from behind, warning them: Three LRA! Right behind you! Run!

  There is a limit to what beaten and gashed sixty-something bodies can do. They could not hike so far off the road again. They slipped into the nearby bushes, and waited all night, again. Again, they gathered their things for an early start. But something told them to pause, to wait. Screams filled the trees and bushes. It must be a fellow bush-sleeper nearby. They stayed perfectly still, waiting for the gunshots, waiting for the LRA to leave.

  On the way out to the road, Alexander said, “We need to see who they’ve killed.”

  They found their next-door neighbor’s son, his head smashed by gunmen unwilling to spend a quick and easy bullet. Leaving a body in the forest is considered profoundly disrespectful, and Alexander loathed leaving his neighbor’s son exposed in the bush. “If we had something to dig a hole with … ,” he said.

  “We can’t dig a grave with our fingers,” Cecelia said.

  They staggered on.

  It was day three with no food, as they made their way to Kpayka. Passing through ember villages, they spotted those burned alive, their ashen mouths wide open.

  Kpayka was no refuge. The whole place had been burned down. They found an abandoned house. No food, but it had water and a clay pot. Like stowaways, they boiled water in the pot and took turns washing each other’s wounded bodies.

  It was an image that lingered with me long after Alexander’s telling: the two of them giving each other a hot wash-down in a borrowed hut.

  When I’d first asked Alexander what he loved about each of his wives, some distinguishing characteristic that made him pick her, he gave the checklist list only. He had married Cecelia because she was handy with needles and yarn. Francisca burst out laughing at the time, when he said he’d married Toni because she made good coffee. Alexander laughed, too, then quieted down, embarrassed. He said, “Look, I know I had the wrong thinking. But I’m with the woman I will be with for the rest of my life. That’s what matters.”

  In that hut after days on foot, so ill, so hungry, now it was just Alexander and Cecelia—all of Alexander’s wives had drifted to something else in some other town so long ago. In that moment—that swollen, stripped, worst-of-all moment—refuge wasn’t a shelter, it wasn’t a place. It was strokes of hot water on broken skin, by an old and familiar hand.

  After the bath in Kpayka, they slept in the bush again.

  Day four without food, day six since finding Roger’s body, they spotted other stragglers, others left behind, who were crawling out of their hiding places around Kpayka. They clumped together, swelling to thirty or more adults, plus children. The others offered quiet encouragement to Alexander and Cecelia: You’re almost there. You can do it. Just walk. Just have the courage to walk.

  They walked nine hours that day. It wasn’t until Kiliwa that they saw the Congolese army. When they passed, the soldiers didn’t offer to help. Everyone was responsible for escaping on their own from places like Duru, Kpayka, and the villages along the way. There would be no UN, no one to greet them.

  They didn’t feel safe until they reached Dungu.

  Months later, when Mama Koko returned from the bush and was reunited with Alexander, they sat next to each other and cried and cried and cried. Under other circumstances, she might have counseled Give it to God, as she so often did. Not this time. While they wept, Mama Koko could only say, “What did we do to deserve this?” All she could offer, over and again: “We’re together in this. We’ll stick together.”

  The Envelope

  • • • •

  The room was warm in the late afternoon by the time we were finishing up with Papa Alexander. He relaxed as we shifted focus and retreated into questions about his life before the LRA, when life
was good: the wives; the stories to the grandkids at night; harvests; his days in the cotton fields as a child; chasing off Congolese suitors who tried to call dibs on Francisca before she and Kevin married.

  For a few minutes, he looked like another man. Francisca and Alexander laughed. The air was lighter. Francisca felt for a moment we had gotten through to the other side of the interviews and that the family might even be stronger for sharing the pain as they had.

  Francisca’s brother Antoine came in unexpectedly holding a beaten-up, reused manila envelope, and handed it to Francisca. “Father Ferruccio just dropped this off for you.”

  We stared at it for a moment before Francisca asked, “Should we open it?”

  “Now? In front of Papa Alexander?” I responded, loathing to lose the ease and warmth we had just regained.

  But curiosity got the better of us.

  Why would Ferruccio drop something off to us?

  Francisca untwisted the tie as Alexander watched from across the room. She slipped out two low-resolution color printouts. Each sheet had four photos patched together.

  I didn’t quite grasp what we were seeing: Ferruccio, with older white men in plain clothes. Perhaps Italian priests like himself? A young man in fatigues, holding a gun. Congolese men, civilians, standing beside the armed man, oozing dread. They looked like they’d been taken hostage. More photos, of the same Congolese men on a motorbike, with the armed man sandwiched between them.

  “That is Roger,” Francisca said, pointing to the driver. The other man was Raphael.

  “Ah, so maybe that is the LRA surrendering,” Francisca continued. “This is official, and Roger does not look …” happy, I finished her thought. He clearly didn’t want to be there. He radiated fear.

  Papa Alexander was watching us.

  “Should we show them to Alexander?” I asked.

  Francisca handed them across the table to him. She asked, “Have you ever seen these?”

  Papa Alexander took the printouts and studied them. “Who got these pictures?”

  Swelling with grief, he said, “It’s the day he died.”

  “Have you ever seen these before?” I asked.

  No, he hadn’t; but he was already in terrain beyond words. Studying the photos taken only an hour or so before Roger was killed—the last photos of his son—had carried him into Roger’s last moments.

  I felt like an intruder in the room, wishing I could slip out. Every word I uttered in a language he didn’t understand felt like a violation.

  Alexander’s tears leaked out as he went under.

  Francisca had avoided looking people in the eyes when they talked about the LRA, for fear she would cry. The only way she got through interviews was to shut something off inside. Not this time. Francisca slid onto the worn foam sofa cushions, next to Alexander, and put her hand on his.

  He jerked his hand away.

  Papa Alexander had never done that in her life. She thought, He blames me for stirring all this up.

  Francisca didn’t get up. She sat still next to him.

  Alexander got up and walked out of the room, crying. He sat out in the yapu long enough for everyone to see him weeping. He wouldn’t talk to us again. He never told Francisca why he pulled his hand away.

  Sitting alone on Mama Koko’s sofa, Francisca knew that in these long afternoons and endless questions, she had broken something.

  Family Day

  • • • •

  The last time I saw Heritier, it was the day before our departure. Francisca had asked about dedicated family time nearly every day since we’d arrived, suggesting a few weeks, which I whittled to a week, and then to the last day, maybe. I never felt we had done enough, collected enough. As Francisca said at some point, “You will never be happy if you are only someone who gets things done.”

  So that day, Mama Koko and Francisca got up early and slipped out to morning Mass. I had breakfast on my own. When they came back, I suggested Francisca take the day. She had already decided she would.

  I retreated to Aunt Harriet’s, my last chance to catch Heritier.

  And there he was in all his soft-eyed sweetness. He brightened when he saw me. His father had finally let the boys come back to Harriet’s for a visit. His older brothers came along this time: Modeste, a skinny, cheery-eyed six-year-old, and Herbert, a pudgy four-year-old with long eyes and a swollen face, bloated with pain.

  Heritier snuggled up in my lap, while Herbert and little Modeste gathered around me, shy but intrigued. My-oh-my, what a serious little man Herbert was. I imagined him standing alone in the path, his father’s firm hands on his back. For a split second, they must have felt like comfort, before they pushed him toward the gunmen.

  I poked his belly, rubbed his head, and dotted him with stickers, fighting back images of a life where these three boys were packing their bags, too, and heading off to a whole different life we would build together. Our house would echo with storybooks and plastic dinosaurs splashing around the tub and songs Francisca would teach us from back home.

  My only real-life aspiration for the day, though, was a smile from Herbert. It took hours, but finally he cracked a baby-toothed grin that barely fit between those swollen cheeks, soaked with pain and desperation, open just enough to let joy leak in.

  I wanted to ask at least about being their godmother. Wouldn’t the family say yes, even if the church didn’t sanction our union? But I didn’t have the words.

  It was time to say good-bye.

  I set Heritier down on the ground.

  For the first time saying good-bye, he didn’t cry. But as I hit the dusty road, leaving them behind, I did.

  Back at Mama Koko’s, cousins packed dried termites into large plastic baggies, and hunks of fish smoked over an open fire, delicacies Francisca would take back to America. Papa Alexander stopped by. Francisca and Alexander stood together on the back porch, under the climbing flower vines where so many family portraits had been taken. The left half of Francisca’s hair was braided, the other half flying free, waiting its turn. They both lingered through long, awkward pauses, unsure of the damage, unsure of the remedy.

  “I came by to say good-bye,” he told Francisca, who avoided looking directly at him. “I’m on my way to collect termites.” It was his way of letting her know he would not be coming to see her off when we left.

  Mama Koko, Francisca, and I sat on the stoop together on our last Procure evening. The question of the hour hung heavy around us. What now?

  I had already decided how I wanted all of this to end. I had brainstormed it: Francisca would emerge a leader for her country. I had no shortage of suggestions for Francisca’s future leadership role, the one I had built up in my head—policy wonks to connect her with back home, campaign ideas, trips to DC to lobby Congress. They all began with one simple first step: signing up for her first e-mail account.

  But after the tidal wave of gory photos and atrocious stories and family frictions, it was too much for her to even think about.

  “I don’t like e-mail and meetings with people I don’t know,” she said. “You have to let me do it my way.”

  The Hangar

  • • • •

  Mama Koko said so many times—mostly late at night, when she wasn’t praying the rosary—that she was happy Francisca had come, but she would be most happy to see Francisca safely go.

  When the time came, though, Mama Koko drifted away from the family gathered under the shade of the airstrip hangar’s tin roof. She kept her back to us, staring instead toward a small parked plane, the one we didn’t take to Bangadi.

  Mama Koko was the first to hear the distant hum of our arriving plane as it emerged out of the hazy sky. Her tears fell with a wordless ache.

  No one had to say it. Scanning the faces—Francisca’s brothers, pregnant sisters-in-law, baby nieces munching on dried termites, nephews, the cousins with colorful wigs, the other cousins, and yet another cousin once again donning the pinstriped suit with pointy shoes—Francis
ca knew more would die before she saw them again. It was only a question of how many, and who.

  Francisca stood close to Mama Koko. Without saying much else, they both wept as the hum of the plane grew loud and enveloped us.

  The plane skipped down the dirt strip and slowed to a halt. There was no time to linger. Francisca grabbed her suitcases packed with termites and hurried through the final good-bye hugs, then stepped into the five-seater and strapped herself in behind me. She waved to Mama Koko through the airplane window.

  The plane taxied and lifted off. Turning her head, Francisca looked back out the window, pressing her forehead against the glass, crying, wishing we were landing. Dungu and her family faded, smaller and smaller, and disappeared as we rose into the clouds above us, lost among endless horizons of forest and grasses.

  Till Human Voices Wake Us

  • • • •

  Back home, Francisca got more of those late-night calls. Even years after our trip, Kony was still out there. A cousin, gone. Then another. Sometimes I’d go over to her house and we would sit together at her dining room table, quiet, while she cried.

  I thought of Heritier. At my neighborhood organic-burrito shop, I watched little boys on the patio fight with each other, while eating their kiddie burritos. I imagined an alternate universe where Heritier, Herbert, and Modeste had come home with me. I would have taken them to that taqueria. I would have bought them burritos. Their rubber boots would have filled my entryway. I would have repainted my empty white walls with a kid-friendly palate—better to hide the fingerprints and show off their drawings. I would have picked their spilled cheerios up off the kitchen floor.

  Instead, home felt like a swollen, empty space. No boots, no finger paintings, no cheerios.

  Once, in the dry air of a cross-country flight, a statistic flashed through my head: One in three children in Congo die before the age of five. I ran the numbers, three boys, two under age five. One of them is going to die. Heritier could die. I pressed my head against the scratched plastic window so my aisle-mates wouldn’t see me cry.

  On an early spring day in 2012, Francisca’s brother phoned her. “Are you sitting down?”