by Minot, Susan
Perhaps I would be stubborn forever. Or I could change. Maybe this was the time of my chance.
I sat up. I said, It is okay, then.
Christine looked surprised. The lady did not look surprised. She had a smile.
We moved to a place apart from the girls, where the camera was put on a triangle. The lady from America took her sunglasses off.
Shall we start at the beginning or the end? she said. The eyes in front of me were gray and a stranger’s eyes, but when she said this I felt she was not a stranger. She was like the sisters.
The end? I did not understand.
Where you are now. Here. The camera was up on black legs just going by itself. The man sat below it, cross-legged.
Perhaps the beginning, I said.
Good. Tell me the beginning.
Maybe I would tell this story again, maybe this was the one and only time, but my words, they were going in the camera.
I began, They came for us in the night.…
The lady watched me as I spoke. I looked at her hair, I looked at her shoulder, then down at her basket. She listened with her mouth closed. Sometimes I looked to the empty football field and saw a dust devil swirl up like a rope unwinding. I saw the girls past the kitchen in their dancing costumes with the woman from Kenya. They were making steps with her. I might look down at my hands, but in my head I was seeing again where I had been. And I told her all these things I have told to you.
AT FIRST THIS girl Esther spoke so softly Jane thought she’d been wrong to use the camera. She had a square forehead and round cheeks and a forceful look in her eye, despite her bland delivery. She spoke as if discovering things.
Marching away that night, she said in her gentle voice, we could not believe what was happening to us. Now I am here and I ask myself, Was I really there?
Her body and face were very still, and her hands sat holding each other in the lap of her white T-shirt. She chose her words carefully, focusing, and now Jane saw she was not being reluctant, but methodical. This girl had been back only a couple of weeks. Now and then she nodded to herself for reassurance, as if to say, Yes, that’s right, that’s how it was. She looked into her lap, she looked at Jane with a frown. She glanced off now and then and her eyes ticked back and forth, scanning the inside of her brain. She told her story without self-consciousness, not trying to impress. But Jane was impressed. She was glad the camera was recording so she did not need to take notes. Jane listened and nodded and asked small questions. Yes, she said, go on. All her attention was taken listening to Esther Akello.
I did not want to hit her, she was saying. None of us want to hit her. Esther’s cheeks started to shake in a twitchy way and Jane saw she was having difficulty moving her mouth. But I did. We beat that girl. We killed her. I killed her. She bit the inside of her mouth. You are the first I have told this to.
The molecules in the air seemed to rearrange themselves around Jane. The part of her recording this story thought how no one could hear this and not be moved and want to help. The part of her unaccustomed to reporting felt a sort of repulsion intruding on this private distress. Pierre sat on the ground beside the tripod, with his arm extended, holding out the small mic, looking down, letting the camera witness.
Esther pressed the side of her face with a flat palm to still it. Her fingers trembled.
You can stop whenever you want, Jane said.
It is okay. Esther frowned deeply, rubbing her face, seeing something new, putting a hard glint in her eye.
One day we were made to cross a river.
Yes?
It was a terrible day.
What happened?
Esther told the story of losing Mary.
That is a terrible day, Jane said.
I WAS REMEMBERING new things. I remembered how on the day we crossed the river I was not so upset. I told the lady this. I did not feel bad, I said. I would lie to say I did. I felt just tiredness.
It was hard to say it.
Yes, she said.
I wished we had saved that girl Mary, but when she disappeared I did not care so much.
The lady looked away from me. I noticed the change because her face had been toward mine so far. She was seeing I was a bad person.
THE FACE WAS so wracked with sorrow Jane glanced away, to give her privacy. What could she say? She looked in Pierre’s direction. His gaze met hers and she saw tears in his eyes. She turned back to Esther.
That happens, she said. It’s okay.
It is hard to know it, Esther said. Her look seemed to plead to Jane, needing to be convinced.
Jane stood up.
THE LADY CAME and sat beside me. You were surviving, she said. Her arm moved around me.
I hoped to let this comfort me.
Sometimes when you worry about other people it doesn’t help you survive. It sounds to me as if you have been very brave, Esther.
A spear came into me. I did not see I was brave. Maybe I had lived, but I knew I was bad. The thought I was brave was a new thought. I looked at her blue dress beside me. She comforted me with her arm. I had never touched against a white person this way. We remained there. Soon we were talking to one another.
JANE KNEW she was crossing a line. The journalistic code barred involvement. The foreign element of yourself altered the scene and the integrity of truth.
Too bad, she thought, I won’t only listen. She no longer was the neutral recorder. Listening to Esther had taken her past that. She wasn’t a journalist anyway and they could have her integrity. When she put her arm around her, Esther did not jump away as she had the first time. She smelled sweetly of sweat.
Esther was looking down at her hands, still shaking. I have done terrible things, she said.
Yes, Jane said. She was breathing in a deliberate way to keep from crying. She remembered in reading about trauma how it was important not to contradict a person in recovery. You cannot take away what has happened, you cannot take away the bad feelings about it. Reassuring a person it wasn’t their fault does not help. The last thing she, or anyone else for that matter, needs is to be told how you ought not to feel something, or that what had happened was not as bad as it felt.
Esther’s head was tipped frozenly forward. Jane kept her arm around her. Her head was close and soon resting on Jane’s shoulder. Jane felt the faint trembling.
But you’re not doing terrible things now, Jane said. You are yourself again. No one is controlling you now. She did not use a cheering-up tone. She was just stating facts.
I am hoping this, Esther said. She spoke from the back of her throat so weakly it sounded like the squeaks of a small animal. Then she started to mumble. Jane couldn’t make out the words. Whatever she was saying needed to come out. She moved her hand on Esther’s shoulder now and then, encouraging her. Maybe the camera would pick up her words, maybe not. They were beyond words now. Esther’s head leaned more heavily and Jane felt the close-cropped hair against her chin.
Yes, Jane said. Yes. And Esther muttered on.
THE MAN REACHED UP and turned the camera off and the lady stayed sitting with me. We stayed there for some time. I was being cleared out, not in a hollow way, but a filled-up way. That ache in my throat had dropped and now spread across my chest. The feeling of her arms was like sleeping in a safe place without needing to know where you are.
She said she had met Sister Giulia. Had she told me that? No. Sister Giulia was well. She had been to St. Mary’s and spoke with Teresa and Beatrice and Sharon. Up close the lady’s hair in places was the color of corn silk. I looked at her necklace. She saw me looking and touched it.
It’s a dragonfly, she said. My sister and I give them to each other. We used to swim in a pond that had hundreds of dragonflies where we grew up and so we like them.
Yes, I said. I like to see them also.
It was a coincidence, but I said so because I really do like them.
She touched the charm, trying to see it. Dragonflies barely walk, she said, but flying the
y are one of the fastest insects in the world. Which is funny.
I looked at her white fingers. Yes.
And other funny things. Their eyes touch each other.
My own eyes felt there were stones on them; I was feeling a change happening.
They can propel themselves in different directions, she said. Up, down, forward, back, side to side. Unlike other flies.
I have watched them do this, I said.
In some places dragonflies stand for strength and courage. Like you have, Esther, she said. She was looking at my mouth. I looked at hers. There was a crooked tooth. I looked in front of us to her blue skirt.
I would like to give it to you, she said. You will take it?
I stayed still, waiting. Was this allowed? She took her arm away from me and reached to the back of her neck and unhitched it and brought it out like a hammock between us. Her gray eyes had the question for me. Yes?
I was surprised. It is okay, I said.
Here, let me put it.
Fastening it, her fingers touched the back of my neck like an insect herself. She let go and the silver chain and the charm now lay on my T-shirt. I looked down, but the charm was high under my chin, so I could see only a part. I felt where it was and felt the sharp silver wings. Thank you, I said.
You are very welcome. Thank you.
I thought, I wonder how long I will keep this necklace before it is lost. They also stand for happiness, she said. Her voice caught. The word happiness made us both look away.
We saw Christine and Emily approaching from across the yard. Emily would speak next, and the lady pushed herself up with her hands and stood to greet her.
THE VISITORS WERE INVITED to sit on benches under a feathery acacia at the edge of a circle of packed dirt. At one side girls stood in a cluster of long royal-blue skirts with pleated yellow peplums and halters crisscrossing strong backs. Each ankle had a yellow fringe wrapped around it. A few boys in T-shirts were poised beside drums stretched with animal skin, or holding hollow gourds the color of army helmets.
The drumming began and the gourds started clacking. The girls shuffled forward in lines—their feet going heel-toe, heel-toe. They took short steps, then hammered their heels double-time. Shoulders rippled like cloth. In the front of a line, a girl biting a whistle blew a sharp note and everyone turned, shuffling in a different direction. Another whistle and their torsos tipped forward, heads to the side, extended and hovering, seemingly disconnected from the body wavering behind. An elbow jutted up and pumped up and down birdlike, all in sync. The dancers’ faces were placid. They appeared hypnotized, gyrating their hips in minute circles and stamping madly, sending off puffs of dust. Jane watched, transfixed by the beauty and overtaken by the beat. She thought, everyone should always be dancing. She spotted Esther. She was moving in a solid way, head level, shoulders twitching, in perfect time with the other girls, and like them with a faraway look.
One girl broke from the line and sashayed to where a group of boys stood bobbing. She danced near and stopped in front of a boy, selecting him to step forward. She shuffled in a circle around him, keeping a chin affixed to her shoulder, not meeting his eye. When he reached out to touch her sash she immediately turned and danced back to her line.
Another girl danced over to the visitors and took Lana’s hand. Another reached for Harry, but he shook his head, keeping his elbows on his knees. Lana kicked off her sandals and moved into the circle, stamping her feet, her fringed skirt shaking. She rolled her hips, not as rapidly as the girls, but in the same motion. Her long arms stretched out. The dancers watched her, clapping, and for the first time Jane saw the faces of all the girls smiling.
THE LADY CAME to bid me goodbye. I know you will be fine, Esther Akello, she said. She thanked me and we shook hands.
I touched my dragonfly and she nodded. I watched her leather sandals walking away. They were white from being covered with our dust.
Holly and I stood as Mr. Charles accompanied them to the truck. I watched them but kept seeing Mary’s head in the river appearing then disappearing. Since dancing the blood under my skin was moving like a big chain twisting through my body. I felt my own head as if it would explode.
THE VISITORS DRIFTED toward the parking area.
Lana held the hand of one of the dancers. You leave Lana here with me, said the girl.
Jane was the last to say goodbye to Charles Oringu. You tell them how it is in Africa, he said.
Yes I will. Thank you for having us.
Thank you. We will be very grateful to Mr. Don for his contribution, he said.
His what?
He has been very generous. Jane looked over to Don by the open door of the truck, brushing white dust off the rear of his pants. Five thousand dollars is a great deal for us here and will do much to help the children. He bowed a little to her, making her feel ashamed.
Sitting behind in the truck she found that the back of Don’s head had a new look to it. Harry’s arm, stretched across the seat back, was different too, not hers anymore, maybe more beautiful.
Driving away, Jane saw Esther walking with another girl, their fingers hooked together. Then they separated and Esther moved off on her own.
The truck passed a marsh lit orange in the late sun, dipped deeply to one side and stopped. Harry revved the accelerator a couple of times without enthusiasm. He got out, and Jane saw in his face he knew they were stuck. Both right wheels were sunk in soft mud. He and Don tried rocking the truck, then kicking stones and soil to fill the puddle.
People appeared from out of nowhere. At first they stood, watching, then without being asked, bent to their knees and dug with their hands. Don and Harry planted their shoulders against the fender and when the wheels spun were sprayed with mud. Someone offered a flimsy piece of cardboard which was slipped under the wheel, and that miraculously gave it the traction to move.
They drove away from waving figures. Jane and Lana climbed out the windows onto the roof and sat in the hot wind, watching a low apricot sun in the haze. At the main road, Harry stopped to let them in, but they stayed up there. The land spread around them, an open world. Jane felt the pulse of the music in her thighs through the roof. It had the sound of the other life they were returning to, which would be different now.
When would they leave her? When would she stop thinking of them? She would write about the children and eventually they would retreat to a place in the back of her mind. She would need to stop thinking about them and eventually would. They would stop being foremost in her mind, as they were now. She was already ashamed of abandoning them, but there it was. Recognizing it did not make her any less helpless before it. She thought of the girl Esther and of her fierce eye frowning and her soft voice and being next to her arm to arm. The truck picked up speed on the main road and Jane felt the sky expanding in her.
They pulled over at a dusty lot to a yellow shed that had pictures of fruit and milk bottles on the side. Pierre went in and emerged with bags and handed warm beer and bananas up to the roof. Both were delicious. They bumped back onto the road. The sun was now shocking-pink and transparent just above the trees. Jane and Lana stayed on the roof in the thick, hot wind. Harry handed them beers from the driver’s window. Jane wasn’t ready to get back in. She and Lana stayed out as long as there was light.
They would definitely be driving back in the dark now.
The night was black and the road undefined. There were no streetlights or lit windows. Now and then they passed a bare bulb on a pole lighting a closed door. Shadowy figures were seen for a moment, then would disappear. A few darted across the street, picked out by the farthest headlights.
Do these people want to die? Don said. His tone was not dismissive, but genuine with wonder.
Farther south more cars appeared, often with no headlights themselves. One massive truck barreled out of the blackness straight for them. Harry swerved, face steely, the others poised and alert. No one said it, but they were all relying on Harry. Lana and Pierre c
lutched hands. Jane sat lightly in her seat, her arm against Lana’s, bracing herself inwardly, but she felt it as a distant fear. In the wake of all they’d seen and heard this fear seemed really rather small.
IX
Spiral
19 / Where I Went
AFTER THE JOURNALISTS LEFT I went to my bed and lay on the top bunk.
I was full, like a barrel. I got down from my bed and thought, I will walk to a place behind the tents where I went other times alone. So I went there. It was near dinnertime and the birds were coming out to sing, but I heard little outside the silence in me. I had the face of the lady from America in front of me and thought again of what I had said today. I stood by a tree I knew. My whole body was an ache. I touched that tree and lay myself against it. It was like being close to a person and for that reason you cry on them. I coughed and a sob came out of me like a cork popping from that barrel. I bent to the ground and my crying began. It rolled throughout like a storm. There was not enough space in me to keep it.
My face was sideways on the dirt. I forgot where I was, hardly even a person curled into a ball. My hand hit the ground and the sobbing went on and I pounded more. I did not feel my fist. I also banged my head, then I hit at my head, beating myself. I beat myself as we did that girl from Gulu, the one we killed. My chest was breaking apart. A chunk split off and another wave of crying came and when I thought there was no more to break another piece would crack off. I could not breathe. I gasped at air. I thought of Janet saying, the heart is endless like God is endless, and I thought, My heart will be endlessly breaking. I wondered, even as I cried, How will this stop? It had to stop. Did it not?
I may die from it, I thought. I had survived many things, but now I would die of this. I even wished I would die and the wishing made more tears come.