Cathi starts to stand. I’ve pushed too hard, said something wrong. “Wait,” I say, lowering my voice, reaching for her arm. “Please. I came here to find out who killed my mother, but every time I think I’m getting closer it just gets more confusing. Help me. I have to understand.”
Her arm is stiff under my hand, tense. I let go.
She takes a couple of long, deep breaths. “I haven’t seen Anju since before this sister of yours was born. I don’t know who killed her.”
“But you knew her better than anyone! Help me understand what happened to her here. Because I think somehow, everything has something to do with this place. With her—your—capture and what she saw and knew. She ran from here, and maybe someone followed her. I don’t know why they killed her, but . . . please. I don’t know her anymore. I think maybe I never knew her. Just tell me what you can. Anything.”
“You are too young,” Cathi says after a long moment, but in that same tone, like she doesn’t really believe it. She bends forward. “My Anju . . . my poor Anju . . . I forgive you, of course I do . . .” Staring at the dirt between her feet, she begins a shallow rocking, back and forth.
I reach out to touch her again, afraid I will lose her to whatever blackness is hovering nearby, ready to sweep her up. “Please, Cathi. I have to go back to Sangui, but I can’t leave knowing less than when I got here.”
Cathi looks up suddenly, her eyes bright. “And what will you do, eh? What will you do with my story? I don’t have answers! I don’t know who killed your mother! I don’t know who my Ruth’s father is! I can tell you what was done to us, but why? What does telling do? Those days brought me nothing but evil! No one gets punished; those men are all still there, just up the mountain,” she says, waving her hand toward the jungle. “There is no justice that comes from telling! Do you know what I do now to get my daily bread? About the men who come to me at the bars because no one will let me sell my vegetables in the market? No. It is not a story for telling. It is nothing but pain.”
“You think I’m not in pain now?” I cry.
She resumes her rocking. “You know nothing of pain. You are a child. You have no idea.” She clamps her mouth shut.
We sit there, with insects buzzing around our heads, looking back at my broken and burnt old home.
For just a moment I can squint and see the way it might look, if we hadn’t had to run away: Curtains in the window. Two flowerpots framing the door like at Cathi’s house. My mother hanging laundry. I look beyond, in the direction Cathi says the militiamen still are, into the forest.
I take a deep breath. “I may not remember you. But I remember that night.”
Cathi inclines her head just slightly toward me, watches me from the corner of her eye.
“I was five years old. I remember loud noises, and seeing fire through the window. There was yelling. Screaming.” I put my hands together and squeeze them between my knees. “Mama pulled me from bed, pushed me out the back window, and told me to run.”
I swallow, looking at the yard, trying to see which way I would have gone. “I’m a good runner. I ran for a long time, to a place near a stream where she used to take me. Maybe you know it. There was a little cave there. I went inside and waited. For . . . I don’t know how long. Days. I ate plants and fruits that made me sick, and drank dirty water from the cave floor. I was afraid of the animals. I was afraid someone would come and find me. I was afraid no one would come and find me.
“I could hear the men passing all around me through the jungle. I was supposed to stay in the cave, but one of those days I had to come out and relieve myself. I was doing my business when I heard the men coming and didn’t have time to get back. I was just squatting there and I had to bury myself in leaves, right on my stink, and hope they didn’t step on me or smell me. One man came so close I could have reached out and untied his boot. I saw his eyes.” I finally look back at Cathi. “He would have killed me as easily as breathing.”
We sit. The clouds are rolling across the sky. Cicadas drone in the heat. My head is starting to feel a little more clear.
“Now,” I say, “I didn’t spend those days in a hole, lying in my own filth, for nothing. My mother didn’t say anything about where she had been when she finally came and pulled me out. She never spoke of that time, or any time before. One day I might have asked her, but she was murdered before I could, and I am going to find out why. I’m not asking you. I am telling you. Help me understand.”
Cathi’s daughter returns to us with a smile like sunlight on water, her dress full of fruit. Cathi watches her and says nothing for a long time. Ruth shows her mother what she’s gathered, sneaking glances at me. I can see the woman in this girl, hovering like a shadow.
“Go and take these to Nyanya Florence,” Cathi says. “Her old teeth will like them. Take the dog.”
The girl nods and runs off, a child again, and we watch her until she is across the creek and out of sight. The silence grows thick and green around us. Then Cathi takes a deep breath and begins.
THIRTY-FOUR
A Story of Two Girls:
Once upon a time, there were two girls who lived in a lush land far, far away.
One of the girls was loud and giggly, while the other one was quiet and stern. One liked boys and the other preferred books. One was plump like a mango and the other was skinny like a pencil. One girl was pretty, but the other was as beautiful as the moon.
As different as they were, they loved each other fiercely, and one was never found without the other. They grew from girls to young women, and after they finished secondary school, not wanting to be separated, both went to the hospital in town to be trained as nurses. The girls worked hard and became strong women and clever healers.
One year into the training, the loud one’s sweetheart gave her father five cows and asked for her hand in marriage. The quiet one was happy for her best friend, but had decided long ago to give her hand to God. Each was pleased for the other, though secretly, deep in their hearts, they both wished they would never have to be apart.
• • •
Midway through their second year of training, a whisper reached the hospital that gold had been found in the mountains. And the nuns made the sign of the cross on their chests and said, “Brace yourselves, because we’ve seen this before, and war is coming.”
At first it was just a rumbling in the distance, disappearances, a scarcity of medicine and food. It was hardly war, and more like a howling of wild dogs somewhere far off. An unseen shivery sound that you would close the window against and try to forget.
And so despite the nuns’ warning, the girls weren’t prepared when the war came through the front gates of the hospital, ripping and slashing. It moved fast. They weren’t ready for the way it spilled blood and flung bedpans and laughed at the nuns praying to God. It shot a priest. It took whatever caught its fancy: morphine and tinned puddings. And before it left, it placed its hands on five young women, including the two young women who would not be separated, and said, These are mine. And it stole them away into the night.
• • •
It was a dark night. A very, very dark and long night. A night that lasted for months, though it was hard to say how many, as the girls used their monthly bleeding to count the days, and when the bleeding stopped, counting became difficult.
The warlords brought the women they had stolen into the mountains, to their kingdom, where trees covered the sky. In that place the women realized some of the men were in fact little boys with red eyes and slack faces. When the men and boys went out to fight, they wore leaves and flowers in their hair because it made them invisible to bullets. There were other women in the warlords’ kingdom, but they spoke a different language, when they spoke at all, and moved like ghosts.
The men had chosen this place because their god lived there, deep in a hole in the mountain. Every day, the five women were sent with th
e other captives into the hole to pick away at the flanks of the god of gold and bring out his shiny scabs.
And at night? Every night was hell embodied as a man or a boy, five or six times over. The loud one didn’t know them; she just closed her eyes and let her soul drift far away while she waited for it to be over.
But the war saw the quiet one’s beauty, and she was held back and given like a gift to a man they called Number Two, who came and went from the kingdom on a powerful white man’s bidding. He would fly in on a helicopter, bringing guns and money. When he came, he always asked for her. No one was allowed to touch the quiet one but him.
They said he came from a city named for blood, Sangui.
• • •
Of the five women:
One ran, and the boys laughed and put a bullet in her back.
One woman began to drink the poisoned water in the god’s hole, even when the others begged her to stop, and she died raving in a fever.
One woman had been the two girls’ teacher, a nun, and when she could, she diverted the hell from her students. But most of the time she couldn’t.
And the two girls survived, but only because neither wanted to die and leave the other one alone in the terrible kingdom.
• • •
One day the men were ambushed by other men that looked exactly like the first men, and there was fighting and gunfire and explosions that shook the earth and chaos, and the teacher said run, and the girls and the teacher ran and ran and ran, until they came back to their town, and stumbled into the hospital and were finally, finally safe.
• • •
The two friends expected things to get better after their escape, and for a while they did.
But soon after they healed and could get up and walk around again, they noticed something strange: a smell. People around them would cringe and move away. The three women sniffed the wind and tried to figure out where it came from. It was rotten like outhouses and the medical garbage pile, and it grew stronger whenever the three were together. Eventually, they realized that it wasn’t being borne in on the wind; it was coming from them, out of their pores, caught in their hair, redolent on their breath.
The women scrubbed and scrubbed, and drank sweet teas, but no matter what they did, the hell they had passed through lingered over them, clearing rooms with its stink. It was pungent, embarrassing, pervasive, and impossible to get rid of.
A smell that was not a smell.
• • •
Then one day the loud woman’s sweetheart took his cows back. They later heard he had waited a week, and then given them to another girl’s father.
The quiet woman’s stomach grew round and large and the reverend mother called her to her office and explained that, while the quiet one could still be a nurse, the cloistered life was no longer appropriate. Not for a mother.
The teacher who had escaped with them left for the city called Sangui, saying she couldn’t remember what God’s face looked like anymore. She asked the two girls if they wanted to go with her. The quiet girl might have gone, except by then she was too big to travel. The loud girl would not leave her friend.
• • •
There was ripping and screaming and a baby was born. They named her Christina.
• • •
The two women moved back to their parents’ neighboring farms. The loud one’s mother and father died within a year of her return, one after the other. The quiet one’s father had died while she was away in the terrible kingdom. Her mother grew small.
The quiet one still worked as a nurse at the hospital, but the loud one’s hands would shake with every new broken woman brought in. She tried to sell vegetables instead, but grew tired of the other sellers’ stares and wrinkled noses.
So she found a new occupation. She no longer liked boys, but for the work she did, she didn’t have to like them. She just had to close her eyes and let her soul drift far away.
• • •
Though the women still loved each other, they knew something had fractured between them that could not be entirely mended. They both focused on the baby, who grew quickly. The quiet one sometimes caught herself staring at her daughter’s face. And sometimes she could not look at her child at all, and when that happened the loud one would pick up the little girl and walk away, kissing the salt off her baby cheeks until she laughed.
• • •
Years passed. War lingered around the edges, coming and going, like the seasons. Sometimes it would steal cattle and goats. Sometimes they would see it hanging around in the bars in town, laughing and drinking. Sometimes they would hear it coming and run and hide in the forest in a secret place, and pretend for the sake of the child they were on a great adventure.
One of those times, the quiet one’s mother, who had grown smaller and frailer, refused to leave and hide, even though her daughter begged and pleaded. When they came back, they found her mother still in bed, as if perhaps only sleeping. There was little blood, and the girls washed her body in the creek and wrapped her in her best Sunday kitenge. They buried her on the hill, next to the quiet girl’s father.
• • •
Something about the death of the quiet one’s mother changed her. She was still quiet, but there was a look in her eyes that worried the loud one. The quiet one started leaving the child with the loud one, and walking off into the forest alone. She would come back with filthy feet, sticks in her hair, and a look in her eyes like an animal gone wild.
• • •
Five years after the birth of the child, a white man came to town and started asking questions.
He wasn’t the first white man to come through. The war had brought pilots and journalists and blue helmets of all colors who followed the fighting like spectators. Lord knows that business was good for the loud one when she worked the bars closest to the hotels. The war brought do-gooders and missionaries who looked bewildered and thrilled all at once, and mining men who acted like the kind of dogs that never bark, that only bite.
But this man was different. He asked too many questions. Said the names out loud that everyone else knew to whisper.
When the loud woman found out that the quiet one had spoken to him, she was terrified. She told the quiet one to stop, but the quiet one said she was tired of being silent.
• • •
The war came back, like the loud one knew it would. It came the very night after the quiet one talked to the white man. This time it didn’t come for goats or cattle. It came for the two girls, now women. It chased them into the forest. It put its hands on them, and said, These are still mine. And it took them back to the terrible kingdom.
Only the child escaped.
• • •
There was no digging this time. Only hell. The two women were separated, and the loud one could hear the screaming of the quiet one, and she screamed herself, and thought about letting her soul drift away and not come back. But she knew she couldn’t because that would mean leaving the quiet one alone.
• • •
But then, four days later, the quiet one was gone.
The men came in screaming for her, “Where did she go? Where did she go?” They beat the loud one, who was not so loud anymore. They put their knives in the fire and laid them sizzling on her legs. But it didn’t matter. The not-so-loud woman didn’t know how her friend had escaped, or where she had gone. All she knew was that the quiet one, who had become not-so-quiet, had left her.
She was alone in the terrible kingdom.
They beat her almost to death. But as they really only cared about the once-quiet woman, eventually they lost interest. They packed up their camp and left the once-loud woman there, alone on the forest floor. And when the once-loud woman realized she wasn’t going to die, there was nothing to do but go home.
• • •
And there she was s
till alone, except for the seed in her belly. A strange thing, because it should not have survived. But it did, which was lucky, or awful. Or both, because it was the only thing that clung to her soul and kept it from flying away for good.
THIRTY-FIVE
When Cathi is done she gets up and brushes the dirt from her dress. She walks to the edge of the forest and stands looking into it, like she’s waiting for someone to appear.
• • •
It’s late in the afternoon when we speak again, and we only do because Ruth comes back full of chatter. She’s had her hair braided by Nyanya Florence’s granddaughter and wants us both to compliment her. It’s enough to ease us both back into the real world.
“Very pretty,” I tell her, and she beams. She doesn’t look like Kiki, but I can’t help thinking again of my sister. I feel an ache in my chest, an urge to protect this girl I’ve only just met. It must make Cathi crazy, thinking the same thing that happened to her could someday happen to her daughter. They are so far from town, just on the edge of the jungle, and Cathi knows the men are still out there. Suddenly the AK-47 and two giant dogs seem very reasonable.
“Will you stay for dinner, Christina?” Ruth asks.
“I should go back to the hospital,” I say.
“Are you still sick?”
“No, I’m better now,” I say. “We’re staying at the guesthouse there.”
Cathi frowns. “It will be dark very soon. Maybe you should stay the night again.”
“My friends will be wondering where I am,” I say reluctantly. And there’s still Kiki to think about. I need to get back to call Bug Eye and head off any more visits from Ketchup. Running away like a madwoman in the rain left me not only shoeless but phoneless. Not that I would have had service up here, I bet. I’ve stayed too long already. But it’s hard to leave. Cathi has started dinner out back and the smell of onions and garlic and chilies is making my stomach growl. It’s familiar, this place. Even if I can’t really remember it, the sense of home is here.
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