by Alix Ohlin
In Kigali, despite the tension in the air, Tug was happy at first. In times of trouble you put your head down. You set your own worries aside. When people are talking of war and famine, of an army massing to the north, of civilians arming themselves with machetes, of children dying in camps, your only choice is to get through each day. People need help, so you give out water and rice, bring sick children to the hospital, and talk to their parents. Every single day is triage, a blur of urgent activity, a sprint. You don’t worry about your mortgage or the last time you went to the dentist. You don’t have time to think about any of that, and it feels like freedom.
He and Etienne listened to the radio in the courtyard, under the shade of a banana tree. Radio was everything here, and new songs were playing that had shocking lyrics, rippling with hate. In the evening, at the hotel bar, he discussed the songs with his Swiss counterparts, who shrugged them off, telling him he didn’t understand the history here. Tug agreed that he didn’t; he didn’t understand why the Belgians were here in such small numbers when the war was a result of systems they’d instituted. He didn’t understand why the Canadians had sent sufficient forces to seem involved but not enough to actually do anything.
But the big picture wasn’t his area of expertise, and never had been. He was good at logistics, at surveying the topography and figuring out where to put the food tents and the field hospitals. He had always been like this, ever since Boy Scouts, taking refuge in practical problems. These were the universals, and beyond them were moral issues and cultural complexities that you could spend a lifetime trying to decipher without getting anywhere at all.
His fellow aid workers called him the Silent Canadian. Except on the subject of hockey, he would rarely be drawn out much. He didn’t mean to be evasive; he just wasn’t a talker by nature. As a child, he and his father would sit together in the garage working on a Meccano kit or a woodworking project; his mother and sister would be in the kitchen cooking or cleaning, chatting all the while. What his father liked most was to get away from that—he called it the hen party. “Silence is golden,” he told his son, and the worst thing was to talk a lot without having anything to say. He had impressed upon Tug the integrity of saying only what you mean, and the emptiness of words without action backing them up.
At Christmas there was a party at the hotel. Though no one wanted to admit it, this was the hardest season for people far from home: the weather, the food, the company, it all felt wrong. On their way to church, Etienne and his family stopped by to wish him a merry Christmas. They were all dressed in their finest, and Etienne’s wife and daughter were more beautiful than Tug had ever realized, their skin glowing against matching pale yellow dresses. Esmeralda, the girl, shyly stepped forward and handed him a doily she’d stitched. It reminded him of his mother, who also stitched and embroidered; when he told the family about this, they all nodded, evidently not surprised. It only made sense that women were the same everywhere.
Marcie had sent him a care package of thoughtful gifts. Foot powder, medicated lotion, propylene socks. And, of course, fruitcake. On a dim, crackling line he called her at her parents’ house, and in the background heard Christmas carols, cocktail chatter, her nephews yelling.
“I miss you,” Marcie said. “I wish you were here.”
“Me too,” Tug said. It was true when he said it, but by the time he got off the phone and went home to bed, it wasn’t. He longed for certain things: a hot shower, Marcie’s body, a hamburger. But longing was part of life here, and it made him happy to feel his lack of these things, as sharp as hunger. He was addicted to want. He didn’t know how this had happened, whether it was because of his childhood or some quirk of his personality or genes, but somehow he had become a person who needed to do without in order to appreciate what he had.
Between Christmas and Easter the situation worsened. Battles were raging to the west of Kigali; there was talk of full-blown civil war. On the streets of the city he saw gangs of teenage boys dressed in clownish outfits—the Interahamwe. They looked like garden-variety delinquents, driven to vandalism by boredom, but in their eyes was a frightening flatness. They didn’t react to his presence and seemed, in fact, not to see him at all.
Etienne shook his head. “It’s going to be bad,” he said.
“Why don’t you leave?” Tug asked.
Etienne again made that sweeping gesture with his hand, encompassing the complex, his family, their extended relatives, maybe even the country itself. Tug couldn’t tell if this was obstinacy or pride. “This is where we are,” he said.
Meanwhile, Marcie wanted to know how much longer he would be there. He thought he’d be back by August, he told her. “August,” she echoed, her voice tinny with distance, but in it he could hear all the unsaid, freighted things. Soon, he knew, she wanted to start having children. Their life was waiting for them just over the horizon, and she was in a hurry to get there. To think of her putting her dreams on hold was a weight on his heart.
It was not awkward, apparently, for him to tell Grace about this. He spoke as if these words, these emotions, belonged to another person.
“Certain facts are known,” he said. They had been reported, brought to light, so he didn’t need to relate them all over again, did he? The story had already been told. How the gunshots and mortar blasts increased as the army moved closer, how the Interahamwe responded, how the radio blared. Everybody knows this happened. Even in the camps people weren’t safe, and now they had to worry about bombings on top of starvation and disease. Those who could leave did, and there was an epochal movement to the south.
Tug stopped sleeping. The nights were bright with smoke. Then the president was killed, and the murders began in earnest. Children with hatchets. Blood in the streets. Relating this, his voice grew not hoarse with emotion but clipped, the words whittled to precise points. “There was a river,” he said. “You must have seen the pictures. It was piled with bodies. There were always screams in the distance, and sometimes they were close. There were dead children, and live children looking for their dead mothers.”
Within hours most of the white people were evacuated. That’s what happened: they left the country to its murders. He found himself in a hotel room in Nairobi, sitting cross-legged in the bathtub, and couldn’t remember how he had gotten there or how long he was supposed to stay.
In Nairobi people spoke of phone calls in which their friends said good-bye just before they were murdered. Some were calm and resigned; others screamed for help until the very last second of their lives. All of this via telephone. Technology existed to hear the murders, but not to stop them.
Tug shared a hotel room with two other aid workers, and they were cramped but had clean sheets and towels. They couldn’t stand this, or one another, and lacking an outlet for their rage they fought among themselves instead. Tug went down to the bar, and this was when he found the gorilla woman, and spent the night with her, listening without sympathy to the story of her life. Later, one of his roommates spent the night with her too, and said she had brought out a knife, wanting him to hold it to her throat. “She loves danger,” the guy said, raising his eyebrows in sexual implication.
Some people went to Goma to work in the refugee camps. That these refugees were murderers was discussed as little as possible; such were the ethics of aid. Then, when a cholera epidemic spread through the camps, the world finally began to pay attention. When the murderers died.
Tug and his roommates were sent to Entebbe to coordinate a field office. Grateful for work, they bent themselves to the task.
And Marcie, so relieved that he’d been evacuated, begged for him to come home.
“Who are these people?” she said angrily, meaning not the murderers but his supervisors at the NGO. “How can they expect you to do this, to stay on, just to fulfill your contract? This is sadistic. They need to let you come home.” She was crying into the phone.
Tug said nothing. Truthfully she didn’t feel real to him just then—just a voic
e on the phone, a crackle of sobs.
“I love you,” she said. “Come home to me.”
He stayed as long as he could in Entebbe, and four months later they were allowed back in. Of the spectacular green country he’d first seen, virtually no trace was left. What remained was a place that no one could fall in love with. Every farm had been left untended or destroyed. Kigali stank of rotten bodies, a riot of flies everywhere, and packs of dogs grown so aggressive and fat on human flesh that people were shooting them on sight. Here and there the first exiles were streaming into empty houses, and to see them sweeping the floors was surreal, an act of domestic normalcy patently inadequate to the task of cleaning up what had happened here.
At the complex, everything he’d left behind had been taken, not that there was much besides a few clothes and magazines. There were bullet holes in the wall.
Inside Etienne’s apartment there was no trace of anyone, just a bad smell he couldn’t locate the source of. He stood there sweating, thinking only that he would soon go back to work doling out medicine, salt and sugar solution, water-purification tablets. Then he heard a shuffling noise and braced himself, expecting one of the huge rats he’d seen poking through the piles of garbage. Instead, a bloody heap he had thought was trash shifted itself and came toward him. He took a backward step, then he heard his name.
It was the boy, Yozefu, and Tug was so happy that he embraced him. The boy tried to hug him back, but couldn’t. He smelled terrible, wrapped in torn, dirty blankets, and the light in the room was so dim that it wasn’t until they were outside in the sunny courtyard that Tug realized Yozefu had only one arm.
He had seen a doctor, and a family down the road had been feeding him occasional scraps, but his bandages were dirty and his skin red hot to the touch. Tug took him straight to the hospital for antibiotics. He was due at the camps but stayed on as a doctor cleaned the boy’s wounds and put him on an IV drip. As the fever came down, Yozefu told him what had happened.
His own uncle, his mother’s brother, had come in the night. He said he would hide them in his own house, but this was a lie to get his squad of three into their house. They killed his parents, then raped his sister. Yozefu didn’t use that word, just said they had stuck things into her, including a branch, a bottle. When he yelled at them to stop, they said, “Then you kill her.” Esmeralda looked at him, crying, begging. So he did. He used the machete they’d given him. Then his uncle took it back, hacked off his arm at the elbow, and left him to die.
He stayed in the house with the bodies of his family until another uncle found him and brought him to the doctor. But they had to move the medical facility because of the bombing and he was on his own again, so he went back to the house. In the time he’d been gone the bodies had been dragged into the courtyard and burned. He cleaned the house and courtyard and hid himself away.
He never once told Tug how he felt, or used a single emotional word. He spoke only of actions and facts.
Tug spent two days and nights at the hospital with Yozefu, but the boy had a septic infection that the doctors couldn’t stop. It was three in the morning when he died. He was eleven years old.
And that was it. Tug became a zombie, useless in the field, and his supervisors ordered him first to Nairobi, then to Entebbe, then to London, and finally he landed in Montreal. At the airport, Marcie crushed him in her arms. Once at home, he took a shower and changed into his clean old clothes. It was August and children were playing on the street outside, shouting and laughing. His sister and her children came to see him, as did various friends. At night, in bed, Marcie caressed his shoulder with the tips of her fingers, a touch that didn’t ask for anything, that only sought to assure him that he wasn’t alone.
He went to therapy, which was what you were supposed to do when something bad happened. Everybody said so. His therapist was a professorial type, bearded, cardigan wearing, with an office full of books. In the first session, Tug told him a little bit about what he’d seen, what brought him here, and they talked about control—what he could have done then, what he could do now. The therapist suggested he keep a journal, or write a book, or a song. He was a big believer in making things.
Tug didn’t mention Yozefu, but a couple of sessions later he told him about the bodies in the river, the wailing of babies. He explained how you treat a corpse infected with cholera, stuffing wadding down its throat and into its anus, then disinfecting it with chlorine and wrapping it in plastic, to keep the disease from spreading, whereas in Kigali the bodies had been left to putrefy in the streets, and only eventually got burned. He didn’t mean to be graphic or shocking. He was simply trying to make a point about the importance of dealing with the dead. But he found that he was drawn to concrete details, and after talking for forty-five minutes without interruption, he felt marginally better. Emptier. Afterward he went down the hall to the washroom and sat in a stall, not thinking about anything at all. He heard the door open and someone came in; from the professorial shoes, he knew it was the therapist. The man hurried into the stall next to him and threw up in the toilet.
Tug canceled the next appointment, wanting to give the therapist a respite from the terrible details; then he decided to cancel the next one too, and after that it was just easier not to go anymore.
Marcie encouraged him to stay home and relax—no one deserved a vacation more than he did, she said—but it made him feel fidgety, restless. She had holiday time coming up herself and wanted to go somewhere, maybe the beach, but he told her he didn’t want to travel. No planes, no highways, no vistas, no sensation of touching down somewhere new. He wanted the opposite of adrenaline, with none of the energy that had so animated his days in the field. He was most comfortable tiring himself out by walking around the city, appreciating the wide-open streets, the uncrowded avenues, the scentless air. Even the most hectic neighborhoods felt blanketed with calm.
The therapist had told him to write down his nightmares when he couldn’t sleep. So one day he was in a stationery store, browsing for a notebook, when the clerk and the manager got into an escalating argument about scheduling and overtime. Suddenly the clerk pushed a pen display off the counter, announced she was quitting, and stormed out. The pens scattered everywhere, rattling like pebbles. Tug spent the next ten minutes helping the manager clean up the mess and listening to her complain about her flighty help, and before he knew it he had a job.
He liked working at the paper store. There was always something that needed to be arranged, inventory to be checked, questions to answer, money to handle, all joyfully inessential tasks. If someone didn’t like their notebook, they could exchange it. It made him laugh to think that anyone would spend three hundred dollars on a pen. He learned more than he thought there was to know about acid-free paper. Eight hours would pass without his noticing, and by the time he walked home that was almost an entire day that he could live with.
Marcie didn’t really understand the stationery-store thing, but she was supportive. That was her nature. She wanted to be there, always offering hugs and solicitude. She tried to pay attention to him when he needed her and not to bother him when he didn’t. In other words, she was trying to do the impossible, and therefore she failed.
Upon his return, Tug took up drinking. It seemed like the best way to get through the hours between leaving the store and going to bed; otherwise, there was just too much time. Marcie stopped inviting friends over, for fear he would pass out at the table or throw up in the sink. Once, he took her sister’s hand, raised it to his mouth, and licked her fingers, an act for which he later had no explanation. In fact, he could hardly remember it happening. When they talked about the things he did while drinking, it seemed to him that they were discussing someone else entirely; he shared Marcie’s concern and disgust, and he shook his head right along with her, wishing that this man, this other Tug, would shape up and get his act together.
As things got worse, he stopped talking to Marcie without noticing that he had. Indeed he rarely thou
ght about her at all, even when she was in the same room. Late one night, he was watching hockey and drinking Canadian Club when she came downstairs to ask him to lower the volume. He didn’t ignore her on purpose; he just didn’t register her presence until she picked up the remote and turned off the television.
“I need to sleep,” she said, her voice trembling. “I have a huge meeting at eight. Can you please just turn it down?”
He kept looking at the television, wondering where the picture had gone. So Marcie positioned herself in front of him, still talking to him, bending over with her face close to his. She was in his line of sight, and he tried to nudge her aside, but he wasn’t very gentle and she fell over the coffee table, landing hard on the floor, rubbing her elbow and crying.
“I know you’re an asshole right now because of Africa,” she said. “But you’re also just being an asshole. Don’t you get it?”
He did. He knew this darkness inside him wasn’t Africa’s doing. It had always been there inside his deepest self, and all his time abroad had done was to wear off the veneer, revealing the truth at his core. Or maybe it had given him permission to acknowledge that most of life just didn’t matter.
Months passed, more of the same. In the winter he took to walking for hours after he got off work, letting the cold air pinch his nose and ears. He spent as little time as possible at home, hoping this might make things better for Marcie. He was standing in the park one evening watching some boys play hockey, the rink a pool of light in the darkness, their skates clashing and whistling in rhythm, when Yozefu came to him unbidden, unwanted. He saw the boy not as he’d been in the days before his death but as he’d looked when Tug first met him.
He saw him laughing as he kicked the banana-leaf puck around the dusty courtyard, yelling, “He shoots, he scores!”