Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  As a child, she panicked when anyone got too close—the heavy flesh, a huffing presence overwhelming her. She’d wallop at the person with her fists. Wide-eyed panic.

  She didn’t talk at all until she was four, before that only squealed in inarticulate rage or laughter. Then in August just after her fourth birthday, she said her first words, strung together a whole sentence. “Mom smells nice.” She was looking away of course, at the ground. Her mom whooped and grabbed her in a hug. Max flailed. There was a muffled crack. Her mom grabbing her nose, the blood spurting.

  They’d taught each other compromise. The way they shared closeness was by sitting side by side on the couch, a foot of distance between them, hugging the other person’s empty winter coat. Her mom’s coat was corduroy and smelled like her: a sort of salty maple syrup. Max would press her face into it. She murmured, “Love love love.”

  And so her mom learned to sit beside her only child, not touching her or looking her in the eye. She tried very hard. However, sometimes she got a little hunched, holding her daughter’s parka, hiding her face in the folds. Sometimes sitting there, she was silent for long enough that even Max would understand, get up and walk fast from the room.

  “Look Mom, so far as I know this Rwandan expedition is the only one out there. Ethnobotany is dead. It’s either this or I’m going to end up working for the fragrance industry. You want me to spend my life finding botanical sources for room deodorizers?” What she looked at was her mom’s elbow. She worked to memorize the way the skin at the elbow—when the arm was held straight—folded into a sort of boneless nose. In Rwanda she might need to replay this image. “This is a heart med. It’ll save lives.”

  Her father. Mostly what she remembered was that he had sat peacefully—so fundamentally different from every other human she knew—that she could ease her way into his lap. He didn’t move much, certainly not unexpectedly, didn’t seem to feel the need to talk. Never patted her on the back. Content to just hum to himself, something quiet and repeated, predictable, lost in his own thoughts. The research said her differences were probably inherited, popping up in the family for generations. It was possible he’d been like her, a trifle alien on this planet. For whatever reason, she could sprawl across him, relaxed, as she couldn’t with other people. She used to rub the wood beads he wore round his neck. They were old and smooth to the touch. If she scratched at one with her nail and sniffed, she could catch the slightest scent of a spicy sweetness like cinnamon. She never asked to wear the beads; at that age she couldn’t imagine the necklace could come off of him. That it could exist anywhere apart from his dark skin.

  Her mom sat down at the computer. She didn’t flinch from anything, not anymore. She was worn down as a rock pulled from the sea. All weaknesses battered away. “I don’t like the way you described these men.” She began to type. “Let’s see what’s going on here. Uganda, did you say?”

  “Rwanda.”

  Her mom was inexact, emotional, no head for details. But when Max was young, she’d saved her: fighting with the school to get the best help and working with Max at home, sheer persistent effort. Max had told her that on six different occasions. Speaking in her flat voice. “Without you,” Max had said, “I would have shot myself with Grampie’s 45.”

  (Especially in high school she’d thought about the gun a lot. Loved the smell of its gun oil. The barrel tasted pretty good too. On her tongue it was unmoving.)

  The first time she’d said this, her mom had reacted a bit like an aspie, turned her gaze away, face stiff. Then she’d locked herself in the bathroom.

  Now her mom was clicking through web pages, head tilted back to see through her bifocals, scanning the words. Research was how she’d gotten assistance for Max in school, found treatments, an appropriate diet and meds. She put together the treatment plan herself. But right now she didn’t have much time. The plane left tomorrow, the lab equipment was already packed.

  Normally each morning at 6:58, Max would sit down in her cobalt chair at her cobalt kitchen table to take her first bite of oatmeal. She appreciated cobalt, the way it twinkled cool in the back of her eyes. She didn’t add brown sugar or raisins to the oatmeal because they would taint the texture and color.

  Tomorrow morning at 6:58 she would be sitting in an airplane—the only food offered: a tray of highly adulterated substances. She would be flying off to another continent for an undetermined amount of time, to live with strangers. Everything about this unsettled her, especially the speed with which it was happening. Still Roswell and Stevens had insisted on how quickly corporate espionage could outflank their lead. If that happened, she would spend her life researching deodorizers.

  She noticed she was rocking slightly. She stopped. Inhaled, taking her time, filling her lungs from the bottom up, calming her body. In her life, she’d gone through a lot. She knew well how much she could deal with.

  She started packing. Ten pairs of identical gray stretch pants, cotton and soft. Ten pairs identical gray T-shirts, form-fitting. It wasn’t that she wished to reveal her body. No, if she could, she would erase her physical self from the vision of others entirely. Create some sort of stick-figure representation, a generic avatar holding a plant and a microscope. She preferred gray because it was the most unobtrusive. A cloudy haze, a fog. Because she wore the same near-uniform day after day, over time it stopped bothering her. Took up no part of her mind. The material was stretchy so the wind couldn’t brush it against her skin, jarring her. When she was a child, her mom had to wash new clothes twenty times before Max would pull them on. As an adult, Max discovered eBay. Secondhand clothing came pre-softened. She just had to wash the scent of the previous owner out, pack it in a drawer with some fresh rosemary for two weeks and it was ready. In an essential way it ceased to exist.

  Her mom was reading, intent. “There’s a travel advisory for the northwest corner of Rwanda. Where are you going to be?”

  “The closest town is Gisenyi. I’ll be in the national park near there.”

  The clacking of keys.

  When people met Max, she passed as normal, at least at first. More than passed. In Maine, she was exotic. Men’s heads tended to track her on the street, until at times she worried she might be dressed or moving inappropriately. Even women refocused as she walked by, their bodies going still.

  Of course once the men or women actually interacted with her, talked with her, their reaction changed. The flatness of her voice, the way she didn’t look at them. The subtle social signals she missed. After a while the men stopped leaning in as close, their voices got less warm and confiding. It took differing amounts of time, depending on how much each had hoped. The women caught on more quickly. Their words would drag a bit as they puzzled it out. Then they’d spot the final clue. There’d be this pause. A silent adjustment.

  Each year she got a little better at her imitation. Each year it took longer for strangers to figure out she was different. She found it easier, if she was going to have any sustained interaction with a person, to announce her difference in the same sentence as her name. It cut down on misunderstandings.

  In high school, she spent a lot of her spare time reading biographies about early botanical researchers living among tribes, Schultes among the Kiowa, Spruce among the Yanomami. Working not to offend, the researchers sipped from a gourd of fermented saliva or tried to sit like the natives did, crouched on their heels for hours at a time. She pictured their struggles at mastering the social rules. She would flip to the pictures and stare at the photos of the white man wearing a grass skirt next to diminutive tribal folk. She was like them, a stranger in costume working to fit in.

  She’d gone into ethnobotany because of these biographies.

  “Gisenyi? I think that’s in the area with the travel advisory,” said her mom. “Did they mention there was trouble there?”

  “Roswell and Stevens? No, they didn’t.”

  Her mom was clicking through the BBC’s archives. “I don’t trust them.”

>   Max packed her oatmeal and rice. She’d be able to get bananas there. Pale food calmed her. Pale food, only one ingredient, not even salt added.

  “Well, it says here there’s been some recent violence. Just across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. People attacked. A few deaths.” Her mother peered closer at a photo, confused, then jerked back. “Jesus. How can they print pictures like that?” She held a palm against her chest. “OK, OK. Let me find a map.”

  Max counted the aseptic boxes of tofu. She didn’t know how many weeks she’d be gone, how long it would take to find the vine. She could always have more tofu sent. The keyboard clicking in the background.

  “Here we go,” said her mom, peering at the map she’d found. “Your research station is in the Virunga mountains? Just north of Gisenyi?

  Max nodded.

  “Right. You’re basically in the Congo.”

  Max stepped forward, surveyed the map, then the inset box about scale. “No, I’ll be inside Rwanda’s borders by 3.5 miles.”

  “That’s what I said. Basically in the Congo.”

  “What were the incidences?”

  “The articles don’t say much. Nothing at all in the American press. The BBC has a few paragraphs. The Congo was recently in some civil war. There are UN soldiers stationed there now, but the peace is pretty fragile. There have been several separate attacks. They seem to be primarily directed against whites who live in the area.”

  On the map, Rwanda was such a tiny country. The Virunga mountains wedged in the corner under the looming monolith of the Congo.

  “Any of these attacks in Rwanda itself?” Max asked.

  “Not that I could find. But the embassy is clearly worried.”

  Her mom pushed back from the computer, staring at the screen. She was gnawing on a dry piece of skin on her thumb. When she was younger, working to raise Max on her own, she used to rip whole cuticles off. Ragged wounds along each fingernail. “The men you met with—” she trailed off.

  “Roswell and Stevens. The company’s called Panoply.”

  “They worry about legal stuff, don’t they?”

  “These days, what company doesn’t?”

  She tugged on the piece of skin with her teeth, her voice a bit muffled. “You know what I think? If the violence moves over the border, the two of them don’t want to get sued for sending someone who’s white into a situation where their skin color could put them in danger.”

  She turned toward her daughter. Max kept her eyes on the map.

  “They chose you because they think in Rwanda you’re going to blend in.”

  Neither of them commented on the likelihood of that.

  FIVE

  Near the Tsavo River, British East Africa

  December 16, 1899

  On the morning of his first hunt, when Jeremy pushed through the flap of his tent, a N’derobbo man stood outside ready to be his guide. Ungan Singh, Jeremy’s head jemadar, had said he would arrange to hire all the men necessary for the sport. Here, Jeremy was led to understand, he would not hunt in the manner he was accustomed to, just whistling up a dog and slinging a gun over his shoulder to wander off into the forest. In Africa, whole parties accompanied each hunter: guides, trackers, gun boys, and bearers.

  Jeremy did not know how long the N’derobbo had been waiting, but the tribesman stood there, balanced like a stork on one leg, leaning on his spear, the other foot pressed into the side of his knee, the stance of an African hunter. He might have been there for hours, standing with as much grace as though his goat-fur toga and shell necklace were the couture of a king. If Jeremy had to dress that way, his less wiry body would appear not nearly as decorous and he would never be able to arrange the robe’s folds as elegantly nor be able to stand so still on one leg.

  Instead of being a N’derobbo, Jeremy was referred to by the Indians as “Pukka Sahib.” Straightening up outside of the tent flap, he felt—in comparison to this man’s primitive clothing—uncomfortably cognizant of his crisply laundered safari suit and fine riding boots, his wide hat and gleaming gun belt. He didn’t wish to appear conceited. Having mastered a few phrases of Swahili, he nodded, “Jambo, rafiki.”

  “Morning,” the N’derobbo answered in a clear British accent, looking him straight in the eye, his gaze not wandering down to Jeremy’s accessories of power. This was the manner in which the Africans tended to look at him. Unlike the Indians, they did not survey his clothes or guns, but searched his face instead for its strengths and weaknesses.

  “I’m Otombe,” the man said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  The hunting party broke out of the underbrush onto the savannah. After all the claustrophobic nyika, the vast stretch of the plain took a moment to adjust to, a shifting inside the mind as much as in the eye. The immense vista reminded Jeremy of the sea, the grass rolling in waves out to the horizon. Hunting here could not be the same as it was in Maine, a matter of stealth and cunning. Here, there were no forest paths to crouch beside in ambush, no trees to hide behind. In this thick grass, there could be no prints visible to trail. No, out on this plain, locating any prey must be a simple matter of wandering along until you spotted one, probably at a range of at least half a mile, and then shooting the creature down like target practice. Really, he was rather disappointed, surprised so many experts had made such a fuss over this pursuit in Africa. Assuming there was no further need to pay attention, that the trotting N’derobbo would guide the search, he loosened the reins, giving Patsy her head as he fell to daydreaming.

  Preston, in one of his final letters, had warned him not to bring any animals with him from America. There was the rather exorbitant expense of the transport on a ship, especially a creature as large as a horse. Few animals adjusted gracefully to the difference in climate and, those that did, had to survive all the diseases of the tropics. However, if Jeremy had of one symbol of his adulthood, it was Patsy. Hers were the saddlebags he had packed to attend Rensselaer. She was the horse he had ridden to graduation, the one he had taken to his first job, as well as to pick up the mail on the day the job offer from Preston came. Although he’d said good-bye to everything else from his previous life in Maine, including his family, he was unable to imagine his future without her.

  He’d had to pay dearly for a horse stall on the ship to be built and enough provisions for her to be stored, had to endure the captain grumbling. Still he judged it worth it. Patsy was only eight and had always exhibited a healthy constitution. Jeremy felt confident she would last many years here.

  Among her many strengths, she was a good hunting horse, never spooking at a shot and when he jumped off to retrieve a kill, she drop-reined like a statue. Back in Maine, they had made a competent team, potted a fair number of animals: deer, fox, hare, and once a wolverine. These were the largest creatures one could find in the area because every farmer had a gun and the fervent desire to civilize the wilderness for both crops and people. Long before he had been born, the wolves had been exterminated, as well as almost all the bears. He had not heard tell of a moose in years.

  Lazy from the heat, swaying in the saddle, he glanced back to see how far they’d come. Ten paces behind the last of his hunting party, two unfamiliar natives trotted along with spears the length of a man. They jogged patiently, utterly silent. The savannah had been deserted in every direction last time he’d looked. Startled by the appearance of the Africans as well as by the span of their spears, he remembered his mother predicting that the savages would be bloodthirsty. She had repeated this belief several times, maintaining that since the natives concentrated on the blood sport of hunting for the daily procurement of their food, instead of farming, the habit of violence must run in their blood. They would not be able to help it. While she spoke, his mother held up one thin finger, which looked even paler than it was from all the black crepe she wore.

  Remember, she promised, no matter how they appear at the beginning, you will see that those people are bloodied and violent, their true natures revealed. D
o not trust them.

  Unnerved, Jeremy asked Otombe, “Where did the two behind us come from?”

  Otombe did not glance back at the hunters, his eyes continuing to study the rolling grass in front of them, in the manner with which a fisherman might examine the sea. “Always people around. Masai, Ogiek, WaKikuyu.”

  Jeremy searched the horizon, saw no one else for miles. How could a person hide out here? There was not a tree or big rock in sight. “Why do they follow?”

  A short man, spare and tendoned as an antelope, Otombe’s breath was not ragged even though he had been loping steadily along beside the horse for an hour since they had left camp. His goat-fur toga draped elegantly, leaving both arms bare but covering the torso down to the upper thighs like a furry dress, the bottom swaying back and forth as he ran. Regarding him from the side like this, Jeremy realized that the flapping item he glimpsed occasionally under the edge of the toga was not a loincloth or the end of a purse. Mortified, Jeremy jerked his eyes up. How was one supposed to maintain a proper decorum here if the people did not dress correctly?

  “Where a white hunter is, soon there’ll be meat,” said Otombe. “They’re hungry.”

  Jeremy tried to keep his gaze fixed on the horizon or on the hunter’s face, but in the heat and boredom of the ride, he sometimes found his eyes drifted back down. Of course, he thought, the man must be cooler that way than if his clothing consisted of leather boots, woolen knee socks, linen underclothes, shorts, belt, spine protector, shirt, and thick hat. But, after all, a native could afford to wear less. Modern science knew that exposure to the tropical sun’s radiation could waste a white man away—especially if the exposure was to the critical regions of head or spine. Thus the spine protector had been invented, a thick piece of flannel cloth running the length of the back held in place by rubberized straps over the shoulders. He had been assured by Dr. Thornton, the camp physician, that it would be close to suicide to remove his hat or spine protector for any length of time while outside, unless in complete shade. The corollary of all his protective clothing was that perspiration occasionally ran into his eyes, stinging.