Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  “Eight, named Annie. She’s staying with the dad right now. If Pip finishes the research, she can publish. Get a better job.”

  “Hey, I forgot. When’s she flying out?”

  A beat of time passed before Yoko answered. “It turns out all the flights leaving the country this week were booked. But she’s got a reservation for next Tuesday.”

  Max considered the way Yoko had said that. She asked, “Were all the flights into the country booked?”

  “No, they were empty.” Yoko opened the door to Pip’s cabin and rather busily stepped away from Max to get herself a bowl of soup.

  Max sat down next to Mutara, thinking about this while she awkwardly tried to saw open a box of tofu with a knife, her left hand cradled against her in the sling.

  Mutara gently took the box from her, cut it open and put it back in front of her. He asked, “Excuse me, but has it truth that the Madonna likes women?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Women. The Madonna, she likes them? I hear this and always wonder.”

  “Oh.” She understood abruptly. “Oh, you mean the singer. Yes, I guess that’s the rumor.”

  He shook his head. “Beautiful woman.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” The others were busy debating whether to save the last few bottles of beer for Christmas dinner or drink them now. “Can you tell me about the Kutu?”

  Mutara turned away from her to rub at a smudge on his spoon with his napkin, considering her request. “What is it you are wishing to know?”

  “Anything, everything.”

  He was silent for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. When he spoke, his voice was much quieter. “The Kutu, they like things of the dead, like to hold them. Play with their toys, put on their clothes.” His words came out quickly as though they’d been in him for a while, waiting to get out.

  “Why?”

  “They think this way they have power of the dead person. Their favorite is, ahh, how you say? Une mariée? A woman who joins with a man.”

  Max cocked her head. “A wife? A bride?”

  “Ahh yes. A bride.” He repeated the word to make sure he remembered it. “Brides of Affonso, this is what they call themselves.”

  “Who’s Affonso?”

  “Long ago Affonso is the last true king of Kongo, back when the country is powerful, before the whites start wanting slaves. The Kutu love Affonso and the Kongo back then.” He actually whispered now. “It is said the Kutu hate Rwanda, you know, for the invasion.” He spoke these words with weight.

  Unsure of which part of this information to ask about first, she said, “More than everyone else they hate?”

  Before he could respond, Yoko interrupted. “It’s just a rumor.”

  The rest of the room was silent in a charged way. Max glanced. Yoko and Dubois were watching Mutara with narrowed eyes. Pip was looking down at her napkin, folding it into squares. The napkin wasn’t a face, so Max studied it, watching it get folded into smaller and smaller squares.

  “There are plenty of rumors,” Yoko said. “You can’t look to the Kutu for accurate predictions of what they’ll do next, attack Rwanda or Uganda. They want to freak the crap out of as many people as possible. That way everyone’s too scared to fight them. Rumors work even better for them than killing people.”

  Mutara was rubbing his napkin against the spoon, busy with the dirty spot. His posture turned away. She realized he’d been told not to tell her this.

  Yoko continued, “During every war in Africa, it seems someone somewhere starts a rumor. People repeat it and repeat it until it becomes fact. Radio Sidewalk reaches far more listeners than any actual radio broadcast.”

  “You remember the doctors who disappear a few weeks ago in the Congo?” asked Dubois. “There is a detail we are not telling you. When the soldiers of the UN find the jeep of the doctors, there is a Kutu in the back selling meat.”

  At this word, Pip stood up and went to the fridge. No one objected at the sound of her popping open one of the last of the beers. They all listened to her take a long swallow.

  Max thought this through. “Meat?” She felt ever since she entered this country all she did was ask questions, unable to make the associations everyone else seemed to consider obvious.

  Yoko cleared her throat. She wasn’t pleased at the turn the conversation had taken. “The rumors abound. There’s no one central story, but hundreds of variations for each incident. That’s why I don’t believe them. In the version I heard, the boy in the jeep was laughing and chewing on what the soldiers assumed at first was a gorilla’s foot.”

  Max noticed no one was touching the soup. Yoko and Dubois had both put down their spoons, placed their hands on the table. She thought she could look at thousands of hands and be able to pick out theirs, they were so familiar. She felt disoriented, as though she’d been here on these mountains for months instead of nine days.

  Then Max said, “Oh.” For a moment, she couldn’t think of the word. “Jesus, you don’t mean . . . ” Autotrophism, saprophagous? “Come on, no one still does that.” She felt a visceral upward shrinking of her flesh, a pursing of her nether regions. That image of her aunt chasing her, grabbing her, wanting to rip her flesh off her bones.

  “Ha,” said Dubois, expelling disgust through her teeth. “Do not be so naive. Jeffrey Dahmer was but a few years ago. Humans always have this possibility inside of them. It never goes away.”

  There are many famous people rumored to be aspie: Bill Gates, Nicholas Tesla, Alan Turing. Jeffrey Dahmer was one of them. The theory went he was confused about how to give affection, wanting someone he liked permanently still before he could sit nearby. After the first murder or two, he came up with his famous twist on the act of love. Perhaps he thought it might diminish his loneliness, for there would be two of them inside his skin, permanently. When Max first heard of what he’d done, she remembered that sexual reproduction had evolved billions of years ago from a microbe attempting to consume a similar microbe and botching it, the two nuclei fusing instead: cannibalizer and cannibalized. Jeffrey’s actions harkened back to the very roots of love.

  Her mom had reacted to the news stories of Dahmer with fascinated disgust. Max had just felt tired, so tired. Had slept ten hours or more each night for the weeks Jeffrey was on the news.

  Dahmer had begun to appear in her nightmares instead of her aunt, his canny sideways glance. Herself frozen in horror. He stepped forward in her aunt’s oversized dress, knife in hand.

  At night, for at least a year, her nightmares had been intense.

  Yoko said, “François Kutu is not from a tribe with a tradition of such things. He could just be spreading these stories, trying to keep the international peacekeepers away. He might be betting the UN council wouldn’t want the scandal that would result if any of the soldiers lent to them got eaten.”

  “Or maybe it is true.” Dubois said quietly, “Once you eat a gorilla, how difficult is it to eat a human?”

  Max still stared at their hands. Yoko’s lay on the table, clasped into fists, the knuckles a trifle white. Dubois’ were loose and open palmed. Mutara was tracing the scar on his palm. She remembered Asante’s hands again—the fingers, the knuckles, the nails. The main difference was the skin was darker than Mutara’s.

  Behind them, Pip’s hands pressed the cold beer against her forehead and rolled it back and forth.

  SEVENTEEN

  December 28, 1899

  At dawn, walking back from spending the night in Otombe’s hunting perch, Jeremy discovered the men had begun to build their beds into the trees in the hope of staying above the lions’ reach during the night. Everywhere he looked in camp, there were men hanging from branches, wielding hammers, and nailing boards together. On top of the water tower stood seven bickering men, each attempting to claim enough room on which to sleep.

  Looking up at the tower, Jeremy felt a sudden sense of vertigo and placed his hand on a tent wall for balance. Three nights straight he had spent w
aiting for the man-eaters, holding tightly to his rifle, the little sleep he had gotten fractured and uneasy. His eyes felt so very dry.

  We are being stalked by cats, the thought struck him, so we take to the trees like birds.

  The progress of the railroad was already two days behind schedule, falling further behind every hour. A quarter of the men were down with malaria. Of those who still retained a healthy constitution, one in five were posted as lookouts for the lions while the others worked. And every moment they were free from work—or at any time that Jeremy turned his attention away—the men desperately wove the bomas higher and thicker, or hammered more beds into trees, taking any boards or nails they needed from the railroad. Whenever he caught them at this, they kept their gaze focused on their work. No one looked at him, no one asked his permission for these materials.

  Alan and Jeremy sat in front of the tent, the table between them spread with cucumber sandwiches and tea. The WaKikiyu woman Singh had hired carried a bowl of sugar toward them, her robe rustling. Like Otombe, she wore a toga-style skin knotted over one shoulder, covering her chest and body down to her mid-thighs. Her robe however had had the goat hair scraped off it, making it seem more like cloth, more like a civilized—if inadequate—dress. Round her neck hung long strings of white shells and her head was shaved bald except for a tuft in the back.

  “Ahh,” said Alan. “The sugar. Good.” As she walked away, his eyes trailed her.

  Following Alan’s gaze, Jeremy saw, without the fur on it, the robe hugged her closely, affording the men in camp a better guess at her body.

  “So bony.” Alan said and spooned some sugar into his cup.

  Wanting to forestall Alan from pursuing this subject, Jeremy asked the question he had been mulling over. “Why is it the Indians stay?”

  The doctor turned to him, his eyebrows raised. “Stay?”

  “Yes. Working for the railroad does seem rather brutal from their perspective. The malaria, the heat, the hard labor, the low pay, and now these man-eating beasts. Frankly, I wonder why they do not just head back home.”

  Alan busied himself biting into his sandwich, but could not hide his amusement. “My dear man, how would India be any different?” He looked up at the sky for a moment, chewing. “Did you hear about Taylor?”

  “Taylor?” Over Alan’s shoulder Jeremy could see the workers working on the boma near them, weaving more branches through it.

  “The new Englishman, Rupert Taylor. He was to take over the coordination of the second more intensive land survey.”

  Jeremy nodded, sipping the hot tea. He was on his third cup. He hoped it would keep him awake for tonight’s watch. “Haven’t met him yet.”

  “Well, you won’t now. This afternoon, I chatted with the conductor of the supply train. Evidently Taylor brought his wife and children along for a brief vacation here, before his family headed back to England. They were camped at Voi. What’s that, fifteen miles back?”

  “Oh, I think twenty at least.”

  “Last night, his wife, getting up to check on one of their children, who had a fever, requested that Taylor check on a noise outside. He stepped out, saw nothing, and called to the askari keeping watch ten paces away. The man also spied nothing. Reassured, the family fell back to sleep, Taylor and wife sleeping together in their cot. Later, she was woken by a sound she thought was her child breathing thickly from his sickness. Sitting up, she noticed her husband was gone. She stepped outside to find his corpse on the ground, not a mark on him. As she leaned over to touch his face, she felt a presence. A lion stood a pace away, looming over her. She screamed and the startled askari shot into the air. The lion bolted.

  “The people in camp dragged Taylor’s body into the tent. All twelve people ended up huddled in that single tent, listening to the lions circling outside, sighing with hunger. The askari had to keep firing at random through the walls to keep the animals from claiming the body.”

  “Oh my lord, the poor children,” Jeremy said.

  Alan nodded, “In this heat, the body will never make it home, has to be buried here in British East Africa. They have lost their father in more than one way.”

  Whereas the coolies each seemed to have several lion stories by this point—where they had been standing when the lion walked into camp, or how they had been only one tent over from where the creatures had taken their last victim—this was the first one Jeremy had heard Alan tell. His voice had real pain in it, for the woman and her children.

  It was the first one to involve Europeans.

  Otombe let his cloak drop to the ground and stood there, waiting for Jeremy to get undressed before he stepped into the river. “This bathing in the water, it is a time to prepare yourself for the hunt.”

  “What do you mean?” Jeremy directed his eyes down at the buttons of his shirt. Normally, he believed it polite to look at a man when he talked, but not now. He simply hurried to strip. Struck with the impropriety of both his front and back, he turned to the side and hunched slightly. His fingers were clumsy from fatigue. He worked hard to pretend that the askaris who watched the river a few paces away did not exist.

  “Men in my tribe, even if it is only with a wet cloth, cleanse ourselves before we hunt. Let our thoughts fall away, concentrate on the animal’s mind.”

  “Concentrate on its mind?” Surprised, Jeremy glanced up. Flustered with what he saw, he looked right back down. The spareness of Otombe’s body reminded him of his engineering instruments, everything of a purpose. He wondered what the man looked like when there was not famine, what he acted like when there were not man-eating predators around. Did he talk more, did he laugh easily?

  “Think like the lions. The more we can do that—see what they see, smell what they smell—the better we will know where these lions will hunt next. The better we will be at killing them.”

  Nodding, Jeremy dropped his last wool sock onto his pile of discarded clothing and quickly waded into the river. In spite of his nudity, he felt the pleasure of the water this time. The humidity today had been so intense it had seemed at times hard to breathe. A headache had pulsed up the back of his head, sounds seemed close, colors bright. He pushed deep into the river, until he stood up to his neck in water, his body concealed. There he stilled, his eyes closed, concentrating on the coolness, the lack of sweat-dampened scratchy clothing. In front of the men, all day, he’d had to hold up his rifle, try to look tough. The water was such a relief. He let his head roll back, closing his eyes. With his ears underwater, all sound was gone except for the rasp of his breathing and the distant underwater clink of a pebble. He felt he could let his feet float up, his whole body letting go, falling asleep on the bed of this river even as he drifted quietly away.

  When he climbed out, he dried off and pulled on all his clothing except for the spine protector. He simply felt too much fatigue to deal with untangling its elastic shoulder bands. Instead, he left the device lying in the grass like some discarded snakeskin. He imagined it would not take long for mold to grow on it in this monsoon season, the rain-soaked flannel absorbing the red of the dirt. A seedling or two of grass would take hold, a colony of mice nesting underneath, the proud label of the Culpepper Mills fading. Gradually, it would become one with this land.

  Jeremy had ordered the goats chained up to the railroad sleeper again, twenty feet from where the satchel still hung from its bush. For their roost, Otombe chose a tree a little further from the goats than last time, downwind perhaps sixty feet. He wanted to ensure the lions would catch no hint of the presence of the men. Taking his seat on their hammered-in bench high in the tree, Jeremy felt uneasy without a boma around him, even with his rifle cradled in his arms. He sat a few inches closer to Otombe than he had the previous night. Though the man did not hold a gun, Jeremy felt safer this way.

  The sun hung for a single moment above the rim of the forest, then disappeared. Somewhere far to the west came the first rumble from a lion.

  Jeremy said quietly, “They killed another p
erson last night. Not just the man in camp, but also a railroad surveyor twenty miles away.”

  “Twenty miles?” Otombe raised his eyebrows.

  Jeremy nodded.

  The hunter looked in the direction of the last roar, sitting very still. For a moment, it seemed he would not respond. When he spoke, it was in a whisper. “It is unusual, but there are two lions. Not much meat on a man once you subtract bones, entrails, and head. Each lion requires thirty to forty pounds of meat a night. If they can, they will kill more than once.”

  Jeremy asked, “But why would they travel so far to find another? There are many men in camp, people in villages all along the way from here to there. Why would they walk twenty miles to eat a surveyor?” Searching Otombe’s face for the answer, he realized a few days ago he did not know these wide cheekbones, these dark eyes. Now, up in this tree, the face of this man seemed as familiar as someone he had grown up with. And at night, in the darkness, Jeremy was hardly conscious anymore of the color of his skin, only that Otombe was a person he trusted.

  “This is why we must learn to think like lions. Especially with these two. They are different. If we do not think like them, become them, we will never catch them.”

  Through the trees came the sound of jerry cans being clanked together in camp a mile away. They heard the single report of a gun. Jeremy caught his breath, waiting for more shots, for screaming, but all was silent. After a few moments, he figured a guard, jumpy from the lions’ roaring, had shot his gun off at some unexpected movement or sound. Before the long night had ended, they would hear eight more shots issued at random, never any commotion afterward. In the morning, he would learn one of the askaris had been hit in the arm by gunfire when he approached a guard for his turn at watch.

  “Unless your shot is sure,” Otombe warned, “do not use your gun. We cannot let the lions know we are hiding up in trees waiting for them. They are smart. They will learn quickly. After they know where we are, they will start to hunt us.”

  Another lion answered, seeming closer than before, although perhaps that was Jeremy’s imagination. It was now completely dark.