by Greg Herren
St. Cecelia’s had girls who went home and girls who lived at the school. Faye wasn’t sure why some girls lived there and the rest of them did not, but she thought maybe it would be nice to live there, with all the other girls and the nuns. Maybe it would be different from her grandparents’ house. She hoped it would be. She hoped it would be more like home. Or at least different. She was ready to leave her grandparents’ house now. She was ready to go someplace else.
The school year had gone quickly. Faye hadn’t fallen behind like the doctor had said; in fact, she was recommended to skip a grade. She’d had her First Holy Communion and had stood at the altar rail with the other girls in her white frilly dress and thin white veil. Her grandmother had given her a rosary with pearly beads and a little white Missal as a present and her grandfather had taken her picture and she had watched him develop it in the darkroom after.
She had spent part of the summer at a camp for Catholic girls and she had made things and gone hiking and caught frogs. In the mornings there was Mass and then there was swimming and lunch and activities in the afternoon. Faye had made some friends, including a girl, Rosario, who would be in her new grade at St. Cecelia’s in September. Rosario didn’t have a father, either, although her father wasn’t dead. She just didn’t know who he was. Rosario lived with her grandparents, too, because, she said, her mother was “sick on the drugs” and she couldn’t take care of Rosario anymore.
Faye was looking forward to seeing Rosario again. Now it was late August and Faye had been back at her grandparents’ house for more than two weeks. It was another week before school would start again. It was hot in her little room, which used to be her father’s room when he was a child, and the fan just whirled around, but didn’t make anything cooler.
Sometimes Faye would go downstairs and lie on the floor in the kitchen because the linoleum was cool and her grandmother kept everything so clean, she didn’t mind being on the floor. She would take the pillow from her rocking chair and put it under her head and sleep there until it got light.
This time when she went downstairs, she stopped outside the darkroom door. She stood still for a minute. She could hear the black fan whirring inside. She could imagine the photographs moving slightly on the clothesline. She could imagine the cut-up women in the pictures, too.
Faye went into the kitchen and put her pillow on a chair. Then she went back to the darkroom and went inside.
14.
The story in Congo was different from anything else Faye had done. The place was hot and steamy and breathtakingly beautiful. That was the text. The subtext was like all subtexts—something totally different. The war that wasn’t a war in Congo was an unending nightmare from which no one could awaken, least of all the women whose lives Faye had come to chronicle. Everything had been shunted off to East Congo, so that people could act like nothing was happening in the rest of the country.
Faye had never seen things quite as terrible as what she saw in Congo and she had to find ways to make the story new, to make a war-weary readership care about the women and girls who were being gang-raped and eviscerated on their way to get water or wood for fire or just right in their own homes, as they lay sleeping. Faye was keeping notebooks again—this was no place for an iPad or a cell phone vlog. As soon as she got there, she knew there was another book here. A big book. An important book. Because Faye knew that even though people didn’t really care what happened to these women, they’d still want to pore over their suffering and examine every hideous detail. She could see them turning her photographs this way and that to see every bit of the horror and still feeling just a little disappointed that they couldn’t see more.
It was just like when she had taken those photographs of the rig that spilled the steel rods back in New York. Everyone wanted to see the decapitated driver, blood and spinal fluid spurting from the place where his head should be, jagged bits of bone and spine and strings of sinew all splayed out like rebar twisted in cement when a building is demolished. Everyone wanted to see the guy screaming, pinned to the seat of his car with the steel pipe, his mouth open in one continuous howl as he tried to pull himself free. Or the dogs, flattened next to their owner, intestines protruding from one, brains spilled out from another. Everyone wanted to see mayhem juxtaposed with the most tranquil of settings. A simple weekday dog walk turned into carnage. That’s all there was in Congo—the simple walk turned into carnage, set against the most postcard-beautiful background.
Faye had met with a woman, Martine, in Kinshasa. Martine worked for the NGO Women for Women and Faye had talked to her on the phone while she was still in New York, setting up the itinerary for her trip. Martine was very dark-skinned and slight, but elegant—she seemed much taller and more imposing than her actual height implied. The scarf wound around her head was a muted blue fabric with black flowers outlined in it. Her skirt, which fell almost to her ankles, was of the same material and she wore a white blouse that looked like a T-shirt, but was a thin linen with white embroidery. She wore no jewelry. Martine told Faye to remove her earrings, watch, and the thin silver bracelets she wore on her left wrist.
“They will tear the earrings from your ears, should they catch you,” Martine said, almost matter-of-factly, as if it were a foregone conclusion that Faye would be ambushed and injured. “They do that. And the watch and the bracelets they will notice first. Just put them away. You don’t need to know the time here, anyway. It is all the same hour.”
Martine had traveled with Faye to eastern Congo, which was, Martine said, the rape capital of the world. “We give out numbers, but we can’t really count. On one weekend, 16,000 women were raped. So many of these women have been raped more than once. By the time they come to us, it is all over for them, they believe. So much has happened. They feel destroyed, like ghosts, yet still drawing breath.”
Faye and Martine had gone to South Kivu province, then to a rural refugee center outside Bukavu, where rape victims were cared for by Catholic nuns and medical personnel from Doctors Without Borders. The building was low and flat and spread out over a wide space that was lush and green. A low-hanging mist furled around the center and in the near distance Faye could see the hills of Rwanda rolling out over the horizon. Below them lay Lake Kivu. It was an incredibly beautiful landscape. If only you didn’t know what lay beneath as well as beyond, for the legacy of the Rwandan genocide was what had bled over into the DRC.
As they entered the building, Faye felt dread take her over: it was like the morgue in Fresno—a bad feeling, a grim, heart-pounding foreboding. She began to sweat; a slight faintness gripped her briefly. Maybe this trip had been a bad idea. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to do what she had hoped. It was only a few days and the handful of people she’d talked to had made her sick with their stories. And how to explain such extremes of violence against such a serene—no, breathtakingly beautiful—landscape? This was exponentially worse than the pesticide poisoning story. Worse than Esperanza. After all, Esperanza had tried to take her own life. Tragic as it was, that young woman had been driven by her own demons, not someone else’s.
Martine led Faye down a wide, open hallway to a very large room that served as a ward for women recovering from gang rapes and the surgeries required after. As they neared the room, a hideous smell began to waft toward them. Faye coughed and Martine said, “I know, I should have warned you. The smell—it is awful, you see. I would give you something to put under your nose, but it does not help. I have tried all of it…”
“What is it, the smell?” Faye asked, trying not to gag. She had stopped walking down the open hallway toward the room. She wasn’t sure what was beyond the doorway. The place was surprisingly quiet. Too quiet. Preternaturally quiet. She reached in her bag for an Altoid. The intensity of the mint would help deaden the smell—and calm her gagging.
“Urine, feces, blood. There is always some rotting flesh, no matter what the doctors do. The gangrene, it can set in quickly, the wounds are so severe. That is the smell that linge
rs most, the smell of what is already dead. The things that have been done to these women—” Martine drew her hand across her face. It came away wet. “What they tell you when they get here, what they describe—”
She turned toward Faye, looked directly at her. Martine’s eyes were the deepest brown, almost black; Faye could hardly discern the pupils. Martine reached out her hand, placing it on Faye’s shoulder. Her grip was shockingly tight. Painful. Faye wanted to shake it off. She was reminded of Shihong, in Chinatown.
“Make them show you,” Martine said, her voice almost a whisper, her face moving closer. “Of course, that means you will have to look, but make them show you. People must see what goes on here. It is hell here. It is the very worst of hell. Make them show you.”
They had entered the room and Faye had steeled herself, biting into the mint and feeling the burning heat of it on her tongue. It would keep her focused, that mint. She’d keep putting them in her mouth as long as was necessary.
The room was long and open. The ceiling was low. Windows ran the length of each side of the room. It reminded Faye of the dormitory at St. Cecelia’s. Only this was a ward and the paint wasn’t the bright white of St. Cecelia’s with its tidy little stenciling of blue crosses near the ceiling. The paint here was shiny enamel of the sort that had been used decades ago, and was probably filled with lead. It was a pale blue and here and there where the paint was scraped off, a sweaty effulgent plaster showed through; it looked like infection. The floor was painted concrete. There were drains in different places. In more than one spot, blood pooled on the floor, flies and other insects buzzing over it.
Everyone on the ward was hovering just this side of death. Twenty-four beds—cots, really—twelve on each side, lined the walls. The beds were low and very flat—thin mattresses with no pillows. Each had a colored sheet but nothing else.
Some women lay in a fetal position, others lay completely flat. Still others lay as if they had been thrown onto the beds, their legs and arms askew. Most had IV bags, a few also had bags with blood. There were none of the accoutrements of a twenty-first century medical ward for what Faye presumed was the intensive care status of these patients. No heart monitors, no oxygen, no nurses, no call buttons.
Some of the beds had another person tending the woman. A mother, a sister, an aunt. No men. No children.
No one seemed to speak, but there was, Faye realized, a low susurration throughout the room—a collective sighing between patients and their caregivers. Occasionally there was a moan.
Martine explained what Faye would see when she got closer. They began with a woman named Jetta. She was one of the women sprawled on her cot. She had not one but two IVs, each running into the place where her arms should have been.
Martine spoke to Jetta in a language Faye did not know, and then the story began to be repeated—Jetta looked at Faye and Martine repeated in English what Jetta told her.
They had come for her at night, late, after midnight. She was alone, her husband had gone to care for his ailing father. It was just Jetta and her younger son and daughter. The older son was with his father. There were five of them—five, imagine, five—she said. Jetta started to cry then, and Martine, who was sitting close to her, where her family should have been, began to stroke her forehead.
Jetta continued, explaining how they had threatened to rape her daughter and her son—they are only children, they are only children—and so she consented. Or so they told her husband, later. But what she had done was beg them for the lives of her children. There was never any consent. Never.
They made her children watch—time after time, in all the places. She was torn apart. And when it was over, they cut off her arms. “One for each child,” they told her, and had tossed the arms at the feet of each child. She could still hear their terrified screams. She could still hear her own screams. “We were like animals, in our pain,” Jetta said. “Like animals in the bush, tearing each other to bits.”
Two neighbors had crept up because of the screaming and had slipped into the house after the men had left. “I owe them my life,” she said, because they had kept her from bleeding to death and had brought her here.
Six more women consented to talk to Faye, to let her take pictures of them. The stories were each of unbelievable torture. Two women had also lost limbs, five had lost their uteruses, because of knives being used on them, or the barrels of guns. All would need catheters for the rest of their lives because of the damage that couldn’t be repaired.
One woman, Yvette, had lost part of her bowel. She had been pregnant when they took her, and so they had cut her open after they raped her and killed her baby, hacking it to pieces in front of her.
“I will never have a child, now,” she cried. “I will never have a husband. I will only have this—” and she had pulled up her shirt and revealed a webbing of raw, red scars against the dark skin and at the center, a tube leading out to a small bag filled with a thick dark fluid. “This is the baby I care for now, now that my child is dead, my husband has gone.”
Each woman had allowed Faye to photograph the scars, the missing pieces—one woman’s breasts had been sliced off. Faye had them turn their faces away, so they would not feel humiliated, but Yvette had said no, she wanted to be seen.
“Let them see what they did to me. Let them see the pieces of me that are missing—my baby, my heart, my soul. They think they saved me here at this place. And they are kind, they want to help. But I died with my baby. I am a ghost, just a ghost—but a vengeful ghost. So show them, show them my face. Let me haunt them for all eternity.”
Faye thanked each of the women, one by one. And then she and Martine went outside where Faye walked as far from the center as she could, put both hands over her mouth, and screamed.
15.
There was another woman Martine wanted Faye to see, but she wasn’t on the ward. She was in a cottage off the main building with three other women. Faye said she wasn’t sure. She felt shaky and something else, she didn’t know what it was. Déjà vu, yet that wasn’t possible.
Martine was talking to her. “We have to keep the worst ones separate,” Martine told Faye. “Sometimes it is better if they do not share their stories. These women are so fragile, and some of these stories—well, you will see.”
Faye wasn’t sure what could be worse than the evisceration of Yvette and the murder of her baby. What could be worse than having your arms cut off and tossed at your children’s feet while they—and you—screamed? What could be worse than five men, or seven men, or nine men and your insides coming out of you?
Vandana sat in the corner of the small room in a straight-backed chair. There was no one else in the room, which held a small cot, a plastic dresser, and a fan. There was a thin pillow between her and the chair. She was looking out the window, which faced the Rwandan hills. It would soon be dusk and a spiral of insects whirled in a column just outside the window.
Vandana didn’t turn when Faye and Martine came into the room. She said, “It is so beautiful here, but I never want it to be night. I want to be where it is never, ever night.”
She didn’t turn until they were standing next to her and Martine said something softly, and Vandana turned toward them, then.
Her face was in two halves. On one side, a pretty, twenty-something woman with full lips, high cheekbones, and a dark, sparkling eye. On the other side, a reddish brown welt of a scar ran from an inch above her eyebrow, through where her left eye should be, and down to her mouth, which had been sliced at the corner, leaving another scar that ran from the corner of her mouth, up her cheek, to her ear, which was gone, sliced clean off. She was missing part of her hand on that side as well. Her eye socket was concave and the scar ran in a Y-shape over it.
Faye began to feel hot. Her heart was pounding now, too, and the blood rushed in her ears.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Vandana said, “I’ve been waiting to tell you everything, since I have so little to show you. You cannot photograph wh
at is no longer here.”
Like all the other women, they had come to Vandana’s house at night, the soldiers, or whatever they were, she wasn’t sure. “They all call themselves soldiers, but what are they really? Just monsters. Nothing but monsters. They are the things you feared as a child, that you begged your mother and father to protect you from in the dark, in the night. But there is no protection now. The monsters, they are free to do as they please. They are free to be monsters, monsters.”
As Vandana began to tell her story, Faye felt herself recede from the room—this story had a familiarity to it that at first she could not place.
Vandana’s entire family had been home the night the men came. They had broken through the door and there had been no time for hiding. Vandana, her husband, her mother, her two small children, her brother and two sisters—eight of them in all—had been asleep.
Her husband had been trussed up right away. It was, they told her, his job to watch. They had tied him to a chair with rope, Vandana said.
“And then they made a meal of us. I am the only one left—what is left of me.”
Faye looked at Martine, but Martine said, yes, that was what she had said.
Faye had been half sitting on the edge of the dresser across from Vandana. She stood up, but felt unaccountably dizzy. Martine reached out her hand to steady Faye, a look of concern on her face. Then Vandana said something which Martine translated as, “I understand. I wanted to run as well. I still do, but there is nowhere to go, no escape from this—” and she had gestured over her body with the mutilated hand.
Faye moved to the cot on the other side of Vandana, the side where her eye was missing and her face raw. She sat at the edge of the hard little bed, thinking that anyone who had been through these things deserved more comforting places to rest. She wanted to lay Vandana in a thick feather bed, let her be comforted by the enveloping softness.