by Greg Herren
The story continued. There had been eleven soldiers—eleven monsters. They had been young and particularly sadistic, Vandana told Faye. They had begun by killing her mother outright.
“They took her head off.” Vandana said it succinctly. A tear rolled down her face on the side where the eye was. It had happened quickly, but not without suffering.
“They said nothing. They just pulled everyone up from the floor. They tied up my husband, put something in his mouth so he could not speak—or scream. Then the one soldier—” Here Vandana stopped speaking. Faye leaned forward. Vandana had closed her eye. Her mouth was tight. She was clenching and unclenching a piece of the fabric of her skirt in her remaining hand.
She opened her eye and her lips parted, then she began to speak again.
“This one, this one who looked like someone’s lost child, he just took the butt of his rifle and hit her so hard in the side of her head that her eye came out, it fell onto her cheek. And then as she grabbed for her eye, she didn’t even have time to scream, really, another one, a taller, bigger one, older—he took a machete and sliced right through her neck. He did it with such force that her head came off—completely off. The children were screaming, my brother and sisters were screaming. My mother’s head landed near my husband’s feet—his bare feet. Her hair had fallen over one foot. You could see my husband’s mouth try to scream, but he couldn’t, because of the thing they had stuffed inside.”
Martine coughed several times at the end of this part of Vandana’s story. Faye continued to sit at the edge of the cot. A reel of pictures flashed through her head. Outside the little cottage, the sounds of the compound could be heard—as if this were any other place, as if this were any normal day, as if the stories Faye had heard, the stories Martine must have translated into English and French several times over, were not the stuff of sheer unmitigated horror, did not call up, as Vandana had said, the childhood images of monsters.
“They silenced my brother first. A third soldier grabbed him from behind and slit his throat like a goat’s. The blood just pumped out like I have seen at the well here. After that, well—it became so ugly.”
Vandana leaned forward, then stood. She turned toward Faye, but spoke to Martine, asking her if Faye was ready to take the photographs. Faye picked up her camera and Vandana untied the fabric that was knotted at her left shoulder but draped around her body like a long sarong.
The light green fabric was embedded with a faded blue and red print—flowers, maybe. Faye wasn’t sure. But as Vandana’s garment drifted to the floor, Faye bit hard on the mint in her mouth.
Under her left arm, the arm without the hand, chunks of flesh had been removed. Inside her thighs, more flesh had been cut away, as had part of the soft mound where her pubic hair should have been. Vandana turned around, as if she were showing Faye a new outfit she had gotten, and Faye saw that her buttocks also bore the marks of cutting, and her back had been flayed open and sewn back up, inexpertly, as if in a great hurry.
Vandana moved closer to Faye, who had been taking shot after shot. Faye stopped and looked at her and said something. Faye looked to Martine, who said, “She wants you to look closer. At the wounds.”
Faye stayed where she was, as the naked woman moved toward her. Faye thought about all the times naked women had come toward her in just this way and how none of those times had been anything like this. She wondered if she would think of this the next time she was with another woman. She hoped not.
Vandana was right in front of her now and she began to point—“La, la, la,” she said as she point to her thigh, her arm, her pubic area. It was then that Faye saw. The chunks of flesh hadn’t been cut away, they had been torn away—by teeth.
“I told you,” she said, “they made a meal of us. This is only part of what they did. There is so much more.”
16.
Faye wasn’t sure why she wanted to go into the darkroom again. She already knew she didn’t want to see whatever it was that was hanging from the clothesline. But she opened the door anyway and went inside.
The red light came on when she flipped the switch. She saw that there were photographs, but she didn’t look at them. She held her left hand at the side of her eye like she was blocking bright sunlight. She didn’t want to see what was there.
Faye had never been in the basement of her grandparents’ house before. The door had a big bolt across it and there was usually a chair in front of the door. Once, Faye had asked her grandfather what was down there and he had said, “Mice. Mice and the furnace. And darkness. There’s a lot of darkness. It can swallow you up, you know. You don’t want to go down there. Trust me. It’s not a place for little girls.”
As Faye began to move the bolt back, she could feel her heart pounding again. She hoped she wouldn’t faint like she had in the kitchen that last time. But she wanted to go down to the basement. She wanted to see what was there. She needed to see what was there. Something one of the older girls had said when she was away at camp had made her think about the photographs and her grandfather, and now, the basement.
The bolt didn’t make any noise when she pulled it back, which surprised her. She had thought it would be loud and make a grating noise or a clanging sound like the black iron gate in front of the house that she would sometimes swing on until her grandmother would come out and just say her name, “Faye,” and she would stop and come inside.
On the wall at the top of the stairs was a big white light switch. It was round and ceramic. When she flipped it, a light went on at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t a bright light, but it wasn’t red, either.
The stairs were made of a rough-looking wood. Faye went down two, four, six steps, and then stopped. She could see into the basement now if she crouched down and looked to the right, where it was open.
There were boxes all along the walls and the tiny windows that Faye recognized from where the garden was. There were some other steps that led up to the door that was on a slant that was in the garden, too. It had a big bolt across it like the one upstairs. She could also see the heater—what her grandfather called the furnace. It was silver and black metal and had big round tubes coming up out of it.
In the center of the room was a table, like the one in the kitchen. There were two chairs, one on either side, and the table was set, like there was going to be a meal. In the center of the table was a jar—a really big one, like the one her grandmother had that was blue and white china and had “flour” written across it in pretty writing. Faye couldn’t see what was in the jar from her spot on the stairs.
In the corner there was a long wooden table—Faye knew it was a workbench because her father had had one in her old house when her parents were still alive. At the end of it was something Faye couldn’t quite see.
She got up from the step and went down the rest of the stairs and over to the workbench. There was a chain above it that turned on a light. Her heart was beating really fast now and she wasn’t sure if she should pull the chain or not.
She put her hand on the chain, closed her eyes, and pulled. When she opened her eyes she saw it.
At the very end, near the wall, in the darkest corner of the basement room was a vise. It was just like the one her father had at his workbench. But her father’s had always had pieces of wood in his, wood being pressed together for something her father was making—a shelf or a little table or bookcase. Once, there had been the leg of a chair that kept falling out of the socket in their dining room.
Her grandfather’s vise was turned tight, just like her father’s had been. But inside the two metal pieces there wasn’t wood. There was a lady’s head, pressed between the two metal pieces at the sides above the ears.
Faye thought she was going to scream, but she didn’t. She felt hot and her heart still pounded and her face got flushed and sweaty. But now she wanted to look at it. She went closer.
The skin wasn’t like skin anymore. It was all dried up and wrinkly. The hair wasn’t soft-looking, either. I
t was long and a reddish color and some of it was wound around the part of the vise that gets turned. Where the eyes should have been were just holes that were black around the edges and the mouth was all sewn up, like the mouth on her Raggedy Ann doll that Faye’s mother had made for her.
Faye reached out to touch it, but changed her mind. She pulled the chain and the light went out. She walked toward the table, to see what was in the jar, but decided she didn’t want to know. She wished she hadn’t come down here, but at least she knew what was here now. It was one of the places where the pictures got taken. Because as she was going back toward the stairs, she saw the little bed against the far wall, behind the stairs. The little bed where the women in the photographs would be.
She had seen enough. She went back up the stairs, turned out the light, pushed the heavy fat bolt back across the door, and left the darkroom without looking at the pictures.
She went into the kitchen and washed her face and hands, then she got her pillow and went back upstairs to bed. It was just beginning to get light.
17.
Vandana had put her garment back on. Faye watched as she managed despite the missing hand to deftly twist the fabric around her mutilated body and tie it over her shoulder using her other hand and her teeth. She sat back down in her chair and resumed her story. Faye wasn’t sure she could hear more, but Martine was looking at her with the look she had given her before, when she asked her to “make them show you.”
The story Vandana recounted was pure nightmare. Her brother’s body had been cut open and his organs had been cut out. The men had shoved the hot pieces of flesh into the hands of everyone in the room—her sisters, her children, her. They had been ordered to eat—the liver, the kidneys, the heart. And when they didn’t or couldn’t, the soldiers had begun to do their worst. Atrocity after atrocity. Vandana’s four-year-old daughter had been raped, then killed. Her sisters had both been disemboweled while they were still alive, one soldier raping her youngest sister while her guts pulsed onto the floor. Her six-year-old son’s head had been cut off, like her mother’s had been. Her husband had choked to death in front of her when he vomited into the rag they had stuffed in his mouth.
Vandana had been the last. They had sliced at her back when she had tried to run and cut off part of her left hand. She’d been raped by all of them, her rectum ripped open, her vagina prolapsed outside her vulva. They had torn bites out of her flesh as they assaulted her—tearing bits of her buttocks and breasts and vulva. They thought she was dead when they left—everyone else in her family was. She wished she had been, but she was still writhing in her own blood, feces, vomit, and urine when her aunt found her the next day. She’d been brought here, barely alive, and saved. Although for what, she could not say.
“They took everything. What you see here is all that is left. They wanted us to eat each other and when we wouldn’t, they made their meal of us. I scream every day as it begins to get dark. Every day I relive the nightmare as dusk falls. Now that you know my story, perhaps I will not have to live much longer. I miss my husband and my children. I miss my family. I know they are waiting for me. I only hope they are in the light, and there will be no more darkness.” Vandana pointed out the window to the setting sun, an incomparably postcard-beautiful sunset that bled out onto the lush greenery beyond the cottage, and said, “Soon it will be dark and I will live it all over again, until dawn comes. So you see, I was not saved. Not saved at all.”
She began to weep and as Martine went to her, a woman came in dressed in a white nun’s habit, murmuring softly in the same language Vandana and Martine had been speaking.
Martine whispered a thank-you to Vandana for her time and her story, and kissed her on her good cheek, while the nun prepared some kind of medication for her. Martine and Faye left. As they drove back to Bukavu proper, Faye was silent. Martine talked a little, explaining how these were actually common stories. Many of the soldiers now tried to force cannibalism on their victims as a way to defile them and shame them, making them unfit for this world or the next.
Faye listened, but said nothing. She kept hearing Vandana saying, “They made a meal of us.”
She and Martine rode the rest of the way in silence. Martine said they would spend the night there, in Bukavu, at the hotel.
“We cannot drive around at night, you see,” she said, looking away from Faye. “It would not be safe. This is not a place to be a woman. Not at night. Not on the road. The roads have been bad since the war, and it is easy to break down, and then…” Martine’s voice trailed off.
“Tomorrow we will go back west. I will arrange for us to get to Kinshasa. I think you have your story, now, don’t you?”
That night they had stayed at the best hotel in Bukavu, the Orchids Safari Club. The place was small, but lovely. Faye thought it could have been in any resort town in the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands—someplace where the only horror outside the hotel grounds might be the poverty of the island residents. The view of Lake Kivu was extraordinary, even as it had gone almost dark, and for a moment in this place filled with European and East Asian tourists, one could believe that nothing bad was happening outside its walls.
But peculiar rules reminded Faye that all was not right in Congo. There was no eating outside, despite the gorgeous view from the veranda. There was no room service. The rooms were simple, but luxurious compared to what Faye had just seen. Yet there was an atmosphere that reminded Faye of the Graham Greene novels she had read in college. Why was there even a hotel in a place like this, with so much happening beyond the gates, just down the bad road Martine had spoken of, all rutted and gnarled? Faye recalled the scenes from Hotel Rwanda, and remembered how the deadly legacy of colonialism lingered. She wondered, as she watched the other guests in the dining room, most of them speaking either French or some kind of Arabic, if they knew that somewhere not far from where they ate, later that night, people would be forced to eat the still-pulsing organs of their families just before they were murdered in their own homes.
*
Faye had not expected to have Martine walk toward her bed in the hotel room and stand there, as if waiting to be invited in, but it was not an unwelcome surprise. As she stood, dropping her thin robe onto the bed, Faye saw her perfect, unmarred body, the skin smooth and dark, devoid of scars or burns or teeth marks. That was more of a relief even than the orgasmic sex itself. Faye wanted to look at Martine, feel every bit of her body, the wholeness of her. Faye hadn’t had sex with anyone since the night of the book launch and the release felt good, surprisingly intense, given the day they had shared. Neither of them cried, though. Faye thought perhaps the sex took the place of tears.
Later, as they lay in Faye’s bed, Martine told her that she had been gang-raped three years earlier, by four men who had stopped her at a roadblock when she was driving from one care center to another. “They didn’t cut me, they didn’t burn me. They let me live. I didn’t get pregnant. But I could never imagine being with a man ever again after that. Because, you see, I had seen these men before—many times. They ran this same road block for nearly a year before they raped me. How could they see me all those times, how could they smile at me and let me pass and then one day pull me from my car and drag me into the bush until I was bloody and act as if it was simply expected? How could I be sure that another man might not turn into a monster before my eyes? How could I risk having a child with a monster?”
Faye had held her, stroking her arms and making the small susurrations that are not actual speech, but which sound like comfort. Faye had thought about telling Martine a story, but then she remembered Shihong in Chinatown, and said only, “It’s good that you told me. Someone else told me that the secrets become you. And they do. That’s not always a good thing.”
*
In the morning they had dutifully pretended nothing had happened between them beyond a comforting exchange. After having a meal in the dining room and then walking out onto the veranda and looking at the lake, they had go
ne on to the airport and flown back to Kinshasa.
But that night, the night she had spent with Martine, Faye had had a series of progressively more terrifying dreams. The dreams had stayed with her after she awoke. Even when they had reached Kinshasa, the images still lingered. Faye wanted to go back to New York. She didn’t think she could go on to Afghanistan now. She called her editor. She’d have to do the second part, Afghanistan, later. This was a lot to process and she wasn’t feeling all that well, she told him—water, developing world, she knew he understood. She tried to keep the shakiness out of her voice. She wanted to get out of this place. The contradiction of the physical beauty and what she knew lay beneath was too extreme, even for her, the photographer who never cringed, never flinched, never stopped recording the darkest of images.
Faye booked her flight, then she called Martine from her room at the hotel. She had asked for a room on the top floor—for some reason she felt safest there, as if soldiers would work their way up the flights if they invaded in the night, and it would be easiest to attack on the first or second floor, rather than the tenth. She asked Martine to spend the night with her before she left.
“You understand—I don’t feel safe. It’s not that I expect you to protect me, and we’re in Kinshasa now, anyway, and this is a big city, as big as New York, and I know I’m being paranoid. But I just don’t want to be alone.”
Martine had talked to her on the phone, trying to reassure her. Telling her the kind of historical facts one tells a tourist—that Kinshasa was the second-largest city in Africa. That it was the largest French-speaking city in the world—that legacy of colonialism, again. That Faye should try to absorb the lush beauty and not be fearful because Kinshasa was civilized, truly. It’s not like they were in the bush. And anyway, tourists came all the time to see the gorillas. She was safe at the hotel. She really was.