Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  There was a vast silence, and then the air seemed to condense and everything rushed together, the screams of the dying and a dense plume of dust and smoke rising into the air. Desks and chairs dangled out of the windows of the Cooperative Bank, then plummeted to the parking lot below. The deadliest attack on a U.S. embassy since the Beirut bombing in 1983 was over, but the death toll was just beginning.

  In Kinshasa, almost halfway across the continent, Ann and I were still scrambling around town, preparing for the invasion. The rebels were now moving hard for the city’s airport. The word was that the airfield would shut down the next day, if not that afternoon. At a sullen little outdoor cafe, I used a cell phone to call my desk back in the States.

  “Thank God,” said editor Joyce Davis when she heard my voice. “The bombing is all over everything. I’ve been trying to reach you for two hours.” I stood up and scanned the horizon, hating to be scooped on a bombing in Kinshasa by an editor in Washington, but saw no plume of smoke. I sat down, wrote “bomb” on my notepad, and turned it around so Ann could see it. “We were just getting our cell phone so I could call in,” I said, stalling for time.

  “They’re saying at least one hundred dead, likely more. That building behind the embassy just collapsed.”

  I stood up again, by now alarmed that Ann and I were twiddling our thumbs while our colleagues were across town, covering the story of the year. “Right, right. Which embassy was that again?”

  “Nairobi, of course, the U.S. embassy,” she said. “And at Dar es Salaam too. A smaller one there. Ah—wait. It’s on CNN again. My God, that building is just flattened. People are screaming. It looks terrible. How quick can you get there?”

  “Real quick,” I lied, furiously scribbling notes for Ann: “U.S. embassy bomb—Nairobi—100+ dead.” She took one look and started for the taxi. “There’s just one small bit of bad news, Joyce, which is that they’re closing the airport here.”

  “Closing it?” Joyce shouted. “How can they close the airport? You mean you can’t get out? You mean you’re going to be stuck in Congo?”

  “There is the small matter of an armed invasion,” I reminded her. “And I didn’t say we couldn’t get out. I said we’re going to have to run. I’ll be on a plane in three hours or know the reason why. I’ll call you back.”

  Ann and I split up, trying to double our chances of finding a flight leaving the city, bound for anywhere. There was no small jet to charter—Nairobi was more than fifteen hundred miles away, which would require a refueling stop in rebel-held territory, which would likely get us shot down. While I went nowhere checking that out, Ann found two of the last seats on the only flight leaving Kinshasa that evening—an overnight Sabena Airlines flight to Brussels, Belgium. Then there was a connection back down to Nairobi, another eight hours. We would arrive at 9 P.M. Saturday. That was just enough time for me to rush into town, talk to three people at the bomb site, and file a story in sixty minutes or less. Ann, with a West Coast deadline, had an extra three hours. It wasn’t pretty, but it would mean we would file in time for Sunday’s paper, the week’s most important edition. The only seats left were first-class, and they cost $3,900 each. That was if we could get to the airport in time. The flight left in two hours.

  We threw clothes in bags and money at the checkout desk, then ducked into the car. The roads were jammed in a turbulent, horn-honking melee. Evening cooking fires arose from roadside stands where vendors were selling fabrics, fruit, or raw meat. The stalls spilled into the roadway at narrow junctures. Buses belched exhaust. At two traffic lights, young men pounded on the windows or yelled from across the street, screaming at us to go home, for Ann to go back to Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

  “I’m going to miss this place so much,” I said.

  The airport was a mess. Cars pulled up to the dilapidated terminal, where crowds of young men clamored to carry your luggage, whether you wanted them to or not. We got out, shoved people away from the trunk, popped open the lid and grabbed our bags, and pushed our way through a loud foul-smelling crowd to the Sabena ticket counter. We stood at the back of a crazy-quilt mélange of a line that was peopled by men and well-dressed businesswomen. There were Nigerians, Guyanese, Brits, Americans, South Africans, French, Belgians, Ethiopians, Lebanese—a multicolored potpourri of foreign nationals who wanted to be on the other side of the border. In the crush, people tried to edge their way in front of one another, or slip under a rope and leap to the front. For any foreign correspondent, the prospect of calling back to the desk and explaining that yes, a plane with 250 people just took off and no, I wasn’t on it, is not a happy one. So we shoved and jostled and threw elbows with the best of them, sweating in the heat, until we made it to the counter and got our boarding cards in hand.

  As darkness fell, the plane and baggage were checked for bombs. We sat on the steaming tarmac, under guard from U.S. Marines, while all carry-on bags were opened and searched. We lumbered down the runway two hours late. The pilot then announced, in English and French, that we would be making an unscheduled short stop in Luanda, the Angolan capital. Fighting in that nation’s long civil war had started up again, and there were a couple of evacuees who had to be picked up as well.

  I thought about that for a minute. Then I turned to Ann and said, “Isn’t Luanda south of Kinshasa?”

  “Of course.”

  “Isn’t Brussels north?”

  Ann got it. “We’re going to miss our connection to Nairobi.”

  Ten hours later, we were running down the corridors of the Brussels airport, just in time to see the flight attendants seal the doors on our plane. I shouted. I railed. I slapped my $3,900 ticket on the counter and demanded they open the door and let us on. The clerk behind the counter said they couldn’t do that; besides, the flight was fully booked. “Then tell someone who didn’t pay $4,000 to scoot over,” I shouted.

  The bluster went nowhere. We watched as the plane backed away from the terminal and rolled down the tarmac. “We get through Kinshasa and get stiffed in Brussels,” Ann said. “Go figure.”

  We were rerouted on a flight to London, where we cooled our heels, watched the Sunday paper go to press without us, and waited for another overnight flight. I called Vita but got the answering machine. I wasn’t concerned. We had often been longer than this without talking. I was sure she and Chipo were fine.

  6

  AWAY FROM HOME

  ANN AND I split up once we got to the Nairobi airport. I tumbled into a taxi, groggy from the second overnight flight in as many days. A few minutes later, when we were still at the edges of the savanna on the outskirts of town, the driver pointed out the pall of dust and smoke that still hung over the horizon, a haze that gave a funereal air to an overcast winter morning. We made our way through the oddly quiet streets, and I got out. The ruined hump of Ufundi House was a twisted hunk of steel, collapsed concrete, and mounds of dirt that was two stories high. Israeli and Kenyan rescue workers stood on top of the debris, working with a 150-ton crane to lift huge chunks of concrete. The steel rods that had been set inside them reared into the sky, exposed, like angry tentacles. Rescue teams lowered tiny microphones into crevasses, listening for tapping on walls or muffled whimpers from people trapped alive. Others worked with shovels and picks. Many of the victims were secretaries who had been sitting at their desks when the roof caved in, mashing their bodies into the tables in front of them and then burying them beneath tons of rubble.

  “I lifted a slab of concrete and there was a head beneath it,” said Jackson Muthomi, an engineer who was walking off the pile of rubble, nauseous. “I kept pulling the stuff, the bricks, the concrete, away from the body, and then the middle section turned into this bloody mush, all the intestines and entrails or whatever is the proper name were spilled out, the liver or something, and there was shit coming out of the intestines and there wasn’t any more body below it.”

  The adjacent embassy was sealed off. Rescue workers from Fairfax County, Virginia, detailed to the
State Department, searched the floors while Marines stood guard behind hastily erected cordons. Across Haile Selassie Avenue, police and FBI investigators were hauling chunks of automobiles and battered bits of steel and concrete to a parking lot that had been converted into an open-air investigation center. Thousands of people stood around the perimeter of the scene, dumbstruck.

  Red Cross officials said there was still hope of finding someone alive in the rubble. There was a woman trapped far below the surface, Rose Wanjiku, who could be heard by rescuers. They began digging for her. At the hospital, thousands of the wounded, and thousands more of their relatives, filled the corridors and sprawled out onto the grass of the courtyard. The waiting rooms were filled and the rooms were jammed.

  The morgue was awash in bodies and blood. More than forty unidentified and badly mutilated corpses were splayed out, two to a table, uncovered. The stench of decaying flesh and formaldehyde washed over me like a bad memory from Sarajevo. Families trickled in, stepping around pools of dried blood, looking to identify missing relatives. They covered their noses with kerchiefs. There was a sudden movement near one of the bodies, and an elderly woman plopped down next to the corpse of a mutilated young woman. Almost all her clothes had been blown off. Her body was pierced and burned by dozens of gashes that sliced through her arms, legs, face, neck, and torso. One breast had been severed. Her hair was set in delicate braids, still pulled back into a ponytail. Her toenails were painted a light purple. The older woman swooned with grief, her high-pitched trill bouncing off the walls.

  Two bodies over lay a man’s corpse, similarly pierced, but with his head split open between the eyes, as if the top half had been cleaved in two with an ax. The brain was gone. One of his eyes had popped out and lay against his cheek.

  Over the course of several days, the scenario of what had happened that day would slowly emerge. Shortly before 10 A.M., a small truck carrying several men pulled to the front of the embassy, where three-foot-high barriers prevented them from pulling onto the sidewalk. The guards waved them to the back entrance. Once there, they were refused access to a drive that led to the embassy’s underground garage. The driver sped over a small curb but was blocked from going farther by a drop-down gate. Several men emerged from the truck. A couple of U.S. Marines came over. Guns were drawn, the men firing several rounds before throwing a concussion grenade—the first, small blast Pressley heard inside the embassy. Then some of them ran. Others detonated a huge bomb set on the back of the truck, some five hundred pounds of explosives.

  The blast killed more than 240 people, 12 of them Americans. The bomb in Dar es Salaam, which went off five minutes after the Nairobi bomb, killed 10 Tanzanians. More than 4,800 people were injured in both blasts, the deadliest attack against an American institution abroad since a suicide bomber killed 241 soldiers at the U.S. Marine base in Beirut in 1983. The first arrest was of Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, a Palestinian national who was detained in Pakistan while trying to cross into Afghanistan on a forged Yemeni passport. He admitted to taking part in the bombing, but that was about all anyone knew at the time. It would be two years later, after the World Trade Center had been leveled, before the connection to Afghanistan would fully resonate.

  That first day, very little was clear. I made it back to the hotel with seventy-five minutes to file a fifteen-hundred-word story, munching chocolate and drinking Cokes to stay awake. Then I used the satellite telephone to call Vita before editors started calling me back with queries and clarifications.

  “Where have you been?” she shouted.

  “Half of Africa and a quarter of Europe,” I mumbled. “The Nairobi embassy blew up. Didn’t you hear?”

  “Sort of,” she snapped. “I’m a little preoccupied. Chipo nearly died.” I sat up. Vita sounded as tired as I felt.

  “What?”

  She gave a quick synopsis of the past week, the emergency room and the hospital and the marathon of caring for her at home. She ended with Dr. Paz’s recommendation that Chipo live with us.

  “What? You mean to stay?”

  “To stay.”

  “Jesus, baby. I had no idea. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Where? How? Who can ever find you? It took two days and three operators to get the hotel in Kinshasa, and you had gone. You’re always in some remote spot or another, or in transit, and no one can ever track you down until you call in. I finally got your message and figured you’d show up in Nairobi sooner or later.”

  That stung. Sitting in my hotel room, I had the sensation of how the child had felt in my arms, how weightless she had seemed, how hard she had struggled just to breathe. That feeling when she took my finger in her hand returned, and I looked out the window. How could I have left? What had I been thinking? Chipo would have died had it not been for Vita, I realized, which was another way of saying she would not have lived had it been left to me. It was difficult to speak.

  “Is she stable?”

  “Well, yes, I think so. But she doesn’t sleep more than an hour at a time. Mavis is helping. The social workers are coming tomorrow to do a home study. But Dr. Paz said no more Chinyaradzo for Chipo.”

  The speed of it all was overwhelming—I had left home seven days earlier, when we were committed to doing what we could on weekends for a child we scarcely knew. Now we were set to become caretakers of a terribly ill infant, as Dr. Paz had left no room for doubt about the magnitude of the responsibility he had asked of us. I found myself trying to say, again and again, that I would not have traveled if I had known she had been so desperately ill, but it seemed flat and defensive, if not just a lie; who was I kidding? Vita knew better than anyone that my job defined my life. It wasn’t a paycheck. It was all of me, a careening mixture of energy, creativity, and curiosity. It was my drug.

  Meanwhile, social workers had told Vita that, with Dr. Paz’s letter, traditional restrictions on adoptions would be greatly eased. Fostering and adoption would be mere formalities for a child in Chipo’s condition. The fostering process, Vita was told, would be concluded in a few short weeks. The adoption would be a matter of paperwork.

  There was no time to take stock of all we had just taken on, and little inclination to do so. We hung up a few minutes later, when Vita had assured me that everything was all right. I worked the words parents and father around in my mouth, trying to get used to them. I ordered champagne from room service, trying to summon the energy for a small celebration. But I fell asleep in my chair, fully dressed with all the lights on, waiting for my desk to call back, too exhausted to drink the stuff.

  I awoke three hours later with violent stomach cramps. I made for the bathroom, and my left knee, the one that had been whacked in Kinshasa, collapsed under me, sending me to the floor with an awkward thump. I crawled to the bathroom and was indecently ill. I peeled off my shirt, drenched with sweat, and looked in the mirror. I had nasty bruises across my back from the lashing I had taken in the parking lot. My head spun; my joints ached so badly I couldn’t stand up. After half an hour, I gave up trying to make it back to the bed. I curled onto the bathroom floor, using a towel for a pillow. In this fevered state, nightmares of startling clarity came sliding by. In the dream, I was walking through the morgue again, but it was not the mutilated young woman with the purple nail polish whom I saw on the table. It was a young girl I had once seen in the morgue in Sarajevo. She had been wounded in a shelling. She could not have been more than five. The hole in her chest could not have been more than an inch wide. She was not the first person I watched die, but her face was the one that hung in my memory, her black hair falling from her forehead, her mouth open and soundless, her head bouncing as a man swept her into his arms and ran screaming into Kosovo Hospital. It was the one image of war that my mind ran in a loop at times of great stress or depression. Now it played it back to me but transposed her corpse to the Nairobi morgue. A tiny body lay on the adjacent steel table. As I moved closer in the watery movement of dreams, I could see that it was Chipo. Her body was badly mutila
ted. She lay in her own dried blood.

  I awoke with a violent start. Sweat was pooling in the small of my back, my navel; I ran a hand across my neck and it came away soaked. Then I was ill again. I staggered around the hotel room, shaking my head to clear the mental fog, opening the balcony window for fresh air. I soon lapsed back into sleep, only to see the same images. I snapped back awake and, this time, stayed that way. I called the hotel’s concierge at 4 A.M., asking for a doctor. I got a return call from an Italian voice thirty minutes later. He said to meet him in his office at 7:30 and gave me directions. I watched the hands on the clock inch forward for three hours and then heaved myself down downstairs into a taxi.

  “Food poisoning,” he said, after prodding about for a few minutes. “Your heart is very slow. I have counted it at thirty-eight beats per minute. Your pulse is weak and your blood pressure is very low. Have you been sick like this before?”

  “I had something like typhus once, in Iraq. They never figured out exactly what it was.”

  “Well. You are dehydrated, I think, and what I would call clinically exhausted. You look terrible, you know.” He scratched out a prescription for antibiotics, for things to calm my stomach. “Stay in your room for a couple of days, lie still, fly home. You will feel very bad. But don’t worry, I do not think you are going to die.”