by Sean McFate
“The civil war?”
“And a few others, all the way back to the Belgians. There’s a long history.”
“I’m an NGO worker,” she said. “Catholic Relief Services.”
“I know.”
“Really? Did you look me up?”
“The indigenous shawl,” he said, pointing to the light wrap she had thrown over her shoulders. “All NGO girls wear them.”
She remembered that she and the younger women had gone to the market together, and she and Mary (and the other Mary) had bought similar wraps.
“You have a good eye for detail,” she said.
He smiled. “I know what to look for.”
Flirtatious. Maybe. “What do you think of Bujumbura?”
“It’s a good place to study genocide.”
They must have talked. She didn’t remember now. She only remembered the end of the night, when she was half in the bag, wearing a sombrero with little tassels along the rim and fending off an overly persistent Marine.
“Let’s dance,” the Marine insisted, when the piano started. She had agreed. Why not? But the music was odd. It was wild, rhythmic, and toe-tapping, but . . . strange. Not Marine House style. She was about to complain, when she noticed it wasn’t the stereo, but Dr. Locke on a battered upright piano covered with half a hundred empty beer bottles. Marine House had a piano? By the time he was finished, she had wandered over to watch.
“What was that?” she asked.
He turned, surprised to see her. “A fandango,” he said.
“From Broadway?”
“No, Padre Antonio Soler. Baroque.” He was clearly embarrassed. “You’d like him. A Spanish priest who liked to rock the harpsichord. Um . . . can I escort you home?”
She hadn’t been thinking about leaving, but once they were outside, she was glad she had. The Marines had full-time staff, but the house was filthy. She had once made the mistake of going into a bedroom. The stench of floor clothes and sweat almost made her sick.
“I can’t believe those guys went through Parris Island,” Locke said, when they were outside.
She stopped, waiting, but Locke walked on. No one was allowed to travel in Buj after the sun went down without escort from cleared security personnel. Was Dr. Locke cleared? Where was his personal security detail, the one from the beach?
“I thought we might walk,” he said, as if he didn’t know this was dangerous.
It was a warm August night. The city was dark, so the stars were bright. She always found it odd to live in a city where you could see the stars. They were walking the ridgeline when the gunfire started somewhere in the darkness below. Someone was shouting. She recognized Kirundi, the native language. It was coming from a walkie-talkie hooked to Locke’s belt.
“Sorry,” he said, lowering the volume but not turning it off. “Someone reporting the shooting.”
“Oh,” she said. Most people wore walkie-talkies, since there were no landlines and the cell service had an annoying habit of cutting out for hours at a time. But the reports were always in French or English.
“Where did you learn to play piano?”
He blushed. “I was . . . a bit drunk,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.” She didn’t say anything. It was three blocks to the Catholic house, and she figured he’d answer eventually, if only to break the silence.
“I’m a classically trained musician,” he said finally.
“On the piano?”
“Violin.”
“That’s an odd skill for a scholar in the middle of Africa.”
“I had an odd childhood.” He smiled. “How else would I have ended up here?”
She felt the truth in that. It was her own tough childhood that had pushed her into this forsaken part of the world.
“May I take you to dinner?” It was oddly formal, this idea of walking a girl home and asking her for a date, especially here. She wondered if he would give her an old-fashioned good-night kiss on the cheek at the door.
He did.
He arrived in a Land Cruiser the next evening. She hadn’t been out of the embassy neighborhood at night, and she was surprised how dark the city felt. The buildings seemed to slink past, their cinderblock frames solid, but everything else sliding toward disarray, or toward the cooking fires fluttering in open windows and doors, like barrel fires in hobo movies. She found it exciting, so much more serene than the bustling days. It took courage to live like this, she knew, and somehow, out here, she felt that courage transferring onto her.
Eventually, they turned into the hills, and she started to see electrical wires, and then glass windows behind steel bars and lights behind curtains. They wove upward, the houses nicer at every switchback, and stopped in front of a wide brick building with a circular drive. A sign said THE BELVEDERE. The restaurant was mostly empty, but there was a flagstone balcony overlooking the city, the lights of Bujumbura so few and scattered they looked like constellations on the pitch-black lake.
“They say there’s a huge crocodile named Leopold in there,” Locke said, picking up on the otherworldly darkness of the water, “with a taste for human arms.” They sat on the veranda. The hostess lit a candle. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the main form of punishment in the Belgian Congo was to chop off arms. Or that the Belgian king was named Leopold. The bottom of that lake is probably covered with human limbs.”
“You are so romantic,” she said, laughing, but despite the talk of severed arms, he was. They hovered near the edge of the balcony, the whole continent beneath them, and drank cognac, because that was what he ordered, and red wine, because that was what everyone drank with French food, especially coq au vin, the best she had ever had. She had dreamed of Paris as a teenager—why else would she have spent her Saturday mornings learning French in a strip mall on Choccolocco Road?—and while this certainly wasn’t Paris, it was as close as she’d ever come. Paris, after all, wasn’t a set of buildings, but an idea, or maybe a feeling, and being a thousand feet above a black lake, with an empty plate of classic French food in front of you and your hands intertwined with a handsome Harvard scholar’s, was the essence of that feeling.
They went back to his hotel. It was a quaint guesthouse, twelve rooms around a courtyard, where hidden floodlights lit the undersides of the trees. He had brought a bottle of wine from the restaurant, and they drank it, alone under the branches, and kissed until morning. They hadn’t slept together that first night, or even that next week, because when you’re that swept up in romance, you don’t want to spoil it with rolling and grunting. You want to spread it out, make it last forever.
“Why did you become a nun?” he asked eventually. “You obviously aren’t very good at it.”
“Simone Weil,” she replied, with a laugh. She had always found it embarrassing that a long-dead writer had changed her life—had saved her, really, at the moment her violent, Evangelical mother had almost broken her down.
“Oppression and Liberty?”
She smiled. He knew Simone Weil. He had mentioned the wrong book. It was Gravity and Grace, Weill’s tour de force on the redemptive power of mysticism, that had converted her, but Thomas Locke had struck closer to her true heart than any man or woman ever had before.
She should have known it was too good to be true.
Maybe she did know. Maybe she just didn’t want to admit it at the time.
But no, she knew that wasn’t true, either. Back then, she was too wrapped up in her story to worry about his.
And all the little clues? The mysteriousness of his schedule. The way he disappeared at odd times, for days on end. Sometimes he was distant, saying three words in a whole night. He seemed to go out of his way, after that first evening at the Marine House, to avoid the other expats, especially the Americans. And on that special night at the Restaurant Tanganyika, when their table was tucked away in the garden, under a flowering hyacinth, and she had thought, He’s going to tell me he loves me, that he can’t live without me, the words he
actually said—“A former president of Burundi was assassinated right there”—should have tipped her off.
Instead, they made her fall in love with him even more.
She remembered the night they went to the street dance with Mary, poor, sheltered Mary, who was living out a fantasy of her own. The event was officially off-limits, and Locke didn’t want to go, he was so tight about rules, but she was going, she told him, whether he came or not. So he had come, and she and Mary had danced for hours while he watched, sullen, a nothing night, until she stripped off his jacket on the car ride home and found the guns strapped to his side, and he had looked up at her, hesitated, and then kissed her passionately, truly passionately, until she fell backward on the seat beneath him. That was the first time they had sex, right there in the Land Cruiser, breaking her mother’s first rule about boys, the one about never letting the first time be in the back of a car.
She wasn’t a virgin, of course. That was obvious. But that was the end of her second chance, the night she took her clean slate and shattered it over her knee.
“You have to meet my family now,” she had said, laughing at his shock. “Don’t you know how it is with Catholic girls?”
She meant her work family, the twelve of them from Catholic Relief Services and the coterie of UN officials and NGOs who hung around them. All she was doing was inviting him for Sunday dinner, at least that was what she told herself, but he begged off that first week.
To her mild surprise, he showed up the next Sunday unannounced, in a natty suit that he and Gironoux spent five minutes discussing over predinner cognac. Gironoux was the most precise man in Buj (with the possible exception of their valet Prosper, the man who had carried her bags the first day), and he appreciated a sense of style. This dinner was his show, after all, and with Gironoux effort went a long way.
The conversation that evening was about Gatumba, a UN camp between Buj and the Congolese border, where 166 refugees had been massacred the previous day.
“It’s not a lack of capacity,” Neusberg lamented. “I know that’s the official line, but I have to disagree. It’s a matter of political will. There are plenty of UN workers here, not to mention our friends in charity, but what is the president willing to do for them?”
“The president is weak,” Gironoux confessed.
“The president is lazy. He is holed up in his palace, drinking brandy, while the country slips away. That’s what happens when you have professional politicians. They’re like academics. They have no field experience. No offense . . .” he added, as he turned to Locke.
“None taken.”
“. . . but these are not men of action.”
“It’s preposterous,” Weiss agreed, “that rebels infiltrate almost nightly. This is the capital city, for God’s sake. If we can’t be safe here, where can we be safe?”
“Perhaps if the military had better training and equipment, they could push back the rebels,” Locke suggested. He was politely ignored. Alie looked at him, saw his sincerity, and shrugged, What can you do? The humanitarian community would never condone such an idea, even after a massacre.
Later that night, Locke told her he was visiting Gatumba in the morning.
“Take me with you,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Take me with you,” she said again, as she lay naked in his bed that night.
“It’s a bad idea,” he said.
“So is this. Obviously. But that hasn’t stopped me.”
He looked at her; it was chilly. “Some ideas are worse than others,” he said.
She didn’t know why he took her. Maybe it was her charm; maybe he really was in love. What did it matter? Gatumba changed her. The still-smoking remnants of refugee tents; the reek of unburied bodies. She had tried to turn away, but it was too late, she caught a glimpse of corpses being sorted like firewood.
“It’s a UN refugee camp. How could this happen?”
“It happens all the time,” he said.
“But we said we’d protect them.”
Locke looked at his driver, the military man from the beach. He was American, early forties, angry. He hadn’t looked at her once on the two-hour drive. He hadn’t said a word until he replied, with disgust: “Who’s ‘we’?”
Locke pulled out a container of Vick’s VapoRub. “Put it under your nose,” he said. “It kills the smell.”
He dropped her off at the Catholic primary school, four cinderblock buildings with a Burundian flag in the courtyard and an African nun, Sister Mary Clementine, to welcome them in French. Had Magdelena been there that day? She was never sure. There were too many girls to remember just one: on the floor, in the desks, standing against the walls. Too many scared and terrified girls staring with empty eyes at the young American from lower Alabama, who had just walked into their hell.
She didn’t want to leave. She never wanted to leave. She had told Sister Mary Clementine that. She had told Locke that when he came back hours later, jittery and unnerved, without his companion. But he had insisted, saying he was the last ride, saying it wasn’t safe to stay the night.
“If it’s safe enough for them, it’s safe enough for me.”
“It’s not safe enough for them,” he said. “Get in.”
They argued on the way back. She demanded to know what he meant. He refused to tell her. She blew up over his lack of respect. What did he know about refugees? What did he care about altruism? He was an academic. Academics were cold. He saw statistics; she saw souls.
“I’m trying to help,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
Silence. It was dusk. He was driving very fast.
“What the hell does that mean?”
He wouldn’t say. He wouldn’t treat her like a partner. Or an equal. Or an adult. They rode the last half hour in silence, the world darkening around them. They made the compound just as the nightly gunfire started in the hills.
“You don’t understand,” she said sadly, as she opened the door to leave. “You don’t know who I am.”
“Alie,” he said. “Wait.”
“Please . . .” she was fighting back tears “. . . don’t . . . don’t tell me what to do.”
She closed the car door.
Three hours later, the rebels poured out of Congo and attacked Bujumbura in force. She stayed awake all night, locked in the house’s safe room with the rest of the Catholic Relief Services workers, listening to the explosions down the hill toward the presidential palace, the gunfire moving back and forth across the city.
By morning, it was over. She slipped out and walked toward the center of town, where the worst of the fighting had occurred. She saw bloodstained streets, bombed-out buildings, burned vehicles. She smelled burned flesh; after Gatumba, she would always know that smell. There were men throwing bodies onto trucks, and others celebrating in the streets. The rebels had lost. Her boyfriend, the so-called scholar, had somehow been involved.
He left before she could ask him anything more. Disappeared. She never saw him again, not until a chance sighting in South Sudan six or seven years later. She had been so deceived, so embarrassed by her gullibility, that she had never even looked for him. She had spent the next nine hours helping the wounded of Bujumbura, and the next nineteen months in Gatumba, at the orphanage, wondering if she was doing any good. She thought she would stay there for the rest of her life, but when Magdelena, only thirteen, told her she wanted a better life in Europe, Alie agreed to help. She traveled with Magdelena and five other female refugees through Rwanda and Uganda, and up into war-torn Sudan. To document their journey, she had told them. To witness for them, so the world would understand.
It had taken almost a year, often on foot, often for weeks at a time in squalid smuggler camps, and for one long stretch on horseback, her whole body a raw wound by then. But she had stuck with it. To tell their story, to give voice to the voiceless. And because she believed somehow that her whiteness—her half-white Western-ness—was protecting the
m.
“Don’t worry, Magdelena, I am with you,” she told the girl on the loading dock in Bossaso, Somalia. “I am with you.”
Then the boat’s fake floor was fitted into place, the darkness descended on that dank hold, and she never saw any of them again. She had tried for years, working through slumlords and other refugees, through NGOs and networks of nuns, but she never found Magdelena, never discovered what had happened to that poor young girl in this civilized new paradise she had tried so desperately to reach . . .
Alie felt a hand on her shoulder and jerked up, her eyes flashing around the grubby hospital room in Kiev. A few feet away, a frail woman lay still on her bed. A nurse was standing between them, with her hand on Alie’s shoulder.
“Don’t cry,” the nurse said in English. “Her pain will end soon. It is for the best.”
Alie wiped away her tears. She fished in her pocket. She came up with a twenty-euro note. She held it out, but the nurse waved it away. Health care in Ukraine was free, but doctors and nurses usually required bribes, even if their patients were dying.
“Morphine,” the nurse said, plunging the needle into the drip line.
Alie nodded absently. She had gone looking for information on John Greenlees as soon as Chad Hargrove identified him in the photograph. She hadn’t expected that search to lead her here, to this dying woman. It was early, barely light outside, but even in the shadows Alie could see the pain. The woman was thin, ancient looking and brittle, but Alie knew that Olena Kravitz was barely a decade older than she was.
She had been a human rights lawyer. A decorated scholar. A lover of life and, apparently, her husband. There was the proof, in the photographs beside the bed: Olena hiking in the mountains, Olena and John Greenlees together. Happy. Healthy. In love. The kind of photographs Alie had never had.
And still those assholes at the U.S. Embassy called her a whore.
The nurse squeezed Alie’s elbow and quietly closed the door behind her. The overnight was ending; the next shift would be arriving soon. Alie wondered if there were kind nurses on that shift, too, and if anyone would stay with Olena the rest of the day. The husband comes every night, the nurse had told her. Just wait.