A Thousand Sisters (25 page)

Aksanti: “The war burst. We escaped, but they shot my grandchild who was on my daughter's back. Shot intentionally. The baby died.

“We ran away, left our village and came into Walungu, where we took shelter in a church for a month. We went back to Kaniola. We thought peace was recovered. It wasn't the case. Last Saturday they came to my village and killed two people, a man and a woman.”

“Last Saturday?”

“Just Saturday. They wanted beer. He was a beer seller. When he said he had no beer to give them, it was finished. They killed him. They killed his wife. They poured petrol on the house and burnt it down. The dead bodies of that couple were inside. Mushisa is the name of the man.”

I ask, “Interahamwe?”

No translation needed. She nods.

“Have you been hiding in the bushes this week?” I ask.

“We run away to the center of Kaniola to escape atrocities. There is a military camp where we can be protected by government soldiers. We are afraid. People are not stable. We cannot work as before. We are starving because we are afraid.”

“There's a military camp in the village and Interahamwe are still attacking the periphery of the village?” I ask.

“We are in serious trouble,” she says, nodding.

My colleagues in D.C. often frame Congo's problems as half solved now that elections have taken place
.
So I ask, “Elections have happened. Some people think the war is over in Congo. What would you say to that?”

She laughs, exasperated. “We have nothing to say. We are just like patients
in a hospital, waiting to be healed. Even if they say war is over, our place is not safe. It is not over. We live in permanent fear.”

Furaha: “They came at night, took my husband and me in the bushes. I spent three months there. They killed my husband. He was killed in my sight. I remember the way they cut my husband in parts. I saw all the parts.”

She makes sharp, stabbing gestures with her hands towards her stomach.

I can't tell that story. It's not productive. If I tell that story, I'm a trash peddler. A gore-monger.

I smile supportively and look at them as they sit opposite me, on the edge of the narrow wooden bench, with their arms crossed. I feel cold and mechanical behind the camera. Something is off. This meeting has become an audition. An audition to become one of my talking points. I could have given them numbers and made a scorecard to help filter the information—charted their stories; rated them, on a scale of one to five, for
usability
. Which horror-nugget wins?

I'll just ignore this sinking feeling.

 

SINCE WHEN AM I the enemy?
Stepping out of the car and into the rain outside Women for Women's Walungu vocational skills center, I am confronted by a crowd of women. They stand in the drizzle, huddle around trees, or crowd under the few umbrellas. At the sight of me, they run for the bushes, faces turned away, covering their heads with wraps and scarves and shooting me dirty looks. I ask Hortense, “Why are they hiding?”

Hortense, who has gone ahead, calls backwards to me. “They say you haven't written them yet. Why should they be filmed?”

They've been waiting hours in the rain to be enrolled.

When we get inside, the enrollment process is in full swing, with women hoping to join the program cramped between previously enrolled participants
working on sewing machines and learning embroidery. Jules explains, “We cannot enroll all the women in the community. This time we can enroll 308 women based on the criteria.”

“What's the criteria?”

“It depends on the project: internally displaced persons, killings, rape, refugees. The problem in this community is that all the women were raped, all are refugees. So here, we have to evaluate their stories. That's why those women outside are angry.”

There is another, even larger crowd in back. I watch them through the rusty windowpanes, hoping they don't notice me. Women crowd around the doors, peering through. Forty or so maintain orderly lines under a plastic tarp. About fifteen more huddle under the eaves to avoid the rain, waiting their turn. Hortense explains, “These are the women who have been selected. They are waiting to be given forms.”

In a few minutes, they'll be invited inside, where they'll take a seat at a long wooden table and squeeze the details of their lives into little boxes on a questionnaire that will soon be entered into a database, printed out, and stapled with a photo, taken today; in a few weeks, this packet will land in an American mail-slot.

Out front it's still a different story. Jules tells us, “We've told them that for today we have too many. Come next time. Go home.”

They don't look like they are heading home. I walk outside and stand in the rain with them. “I'm filming so I can show Americans you are waiting. So they will sponsor you, okay? I'm trying to help you.”

Hortense stands in the rain and translates while I slip back inside. A few minutes later, Hortense is still explaining. The women continue to argue; someone yells from the back, louder and louder. Everyone cheers. They are shouting, chiming in together. I don't understand a word, but it's clear they are going off. Even the babies wail, following the leads of their mothers.

Hortense walks back inside. “They've understood.”

We dash out to the car. One of the waiting women approaches the window and says, “Call me. Call me.”

As we're driving away, I call back, “I don't have your number.”

She hollers after me, “Why?”

 

I AM WEARING THIN. On the ride back to Bukavu, I blast music on my iPod, trying to shut it all out.

Through dinner on the terrace at Orchid, my iPod is still blasting. It takes everything I have not to think. The phone rings: unknown number. I ignore it.

Minutes pass. I eat my daily staple,
plate de legumes,
and zone-out by staring at Lake Kivu. The phone rings again. I pick up. It is D, calling from the Nairobi airport. He's waiting for his flight to Zanzibar. “How was your day?”

“Sobering.”

“Mine too,” he says. “I spent the afternoon visiting genocide memorials in Rwanda.”

We are both quiet.

“Do you feel like taking a break from Congo? Why don't you join me?”

I am not that girl. I mean, leave a war zone? Abandon Congo for a romantic weekend of R&R with a stranger? Come on. But I'm just fried enough to indulge the thought for a second, imagining another life where I
am
that woman—sitting in a luxury eco-spa overlooking the Indian Ocean. But that's not why I'm in Africa.

“It sounds like heaven. But I can't.”

And that is that.

I finish my meal, then head back to my room for a doomed effort at sleep.

In the morning, I text D: “Is it too late to change my mind?”

FLOATING LANTERNS ON
water, probably night fishermen making their way back to shore, are all I can see looking out the window from this small plane packed with Europeans on pleasure holiday. As we descend over Zanzibar, the bobbing lights lead me to imagine the island as a massive spa, full of tea candles and orchids.

It makes me tense.

I am already certain this was a huge mistake. I was sure of it earlier today, as soon as I stepped into the Nairobi airport, full of backpackers and safari-goers. I paced the main corridor, focused on breathing, trying to shake off my dis-ease. When I tried to escape over a cup of tea in the airport café, I sat next to a couple of leathery English women debating the affairs of the royal family. “Oh, never mind him,” one said. “He's gay anyway.”

A woman in a safari T-shirt invited herself to join me in my booth and initiated a chat about her volunteer work on a game reserve. She'd had a “shocking” visit to the local school, where the children wore dirty clothes and their school meal included only white rice. Don't get me wrong, I'm a whole-grain believer. Two months ago, I would have felt her white-rice pain. But I
am ripe to crack. Half of me wanted to hurl expletives at her and everyone else in the terminal: “Are you f——ing kidding me? White rice? That's the most upsetting thing you've run across in
Africa
?!”

The other half of me wanted to find the nearest bathroom stall and cry. Instead, I was measured, even nonchalant, when she asked, “So what brings you here?”

“I've been in the Congo.”

“On holiday?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

Clearly this is a risky little social experiment I'm undertaking. Slipping out of Congo for an exotic first date on a remote African spice island turns out to be kind of like going on a dream-job interview right after your best friend's funeral. Best avoided.

It's true, I could not have known how Congo would seep under my skin any more than you feel wet when you're underwater. But when you come up for air, well, that's something else entirely. I know the dating cliché: Just be yourself. But what if
myself
is
freaking out
?

To feel or not to feel, that is the question. If I start to cry, I'm afraid I won't be able to stop. I picture myself curled up in a five-star bathroom sobbing uncontrollably for two days, like D's hysterical sideshow. I hate to emote in public, and for all intents and purposes, D is the public. (After my dad died, even my mom and my sister were the public.) I've got to get it under control. Shut it down. Fortunately, over the last few years I've grown expert at this very thing. Then again, I am undeniably raw, more so than I've been in a long time. My new goal: just get through this thirty-six hours of self-allotted R&R without a major meltdown.

I spot D just outside of Zanzibar customs. My first thought: We glean so much about a person, albeit superficial things, through contextual clues—mutual friends, reputation, style choices in things like food, clothing, and home decor. He and I have zero context. The odds are high for us to stumble upon some deal-breaking fact and end up curled on opposite ends of the bed by tomorrow night.

He kisses me. I'm not sure what I find more awkward: the fact we know almost nothing about each other; my attempt to avoid eye contact, afraid he'll sense the fresh-out-of-Congo nerves; or a public display of affection in a Muslim country.

The taxi ride to the resort is long and meandering. It's late, close to eleven, and the cab driver doesn't seem to know where he is going. We pull over at a quiet crossroads and the driver leaves us to ask for directions at a local shop. With only a dim street lamp lighting the empty road, I engage D in a rush of fill-in-the-blank questions about family, work, and his background, all the while scanning the bushes, watching for movement. The paranoia has apparently followed me out of Congo like a stray dog. I remind myself: There are no militias in Zanzibar. No armed men lurking behind those bushes. No one is going to take us out on this abandoned road. My heart pounds anyway.

Entering his room is surreal. With Congo only a short hop behind me, here I am with a stranger in a modern, five-star palace where luxury oozes out of the walls. I look down at my feet and realize I'm still caked in road dust from Congo. It's sorely out of place here against the modern all-white decor. I'm exhausted from the mental combat I've been engaged in all day, all month, or much longer. I'm through with declarations about what kind of woman I am. I want Congo off of me, even if I can only shake it for a little while. I see D, who's standing across the palatial bathroom, as an escape route—or even just a temporary anesthetic. We're already warm from snuggling during the rest of our taxi ride, and there will be no tour now. It's straight for the bed—pushing aside the mosquito net and onto the six-hundred-thread cotton sheets.

It is not the first time I've been touched since Ted left, and I've already found that being with a new lover can prove far less soothing than expected. But this is something I have not felt in more years than I can count. There is no space for another thought or emotion. We take refuge in each other like we mean it.

I haven't slept in days. I still can't sleep. D asks if I'm having a hard time getting the stories and images of Congo out of my head.

I skirt the question and lie, “It's just the new environment.”

While he sleeps, I stir over half-formed thoughts, recycling images of young men dousing huts with gasoline, straw catching flame, people screaming. As my thoughts inch towards lucidity, the title of a poem drifts to the foreground. I read it in high school; it was assigned in freshman English, in preparation for the visit from prominent American writer Yusef Komunyakaa, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Though I haven't thought of the poem in almost twenty years, I remember it because I was confused by the title.