The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  Mom did believe that there was a life and future for the child soldiers. That was the lesson of Beah—who had graduated from college in 2004, published his book in 2007, and become a champion of human rights—and also of other children Mom had met and seen around the world. In 1993, in Liberia, Mom had visited the War Affected Children’s Home. She wasn’t allowed to take any pictures there, not even of the gardens the children were tending. “War Affected” was the term they used for child soldiers—it was first called a “detention center,” but the children liked it better when they were told they were going to a home. The children were kept there for six months. The place consisted of three dorms for the boys, who ranged in age from nine to sixteen. Originally, they were going to have fourteen be the upper age limit, but they soon learned that the sixteen-year-olds were really children too. Mom wrote in a report, “They sleep in bunk beds—they have little of their own. But for children who have come from terror, torment, and trauma, I saw boys who were smiling, quiet, friendly—and nice to each other.”

  They were kept to a firm schedule—up at six A.M. to do chores and take baths, if there was water. Breakfast at seven thirty. Literacy class until noon. Then an hour of group therapy with different social workers. Lunch followed, which they helped prepare. Then rest, vocational training, recreation, supper—and bed at eight P.M.

  “It’s amazing,” Mom said, “just to see the effect of a schedule. They’re children, and they want to be told what to do. That’s both the problem and the way back.”

  So the responsibility on all of us, as Mom saw it, was not just to attend to those who were conscripted and forced to do terrible things or who found in themselves the same terrible impulses that the Lord of the Flies kids found in themselves, but also to look to those parts of the world where children were likely to be impressed into service and try to stop it before it happened.

  Mom and I had both intended to read Suite Française from the moment it was finally published in America a few years before, but neither of us had gotten around to it until now. The fact that the book exists at all is miraculous. When the Nazis occupied Paris, Némirovsky, a Jewish writer who with her husband had converted to Catholicism, sent their daughters to Burgundy and eventually joined them there. But in 1942 Némirovsky and her husband were betrayed and shipped to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus. Before being sent to her death, Némirovsky gave her daughter Denise a suitcase containing a notebook.

  Denise and her sister survived the war in a convent. Only in the 1990s did Denise realize that the notebook, which she’d managed to save, with its tiny, cramped script, contained not random scribbles but two completed parts of an extraordinary novel, written during the occupation, called Suite Française. “I’m working on burning lava,” Némirovsky had said while writing the book. This was it.

  My copy of the book was the U.S. version; someone had given Mom a copy from England, or she’d bought it on one of her trips. I was with Mom when she was reading the epilogue to the English edition, which had been the preface to the French. It said, “On 13 July 1942, the French police knocked at the Némirovskys’ door. They had come to arrest Irène.”

  July 13 is my birthday—though 1962, not 1942. Némirovsky was arrested exactly twenty years to the day before my birth. Obviously, this is a totally insignificant numerical coincidence. But it did force me to remember anew how recently it had all taken place. I remember first learning as a child about World War II and thinking it was a million years ago, as a quarter century is to a five-year-old. But the older I get, the more recent it becomes: events in my life from twenty or so years ago often seem like yesterday. And as Mom constantly reminded me, you don’t need to look far back in history, or even at history at all, to find atrocities. The genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, to name just two, took place under our watch.

  Suite Française is a book about refugees, and life under occupation, by a refugee. (The IRC, the organization for which Mom worked, had actually been started at roughly the same time as the novel—at the suggestion of Albert Einstein—to rescue Jews from Nazi Europe.) It’s a subtle book, with scenes of comedy and violence, that is devastating to read both because of the power of the writing and also in light of the murder of its author and so many millions more by the Nazis and their collaborators.

  IT WAS NOW May 2009, there had still been no news about David Rohde, and Mom was increasingly worried. She was also determined that they break ground on the library, something that had been postponed for all sorts of reasons, mostly involving the difficulty of building anything in Afghanistan. They still had no office for the lone staff member, a woman who was working night and day raising money and awareness for the project. They were also busy editing a video of one of the mobile libraries, and of Nancy Hatch Dupree in action, which they would use for fund-raising; they needed more money to finish the library once they started and to pay for the traveling collections. A friend of mine had shot the footage; that he had returned safely from Kabul was a huge relief. In all, there was so much to do that Mom didn’t know how she would get it done. But she said she would.

  We were back at chemo for Mom’s dose of mitomycin and found our conversation moving back, once again, to Suite Française. I also mentioned, again, my insomnia—I’d finished the book on a night when I couldn’t sleep at all.

  “I just feel guilty that I’m not doing more in the world,” I said. “I mean, it’s so easy to read Suite Française and think, ‘Why didn’t people in America know more and do more?’ But here I am, and there are things going on all over—child soldiers and genocide and human trafficking—and I’m hardly doing anything.”

  Mom tilted her chin to the left and pursed her lips, giving me the same quick, mystified look she used when I’d forgotten to call someone she wanted me to contact, or when I’d asked again for directions to somewhere when she was sure she’d already given them to me. “I loved the people I met on all my trips, Will,” she said. “I loved hearing their stories and getting to know them and finding out what if anything we could all do to help. That’s enriched my life more than I can say. Of course you could do more—you can always do more, and you should do more—but still, the important thing is to do what you can, whenever you can. You just do your best, and that’s all you can do. Too many people use the excuse that they don’t think they can do enough, so they decide they don’t have to do anything. There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything—even if it’s just to sign something, or send a small contribution, or invite a newly settled refugee family over for Thanksgiving.”

  “And what about going to expensive restaurants and things like that?” I asked, risking The Look again.

  “It’s fine to give yourself treats, if you can afford it, but no one needs to eat like that every night. It should be special. If you are fortunate enough to have these questions, it means that you have an extra responsibility to make sure you’re doing something. Oh, and I don’t mean just something that helps you. I’m always so disappointed when I hear of wealthy people who only give money to the schools where their children go while their children are still going there—that’s charity, of course, but it’s quite selfish. There are also so many wonderful schools that help children who have very little. If they gave a fraction of what they give to their children’s school to one of those schools, too, just think of what they could do.”

  “Lots of my friends say they want to do something but just don’t know how to start. What do you tell people who ask you that?”

  “Well,” Mom said, “people should use their talents. If you’re in public relations, you can offer public relations help to a charity. And charities are always looking for people to raise money, and everyone can help do that. I always have people come to me who have professions—bankers, lawyers—and they want to go right away and get a paid job working in the field with refugees. And I say to them, ‘Would you hire someone who had no other qualification than working with refugees to be a banker in your bank, or to argue a case in
court? It’s a profession.’ So I tell these people to start by volunteering or giving money and then decide if they want to train to do this kind of work. But if they really want to help, then money is the quickest and fastest way, even if you can only afford a little.”

  Then Mom added, with a smile, “And there’s something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don’t know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.” She paused. “But all this isn’t what’s keeping you up at night, is it?”

  “No, Mom, it isn’t.” I took a moment before continuing. “I’m up at night thinking about what we’re going to do …” I wanted to say “without you” but stopped myself. I just couldn’t say it. I couldn’t even let myself think it.

  Mom reached out and touched my cheek, as if to wipe away a smudge of dirt or a tear.

  “Aren’t you angry?” I blurted out. “I am.”

  “Sometimes, sure,” she said.

  It turned out that she had one more thing to tell me that day—or rather, to show me. When she got up to go to the toilet, she left Daily Strength for Daily Needs open on her chair. The day’s passage was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It read:

  That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

  The Bite of the Mango

  Across the street and up a block from the main entrance to Macy’s, in the middle of Manhattan, is a banquet building called Gotham Hall that was once a bank: a large structure with a cavernous main room. It’s incredibly grand, built at a time when banks were temples to money and no expense was spared in creating spaces that would awe visitors and give them confidence in the abilities of the owners to take their money and make vast sums for their customers.

  Gotham Hall is where more than a thousand people, mostly women, have come together to celebrate, on this day in 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, recently renamed the Women’s Refugee Commission.

  It’s a bit cold in the hall. I look over at Mom, but she seems warm enough; she’s wearing her pearls, a brightly colored scarf, and a pistachio-green mandarin-collar silk blouse, but she has left her coat on. She’s surrounded by people she’s worked with in the organization’s New York office and people with whom she’s traveled all over the world: to Khartoum and Rangoon and Khost and Monrovia and Gaza. It’s been eighteen months of chemo: of mouth sores, swollen feet, nausea, headaches, weight loss, lack of energy, diarrhea, constipation, cramps, and fevers, and hours in doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, and hospitals. And it’s been thousands of dollars of her own money and tens of thousands of dollars of Medicare. But how can you put a price, in suffering or in dollars, on seeing her here, among her friends and colleagues, celebrating twenty years of helping women and children all over the world, and recommitting to continuing to help in whatever time she, or any of us, has left?

  Or what price could you put on Mom’s lunches with her oldest friends—some of whom she’d kept in touch with since grade school—or her time with her grandchildren, or a trip she was making to visit the extraordinary women she loved who had been directors of admission at Radcliffe’s six “sister” colleges? These women, who ranged in age from late sixties to mid-nineties, had been getting together every year for more than thirty years. What price could you put on the daily calls and movies and meals she shared with two of her and Dad’s best friends, a renowned Harvard scholar, now retired nearby, and a college president Mom had met while serving on a board, who was one of the few people with whom Mom enjoyed shopping for clothes, because her friend’s enthusiasm for this activity was so intense and infectious? How could you even put a number on something as simple as the hours Mom spent listening to music, or reading, or looking at the wonderful shapes and shadows of the pottery she loved?

  And yet Mom was calculating that price. And she’d made it very clear to all of us. There would come a time when she would say enough.

  THE ROOM WAS so packed, there was barely space for the waiters to get between tables to clear the dishes. Mom thinks this kind of lunch should be one plate, no clearing, with cookies already on the table for dessert—something she will later remind her friends at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

  Liv Ullmann, a co-founder of the organization, gave a speech and included a tribute to Mom, in which she said that Mary Anne Schwalbe made her proud not just to work with the commission but proud to be a woman. Carolyn Makinson, the director of the commission, had spoken before, describing, with humor and love, how Mom first approached her for funding, then became a friend, and eventually roped her into running the organization. How great, I thought, to honor people while they are still alive.

  After the tributes, and a film on the history of the commission and Mom’s role in the early years, and the lunch, and the conversation about this and that, came the recipients of the Voices of Courage awards. Dr. Shamail Azimi was the first woman doctor to return to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban—bringing a team of women doctors from Pakistan to deliver maternal and child-related medical services that no male doctor would ever have been allowed to perform. I thought of my talks with Mom about courage and about what needs to be done in the world.

  And then came Mariatu Kamara, the other recipient of a Voices of Courage award, a young woman who had written a book called The Bite of the Mango, which Mom had chosen for our club and which we’d both read the night before.

  One of the first things everyone noticed about Mariatu Kamara was that she has no hands. You couldn’t help but see this as she accepted her award, holding it proudly with her stumps before gently placing it on a table behind her. A gorgeous presence, with long braids wrapped like a crown around her head, she spoke in a loud, clear voice, with a distinct African accent, dotted with some Canadian vowel sounds. She wore a golden African-print gown and a tangerine-colored shawl.

  Mariatu was born in Sierra Leone and was only twelve years old when she was captured by rebels, adult and boy soldiers. At first she was forced to witness unimaginable horrors—the torture and murder of people she knew from her village as well as others. In her book, she describes how the rebel boys boarded up a house where twenty people had taken shelter—and then set it on fire.

  After being held captive for a while, Mariatu thought she might be allowed to leave physically unscathed. But just as she was walking off, she was stopped and told she must first choose a punishment. It wasn’t much of a choice: Which hand, they asked, did she want to lose first?

  “Three boys hauled me up by the arms. I was kicking now, screaming, and trying to hit. But though they were little boys, I was tired and weak. They overpowered me. They led me behind the outhouse and stopped in front of a big rock.”

  She begged them not to do it, reminding the boys that she was the same age as they were. That they spoke the same language. That they could perhaps even be friends. She asked them why they would want to hurt someone who liked them.

  The boys replied that they needed to chop off her arms so she couldn’t vote. They told her that they wouldn’t kill her—they wanted her to go to the president and show him what they had done to her. They said, “You won’t be able to vote for him now. Ask the president to give you new hands.”

  It took two attempts for the boys to cut off her right hand. “The first swipe didn’t get through the bone, which was sticking out in all different shapes and sizes,” she writes. It took three tries to cut off her left hand.

  The book continues: “As my eyelids closed, I saw the rebel boys giving each other high-fives. I could hear them laughing. As my mind went dark, I remember asking myself: ‘What’s a president?’ ”

  If anyone at the lunch had any doubt abou
t why they were there, or if their money was well spent, Dr. Azimi and Mariatu dispelled it. The title of Mariatu’s book, written with the Canadian journalist Susan McClelland, refers to the moment when Mariatu, after regaining consciousness, and after using her feet to wrap cloth around her arms, and after walking all through the night on snake-infested paths, finally comes across a man who is willing to help her. He has a mango and starts to bring it to her lips, but she shakes her head. “I couldn’t eat from his hands. It felt wrong to be fed like a baby.” She manages to take a few bites of the fruit by cradling it in her injured arms. She had to do that one thing—feed herself. That meant everything, that she might live.

  The Bite of the Mango is written elegantly but simply. It’s also the story of how the author survived rape; how she reconnected with friends from her childhood whose arms had also been cut off; how she created a family for herself among other victims of violence in Sierra Leone; how salvation came in the form of a theater troupe she joined, to educate others on the war and on HIV/AIDS, where she found her voice; and how she managed to emigrate to Canada and make a new life for herself while keeping her ties to Sierra Leone and her commitment to build homes for abused women and children there.

  Perhaps the most moving thing about Mariatu’s book is how she learned forgiveness. She describes a play she performed with the theatrical troupe she discovered in the camp for displaced people where she was living. In one part of the drama, they enacted scenes of the rebel commanders giving the boys drugs to “make them strong men” and beating a boy rebel who refused to take them.

  In the second-to-last scene, the boy rebels huddled together, crying. They admitted their crimes to one another and wished they could return to their own villages and their old lives—much like all of us … were wishing we could do.