A Thousand Sisters

by Lisa Shannon

  The Democratic Republic of the Congo—otherwise known as the worst place on earth. Home to Africa’s First World War, the deadliest war on the planet since World War II. I’ve spent months trying to shake that place, but it keeps knocking at my door, like a bill collector or an old lover anxious to wrap up unfinished business.

  This morning is different, though.

  “Do you remember there?”

  Yes, Eric. I remember there.

  It’s news from the village of Kaniola. One Sunday, many months ago, I walked through its far-flung settlements, which are scattered along the ridgeline, butted up against vast stretches of forest. Since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the forests, thirty miles inland from the Rwandan border, have been ruled by Hutu militias known as Interahamwe, a Rwandan word meaning “those who kill together.” The group is also known as the Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda, or FDLR.

  I thought about Kaniola just the other day while strolling past the Old Portland houses and walnut trees that line my street, sipping my takeout tea. I’m not religious, so Biblical passages almost never cross my mind, but that psalm flashed in my head: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . I realized that if there is anywhere on earth that qualifies as the valley of the shadow of death, it’s Kaniola. In the five and a half weeks I spent in Congo, the most horrific stories I heard came from that valley. I walked through it and I felt no fear. I’ve done that, literally.

  I chuckled to myself.

  This morning, sitting in front of my laptop with another cup of tea, staring at my email in-box, it is not amusing in the least.

  My friend Eric, a Congolese conservationist with whom I maintain regular contact, writes, “I am forwarding you an article about seventeen persons who were killed by knives in Kaniola. Do you remember there?”

  Of course I remember.

  The international news report outlines the attack. “It was a reprisal. They targeted houses. They silently entered the house. They started by strangling some victims before stabbing them to stop them raising the alarm. . . . The assailants left a letter saying they would return in force.”

  Twenty injured. Eighteen kidnapped. Seventeen killed.

  On my second read of the article, I stop cold at a line I initially missed: “The victims included the father of a girl kidnapped by the FDLR and recently freed by the army.”

  From the hundreds of people I interviewed in Congo’s war-ravaged

  South Kivu province, I heard plenty of stories of abductions and countless reports of the army running away from the Interahamwe. But I heard only one account of the army protecting civilians, a shocking story because these kinds of heroics are so rare. In Kaniola, I met three girls who’d been abducted by the Interahamwe and rescued by the Congolese Army.

  Is this article about that same family? It must be.

  It will be days before I hear from one of the United Nations majors who escorted me that day, who confirms my guess. “If you remember the last walk, it was that same area.”

  I went to Kaniola on a tip, a shred of paper, on a day I had nothing better to do. I spent less than a day there—just a Sunday morning—walking through the village, hoping to talk with the rescued girls. We visited the girls’ home and spoke for more than an hour with the cool-tempered teenagers, their brother, and their desperate father. Afterward, their dad turned to us and asked pointedly, “Now that we’ve talked with you, what are you going to do?”

  I drag out the plastic storage bin packed with videotapes from my trip, long since left in a corner of an empty room, its contents unviewed. I’m up late, combing the unfiltered, raw footage, which are called “rushes” in the film industry. Finally I find the Kaniola tapes.

  It’s peaceful enough there. Certainly, there is no gore. (I never once saw a dead person in Congo.) Still, I notice my hands shaking as I watch. I have to stop, pace the hall, and return to inch through the footage, frame by frame, until I land on the clearest image of each person I so much as scanned with the camera that day. I capture them in still frames. I export them, save them, print them out in pixilated eight-by-tens, and file them in a white plastic three-ring binder.

  I missed so much when I was there. I had heard that when you cross the border into Congo, the look in people’s eyes changes. I noticed it the first day, then never again. Now, as I scan the video footage, it seems so obvious. I study their eyes. Countless people have referred to that look as one of numbness or shell shock. Journalist Lisa Ling once called it “a look of utter death.”

  As days fly by and I continue to dig deep into the footage, I stumble across a shot of myself on my second day in Africa, standing on the Rwandan side of the border with a rickety wooden bridge in front of me. I’m about to cross over. I’m already disheveled from the thirty-five-minute flight from Kigali, Rwanda.

  That’s odd. In the footage, I am blinking rapidly. My eyelids are fluttering. I didn’t feel afraid at the time, but as I watch myself, I’m clearly scared. Why did I invite that place in? Why did I pursue it, track it down?

  It wasn’t because I wanted a feel-good pet project. I needed a solution.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Greenest Grass

  IT ALL STARTS with Oprah, as these things so often do.

  It is August 2004 and I am sitting in my therapist’s office. She zeroes right in. “You’ve been watching Oprah a lot lately.”

  I am not one to advertise my daytime TV habits, but my four o’clock appointment with Ms. Winfrey has recently become the sturdy anchor in my day. “How did you know that?”

  “Depressed people who are at home during the daytime always watch the show.”

  Wait, depressed? I don’t have a clue where she’s getting that. To me, depressed is someone in a dingy bedroom in mid-afternoon, blinds closed, watching the digital clock click from 2:12 PM to 2:13 PM to 2:14 PM, or rattling around the house in day-thirteen socks. That is not me. Some stress issues? Sure, and there is my dad’s end-stage cancer. But I feel fine.

  I have a great life. At twenty-nine, I am on a solid trajectory, working my plan. I have a little Victorian house with a flower garden in a hip, walkable Portland neighborhood; a creative business with cash-flow charts that tell me freedom is just around the corner; and a good man to snuggle with at night. My quirky English business partner, Ted, is also my significant other. We aren’t married, but there’s no need. We have a bond just as strong, with all the legal protections to match. We are a corporation.

  Ted is wonderful, truly. Everything I’ve always had on my list. Kind. Creative. Fun. Cool. Though he’s fifteen years my senior, at forty-four, he prefers to think of himself as twenty-two. Playful and charming to the bone, he can squeeze a smile out of even the most sour grocery-checkout lady or snarky video store clerk. He’s not one to talk much (did I mention he’s English?), but we have between us the quiet harmony of best friends.

  We shoot lifestyle stock-photography, the kind of images you see on display in health food stores, dental brochures, and advertisements for online dating services. The beauty of the stock shot is that it can be used to sell anything. One aspiration fits all. A winning photograph will convey two things: perfection and genuine emotion. Correction: The illusion of genuine emotion, which, it turns out, can be manufactured with a few rounds of “One, two, three, yay!”

  Ted shoots; I art direct and produce. I haul perfect size-2 models out to a cloudless beach or field of the greenest manicured grass and tell them to lift their arms to the sky like wings so we can capture pictures that will rise to the top of online image searches tagged with the keyword “freedom.”

  We call it “image pollution,” just to be clear we’re in on the joke. At parties, Ted likes to say facetiously that we’ve sold our souls. For us, stock photography is strictly a means to an end. As though such things can be coaxed from the universe—or from hundred-dollar-an-hour models, for that matter—Ted often rocks back and forth as he shoots, chanting, “Happiness. More happiness.�
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  CHAPTER THREE

  Sometimes Death is More Like a Labor

  THE LABORED BREATHING starts late at night. They call it “the death rattle.” Though it is my job to stay near my dad in case he needs anything, I sleep through it as though it isn’t happening. My blankets and foam pad are piled on the dining room floor amid the chaos of oxygen tubes and pills, the hospital bed shoved in one corner, and the antique dish-cabinet in the other. I drift in and out of sleep, ignoring all the cues that this is his final night.

  In the morning, my mom calls hospice. The nurse arrives and announces that he is now in the active dying process.

  There is a grasping half-light in Dad’s eyes and his desperate breathing continues, increasing in intensity. The nurse warns us that this slow release of life could go on for days—that “sometimes death is more like a labor.” Hours pass. His blood steadily retreats up his arms and feet, leaving his skin bluish green and translucent. His pajamas are soaked with sweat. Someone grabs scissors and cuts them off, leaving his six-foot-four frame naked, swaddled in pink sheets.

  Everyone leaves the room, so I sit down next to him and hold his hand. A Vedic prayer I learned in college comes to mind. I haven’t said it aloud for years. What the hell. We’re alone. I lean in close and sing the prayer.

  He cranes his head toward me to listen. The nurse comes back, sees Dad fading, and corrals everyone into the room. “This is it!”

  I sense panic and crying behind me, but I don’t look up. I continue the prayer until someone puts a hand on my arm and I hear, like sounds from a distant radio, “He’s gone.”

  I step away, disconnected, like someone who slipped out to the restroom and missed a crucial point in a movie. I want to lean over to the nearest person and whisper, “What did I miss?” Instead, they cry, while I study his body. Sprawled on the hospital bed, my father looks like a giant, pale green frog. The nurse shuts off the oxygen pump.

  After they roll Dad away in the burgundy velvet body bag, all that is left on his hospital bed is his outline on the pink sheets. I sit in the room for a long time, and again the next day, until the bed is broken down and taken away. The dining room table returns to host distant relatives who will eat from Chinese takeout boxes on the spot where he died.

  SEVERAL CRISP FALL DAYS LATER, the sun in my eyes obscures the people who are scattered down the hillside of a modern, 1960s-era graveyard, its flat head-stones and manicured grass overlooking Portland’s Sunset Highway. I stare at the one-foot-square, simple wooden box of ashes with my mind locked on the impossibility of the math. How can my father, who was six-four and weighed 250 pounds, fit in that little container—even reduced to ashes? What percentage of his body is this?

  I try to calculate. We are burying just a portion of his ashes. The rest will be displayed in bits and pieces. Some are split between three pink and green cloisonné mini-urns on my mother’s mantel. Some are in a “Granddaddy” Build-a-Bear made for my niece. Some will be scattered at the family cemetery, in a wheat field where my father spent his summers as a child. I abandon the math. This all seems a bit silly. And he was not a silly man.

  Dad was a government servant. His preference was for all things simple: pleated polyester pants, microwave dinners. His favorite things were blood-and-guts action movies and hours of philosophical conversation over morning coffee. He was a therapist who treated Vietnam vets’ war trauma, though he did not fight in the war himself. Growing up, I heard bits and pieces about his work and some horror stories from Vietnam. But Dad’s “guys,” as he called his clients, seemed more like mythical characters to me until we had a living wake—a memorial service held before someone dies—a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed a crusty guy wearing a trucker cap in the back row, unobtrusively showing his support.

  On the other hand, Mom is a nervous lady, given to melodrama. She’s a former Southern beauty queen, and with her heavyset frame and salt-and-pepper hair, she can look ultrasophisticated when she chooses to streamline. But on most days she prefers black socks under tan sandals, paired with wrinkled, cropped khakis and oddly layered T-shirts that, more often than not, she slept in the night before. By midday she’s tugging at the ends of her shirt, combing her hair, and declaring, “I feel so frumpy!”

  Now that Mom has lost her lifetime love, I stand back and allow her center stage in her rather public grieving process. At today’s wake, I wander around stiffly, avoiding the sympathetic hugs and talk of how I’ll be able to feel his presence “if only I open my heart.”

  My mom and sister mourn, as they will for months. Sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed, they cry it out. They purge the closets of his extra-extra-large, tall-size flannel and Oxford-cloth shirts (striped and plaid) and his white V-necks. They keep their eyes on the sky, watching for eagles to circle above the house, insistent that his “spirit animal” carries messages from beyond.

  I don’t cry. He doesn’t appear in my dreams. I avoid my parents’ house. It’s not that anything has changed that much. But I’d imagined that after Dad died I would be upset. In fact, I don’t feel much of anything, and as I think about it, I haven’t felt much of anything for quite some time. I call it “creepy normal.” On my trips to the grocery store, when visiting with friends, and during my afternoons with Oprah, it’s like I’m still sitting in the converted dining room—in the green wingback chair—with his body, silent and still, like I’m waiting to wrap up an unfinished conversation.

  There’s something that bothers me, something Dad told me a few weeks before he died. He had structured his life around family, friends, and service work. He connected very deeply with people. Yet he viewed himself as a loser. Why? Because he didn’t think he’d made enough money. Like so many other men, he judged himself through the lens of status. In his mind, a couple of rental investment properties didn’t cut it.

  I, on the other hand, have never had trouble making money. But now that Dad is gone, I find it hard to remember what the goal is supposed to be. This? Ted and I designed our home as a background for photo shoots: white-on-white-on-white décor, accented with bold doses of nothing. It’s the kind of purity you can purchase on a long afternoon at IKEA—perfectly generic. We periodically swear off business talk during our nightly dinners out, declaring some nonwork “personal time,” but we never seem to find another topic worth pursuing. Our conversation always careers towards production plans. My malaise never comes up. When I watch Ted across the table, I notice how he refuses to look me in the eyes. I wonder if it’s possible to be this close to someone, locked in a twenty-four-hour-a-day, aura-meshing marathon, and still feel lonely.

  Can’t we push the reset button?

  AFTER DAD DIES, I don’t go back to work. I cannot step on another plane bound for sunny Southern California. I can no longer retreat behind the camera wearing this season’s Banana Republic collection in all black, size 14, hoping it hides my forty-five-pound weight gain, which I’m afraid screams: I don’t know who I am anymore. I am disappearing. I can’t lead models in one more round of “One, two, three. Yay!” I will not sit through one more lecture from a stock-photo library rep who mocks lovely little-girl models as “weird looking” or “horsey faced.”

  Instead, as Ted will point out later in division-of-labor arguments, I sit on the couch and do precisely nothing for months. Four months, to be exact. This leads us to try Paris. The plan is to visit the city—it will be my first time there—to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. I want to mark the territory of the next decade with something new and different. Because I have a sneaking feeling that now may be the time to get away . . . from all this.

  Ted and I visit his family in England, where I catch a horrible cold. By the time we reach Berlin for a quick visit with friends, I have both the flu and strep throat. As though I can will myself to feel better, I go out one night, but the smoky Berlin bars throw me into a nonstop coughing fit. The next day, while Ted explores the city’s museums, I stay in bed watching shadows shift around our hosts’
dark guest apartment. I trace lines in the wide-board floors, scan the bookshelf and attempt to make sense of the German titles, and drift in and out of sleep, trying not to swallow. By the time Ted returns, we hit “eject.” We’re supposed to fly to Paris in the morning, but we fly home instead.

  I wind up back on the couch in Portland, watching Oprah.

  ON JANUARY 24, 2005, Oprah features a twenty-minute segment on women in the Congo.

  “During World War II, a lot of people pretended not to know what was going on. Well, there’s another holocaust going on. This time, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And if you are like most people, you probably had no idea.”

  What?

  In the report, journalist Lisa Ling describes a conflict born out of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. After the mass killings, the Hutu militias responsible were pushed west over the border into Congo, where they retreated into the forests and began to terrorize the local population. The militias that were formed to fight them soon began fighting each other. Eventually, half a dozen countries were involved in the conflict, which became known as Africa’s First World War.

  Oprah adds, “And the violence continues today, as we speak.” Women have suffered the worst of it; rape and sexual slavery are widespread, and once they’ve become victims, women are usually rejected by their husbands. “Four million people have died. Four million people. And no one is talking about it,” Lisa Ling reports. “I think it’s the worst place on earth . . . and the most ignored.”