A Thousand Sisters

by Lisa Shannon

  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.”

  Really? They still look pissed off to me.

  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?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Parentheses

  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 Yu
sef 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.

  Later, I will look up the poem.

  YOU AND I ARE DISAPPEARING

  The cry I bring down from the hills

  belongs to a girl still burning

  inside my head. At daybreak

  she burns like a piece of paper.

  She burns like foxfire

  in a thigh-shaped valley.

  A skirt of flames

  dances around her

  at dusk.

  We stand with our hands

  hanging at our sides,

  while she burns

  like a sack of dry ice.

  She burns like oil on water.

  She burns like a cattail torch

  dipped in gasoline.

  She glows like the fat tip

  of a banker’s cigar,

  silent as quicksilver.

  A tiger under a rainbow

  at nightfall.

  She burns like a shot glass of vodka.

  She burns like a field of poppies

  at the edge of a rain forest.

  She rises like dragonsmoke

  to my nostrils.

  She burns like a burning bush

  driven by a godawful wind.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF the African night, I am haunted by the title. You and I Are Disappearing. When I was fourteen, I hadn’t a clue how the title related to a poem about a girl burning in a napalm attack. During the Q&A period following Komunyakaa’s reading, I asked him, “Who are the ‘you’ and ‘I’ and how are we disappearing?”

  Who are the ‘you’ and ‘I’? How are we disappearing?

  I understand his answer now. I crawl out of bed and scrawl it down in my notebook. I know exactly who the “you” and “I” are. The burning girl is almost every person I’ve met in Congo, and me, or us, when we watch the Congolese burn “with our hands at our sides.”

  We wake up and stroll down to the sea. In the daylight, the whole resort is like a giant set for a stock photo shoot, no retouching required.

  The day unfolds in a slow-motion haze. An elaborate breakfast buffet, a swim, iced tea on the jetty, massages at the hotel spa, a visit to a fishing village overrun with backpackers, a long nap. The resort is nearly empty. In the quiet moments, I occupy myself by mentally sketching a shoot here—casting, storyboarding, forming shot lists, framing shots. Otherwise, I continue to barrage D with intrusive personal questions. Nothing if not gracious, D obliges them all. I will do anything to keep the focus off me, off Congo, off cracking.

  Alone at the resort’s bar perched above the sea on a jetty, we gaze out over the ocean. I realize it’s the first time I’ve looked at the night sky over Africa. D points out constellations he remembers from his childhood in South Africa. They’re playing one of the Buddha Bar albums in the background, one we both own. Each of us loved it at first, we discover through conversation, then grew bored with it. It’s just us and the bartender, who remains remote. I say, “I imagine you live in a place like this, modern, clean.”

  “Nope. I’ve lived in the same Victorian townhouse for the past twenty years, since I left academia.”

  I’m impressed. To build a global software empire and not upgrade your house? To use all of your resources—money, time, and influence—not for a better lifestyle, but to save the planet? Those are values.

  We fall into a deep conversation about wealth as the great divider. We talk about two kinds of philanthropists: those who write big checks and those who doggedly work for something bigger than themselves. He tells me about acquaintances who fuss and send back a glass of water if it has four ice cubes instead of three. I tell him about my grandfather’s work with Dominique and John de Menil founding the Rothko Chapel in Houston, an interfaith place of worship dedicated to human rights. Family legend had it Dominique de Menil, aka “Mrs. D,” insisted on riding public transportation until she was in her eighties, when her staff finally had to talk her down: “You’re eighty. It’s okay to take a car!” Or the Vogels, who I saw on a segment of 60 Minutes I watched with my Dad many years ago. They built an art collection worth hundreds of millions of dollars, yet still live in the simple two-bedroom apartment they bought when Mr. Vogel worked for the postal service. I comment, “Artists love them because they’re in it for art, and not—”

  “The commerce of art,” D says, finishing my sentence.

  “Exactly.”

  The more we talk, the more I realize he doesn’t quite fit into the Big Important Guy demographic. He likes to secretly meditate in the woods, craves all things simple, and writes in his spare moments, scrawling down poetry to zone-out in board meetings. He’s undeniably intense. Of all things, lurking under his thick persona is a quirky-pensive-brilliant artist. As we do that odd dance between foreigner and friend, I wonder if I might be sitting next to someone I will know outside of Africa.

  We return to the room and, snuggled next to D, I sleep for the first time in days.

  In the morning, we walk across a vast, pristine beach, arms stuffed with snorkeling gear. There’s nothing commercial here, just African women in pastel dresses wading waist-deep in the ocean with fishing nets trailing behind them. D turns to me and says, “You could shoot here!”

  “Too much seaweed on the beach,” I blurt out, regurgitating Ted’s predictable objection.

  Did I just tell an environmentalist that Nature isn’t good enough?

  “The dark side of Lisa,” D says, raising his eyebrows, “Part two.”

  There is nothing complicated about fish. They are beautiful, simple little beings in weird, wild shapes and neon colors, like eighties cruise-ship clichés, some with frills that remind me of war-era secretaries in black-and-white polka-dotted dresses. I squeal with delight, smiling so wide I break the seal on my mask. It floods with water over and over again, so I have to keep coming up for air.

  We get back late, in a rush to make it to the airport. While the taxi driver loads my bags, D and I pause for a moment. We’re too rushed for a decent goodbye, and I’m too worn down to drum up some witty, sexy, romantic endnote.

  “I can’t believe you’re going back to that place,” he says, kissing me goodbye.

  I ignore the slow-creeping adrenaline buzz that comes when I think of Bukavu’s gutted streets. My inner college-era feminist is tickled by the role reversal: powerful man kisses young woman goodbye on her way back to a war zone. He adds, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Yeah, right. I laugh, and say teasingly as I climb into the taxi-van, “I’m already doing something you wouldn’t do.”

  As the taxi pulls away, D stands in the driveway of the hotel watching me. I look down at my arms, which are getting redder by the minute. I press my fingers down and fixate on the white imprint that remains. My back smolders with my only Zanzibar souvenir: the worst sunburn I’ve ever had. It will blister and peel for the remainder of my time in Africa, aggravated by the daily thrashing from bumping over Congo’s washed-out roads. Two years from now, the faint traces of the swimsuit I picked up in the hotel gift shop will still be burned onto my back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Goodbye Party

  THE WOMEN FOR WOMEN staff is abuzz with the imminent arrival of the organization’s founder, Zainab Salbi, and the writer Alice Walker.

  Hortense called early this morning, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I am not invited to their arrival reception or to any of their meetings with women, including Generose. I don’t know why and I won’t lie: I’m disappointed. Especially after days of enthusiastically trying to walk the Congolese staff through every Alice Walker work I’ve read—from Meridian to Possessing the Secret of Joy—trying to remember all the key points I made in a twenty-five-page college paper comparing Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple. But as anyone who has engaged in the political minefield that is celebrity wrangling can tell you, this kin
d of thing goes with the territory. I decide to not take it personally and make plans to spend my day-in-exile following up with some of my new Congolese friends.

  First up, Generose. Her brother has collected her children from various friends and neighbors, so they are now fine. It’s time to break the news about the house. I sit next to her on her hospital bed. I don’t want any of the other sisters in the neighborhood to be jealous, so I’ve made up a story. “I’ve found an organization that provides small grants for people who are disabled because of war-related injuries,” I tell her. “They are going to build you a small house.”

  For a moment, she sits quietly, absorbing the news. Then she lifts her hands up and cries out, “Aksanti sana sana sana! Merci!” Thank you very, very, very much.

  On the way out, we stop by the baby ward to check on Bonjour. As I take him in my lap, shouting fills the room. We all watch, stonefaced, as a man yells at a crying child in the corner. The man moves on to the next bed, lays his hands on his next victim and launches into his routine once again, apparently egged on by the fact that the whole ward is staring at him. The new baby screams with fear while the man holds his hands above the child in some form of prayer symbol. Ah, he’s exorcising demons.

  I focus on Bonjour, touching his tiny fingers, looking in his eyes, trying to block out the Congolese exorcist. The little guy is getting better. His skin is darker and the half-light in his eyes is gone. He smiles.