Occasionally, maybe once an evening, two or three bars appeared and the phone pinged me with texts and e-mails. The messages were mostly from my mother, fretfully asking if we’d made it home that day.
I slept with my Blackberry, tossing around all night, drenched in sweat. I woke up often, fishing around in my gritty sheets for my phone, hanging over the side of the bed, holding the phone at just the right angle as though it had an antenna, to see if any messages had arrived.
Considering the fervor of my preoccupation, one might think I was anticipating urgent business messages, or notes from loved ones back home: a boyfriend, husband, family. But I wasn’t fooling anyone in Dungu. My status as a soon to be thirty-five-year-old célibataire was transparent.
I wore African-style dresses almost every day. It was my only option, after tossing to the side my sticky, head-to-toe black cotton, so misguided for these parts. The traditional dress attracted many a suggestion that went along these lines: Kevin took a daughter of Dungu to America, so wasn’t it only reasonable that his “sister” should be married to someone in Dungu as the family’s gift back to Congo?
When the governor of Orientale Province fired the mayor, he flew in a replacement, a district administrator from another area of the province. He’d landed in Dungu with no more than a wrinkled suit, without knowing why.
Officials dropped him at the Procure with welcome gifts of a toothbrush and a track outfit for his down-time. We felt sorry for him and greeted the new neighbor with idle chatter about politics and the state of education in Congo. By way of introduction, he showed me photos of his wife and kids and admired my traditional African wrap dress.
He was up front. “Marry me.”
“You just showed me photos of your wife and kids!”
“You know … as second wife.”
African polygamists don’t usually stir feminist sympathies. Yet, compared to all the American men who cheat, or just want to get some, shall we say, alone-time in exchange for as little emotional baggage as possible, I found something refreshing and forthright about the offer. Like, “Yes, I’m married. And I still want in your pants. In exchange, I’ll take care of you for a lifetime.”
I declined, but thanked him for the generous offer. Of course, should I ever decide a polygamist union in remote central Africa is for me, it’s always good to know that a girl has options.
At Mama Koko’s, I tried to create space for the family, and filled my time covering the children in stickers and leading them in rounds of camp songs. One of Francisca’s cousins, an unmarried teen mother, tried to soothe me. “Don’t worry. You’ll have your own.”
I smiled politely, aware that this was the sort of comment that in the past had set my inner feminist grumbling. Please. I’m doing meaningful work! Get tied down? No thanks!
Instead, these days, the comments landed with a disquieting twinge.
I looked away, not with an eye roll but with embarrassment. To be alone, to have no one to lose, was to the Congolese perhaps the worst possible fate. For all the turns of misfortune Mama Koko and her family had suffered, they felt sorry for me.
Aunt Harriet
• • • •
At lunch in the family dining room, Mama Koko gathered her skirt and plunked a many-times-reused plastic bottle on the table like a punctuation mark.
Francisca interpreted, “There’s been a death in the family.”
The bottle was filled with yellowish local liquor, meant to make the pains of death go down easier at the family wake. The baby boy we met the week before at the hospital had died that morning.
“Not Heritier?” I asked, thinking of the boy limp on the hospital bed, gripped by cold from the night in his dying mother’s arms.
No, it was his wide-eyed neighbor from the children’s ward. The other cousin’s little boy. Embarrassed by my inexplicable relief, I asked, “Can we buy flowers for the funeral?”
Francisca laughed, “There are no florists in Dungu!”
But she said cash was always welcome. I trailed behind Mama Koko’s procession of family women bearing their local brew, en route to the funeral a few blocks away, deeper into Bamokandi’s back alleys.
A few houses down, an elderly woman called to us from under an ancient mango tree. Her arms and feet bare, she was cradled in a traditional woven chair; her hair was in a bundle of short braids pointed at the sky, like a dancer’s fingers twisted upward. With a sober expression, she craned toward us to reveal a bandage on her chest, just big enough to cover the wound from a bullet, shot at close range.
Half of Dungu seemed to be Francisca’s family or old friends, so it was no surprise when she introduced Harriet as “my other cousin.”
Harriet was Modeste’s sister, Antoinette’s aunt. She wore two draped strands of tiny red beads just above the bandage, a gesture I imagined was willing life—with all its delicate frivolities—to return to normal. She was recently released from the hospital. The family had left her to heal on her own under the shade of the compound’s lone remaining mango tree.
Antoinette had lived across the footpath from Harriet, and was over at Harriet’s all the time, especially of late. She and her three little boys stayed longer those days to escape quarreling with her husband. He had just asked Antoinette to move out—and to take the kids with her.
That day, the attack happened in the late afternoon. One of Antoinette’s boys, Herbert, was with his dad at their hut across the way. The rest hung around at Harriet’s.
Screaming. Gunshots. Chaos. Everyone ran. Harriet snapped upward and saw men in camouflage with guns. A neighbor screamed LRA! Another: We’re dead!
Harriet saw Antoinette’s husband push chubby-cheeked four-year-old Herbert into the pathway, toward the gunmen, yelling, “Go back to Auntie’s house!”
He jumped on his bike and rode to safety, leaving the dazed boy alone, in the path of the gunmen.
As she recalled the story, Harriet registered the shock on my face. In all my hundreds of interviews in Congo, I’d never before heard of a parent serving up his child to a militia.
“What can I say?” she shrugged. “He’s not getting those kids.”
The gunmen kicked Harriet’s daughter in the stomach, knocking her to the ground. Another cocked his gun and aimed it at her daughter.
Harriet screamed and ran at the gunmen. “Oh, God! Kill me instead!”
The gunman swung his gun around, pointed squarely at Harriet’s chest, and fired.
Harriet collapsed. The gunmen stomped on her daughter. Believing they were both dead, the gunmen moved on. Harriet’s daughter struggled, but got up. She picked Harriet up and they dragged themselves and the children up the road. That’s when they heard another gunshot and Antoinette’s scream.
Someone on a bicycle stopped for Harriet. She collapsed on the bike, and woke up in the hospital.
“You’re a hero,” I said. “You saved your daughter’s life.”
She stared at me, unmoved by the accolades.
I looked at Harriet’s bandage and thought of Antoinette’s husband, Heritier’s father. In creative-writing classes they say choices under pressure are the only true measure of character.
“I met Heritier’s dad. I gave him $20 for the boy,” I said.
“Well, he sure didn’t use the money for that child,” Harriet said.
“Where will the children live?” I asked.
“When I feel better, I’d like to have them.”
By the time we reached the funeral, the family parcel was awash in harsh sunlight. Some of the men had already started drinking. A few boys stood guard as they put the finishing touches on the baby’s miniature coffin, streaked with yellow wood stain; it was just dry enough for the lid to be placed on top.
Guests could have spread out; there was plenty of room, even shade for refuge at the edges of the parcel. Instead, all the women and children, perhaps thirty or more, squeezed into a shelter the size of a one-room hut, made of freshly picked palm leaves and dusty
plastic tarps to block the sun. Aunties and little ones wailed around the still baby boy who rested among them on a bed, dressed in his best striped shirt and sports jacket, draped under eyelet lace, cotton balls stuffed in his nose.
Zealous explosions of color on aunties’ dresses in clashing geometric, floral, and paisley patterns formed a kind of live, quilted human shroud to swaddle the departed baby, wrapping him in shockwaves of cries. Aunties and cousins sang in rounds: Come Lord, come Lord, come and help us. Stand up Lord, stand up Lord, stand up and help us.
Periodically the baby’s mama quieted down and let herself breathe as an auntie stroked her hair. The song would wane, and then erupt again with the mama’s fresh howls of grief.
Francisca and I squeezed in at the edge of the crowd, the outer limit of the shade cast by the tent, trying to not stand out, watching the uncontained anguish.
I was surprised. Maybe because back home, this kind of raw grief is saved for dark rooms with closed curtains, or because our cultural icons of strength in untimely grief feature silent tears behind black veils. Maybe.
Maybe.
But maybe my surprise stemmed from something deeper, more insidious, floating slowly by on my private sea of assumptions, the kind so many carry through the world. This baby was the first person I’d met in Congo who had died. The deaths of Congolese children certainly didn’t appear to be unusual. I had heard the endless stories, unnamed babies dying the same day as their birth in the dripping, muddy bush, or a mouth stuffed with grasses by a mother desperate to choke off a child’s cries that might get many others killed during militia attacks in the Kivus.
The question to Congolese mothers wasn’t Have you ever lost a child but, rather, How many? So common were the deaths of Congolese children under the age of five that when I met with women in South Kivu, mothers would often wave fingers indicating how many children they had lost.
At the funeral, the unending wailing wasn’t just coming from the mother. I watched a girl near the body. She was a pre-teen. I guessed that the baby was her special little friend, that she had played with him while his mama cooked and cleaned, just like the older girls did at Mama Koko’s parcel.
This wailing wasn’t for the sake of ritual, manufactured or dramatic, as one sometimes sees on televised mega-church broadcasts, with flailing arms and speaking in tongues. Even the stoic Mama Koko wiped away tears. Despite the caring and running and volunteer work and movement building I had done, I somehow pictured the death of a baby here—in Africa, in Congo—as landing softer because it is so common, in some unconscious equation calibrating grief in proportion to predictability of the loss. I imagined it might be less of a shock.
I was wrong. Of course I was. The death of a baby in Congo, by militias or not, arrives with the same slicing agony as it does everywhere.
I thought of motherless Heritier.
Mayano
• • • •
Our driver Mayano slipped into the funeral and whispered something to Francisca. Apparently he wanted to leave to pick up some money, promising to come back soon. By now he should have known: His availability and readiness for an emergency escape from the LRA was the whole point of hiring a car. Taking off for a few hours midday, while we were in Bamokandi, left us unprotected and exposed. Safety had to come first.
“No,” I said, without further explanation.
Back at Mama Koko’s, he asked Francisca again, hoping to leave with the car for a while. Francisca told him flat out “No,” again. A few minutes later, Mayano walked down the driveway with a yellow bungee key chain belonging to Francisca’s brother and mounted Antoine’s moped.
Fear of being stranded in an LRA attack pushed me to my feet. I yelled, “No!”
The family exchanged uncomfortable looks between themselves.
Mayano dropped the subject and returned Antoine’s key, but he refused lunch and sulked the remainder of the day. Noting the tension, Francisca said, “I don’t like being around grumpy people.” I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Mayano or me.
Back at the Procure, Francisca spoke with a nun about the situation and insisted on a new driver. She reported back, “It’s serious. He could lose his job.”
That evening, as we sat out on our stoop eating dinner, Mayano sauntered over. As though letting us down easy, he said, “Tonight will be my final service for you.”
We didn’t say much in return.
“You know, they need me here,” he added. “I can’t take care of everyone.”
When he left, Francisca commented, “He’s just showing off, acting big. He thinks he quit.”
But in the morning, he was there, ready to take me to a morning Internet session. He approached Francisca. “So, I need you to tell the Procure I’m the best driver here.”
Francisca laughed him off. But he came back later and asked her again.
The next morning, he spotted me and forced a smile, anxiously waving hello across the courtyard. He approached Francisca, laying out the plan: “First I’ll take Lisa to her Internet, then I’ll come back here, pick you and your mom up, drive you to her place. I’ll wait all day.”
Francisca shook him off; we had already hired another driver, Mamba. I asked, “What’s his deal? Why does he keep coming around?”
“They are sending him out to deliver food in LRA territory,” Francisca said.
The Procure had given him his new assignment: driving the mission truck out to the Red Triangle, the epicenter of the violence.
When I saw him around the Procure, he wore his desperation like someone on death row. Strike that. Like someone I had put on death row. Francisca reminded me that the other drivers had been making the drive. All the same, driving to those villages was like a death sentence.
Heritier
• • • •
Among the resting mamas and babies, Heritier’s hospital bed was empty. I circled, and found him lying on the bare floor between two rusty beds, alone, covered in crumbs. He was staring into the distance, quiet, like a child who has given up, retreating beneath his own skin.
I thought of his mother Antoinette’s body, binding him in her cold arms, her breast exposed. How many hours had he wrestled, in waves of crying, waves of stillness? Why did the neighbors who found them in the morning leave him there on her body? How much time did it take for the neighbor boy to run all that way into town, to travel the mile stretch, to find Heritier’s Grandpapa Modeste or his aunties? How much time to lead them back to her body and the baby, cemented to her in her stiffened arms? How could those neighbors not pick him up?
Standing over him alone on the floor, though, I paused just as they likely did: He isn’t mine. It’s not my job to gather him up.
But if he were mine, I decided, I wouldn’t let him off my body. I would strap him on, snuggle him, and let my body heat radiate to warm him up from that cold night.
Who were his people, anyway? The father who would hurl his four-year-old toward a militia? His elderly auntie recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest? The miscellaneous others who would leave him alone on the floor of the hospital, covered in crumbs, resigned to stare at the ceiling?
My fingers pressed into his squishy belly. I scooped him up, grabbed the corner of my shirt, and rubbed his face clean.
He collapsed his head on my shoulder.
He appeared to need that shoulder, my shoulder. Me.
It stirred something in me I couldn’t have articulated a moment earlier. I couldn’t have understood it. I had mastered the art of impersonal compassion, but I considered “needing to be needed” a weakness. It was a strange new feeling for someone who has stacked her whole life toward independence, flexibility, and the pursuit of the greater good. Now, in an instant with Heritier, the choice to live alone, keeping no one terribly close, seemed like its own kind of irrelevance. The feeling was personal. The feeling was love.
His younger aunt reappeared from a bath in the back.
Francisca wanted to visit a friend elsewh
ere at the hospital, another cousin no doubt, and Heritier’s aunt needed a break. Heritier, I decided, needed sunshine. I wanted to give it to him. I wanted to give him everything.
Heritier and I wandered outside into the sun. We sat with our legs dangled over the walkway, as we looked at the empty courtyard of dried grass. No filming, no pictures, no awake-the-world agenda, no to-dos. Just extended quiet time in my lap, in the sun. I played with his toes. I stuck butterfly and heart stickers all over his feet and arms. He fixated on a cactus-flower postcard I had in my backpack. We had a winner. He waved the postcard in the air.
His soft baby skin under my fingers mashed me up inside.
I wanted all that cold that had seeped like a virus into his bones that night, the lonely time on that hospital floor, to drain out those toes. I rubbed his little legs and poked his stomach, and decided: Uninvited nothing. I’m going to love him back to life.
Later, Francisca trailed behind me as I combed the shops and stalls along the main market, hoping to find a children’s book, a toy, maybe a ball or a stuffed animal, a calendar with photos on it, or some children’s clothes. Anything that could serve as a little love gift. There wasn’t a big market for luxury items in Dungu. Shops displayed only shiny polyester tuxedos or party dresses for children, mixed in among practical household goods. A soccer ball, maybe? But older kids would snatch it from a baby in no time.
We moved on to the open-air market, where they sold “lift and throws.” I took to digging and sorting, hovered over the piles of used American clothes, as if to cover a dirty secret, searching for breathable cotton in baby-boy blue. Francisca stood behind me, amused. I pulled out some clean onesies that fit the mark. When I got to five, she said, “I think it’s enough, yeah?”
There were no toys. I took a second look at scrubbies and bright plastic combs that might double for one. But on the way out, a bright green and yellow plastic rattle caught my eye, perhaps the only toy for sale in Dungu.
Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen Page 10
