Raphael had a second home in the village of Kiliwa, en route to Dungu.
On the road, he ran into his family searching for his body. His wife cried.
He and his wife and the children returned to their hut and settled in for the night.
Raphael hunkered down to rest, indulging his fingertips by caressing his little ones, resting his legs weary from flight, resting his aching axe-wounded head. How could he know that these precious human moments, or any action other than sleeping directly under a heavily guarded United Nations sandbag fortress, would exact a mighty price?
The knock came.
“Is that you, brother?” Raphael called.
No answer. They opened the door.
Four gunmen.
They took his children that night.
They took everything he owned and all four of his children.
He and his wife made it to Dungu, to live out a long future of dull refugee days.
One by one, months later, then months later again, the children straggled into Dungu, ointments and split skin and killings behind them.
Kuli was the last to come out, the only girl. She came in December, only a few months before our trip. She came with wounds between her legs. Her wounds didn’t heal.
On January 23, Kuli died. That afternoon in Mama Koko’s living room, it wasn’t so long since she had passed on.
Only a few weeks between them and Kuli.
Alexander’s Grandson
• • • •
I had been asking about Nyakangba since the day we arrived. He was Roger’s son, abducted when he was twelve and held as a soldier for a year. Black killing powder, laced with God knows what drugs to make killing exhilarating, had been packed into split-skin crosses close to the veins on his wrists and ankles. The scars were still there. He entered Mama Koko’s living room, a man-eyed fourteen-year-old.
He sat on the far side of the couch. I poured tea in a Get Well Soon mug decorated with rainbows and hearts. He set it in front of him, gentle and polite. He was cold and matter-of-fact, without occasion to hide his aching soul.
Yes, they split his skin, rubbed black powder in it. Yes, he killed. Often. (It wasn’t hard, just look at people like animals.) And yes, he was there during the Christmas massacres, when hundreds were murdered in several villages—including Duru and Bangadi, including more of Francisca’s and his own cousins. In Duru, seventy-five people were killed at a church. Nyakangba didn’t say which village, but he was there when LRA gunmen found people at the church during holiday celebrations. He guarded hostages while they locked the people inside the church. He watched the LRA joke and cheer as they killed their captives. On the long hike home that Christmas Day, he took three people aside and hacked them to death with an axe, just as his father had been hacked to death only a few months before.
Only once, he saw his baby brother Dieu Merci, then turned into a soldier. He spotted him across a field.
In his off-hours, he’d think of home, mostly of his mom, Marie. Out in the bush, he fixated on her. He thought of Marie at church, of drawing water for her, of helping out around the house. He thought back to when he was still good.
Every time people were caught trying to run away, they were killed. He still thought constantly of running. When his LRA group crossed into the Central African Republic, leaving the main road and slipping into the bush, Nyakangba knew they were leaving Congo behind. They were going so far away that getting home, ever, seemed impossible. That’s it. I’ll never see my mom again.
That, he couldn’t take. Marie’s forgiving arms, a chance to be good again, to be helpful. That, he decided, made running worth it.
One night he was assigned evening-watch, and they took away his gun so he’d be less recognizable as a soldier. Once he was alone, he made a run for it.
He spent two nights in the bush, continuing by foot during the day, disoriented, until he heard a rooster, then someone revving a motorcycle. He knew he must be close to a home. He spotted women pumping water from a well. They stared at him. He didn’t speak and neither did they. He found a mango tree, where he sat, exhausted, and slept.
Ugandan soldiers on their way to draw water found the boy sleeping under the mangoes—in a military uniform. They handcuffed him. Soon enough, he was in custody, in an office with another recent escapee, a former girl-soldier who had also been in the bush.
He answered their endless questions: Where have you been? Can you show us where their camp is? Who was there? What did they do to you?
He shared everything he knew, and in exchange for his cooperation they told him he didn’t need to be afraid.
They told him to get into the back of a plane, a fighter jet with two Ugandan army pilots and a friend of his, who was another runaway LRA. “Don’t be scared. We’re just going to look for the LRA. Once we see them, we’ll kill them.”
In the air, he laughed and joked with the pilots and with his friend. They flew above the forest, scanning for the camp. Nyakangba pointed it out—and boom! They threw bombs into the camp and finished everybody. Then, while he was still in the plane, they threw bombs many times again, and they started fire—fire everywhere.
I saw the bombs.
I saw the fire.
I was happy.
I was happy to be in the airplane that finished those guys.
Francisca could see by the way he looked to the side, as though searching for answers, that he was lying. I had followed the bread-crumb trail in, tracking Nyakangba deep into his story. I could picture him ducking into the bush, the women drawing water at the well. I sat with him under his mango tree, resting until the Ugandans saved him with rescue handcuffs, and through the awkward reconnection with people he knew from the bush in some bureau somewhere between Sudan, Uganda, and the Central African Republic. But the giggling fighter pilots who bombed everything he wanted them to, that sounded incredible. As in not credible.
I wondered where the truth ended and his fantasy began. He seemed to want a happy ending. Happy, as in explosive revenge.
There was no tenderhearted mending under way for Nyakangba. His bone-thin, barely teenaged frame, his indifferent killer eyes, embodied everything in the family that had been destroyed. His answers grew cursory, as if to remind Francisca that she didn’t know him, that she knew nothing about his time out there. As if to point to the insurmountable chasm between him and her, the chasm between him and the children crawling around Mama Koko’s parcel.
After all of Nyakangba’s dreaming to see his mother again, when he got to Dungu he found out: Marie had made it out of Duru. She had made it safely to Dungu. Alone, chewed up by the loss of her husband Roger and her children, after a few months, she got sick and died.
Nyakangba held on for a week or so before he snapped. After Papa Alexander’s, he moved into Mama Koko’s compound. Francisca’s brother Antoine kept him close. He wouldn’t talk much; often he didn’t even respond to yes-or-no questions. If anyone tried to tease him or get him to crack a smile, he’d say, “Don’t joke with me.”
He’d remind them with a deadpan stare, “It’s easy to kill. It’s not a problem.”
They hid the knives and moved sharp objects away from him when he lounged in the yapu. Then one day he pounced on one of the young children with a machete.
They wrestled the weapon away. No harm done. But he had to move on. He’d moved every few weeks since between extended family compounds, and was now far out of town.
What was it like to see Papa Alexander again?
I was happy.
How did you find out that your mom had died?
I’m thinking.
What are you thinking about?
Things that we did together.
What has been the best thing about being home?
Seeing people again.
And what was the hardest part?
Nothing.
Did you see other cousins who were out at the same camp?
I never saw them.
If
you could get back into school now, would you? I’ll pay your school fees.
It’s too late to catch up with other kids.
Do you want to start again in 6th grade?
I don’t know.
Do you play soccer?
I like cards.
Okay, cards. That we could do. But before I could grab Mamba to go to the store, Nyakangba was gone. By morning, he’d left town.
Godmothers
• • • •
I promised I’d bring Heritier back, and I did. After weeks of borrowing him, I felt restless when I thought of his future, recounting the facts: Heritier’s mother was murdered a few weeks ago. His dad pushed his little brother toward the LRA and kept the $20 I gave him without spending it on Heritier’s care, even when he was limp and wasting away in the hospital. Hardly a fit father.
I took to musing out loud to Francisca about adopting Heritier and his brothers, or sketching out budgets and weekly chore charts, or picturing backyard gardening projects and where the boots and finger paintings might go in my entryway.
But I had five years of life choices behind me that made the notion of adoption ludicrous. I had so de-prioritized a personal life that there was no room for one anymore. I could never pass an adoption agency’s home study. I had nowhere to live. No income. No partner. Then, of course, there was my work.
Then I thought of all the Congolese women who do it, no questions asked, even when they can’t feed their own kids. They just take on orphans and make it work.
Everyone could see it. When Francisca picked up on the fact that my thinking had ranged beyond the safe what-ifs into more serious soul-searching, she started raising red flags. She loves this kid, Francisca thought. It’s sweet, but it’s too much. Everybody saw him getting attached, and remarked among themselves, “That baby will suffer when Lisa leaves.”
I showed up at Aunt Harriet’s one day and Heritier was gone. He was staying across town with his father and brothers, Aunt Harriet told me. He’d be back with his brothers at the end of the day. So I checked back. Still no Heritier. Day after day, I stopped by to find no boys waiting, only more promises about later today or tomorrow.
Francisca was clear, sitting under the yapu: “The family would never let him go.”
A family friend sitting on the opposite side of the lounge pavilion, a stalky Congolese-Greek man, tracked the conversation in English. He interrupted the musings: “Why not be his godmother?”
Godmother! I could do that. I could send letters and money for doctors, healthy food, and school fees.
“You aren’t Catholic,” Francisca said.
He interrupted her. “You don’t have to be Catholic to have God. The Jewie-Jews, they have God. Everybody have God.”
“You have to be Catholic to be a godparent. You are taking responsibility for the spiritual development of the child,” Francisca said.
I turned to her. “You’re Catholic. What if we were godparents together?”
“What? You want us to be lesbian godparents?” Francisca asked.
“Yes! Exactly.”
We laughed, but I refused to drop it. At random intervals over the next few days, riding across town, over morning pondu, between interviews and visits with relatives, I peppered Francisca with questions about godparenting. How we might wire money; how I might come back to visit; how I might write letters and send Heritier and his brothers to college. How I could meld him into my world and me into his.
Several nights later at the Procure, Francisca, Mama Koko, and I took shelter in Francisca’s hallway, avoiding another downpour. We spotted a young priest from the diocese across the parking lot, the light reflecting off of his slick yellow rain gear. “Hey, why don’t we ask about the whole godparent thing,” I suggested.
“You’re serious?” Francisca asked.
“Yeah. I’m serious.”
Francisca called out to him.
The clean-shaven young priest stepped inside the dark cement hallway, dripping from the rain, lit by the cool blue florescent lamp. Francisca asked about what procedures were involved and whether a two-woman godparenting team might be acceptable if one of them was a devout Catholic.
The young priest was soft and sympathetic, but clear on the church code. “Were his parents married in the church?”
No.
“What number child is he?”
Number three.
“If he was the first, or even second, of unwed parents, then maybe they could make an exception. But he was the third of a couple not married in the church. And she’s not Catholic. So no. It’s not possible.”
So there it was. Heritier, the third so-called illegitimate child and I, the agnostic nonbaptized, were both rejects. There would be no sanctuary for us. Someone suggested, “Why do you need to be a godparent? You can always play a special role in his life.”
But how? What does “special role” look like?
As the priest disappeared back into the storm with his florescent lantern, I turned to Francisca, quick-fire brainstorming: What if I just asked the family? Or Father Ferruccio? Surely he would perform the ceremony. How could he be a stickler for the standard rules of engagement in a situation like this?
I could have pressed on. I could have asked again. But I’d heard the snarky comments back home about white-savior complexes; I understood that I was trampling too far into cultural sensitivities. I was grasping at something already slipping away. It would take years to understand it. That night, the love impulse, the take-it-on, make it my problem drive to intervene, began to wash out in inspiration’s inevitable wake: doubt.
Nights
• • • •
Sometimes Francisca would wake up in the dead of night to Mama Koko praying the rosary. She’d listen for a while before joining in. Then they would lay there softly mumbling their prayers together.
At other times one of them would ask, “Are you awake?” They’d murmur back and forth for hours, with Francisca asking, Whatever happened to so-and-so? Mama Koko gave her updates: Oh, they died. They were murdered. Or Oh, she’s fine, just living on the other side of town.
Mama Koko wanted to know about the grandkids in America. Francisca told her about Isaac and Solomon’s indie bands, the huge party they throw every summer, so much like the harvest festival when she was a child: Everyone comes and Isaac’s college friends all spend the night so no one drives home drunk. She told her about how tired her feet get from standing all day at work, then standing to cook dinner in an American kitchen.
Mama Koko asked, “Will I see Kevin before I die?”
“Kevin would come if he could, but work keeps him so busy,” Francisca said.
“Well, he loves our culture. He married you,” Mama Koko said. “Why can’t you come together?”
“Someone has to make the house payments.”
“What do you mean? You don’t own your house?”
“We kind of own it. We owe the bank and make payments.”
“That’s so complicated.”
“Life is stressful in America,” Francisca tried to explain. “We live in a house, but everyone comes and goes. Sometimes we don’t see each other for days.”
“I think you should move home.”
They began to drift.
Then Mama Koko said, “I wish the world was the way it used to be.”
Papa Alexander: The Third Sitting
• • • •
Enough time had passed for Alexander to calm down from the storm of emotions stirred in our last meeting. He came around to the yapu and offered to continue talking with us. Together, we retreated to Mama Koko’s living room.
Alexander and Cecelia had escaped the gunmen in the forest and briefly met up with the group of survivors. But soon, exhausted and injured, they fell behind the rest of the crowd. No one could hang back to help them. The more people in a group, the more twigs to break under fleeing feet, the longer the pauses when they spotted the LRA down the road, the louder the breathing when hidi
ng in the bush with the LRA just a few feet away. Everyone scattered in hopes of a discreet exit.
Making their way through a jumble of forest and abandoned fields, grasses, palm trees, emptied-out huts, with bare feet on brush, Alexander and Cecelia struggled to ignore the stinging wounds and bruises from their beatings. Without knowing where they were going, they went.
At dusk, they came across two graves, not fresh, but familiar. In the graves were André and Alexander’s mother and a young son of Dette and André who died on the farm many years earlier. The chaos of the day had spun everything far beyond the bounds of reality. It seemed impossible that they could have woven a path through the forest back to their own land after so many hours. A sudden wave of relief came over Alexander, as if he was able to retrieve his whole life, his whole family: The attacks, the LRA, it is just a dream.
Except it wasn’t.
Alexander scanned the bush, the nearby road. No, we are really home. It was their coffee plantation. But it wasn’t a refuge. They could hardly go back to the castle. Homes were now off-limits. Too easy to be found; too easy to turn a home into a funeral pyre. They retreated under their shallow cassava bushes for the night, though these were still too young and spare-leafed to provide real cover.
It was a one-eye-open sleep on raw dirt under the cassava, with Alexander listening for any signal to jump and run. Some days when it was clear, depending on the direction of the wind, they could hear Father Ferruccio’s church bells in that spot in that field. But the wind blew in some other direction that night, or not at all. They didn’t hear the bells, leaving them in the silence of morning.
“I need coffee,” Alexander whispered.
“You can’t go home,” Cecelia said, making no move for the house key.
“I’m going. Give me the key.”
They had words.
I’m not going with you. We need to go to Sudan, now.
Well, I’m going, like it or not.
Something could happen.
“Okay,” Cecelia said. She threw the key at him in exasperation. “But no one is going to blame me if something happens. I tried to stop you. You don’t listen.”
Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen Page 14
