The building was bombed five hours after Freddy was born. Claire did not have any clothes for him. She wrapped him in a hospital sheet and ran back to the house, and she joined us under the bed.
* * *
The shooting lasted for days. We pushed the beds into the hallways and lay under them there. Rob’s mom snuck out to find water. We had nothing to eat, just a little sugar. Mama Nepele stirred the sugar into the water and gave it to Claire. “Drink, you need to drink,” she said, “or you won’t have milk for the baby. If you have no food, just water, you will poison yourself.”
After a few days more, Mama Nepele begged a neighbor to give us a banana. Just one banana, for Claire.
We all stared at Claire and the baby. We prayed for Freddy not to cry. Time was a box, claustrophobic, no way out. We sang with no noise. We prayed with no faith. We peed on ourselves, and each of us pretended for the others not to see. The adults whispered:
“We need to leave.”
“Where could we go?”
“To the lake and find a boat.”
“Are you out of your mind? We will be caught. We will be killed.”
“We are going to be killed anyway.”
My brain stopped recording. I couldn’t take it in. I prayed for tomorrow. That was my whole prayer: I prayed tomorrow would happen.
We are alive, we are lucky! We said that—it was absurd.
The only respite was dark humor, jokes about who should stand watch for whom while they defecated. The bathroom was behind the house. Who was quick, who was noisy, whose smell could draw fire.
When the guns were quiet we could hear the birds singing. We heard boots and men laughing. Freddy learned not to cry.
* * *
No one would let the children out, even on the days with little shooting—because all the adults knew. They knew people were the same. They knew we were scared and hungry, thus capable of becoming depraved.
The Congolese army was filled with war orphans, many close to my age, just eleven or twelve years old, children like me but who hadn’t been forced to stay inside, under a bed; children who’d wandered out and met a man with a rifle who offered them candy or stew in exchange for passing forward their pain and spreading hate. We saw women with guns in the trucks too. Older girls.
Who was evil? The children who were hungry and scared? The men with guns offering them comfort and the means to feel purposeful and empowered?
If you’re eleven and you haven’t eaten, if you’ve been hiding all day and night and you are literally walking on spent artillery shells—and then someone shows you a nice house they’ve stolen and offers avocados and the stew they are cooking, you want it. I wanted it. I wanted release from misery, however ill-gotten and short-lived.
* * *
In the normal world, people talk about shoes, people talk about love. We only talked about fire. Which machine gun made the loudest noise. Where the land mines were hidden. What bomb had just exploded, the name of it.
Boom baa cchshh ccshhh.
Mama Dina would wake up in the morning after a rain of fire and pray for us.
“Set the world straight for these kids!”
“It’s going to be peaceful for you. All this sickness is going to be kicked away. You are going to walk strong.”
That was the second or third breaking of everything, but the first rupture when I was old enough to understand just how cruel and terrible people can be without even knowing they are so cruel.
Life just kept shattering, the bricks of decency falling in a pattern both so illogical and so regular that we didn’t even try to trace the chain reaction of destruction back to any particular origin anymore. There was pain. People felt threatened. Someone inflicted a wound.
* * *
Every night I had the same dream.
I was on a massive boat, a fancy one, like a cruise ship, and we were so far out in the middle of the ocean that you couldn’t see land. Everyone on board seemed happy. I was with Mariette.
Then, all of a sudden, the ship stopped and the electricity went off and everyone fell asleep, except me. I panicked and started trying to wake everybody. No, everyone was inert. The boat wasn’t moving. All the lights had been cut. I ran around the deck in the pitch-dark, trying to find the captain. The dream went on for hours, or so I thought.
Then I heard a voice, a whisper, say, Go to your backpack. I went to my backpack and opened it. Inside was one of those mini Bibles like the ones the Congolese nuns gave us at my old horrible French school. As I pulled it out, the book transformed into a bigger and bigger Bible. As this happened, the ship started sinking. I found Claire and shook her violently, saying, “We’re going to drown.” Then the letters started flying off the Bible pages.
The ship lights came back on and everyone started waking slowly. None of the passengers had any clue what had happened. I said, frantic, to each one, “We almost sank! You almost died!” They all said, “No, we just fell asleep. It’s late at night.”
The dream was so upsetting. I refused to close my eyes for days. What if it came back again?
I told Claire my nightmare. “That is weird,” she said. “Why would a giant ship sink?”
14
My mother used to test us. “Go get an orange,” she’d say at the end of a meal, and then she’d cut the orange into pieces and watch us. There might be two pieces, there might be four pieces, there might be six pieces. She wanted to be sure we didn’t take more than our share.
The exercise was illogical. We had trees full of oranges in the garden. We could each have our own orange. But if my mother didn’t cut that one orange into enough pieces for everyone to share, the correct answer to the test was to cut it into more.
My mother was radical, in her actions if not her words. Sharing was her philosophy, an ideology to counter what she considered to be the emotionally stingy notions of possession or entitlement. We were never to think, This orange is mine. I’m giving you what’s mine. We were to think, This orange is ours. We’re sharing what’s ours.
I think back to this often in trying to make sense of the world—how there are people who have so much and people who have so little, and how I fit in with them both. Often I find myself trying to bridge the two worlds, to show people, either the people with so much or the people with so little, that everything is yours and everything is not yours. I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.
Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anybody else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.
I’ve flown on private planes, I’ve lounged on private beaches. I’ve fallen asleep at night with no shelter, no parents, no country, no food. I’ve been made to feel worthless and disposable by the world.
I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. Everywhere, and especially at both extremes, you can find monsters. It’s at the extremes that people are most scared—scared of deprivation, on one end; and scared of their privilege, on the other. With privilege comes a nearly unavoidable egoism and so much shame, and often the coping mechanism is to give. This is great and necessary, but giving, as a framework,
creates problems. You give, I take; you take, I give—both scenarios establish hierarchy. Both instill entitlement.
The only road to equality—a sense of common humanity; peace—is sharing, my mother’s orange. When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you. When we share, you are not insisting on being my savior. Claire and I always looked for the sharers, the people who just said, “I have sugar, I have water. Let’s share water. Let’s not make charity about it.”
* * *
There was another lesson my mother taught me, this one with herbs. After she picked herbs from her garden she sorted her harvest: some herbs she hung to dry, some she buried, some she dried flat. She cooked with what needed to be used fresh. I think about that sorting now, too, as I try to untangle the pieces of myself, recognize and differentiate memories and emotions and place them them into categories I can use and understand.
When I first got to Hotchkiss, I was angry. I know that now but did not realize it then. I just felt guilty, sad, and ashamed.
Mrs. Thomas flew with me out to Connecticut, and on the drive from the Hartford airport to Hotchkiss, I found myself trying to remember the landmarks: the big white church, the slopes of the hills. “This is a whole new chapter!” Mrs. Thomas said. “A new chapter in your life!”
She was steadfastly positive. But the truth is, as we drove onto the over-hundred-year-old estate of the campus, complete with boathouse, cemetery, and two hockey rinks, we both felt unmoored and confused. She’d done this: Mrs. Thomas’s generosity had made Hotchkiss possible for me. She could not have hoped for a better outcome when she invited me into her home and tended to my schooling with such care.
Then my parents moved to Chicago and my world didn’t move toward healing; it ruptured further. They arrived and I left to go to boarding school, something no one had foreseen.
I had a single room on the third floor of Wieler Dormitory. Mrs. Thomas opened the box of fresh bedding we’d ordered online—a pink, green, and white plaid print with green accent pillows—and made up my long twin bed. On the shelf above the radiator I placed framed pictures of me and my family with Oprah and Elie Wiesel. I could tell Mrs. Thomas was nervous for me. I had lived so many places, adapted so well, but I had never lived alone.
Mrs. Thomas cried when she left. I cried too. Then I napped and tried to get back into my toughest, most defended refugee mindset. I wanted, in my first walk across campus, to evince that I believed that this place had been waiting for me all my life.
I knew enough not to play the same game that the other students played. I didn’t seek status. I figured there was more for me in being humble. If I told my math teacher that I didn’t know how to do the problem set, she asked if anybody in class would be willing to meet with me. When I told my ethics professor I was confused, he said, “Let’s meet for tea.” We sat together in the dining hall. He approached me with such kindness and patience. We read Socrates and Plato two sentences at a time.
I was surrounded by teachers paid, not by me, to invest in my future. Clemantine, are you doing all right? Clemantine, how’s your project going?
But I remained panicked. I could not stop moving.
Each morning I danced from 7:30 a.m. until my classes started at 9:00 a.m. This was not lovely or meditative. It was desperate, often aggressive. I was not kind to myself. I saw tutor after tutor, for hours each day. I managed the girls’ field hockey team. I was drowning inside, and worse, I felt I had no right to be.
On weekends Claire would call and I would not pick up the phone. When I lived with the Thomases, I took care of her kids on weekends and babysat children in Kenilworth to earn money to buy them things. Now it felt like I did nothing. I had everything and I did nothing.
* * *
Christmas was awful. The official line in my family was: We are so blessed. We are drenched in God’s love. But Claire’s apartment was a war zone. My mother, my younger sisters, my brother, and my father all felt like one team. Claire and her children felt like another. Each squad huddled in a separate room to discuss plans, chores, it didn’t seem to matter. This was a competition over whose needs got met. No one had let go of their sense of betrayal, not really. There was not a unified front.
I was unaffiliated. My younger sisters never talked to me. My brother never talked to me. I could not look at my father. Time had opened such a gap. You could scream, but the person on the other side was so far away that they couldn’t hear you. I worried I had been selfish, going off to school. But my parents coming to the United States was supposed to be the big fix. Nothing was fixed.
Claire corralled almost the entire family into dressing up in red and black and holding glasses of sparkling cider so we could take perfect family New Year’s pictures. But I could not. Mariette could not. She was now a teenager. Her fury was rude.
On New Year’s Day, Mariette refused a direct request from my mother to help wash the dishes. I grabbed her arm and yanked her outside, onto the sidewalk.
“I don’t care what you’re going through,” I yelled. “You cannot disrespect your elders. You’re going to go inside and you’re going to apologize to your grandmother.”
“Nope,” Mariette said. “That’s not my grandmother. I don’t even know her.”
* * *
When I returned to school, to my single room with the pink-and-green duvet, I cracked. I had the skills to get into those long halls filled with portraits of pale, square-jawed men. I had the ability to work the system here. But none of that could protect me from my inner life. I was twenty and felt so old and so young. I’d always been alone but I’d never been alone. I was so many people and nobody at all.
One day, in a philosophy seminar, I sat around a mahogany table with my fellow students, the boys in sports jackets, the girls in sweaters, the winter sky sharp and crisp, the golf course in view. That day our class was focusing on war scenarios.
The professor, who’d been so patient with me, reading philosophy with me sentence by sentence in the dining room, had dedicated his life to teaching. He wore corduroys and ironed shirts over his comforting girth, and he kept a tight salt-and-pepper beard. That day he gave us a thought experiment: You’re a ferry captain with two passengers. Your boat is sinking. One passenger is old and one is young. Who do you save?
With this, my veneer of decorum started to crumble. Before I arrived on campus I had asked the headmaster not to share my story. I didn’t want to be a curiosity. Now I blurted out: “Do you want to know what that’s really like? This is an abstract question to you?”
I packed myself together for a bit. Then, a few weeks later, around that same seminar table, the professor asked us all to share the presentations we’d prepared on whether or not to send troops into a Black Hawk Down–like war scenario—an extremely dangerous mission to capture warlords and their lieutenants, in a country like Somalia, filled with violence and starving children.
I hadn’t prepared for the class. I knew I couldn’t handle sitting in the library, using my intellect to take on war, chaos, and hunger as if those were abstract concepts, as if I’d never held Mariette on Lake Tanganyika, on a boat crammed with humans throwing heirlooms overboard. In class, as students went around the table, taking turns describing whether they’d intervene, I lost it, for real.
“You have no idea, do you?” I yelled as one girl spoke. “You’ve never been in that scenario. What gives you the right to even talk? This is real. That’s me—and I have a name and I’m alive and there are people out there who are dead, or they’re living but they’re checked out and they hate the world because people in your country sat there and watched all of us getting slaughtered.”
I ran out of class.
When I returned to fetch my bag, the professor asked me to meet him later in his office. I had loved that room—the drifts of papers and towers of books, the leather of his chair, soft and deep as
his voice. As always, he spoke with patience and certainty. He told me that I needed to learn how to be a less emotional student.
“I can’t be less emotional. It’s personal,” I said, all the while thinking, with cruelty, that I hadn’t survived all that horror to sip tea and join his club.
My mind reeled with judgment. I believed that the professor’s directive to me was meant to augment his own comfort while ignoring mine. It suited his need to exclude emotional episodes in class. They were unpredictable, not his speciality. He had no authority over feelings, no moral or intellectual high ground on that terrain. I dropped the seminar.
* * *
After that, in every class, even if the material had nothing to do with war, family, ethnicity, racism, poverty, I had to bring up my family, my childhood, my pain, and all my classmates would roll their eyes. Every paper I bent around my personal narrative. Every comment I made, every conclusion I drew, demanded that the teacher consider not my intellectual command of the material but my experience, me. They all tried to nudge me back toward the expected track, guide me into the Hotchkiss-approved form. The professor whose seminar I dropped was especially patient. He continued inviting me to his office and reiterating that my feelings were valid, no one was denying that, but in the classroom I needed to learn to channel them, not throw a tantrum, make everybody angry, and stomp away.
I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I was unruly, full of contempt. I told them to go ahead and teach their students who knew nothing but comfort and were headed to careers at Goldman Sachs. I would not go along. I had not picked bugs out of my feet and watched my beaten sister nurse her baby while fleeing from one refugee camp to another to be lectured about human ethics by a man in corduroys.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 15
