Displaced (3 page)

“You’ve got a question, you always have a
question, there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“No, seriously Addie, when do you think
they’ll catch Osama Bin Laden.”

“You’re like a broken record with that
shit”

“Gaddy, really, we’re friends, I just can’t
understand why the United States hasn’t caught him yet.”

“You can’t understand is right, there’s a lot
you can’t understand.”

“You know, Jonathan,” Anne restarted.

“I know? What do I know? Please tell me.”

“Okay,” she laughed.

“You know,” Chris said picking up the thread.
“I think I’ll buy another bottle of Waragi,” he said and got up and
went to the bar.

Lynnette a young dark skinned Ugandan with
extravagant curly hair and a sing song way of talking, walked in
and pulled up a chair and immediately joined in the conversation.
She had a habit of asking questions in her speech just so that she
could answer them. “I was late because of what?” she would ask and
then immediately answer, “the traffic.” When Jonathan found himself
talking with her he felt like a kid in school unable to answer her
questions before she did. Andy and Robert and three English girls
joined the group smoking cigarettes and talking about fags and
quids and Andy’s familiarity with the prostitutes at the Rock
Garden. A woman named Sarah asked Andy if he thought she was an
easy shag, but Jonathan didn’t hear the response. He sat back in
his chair and listened to the conversation and looked out over the
treetops toward the city to the south.

****

When Tshindundu Mukadi and Omar picked up
Nicole and moved her to the car, she was firmly cocooned in
despair.

“We have to move you dear,” he told her.

They took her to Mukadi’s home and he laid
her on the bed in the guest room where she curled up in a ball.
Later when the doctor came to examine her, she did not resist
allowing herself to be manipulated, reacting mechanically and
impassively to instruction. Mukadi left her alone that evening and
she cried herself to sleep.

The next morning when he brought her food,
she was sitting up in one corner of the bed with the covers
clutched to her face and her chin buried in her neck.

“Here dear having something to eat.”

“What happened to Father?”

“He is gone. They took him dear.”

“I am ruined and alone uncle.”

“You are not ruined.”

“I am spoiled and no one will have me,” she
cried.

“They will be lucky to have you. Listen
Nicole, you are still the same, you are still the same you.”

“Why uncle? Father is not in the government
anymore.”

“The past has a way of catching up with us.
Your father … made enemies, your father knew too much, what he knew
was a threat to others. You’re his daughter – maybe you’re also a
threat. I think they may have made a mistake. I think we need to
get you out of the country.”

****

The Democratic Republic of Congo national
road no. 2 was a wide dirt track that flooded with the seasons and
had fallen into disrepair. Nicole’s Uncle decided that north was
the only route available and the only route out. There was violence
to the south and west to Kinshasa was neither practical nor safe.
They started out early in the morning and drove north, the farther
they got from Bunia, the greener the landscape, until they came to
patches of ashen countryside denuded for charcoal and lumber. The
green and brown alternated for a time until the road returned to
verdant jungle. The white Toyota would just get up to speed only to
be forced to slow at a series of deep ruts and potholes in the
packed clay road. Mukadi maneuvered the car carefully amongst the
fissures in the road. Unavoidably the car would go into a sink at
slow speed and dip down as if submerging into the road just before
bottoming out. The wheels would emerge from the other side with the
body of the car rising and falling with the topography of the road.
Nicole in the passenger seat rose and fell with the car as she
looked out the window into the early morning while her Uncle
navigated obstacles intent on throwing a tire, wheel or axle. At
his side and beneath his seat a carton of cigarettes and some
bottles of beer, a possible offering in the event of a road block.
In this way, they made progress toward her Aunt Philomene’s
house.

They arrived in Mongbwalu in the early
afternoon. Mukadi greeted his sister and reassured Nicole that she
would be fine and that Philomene would see her the rest of the way
to the border. He gave her the contact information for a friend in
Kampala, and Nicole assented that she wouldn’t lose faith and stick
with Philomene and everything would be okay. He was anxious to get
back on the road and return before dark and made his farewells
before climbing back in his Toyota for the trip home. He left
Nicole with her duffle bag of possessions in Philomene’s care and
her Aunt busied herself with Nicole showing her where to put her
bag and her bed for the night.

Philomene lived in a single story house with
whitewashed walls and tiled floors north of the middle part of the
town of Mongbwalu. A central common room bisected the home and was
surrounded by four bedrooms. The next morning when Nicole awoke the
sun was shining and there was movement outside in the street. She
walked into the main room in her flip flops and night clothes.
Philomene was busy wrapping food in wax paper and cloth, and
packing it in a cloth bag. During the night two UN peacekeepers had
gone missing from their post and now they had been found dead, one
shot through the head, the other through the stomach, their bodies
dumped in a small ravine and covered with brush.

Stability a precarious notion in Mongbwalu
under the best circumstances had been shattered. As a result, lines
were shifting and established norms of control were upended. The UN
peacekeepers were repositioning and moved from their most exposed
posts in town and consolidated their forces at their base to the
south. They were expected to retreat further toward their strength
in Bunia. The local militias were positioning themselves to take
advantage of the vacuum.

“Nicole get yourself dressed and pack your
clothes, we need to be ready to leave.”

Nicole, unnerved by the uncertainty, began
shaking but did as she was told. She put her bag by the door and
sat down folding her arms and putting her head on the table, she
felt tired again. The rumors had reached her Aunt that morning that
it was the Lendu militia that had killed the two peacekeepers and
dumped their bodies by the side of a road. To distance themselves
from the murder, they had pulled back from the eastern edge of
town. Retreating west, gangs of militia had burnt the homes of
suspected Hema. Other antagonists had used the opportunity to
better their position and fill the space left by the retreating UN
forces and the Lendu. A Hema militia lead by a Commander Jerome
moved east toward town, squeezing the civilian population in the
middle.

The front door swung open and Moses,
Philomene’s next door neighbor, said it was time to go. They
gathered their things and walked the dirt drive connecting the home
to the road. As they approached the main road, they heard the sound
of movement a dull rumble and saw a procession of people moving
east. They joined the crowd adding their bodies and possessions to
the greater mass that walked with the few things they could carry,
many with only some clothes in a bag. They moved quietly slowly
marching out of town. They were mostly Lendu, or so Nicole guessed,
the line between Lendu and Hema was not always easily decipherable
by appearance.

Nicole and Philomene had walked only a short
distance, maybe half a mile from their home, when suddenly there
was a surge from the rear as if those in back were out of step and
needed their cadence checked. The sudden push caused those in the
front to move forward and then to stop and look back. Everyone then
stopped and remained standing in quiet. They watched as three young
men with no belongings came into view and just as quickly sprinted
past using the side of the road and the shallow ravine that
bordered the road on the other side. Then in subsequent order they
heard a scream, a shot, and another scream.

A brief murmur went through the crowd and it
began moving with urgency. Those at the front began to run and
those to weak to run far cried and called out in desperation. Many
in the crowd abandoned the road altogether and sought hiding places
or ran through the warren of streets that formed one end of the
town bordering on slums. The road once full quickly emptied and all
that remained was the litter of cast off articles as people dropped
their possessions and ran.

Philomene grabbed Nicole by the top of her
sleeve near the shoulder and practically dragged her through the
ravine on the side of the road and up the other side through the
overgrowth to a bordering field. They ran through the field to
another and over a wire fence now angled almost parallel to the
ground having been trampled by a group running ahead of them. At
one end of the field they approached a row of mud and brick huts
with metal roofing and Philomene pulled Nicole down in the grass
beside her. They hid in the tall elephant grass on one side and the
back of a hut and partially finished or collapsed cinder block wall
on the other.

Nicole was breathing hard and she buried her
head in the mud and brick in front of her and dared not look out.
Philomene raised her head over one portion of the wall and viewed
the central road through Mongbwalu. A rearguard of three boys still
in their teens with machetes approached the center of town. Another
one, older, had an elderly man by the arm and dragged him toward
the middle of the street. The man twisted around the radius of his
wrist as he tried to free himself. The boy hit him on the head with
the flat part of his machete in response. “You are my enemy,” he
shouted at the man. “We are going to exterminate you – the
government can’t help you now.” He kicked the man and pushed him
with the sole of his foot, knocking him face forward to the ground.
He raised his arm and swung the machete into the back of the man’s
neck. It briefly caught as the boy yanked and then freed itself
giving way to a spray of blood. The boy swung again and Philomene
could see the flash of scarlet when he raised his machete. Another
joined and hacked at the now lifeless body completely separating
the head from the torso.

Behind the small group of boys appeared men
with guns, some in uniforms or irregular uniforms, others had
spears and one had a rocket propelled grenade. They went from house
to house, checking the premises and pulling out anyone remaining
and questioning them. Philomene watched as they took one of her
neighbors, Kasore, a Lendu man in his thirties. They took him out
of his family home and he was crying and begging for his life. They
led him into the street and attacked him with knives and a hammer.
The son was being held by two soldiers and made to watch and his
eyes were big and white like eggs. A third soldier approached and
without warning cut the boy’s throat. Philomene could not see his
eyes glaze over and roll into the back of his head but watched from
a distance as he dropped to the ground and bled out. It wasn’t
enough to simply kill their enemy but to render him in a
ritualistic orgy of the grotesque. The men, like experienced
butchers, cut the tendons on his heels and smashed his head, and
Philomene gagged and turned away when they cut open his abdomen and
removed his intestines. At the end of their vivisection, her
neighbor was reduced to his parts and his guts lay strewn on the
dirt roadway in a gray viscous heap.

More soldiers entered town and increased the
house to house search. It was clear to Philomene that this was the
Hema militia, and although Hema herself, she felt no kinship and
was unwilling to risk revealing herself. She watched as those
suspected of being Lendu were taken aside to be dealt with later.
As the militia set themselves up in the center of town, gunshots
could be heard in the distance directed at the fleeing Lendu
militia. The shouts of noncombatants, as well, could be heard
fleeing into the bush as soldiers pursued civilians, who sought
refuge in the surrounding countryside. In one house an incendiary
grenade exploded with a thump. Philomene saw the muffled flash
through a window frame of shattering glass and watched as flames
engulfed the house from inside out until the roof caught fire and
collapsed in on itself.

She got down on all fours and began pulling
at debris to surround them on the one exposed side. “We can’t leave
now Nicole, we’ll stay here until night” she said to reassure her
niece. What would happen at night she didn’t say or know. She
gathered a piece of corrugated metal and leaned it against the
fallen down wall. Over the tin she draped a sheet of once
translucent plastic now stained by mud and clay. Surrounded by
trash and overgrown grass, they appeared as a debris pile against
the back wall of the deserted hut.

****

Father Ignatius Boniface was living in a
state of in between leaving his old life and adapting permanently
to a new one. Large and black with a barrel chest, broad puffy face
and coke bottle glasses, he appeared as caricature, somewhere
between Uncle Remus and little black Sambo. A refugee in Kampala,
the Dioceses had ordered him reassigned from Bunia after repeated
death threats. Now out of place, he had struggled to find a role
for himself and had taken up duties at the local Church, saying
Mass during the week and once on Sunday.

In addition, he had taken to ministering to
the diaspora in Kampala. Initially it was a single parishioner
asking for intervention with the immigration ministry, then another
needed a small loan to hold him over. Now a resource for the local
Congolese community, he was torn by his memories from home and the
connections he was making to his new residence. He tried to take it
in stride and ascribe his situation to providence, but it stuck in
his craw, there was someplace else he was supposed to be and his
life in Kampala felt a betrayal to his past.