Luck (22 page)

It was definitely insufficiently involved—although what was one miserably sunbaked or mudcaked, not-very-skilled volunteer to do about it?—to allow what looked like perfectly healthy boys and young men, and some older ones, too, with muscles and all limbs accounted for, to shoulder entire bags of food from a truck and simply walk off. The camp’s second-in-command, Doug Smithfield, who’d been around, just shrugged and told her, “There’s an underground economy. There always is.” And who were these men? “Some are criminals, obviously.” War criminals? Responsible for others’ visible wounds? “That can happen. It’s impossible to know everyone’s history. And if we’re suspicious of some people, at least they’re here and not roaming around where nobody’s keeping an eye on what they get up to.” She supposed that was reasonable, if also useless and limp. Wet season turned to dry and back to wet and what became visible, though, was the mutuality of these transactions. That a few of her colleagues, not many, just a few, were selling food to some of those muscular, multi-limbed men. And other things, too: cigarettes, liquor, they used those currencies also.
Too involved?
So it seemed.

But of course the already-strong were corrupt and probably dangerous, what possible surprise could there be about that? Silly Sophie. Anyway, theft and greed could at least look comprehensibly human. She would never have nightmares about stolen food and black markets.

It’s Martha Nkume, out of hundreds and thousands of people each with a particular story of sorrow or triumph or sheer stubborn survival, who came home with Sophie, bony grip firm on her dreams.

They might easily not have met. Women regularly tended sons and daughters lying on cots in the medical tents. Martha was one of those, an infant in her arms, someone older, a girl, on a cot. Martha was so gaunt, her infant so paltry that either of them might have been the one lying down, being treated. Or in this instance not being treated exactly. The girl’s eyes were closed. She lay under a light sheet flecked with blood. The pulse barely perceptible at her throat was all that distinguished her from a corpse. Sophie paused. She had no idea why she was kneeling beside this woman among many, and putting a hand lightly, cautious of breakage, on her arm. Maybe just because Sophie had a moment to spare; or maybe to draw the woman back from whatever far place she was staring at.

She turned towards Sophie. She examined Sophie’s face with unusual, personal attentiveness. “Daughter,” she said at last, pointing to the girl on the cot. Then, gravely and slowly, “Bad men. Bad men.”

Sophie nodded. There was no shortage of women and girls injured, at home or in flight, by very bad men. “Sophie,” she said, indicating herself.

“Martha. Matthew,” looking down at the infant. “Mary,” nodding towards the girl. Even after many months, Sophie didn’t have the hang of gauging ages. She thought the unconscious girl might be ten, or maybe fifteen. Martha, her mother, had the bleak, dogged look of any number of mothers.

“Can I get you something? Can I help?” Perhaps water, or a cleaner sheet, or she could hold the baby for a few minutes and give this woman a rest from what looked to be a dangerously slight burden.

Martha’s eyes narrowed. Even seated, it was clear she was quite tall for a woman, rather like Sophie that way, although
much thinner, of course. She didn’t have very much hair. Matthew’s belly was bloated, his hair rusted red, the shape and shade of profound deprivation. He would almost certainly die. Sophie wondered if Martha knew that. “Get bad men,” Martha said.

Well, that was a large and hopeless request, wasn’t it?

Or not.

It’s one thing to have learned to communicate through several broken languages. It’s another to comprehend the facts of serious crime through semaphore and basic verbs, nouns and adjectives in two unrelated tongues. Sophie and Martha went back and forth, back and forth quite a few times before Martha nodded at Sophie’s finally convinced, stricken face.

A simple, brief, brutal event. Mary was one of Martha’s several daughters and sons. She was twelve. The night before, while three men held back a frantic Martha, three others dragged Mary away. When they returned, they held Martha while the other three left, and when they were finished, they tossed the girl back to her mother and went away. Early this morning Martha and another woman carried her to this medical tent.

Those muscled, fully limbed men, Sophie thought at first, used to making off with whatever they wanted. What took her so long to understand was that three of the six men were aid workers. Colleagues. Martha recognized their faces from food lines, from daily staff patrols, from this very medical tent. “Our people?” Sophie asked, pointing to her own chest.

“Yes. Bad men.”

So it sounded. “Show me who.” Although, Jesus, what could she do?

Martha again regarded Sophie carefully, and then rose. She looked down at Mary. “She die, I think.” Sophie thought so as
well. Who could commit such an atrocity, much less commit it on this helplessly frail bag of child-bones? Someone Sophie had sat beside at breakfast, someone who told stories and showed photos of family and home around night-fires, someone who bandaged wounds every day in this tent—what sort of corruption was this, that didn’t show up in expression, voice or benevolent task? Had this sort of thing happened before, only Sophie had happened to pass by, not pausing, asking no questions? It must have. She felt blind, she felt stupid.

She felt rage. “Show me the men,” she repeated, relieved that Martha seemed to understand that the alien fury in her voice was Martha’s friend, not her enemy.

They walked like any two people strolling, one carrying a small child and with Sophie’s hand under Martha’s elbow, up one row of tents, down another, around the administration and staff quarters, through the loading and unloading areas. “Him,” Martha pointed finally. Then again, “Him.” Both men drove back and forth to the capital city, bringing freshly landed supplies and now and then freshly landed staff. One of them, in fact, had driven Sophie here many months back. They worked hard. Their road trips could be very dangerous. How could they work so hard, and so bravely, and then turn around and do this? Sophie shook her head; Martha seemed to realize this did not mean disbelief.

Back at the medical tent they found the third man, just starting his shift. His name was Stan Dowling. Sophie and he sometimes worked side by side, applying fresh dressings, doling out Aspirins. Not a doctor, not a nurse, only another helper, like her, but a few years older, and a veteran of several camps. Stan was good at jobs that took strength, such as lifting people straight off the ground and setting them, gently
enough as far as she’d ever seen, on fresh cots. Sophie wondered what he would have thought, reaching Mary, if he’d gotten that far, looking down at what he’d done? Maybe here, in a different place and in daylight, he wouldn’t even recognize her.

How could he?

Not for a minute did Sophie disbelieve Martha. Perhaps that was strange.

Not for a minute did she hesitate, either. Leaving Martha behind, she hauled Stan out of the tent with a hard grip on his arm. He was too surprised to resist. “What?” he asked. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“You know.” How large she was, menacing and unbeatable.

Ah, but not really. Another hard lesson.

The men were questioned, so was Martha, so was Sophie. Then the men were put on planes and sent home. Sophie protested, of course she protested, over and over, and bitterly. How could this be? Almost as great a crime as rape itself, the condoning of rape.

Doug Smithfield was assigned to calm her down, help her to see what were considered the larger ramifications. “Of course we can’t have these bad apples, everybody understands that,” he said. He was being avuncular, the older, wise, worldly man. “But imagine what would happen if we made a big fuss, had them charged, put on trial, and the information got out. What would happen to all the people here if we lost donor support because of it? Which we would. We have to keep focused on the big picture, Sophie.” She was asked to weigh short term against long term.

“But what about those men? They’re not even punished.”

“Yes, but they’re gone, they can’t hurt anyone any more.”

This did not strike Sophie as true.

Mary was also gone by then, whether from injuries or hopelessness or history didn’t much matter. Then Matthew slipped away also, one moment breathing in his mother’s arms, the next moment not.

Martha’s gaunt hand gripped Sophie’s arm hard. “Say my children be care,” she said. She meant her other children, the ones Sophie had no way of finding. They were not in the camp. They could be anywhere, doing anything, they might have been kidnapped or killed, they might be in hiding, they might have taken up any side in any of the several conflicts occurring, they might be killing or raping or being raped, or for that matter they might be thriving and safe, who could know?

Martha died with her long bony fingers gripped around Sophie’s wrist.

There is no reconciling to heartlessness. Land mines blow off little legs, boys bear weapons larger than themselves and grow up to be men grown hard in the process. Rape flourishes, yes, along with other hatreds and vengeances. Threats of violence and results of violence seep deep into the psychic soil. Sophie’s, too. She, who had never hated before, hated those men and that camp. How glad she was—no, not glad; breath-takingly relieved, and guilty for her relief—to fly off at last.

Home, her worried parents asked, “Isn’t it enough to know you did your best? Nobody can save everyone from everything, and even justice doesn’t always work out very well.” They might have emphasized
that
more, mightn’t they, around the dinner tables of her childhood?

She moved into her bedroom upstairs in their home. She decided she wouldn’t go out, then found that she couldn’t; that she was paralyzed by the prospect of witnessing tragedy, or just something bad in somebody’s life which, having witnessed it, she would have to do something about, and would
fall short. She was frozen in this state of immobilized terror for months, until her worried parents sent her to a therapist, who wanted her to talk about them, and about dinner tables and, of course, about her notions of virtue. Janet, as she urged Sophie to call her, asked her to consider whether she’d become so “obsessed” that she could not accept anything that unfolded in unsatisfactory or unfortunate ways. She asked Sophie to consider why, when and how ideas of virtue and sacrifice might have gotten so tangled together.
I don’t care
, Sophie thought.
Just make it stop.

Then in the nick or the fullness of time, she was discovered by Nora and Philip, who whisked her here to do one simple chore after another. She has learned, except sometimes at night, how to flatten that whole two-year package of time and most of its contents into something Phil would be able to carry out to the recycling box under one arm.

A couple of years ago she read in the newspapers of an international investigation whose final report documented a terrible flourishing of crimes by aid workers such as those against Mary. Did anything come of that report, did very much change once people had expressed their surprise and alarm and pledged better intentions?

Probably not. That’s how Sophie’s own heart has hardened.

Her head is light, though, she is rising and floating, tipping and turning this way and that into regions where hot, faint, phantom figures begin to creep and slither around the edge of her vision. Oh no! Sophie nearly cries out at the sound of a door opening and closing in muffled fashion, light footsteps out in the hall, slipping past her door, down the stairs. Do they belong to someone who lives here, or are they the first of a new, or old, battalion of ghosts?

Here is Phil’s life line, here’s his heart, there are his aptitudes and desires—one line at a time and, please, only his hand, and no dreams. Surely that’s not a whole lot for a reasonably good woman to ask, is it, even if she is not exactly the reasonably good woman she once was?

M
ax is here, Max is here, oh, hurray! There’s the distinctive clattery sound of his ancient yellow Fiat out front, the distinctive clattery shudder that follows the ignition being turned off, and Nora is pelting downstairs, almost colliding with Sophie at the front door. Here is Max, unfolding himself from a low car that these days fits him snug as an outgrown sweater, stretching his long, arthritic body and turning, his old arms opening. Nora flies off the porch and they fold around her. Max’s big belly presses like a hot-water bottle. She is in good hands.

Until this moment the day has been an odd combination of fast and slow: a matter of bracing for the funeral and waiting for it. For a mere instant when Nora woke and glanced over at Philip’s pillow, she thought,
Oh, he’s already up.
The lightning-strike fact of the matter sent her leaping again—is she going to jump from bed every morning from now on?—although quietly this time. She has pulled herself more sensibly together since then, and was just now upstairs trying to locate dark stockings that do not have runs.

For her part Sophie has mainly been occupied, between
cups of coffee to keep her alert after a restless, unhappy, but blessedly unnightmarish night, handling phone calls. Word keeps spreading, and people from further and further afield want to know what happened and when the service will be. “Today?” some cry. “Oh no. I can’t possibly get there today.” They speak accusingly, as if this is Sophie’s fault.

“Yes, I know it’s difficult, but if you can’t get here, I’m sure there’ll be other chances to pay your respects later on.” Not that Sophie could say what those might be. Anything beyond this afternoon is a blank. What happens then, do they all come back here, and hope for more food to turn up at the door, and pass another evening, and go to bed, and get up for another morning, carrying on as usual, with the notable exception of Phil?

Surely not.

Besides the future, the day’s mysteries include a shortage of leftovers. “I can’t think what happened,” Sophie told Nora a couple of hours ago, peering into the fridge, lifting lids.