Read Online Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker - Free Book Online
Authors: Neely Tucker
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beeping at the top of the hour. The BBC news came on, bringing news that jolted me back to work. Laurent Kabila, the self-declared president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was facing an uprising in the eastern part of the country, the same place where the rebellion that brought him to power had begun two years earlier. Since the current unrest was centered in Goma, a city just across the border from Rwanda, it was reasonable to believe that the Tutsi-led Rwandan government was involved. It made sense.
In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, radical militias from the Hutu ethnic group, known as the Interahamwe, had unleashed one of the deadliest episodes of the twentieth century, leading a slaughter of more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The instrument of choice was the machete, and they did their work in just one hundred days. The death toll may have been as high as eight hundred thousand; no one really knows.
The Interahamwe was shoved out of Rwanda by a Tutsi-led army. The killers fled over the heavily forested border into Congo, then known as Zaire, where they received shelter and support from Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator. From there, they continued to stage murderous raids back into tiny Rwanda. This set off the Tutsi-led rebellion to overthrow Mobutu, and the installation of Kabila as the new ruler.
But once in power, Kabila renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of Congo and turned on his Tutsi backers. He began giving shelter and support to the same Hutu militias that had terrorized Rwanda in the first place.
Another rebellion in the east, therefore, almost certainly involved a Rwandan attempt to neutralize Kabila. There was a message on the office answering machine from one of my editors, asking when I was planning to go in.
I started flipping through the pages of a thick catalogue called the
Overseas Airline Guide,
a monthly listing of international flights around the globe that is something of a Gideon Bible among correspondents. I was checking out how I could get into Kinshasa within the next forty-eight hours—Harare-Johannesburg-Kinshasa, or maybe Harare-Nairobi-Kinshasa—when I heard a shout from Vita. I went to the bedroom. “Look at this,” she said, unwrapping the folds of cloth from Chipo’s body.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Undressed, her belly protruded as if she’d swallowed an inflated balloon. Her arms and legs looked like spider limbs. The skin over her stomach and hips had gone a pasty shade of brown. I recognized the onset of marasmus, the staple disease of desperate refugee camps. She would open her mouth, her face contorted with pain and rage—but no sound would come out. We would pat her on the back for fifteen seconds and then a fierce wail would emerge. She would stop a few minutes later, exhausted, chest heaving, and stick three fingers of her right hand into her mouth, her comfort gesture. A few minutes later, she would start screaming again.
We had bought a small infant tub to bathe her in, but she was lost in it. Vita ran a sinkful of water and cleaned her there, soothing her swollen belly with a warm cloth, running it over her arms and hands and fingers and feet. Chipo just looked at her. She had almost no responses. She did not smile and had never laughed. We had bought the smallest infant’s shirt we could find; it fell to her ankles. I finished warming up the infant formula and put it in a bottle. She could scarcely suck the milk from the nipple. So I went to the store and bought several syringes. I sterilized them, poured in some warm formula, and squirted a few cc’s into her mouth. She looked up in surprise when the spray of milk hit her tongue, then let it dribble off her chin. Then a few drops went down. She swallowed, looked confused for a minute, and then held her mouth open. I laughed and gave her another splash, and then another.
I was rocking her to sleep when she began coughing. I patted her back, as if burping her. It didn’t
In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, radical militias from the Hutu ethnic group, known as the Interahamwe, had unleashed one of the deadliest episodes of the twentieth century, leading a slaughter of more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The instrument of choice was the machete, and they did their work in just one hundred days. The death toll may have been as high as eight hundred thousand; no one really knows.
The Interahamwe was shoved out of Rwanda by a Tutsi-led army. The killers fled over the heavily forested border into Congo, then known as Zaire, where they received shelter and support from Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator. From there, they continued to stage murderous raids back into tiny Rwanda. This set off the Tutsi-led rebellion to overthrow Mobutu, and the installation of Kabila as the new ruler.
But once in power, Kabila renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of Congo and turned on his Tutsi backers. He began giving shelter and support to the same Hutu militias that had terrorized Rwanda in the first place.
Another rebellion in the east, therefore, almost certainly involved a Rwandan attempt to neutralize Kabila. There was a message on the office answering machine from one of my editors, asking when I was planning to go in.
I started flipping through the pages of a thick catalogue called the
Overseas Airline Guide,
a monthly listing of international flights around the globe that is something of a Gideon Bible among correspondents. I was checking out how I could get into Kinshasa within the next forty-eight hours—Harare-Johannesburg-Kinshasa, or maybe Harare-Nairobi-Kinshasa—when I heard a shout from Vita. I went to the bedroom. “Look at this,” she said, unwrapping the folds of cloth from Chipo’s body.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Undressed, her belly protruded as if she’d swallowed an inflated balloon. Her arms and legs looked like spider limbs. The skin over her stomach and hips had gone a pasty shade of brown. I recognized the onset of marasmus, the staple disease of desperate refugee camps. She would open her mouth, her face contorted with pain and rage—but no sound would come out. We would pat her on the back for fifteen seconds and then a fierce wail would emerge. She would stop a few minutes later, exhausted, chest heaving, and stick three fingers of her right hand into her mouth, her comfort gesture. A few minutes later, she would start screaming again.
We had bought a small infant tub to bathe her in, but she was lost in it. Vita ran a sinkful of water and cleaned her there, soothing her swollen belly with a warm cloth, running it over her arms and hands and fingers and feet. Chipo just looked at her. She had almost no responses. She did not smile and had never laughed. We had bought the smallest infant’s shirt we could find; it fell to her ankles. I finished warming up the infant formula and put it in a bottle. She could scarcely suck the milk from the nipple. So I went to the store and bought several syringes. I sterilized them, poured in some warm formula, and squirted a few cc’s into her mouth. She looked up in surprise when the spray of milk hit her tongue, then let it dribble off her chin. Then a few drops went down. She swallowed, looked confused for a minute, and then held her mouth open. I laughed and gave her another splash, and then another.
I was rocking her to sleep when she began coughing. I patted her back, as if burping her. It didn’t
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