A Thousand Sisters by Lisa Shannon

Author:Lisa Shannon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Seal Press

CHAPTER TWENTY

Water Water

WITHIN MINUTES OF wrapping up with Fitina, we load onto the boat. The motor revs up and we are off.

Cruising along the edge of the peninsula, Maurice, Kelly, and I sit outside on the wooden benches, exhausted from the day. I ask Maurice, “Were they Congolese military?”

“Ah, no. They were Mai Mai,” he says, as he leaves to retire inside.

Fear chemicals surge through me and I start to shake as I describe the soldiers to Kelly.

The boat slows down suddenly. The skipper and first mate are throwing on their life vests. This is not a good sign. They’ve been barefoot and shirtless most of the day.

I look ahead. A few miles in front of us, rain pours from storm clouds onto the lake; it looks like a steel wall.

“What’s happening?” I ask Hortense.

“They are turning the boat around. We will spend the night in the village.”

With our new Mai Mai friends?

I ask rhetorically, “The Mai Mai . . . Do you really think it’s safe?”

She flashes a big, tension-diffusing smile. “Safer than drowning trying to cross the lake, yes?”

The canvas canopy covering the deck flaps wildly, while the first mate grasps the canopy frame, trying to keep it from flying off. He maintains a tense gaze forward, anxiously blowing a plastic whistle as if to a drumbeat. I can only imagine that he’s poising himself to send out a louder, high-pitched call for help should the boat capsize without warning.

So these are our choices tonight, more only-in-Congo choices. Would you rather be raped or watch your children starve? Drown, or camp with the militia?

So be it. We’re sleeping over with the Mai Mai.

I grab my camera and try to capture it all on video. By the time the boat rocks to shore, slate-gray clouds blot out the remaining evening light, leaving just enough for my eyes to adjust and glean detail, but causing my video camera viewfinder to go black. I wobble back down the wooden plank.

I notice a little girl I walked with earlier today among the handful of women waiting for us. I touch her shaved head affectionately and say hello while the others disembark and Hortense talks to the women on the beach.

“They are glad we have returned,” she says. “They knew it would rain and were concerned.” (Much later, Maurice tells me what he overheard the villagers muttering to each other. Tension between the Congolese Army and the Mai Mai is at its peak, they were saying; it could erupt into gun battle at anytime.)

I kneel on the pebbled shore and grope around putting my camera away. The first fat raindrops hit, warning that a downpour is moments away.

“We must hurry!” Hortense calls back to me, chastising me for dallying.

I don’t understand why you think of problems.

I look up. The others are already halfway across the beach.

The girl lingers, her reedy frame draped in a tattered white dress with a faded strawberry print, a rounded collar, and buttons up the back—the kind of dress American girls wore in the 1950s with Mary Janes.

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