Freeman's Read online

  Seven Shorts

  I’m getting old. Yet writing more. And maybe better. Or maybe only with more urgency. Which might amount to the same thing, right? To get the limitations of the system more excitingly involved. Like Lindbergh’s monoplane accelerating, bouncing down the runway trying to get some air before it hits the trees—my favorite moment in the movie. The unlikeliness of everything revealed. What were we thinking? This can’t possibly hold together. I’ve had health issues as well. So I would like to make the case for pathological revelation. What emerges as the limits are approached. When things begin to break apart.

  I think of Giorgio de Chirico (I tend to think of him a lot in any case), inventor, or discoverer, of that cold surrealist surface which eventually would support the weird unlikeliness of others, too, like Dalí and Tanguy. I tend to think of him recovering from severe intestinal illness in a Florentine piazza back in 1910 or thereabouts—how, in his weakened state, in the autumn light, the ancient city square became a stage whereon could be observed, and then recorded in his “metaphysical” paintings, all laid open like an anatomy lesson, the mutual detachment of the arbitrary objects of the world. The silent, airless gulf between them as imponderable as that between the stars. You get a glimpse sometimes when things go wrong. The mechanism opens up a bit and you see through it and beyond it in a way.

  All through my college years I drove a much-abused VW Beetle. Drove it pretty much into the ground—to the point where you really needed a tailwind to sustain the usual highway speed of fifty-five miles per hour. On its final voyage it carried me and three others to an air show in Fort Worth where the big attraction was the recently top-secret SR-71 spy plane guarded by a rope and an armed Marine and rumored capable of speeds beyond Mach 3. I think we might have had a tailwind going out, but coming back it was a struggle for the first few miles. And then it’s like we’ve topped the hill or something. Cars no longer seem to pass us quite so frequently. My friend Jim Lynch is driving. He loved driving. But he was a little crazy. Now we’re doing sixty-five. So I lean up between the front seats and say, Hey, what’s going on? We’re pushing seventy. Jim is hugging the wheel with this wild expression and a squint like he needs goggles. What the hell? He’s got it floored. He’s not about to back it off. He’ll never get this chance again. We look around at one another. We’re beginning to pass some cars. We’re doing seventy-five and still accelerating. Holy crap. We’re quiet now. There are these aerodynamic sounds I’ve never heard before. Jim’s locked onto the wheel. He is committed. We’re at eighty. We are passing into a new regime. At any moment we might leave the road, go into hyperdrive with fenders, mirrors ripping off, the paint igniting, flaming away in flashes as we slip beyond the envelope of atmosphere and ordinary life. When you’re that age, you’ve no idea. A thing like this might be your destiny. Then suddenly just silence. Not transonic, but the engine cutting out. No bang or clatter. Just the whistling of the wind through those little side vents like we’re plummeting from altitude. Somehow we manage to coast it off the highway into a service station. Hardly even tap the brakes. We don’t need gas. It just won’t go. It’s done. We call someone to pick us up. I sell the car to one of the guys who can use the parts. A week or so later I’m informed it threw a rod—though how so violent an event could have been so quiet is a mystery. Maybe a day or two after that, my friend comes over to present me with the camshaft. He regards it as a marvel. As suggesting both a further mystery—how my car could have run at all with cams so worn and misshapen—and a plausible explanation for its ultimate performance. Proper cams—that lift and close the engine valves controlling intake and exhaust—have tapered ovoid profiles much like that of a hen’s egg. Mine have profiles more like that of a piece of popcorn. My friend speculates that, somehow, at the end, these cams had worn into a shape that suddenly duplicated the function of what’s called a “racing cam”—think of the deep, irregular gluggedy-glug of a hot rod at a stoplight, and the way it all smooths out into a roar as it accelerates away. Such engines, fitted out with racing cams, will sacrifice performance at low revs to find efficiency at speed. So, it appears we had an accidental hot rod for a moment. An ungoverned and self-generating hot rod. Had it not blown up? My God. We’d still be on our way, I guess, my friends and I, into the silent, airless gulf. Into the dark where two of us, by a different route, have gone already.

  —

  David Searcy

  Gladice Aymare has a peculiar, almost infectious lilt to her voice—a singsong cadence that softens the hard syllables of her French. She occasionally hums between sentences, her voice barely rising above a whisper, as if she were treating her words like her patients—gently, with an almost excessive kindness that makes it hard to imagine anything could ever go wrong. Among local and expat aid workers in the Central African Republic, Gladice is a veteran on multiple fronts. Trained as a midwife in Bangui, the capital of the C.A.R., Gladice followed the peripatetic path common to aid workers. There was her first Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Boguila, a small village in the northwestern corner of the country, followed by later missions in Damara and then Sibut. She was born and raised in Bangui, but her life now is built along the borders of her country, in remote villages reached either by plane or by several days’ drive along the C.A.R.’s winding roads, which are so few in number that a map of every major road in the country can be memorized without much effort.

  Gladice has, I imagine, traveled on every known path in the C.A.R., and that knowledge grants her more than just a privileged position. In the standard narrative of foreign aid, help, if not salvation, arrives from the outside, but on the distant back roads of a country like the C.A.R., nothing moves without someone like Gladice’s direction. In 2012, when a coalition of armed groups toppled the government of François Bozizé, Gladice was working in a clinic in Damara and then later Sibut. She treated war-wounded soldiers and civilians, including forty-two rape victims, alongside her usual responsibilities in the maternity wards. When later that year Gladice returned to the hospital in Boguila, she was moved to the intensive care unit, where, she notes, she was more than just a midwife. It was a sort of homecoming for a woman who had come to know her country intimately, through its hospitals and clinics, through its sick and wounded.

  She recounts this particular period with an obvious whiff of nostalgia, her gaze fixed on some indeterminate point just beyond the walls of the courtyard we’re sitting in. We’ve just returned to the M.S.F. mission in Bambari, the second-largest city in the C.A.R., after two days of nonstop work in mobile health clinics. Despite the long hours and daylong drive to return to base, Gladice insists this is the perfect time to have our conversation. She speaks slowly and proudly about her work in the maternity ward and the responsibilities charged to her in the intensive care unit. Knowing how the story ends, she seems to linger deliberately on the bright spots. The Seleka forces that had swept into the capital and seized power at the end of 2012 had done so quickly, with little resistance from the military. When Gladice returned to the hospital four months after the coup, it was still possible to imagine that this vulnerable and profoundly underdeveloped nation would shrug off its latest political crisis. There had been coups and attempted coups before—but so far, in four decades of independence, the C.A.R. had never fallen victim to the type of violence that had afflicted nearly all of its neighbors, from Chad, Sudan, and South Sudan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the hospital, there were wounded soldiers and civilians from sporadic fighting between Seleka and the former army, but it was the common daily concerns of malnutrition and malaria that demanded the most attention.

  The bright spots that Gladice lingers on are centered on her former colleagues. All the staff lived next to the hospital in Boguila—a communal arrangement born out of necessity that also served as a daily exercise in bonding.

  “We always ate together,” Gladice says. “We lived together. We would leave at the same time to go to work. On Sunday we went to church togethe
r.” Back in Boguila, she was nicknamed “Mamma Coffee.”

  “My friends would come to my room and they would say, ‘Mamma Coffee, Mamma Coffee,’” Gladice tells me, because they knew she loved coffee, and as a lover of coffee, would make anyone who asked a cup.

  Gladice never describes the bonds with her former coworkers in familial terms, although certainly there was the intimacy and proximity of family, but perhaps the term “family” is a poor substitute for the peculiar binding of work and life that comes with this type of aid work. Families separate—their members leave and go to school and work and then come together at the end of the day. At the M.S.F. hospital in Boguila, like the mobile clinics in Bambari that Gladice now attends to, no one was left alone, no one had a life alone. There was only the work and the post-work gathering that followed.

  As we near the difficult part of the story, Gladice lists the names and jobs of the eight staffers who lived with her. She leans over to make sure I spell each one properly.

  “Before the attack we felt very secure,” she says. “We had a guard day and night, a safe room. We had three blocks—I was the supervisor of our block, block 2. During the night we guarded the radio with us. And they [the guards] would call us on the radio if there was a problem.”

  Two days before that conversation, I followed Gladice into the back of a white Land Cruiser as it prepared to leave for a mobile clinic four hours south of Bambari. There were eight adults in our SUV—six of us squeezed onto folding benches in the rear. Underneath our seats and at our sides were the building blocks that would later be used to construct a temporary clinic on a patch of grass a few hundred feet away from the country’s largest sugar factory, and the internally displaced persons’ camp huddled in its shadow.

  Within a few minutes of leaving the compound, we reached the edge of Bambari—a point marked by an unofficial transfer of power from the UN forces to a pair of teenage boys in military fatigues, each with an automatic rifle dangling indifferently around his neck. The young soldiers were the first official checkpoint marking the end of government-controlled territory. Almost the entire province from that point on was controlled by an ex-Seleka militia that had rejected the peace agreements that brought a measure of stability to the rest of the country.

  We were casually waved through the checkpoint without the slightest hesitation, but something was obviously different on the other side of the barrier. Here, along the road to Ngakobo, the C.A.R. was still undoubtedly at war. In Bangui, the costs of that war had been evident in the camps and in the clinics and hospitals. Here in Ouaka, the proof was in the burned homes and abandoned villages that lined the narrow red-dirt road. Ten kilometers away from that initial checkpoint, we drove past what was left of Jean-Claude Pouzamandgi’s village. Jean-Claude, a technician in the clinics, was responsible for dispensing medication, and when we neared his home—of which only half a wall and a pile of bricks remained—he leaned over from his side of the car, pointed out the window, and stated proudly that this was where he had lived, and, as he explained, would certainly live again.

  For the next several hours, we drove through more burned villages and roadblocks—each barrier manned by soft-faced boys in military clothing a few sizes too large. With every one passed, it was hard not to feel that whatever security and authority had been present in Bangui, and to a lesser degree in Bambari, was eroding. We weren’t in a dangerous area; it was, in fact, just as Gladice had described it—an insecure zone. Initially that description had sounded slightly romantic, but in retrospect, it’s a phrasing generous enough to include all the threats and possible threats that make Gladice’s work necessary.

  On April 25, 2014, Gladice went to bed very late. She was the designated night guard and was slow to wake the next day.

  “On the morning of the twenty-sixth, I came down. At one p.m., I went to the hospital for an online course on malnutrition. I went to the office for one or two hours. I was feeling tired. It was a ten-minute walk to get to the office.

  “I had two hours of courses per day. When I was finished with the two hours, I returned home to wash clothes. I had just begun to wash my nurse’s outfit. I had the radio next to me when I heard the guards begin to talk in their local language: Souma. It’s the language of Boguila.

  “When I heard them talking, I asked them to talk in Sango or in French. I then had a response—the [rebels] are starting to arrive in the hospital. And then right away, there was shooting.

  “In our area—Jean-Claude and Raissa and Fiacre were sleeping. I started slamming on the doors telling them to wake up, the Seleka were here. We started looking for a place to hide.

  “We quit our block to hide in block 3. There was me, Jean-Claude, and Raissa. We hid in the kitchen of block 3. It was big and there was a lot of shooting. They started around two p.m. while we were in the kitchen—the kitchen was exposed, only partially brick, so we went to go hide in the shower. It was a shower with three doors. We stayed there while they continued shooting. And because I had the radio, I turned down the volume. And we stayed like that on the floor and they continued to shoot and shoot and shoot. And it was at that moment I began to pray. ‘Is it the end of my life?’ I said to God. ‘We’re here to help the people, help us. We’re here to save lives.’

  “We were all in the same shower. Fiacre also began to cry. We stayed there for at least forty-five minutes of shooting. We didn’t know they were killing.

  “After, there was silence, we heard the cars pulling away. And then there was calm. And then I turned up the volume of the radio. We heard the voice of our project coordinator, Will. I heard him in conversation with our nurse. We heard him say there were injured at the hospital. He gave the authority to leave and go to the hospital. The first person I ran into was Raassaoul—and it was he who told us that we lost Papa Daniel. Automatically we hugged and began to cry. I went to the hospital and there were bodies everywhere.

  “In addition to Papa Daniel, there was the guard supervisor, who was called Papa Jean-Paul Yainam.

  “When we arrived everyone was running, crying, hugging. We went to the O.P.D. (the external consultation area)—there were eleven village chiefs killed there. That’s where the meeting was.

  “We did the triage—we found three survivors. And among the three was one M.S.F. guard who had a bullet in his abdomen. He had a severe hemorrhage. The doctor took him straight to surgery.

  “We began to search for people to donate blood, but the guard died at the block. Then other people in the neighborhood who were attacked began to arrive at the hospital—they began to bring their survivors. We were all together—staff, expat, inpat—to stabilize those who were still alive. That Saturday everyone spent the night in the hospital.

  “Will decided to evacuate the staff—on Sunday a plane came and took one part of the team. [Will] asked me if I had the courage to stay one more day while M.S.F. came to get the rest of the survivors. I stayed with my other colleagues. On Monday, two M.S.F.-France cars came from Paoua, and on Tuesday, we made a convoy with four cars. The chief of our mission, Stephano, stayed with us.

  “We stopped at Bossangoa, where the team was waiting to greet us. We hugged, cried, ate together, and then continued.

  “After one month, they asked if we were ready to go back to work. They offered us a choice: Grimari, Bossangoa, or Zemio—Grimari is an emergency project, which is what I chose. I didn’t lose my courage to continue to work.”

  —

  Dinaw Mengestu

  It is a fact universally known that in Lima, if you are a lady of beauty, you are likely to be a whore. I learned this when I was around thirteen, and my mother was obsessed with me being a lady of the night, too. She liked to check my pockets to see if I had extra money, money I couldn’t account for, a domestic IRS of my little, never-been-kissed vagina. But I digress.

  I’ve been wanting to write about the women in my family for some time, but haven’t known where to start. I’ve always located them in a nineteenth-century r
ural world of dusty roads and wooden carts, like the ones carrying the thirteen-year-old prostitute Eréndira and her abuela desalmada in the Gabriel García Márquez story. Their Peruvian lives ooze a vague Vargas Llosa air, but the places they hailed from would have been irrespirable for his bourgeoisie. Melchora, my great-grandmother, was a native of Huánuco, a small village at the center of the Andean plain, a yellow world trapped between jungle and mountains. She couldn’t read or write, though it really didn’t matter; she spoke Quechua, and Quechua is a spoken language—its real life exists between mouths and ears, though it can be transcribed. Melchora loved going to the movies and yelling at the screen, especially at the villains: You are as ugly as your deeds! Melchora married an Irishman, Byrne, who beat her frequently and was drunk all the time. Eventually he left, and Melchora moved to La Victoria, a shoddy neighborhood in Lima, along with her two daughters, Olga and Ana, and a retarded little boy, Pepe.

  Ana was the prettiest: by the time she was twelve a line of suitors had already formed in front of her. Men came to the house and offered their charms and gifts: platters of carne seca, furniture, ham, jewelry. Ana loved dressing up and dancing. She was wispy at the waist, she had wide Bambi eyes, and she loved getting dolled up in capri pants to dance boleros at the Lima clubs. Sometimes she wore jasmine in her hair like La flor de la Canela, a bolero heroine, the Madonna of the Rímac. She enjoyed the vanity of the temptress; she had fun with it.