City of Saints & Thieves(75)

But the war saw the quiet one’s beauty, and she was held back and given like a gift to a man they called Number Two, who came and went from the kingdom on a powerful white man’s bidding. He would fly in on a helicopter, bringing guns and money. When he came, he always asked for her. No one was allowed to touch the quiet one but him.

They said he came from a city named for blood, Sangui.

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Of the five women:

One ran, and the boys laughed and put a bullet in her back.

One woman began to drink the poisoned water in the god’s hole, even when the others begged her to stop, and she died raving in a fever.

One woman had been the two girls’ teacher, a nun, and when she could, she diverted the hell from her students. But most of the time she couldn’t.

And the two girls survived, but only because neither wanted to die and leave the other one alone in the terrible kingdom.

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One day the men were ambushed by other men that looked exactly like the first men, and there was fighting and gunfire and explosions that shook the earth and chaos, and the teacher said run, and the girls and the teacher ran and ran and ran, until they came back to their town, and stumbled into the hospital and were finally, finally safe.

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The two friends expected things to get better after their escape, and for a while they did.

But soon after they healed and could get up and walk around again, they noticed something strange: a smell. People around them would cringe and move away. The three women sniffed the wind and tried to figure out where it came from. It was rotten like outhouses and the medical garbage pile, and it grew stronger whenever the three were together. Eventually, they realized that it wasn’t being borne in on the wind; it was coming from them, out of their pores, caught in their hair, redolent on their breath.

The women scrubbed and scrubbed, and drank sweet teas, but no matter what they did, the hell they had passed through lingered over them, clearing rooms with its stink. It was pungent, embarrassing, pervasive, and impossible to get rid of.

A smell that was not a smell.

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Then one day the loud woman’s sweetheart took his cows back. They later heard he had waited a week, and then given them to another girl’s father.

The quiet woman’s stomach grew round and large and the reverend mother called her to her office and explained that, while the quiet one could still be a nurse, the cloistered life was no longer appropriate. Not for a mother.

The teacher who had escaped with them left for the city called Sangui, saying she couldn’t remember what God’s face looked like anymore. She asked the two girls if they wanted to go with her. The quiet girl might have gone, except by then she was too big to travel. The loud girl would not leave her friend.

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There was ripping and screaming and a baby was born. They named her Christina.

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The two women moved back to their parents’ neighboring farms. The loud one’s mother and father died within a year of her return, one after the other. The quiet one’s father had died while she was away in the terrible kingdom. Her mother grew small.

The quiet one still worked as a nurse at the hospital, but the loud one’s hands would shake with every new broken woman brought in. She tried to sell vegetables instead, but grew tired of the other sellers’ stares and wrinkled noses.

So she found a new occupation. She no longer liked boys, but for the work she did, she didn’t have to like them. She just had to close her eyes and let her soul drift far away.

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Though the women still loved each other, they knew something had fractured between them that could not be entirely mended. They both focused on the baby, who grew quickly. The quiet one sometimes caught herself staring at her daughter’s face. And sometimes she could not look at her child at all, and when that happened the loud one would pick up the little girl and walk away, kissing the salt off her baby cheeks until she laughed.

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Years passed. War lingered around the edges, coming and going, like the seasons. Sometimes it would steal cattle and goats. Sometimes they would see it hanging around in the bars in town, laughing and drinking. Sometimes they would hear it coming and run and hide in the forest in a secret place, and pretend for the sake of the child they were on a great adventure.

One of those times, the quiet one’s mother, who had grown smaller and frailer, refused to leave and hide, even though her daughter begged and pleaded. When they came back, they found her mother still in bed, as if perhaps only sleeping. There was little blood, and the girls washed her body in the creek and wrapped her in her best Sunday kitenge. They buried her on the hill, next to the quiet girl’s father.

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Something about the death of the quiet one’s mother changed her. She was still quiet, but there was a look in her eyes that worried the loud one. The quiet one started leaving the child with the loud one, and walking off into the forest alone. She would come back with filthy feet, sticks in her hair, and a look in her eyes like an animal gone wild.

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Five years after the birth of the child, a white man came to town and started asking questions.

He wasn’t the first white man to come through. The war had brought pilots and journalists and blue helmets of all colors who followed the fighting like spectators. Lord knows that business was good for the loud one when she worked the bars closest to the hotels. The war brought do-gooders and missionaries who looked bewildered and thrilled all at once, and mining men who acted like the kind of dogs that never bark, that only bite.