MYRIAM LEFT. THE rain is beating at the windowpane, the malicious, perverse Dutch rain. I am drinking the instant coffee that mid-range hotels offer their guests, a kind of syrup that conjures up the idea of coffee. Strangely, I wish Myriam were here. Or someone else who could explain why I have this feeling that I’ve wasted my life, why the freeing of Kabanga has turned my patient apprenticeship of the world into something useless. Kabanga, freed, destroys me. Maybe Myriam could tell me why, or Claus or Pascal. I don’t seem to know myself. I don’t, and it’s a great revelation to me that only a woman could understand that life has no further interest for me. Why a woman? Because women are mothers.
Testimony of Béatrice:
“Mr. Kabanga came into the house with three bodyguards who were students at the same school I went to. He asked Mother if she was a good Hema and if she thought that all Hema families should work for the supremacy of the Hema over the Lendu. Mother said yes. That’s how I became a soldier. I wasn’t taken away or kidnapped, and nothing violent happened to me. Mother ordered me to be a soldier. I didn’t like anything about war. During training, when I shot at the targets with my Kalashnikov, I shook and I trembled. I was a very bad soldier. That’s why, during my first attack, the Lendu took me prisoner. I lost count of how many times they raped me. I finally managed to escape. I went back to my mother’s house and told her everything. She threw me out. I went to see my Hema uncles and cousins, but they turned me away too. I am impure now, full of Lendu sperm. I am eighteen years old and I work as a prostitute in the Lebanese restaurant, mostly for foreigners. I know I’ll never get married and never have children. I love children, but when I go up to one in the street or the market, the parents grab him and pull him away from me as if I had the plague. That’s what Mr. Kabanga did to me. I hope you are going to punish him.”
No, Béatrice, we are not going to punish him. An insane judge who knows nothing of your despair, and who spends his time reading procedure manuals, is leading a crusade against the UN to prove that only judges are judges, they’re demi-gods, masters of this earth, that their status gives them the right to forget that you’ll never have children, or if you do it’ll be the fruit of a relationship contracted at the Lebanese restaurant, and you’ll abort it because the father is a Belgian soldier who slapped you across the face when you admitted you were pregnant.
No, Béatrice, this Court will do nothing for you. The Court is concerned only with its own future existence. It is using you to create jurisprudence, rules, and procedures that one day might give the Béatrices of the future the chance to demand and receive justice. No, Béatrice, don’t expect anything from The Hague. For the judges, you are a hamster on a wheel of endless sadness, a guinea pig whose DNA is being tested for what is just and what is not.
Béatrice, I am going to go to Bunia to say that I’m sorry in the name of the Court. Thanks to your extensive testimony, I discovered that you wanted to be a nurse, that you’re HIV-positive, and that you’ve had two abortions. I love you, Béatrice.