FISTON SANG while the jeep bumped over the dirt road on the way back into Nyarugusu, a lullaby about rowing on the river that Sylvie remembered Mama singing to her when she was small, back when Mama was happy. Olele, olele, the current is very strong! Fiston’s voice was surprisingly sweet, coming from such a rough man. Riding in the front seat with the cooking knife in her lap while Pascal sulked in the back, Sylvie would have found his song comforting if she hadn’t been so filled with worries.

“I know you won’t tell me what Olivier is doing for Mr. Kayembe,” Sylvie said to Fiston after they had passed back through the camp gates, “but can you at least say if what he’s doing is dangerous?”

Fiston shifted in the driver’s seat, taking a moment to consider his answer. “Olivier is with experienced fighters,” he replied at last, “but in the Kivus, everything is dangerous. The Chinese want to buy coltan, and the Canadians want to sell it to them. Mr. Kayembe is in the middle between them trying to do business, but so are the Mai-Mai and the Rwandans, and other rebels.”

“The Canadians?” repeated Sylvie, startled. “What do they have to do with it?”

“They own a lot of the big mining companies,” he replied. “Sometimes the foreigners have need of a militia to do their dirty work for them.”

“What kind of dirty work?”

Fiston kept his eyes on the road and honked several times at refugees who were ambling along. “Get out of the way! Do you want to get hit?”

“You mean like when the Mai-Mai killed my father,” Sylvie said, watching for his reaction.

Fiston shot her a warning glance. “You’re a smart girl, Mademoiselle Sylvie,” he said. “You know it isn’t wise to ask too many questions.” Abruptly, he changed his tone and became carefree and joking once again. “Where shall your chariot take you? You live in Zone 3, no?”

Sylvie thought for a moment. “Would you take us to the Zone 3 clinic?”

“At your service, mademoiselle.”

Sylvie rode the rest of the way wondering if it could be true what Fiston said, that Canadians were somehow involved with the misery that had befallen her family, and thousands of other Congolese. She remembered Marie telling her something about her friend Alain’s website keeping tabs on mining companies in the Congo, but she hadn’t told her that those companies were Canadian.

When they reached the clinic, Fiston gave Pascal a grave look. “You listen to your sister and go home with her, or you will have Fiston to deal with.”

“Yes,” whispered Pascal, in awe of Fiston, but Sylvie could see he was still pouting over being pulled away from his new friends.

“Thank you,” Sylvie told Fiston.

He dipped his head and drove off, the jeep kicking up dust in its wake. Sylvie turned to Pascal.

“Go home. Give this back to Mama,” she told him, handing him the cooking knife. “Tell her I will be there soon.”

“Where are you going?”

“Never mind that. Go right home, or I will tell Fiston!”

Reluctantly, Pascal headed away, scuffing his bare feet through the red earth. Sylvie watched him long enough to be certain that he was obeying, then she went into the clinic to find Doctor Marie. She wanted to hear from her if it was true that Canada was involved in the fighting back home.

“She is with a patient. You will have to wait,” said Neema, at the admitting table. She took in Sylvie’s impatience. “What is so important?”

“I need to talk to her, that’s all,” Sylvie replied. She had no intention of sharing more.

“Is it true what they’re saying, that Kayembe wants you?” Neema asked. When Sylvie didn’t reply, she added, “You know he recently took a wife in North Kivu, don’t you?” She hadn’t known this, but it didn’t surprise her. A man like Kayembe wouldn’t care that taking many wives was considered backward by modern people. “Sure he’s rich, but you’d better watch out,” advised Neema. “You will be his second wife, under the thumb of his first one.”

It was on the tip of Sylvie’s tongue to tell her she would rather die than marry Kayembe, but Olivier’s words rang in her ears. He’d kill all of us. Mama, the children. All of us.

Sylvie took a seat on one of the rough wooden benches in the small waiting area, beside a man moaning with a toothache. She waited for half an hour, watching patients come and go. A rash, a sprained ankle. One young man on crutches, his pant leg pinned under the stump of his right leg, complained to Neema he was having trouble breathing. Doctor Van de Velde came out to the waiting area to check on him, making Sylvie nervous. She hadn’t forgotten how angry the head doctor had been when the young American, Martin, had let her come inside the foreign workers’ compound. But Doctor Van de Velde ignored Sylvie, listening intently through his stethoscope to the man’s lungs, round gold-rimmed glasses perched on top of his large nose like a tiny bicycle.

“I can find nothing wrong,” the Belgian told the man in his strangely accented French. “How have you been sleeping?”

“Not well,” replied the man.

“Nightmares?” The man nodded. “Are you Congolese? From the DRC?” The man nodded again. “You came from the Kivus recently?”

“Yes. Someone killed a Mai-Mai soldier in our village,” the man explained. “So they came and butchered thirty people, maybe more.” His kept his voice flat while he told his story, as though his emotions were all used up. “They pulled us from our homes,” he said, “women and children, too.”

He winced, as though he was seeing them in his mind. Sylvie could see them, too. She could hear their screams.

“They cut us with machetes,” he went on, “even the babies.”

Sylvie’s heart pounded painfully as she saw the soldier’s machete raised over her face. There was no escaping memories. They stayed close, like unhappy spirits, demanding attention.

“You saw this?” asked Doctor Van de Velde. His face was blank, without feeling, his skin ashen against his white lab coat—not rosy, like some Europeans.

How can he be so heartless? thought Sylvie. How can he be a doctor and not care?

The man nodded and bowed his head, admitting in shame, “I pretended I was dead, and hid under the bodies.”

Now Sylvie understood why he couldn’t breathe—
because he survived when his friends and family died. She felt guilty, too, sometimes, because she lived and Papa died.

“Your shortness of breath is most likely related to post-traumatic stress,” Doctor Van de Velde told him.

“Is there medicine for it?” the man wanted to know.

“There is, but we don’t have any right now. There are counselors who can help, other refugees who’ve been through the same things you have.” The man looked disappointed. Doctor Van de Velde at first looked angry, but when he spoke, Sylvie could see he was trying to be helpful. “When you feel a panic attack coming on,” he suggested, “try some simple exercises to regulate your breathing.”

He demonstrated, drawing in a deep breath and releasing it slowly. Sylvie tried, breathing in and then out. But the man wasn’t interested. Taking hold of the crutches, he struggled up from his wooden bench.

“What use is breathing?” he said. He wouldn’t look Doctor Van de Velde in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor told him. “I wish there was more I could do to help.”

The man shook his head. “There is no help for us. When the mines are open, there is work, but then the fighting comes back, too. The people suffer, and the warlords get rich.”

Like Kayembe, thought Sylvie.

She and the doctor watched the young man lumber slowly out of the clinic, planting his crutches on the ground and swinging his good leg between them. Sylvie glanced to Doctor Van de Velde, and saw that he was not without feelings after all. He looked like he wanted to yell at someone. He looked helpless. How many times had he heard the same story? For millions of people, since before Sylvie was born, it had been the same, over and over again.

“Are you here to work?” the Belgian asked, at last acknowledging Sylvie’s presence. He was stern, even when he was trying to be friendly.

“No. I’m waiting for Doctor Marie.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

There was, in fact. “Is Canada bad?” Sylvie asked abruptly.

He got a puzzled half-smile. “No, Canada is not bad. Why?”

“Someone told me the big mining companies in the Kivus are owned by Canadians. Is it true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” answered Marie. Sylvie and Doctor Van de Velde turned to see her coming into the waiting area, pulling surgical gloves from her hands. She looked tired. “A lot of the companies are Canadian-owned.”

“But…you said people in Canada want to help us,” said Sylvie, struggling to make sense of it.

“There are many people in lots of countries who want to help, Sylvie,” remarked Doctor Van de Velde. “Take my country. A long time ago, a Belgian king declared he owned all of the Congo and everything in it! Now, some of us are trying to make up for that arrogance.”

“Most people have no idea what the mining companies are doing over here,” added Marie. “That’s why Alain and his group started their website.”

“Why don’t you tell them what’s happening, Sylvie?” said Doctor Van de Velde with a shrug. “Marie, this website your boyfriend started, it’s a good start. But how about a video, telling people exactly what’s going on, from Sylvie’s perspective?”

From the look on Doctor Marie’s face, Sylvie could tell she liked the idea. “Sylvie, what do you think?” she asked.

More people staring at me, is what she thought. But if it would help to change things… “What would I say?” she asked.

“You could start by telling people what happened to you,” suggested Marie. “I mean, the parts you’re comfortable talking about,” she hastened to add.

Sylvie thought about it. “We need a movie camera, don’t we?” she asked.

Marie fished her mobile phone out of her pocket, tapped the screen with her finger, and suddenly it was a video camera. “Voilà!”

“It’s ironic, isn’t it, that there’s coltan in that thing,” commented Doctor Van de Velde.

Sylvie thought he had missed the point. “Coltan is just a rock. ” she said. “It’s the fighters who hurt people.”

The two doctors exchanged a look.

“Sylvie,” Doctor Van de Velde told her, “I think you know exactly what to say.”

 

AT FIRST IT SEEMED STRANGE to Sylvie to be speaking to a mobile phone. Marie held it up in front of her as they sat together in the clinic waiting area, after the staff and patients had gone. Sylvie tried to convince herself that she was simply telling the story to Marie. Still, it was hard to know where to begin.

“How old were you when your village was attacked, Sylvie?” prompted Marie.

“I was ten.”

“When did you first see the soldiers?”

“I was in our house, playing with Pascal, my little brother. We heard a truck outside. The next thing I knew, soldiers were breaking the door down.”

“Then what happened?” asked Marie.

Sylvie saw the soldier in her mind, felt his weight on top of her. Smelled his heavy stink of diesel and sweat. She wanted to tell Marie about it, wanted to let go of the festering memory, but her mouth refused to form the words.

Marie turned the camera off and let the phone rest in her lap. “Do you want me to stop recording?”

“No,” she replied in a whisper.

“If you say something, and you decide you don’t want it to be in the video, I can erase it,” Marie told her.

Sylvie nodded. Marie lifted the camera-phone up, and they tried again. “The soldier pushed me down…” Sylvie began. Her heart raced. She couldn’t speak.

Marie saw her difficulty and said it for her, “He raped you?” She said it in a calm way that made Sylvie realize she had guessed it a long time ago. Sylvie gave a short nod. Marie kept the camera-phone steady. “Have you ever told anyone about this before?”

“The Congolese don’t talk about things like that,” she told Marie.

“But talking about it can help,” Marie said, choosing her words carefully. “It’s what psychotherapists do with their patients. It can help people to be able to remember traumatic events without reliving them.”

“Reliving them,” said Sylvie, grasping her meaning, “like in nightmares, and panic attacks?”

“Exactly. Should we keep going?”

Sylvie hesitated before replying, “Yes.”

“What else do you remember?”

“I woke up in a truck,” she said. “I couldn’t see because there was a bandage over my face, but then I pulled it up a little.” She lifted an imaginary bandage. “The first thing I saw was Pascal, sleeping, and that made me happy because he was safe. Then Mama told me it was my own fault that the soldier cut my face, because I was so stubborn.”

“She said that to you?”

Sylvie nodded. She could tell that Marie was struggling not to let anger show.

“Then my other brother, Olivier, said, ‘Papa is dead.’ Just like that.”

Sylvie stopped. She was remembering Olivier in the truck, sitting apart, sullen—his words so cold and hard, twisting in her like a knife.

“What did you feel in that moment?” asked Marie, her voice thick with emotion now. “I felt…” What had she felt? Until this moment, she hadn’t realized. Now, she was sick with shame as it came to her. “I hated him,” she said. “I hated Olivier, because he was the one who told me about Papa. Because of the way he told me.” That was why she had let her heart turn against him, finding defect in everything he did. Mama had been right all along—he stayed away because of her bad temper. Sylvie looked past the camera-phone, searching Marie’s eyes. “He was only nine,” Sylvie said, tears streaming freely. “It wasn’t his fault.”

Marie turned the camera off. “But, Sylvie,” she told her, her own cheeks wet with tears, “you were only ten.” Marie was quiet for a moment as she ran her thumbs under her eyes, wiping them clear. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” she said, turning back to Sylvie. “It’s good you’re talking about these things, but it’s too personal for a video.” Sylvie watched as Marie tapped the phone’s screen a couple of times. “There!” she said, forcing a smile. “Erased, all gone. It isn’t your responsibility to be the poster child for coltan.”

Poster child? Sylvie didn’t understand what Marie was talking about, but it didn’t matter. She was busy thinking about Olivier, and how she could make it up to him. I can get him away from here, to a better life! she thought. If only I can convince Mama to go.

“Marie,” she said, “we have to make the video.”

“No, Sylvie. It’s too hard on you.”

“But we won’t make it about me,” she said. “We’ll make it about all of us. My family.”

Marie studied her for a moment. “Will they agree?”

That was the question. Sylvie couldn’t be sure if they would. But she was sure of this—that unless she could persuade her mother to go with her to Canada, Olivier would never leave. And if Olivier stayed, how long would he go on living?