When his father’s condition improved — at least, as much as a seventy-year-old man’s can — he contacted the NGO for a new posting. Marcie wasn’t thrilled with the separation but understood that he was itching to get back in the field. She admired his drive to help other people, and he basked in that, never wanting to admit that the exigency of it was like a drug, or how much adrenaline was involved. This was the first gap between them, and he told himself it wouldn’t matter, years on, when he was through with international aid and they were living a settled life together somewhere.
Rwanda was where they sent him. He was assigned the same tasks — assistance, medicine, infrastructure — but for different reasons, not natural disaster but civil conflicts that put the displaced in camps and the country on edge.
He knew little about the country, but when he looked out the plane window, he felt that he had seen it before, in films or on television or maybe — this was hokey, but also his actual thought — in dreams. The landscape was hilly, green, wreathed in clouds, incomparably beautiful, somehow both severe and lush. It looked otherworldly, somewhere you’d go after exhausting your time in the earth’s ordinary places. His heart lifted as it always did when he saw somewhere new: there was so much to see and do, and he felt the old energy returning, the sense of clear-eyed purpose that would help sculpt his days.
I wish Marcie could see this, he thought, and took a blurry photograph.
He had a room in a ramshackle, single-story housing complex along with some Belgian and Swiss workers. In the evenings they drank beer together in a hotel bar surrounded by other foreigners, mostly journalists, nurses, and UNAMIR personnel. In December of 1993, there was either nervous tension in the air or else everybody knew what was coming, he couldn’t say which. He had only just arrived, and as far as he knew maybe every day in Rwanda was like this. He had no perspective on the situation, and the others at the bar were of little help. Their attitude was that you should figure things out for yourself rather than be instructed; everybody considered this hard-won knowledge a mark of toughness. Laughing at the newcomers and their mistakes was a tradition that built morale among the ones who had been there longer.
At first the days were long, hot, and pleasantly full. The coordination of supplies in the camps was an endless task, and the supplies were inadequate to the enormity of the need. Reddish mud from the dirt roads coated his boots and clothes, and the boxes themselves, then dried to dust that ended up in his mouth and nose and ears. He worked under a bilingual Quebecois named Philippe who gave quick, clear orders in English and French. Tug set up dispensation stations for medicine and water and walked the camp, checking on conditions. He saw what appeared to be a dying woman, her sunken cheeks spotted with flies, and next to her a boy was nestled calmly against her bony knee. He checked her pulse — she was gone — and then asked around, but couldn’t find any relatives to claim the child.
Philippe told him that a group of nuns running an orphanage would take him, and added, “AIDS, most likely. Won’t be long.” He meant before the boy died. Tug took him over to the nuns, and he went along placidly. Probably he didn’t have enough calories in his system to make a fuss.
The housing complex was supervised by a resident manager, Etienne, and his wife, son, and daughter. In the late afternoon, when Tug returned home, the son would be kicking around a soccer ball made of banana-tree leaves with his friends in the courtyard, while his sister watched. Etienne was friendly and genial, and the collared shirts and brown pants he wore every day looked elegant on his tall, thin frame. His brother-in-law had studied at the University of Laval, he said, and told many stories of his life there. At one time Etienne and his wife had wanted to visit him in Quebec, perhaps studying there themselves.
“But,” he said, his voice trailing off, his delicate fingers making a vague wave, signaling, Tug supposed, a vast array of circumstance, economics, the pull and problems of home. “I am here instead,” he finished, and offered Tug a beer. Often they would spend an hour together like this, drinking beer in the late afternoons as the boys played around them. He asked Tug about Marcie, his family, and his education. And he explained that his wife’s family were Hutus, and that his own relatives had left Kigali and gone to the south.
“We stay here,” he said firmly, gesturing at the complex, where he swept the courtyard and greeted the residents regally, as if it were his kingdom.
He had heard from his brother-in-law about hockey, and especially about the Montreal Canadiens. He asked Tug about the Stanley Cup and his favorite players, and this — of all their discussions — captured his son’s attention. Yozefu was eleven years old and found this new sport intriguing. He demanded to know the rules and the names of the teams, how the game was played and for how long, and Tug was soon explaining the minutiae of penalty shots, sudden-death overtime, and off-sides. The boy and his friends clamored for more information. Tug, laughing, used a long, sturdy branch to maneuver their soccer ball around the courtyard, showing them the basics of stick handling.
Yozefu caught on quickly, moving the ball from side to side, imitating Tug’s lunging motions and kicks. Tug taught him to say, “He shoots, he scores!” and the boy ran around repeating this over and over, laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
In the doorway of the family’s apartment his sister stood in the shadows, staring fiercely, a half smile curtaining the whiteness of her teeth.
Then the boy stopped and asked Tug why the shoes with blades in them didn’t get stuck. Machete shoes, he called them, because that was the only kind of blade he could picture. And Tug started to answer, before realizing just how impossible it would be to explain. There was no way that Yozefu could understand the idea of a game played on ice, that he could imagine a rink or any part of winter at all.
So he just said the ground in Canada was different. The boy shrugged, and he and his friends played stickball for a while longer until they reverted back to soccer, sometimes shouting “He shoots, he scores!” for no reason, whenever they felt like it.
In Kigali, despite the tension in the air, Tug was happy at first. In times of trouble you put your head down. You set your own worries aside. When people are talking of war and famine, of an army massing to the north, of civilians arming themselves with machetes, of children dying in camps, your only choice is to get through each day. People need help, so you give out water and rice, bring sick children to the hospital, and talk to their parents. Every single day is triage, a blur of urgent activity, a sprint. You don’t worry about your mortgage or the last time you went to the dentist. You don’t have time to think about any of that, and it feels like freedom.
He and Etienne listened to the radio in the courtyard, under the shade of a banana tree. Radio was everything here, and new songs were playing that had shocking lyrics, rippling with hate. In the evening, at the hotel bar, he discussed the songs with his Swiss counterparts, who shrugged them off, telling him he didn’t understand the history here. Tug agreed that he didn’t; he didn’t understand why the Belgians were here in such small numbers when the war was a result of systems they’d instituted. He didn’t understand why the Canadians had sent sufficient forces to seem involved but not enough to actually do anything.