But the big picture wasn’t his area of expertise, and never had been. He was good at logistics, at surveying the topography and figuring out where to put the food tents and the field hospitals. He had always been like this, ever since Boy Scouts, taking refuge in practical problems. These were the universals, and beyond them were moral issues and cultural complexities that you could spend a lifetime trying to decipher without getting anywhere at all.
His fellow aid workers called him the Silent Canadian. Except on the subject of hockey, he would rarely be drawn out much. He didn’t mean to be evasive; he just wasn’t a talker by nature. As a child, he and his father would sit together in the garage working on a Meccano kit or a woodworking project; his mother and sister would be in the kitchen cooking or cleaning, chatting all the while. What his father liked most was to get away from that — he called it the hen party. “Silence is golden,” he told his son, and the worst thing was to talk a lot without having anything to say. He had impressed upon Tug the integrity of saying only what you mean, and the emptiness of words without action backing them up.
At Christmas there was a party at the hotel. Though no one wanted to admit it, this was the hardest season for people far from home: the weather, the food, the company, it all felt wrong. On their way to church, Etienne and his family stopped by to wish him a merry Christmas. They were all dressed in their finest, and Etienne’s wife and daughter were more beautiful than Tug had ever realized, their skin glowing against matching pale yellow dresses. Esmeralda, the girl, shyly stepped forward and handed him a doily she’d stitched. It reminded him of his mother, who also stitched and embroidered; when he told the family about this, they all nodded, evidently not surprised. It only made sense that women were the same everywhere.
Marcie had sent him a care package of thoughtful gifts. Foot powder, medicated lotion, propylene socks. And, of course, fruitcake. On a dim, crackling line he called her at her parents’ house, and in the background heard Christmas carols, cocktail chatter, her nephews yelling.
“I miss you,” Marcie said. “I wish you were here.”
“Me too,” Tug said. It was true when he said it, but by the time he got off the phone and went home to bed, it wasn’t. He longed for certain things: a hot shower, Marcie’s body, a hamburger. But longing was part of life here, and it made him happy to feel his lack of these things, as sharp as hunger. He was addicted to want. He didn’t know how this had happened, whether it was because of his childhood or some quirk of his personality or genes, but somehow he had become a person who needed to do without in order to appreciate what he had.
Between Christmas and Easter the situation worsened. Battles were raging to the west of Kigali; there was talk of full-blown civil war. On the streets of the city he saw gangs of teenage boys dressed in clownish outfits — the Interahamwe. They looked like garden-variety delinquents, driven to vandalism by boredom, but in their eyes was a frightening flatness. They didn’t react to his presence and seemed, in fact, not to see him at all.
Etienne shook his head. “It’s going to be bad,” he said.
“Why don’t you leave?” Tug asked.
Etienne again made that sweeping gesture with his hand, encompassing the complex, his family, their extended relatives, maybe even the country itself. Tug couldn’t tell if this was obstinacy or pride. “This is where we are,” he said.
Meanwhile, Marcie wanted to know how much longer he would be there. He thought he’d be back by August, he told her. “August,” she echoed, her voice tinny with distance, but in it he could hear all the unsaid, freighted things. Soon, he knew, she wanted to start having children. Their life was waiting for them just over the horizon, and she was in a hurry to get there. To think of her putting her dreams on hold was a weight on his heart.
It was not awkward, apparently, for him to tell Grace about this. He spoke as if these words, these emotions, belonged to another person.
“Certain facts are known,” he said. They had been reported, brought to light, so he didn’t need to relate them all over again, did he? The story had already been told. How the gunshots and mortar blasts increased as the army moved closer, how the Interahamwe responded, how the radio blared. Everybody knows this happened. Even in the camps people weren’t safe, and now they had to worry about bombings on top of starvation and disease. Those who could leave did, and there was an epochal movement to the south.
Tug stopped sleeping. The nights were bright with smoke. Then the president was killed, and the murders began in earnest. Children with hatchets. Blood in the streets. Relating this, his voice grew not hoarse with emotion but clipped, the words whittled to precise points. “There was a river,” he said. “You must have seen the pictures. It was piled with bodies. There were always screams in the distance, and sometimes they were close. There were dead children, and live children looking for their dead mothers.”
Within hours most of the white people were evacuated. That’s what happened: they left the country to its murders. He found himself in a hotel room in Nairobi, sitting cross-legged in the bathtub, and couldn’t remember how he had gotten there or how long he was supposed to stay.
In Nairobi people spoke of phone calls in which their friends said good-bye just before they were murdered. Some were calm and resigned; others screamed for help until the very last second of their lives. All of this via telephone. Technology existed to hear the murders, but not to stop them.
Tug shared a hotel room with two other aid workers, and they were cramped but had clean sheets and towels. They couldn’t stand this, or one another, and lacking an outlet for their rage they fought among themselves instead. Tug went down to the bar, and this was when he found the gorilla woman, and spent the night with her, listening without sympathy to the story of her life. Later, one of his roommates spent the night with her too, and said she had brought out a knife, wanting him to hold it to her throat. “She loves danger,” the guy said, raising his eyebrows in sexual implication.
Some people went to Goma to work in the refugee camps. That these refugees were murderers was discussed as little as possible; such were the ethics of aid. Then, when a cholera epidemic spread through the camps, the world finally began to pay attention. When the murderers died.
Tug and his roommates were sent to Entebbe to coordinate a field office. Grateful for work, they bent themselves to the task.
And Marcie, so relieved that he’d been evacuated, begged for him to come home.
“Who are these people?” she said angrily, meaning not the murderers but his supervisors at the NGO. “How can they expect you to do this, to stay on, just to fulfill your contract? This is sadistic. They need to let you come home.” She was crying into the phone.
Tug said nothing. Truthfully she didn’t feel real to him just then — just a voice on the phone, a crackle of sobs.
“I love you,” she said. “Come home to me.”
He stayed as long as he could in Entebbe, and four months later they were allowed back in. Of the spectacular green country he’d first seen, virtually no trace was left. What remained was a place that no one could fall in love with. Every farm had been left untended or destroyed. Kigali stank of rotten bodies, a riot of flies everywhere, and packs of dogs grown so aggressive and fat on human flesh that people were shooting them on sight. Here and there the first exiles were streaming into empty houses, and to see them sweeping the floors was surreal, an act of domestic normalcy patently inadequate to the task of cleaning up what had happened here.
At the complex, everything he’d left behind had been taken, not that there was much besides a few clothes and magazines. There were bullet holes in the wall.