Somewhere in the Unknown World Page 7

  When the rebels attacked and the soldiers moved in, we found ourselves in lives we could not have prepared for. The townspeople fled overnight. Where once children had played, their voices loud and happy from the primary and secondary schools, now the classrooms were empty and silent. If we wanted, we could have lived in them, but we didn’t want that. We were afraid of that much space. We became refugees in our own town. We moved from one series of empty houses to the next over the course of a year.

  On the telephone, I heard news that one of my brothers had died. I couldn’t go see him or be there when they buried him, but I urged my mother and my sisters to come and live with Albert and me. I told them we would share what we could find to eat and trade for the things that were not to be found. They agreed. My mother could not bear to live in Harbel anymore.

  My mother had been a village girl. She’d moved to Harbel when she married my father. His family had lived on the plantation and worked for the Firestone Company for generations as rubber tappers. They made a life in a two-bedroom cottage with no running water or electricity. They were thankful that the house was built from concrete and covered with corrugated aluminum. The outhouse was in back. It was not much but it was the life they had shared. After my father died of a sudden heart attack on his way to carry his morning bathwater from the neighborhood pump, my mother’s first reason for being in Harbel was no more. With the death of my brother, there were fewer reasons for her to stay—especially with the fear of rebel forces taking over.

  In Bong Town, we all took care of each other to the best of our abilities, but the stress of the continual moves was too much for my mother. She made the decision to return to the village of her youth, to the place of her beginning, convinced that the end was near. She took all but one of my sisters with her. This sister who I had carried on my back when she was a baby and had supported through high school wanted to stay with me. The parting with my mother and sisters was bitter, but I would rather part while we were alive than dead.

  A piece of me understood, even then, that this was a war that had to happen because we had lived for far too long without the power to determine our future as a nation. I was afraid and I did not agree with the methods but I knew the civil wars of Liberia were inevitable. We were the first country in Africa to declare our independence as a republic, thus we were the oldest. We’d been “founded” by the Americo-Liberian settlers, freed slaves from the United States and the Caribbean—people dreaming of a place that they could make their own, but they were a population that had gotten used to the idea of taking over what had already been, dominating those who were already there. Before they came, we lived as tribespeople, each tribe governing their own way of life very much like the Native Americans in the United States. When they came, they practiced the worst of what they had learned from the white colonizers. We were at a point in our history where decisions about the fate of our country had to be made. While I will never agree that the indiscriminate killing was justified, Liberia was a nation birthing itself, and the delivery was bloody and disastrous.

  Our family moved into the last section of houses that we felt were safe in Bong Town. It was afternoon and my sister and I had just finished making a simple lunch when three teenage rebels entered through the front door with their guns cocked. They were already afraid. Their guns danced in their fingers, slippery with sweat. They stood in a small triangle, one in front and two in back.

  The boy standing in front said, “Leave.”

  I asked, “Can I feed my children first?”

  The boy to the left said, “No. You can watch us eat.”

  I moved away from the pot of stew I’d made. My children crowded behind me. Albert had gone out. When would he return?

  I said, “I need to pack.”

  The front boy said, “Only for your children.”

  He was no older than my oldest. I nodded and gathered what I could into a bag as the boy soldiers gathered around our pot eating with our spoons. I snuck the family bible and a pen into the bag as my sister held my children, who stood watching as the rebels ate their lunch. I knew we had to leave before they satiated their hunger.

  I said, “Come, children. Let’s go.”

  The rebels did not even look at us as we exited the door. I carried the youngest and my sister dragged the other two small ones as we started to run, afraid they would shoot us in the back.

  At the edge of Bong Town, I heard a noise and turned around trembling, ready to do what I could to protect my children. It was Albert. He’d heard the rebels coming; he’d hidden in a neighbor’s house and then followed us.

  Albert took us into the bush. He didn’t know where he was headed but he knew that we had to get away and get away fast before the rebels finished their meal and decided to come hunt us down for sport. The bush was thick, the canopy of the trees so dense over the little path that all we could see was a sprinkling of sun. The children were afraid and disoriented.

  They kept asking, “Where are we going? Where are we going?”

  Albert and I kept answering, “Far from here. Far from here.”

  We walked for a full day and long into the night before we rested on banana leaves beneath a sky we couldn’t see. In the morning, we woke up and walked again, dragging and carrying the children as needed.

  By nightfall on the third day, as luck would have it, we stumbled upon a small village in the middle of nowhere. There were about fifty people living in the thick of the green. There was a church, a hut with a wooden cross in front of it. We entered. Inside, there were men protecting their wives and children with sticks, rocks, several guns. They yelled for us to leave. They did not want any trouble with the rebels.

  They shouted, “Leave!”

  I got on my knees and I started begging them, crying, “We have nowhere to go.”

  The days had been too long and the sleepless nights too short and I had gone through too much and my children were exhausted and hungry and we needed help.

  I begged, “Please, please, help us.”

  I prayed to a God I had grown up believing in at the plantation school in the Firestone Natural Rubber Company. A God that I believed was good and kind and wise. I prayed for a life that was no more and the possibility of a life after this one where we would be free from war and strife. I prayed for forgiveness for any sins I may have been guilty of, any harsh words or actions I may have committed against another. I prayed for mercy.

  Mercy came in the form of a thin man with a face full of wrinkles and a scraggly white beard. He was the oldest man in the group. He stepped from the people and turned to them and said, “I will take them and take responsibility for them.”

  Under his tutelage, we learned how to live in the bush. He gave us a banana-leaf-roof hut with a makeshift bed. Albert and I let my sister and the children sleep on the bed while we continued sleeping on banana leaves spread over the damp earth. At first, the man shared his harvest with us until we planted a garden of our own and were able to harvest. We scavenged for cassava and wild fruits and vegetables, and we shared what we found with the others. We realized that we had stepped into an existing network of people who’d run into the bush to survive the ambushes and the senseless killing. We discovered that we were a mere three hours away from a nearby rebel city where simple goods could be traded and elementary business conducted. My sister and I walked the journey to the rebel village each week to buy eddoes, a small root vegetable similar to taro, high in protein, and carried them in huge baskets on our heads the three hours back to sell to the remote villages around us in the bush. In this way, we didn’t die. The life we were living was unlike anything we’d imagined but we came to believe it was the only way life could be lived anymore.

  I had one suit. It had once been a beautiful white color. Now it was the color of the dirt that I sat and slept and lived on. During my periods, my lack of clothing presented issues. I had only two pieces of cloth to use. One for the day and one for the night, and when I was waiting for them
to dry, I had to go to the river and to sit in the middle of the water to wait for the cloths to dry on the rocks. In those moments, beneath the bright sunshine, I looked down at myself. I saw that I had been built like my father: I was supposed to be strong and tall. In our time in the bush, I could count my ribs. When my younger children saw my naked chest, they asked, “Where’s your breast, Mama, where’s your breast?” All I could do was pull at the nipples still attached to my skin.

  Albert and I gave every morsel of food we could find to the children. When they were done with the insides of the fire-roasted cassava, we shared the burnt bits they had not eaten, the fibers that were too hard for them to chew through. We ate quietly, never looking at each other. We wasted away, day by day. I knew it was only a matter of time before one of us grew too weak and sick to continue.

  Near the end of our first year, Albert contracted malaria. It was not in his nature to complain but I saw the beads of sweat on his face, the red in his eyes, and I knew something was wrong. I cut down the stalks of young banana trees and split them open and placed the cooling insides against his forehead to no avail. When he grew delirious, when the infection had spread to his brain, he lost the ability to speak and I grew scared. The only thing we had to write on was the family bible and the single pen I had snuck out of the house when the rebels came. I handed both to Albert and I asked him gently to write something for me, anything at all. He saw the desperation in my eyes and took hold of the pen and the bible, opened up its front page, and scribbled a small poem whose words I no longer recall.

  I knew that if we did not get Albert to a doctor, those scribbled lines would be his final words to me. I knew that there was a doctor named John, the doctor who worked at the Firestone Natural Rubber Company, who was traveling across rebel cities and towns and through the bush treating the sick. It was ten o’clock at night. I pleaded with the men in the village until three of them agreed to carry Albert in a makeshift hammock and journey with me in search of the doctor. A fourth man said he’d run ahead of us first to find the doctor and lead the doctor our way. I remember thinking: People are still good, this is still why faith matters. I knew that whether Albert lived or died, there would be no way I could ever repay these men in this lifetime.

  The forest was dark and the night creatures were loud. Wild monkeys cried from the tops of the trees. We heard growls from creatures we couldn’t see on either side of the path. We focused on walking as quickly as we could with the weight of Albert between us. My husband made no sound as the men and I helped one another carry him along the narrow dirt path. An hour and a half into our journey, as we were ascending a hill, I saw the dark figure of man who had offered to go get the doctor running our way. Behind him was the good doctor running along with his bag.

  The doctor, when he saw our group juggling Albert, joked, “You are all so lucky this evening. What a big deer you have.”

  I said, “John, it is me, Siah. This is not a deer. It is my husband. John, you have to help us.”

  The doctor rushed into action at my words. He directed us to a small clearing where we could put Albert down. I put a hand to my husband’s forehead to find that he was still burning with fever. John crouched beside me and used his hands to feel Albert’s face and upper body. He said he wanted to treat Albert but that the fever was too high and Albert’s teeth had locked. I could sense the helplessness from the doctor’s form and even in the darkness see the tension in his body as he shook his head and then rose to his feet.

  I said, “Wait.”

  I felt the ground for sticks. I found two. With one hand, I opened Albert’s lips. With the other, I jammed the sticks into Albert’s mouth. The doctor crouched back down when he saw what I was doing. He proceeded to help me. Once the sticks were through Albert’s teeth, the doctor had me hold them in place while he opened his bag and rummaged through. He took out medicine in different canisters. He shook a nearly empty one and out came several tablets. He used the canister top and a small rock to crush the tablets. I held the sticks firmly to keep Albert’s teeth apart. The doctor stuffed the crushed medication into Albert’s mouth, then looked at me and said, “If the medication works, Albert will be fine, and if it doesn’t, then I have done all I have the power to do on this night.”

  The doctor got up and asked if the man who had led him to us would lead him back to the rebel village so his presence would not be missed. I thanked the good doctor, saying again and again, “God bless you, John. God bless you.”

  The three men picked up the hammock again with me and we made our way back to our remote village. Albert was as quiet as he had been on our way from the makeshift village. A light drizzle fell. Near the edge of our gathering of huts, one of men carrying the hammock slipped and lost his hold. Albert’s body slammed to the ground. I thought it was the end of everything. The tears were rising in my throat and my belly tightened as I gripped my end and watched my husband’s body sag to the ground before the man could get on his feet again.

  In the dark of everything, I heard Albert say, “Ow.”

  I could not see his face but I knew he was alive and he would live.

  We, the men and I, laughed out loud, in what will always be the funniest moment of my life, when Albert added with some surprise, “Something hit me.”

  It was one or two in the morning. The children waited for us at the entrance to our hut. When the men and I settled Albert back onto his sleeping place on the ground, I made a decision that my family would leave the bush at the first opportunity. I could not do this again. What would happen if one of the children got sick?

  A week later we all entered the rebel city. The people on the streets were too busy looking out for themselves to pay attention to one more war-ravaged family. We walked around taking note of how normal life seemed despite what we knew existed in the bush: the hawkers with their wares on their heads, the cars on the roads honking their horns, the women with babies on their backs. By day’s end, we found a kind family who remembered Albert and me from the Firestone Natural Rubber Company and they offered us a place to stay. Their house was nothing more than a cement shelter, with no electricity or running water. Still, it was better than anything we’d known in the bush, so it felt luxurious and safe. We spent many nights on their hard floor, listening to the sounds of the city bustling with life. In the evenings, we piled rocks into cans and cut thin pieces of our clothing to roll into rope. We poured precious palm oil into the cans. I looked at the faces of my children in the light of the small flames, their faces thin with hunger, and I gratefully accepted the food our host family offered.

  Not long after we entered the rebel city, a French NGO called Médecins Sans Frontières came looking for people to work. They wanted people to conduct surveys asking about nutrition. I eagerly applied. They accepted me because of my background of working outside the home in Bong Town. With the NGO team and a few local women, we journeyed from village to village asking questions and doing nutritional surveys. I got food for the family: milk, oil, and rice, and simple medicine. When the NGO left I was so sad and scared, but then the Red Cross came and Albert secured a job with the organization as a food distributor.

  Slowly, some semblance of a normal life returned to us. Albert and I were able to register the kids for an American Catholic school. My sister told me that she was going to go to Monrovia to become a businesswoman. Slowly, we began to talk of our year in the bush as the worst year of our lives. We began to say things like, “At least the worst things didn’t happen.”

  —SIAH BORZIE

  6

  Leaving with No Good-byes

  MY STORY BEGINS in a small Karen village in Burma where the chickens peck the ground and the canopies of tall trees provide shelter from the rain. At the beginning of the story, there is a man, a spoiled man, the youngest son of a family of girls, and then there is a woman, a competent, headstrong woman, the oldest of six children. There is no love story but they marry. They become parents, my parents.

 
In my time with my mother and father, they never talked of love as a feeling between people, a shared affection, attraction, a belief, a bond, a relationship that even death could not sever. They only talked of love in terms of country, a country we did not have as Karen people, one of the seven main ethnic minority groups in Burma.

  In a life where love was not a language for each other, my mother and father raised five children. I was their middle child, their most stubborn and independent child, the one who questioned everything, sometimes with, but more often without, words. When my father told me it was time for me to become a monk for a season, as good Buddhist men do for the merit of their parents, I gave him a look. It was a formidable look, with my slanted brows, my eyes dark as black fire. My rebellious heart, like their feelings for us, needed no words to be understood. He knew that I complied with his request only for him and Mother, not for myself.

  When my oldest sister drowned in a nameless river, in a nameless place, on a day that I would forget if I could, I experienced death for the first time: to leave with no good-byes. On the day that she died, I saw my mother and father cry until they had no more tears. They cried until they were dry. They cried until the words of love they had not expressed choked them.

  I saw what happened after a person died; those who had loved them became less fearful, less careful, more recklessly brave. After my sister died, my mother and father were no longer afraid of the consequences. They moved us away from the Karen village I understood as home into the depths of the borderlands between Burma and Thailand to become resistance fighters. We children, like all people who could die, had to struggle for our lives.