Blue Gold Page 17

  Suddenly, Laiping was weary—so weary she thought she could fall asleep right there in line, standing up. So weary, her arms and legs felt like lead. She let her eyelids drop like weights, just for a second or two. She snapped awake, uncertain if she had actually gone to sleep, or for how long, although the line hadn’t moved. Then something caught her gaze—a crumpled paper caught in the tall weeds growing along the wall of the building. She picked it up and unfolded it. It was yellow, not pink like the paper Kai had handed her eight weeks ago, but the message was the same: Know Your Rights! There was an email address.

  Hiding the paper from those around her, Laiping slipped it into her jeans pocket. She stepped out of the line and walked quickly away, being careful not to look back. She kept her eyes forward all the way to the Internet café, imagining as she cut through the crowd of hundreds waiting for busses along the main boulevard that any one of them could be a company spy—afraid of what would happen to her if they found out she was carrying the yellow paper. At the café, she waited for her turn on one of the computers.

  “I need to know my rights,” she typed. “Please contact me.”

  She included her cell phone number in the email and signed her name. Then she worried all the way back to her dorm that the email address was a trap set by the company to catch troublemakers, and that she had given herself away. As she reached the building, she glanced at the nets surrounding the dorm. She tried imagine what it was like for those people—how frightening it would be to jump from the roof, and how horribly desperate they must have felt. Then a realization came to her, an idea so fully formed that it hardened immediately into resolve: Once I get my money, I’m quitting and I’m going home.

  EXHAUSTED, Laiping went back to the dorm to catch a few hours of sleep before her next shift. But she couldn’t sleep. Her senses were full of longing to be back home in her own bed, listening to Baba snore behind the thin wall. She imagined the sound of oxen lowing softly in the village pen, and of a rooster crowing—smelled the tangy aroma of the fields outside the open window. But she must have at last drifted off, because she was jolted awake by the ringing of her mobile. She grabbed it from under her pillow and fumbled to answer it.

  “Mama?” she said, dopey with sleep.

  “Laiping?” came a man’s voice. Laiping was filled with dread, certain that someone must be calling from the hospital with news about Baba. But the voice continued lightly, “It’s Kai. You were looking for me?”

  “Where have you been?!” replied Laiping.

  “Away.”

  “I need your help,” she told him. “Can we meet?”

  “Not at the usual place,” he said.

  An hour later, Laiping was sitting with Kai at a small table in a near-empty bubble tea shop, located in a small strip mall clear across the factory campus. Kai hadn’t wanted to meet at the Internet café—especially after learning that Laiping had sent her email from there.

  “You can’t be too careful,” he said. “The company has spies everywhere.”

  “I’ve been looking for you there,” Laiping told him.

  “I’ve been traveling, to Dongguan and Guangzhou,” he replied, naming other factory cities in the Pearl River Delta, “meeting with workers, to see how conditions compare, and what can be done.”

  “That’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s dangerous! There are work camps full of people whose only crime is trying to change things. If somebody dares to speak out about being worked to death, or about corrupt officials taking all the money for themselves, the next thing they know, police are busting down their door in the middle of the night.”

  Laiping shivered and thought of Fen’s father, the troublemaker. Perhaps that was where he was, in a work camp somewhere.

  “I thought…” she began, then hesitated about saying what was on her mind. Kai was discussing such important things, and she didn’t want to appear to be shallow, or selfish.

  “What?”

  “I was afraid you were mad at me,” she said, “because I didn’t want to go to your meeting.”

  “I was rude last time,” he told her, his voice softening. He reached across the table and took her hand, like a boyfriend would. Laiping felt a thrill run through her. “You’re so new here,” he said, “it takes a while to understand why we have to fight back.”

  “I understand now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I applied for my back pay because my father is ill—”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “They refuse to give me my money. Is there anything I can do?”

  “To be honest,” he said with a shrug, “no. The company has the power to do what they want.”

  Laiping’s heart sank. Kai squeezed her hand.

  “Come to our meeting the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Talking with others at least makes you feel you’re doing something.”

  Laiping nodded. “My cousin might want to come, too,” she added. “People on her line are getting sick.”

  Kai looked her in the eye—measuring, assessing. “If I tell you where the meeting is, you can’t tell anybody else. It’s too risky. We could be arrested.”

  Without meaning to, Laiping pulled back slightly. Kai saw her uncertainty, and dropped her hand.

  “Do you want things to change, or not?”

  She answered without hesitation, “I want things to change.” And she wanted him to take her hand again.

  Kai nodded and smiled. He did a quick shoulder-

  check to make sure no one was watching, then he told her, “Give me your mobile.”

  Laiping fished in her bag for her phone and handed it over. Kai typed an address into her date book.

  “Come to this address on Friday morning,” he said, and handed the phone back to her.

  “I’ll be there,” promised Laiping.

  When they left the tea shop, he held her hand as far as the bus stop on the main boulevard. When they paused to say goodbye, she wondered if he’d kiss her right there in public the way some couples did—even though such displays were frowned upon by the older generation—but he turned away from her and quickly lost himself in the crowds along the sidewalk. Laiping watched him until she lost track of which bobbing head was his, already counting the hours until she’d see him again.

  THE MORNING AFTER Kayembe brought Fazila to examine Sylvie, Olivier came striding into the cluster of huts carrying something large and pink in his arms. At first glance, Sylvie—outside squatting over the cook fire as she stirred the porridge—thought how strange it was that he was holding a flamingo, like the ones they’d seen years ago when they crossed Lake Tanganyika from the Congo. As he came closer, however, she saw that it wasn’t a flamingo at all. It was a frilly, European-style dress, something an actress on TV might wear.

  Kayembe and his men were leaving tomorrow for North Kivu, and he had insisted that the marriage take place before they go—just in case Sylvie had any ideas about running. He forbade her from going to the clinic to talk to Doctor Marie. Sylvie would have defied him and gone anyway, but she was worried about what Kayembe might do to Marie and the clinic as punishment.

  “Here,” Olivier commanded, holding the dress out to her. She could see the strap of his AK-47 across his chest, and the gun barrel behind his right shoulder. “Put this on. It’s for the wedding.” Stubbornly, Sylvie stayed squatting and continued to stir the pot. “Sylvie!” he told her. “Mr. Kayembe sent this for you. Put it on and come with me.”

  “I’m making breakfast,” she told him, refusing to meet his eyes—bracing herself for more of his bullying.

  But Olivier surprised her by crossing his ankles and plopping down onto the dusty ground across the fire from her, still holding the dress. Sylvie glanced at him. He gave her a look that was almost shy. “You need to put it on,” he said. “I’m to bring you to the church at noon.”

  “Is that all he’s offering for my bride price?” asked Sylvie resentfully. Back
home, the groom had to give the girl’s family so many goats, so many cows, pots and pans—all of which could amount to a lot of money. Kayembe was wealthy enough to afford any bride price, but nobody, least of all Olivier, was about to negotiate with him.

  “Why are you so ungrateful?” Olivier shot back. “Who do you think you are, to turn up your nose to any man, let alone Mr. Kayembe? I’ll tell you who you are—an ugly girl that nobody wants!”

  Sylvie wished with all her heart that nobody wanted her—most of all Kayembe—but before she could tell Olivier this, Pascal came out from the hut, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Sylvie is getting married today,” Olivier told him. “This is the dress she’s going to wear.”

  Pascal wrinkled his nose at the strange dress. “Will you still live with us, Sylvie?” was all he really wanted to know.

  Since yesterday, Sylvie had been practicing hard at feeling nothing. It was the only way she could bear to take another breath, knowing the future that awaited her. But Pascal’s question made a familiar panic rise in her stomach. Tonight, she supposed, she must stay with Kayembe. The thought of him touching her sickened her—she could feel the weight of the soldier who raped her; she smelled his diesel smell.

  “Don’t be stupid, Pascal,” Olivier answered for her. “From now on, Sylvie is going to be Hervé Kayembe’s woman. She’ll be important,” he added.

  Sylvie wondered if Olivier really believed that she would become anything other than Kayembe’s slave, or if he was simply trying to convince her to go with him willingly. She gave the porridge a final stir and knocked the spoon on the side of the pot. “Tell Mama and Lucie breakfast is ready,” she told Pascal. After Pascal went into the hut, she spoke softly to Olivier. “I will go with you,” she said, “but you must promise me something first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you will look after the family. That you will put them first, before Kayembe. Before anyone. Swear that you’ll do it, Olivier. Swear it so that Papa’s spirit can hear you.”

  Olivier eyed her nervously. Sylvie wasn’t sure if he was spooked more by the mention of the spirit world, or of Papa. After a moment, his expression became solemn. “I swear,” he said, and Sylvie believed him. Maybe there was something of her brother left inside him after all.

  Standing up from the fire, Sylvie took the dress from Olivier and held it up against her. It had straps—no sleeves—and the top part had wires in it to shape a woman’s bosom. Sylvie supposed that some girls might think it was pretty, but the fact that Kayembe had chosen it for her made it hideous. From Olivier’s dubious expression, it seemed he agreed.

  “We don’t have to leave right away,” he told her. “You can eat breakfast first.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she replied.

  As she carried the dress into the hut to change, she told herself that when Kayembe touched her after the wedding, she would go inside of herself, the way Mama did when she didn’t want to face the truth about Papa. Then it would be only her body that Kayembe took. She would never give him her true being, the self that from now on she would keep locked away so down deep that Kayembe would never reach her.

  OLIVIER INFORMED THEM that Mama, Pascal, and Lucie were not invited to the wedding, but no one protested. In spite of Sylvie’s fancy dress, even little Lucie seemed to understand that there was nothing to celebrate, and, since Kayembe’s visit, Mama had withdrawn to the place in her mind where she believed that Papa was still alive. “Patrice won’t approve,” she said when she saw Sylvie in the long pink dress, forgetting all about the firm grasp she’d held on reality just two nights before, when she’d told Pascal that Papa was gone to the other side. “We must wait for your father to come.”

  By mid-morning, Sylvie could delay no longer. She set out with Olivier, tripping over the billowing skirt as she walked toward the far side of the old marketplace, where they were to meet Kayembe at a small church. The bodice was too big for her—it cut into her underarms and the straps kept slipping. Olivier slowed his pace to match hers as she fumbled to lift the hem of the dress out of the red dust, her plastic thongs slapping against the soles of her feet. He, too, seemed in no hurry. She wondered where his thoughts were leading him, and decided to take a risk to find out.

  “Olivier,” she said. “Why do we never talk about Papa?”

  Olivier gave her a startled look, then let out a short laugh. “Mama talks about him all the time.”

  “But we never do.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” he shrugged. He fell into a brooding silence.

  Sylvie thought, No, there is too much to say. She’d always been afraid to ask what he saw at the school the day Papa was killed, but somehow today she felt brave enough to hear it.

  “Tell me about how he died,” she said, after a few more paces.

  “You know how he died. He was shot.”

  “By the Mai-Mai?”

  “You know it was the Mai-Mai.”

  “Did you see it?

  Olivier looked away sharply and didn’t reply. That’s it, Sylvia thought. He’s closed the door. Then he surprised her.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Stop this.”

  “You’ll feel better if you tell me,” she said, because it was true, and because she needed to know—needed to lock the picture of Papa’s last moments inside her, deep down with her true self. “Where was he? Where were you?”

  “I was outside, playing football with the junior boys.”

  “And Papa?”

  “Inside with the older grades. Teaching French, I think. They were reciting poetry.”

  Sylvie could see him—Papa at the head of the class, his shirt and tie, his dark-rimmed glasses, his hand waving to mark the rhythm of the poem.

  “How did they come, the soldiers?” asked Sylvie. “In a truck?”

  Olivier shook his head. “Out of nowhere, they were all around, walking through the grass, coming from all directions.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I yelled for Papa, and I ran into the school to tell him.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Papa told the kids to get out of the school, but the soldiers were already coming in both doors.” Sylvie pictured it, the single room of the cinder block schoolhouse, the two doors, one at either end of one long wall. “The doors were blocked. Some kids tried to climb out a back window. They shot them.” Sylvie pictured this, too. Probably her friends were among the dead. She wondered which ones.

  Olivier kept talking, as though a dam had burst and his memories were spilling out. “Papa gathered the kids behind him, with his arms out, like this.” He held his arms out straight from his body. “He asked the commander what he wanted. The commander said they came for him, because he was making trouble with the miners.”

  “What did Papa say?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  But Sylvie could imagine what Papa told the commander, that it was his moral duty to help protect the miners and their families against soldiers like him. Did he know about the foreign mining companies, driving the Congolese off their plots? Did he know the Mai-Mai were working for them? He must have.

  “Then what happened?” she asked.

  “They made us go outside, all of us. Papa said not to worry, they wouldn’t hurt us if we did what they said. But everyone was crying.”

  She saw Papa, herding the children out through the doors into the playing field, comforting them, when he must have known he was about to die.

  “Did he die quickly?”

  “Stop asking so many questions,” he said.

  They walked on for several paces. Olivier kept his head turned away from her. He’s crying, she realized. Then, abruptly, he stopped walking and turned to her. His eyes were a little wild, as though he didn’t know where to look, and he was breathing heavily. Tears streaked his face and sweat dotted his forehead. He was rememberi
ng, reliving—Sylvie recognized the signs. She touched his arm.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What are you seeing?”

  “I didn’t have a choice!” he cried, suddenly a child again. “Papa said so!”

  “About what?”

  She saw him struggling to speak, but the words seemed to choke him. She stepped closer so that she was looking up into his wet face and gripped his arms with her hands.

  “Olivier, whatever it is, you have to say it,” she told him. “You have to get it out.”

  Under her steady gaze, Olivier’s eyes became ghostly calm.

  “It was me, Sylvie,” he said at last, in barely more than a whisper. “I shot him. They put the rifle in my hands, and they made me shoot him, or they said they would shoot me.”

  The odd thing was that Sylvie wasn’t really shocked, or even surprised. She should have guessed that Olivier bore a scar far worse than hers—from his moods, from the way he used words to wound her. From what she knew about the Mai-Mai, and their inhuman cruelty. Of course Papa would have told him he had no choice—because Papa wouldn’t have wanted him to live his whole life under a cloud of guilt.

  Olivier put his face in his hands and began to sob. Sylvie squeezed his arms to let him know that she didn’t hate him, that somehow the truth had made them brother and sister again. They stood like that in the middle of the path for what seemed like a long time, with passing people casting curious looks at the boy soldier, weeping, and the scarred girl in the frilly pink dress that was too big for her. But Sylvie didn’t care if they stared. Her mind was clear, and she was strong. She knew what they had to do.

  INSTEAD OF CONTINUING ON to the church, where Kayembe was waiting for them, Sylvie and Olivier went to the clinic. The waiting area was crowded with mothers holding crying babies in their laps. A man was sleeping sitting upright on one of the wooden benches, crutches propped beside him. Neema, at the admitting desk, laughed out loud when she saw Sylvie’s dress.

  “Do you think you are a movie star now?” she said, “just because of that video?”