Unless you are unfortunate enough to have been born among a time of social and/or political and/or economic unrest and/or upheaval and/or genocide—phew, I forget how many ways humans justify mass murders until I attempt to mark them all down: this is by no means an exhaustive list—you will likely go to your death completely oblivious of my existence. You will sit there in that flesh covered cell, trapped in that body that has long stopped obeying your commands, until you see me standing over you. I like to think that I am not scary: none of that grim reaper nonsense that seems so popular among today's generation. I even like to think that you welcome me, that your fear of being trapped underground will trump any irrational fear of the hereafter. That after your body has given up on that spark that is quintessentially you, you will recognize that I have been there all along, waiting for you: waiting to take you in my arms and put you to your most perfect rest. Or whatever it is that comes next.
But before you ask me more difficult questions, like "what created death?" or "what is it like to be nothing but a soul?" or even the dreaded, "what is the meaning of life if I am just going to lose it?" I would like to distract you with a story of a boy. This boy would grow into a man that I later wished I could leave to rot in that shell of a body he had left after seventy-four years of life on this earth.
A quick digression: the name, the cause of your death if it was an unhappy one, will mark your soul when I pluck you from your body. Whether or not you know the person who is the cause, or even what it was you died for makes no difference: their name will cut across that spark of light that you are left with and you will be at peace. Because at least one will know who deprived you of years you deserved. Be it poverty or accident or outright murder, there will be a name to attribute to it. Some people go without ever being inscribed on the bright light of a soul, and then there are some whose name touches uncountable lives.
The story I wish to tell you, the one about this boy who could have kept the number of souls with his name minimal, left a mark on somewhere between two to fifteen million souls. I lost track after a few years of cleaning up the mess he created for me.
King Leopold II of Belgium was his name, and he stayed relatively below my radar for a couple decades. He was not yet born when I came for what would have been his elder brother, and I would not see him or his name except in passing throughout his childhood and adolescence. Unfortunately, I am just a bit too busy, as one could assume, to be counted on for the bulk of a person's story. I only know so much as what a person whispers to me as I carry them beyond.
The first time I met him, he was King of the Belgians and far more human than I like to remember him as.
Another digression: can act of humanity cancel out decades of cruel tyranny?
It was a usual enough death: a young boy falling into a pond in the middle of winter and then succumbing to pneumonia. If it hadn't been for a relatively quiet day and that little spark of a boy who wished to know who would miss him, I would have moved on without thought. But he asked so sweetly, and did not mention that he was a royal once. I was moved by the beauty of this little soul who would not even see a decade of years, who wanted to make sure that his mother and father loved him enough to miss him: they had never loved each other, so how could he be sure they loved him? The more dramatic part of me hoped that his soul would see parents weeping beside him, that he would have the final assurance that they loved him more than he could ever know. So I allowed my admitted flair for the theatrical to carry us to his funeral procession at the Notre Dame Cathedral of Laeken. I hoped and prayed that my gamble would have the outcome I desired: that it would allow this child-soul to rest.
It was only when I traced the lines scratched into this boy's marble tomb that I realized that the child-soul I bore in my arms was the crown prince of Belgium. In retrospect, I must admit I was a fair bit blind to have missed this fact: he was taken from the palace after all and the sheer number of attendees astounded me. It made perfect sense with that scrap of information, but I now knew that he would get the ending he desired. After all, he was the only son.
Yet despite this knowledge, the pure anguish of the King was not just that of a king losing his sole heir: it was the humble loss of a man who has lost his reason to move forward. I watched as his heart fell out in little pieces on the floor. I watched as his back bent forward and his knees bent so that he could pick them up. I watched as he could not bear to rise, and he collapsed beside his heart and the shell of a boy whom he loved so dearly. His tears slid across the polish of the coffin and I turned away: the child-soul had his answer, and I can hardly bear the despair of those left behind.
All I could think was how sorry I was that he should lose so much.
I sent the little child-soul on, never expecting what that broken human would do a decade and a half later.
I spent a fair amount of time in Africa in those years, just as I continue to spend a lot of time in Africa. It always astounds me, though I suppose I should be more cynical after all I have seen, how much death occurs when the Europeans and later the Americans introduce "civilization" into a society. Some are quite gentlemanly about expansion and exploration—Livingstone managed to explore a fairly large portion of Africa without making a mark on the souls there. And then you have those like Henry Morton Stanley who left his mark on thousands of souls on his first expedition to the African interior. That number would swell when he began to work for the King I had once grieved for.
In the 1870s, that King's name began to appear on the souls I plucked from the rainforest. I did not understand it: these bodies were mutilated, missing hands and limbs. There was no sense or order in this massacre, just body after body containing tired souls who bore Leopold's name across that bright glow and took it with them to the abyss. How could a man in Belgium—half a world away!—be responsible for these children, these mothers, these husbands? Their souls slipped away with little or no explanation: they did not wish to tell me their stories, to weigh me down with the sadness of this world. It did not help that they had been raised to fear me, to fear the white glow their bodies would take on in the afterlife.
I was childlike, waiting for one to explain to me. I could not understand how a King, who had been so broken over the death of his own child, could leave a mark on so many: could strip parents of their own children and make so many orphans.
Do you have any idea what it is like to be so helpless?
Of course you don't.
You have the ability to turn the tides, if you so choose. Not many of you do, but you can if you choose. While I? I am cursed as a vessel and nothing more. A bearer of souls to whatever is next.
I can see the villages that smolder among the trees and the children whose exposed ribs are the only substantial part of their malnourished bodies. I can see the machine guns and the explosives tear families apart in minutes. There isn't even burial! And I can't do anything to stop it. I can only comfort those who reach for me and let them know that their suffering in this life is over.
It was only when a district commissioner succumbed to Malaria that I understood what was happening in the Congo. He whispered to me how he had been made rich, rich off the King's venture with the rubber trees that grew abundantly in the forest. He had enough money, surely, that he could buy his way back from death. He was a christian, he pleaded, and he would devote the rest of his life to good works to atone for what he had done to those he had thought animals, but now bore his name and rode in my arms beside him. How could he meet his maker when he had done so much wrong? How could he expect to be judged fairly? He really wasn't a bad person: just following orders! He begged with me until he was incoherent.
But at last I understood.
And so when I took another child-soul in my arms, I held him so tightly that I almost blocked the glow of his spark. I held him so tightly that I could no longer see the scar of Leopold's name on his heart. The poor little soul that had lived for less than ten years on this Earth laced his child like arms up around my neck, his soul returning a hand once lost so that he might lace his fingers together and cling to me. "Will the thundersticks hurt the rest of them?" He whispered so quietly in my ear that I could not be sure if I had heard anything at all, but I looked down at the bodies littering the space around my feet, the souls I would have to collect in a moment. I debated giving him the truth, that these white men would plague Africa until there was nothing left but violence and hate. That they would strip the beauty from this wondrous land.
But I could not do that to him.
I whispered sweetly to him as I carried him beyond.
Leopold's name stopped showing up in the 1890s, and I could only assume that he had lost control of the colony. The abuses of the people slowed, though they never exactly stopped. And I counted the days until I could take Leopold II in my arms.
In the grand scheme of things, it did not take long. He was human, and when you have lived as long as I have, there is no true sense of time. It could have been seconds for all I knew, but it was a few decades that I would have to wait. I carried off Henry Morton Stanley, the waste of soul though he had been, without a single word of comfort in 1904. After all, why should he be allowed the only comfort I could give to those left in his wake? He tried to tell me how he had been so lost, so hateful of his upbringing, so ready to destroy what he had been, that he had forgotten how to live. He sensed that his story fell on deaf ears and soon fell to muttering his apologies: I noticed there was no mention of the Africans he had exterminated like rats.
And then it was Leopold's turn.
As he shuddered his last few breaths, I hesitated. After all, what better hell could I imagine than letting his soul remain trapped in a rotting corpse. But then I remembered that my duty is not to pass judgment: I am a vessel, a bearer of souls. I took him in my arms like the rest of them, and we watched the proceedings that followed in silence. I hoped that I could show him that he was hated. But as they booed his funeral procession and only one daughter went with him to show respects, and that more out of duty than love, I mourned for the miserable man beside me once more.
He only whispered one thing to me as I passed him along to the next plane of being.
"What was the point of it all?"
I have never before wished that I had an answer for him...
I wish to credit Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, as my inspiration for using death as the Narrator and arguably the main character in my piece on the Belgian Congo. Though his content revolved around the Second World War, his characterization of death has captivated me since the first time I read his novel nearly five years ago.