We humans are inborn assholes – everything that is useful to us we either fuck over or destroy. Congo is no exception to the general rule – it's just like any other country where there is war – civilians die, soldiers die, houses are ruined, lives are destroyed, and money is made by a select few. Not much different from any other "war-torn" country I've been in. "War-torn" is a good descriptive adjective, because war tears a lot apart – lives, families, careers, destinies, anything you can and can't imagine.
Right now, I feel like I am an island in a middle of a stormy ocean, a small, uninhabited island that is about to be swallowed up by that ocean. This feeling is perhaps due to the fact that the Congolese army flew in a helicopter to evacuate several people, but not everyone could fit in, and thus me, Eddah and Chance stayed behind. The area is deserted of people for miles around us, and unless there is shooting, it is unnaturally quiet. I have started to doubt the intent of the army to come back for us, although I have not yet shared this thought with Eddah. I don't want to deprive her of whatever hope she has left, since hope is sometimes all that one has in a situation like this.
Chance has recovered from the amputation well, and there has been no infection on site where we amputated her foot. Chance is a lively little girl, and a quite inquisitive one too. She has decided to become a doctor now and has been practicing on me as her patient, with Eddah sometimes joining us as my fellow patient or nurse. Eddah has decided to mother me and refuses to let me anywhere near the kitchen area. She's a great cook too, since she manages to turn our meager and tasteless rations into something edible. Before the war, she taught French in the small school in her village, but she has been homeless and unemployed for two years now. She has told me about how hard it is for her to wear dirty clothes for weeks, since she enjoys having clean clothes, but she often doesn't even have water to drink, much less to wash clothes in.
While Chance sleeps at night with the sleep of the innocent, Eddah agonizes that she is unable to get Chance things she needs, sometimes things as elementary as clothes. She says she wants her daughter to have a childhood, that she feels guilty that her daughter was injured and that she was unharmed, that she wants to ask someone why her daughter has to suffer so much, but that she cannot find anyone to ask that. She hopes that one day she can buy Chance some of the things that she wants – a new hair band, a little bottle of nail polish like the one Eddah let her use when they still had the house where they lived, a bracelet made of beads. I listen to her and nod, her words speaking to the almost-dead parent in me, remembering small hands tearing apart wrapping paper and the agonizing over meager paychecks, deciding what to cut on so your daughter has what she really wants for her birthday.
Despite my attempt to keep my worries to myself, I think that Eddah knows that the helicopter is probably not coming back. She has been cleaning the already clean clinic all morning, so I decided to give her some room and do the laundry with Chance. Eddah has washed her and Chance's clothes yesterday, so we have gathered all of my clothes that don't have blood on them, and Chance and me have gone down to the nearby stream. My clothes are in definite need of washing, because I was starting to attract flies just by going outside. We don't have enough power to boil a lot of water at the clinic so we will first wash most of the dirt off in the stream and then boil the clothes to kill the bacteria.
I've already washed my underwear (although how some of it got bloodstains on it is beyond me) and the two clean T-shirts that were still some degree of white, as well as a pair of jeans that are almost too small for me. Now I still got to get my cargo pants clean, which is a monumental task. The situation looks somehow perversely idyllic - a warm sunny day, me in my underwear and up to my knees in water washing my clothes while Chance sits on a rock holding on to the sheets so they won't float away. Only Chance has a stump where her foot used to be and we are stranded in the middle of a war zone and I'm in desperate need of a drink and a cigarette. I know I got half a pack stowed away somewhere, and there's a bottle of medical alcohol in the medicine cabinet which I can add water to. Think happy thoughts, Luka, think happy thoughts, a voice in my mind says ironically, before you lose whatever marbles you have left. Great – my mind is talking to me… does this mean I am going crazy?
"Can we sing the song, Luka?" Chance asks, and I blink, realizing that I've been standing and staring at my dirty pants for several minutes.
"Of course, my dear Chance."
Chance has learned " the song" from a tape a couple years ago, but still remembers most of it. She has taught me the lyrics in French, the original being a little hard for me to master. I may be a relative polyglot when compared to the average County doctor, but I am not yet ready to take on more the a couple of words of a language outside the Indo-European language group.
She starts, clapping her hands, moving her upper body, entranced by her own voice. I echo her in my weirdly accented French, squeezing what seems to be the whole stream out of my pants and trying to keep an eye on the soap dish that swims in drunken circles around my legs.
Chance takes over, almost dancing on her rock, her voice strong and clear.I continue, and notice that the soap dish has decided to escape after all. I step toward it, trip over a rock and fall into the water with the pants I just spent ten minutes squeezing that water out of.
"Luka, you are very funny!" she yells and dissolves into a fit of giggles.
I get up, now thoroughly soaked and glare at her. She giggles even louder. I give up on the pants momentarily, wade towards her and lift her off the rock. She squeals and laughs even more, and swears that she won't laugh anymore. I dangle her above the water, which makes her almost burst with laughter, and after a "solemn" promise to not make fun of someone when they fall down into a stream and get drenched, I deposit her back on the rock, only to be teased again. It is great to see Chance laughing. It makes me feel like there is still hope for the world when children laugh, because children are stronger then us, because they have not yet given up on the world.
Finally, I manage to get the cargos to look like they were at least once clean and after I get the laundry into a plastic bucket I help Chance up on the roughly made crutches. To amuse her I try to balance the bucket on my head, which she finds very funny, which leads to yet more giggling. We make our way back to the clinic, where Eddah has re-cleaned everything she could and made food. Chance tells Eddah about our adventures at the stream, I can tell, even though they are speaking in their language. Eddah kisses Chance on the cheek and turns to me. I suddenly feel self-conscious wearing only underwear. She asks me if I want to eat, and I answer in the affirmative. Our dinner consists of tuna conserves, crackers with condensed milk and some kind of pickled fruit – I wasn't able to tell what it was by the taste and I didn't want to ask Eddah. After we eat, Eddah and Chance retreat to the clinic for an afternoon nap and I remain outside, alone with my depressing thoughts.
The air is heavy and smells of smoke, and I shiver despite the heat, feeling something strange and undefined, perhaps fear, perhaps resignation to my fate, whatever it will be. I have no fear of death, haven't been afraid of it for a while, so if the strange foreboding feeling does predict my end, I will let go easily. Perhaps I have wanted to die subconsciously for a while. My life for the last twelve years has not been something I'd wish on my worst enemy. There have been days I wanted something to strike me, to destroy me so I wouldn't feel the indefinable pain in my head, the feeling of uselessness, emptiness and loss that did not go away with a new life and a new job. If it's just my head screwing with me, I still have to deal with my return to Chicago. I'll have a new friend there, a friend I'd never thought I would have, and an old friend in Croatia who would listen to all of my rants and musings if I only gave her a call. But there will be the emptiness again, the emptiness and Abby, reminding me of my dark side, reminding me of my failures and awakening my jealousy. Do I want to go back? I don't know. Do I want my expensive apartment that sometimes feels like a grave, a well-paid job that makes me want to kill myself and a woman who makes me feel like I want to tear my heart out and hand it to her?
After Eddah and Chance wake up, we decide that it's time for a shower, since we don't smell much better then our clothes before they were washed. We leave Chance at the clinic and go down to the river to get some water, which we pour into the canister on top of the makeshift shower which consists of several steel poles and a piece of plastic wrap for privacy. I let Eddah and Chance go first and shave in the meantime because I'm starting to look like a pirate. Then I take a superquick shower which makes me feel much better, and put on my last clean boxers, silently praising my mother for her advice to always pack extra underwear. Our clothes hang on the clothesline and flap slightly in the light breeze, and I think of my grandmother hanging up freshly washed clothes and Janko and me running around among the huge wet sheets, pretending we were in a maze with a dragon who had captured a beautiful princess. We would locate the old washing machine which always was the dragon and "kill" it, and after that, the "princess" would give us – no, not a kiss, but a swat on the rear, because we stuck sticks into the washing machine again, and would curse at us, saying that little boys had the devil in them. We would make cute faces at her, and she would chase us to the kitchen and give us some fresh cherry pie after we promised we would not stick sticks into the washing machine. And the next laundry day, the story repeated itself…
Eddah sits down on the bed next to me. I look at her, trying to guess what she wants to tell me. Eddah has been pretty once, but her face is tired and lined with the worries of the war. I aged ten years in one in 1992, so I can relate to that. I regained some of the years back, but I still have photos of me where I look forty, and where I am only twenty-seven. She opens her mouth, closes it again, fiddles with her crucufix, and finally decides to start speaking.
"Chance told me that your children killed in a war, like here," she says nervously.
I look at her, a bit taken aback by her directness. Not many people have the nerve to talk about my dead family with me, but I guess Eddah is not afraid to talk of such matters. I nod, and look at her, challenging her to continue.
"And your wife?" she asks, her eyes deep and dark and infinitely understanding. What the hell – we are alone here, and it has been twelve years. I should be able to talk about this.
"She died too," I say, wondering why Eddah wants to know, why she asks about something she can guess is painful to me.
"My husband was killed last year and my son this winter. Chance is all that I have left. I- I wanted to thank you for saving her. When you go home, can you thank Docteur Carter?"
"I will," I say, and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it lightly, "but it was your quick thinking and getting Chance here as fast as you could that saved her."
"Luka, you played a role in this too," Eddah says, smiling at me, finally a smile without sadness. "God has put you in the right place so you could save my daughter." She takes the chain holding the little crucifix from her neck and puts it around mine. I try to protest such a generous gift, but she doesn't want to hear it.
"I want you to have it. It was my husband's, and I feel that I need to thank you. That is all I have, and please, don't refuse it." She suddenly turns around and walks away, and I stand there, feeling the cool metal of the small crucifix against my skin. I think of Danijela's crucifix, locked away in a safe in my apartment, awaiting my return, all I have of her except for the memories and several blurred photos.
The night comes soon, making the jungle around us look dark and threatening, and I start getting ready to sleep. Eddah is already asleep, tired from the day's work, and Chance is sitting on her bunk, playing with something. I climb on my bunk and lean back against the pillow. I found the medical alcohol and diluted it until it wouldn't take out my esophagus if I drank it. I take a cautious sip, grimace at the awful taste and take another sip.
"Why do you drink the medication?"
I jump up a little and look up from the glass. Chance is looking at me through the mosquito net, her eyes glistening in the light from my lamp.
"Sometimes…adults do things that are bad for them because those things help them forget bad memories."
Hopefully, she will be satisfied with this explanation. I am not the greatest example of how adults should behave, and to tell the truth, I don't want to shatter the almost spotless image Chance has of Docteur Luka by showing her the real Luka Kovac.
"Are you trying to forget your daughter?"
The glass slips out of my hand and breaks on the floor. Chance might be a little girl, but she is smarter then Dr. Myers and any shrink I ever saw, since she has gotten right to the point. About a year ago, I woke up and I couldn't remember what Jasna's voice sounded like. I was so distraught that day that I could barely work, because I realized that I was slowly forgetting my daughter, one of my own Holy Trinity, and that thought hurt like hell. Perhaps, I've been trying to drown the fragmented happy memories in booze and women, because I was afraid to acknowledge that I could forget them.
"No, Chance. She – she was my life."
"What was her name?"
"Jasna. Her name comes from a beautiful white flower that smells really nice, jasmine -"
She loved the flower she was named after, and when Dina brought her perfume from France that smelled like it she used it up in a month. But this memory is not what makes my heart hurt. I have started to think her as my Jasna, my personal angel, my forever six-year old, and I have rarely thought what she would look like right now. She would be eighteen, her hair maybe long and curly like Danka's, or maybe short and spiky, as young women seem to like these days. She would roll her eyes if I tried to kiss her on the cheek, would say that I was embarrassing her, that my stubble was scratching her. She would- would, it's the word of my life…
"Chance-" But she is gone, probably gone to sleep or to sit on the steps and play with the dolls Eddah has made her from the leftover bandages and some sticks. I debate with myself whether I should go and talk to her, but I feel too tired, too old, too exhausted to face anyone, especially a curious little girl who is not yet restricted by false politeness in the questions that she asks. I still want a drink, but unless I lick the floor where the glass broke, I'm not going to get any alcohol in the unforeseeable future, so sleeping pills it is.
I rummage in my backpack, which contains all the needed ingredients for survival on volunteering missions other then alcohol, take out the yellow see-through plastic vial still almost full with pills, the only thing Myers managed to prescribe me before I escaped from him, take two pills out, and then put the vial back into the pack. I swallow the pills dry, and cough when one of them nearly lodges in my windpipe. After that I secure the mosquito net, turn the lamp off and lie down. The night heat can be felt even through the thin sheets, and I long for Chicago wind or the water of the Adriatic sea, but instead all I get is more heat. After a while, my head begins to feel fuzzy and my eyelids begin to close –
– but suddenly I feel cold and see myself standing barefoot on a field. It must be a dream, since I am in Africa, after all. The field is familiar somehow, but I can't remember why. I shiver from the cold wind, and see that snow has begun to fall. The snowflakes melt on my skin and run down my body like cold tears, soaking my clothes. I see a light and walk towards it briskly, but it seems to be growing further away. Suddenly a sign with a perversely smiling skull pops out seemingly out of nowhere. I stop in my tracks. I should not move. I do not want to die.
I see Jasna standing on the other side of the sign, wearing her winter coat, her face white from the cold. She is speaking to me but I cannot hear what she says. She turns around and starts walking across the field, her footsteps disappearing, covered by the falling snow.
"Jasja, don't move! Don't-" I forget about the mine warning and run towards her, but the snow is so thick I can barely see. I stumble, fall down on my knees and see that my hands are resting on a mine, and I know that if I move it will go off. I kneel in the snow, shivering from the cold, and pray to wake up, because I know it's a nightmare, and I want it to end. My hands are numb, and my tears freeze on my cheeks, as I beg God to save Jasna, to get her out of this fucking field, to let me wake up. I lie down in the snow, thinking of when the mine will go off, when I see Jasna's winter boots in front of my eyes. I look up and see her, a tall young woman with spiky hair and a nose piercing. She kneels next to me, kisses me on the cheek and before I can say anything to her, she takes the mine from my hands and disappears. A mortar shell explodes somewhere behind me. I shakily stand up and scream Jasna's name, but she is gone, gone again... I feel like I am drowning in the snow, and I can't feel the ground under my feet -
and then, a mortar shell explodes again, and I realize that this is not a dream anymore.
A/N – So, here's the long-awaited Luka chapter. It has taken me longer then I thought it would – first I managed to catch a horrible cold and spent most of that week in a daze, sneezing my brains out. Then I had strange joint paint in my hands that made typing impossible for two weeks. After that, it was vacation time, which passed in a rakija-induced haze (if you go to Croatia you'll find out what rakija is…you will find it out a lot.) Then it was midterms and a new boyfriend. I'm also ER deprived, since I am in Europe, where they're a season behind – and now I'm deprived even of season 9 reruns since my new apartment has no TV. AAAAAAH! Furthermore, I suddenly have tons of work and as I've discovered, graduate level readings in Gender Studies do not a college junior with a lot of free time (or a lot of sanity) make. I swear, next time I see the words "phallic gaze" I'll beat myself to death with my 600-page "Reading Popular Culture" reader… But in good news, I made a presentation on slash fan fiction and some people from my class liked my ER stories. Whee!
A/N 2 – Ariadne, thanks for your constructive criticism – but I have seen some pretty poor people who knew what nail polish was. We don't really know about Chance's past – she might not always have been a poor refugee. But anyways, thanks for beeing a sharp-eyed reader, the best kind there is.