Brendan DuBois: Dead of Night

I just nodded, picked up my camera. Like before, in the bam, I took photos of the living room and the blood spatters and the bullet holes. I went to the other rooms as well, a children’s room and a bedroom for the parents upstairs, where the fires had been set and had sputtered out. The smell of burned wood was nauseating. I made a special point of taking photographs of the few framed pictures I could find: photos of weddings, of school graduations, of family celebrations. I tried to heed Sanjay’s advice not to dwell on the implications of what I was taking shots of. I just made sure that the photos were in focus and were framed properly and had the correct captions. In a narrow hallway I moved between Jean-Paul and Karen in mid-conversation, with Jean-Paul being his usual pompous self:

‘…Agree with Peter, we can’t spend all this time here with no bodies, no additional evidence. Site A is supposed to have more than a hundred bodies and the evidence…’

‘… Won’t ignore this site. So, sorry, Karen, but that’s the way it’s going to be…’

Back in the living room Sanjay was processing some of his own information in his laptop, while I took additional photographs of the bloody clothing that had been left behind. These photographs would go in specially bound books prepared by the International Red Cross. With many records being destroyed in villages and towns here in New York and other places as well, especially those in the immediate footprint of the EMPs from the airborne nukes, these books were often the best source of information left. Sometime, somewhere, some trembling survivors would leaf through these photos and find a baby sock or a man’s shoe or a woman’s frock that they could identify, and one poor family’s fate would be transferred from ‘unidentified’ to ‘identified’. Again, not much of a peacekeeping function, but as record keepers we could not be beat.

Then I found myself alone on the front steps of the house, having downloaded and uplinked the latest photographs and captions. I found I could not spend another second in that dead place. My hands were threatening to shake so I clasped them in my lap. Outside, Charlie was leaning against the fender of one of the Toyota Land Cruisers, sipping yet another cup of coffee. He looked over at me and then went back to his coffee. Behind me the door swung open and Jean-Paul sat down next to me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Taking a quick break, eh?’

I just nodded, fearful that if I opened my mouth I might throw up. Not a way to impress one’s supervisor, even if it was just Jean-Paul.

He reached under his parka, took out a packet of Gauloise cigarettes. He lit one and asked, ‘A smoke, Samuel?’

‘No. thank you,’ I said, grateful that I could get those words out without choking on them.

The smell of the harsh French tobacco was almost comforting and Jean-Paul clasped both his large hands together, holding the cigarette in his rubber-gloved fingers. He said, ‘The first time is always the worst. Always. No matter what you see in the future, this will be the worst of the lot. That should give you some comfort.’

‘It doesn’t,’ I said.

‘Don’t blame yourself, then.’

‘Sorry, I do,’ I said, my voice getting stronger. ‘Hell, there aren’t even any bodies in there, but I still feel like puking on my feet. And some of my photos suck, because my hands are shaking so much that the pictures come out blurry. A hell of a thing to be doing. And compared to what you guys do…’

Jean-Paul took a puff of his cigarette. ‘We have you, and that is fine. And still, despite everything you’ve said, here you are.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m doing shit.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ he said. ‘What you are doing is important. What we all do here is important, but you are the record keeper. Months and years from now, our reports with their formal and stale language about bullet holes and decomposed bodies and clothing identifications will be forgotten. But your photos and your reports and your journals will be read for ever, to show the world what has happened here.’

‘Why? So it doesn’t happen again? Faint damn chance of that, and you know it.’

Another puff of his cigarette. ‘If there is to be any progress, we cannot ignore what has happened. Sometimes we can prevent the atrocities, and sometimes we cannot. And when we cannot, we comfort the survivors and prosecute the criminals. A little thing, perhaps, but better than doing nothing at all. We are not a perfect organization, the UN. We never have been. But we are a start.’

‘True… but this is different. I’ve been in the States, many times. To come here like this, to see them like this…’

‘I know. In some ways it is the hardest, eh? As so-called civilized men, we believe in “the other”. That only bad things can happen in certain backward places. In the Sudan. In the Balkans. Not the Adirondacks. But under pressure—after the spring bombings—even the most advanced places can collapse.’

I rubbed my hands together, not sure what to say next, and Jean-Paul said, ‘I know your father. How is he?’

‘All right, I suppose. Where did you know him from?’

‘In Mogadishu.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not wanting to say any more.

Jean-Paul dropped the cigarette butt on the brown grass, ground it out with his boot heel. ‘If you write to him, tell him I said hello, will you?’

‘If I write, I will.’

‘Another thing—but not to be mentioned in any letter to him.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘The thing that happened to him after Mogadishu… Not his fault. For what it’s worth, I think what happened to him was unfair. All right?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But you’ll excuse me if I don’t agree with you. It was his fault. From start to finish. He was the CO. Period.’

‘And that will have to be discussed at another time,’ Jean-Paul said, opening the door. ‘Look. Take some more time off. Go for a little walk. Keep in view of the farmhouse and Charlie and don’t go into the woods. But clear your head some, all right?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and when the door slammed behind him, I looked out again to the little dirt driveway and Charlie still standing there, our coffee-drinking sentinel.

I followed Jean-Paul’s suggestion and got up and walked around the muddy yard, looking at the empty clotheslines, the thin ropes moving slightly in the breeze, and at an overturned tricycle, and a picnic table with peeling green paint. The woods were mostly pine, about fifty meters away from the rear of the house, and it just seemed right to me that the men with guns had come out of these woods sometime during the night, for that was when they preferred to work. At night, when everything was dark and everything was permissible, especially if you were from far away, you were hungry, and you wanted to take what you didn’t have.

I went behind the barn and saw that the fog had burned off so much that I could make out a rise in the land, some distance away, and two other farmhouses on the crest of the ridge. Woodsmoke eddied up from chimneys at each of the houses, and I wondered who was in those two homes. Were they local refugees, back home now because of the accord and because of the UN force? Or were they survivors of what had happened, only now emerging from root cellars and hidden shelters in the forest, having been terrorized here after fleeing one of the big cities?

Or maybe they were collaborators or former members of the militias, who had kept watch on their neighbors all these years so that when the night fell after last spring’s attack and the knives and guns came out they could so efficiently do their work. How could they still be there, I thought, just hundreds of meters away from this massacre site? Hadn’t they seen the men with guns come across the fields, or drive up in pickup trucks and cars? Hadn’t they heard the shouts, the screams, the gunshots? Hadn’t they seen the muzzle flash of gunfire, the flames coming out of the windows, the smoke billowing from the house?