Alix Ohlin - Inside

Even though he came back at five in the morning, apologized, crawled into bed, and promised to tell her everything, she understood that he wasn’t scornful of his friend, just envious of how little he cared about survival. If he had been able to join his friend, she thought, he would have. He wanted to be the one to jump into the air without worrying whether he’d land dead or alive.

The next night, after she got home from work, he poured them each a large glass of wine and started talking. He talked until midnight, hardly stopping except to refill their glasses and open new bottles. He seemed to require the wine to keep going; other than that, he needed no encouragement from Grace, no murmurs of attention. She sat there, and listened.

Kigali, 1994

WHEN TUG FIRST set eyes on the country, he thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. And he wasn’t someone who had dreamt of Africa in childhood and pictured himself exploring it in a safari jacket and jungle gear — though plenty of the North Americans and Europeans around him harbored precisely such fantasies. Some, to conceal their infatuation, spoke of Africa in carefully jaded tones. Others talked openly about their fascination with its rich, complicated history and their long-held desire to experience it in person (for men, this usually meant its women). Aid workers were romantics who pretended not to be, their personalities swinging like pendulums between idealism and pragmatism.

Months later, a woman working for the Red Cross asked him to spend the night, both of them sweating, drunk, and sloppy with loneliness. At three in the morning, her thigh sticking to his, she confided that as a child she’d been obsessed with Dian Fossey.

“I wanted to see the gorillas in the mist,” she said wryly. “I saw them the first week. Now I’ve been here two years.” A stocky, muscular former field hockey player, she turned surprisingly clingy and weepy in the night; she said she realized she had never cared about anything as much as she had about those gorillas. Tug felt, perhaps unfairly, that this was just something she said after sex, a bit of extra drama to keep the attention coming. Although he actually would have liked to hear more about the gorillas and what seeing them was like, he didn’t want to indulge her. No doubt sensing his skepticism, the gorilla woman — as he always thought of her afterward — ignored him in the morning, pretending nothing had happened between them.

To Tug, Rwanda was a surprise. He’d last been stationed in Guatemala, where he spent six months ferrying food and medicine to families in the department of Suchitepéquez after floods and landslides devastated the towns there. He had grown used to the country, liked the people, and his Spanish was pretty damn good. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to leave, but his father was seriously ill and he needed to get back home. He stayed for two years while his father went in and out of hospitals. His mother was frail and his sister, who lived in Toronto with her two children and a salesman husband who spent half his life out of town, had made it clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of their parents on her own.

This was when he met Marcie, who worked as a paralegal for his parents’ lawyer. She was blond, attractive, and extraordinarily capable in what he considered domestic matters. Tug knew how to rig tents and set up a basic medical facility, where in a given terrain the latrines should be dug, and that when you hand out rice you give it to the women first, never to men and especially never to young men. Around children with their hands outstretched he crackled with energy, thriving on their need. He could go weeks without sleeping more than three or four hours a night. At home in Canada, by contrast, he froze up. Faced with insurance companies, with the routine upkeep of his parents’ house, with his mother’s small talk about the neighbors, he barely had enough energy to get through the day.

But Marcie, thank God, was good at all of that. She didn’t mind paperwork, didn’t freak out when put on hold, listened to his mother solicitously. She wasn’t a traveler; she came from a large, close-knit family and hated to leave home. They spent every weekend together, and either she cooked or they had dinner with her parents in their sprawling farmhouse in Hudson. She always brought a casserole or cookies to his mother, who protested weakly, insincerely, and loved being fussed over. In almost no time at all, his family and hers were entwined; her parents often visited his father in the hospital, and they all spent Christmas together. After a year, he proposed to Marcie while they were on vacation in Florida, and they were married two months later in a small ceremony in Hudson. As he slipped the ring on her finger, she cried a little, tears crinkling her cheeks, and he thought, This is it. This is the shape my life will have.

When his father’s condition improved — at least, as much as a seventy-year-old man’s can — he contacted the NGO for a new posting. Marcie wasn’t thrilled with the separation but understood that he was itching to get back in the field. She admired his drive to help other people, and he basked in that, never wanting to admit that the exigency of it was like a drug, or how much adrenaline was involved. This was the first gap between them, and he told himself it wouldn’t matter, years on, when he was through with international aid and they were living a settled life together somewhere.

Rwanda was where they sent him. He was assigned the same tasks — assistance, medicine, infrastructure — but for different reasons, not natural disaster but civil conflicts that put the displaced in camps and the country on edge.

He knew little about the country, but when he looked out the plane window, he felt that he had seen it before, in films or on television or maybe — this was hokey, but also his actual thought — in dreams. The landscape was hilly, green, wreathed in clouds, incomparably beautiful, somehow both severe and lush. It looked otherworldly, somewhere you’d go after exhausting your time in the earth’s ordinary places. His heart lifted as it always did when he saw somewhere new: there was so much to see and do, and he felt the old energy returning, the sense of clear-eyed purpose that would help sculpt his days.

I wish Marcie could see this, he thought, and took a blurry photograph.

He had a room in a ramshackle, single-story housing complex along with some Belgian and Swiss workers. In the evenings they drank beer together in a hotel bar surrounded by other foreigners, mostly journalists, nurses, and UNAMIR personnel. In December of 1993, there was either nervous tension in the air or else everybody knew what was coming, he couldn’t say which. He had only just arrived, and as far as he knew maybe every day in Rwanda was like this. He had no perspective on the situation, and the others at the bar were of little help. Their attitude was that you should figure things out for yourself rather than be instructed; everybody considered this hard-won knowledge a mark of toughness. Laughing at the newcomers and their mistakes was a tradition that built morale among the ones who had been there longer.

At first the days were long, hot, and pleasantly full. The coordination of supplies in the camps was an endless task, and the supplies were inadequate to the enormity of the need. Reddish mud from the dirt roads coated his boots and clothes, and the boxes themselves, then dried to dust that ended up in his mouth and nose and ears. He worked under a bilingual Quebecois named Philippe who gave quick, clear orders in English and French. Tug set up dispensation stations for medicine and water and walked the camp, checking on conditions. He saw what appeared to be a dying woman, her sunken cheeks spotted with flies, and next to her a boy was nestled calmly against her bony knee. He checked her pulse — she was gone — and then asked around, but couldn’t find any relatives to claim the child.