Truth, by Omission Read online

  I nodded my head.

  We could hear the convoy of vehicles up top pulling to a stop as the boat driver flagged them down. A few minutes later eight or nine soldiers carrying machine guns escorted the boat driver down the embankment to where we were. The boat driver had his arms raised over his head, and one of the soldiers had a gun pointed into his back. Trailing them all was an officer. He carried no weapons except his pistol, still holstered. I felt a wave of relief with my rescue imminent.

  The officer walked past his men and stepped onto the boat deck.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” he said, addressing my captors in Kinyarwanda. I was joyed to hear the sound of the language that I knew my captors could not understand. My hopes soared.

  Idi spoke in Swahili. “Captain, thank you for meeting us.”

  The officer switched to Swahili. “Major … Major Ntagura. You have something for me?”

  Kakengo nodded to the boat captain who went to one of the chests that were locked with large padlocks. He spun off a combination, flipped up the lid, and removed a small but obviously very heavy sack. He set it on the deck and untied the top. Major Ntagura went over to the sack and scooped into it with cupped hands, letting the contents, small black nuggets, dribble back into the bag.

  “Very nice,” Major Ntagura said, nodding his head with a big smile.

  “No, excellent,” Idi said. “Guaranteed over thirty percent. You won’t find this purity anywhere else.”

  “How much do you have?” the major asked.

  “We have eighty kilos here.”

  “How much can you get?”

  “The same, every two weeks.”

  “Twenty-five hundred francs a kilo,” the major said.

  Idi smiled. “American. US dollars. And a special price for you, Major. Ten US a kilo, eight hundred dollars for this. The rest in hardware.”

  The majored nodded to him.

  “And,” Idi added, “safe passage on the roads from the border to here, every second week.”

  “Don’t you ever fuck me, or I’ll give you safe passage to hell,” the major replied before instructing his men to take the sack, along with the three others that remained in the chest. Four men threw the sacks over their shoulders and lugged them up the embankment. A few minutes later they returned carrying six rifles, two machine guns, and two heavy boxes of ammunition. The major indicated for them to set the boxes on the deck, and one of the men handed the major a pouch from which he counted eight hundred strange bills. As he went to hand it to Idi, Kakengo stepped forward and snatched the cash. The major looked from Kakengo to Idi and then shrugged his eyes.

  If I was going to have any chance of escaping I was going to have to do it now. Until now, not one of them had paid me the slightest attention. As the major turned to leave I dashed toward him, fell to my knees at his feet, and grabbed him by the leg, hugging tightly.

  “What’s this?” asked the major.

  “My nephew,” Idi responded quickly. “He’s with us for the ride.”

  I looked up at the major and spoke quickly and imploringly to him in Kinyarwanda. “Sir, please, he’s not my uncle. These men killed my uncle and aunt. They have taken me. Please help me.”

  The major looked down on me with a serious face and picked me up in his arms. He held me to his chest and I wrapped my arms around his neck, embracing him snugly.

  Idi glanced nervously at his comrades. “What does he say to you, Major?”

  The major pried me off and held me out for Idi to take. “He says that you’re his favorite uncle and he loves you.”

  With that he walked off the boat and his men followed him up to the bridge. Idi set me down on the deck and I started to sob. Kakengo took two steps toward me and swatted me with a large hand across the side of my head. He turned to walk away but then abruptly came back and kicked me in the ribs. I coughed and sputtered and cried like the child I was, alone, without hope. Once again, Idi tied me by my wrists to the length of rope again.

  While I whimpered in my corner of the boat the men were in a jovial mood. They set camp in good spirits, enhanced by the homemade booze that they retrieved from their supplies. Emboldened, they built a large fire and laughed. Examining the new weapons that they’d received, they tested each of them by firing rounds into the sky. They cooked a large meal but offered me none. In fact, they paid me no attention; they’d forgotten me again, or so I thought.

  Well after dark, when all but Kakengo had drunkenly fallen asleep, he called me over to where he sat on one of the chests. I looked at him, afraid to venture close. He pointed a pistol at me and said, “Get over here right now, you fucker.”

  I crawled across the deck to him and he reached down with his big meaty left hand, clamping it around my small ankle. Holding me like that, with one foot up in the air, he casually took a long puff on his homemade cigarette. He then took the cigarette from his mouth between his finger and thumb and held the lit end to the bottom of my foot. I wailed in pain while he held it there, searing me. My screams woke the others but only enough to have them grunt for me to be quiet. Kakengo put down the cigarette and transferred his grip to my throat, squeezing it with one big hand. He drew me close to his face, his steamy breath stinking. He looked at me for a long moment before spitting in my eyes.

  “Fucker.” He dropped me to the deck, and I scampered as quickly as I could to my corner of the boat.

  I hated that man with every bit of my being.

  The trip back downriver was swifter; we had the current behind us and were able to make better time. The men remained in high spirits, likely encouraged by their new arrangement with Major Ntagura. Their chests puffed out with their new stature, and it was manifest toward me in two very different ways. Idi used his newfound importance and doled a small level of benevolence to me while Kakengo demanded I demonstrate total subservience to him. Idi fed me; Kakengo insulted me and whacked me whenever he felt inclined. On the first day heading downriver Kakengo insisted on keeping me tied by my length of rope. Whenever he saw an area of crocodile infestation he would kick me overboard, taking pleasure in my terror. Idi fished me out several times before standing up to Kakengo.

  “That’s enough, Kakengo. Don’t do it again.”

  “The boy will develop courage,” Kakengo said.

  “The boy will be dead, and then he’s worth nothing,” Idi countered. “He’s worth two thousand francs at the mine, but I might keep this one myself.”

  They kept me tied up the entire first day and night of our journey back downriver, until we were well past the area of my village. Our stop the first night was only a little way past the place where Kakengo had killed Uncle Dzigbote and Auntie Nyaka. I hardly slept at all that night, thinking about them both. Uncle Dzigbote had taken me into his home when I was two. My father had been killed by the same sort of thugs who now held me and had only a few days ago killed my aunt and uncle. Uncle Dzigbote took both my mother and me into his care and his home to live with him and his wife, Auntie Nyaka. My mother died very soon after that when she contracted the sleeping fever that seemed to curse many of the pregnant women in our village. Auntie Nyaka told me this family history because at that age I had no memories of what had happened to either my father or mother. Nyaka, “precious” in our language, and Dzigbote, “patience,” became my mother and father. They were each both precious and patient. They, having no children of their own, and I, an orphan, became a family. They were the only family I had ever known, and at that young age I was oblivious to the facts of orphanhood and hardship.

  I have many memories of my childhood, many pleasant memories, before they killed Uncle Dzigbote and Auntie Nyaka. Most of these involved the comforting smotherings and gentle smiles of Auntie Nyaka. Rarely would I look for her and not see her eyes already focused my way. Or if she were busy with some task, she was never so busy that she wasn’t regularly finding me with those deep
dark pools of envelopment. The love and affection that Auntie Nyaka endlessly showed me gave me a sense of security and happiness that I just assumed would always be there. And then, when it was gone, I was certain that I would never again find someone who loved me in such a wholesome, all-encompassing outpouring.

  On the second day downriver Idi untied my wrists, but I might as well have still been shackled. I was too afraid of any of them to venture near them and I stayed in my corner at the back of the boat. I thought of jumping off and swimming to shore but knew I’d be an easy target for them in the water. Even on shore, I could not survive alone in the jungle long enough to find my way back to the village. After lunch on this day the men unloaded everything from the chest where they stored the guns. They laid it all out on the deck, and Idi gave me two rags and poured some oil into a tin can. One at a time he brought the guns over to me and slipped the bolts open to show me that they were empty of cartridges. He showed me how to use just the right amount of oil on a rag to scrub the dirty and rusty spots, cleaning and lubricating the entire weapon. The second rag I used to wipe off the excess oil and to polish a dull gleam into the guns. The work helped take my mind off my plight.

  I was surprised at the number of parts to each gun. With Idi inspecting each one when I handed it back to him, I was diligent in cleaning every crevice. Some of the rifles were almost too heavy for me to lift—they were longer than I was, and I manipulated them by working on one end at a time. Even some of the handguns were too heavy for me to hold steady, but there was one that was smaller. I picked it up with both hands and extended it out like I had seen done, my forefinger braced around the trigger. Kakengo was snoozing on the front of the boat with his eyes closed. I swiveled the gun around in his direction and looked down the barrel, setting him up in my sights. With great care and calculation I squeezed the trigger. When I looked toward Idi I saw that he was watching me, staring straight at me. As our eyes met, the corners of his mouth curled up ever so slightly. He came over and took the gun from me, replacing it with a machine gun.

  I was surprised at its modest weight. “It’s not so heavy,” I said.

  He picked a full magazine out from the ammunition stash, flipped the catch, and shoved it into place. The weight unexpectedly doubled in my hands, and I held the gun with my arms hung down, fully extended. I went to rest my finger on the trigger, and before I even felt it the gun exploded, ratttattaattattataatatt, jerking my arms back and pulling me to the deck with it. Almost as quickly as the gun had fired, Kakengo was across the deck. He grabbed the gun and dropped on me with one knee in my chest. I couldn’t breathe with his full fat weight on me.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed. “What the fuck is he doing with ammo, Idi? Are you fucking nuts?”

  Idi started laughing hard. “I told him to wake you up.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?” Kakengo shouted. “I should shoot both you fuckers.”

  “The kid needs to learn how to use a gun,” Idi said.

  “Not a fucking machine gun.”

  Kakengo stood while Idi continued laughing. I didn’t think it was the least bit funny. I could have been killed the way Kakengo had dropped his knee onto me. I tried to catch my breath as I watched Kakengo move his face close to Idi’s. Idi’s laughter died and he bored into Kakengo’s eyes. The coiled vipers faced each other for a slow moment—but neither of them struck. Kakengo finally sneered, picked up the machine gun, and released the catch, allowing the magazine to fall to the deck with a loud clang.

  The next day the slow river of my village emptied itself into a much larger one, and our boat pudded out into it, moving even faster with the stronger current. After the incident with the gun Idi made sure that both he and I gave some space to Kakengo and stayed out of his way for the rest of the journey. On the fourth day after selling the heavy sacks to the major, our boat driver steered us up a small creek. He angled the motor up to the surface of the water because the creek was so shallow it couldn’t take the full depth. At some places it was also barely wide enough for the boat to slip through; thick lush jungle in a thousand different shades of green reached out over the banks, stretching to find sunlight. Suddenly, without warning Idi pointed his pistol in the air and shot off two quick rounds, paused just a second, and fired a third. A few moments after this we came to a spot where the boat just couldn’t go any farther. A giant of a man stood on the shore, pointed his rifle overhead, fired off two shots in succession, paused, and let a third one go, and then reached out and tied our boat to some trees.

  Once our motor was shut off, I could hear a commotion of other sounds in the distance, farther upstream. The sound of another motor droning competed with running water, the clinks and clanks of machines and equipment, and the murmuring babel of many voices. The men began to unload our empty fuel cans and the weapons and gear from the chests on the boat. Idi directed me to jump to the shore to help with the task. Within minutes six others, armed with rifles and pistols, broke from a path in the bush. They were boys, much older than me, but not yet men. Some had the patchy whiskers of almost being there, and muscles tough and stringy, but not quite the full bulk of manhood. These six and the four from our boat easily hauled the entire load we had to carry. Kakengo led the way on the path back into the bush and Idi brought up the rear, with me just in front of him, limping to take some of the weight off my foot that Kakengo had burned. Idi tapped me from behind on the shoulder and handed me part of his load, weighing me down with as much as I could handle.

  The path into the bush did not go far before it led us through a narrow crevice in a small escarpment. The other side of the bluff opened to a large clearing, perhaps fifty yards wide by a hundred and fifty long, where the jungle was missing, replaced by red-brown muck. The far side of the clearing was separated from the jungle by strands of razor wire coiling the entire perimeter. On this side of the clearing the rock ledge made a natural barrier, but in spacing along the top of it, guards sat with rifles or machine guns leaning against their shoulders. The creek we had been following ran through the muck field but was barely identifiable, having been dammed and diverted through at least a dozen different sluiceways. Seventy or eighty people, all colored the same red-brown from their necks down, toiled in the muck. Some of these were men, some boys, others in between.

  At the farthest end from us a large wooden cabin sat surrounded by a haphazard group of plank sheds. Off to one side a small village of tents, everything the same mucky red-brown color, peppered a patch of muddy ground. We trudged a path along the bluff toward the cabin and sheds. As we continued around to the far side of the cabin, a green lawn, manicured with gardens, surprised me. A table was set with fruit, a platter of fried fish, and a large bowl of rice. A tall thin man, black but not black like the rest of us, dressed in a clean and pressed safari suit rose from his seat at the table.

  “I thought perhaps you’d decided to take off with my coltan,” he said, looking first at Idi and then at Kakengo, deadly serious.

  “We’ll wait for a bigger load than that. Then we’ll steal it,” Kakengo replied, and laughed at his own joke.

  The man in the suit didn’t laugh. “Did you find them?”

  “We did. I think we can trust him. He looked greedy. Said he’d take a load every two weeks.”

  “What did he pay?”

  Idi spoke up, “For the eighty kilos we delivered we got nine dollars a kilo from him, seven hundred and twenty dollars US.” Idi pulled the pouch of money out and began to count it out. “Fifty for Kakengo and me for arranging it and one hundred for our twelve men for the last month. Five hundred US dollars for you, Gregoire.” Idi handed it to him.

  “When I find out what he really paid you, I’ll take it off your fees,” Gregoire said. “How much for the boy? I’ll give you five dollars for him.” I was surprised he’d even noticed me.

  “I’ll keep this one for myself,” Idi said. “He’s already pretty
good with a machine gun.”

  Kakengo glared at Idi. “Take the money,” he said. “The fucking boy’s not worth five dollars.”

  “I’ll keep him,” Idi responded firmly.

  “Then pay me for half. Two dollars and fifty cents,” Kakengo said.

  But before Idi had a chance to respond two mud-brown skeletons appeared, whimpering indecipherably and prodded ahead by the barrel of an automatic rifle. The lighter-skinned man dressed in the suit, Gregoire, barked at the owner of the weapon, “What’s the problem?”

  “Master Gobeni, these two were caught on the path to the boats,” the captor said.

  Both men had already dropped to their knees and were groveling at the same time. I could see the pleading in their eyes, and although their speech was unintelligible through their stammering it was unmistakably a piteous beseeching for mercy. I could not make out whether they were old or young men, so weathered was the bit of skin that showed through the caking of red-brown mud that coated most of their bodies. I had seen hungry people, but I had never seen the effects of real starvation on a man’s body until these two dropped in front of us. Neither of them had any meat covering their bones, and when they bent over in pathetic supplication to the man in the suit, every vertebra in their back and each rib stood out, clearly identifiable.

  “Take these two to the sluicing wash,” Gregoire Gobeni said.

  It was obvious who was in command of this place. Even Idi and Kakengo jumped at the direction issued by Gobeni, and when neither of the two prisoners made any move to get up from their knees, Idi ordered two of the others with us to take them by their legs. The skeletons clawed at the ground desperately as they were dragged around the cabin and out to the center of the cleared work area through which we had just arrived. We followed, creating a procession that demanded the attention of nearly all the other men working on the site. The sluice wash seemed to be the center of the entire operation, and the several channels of water that had been ditched out through the site were all diverted to this one area where a team of two men sat, continuously cranking around large handles in unison, which in turn propelled an upright waterwheel, lifting the water up in its paddle buckets and dumping it into an angled wooden trough. When we arrived at the sluice, Gobeni blew on a shrill whistle that brought the entire site to a standstill. A second blow beckoned virtually everyone within hearing distance to leave what they were doing and gather around.