“Your daughter is black.” She hadn’t been looking at me at all. She’d been looking at Sarah. My mouth filled with a bitter taste. “But you’re white. Her mother?”
I breathed hard through my nose for a minute. “Kenyan. Dead.” She looked me in the eyes then and it just came out. “We found her, I mean, I found her rooting in our garbage one night, she’d had a fever but we thought she would make it, I brought her inside but I didn’t let her out of my sight, I couldn’t-”
“You knew she was one of the dead.”
“Yes.”
“Did you dispose of her properly?”
My whole body twitched at the thought. “We-I locked her in the bathroom. We left, then. The servants had already gone, the block was half-deserted. The police-even the army couldn’t hold out much longer.”
“They didn’t.Nairobi was overrun two days after you left, according to my intelligence.” The woman sighed, a horribly human sound. I could understand this woman as a deadly bureaucrat. I could understand her as a soldier. I couldn’t handle it if she expressed any sympathy. I begged her silently not to pity me.
Lucky me.
“We can’t feed you and this installation isn’t defensible so we can’t let you stay here, either,” she said. “And I don’t have time to argue about your list of demands. The unit is decamping tonight as part of a tactical retreat. If you want to come with us you have five minutes to justify your keep. You’re with the UN. A relief worker? We need food, more than anything.”
“No. I was a weapons inspector. What about Sarah?”
“Your daughter? We’ll take her. Mama Halima loves all the orphan girls ofAfrica.” It sounded like a political slogan. The fact that Sarah wasn’t an orphan didn’t need to be clarified-if I failed now she would be.
It was at that moment I realized what being one of the living meant. It meant doing whatever it took not to be one of the dead.
“There’s a cache of weapons-small arms, mostly, some light anti-tank weapons-just over the border-I can take you there, show you where to dig.” We’d put the guns there in hopes of destroying them one day. Stupid us.
“Weapons,” she said. She glanced at the pile of rifles on the floor by my feet. “Weapons we have. We are in no danger of running short on ammunition.”
I clutched Sarah hard enough to wake her, then. She wiped her nose on my shirt and looked up at me but she kept quiet. Good kid.
“She’ll be protected. Fed, educated.”
“In a madrassa?” She nodded. As far as I knew that was the limit of the Somali educational system. Daily recitation of the Koran and endless prayers. At least she would learn to read. There was something impacted in my heart just then, something so tight I couldn’t relax it ever. The knowledge that this was the best Sarah could hope for, that any protests I made, any suggestion that maybe this wasn’t enough was unrealistic and counter-productive.
In five years when she was old enough to hold a gun my daughter was going to become a child soldier and that was the best I could give her.