A White Vampire Story
From Gobshite Quarterly Winter 2004
In 1996, while I was working with a medical team treating refugees of the civil war in Rwanda, I made a habit of driving a 4-year-old Hutu child to tears every day for nearly a week straight. The truth is, I love children, and under ordinary circumstances, I think I’m a pretty decent person. But hers was a special case. I made it my mission to terrify this frail little girl at every available opportunity—so much so that when I woke up in the morning, before first light I had thought of a dozen ways to torment her.
Of course this wasn’t the main reason I was in Africa. I was working as a photojournalist, covering medical relief efforts centered around Kibagora Hospital on the shore of Lake Kivu in western Rwanda. Given these duties, my ill treatment of the child was more like a hobby, or, in a sense, a pastime.
The hospital, built by Methodist missionaries in 1964, treated about 300 patients a day. The majority were Hutu refugees who had originally fled Rwanda in 1994, at the height of a genocidal campaign which claimed (estimates vary) the lives of as many as 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. At Kibagora Hospital, patients who even appeared to be Tutsi were dragged from their beds and strangled or hacked to death with machetes. In a grade school I visited less than half a mile from the hospital, Hutu teachers had killed their Tutsi pupils. It was the latest bloodletting in a chain of civil wars between the Tutsi, who make up about 14 percent of the population of the country, and the Hutu, who comprise 85 percent of the population.
The child and her mother were part of a war-weary body of Hutus who had fled to Zaire, fearing reprisals after the Tutsi, aided by the U.S., began to gain military control of the country. And, along with roughly a million of their countrymen, the girl and her mother were forced by the government of Zaire to cross back into Rwanda at Bukavu, near the southern tip of Lake Kivu.
The girl’s father had been killed, but when, or at whose hands, I never knew. What was clear was that the mother, whose eyes seemed fixed blankly on some invisible point on an imagined horizon, fared the march better than the child. At some point as the two wandered north, empty handed and barefooted, up the shore of the lake, the child weakened to the point she could no longer walk. A fever set in and her breathing became shallow and labored.
The day the child was admitted, Sandra Bagley, a nurse practitioner from Salt Lake City, Utah, called me bedside. “Listen to this.” Bagley pressed the diaphragm of a stethoscope under the ridge of one of the child’s shoulder blades. I fitted the earpieces and concentrated on the sound. With each breath, there was a muffled crackling. I couldn’t help thinking of Rice Krispies in milk: snap, crackle, pop.
“That’s pneumonia,” Bagley said.
In the past four days I’d seen three children, all under five years old, die from respiratory-tract infections. The parents had not wept. They had simply covered the child’s face, wrapped the body in rags and left wordlessly. The death of one child, a girl about three years old, troubled me the most. When I look back on it, I know that it was that child’s death, more than any other cause, that led me to a systematic persecution of the four-year old girl.
Bagley had taught me how to do respiratory therapy (or a crude form of it) on the girl, using a device called a nebulizer. A nebulizer mixes water and a drug (Albuterol, in this case), creating a mist which snakes out a tube the diameter of a cigar. Albuterol expands the bronchial tubes, and with a little help from the therapist, who raps the patient between the shoulder blades to loosen the phlegm, the patient coughs up the liquid drowning her lungs. With antibiotics attacking the infection, the patient begins to recover.
Or so it goes in theory. The three-year old didn’t have the strength to cough. I watched her slip away the first day I worked with her. When I, like her mother, gave up hope, I took the child’s clothes off and washed them in a metal tub, bathed the child, and left her in her mother’s arms, to die in clean rags.
Because of that child’s death, I made it a point to be in the clinic four times a day, doing respiratory therapy with the four-year-old who’d just arrived. Even in her weakened state, she was much stronger than the three-year-old. The problem was that she wouldn’t cough. It was as if she simply flat-out refused. I sat her on my lap for 20 minutes at a time, holding the nebulizer up to her mouth, watching her inhale the vapors, waiting. I coughed to show her what I wanted. I pointed to her (now you). I pointed to my lungs, I made exaggerated breathing sounds, coughed again.
Pleaded with my eyes.
She just shrank away, terrified.
I supposed that it was because I was White. Most of the whites she would have seen over the last year—U.N. soldiers—would have been heavily armed. I wondered if soldiers, either Hutu militia or Tutsi, had killed her father. I never knew, but the point was, she lived in terror of me. After a day and a half of treating her, and getting nowhere, I was in despair. On the evening of the second day, I told Bagley that I wasn’t much of a ‘therapist.’
I explained what I’d been doing, and how I couldn’t get the girl to cough.
Bagley didn’t waste time on moralizing about the problem. She said, “You’re being too gentle. If you can’t get her to cough, then you’ll have to make her cry. If you can make her cry, there’s no way she won’t start coughing.”
She didn’t leave any margin for misunderstanding. She said, “If you can’t get her to cough, she’s going to die.”
The next day I went to the hospital in turmoil, determined to see it through. I sat the girl on my lap, turned my back to her mother, held the nebulizer up to the girl’s mouth and pushed it against her lips, hard enough to irritate her. I did it roughly, tormented with guilt, and pushed harder—more to make her angry than to hurt her. She hunched her shoulders over, gave a little gasp of annoyance, turned away, cowering in fear, and made her body into a ball.
She shut her eyes tightly, wrenched her face in pain, and seemed to harden to stone. A moment later, she glanced up at me, dry eyed.
I had no idea what to do. I thought about pinching her, but I wouldn’t be able to explain to her mother (who spoke only Kenya-Rwandan, unlike many of the Tutsi, who spoke fluent French) why I was intentionally hurting the child. I had to come up with something less obvious.
I had her mother change places with me and hold the nebulizer, while the child sat on her lap. I was standing behind her mother, when the girl glanced up over her shoulder to see where I’d gone. Her mother was looking down, into the girl’s face, and couldn’t see me. But the child could. I drew my lips tight over teeth, jutted up my jaw, and showed her my canines.
A look of timeless terror came over her. I narrowed my eyes and slowly raised my hands as claws, the fingers digging into the air, and leaned forward, ready to spring at her helpless body. She broke out into a wail. And started coughing. She gagged and coughed and wailed and the tears streamed down her cheeks. She writhed in her mother’s arms, choking.
The mother looked back, in confusion, over her shoulder. I closed my mouth just in time, then made a show of fidgeting with a hose for the nebulizer, ignoring them both. The girl, who’d put her face in her hands, uncovered her eyes and peered up at me. I showed her my canines again. More wailing, writhing, coughing. The guilt evaporated. I’d found my mission in life—making little sick girls cry.
Every time she saw me, from that point on, she buried her face in her mother’s chest and bawled. I took every opportunity to show her my teeth. The antibiotics worked, her fever subsided; she began to eat well. On the sixth day, I cheerfully walked to the hospital to torment her some more, and found her bed empty. A nurse told me that she’d been released. I sat down on the bed, felt myself begin to cry, this time for joy, but instead rose and walked out into the sun.
That was nearly six years ago. A lot has happened since then. Two years ago, my wife and I divorced. I have two sons, six and 12, and I see them three days a week. I still have the house, but I don’t feel at home here anymore. When I cook, I find myself wanting to set the table for people who aren’t here.
Or I lie awake and wish that I could hear my children whispering in their beds. I think about a night in which I walked the floor from dark to dawn, begging aloud, “God, give me back my family,” until the words would only come as a whisper and I dropped asleep on the kitchen floor. A year ago, I was driving west through the Cascades, watching the slope fall away sharply to the hemlocks below, and thought of turning the wheel.
Sometimes in the midst of these thoughts, I think back to Rwanda, to a time when what was needed from me was very simple, to when I was the White Vampire. I think of myself sitting on a hospital bed, trying to hurt a child just enough to keep her from dying. I see myself leaning over her, showing her the whites of my wide eyes, canines biting into my lip just short of drawing blood.
Sometimes I wonder if all her life she will be terrified of Whites. I wonder about the ethical dilemma that presents. And then I remember seeing her empty bed, and knowing suddenly that she’d been released, that she was going to live. And in those times, I see the tears rolling down her face, her body shrinking away from me, wracked with sobs, and I am as happy as anyone could possibly be. The End
08/25/11 | 0 Comments | A White Vampire Story