The night the helicopters came in, the vibrations pummeled us out of our beds. I thought the old stone convent was falling down. We ran outside with the wind from the blades tearing down on us from just above the trees, whipping our plain white nightgowns into a froth. The sisters registered their dismay, crossed themselves, and hurried back to bed. I couldn’t. I sat on the ground, hugging my knees, and started to cry, for the first time since time began, it seems. Crying with my mouth open, howling for Ruth May and the useless waste of our mistakes and all that’s going to happen now, everyone already dead and not yet dead, known or unknown to me, every Congolese child with no hope. I felt myself falling apart— that by morning I might be just bones melting into the moldy soil of the sisters’ vegetable garden. A pile of eggless, unmothering bones, nothing more: the future I once foretold.

To hold myself together I tried to cry for something more manageable. I settled on Anatole. Kneeling before our little statue of the Virgin with an eroded face I endeavored to pray for my future husband. For a chance. For happiness and love and, if you can’t pray for sex outright, the possibility of children. I found I could hardly remember Anatole s face, and couldn’t picture God at all. He just ended up looking like my father. I tried to imagine Jesus, then, in the body of Brother Fowles.Tata Bidibidi, with his kind, pretty wife and their precarious boat dispensing milk powder and quinine and love to children along the river. Attend to Creation, was his advice. Well, the palm trees in our courtyard were ripped and flattened from the wind of the helicopters, and looked far too defeated by war to accept my prayers. So I focused on the sturdy walls of the compound and prayed straight to the black stones. I implored them, “Please let there be sturdy walls like these around Anatole. Please let them hold up a roof that will keep this awful sky from falling on him.” I prayed to old black African stones unearthed from the old dark ground that has been here all along. One solid thing to believe in.

Rachel Axelroot

JOHANNESBURG 1964

IF I’D KNOWN WHAT MARRIAGE was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

It isn’t living here in South Africa that I mind. It hardly even seems like a foreign country here. You can get absolutely anything you need in the stores: Breck Special Formulated Shampoo, Phillips’ milk of magnesia, Campbell’s tomato soup, honestly you name it! And the scenery is beautiful, especially taking the train down to the beach. My girlfriends and I love to pack up a picnic basket with champagne and Tobler biscuits (which actually are cookies, not biscuits—imagine my surprise when I bought some aiming to serve them with gravy!), and then we just head out to the countryside for a view of the green rolling hills. Of course you have to look the other way when the train goes by the townships, because those people don’t have any perspective of what good scenery is, that’s for sure. They will make their houses out of a piece of rusted tin or the side of a crate—and leave the writing part on the outside for all to see! But you just have to try and understand, they don’t have the same ethics as us.That is one part of living here. Being understanding of the differences.

Otherwise this country is much like you’d find anywhere. Even the weather is very typical. I have always felt that people in other countries just don’t have any idea that Africa could be this normal. The only bad thing is that with the equator being above us the change of seasons conies backwards, which does take some getting used to. But do I complain? Heck, no, I just slap up our Christmas tree in the middle of summer and sing “Deck the Halls” and have a martini on the patio and don’t give it another thought anymore. I am a very adaptable kind of person. I don’t even mind speaking Afrikaans to the maid, which is practically the same thing as English once you get the hang of it. As long as you’re just giving orders, anyway, which are more or less about the same in any language. And if you hear the word “Nuus” on the radio, for example, why, any fool can figure out that means “News.” So you just get up and switch over to the English station!

I have a good life, as far as the overall surroundings. I have put the past behind me and don’t even think about it. Do I have a family? I sometimes have to stop and ask myself. Do I have a mother, father, and sisters? Did I even come from anywhere? Because it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like I’m just right here and always was. I have a little tiny picture of my sisters and me cut out in a heart shape, which I happened to be wearing in a gold locket when I left our unfortunate circumstances in the Congo. Sometimes I get it out and stare at those teeny little sad white faces, trying to make out where I am in that picture. That’s the only time I ever think about Ruth May being dead. Which I’ve said was all because of Leah, but really, mainly, it’s probably Father’s fault because the rest of us just had to go along with whatever he said. If it was up to me, I would never have stepped foot in that snake-infected place. I would have sat home and let other people go be missionaries if they wanted to, bully for them! But the picture is so small I have to hold it practically at the end of my nose to make out who is who. It hurts my eyes to focus on it, so mostly it stays in the drawer.