One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [114]
“Mzungu, mister. Mzungu, mister,” he said and came toward me with his hand outstretched. He turned his lips down immediately in an expression meant to look pitiful. I was alone and had no way to communicate with the boy except for broken French and hand gestures. “Hungry,” he said and repeated it again and again. “Hungry, hungry, hungry.” I gave him some change I had, and he patted me on the back, transforming once more to smiles, tipping his hard-hat back on his head. “Hey friend,” he said. “Friend man.”
He laughed, a staccato laugh that shook his body. He seemed suddenly dangerous, though he was reed thin and several inches shorter than me. He pulled a cardboard box from his pocket. Glue. Cheap glue. The preferred drug of street children in this part of the world. He took a deep whiff, and his eyes went glassy, like big black marbles or tiny vacant cow’s eyes. His face turned blank.
“My friend,” he said again and nodded. Two men entered the lot at the far end. They looked tattered, but not nearly as frail as the boy. They stopped and took me in a moment, a young white man standing in a vacant lot talking to a drugged street kid.
“Hey!” one of them shouted, but I left the lot quickly, not wanting to find myself alone and outnumbered along what began to seem an unwise shortcut. I kicked myself for not doing more to help the boy, for not knowing what to do.
That night, walking with two colleagues back toward the hotel from the very same Indian restaurant, I saw the boy again. He no longer had his white helmet on, and I wondered where it had gone. He followed us down the hill slowly, calling after us, trying to catch up.
“Wazungu! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!” His voice sounded pitiful. It was dark out and we were rushing to get back to the hotel, to get to sleep, to get on a plane the next morning. We did not stop.
I knew, as all of us did, that we were actually rushing away from the boy. After our time in the Congo and after the volcanic eruption just a day earlier we were exhausted, and not only physically. I have to admit to a deeper kind of exhaustion that night in Kigali. I could not bear to face another begging child, especially this glue-sniffing child with whom I’d shared one brief moment of connection. I couldn’t bear to face my own helplessness that would be reflected back at me through his eyes.
“My friends,” he called again, his voice reaching a new high pitch, practiced and pitiful. It hurt to hear it. “Hungry! Hungry!” And then, almost in a whisper: “Help me. Hungry.”
He whined after us, his French vocabulary limited but confident. He followed like an injured dog, effacing himself of his humanity, whimpering. He did not care. Dignity would not get him the money he needed. Pity would. He knew the effect he was having on us. He was a skilled professional.
We walked faster, our hearts breaking. Then the dirt beside us kicked up in the air as if a bullet had struck. We ducked and looked back. I thought of the two other men from the afternoon, thought of a gang. For a moment, fear erased my guilt. But it was just the boy, no longer walking. He stood still on the road, his hands clutching a pile of small stones. The boy had thrown a rock at us. He raised his arm to throw another. It hit the ground near one of my companion’s feet, kicking up another spray of dirt. The boy cocked his arm back to throw again, but we yelled at him to stop, turned toward him aggressively, and he ran off into the dark without a sound.
I thought of the owner of the Indian restaurant chasing the boy with a stick and how I judged him for his lack of compassion. I thought of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a wily street kid in India, and of Charles Dickens