One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [81]
I had just left the center where I met Musa and Xavier and Paul. My translator and I drove near a market that I had been told to avoid, the one where many of the street children in Bukavu lived. It was in a bad part of town, they said. I wondered, foolishly, what made one part of town in an impoverished war zone worse than another part. I was looking out the window at the women selling nuts and the boys ambling past the car with their goats when I noticed we had stopped. I turned to ask why we had stopped, and that was when I saw the soldiers.
The car was surrounded by five soldiers. Only two of them looked like adults. The oldest, a wiry man with a mustache and mirrored sunglasses, stood next to the driver’s side window and spoke in a firm voice. I have no idea what he said. The driver, Philippe, handed him his papers, which the commander did not want. He spoke angrily and Philippe responded. They stared at each other in silence, and I felt a lot of eyes on me. The soldier next to my window had a baby face and a handgun. He wore a beret on his head, and his uniform hung off his shoulders. It was far too large for him. I guessed he was sixteen. He caught me looking at his handgun, and I quickly looked away. Philippe and the officer started talking again, and this time there was anger. Philippe kept his hands on the steering wheel. My hands were in my lap. I thought about my bag, with all the names and notes. A lot of people might have trouble if these guys got hold of my notes. The commander was yelling at Philippe, who, for some reason, was yelling back. Without warning, the commander snapped at the young man next to me, who opened the car door. For a moment I wondered if he would drag me out.
He got in.
Philippe looked at him a while and then turned back to the commander and spoke very quickly. There was a rapid back and forth. The other kids around the car, all of them with Kalashnikov rifles, had their fingers on the trigger, but they were not yet pointing them at us. In frustration, the commander waved his arm and turned away. The youths raised their weapons, pointing them at us. There was a small crowd in the market watching this. Their presence helped me relax. Surely they wouldn’t gun us down in the middle of the city, in the middle of a crowd, I told myself.
Philippe turned to the boy in the car. They had a brief exchange. After the longest minute of my life, the commander came back and yelled at Philippe some more. Philippe responded calmly and gestured at the market. The commander stood in silence again and then, as quickly as the incident began, it ended. The boy got out of the car, and they waved us forward, through their checkpoint and on with our day. I asked Philippe what had happened.
“Congolese people,” he said. He shook his head and laughed, though it really wasn’t very funny. “Everybody wants to steal the money.”
They wanted to rob us. The commander used the children under his command to intimidate me. When he really wanted us afraid, he turned away and left us under the control of the children. It was only for a moment and there was a crowd around, but it was terrifying nonetheless. Had we been somewhere more remote, our escape might not have been so easy. The boy got in the car, Philippe later told me, to direct us to another place to go to continue the discussion.
Anyone who has traveled in a war-affected area knows that life and death are often decided by a simple word or hand gesture when stopped at a checkpoint, and these checkpoints are often manned by children. Philippe, a buoyant twenty-four-year-old with four children of his own, had a way with words and kept the situation from getting out of hand. He stayed calm and deferent and found the magic words that sent us safely on our way. Six months after I left the Congo, I learned that