The Devil's Handyman

“We found some abandoned water cans but no signs of the missing children. As dark was coming down, I tasked the Tunisians to extend the search higher up the volcano the next morning and returned to Kigali to try to quiet flying rumours.
The Tunisians found the children the next day. They had all been murdered except for one young girl, who my soldiers carried to a nearby hospital. I dispatched Brent, another officer and a local translator to the site. After a long drive and foot march, they came to the place where a boy of eight and five girls between six and fourteen had been strangled to death. Deep violet rope burns cut into their necks. All of them had also suffered head wounds and the girls had clearly been gang-raped before they were murdered.” Lt.Gen. Romeo Dallaire: Shake Hands With The Devil

At night they lay together in silent communion, his body cupped around hers, comforting her. She could feel the heat of his body enveloping her, slowly thawing the misery that held her so tightly in its grasp, so all-encompassing at times that she wondered she could still breathe and compel her body to obey her brain’s signals, for she felt her brain to be utterly wasted by despair.

“Don’t, Love”, he said to her. “There will be other times. This happens to everyone. Some women don’t even know they’re carrying. It’s just that you’ve always been so well attuned to your body. It just didn’t take. It’s nature’s way”, he said, softly wiping her tear-stained cheeks. “Next time it will be different.”

He should know, he was a medical doctor, even if his speciality was not gynaecology.

He had been so concerned for her that he’d taken the trouble to call in a colleague to cover for him in the hospital clinic. He’d stayed home with her for the remainder of the week. Cradling her, telling her that she would recover. They would try again. They would succeed.

He wanted children, she knew, just as much as she did. They had always planned on having children. During that bleak time she was reminded of just how much she loved him. She depended so heavily upon him to counter her black thoughts of barrenness. He had laughed softly when she’d fearfully brought to light that fear. Told her to trust his professional knowledge. She would bear them as many children as they wanted, eventually.

They had held off for years, because the time wasn’t quite right, despite both their wishes to begin a family. And finally when the time seemed right, this happened. It certainly wasn’t because she hadn’t taken adequate care. They were beside themselves at the certain knowledge she was carrying their first child. His tender treatment of her, his loving concern was not lost on her. She returned that love, anxious to produce what they both wanted, knowing they would cherish their child and all the others that would follow, giving them all the emotional support and loving direction that children needed.

First aware of the pregnancy, he had assured her she could continue working if she really wanted to. On the other hand, both he and she had no intention of her doing anything but staying at home, looking after their eventual brood. No one other than herself would care for her children, their children. She would entrust them to no one’s care other than her own. And he had agreed.

There was nothing new about this. They had been married long enough to know one another at the most intimate level of introspection, each sharing the other’s values. He was, she conceded, far more emotionally stable than she was, and he gave her the balance her life required. Without him she would be unable to function as a capable, self-assured human being, she was convinced. She had once proffered that thought to him and he had denied that to be the case. She fulfilled his needs as much as she felt he did hers, he assured her, but this did not translate to utter dependence. She was as capable as he was of finding solutions to their inadequacies left to her own devices. She denied that, hugged him fiercely and murmured to him that he was her salvation.

But something seemed not quite right, afterward. She became shy of physical intimacy beyond sleeping together in one another’s embrace. Their love-making became constrained. He kept telling her to relax, to be less restrained, to remember how it had always been between them. Then he introduced a technique that shocked her at first, but at the same time she found titillating, and it seemed to work. They would both leaf through a pornographic magazine and she found herself becoming heated with the physical pull of his presence, and then their sex became wildly successful. She slept far more peacefully, then, felt less need to snuggle into him for comfort.

They enjoyed wild, abandoned sex of a kind she would never have been able to imagine. She was in a continual state of arousal, it seemed to her, and she relaxed right into the excitement of it. He was pleased, and urged her to look at the magazines even when he wasn’t around. It was good therapy, he said. Forget all about the usual social constraints; such publications had their legitimate use. Wasn’t she aware that most couples used these things to achieve better, more satisfying sex lives? Take it from him, he knew. So many of his patients confided in him. All she had to do was look at the improvement in their own sex lives, right?

She conceded that, readily, happy with the transformation that had taken place within her. Until, as though a curtain had abruptly come down on a play she had been observing, she took a sudden revulsion to the very thought of those magazines and the orgiastic display of abandoned sex they portrayed. It was sordid in her view now, and she wanted nothing more to do with them. Nor with the kind of demented, as she now viewed it, sex they had been engaging in. she felt repulsed, ashamed, filthy. He was nonplussed. And as she withdrew from what had become an almost-nightly ritual, he too withdrew, becoming quietly closed away into himself.

And then, she discovered she was pregnant. He was ecstatic, reflecting her own reaction, hugged her compulsively, almost threw her into the air in celebration. Then sobered, and took account of the physical excess and was satisfied to just sit there, smitten with her, with her new condition, with their suddenly burgeoning future as parents. They both felt completely confident that absolutely nothing would go wrong this time. There would be no other miscarriage. She would carry to full term, they would finally start their family.

She wanted, she needed to have - she told him in an excess of exuberance she recognized as a triumph over her earlier worries of being unable to conceive - at least four children, like her older sister. He hugged her, nuzzled his face into hers.

“That sounds manageable“, he said finally, standing back, grinning at her.

She groaned inwardly at the fullness of her content. She absolutely adored her uxorious, child-loving husband. He was incomparable, the best companion in the world, the most empathetic, understanding, sweet-natured and kind person she had ever been privileged to know. She was blessed. Life was good, nature had been excessively kind to her. She vowed to be a better person than she was. She owed it to him, to their children yet to be born.

“Four kids sounds ideal”, he repeated, beaming at her. “Wouldn’t be any problem sending them all to university!” he laughed uproariously, pleased with himself. And she, enormously pleased with him, laughed right along. That evening they talked quietly, but with an undercurrent of excitement, about the future. Their future with their soon-to-be brood. And about time. Although that was her thought; he intimated no such thing. He was patient to a fault, she thought, happily.

They were really, truly happy. And she felt a kind of confidence she had never before experienced. Which proved to be short-lived when she suddenly realized a few weeks later that, unlike his usual self, he hadn’t made any physical overtures to her. Nothing, apart from smiles and pecks on the cheek. No languorous kisses they always had engaged in, preliminary to sex.

Even though she admitted to herself her sex drive had plummeted, she was prepared, concerned with his physical well-being, to accommodate him. But he made no overtures, no effort to have sex again. Not since she had rejected their old routine of using pornography for arousal. She felt guilty, that she had deliberately deprived him of a deep pleasure, and herself as well. But nothing she could say to change all that occurred to her now. She thought to herself she would allow him time to re-engage. She simply waited for him to come around.

But he didn’t, he expressed not even a hint of interest in sex. This perplexed and worried her. On the one hand they were both happy about her pregnancy. And she glowed with pleasure at the very thought of giving birth to a child they would raise together, love and support in every conceivable way. And then, on the other hand, there was her beloved - oddly withdrawn physically, albeit not emotionally.

She cudgelled her mind trying to find answers within herself, but came up empty. And then, although she always had the option of directly asking him, since they had always had a very open relationship, keeping lines of communication open, she shrugged that off, and decided to just let it go. Things would resolve themselves.

And then things changed again. She had been reading a book, a first-hand account of the genocidal war in Rwanda. She had been curious, becoming aware of the Darfur conflagration in Sudan, and wanted to try to understand what would drive human beings to perpetrate such horrendous acts of cruelty on one another. She had long owned the book, but had put it away, always meaning to read it. She’d actually forgotten it on the bookshelf, then re-discovered its existence, and began to read.

She did not, in fact, manage to get much beyond the first hundred pages. At one juncture she had read enough, could go no further, her heart palpitating in actual pain at what she had read. It was just simply impossible, she told herself, that such horribly sordid and cruel things could happen to children. Barely out of infancy, rising through childhood in desperately poor places of the world, only to fall victim to unspeakable atrocities. She wept and she railed, she felt utterly disconsolate, and spoke to him at the first opportunity of her misery.

She felt herself falling into the depths of depression that she knew would, if she did not speak of it to someone else, envelop her and tamp down her ease in carrying their child. She knew very well what depression could do, how it overtook the psyche, plunged the very soul into a deep, dark, hollow, suffocating place of misery. How it put the sufferer in a very private, deep dark place of overwhelming despair. She was herself a clinician, dealt with people who suffered grievously from that devilish condition, and knew that she was as vulnerable as anyone else in society.

As usual, he rescued her, brought her out of that inner grief, not even questioning why she might feel so afflicted about something that had occurred decades ago, in a far-off deeply-deprived country experiencing a horrendous civil war.

“Look, be reasonable”, he said quietly. “There is just so much that can be done in areas of the world that are tribal and primitive in their customs. These are not advanced societies. You know that we try to do what we can to alleviate the strains among ethnic groups gearing toward war, as civilized societies, through the UN, NATO, NGOs.”

“I can’t bear it!“, she sobbed, inconsolably, “I think about young children, about my sister’s kids, about the baby we’ll be raising, and then I think about these horrendous things. How is it even remotely possible that human beings can do these things to children!”

“Well”, he said slowly, “Consider the source. Civilized communities don’t do these things. These are Africans, tribal, clannish people whose minds and values have not gone far beyond the miserable, primitive world they've always inhabited. In a sense, it’s what you can expect from them. They’re totally absent of empathy, of morals, of a decent value system.”

She accepted that from him. She wanted to believe that such things could happen, and could happen only there, in dark, primeval Africa. It took the atrocity she read of out of the realm of civilized human norms, and in a peculiar way assured her that her child would be growing up in a world in which safety and security, respect and decency were assured. She accepted that because it was a soothing balm, and served to pacify her. He comforted her as he always did, drawing her into his strong, protective arms.

She thrust all thoughts of what she had read out of her mind. She refused to read newspapers. She knew in her innermost being that child-predators existed everywhere. That knowledge assumed huge, suffocating proportions in her mind, until her husband assured her in the way he was skilled at. She tamped down any further thoughts, expelled them from memory, exiled them from her knowledge files, and went on her with her life.

And then, a little worm of suspicion began to gnaw at her. After all this time, still no sex. She would have been content enough to let it go; she felt little urge to make love at this juncture, even if she hadn’t yet begun to evidence physical signs of pregnancy.

But he was such a sexually-charged man, she could not help but wonder what was happening? She began to suspect that he was satisfying himself somewhere else, with someone else, and she wanted to know. She couldn’t ask him, he would be appalled at the very suggestion he would do such a thing. Either because he had not and his reaction would be authentic, or because he was surreptitiously finding release in sex elsewhere.

And she thought she had a right to know. She wanted to know. She would not approach him to insult him with the charge of being unfaithful. She had no evidence. There was her intuition, certainly, but there was every possibility she could be wrong. She wanted to be wrong. She wanted to believe that his sex drive had simply plummeted just as hers had. But she found that bordering on the impossible for her to believe. There had to be a logical explanation. And logic told her that because he was not having sex with her he was finding it somewhere else.

She steamed about that conundrum for a while, wondering what she could do, how she might discreetly find clues that might clear up the mystery. She went through the mail, found nothing there. Snuck peeks at his cellphone but that didn’t enlighten her. Went into his files on his computer, because she knew he didn’t use a password, but found nothing there, either. And berated herself for being an evil-minded suspicious harridan. Had pregnancy done this to her? What on earth was the matter with her?

But stop she could not. She regarded him, speaking with her, doing things around the house. He was handsome, young, virile, highly intelligent. She was the most fortunate woman on the planet, she told herself. He was loving, compassionate, kind and wryly amusing. She loved his clever wit, the way he could use irony to excellent advantage.

One day he inadvertently left his notebook at home. She called him, asked if she should drive it over for him, knew how much he used it. He laughed, said not at all, he’d use one there, just transfer the data to his own later on. Something held her back from turning it on. Finally, she submitted to her urge, to sneak into his mind through what she might find on his notebook.

It took a while, but she finally found what at first she thought might solve the questions that had been burning in her mind. But no, it was just a video he’d taken, she guessed, of one of his little patients. She thought she recognized part of the interior of one of the hospital operating rooms. She did see a vaguely-filmed figure in green scrubs. And she thought why isn’t that child anaesthetized if it’s undergoing a surgical procedure?

The anguished cries of a child in distress were loud and unnerving; she turned the sound off. Then watched, mesmerized, saw the figure, back to the camera, head obscured by the limitations of the frame, then as the camera moved closer in and began to focus on the infant concentrated her attention there….

It was hideously repulsive, and soon enough clear that this was no surgical procedure. This was some sadist - clearly a sexually-depraved lunatic - deriving pleasure from torturing a child.

Later, after controlling her gorge, after what she had seen had coalesced into the realization that there was much more than had met her eye yet to be revealed, she closed the notebook, and dialled her sister’s number.

She related to her sister what she had seen, her voice hollow. There was a prolonged silence, then she heard her sister’s uncompromising voice: “You know what you have to do. Pack a bag, and come here directly you’ve reported it.”

She heard her voice, dully, mechanically, agreeing.

“Are you okay?” her sister asked. “Want me to come along and fetch you?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine. I’ll be just fine” she said.