Scarlett Bride (The Scarletts Read online

  "What?" Oliver felt the first steamy effect of the heat on his upper lip. Already the day was shaping up to be a scorcher. He could feel the slight warmth through the window. Even though the whole mission compound was solar powered and the air conditioners were usually kicking in the day, he could feel the heat already.

  David folded his arms. "You don't have a secret girlfriend stashed somewhere, do you, Oliver?"

  "No." Oliver shrugged. "I had no time for relationships, you know that. You used to tease me about it in school."

  "I am sorry about that," David said sheepishly. "I should have followed your advice and not gotten married in med school. Now I have a divorce on my hands."

  "What's the point of this, David?" Oliver asked impatiently. "I need some shut-eye."

  "Well," David lowered his voice, "because I am already married, technically, I can't help Ashaki out of her predicament. If she could marry someone..."

  "No." Oliver turned to the stove and turned off the kettle. "No. No. No! I know where this is going and the answer is hell no!"

  "I thought you liked her," David said, his voice wheedling.

  "Yes." Oliver nodded. "Sure. I guess. But marriage? No thanks. I am not ready for marriage."

  "At least consider it," David urged. "And think about it. You don't have to sleep with her or anything; you just need to marry her and get her out of the country. When my divorce is finalized I'll come and take her off your hands. What can be simpler?"

  "Who is on duty?" Sally, the head doctor for the clinic, stuck her head in the break-room. "I have an emergency: villager, breach birth."

  Oliver looked at David in relief. "Your call, Dr. Wheeler. I am going to drink this tea and then head to the dorm and sleep until lunch."

  David nodded. "Have a good rest. Think about what I said, hmmm?"

  Oliver shook his head. "What you said is crazy."

  "Come on, a lady is dying here!" Sally bellowed at David as he paused to reply.

  "I am coming!" David growled. "I'll come and check you at lunch." He pointed at Oliver. He hurried off behind Sally but looked behind to say, "By then you'll be well rested."

  Oliver shrugged. He doubted that. He wasn't going to marry Ashaki Azanga just because she was pretty and intelligent and had potential. Her fate, her destiny, was here as the chief's fourth wife, living in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  He looked through the window at the vast greenery that surrounded the dusty thatched huts in the distance. He had done his duty where saving people was concerned. He had saved hundreds of lives in his short time at Kidogo, Oliver thought bleakly.

  He had been ill-prepared for just how demanding the job would be. The Congo was a country still recovering from civil war and skirmishes both in the country and at the borders. The UN soldiers did a good job of guarding this village but he had seen and heard the very real stories of deprivation and devastation visited on the survivors of the war.

  Every day there was something new and astonishing or life-threatening. He looked through the window as he got a mug to steep the tea in. The clinic was surrounded by chain link fence with rolled barbed wire at the top.

  The compound had a church, a school and the dorm room type housing where the missionaries slept. Quite a few missionaries, doctors, teachers, and human aid workers were stationed in Kidogo. This village was where the paved road stopped; roads in the Congo region were as scarce as hen's teeth. The rest of the 'main road' heading into the dense forest area in the distance was a dirt track.

  Oliver sighed. A country of contrasts, very green and lush, but alas the Congo was not a place for tourists. He would love to see what was beyond the forests and the greenery but it was simply not safe.

  "What flavor tea are you making today, Doctor Oliver?" Ashaki's husky voice dragged him away from his thoughts.

  "Oh," Oliver spun around, "nothing exotic, just plain old peppermint."

  "Sounds yummy." Ashaki smiled. She sat down at the small table in the corner and he completed his ritual of pouring some of his tea into a smaller cup for her. She liked the navy blue mug.

  There were so many things he had learnt about her in the past year and a half, like the way she inclined her head to one side when she was about to make an observation or the way she rolled the ‘r' in doctor and Oliver, especially when she was about to ask him some medical question.

  Could he leave her in this life, as David had put it, or was she to be his final good deed in the Congo? He turned around and looked at her, and her usually bright eyes were looking a bit sad.

  Had they always had that world-weary look around the edges or was he now seeing things because of David's suggestion? He handed her a cup of tea and took a sip of his.

  "Ashaki," he cleared his throat.

  She cradled the mug in front of her as if it were a talisman.

  "If someone were to...er...marry you before Chief Bekele does, what would the repercussions of such an action be?"

  Ashaki looked at him with piercing, whiter than white eyes and then a smile curved her lips.

  "If that person were a foreigner and removed me from this village, I don't see what the chief could do."

  "Mmm." Oliver raised an eyebrow. "You would want to leave the Congo?"

  "Yes!" Ashaki said with more exuberance than the question called for. "Yes. Now, this minute. There is nothing for me here. You don't understand, Doctor Oliver; before I had my father. I had ties here. Now, I have none." Her eyes teared up.

  He remembered one of the missionaries telling the story about Ashaki's mother, Mindi. She was a Sudanese woman who died in childbirth when Ashaki was just four years old. Her mother had seven children, six boys and Ashaki. Her father had been an educated man with a past shrouded in secrecy.

  Ashaki sniffled and hung her head. Speaking of her father usually made her sad.

  "And I had my brothers. All of them went out to fight. The youngest one was just eleven."

  She cleared her throat. Her voice had gotten husky.

  Oliver inhaled and struggled to not feel the pull of sympathy he usually felt when he heard these stories but it was not working. He dragged his eyes from Ashaki's face; watching her struggle not to cry was a bit too much.

  One of the programs they were working on at the Hands For Help mission was to bring child soldiers back to their villages. Some of the young boys they had seen were hardened soldiers as young as nine. They were killing machines who had already seen too much to be even called children.

  Ashaki sipped from her mug and then nodded. "This is good."

  He turned around to look back at her. She had regained her composure. She fiddled with the braids at her neck; that was new. She usually had her hair in cornrows, somebody had obviously done her hair in a modern style. He suspected Faye. She was a South African missionary who taught the women classes on how to sew and fix their hair.

  He had not really seen Ashaki clearly when she came in early in the morning to help out the nurses. And he had been too fed up with David and his obvious hero worship to really observe her earlier. The braids made her look different.

  "Dr. Oliver," she looked at him, her eyes gloomy, "most of the people I knew growing up are dead. I have no family. Chief Bekele is only marrying me to protect me. Not that it will be much of a protection.

  Nobody follows the customs anymore. Just last week they raped a whole village of women over at Fruga. They did it in the daylight—the whole village, Dr. Oliver. And then they threw acid in the women's private parts. They had a chief. He had to stand by and watch his women be desecrated by rebels."

  Her eyes widened in fear.

  "What will happen to this village when the U.N. soldiers move on?"

  Oliver put down the mug and clenched his fingers around the cup.

  She heaved a sigh.

  "Sometimes I wish I lived in Kinshasa. Mango says that life is different there in the city but to get to Kinshasa from here is a four-day journey...five if you take part of it by river, like Mango did.
I would have to go to Beni and then..."

  Oliver folded his arm over his chest and regarded her as she plotted how to get to Kinshasa.

  He had never heard her so forcefully state how much she wanted to get out of the village. But then again, they hardly spoke at length these days since his stint in night shift. Was that why he had felt as if the last couple of weeks something was missing from his life?

  No, his inner voice said firmly. You are tired.

  Ashaki continued her one-sided dialogue, plotting her escape while he listened and nodded. Her face became animated, the downcast look gone.

  "Maybe I can go back to Sudan! My mother has family there." Then she shook her head. "But I don't know them and I hear there is war in Sudan now."

  Oliver sighed. "Ashaki, I, er..."

  No, he wasn't going to help her out as David had urged. He was sleepy and not thinking straight and his sympathy strings were being unfairly tugged.

  "Yes Dr. Oliver." She was looking at him now, her eyes exotically slanted. Her thick kissable lips in a slight natural pout...

  Did he just think kissable lips?

  "You have a good day," he said abruptly. "I am going to sleep. It was a long night. See you tomorrow."

  She nodded with a slight inquisitive frown on her face.

  Chapter Two

  Ashaki sat in the kitchenette long after Dr. Oliver left. Maybe she had driven him away with her desperate babbling. It was just that, after his question about the marriage to Bekele, she had let loose her personal thoughts.

  And these days they were usually geared towards escaping. Increasingly so the more she heard that Bekele was doing better physically. She didn't want to marry him. The very thought made her brain want to vomit.

  Bekele was not attractive, not like Dr. Oliver or Dr. David. He didn't practice good hygiene either. And most times he acted like a savage beast. His first wife Nana had no teeth because he had knocked them out. His second wife was afraid of her own shadow and his third wife, her school mate, Emanuela, had three children already. He had married her when she was just eleven.

  If her father had not been around to protect her all these years she would have ended up just like Emanuela.

  Ashaki inhaled shakily and rubbed her temples. Her papa, Joseph Avanga, was dearly missed. He was her last link with this place. Before he died he had told her to leave Kidogo and find her way back to Kinshasa to have a better chance at life.

  Without the ties to him, she was free to be whoever she wanted to be. If only she could find those diamonds.

  She had thought that her father was delirious when he whispered to her that she could find millions of dollars worth of diamonds in the hut, which they had shared. "Buried diamonds," he had coughed and said. "Right here in this hut."

  She had been looking for them ever since.

  Four months of totally digging up the hut had become discouraging. Doubt had set in a long time ago as to the veracity of his claims. And then resignation. Whole villages had been pillaged for less, after all. The rebels just needed a whiff of the scent of a precious stone and they would rob the entire place.

  Maybe it was God's way of saving her from a brutal death.

  Or maybe those diamonds were a way for her to be free?

  Maybe, could be.

  She looked up into the ceiling. Which one is it, God?

  She sighed and looked down at the table after a while, fiddling with the mug she had come to think of as her own. She was sinking into one of her ‘if only’ thought processes.

  If only her papa had escaped the Congo to another country before the war.

  If only her mama had not died in childbirth.

  If only her brothers had not joined the rebels.

  If only the Democratic Republic of the Congo could get it together. Be more like Nigeria or Ghana or even South Africa. So few African countries get it right.

  She sighed feeling more like eighty-one than eighteen.

  Her papa had worked with the former government, when the country was known as Zaire.

  In fact, she had been born in Kinshasa in a substantial house with a garden, as her papa would reminisce. Life for them had been good at one time, but a change of government had come with a bang and her father had narrowly escaped being killed by rebels. He had not had the time to move his family to other countries as so many others had done because her mother had been close to giving birth. The birth had killed her and the baby when they arrived in Kidogo, a relatively quiet village that was a couple of miles from the city of Beni and four days’ journey from Kinshasa.

  Kidogo was quiet because it didn't have much in terms of natural resources. There was no copper, coltan, cobalt, gold or diamonds there. Their only saving grace was the fact that they were near enough to the river and had ample space to plant food that supplied the village and the surrounding areas. Even rebels had to eat and they had bypassed this village several times in favor of more lucrative ones.

  When the missionaries arrived ten years ago in the height of the social upheaval she had the chance for an education and her father had encouraged it. Her papa had kept a low profile. He had helped out at the missionary school as a teacher getting a bare minimum stipend.

  He had not told anyone what his real name was; they had been using her mother's surname, Avanga. Nor had he given them any indication that he was anything other than a poor man who was displaced by the war like the thousands of other people in the country.

  Losing him four months ago had been a great loss—and it had been a day before her graduation ceremony, too.

  "It is not healthy to sit and mope," Nurse Constance Maypole said, jerking Ashaki from her contemplation.

  Ashaki grinned. Constance has been at the Hands For Help missionary base in Kidogo since it first opened. Kindness and compassion exuded from her. When she had arrived in the Congo she had been stout, her fair skin prone to burning in the hot Congo sun, but these days she was slimmer and had developed a nice tan. She was from Leeds in England and Ashaki loved to hear her speak.

  "So what gives?" Constance asked, grabbing a tea bag and splashing some hot water in a mug.

  "Nothing much," Ashaki sighed.

  "I don't believe you, lass." Constance loosened the band around her long brown hair and massaged her scalp.

  "David suggested that I marry Oliver." Ashaki blurted out the conundrum that was on her mind.

  Constance made a choking sound. "Say what?"

  "I know, it sounds ridiculous out loud." Ashaki sighed.

  "No, no, it doesn't," Constance said quickly. "It's brilliant actually. Oliver leaves in a month. You can go with him. Get out of here; I have always wanted that for you. That's all your father would talk about too. He wanted his little girl to leave the jungle and spread her wings in the town."

  "Yes, I remember," Ashaki muttered. "That is all I think about these days."

  "God will work it out the way it is supposed to be," Constance said, conviction heavy in her voice. "I have seen him do so many things in this place already. I am sure your situation is already taken care of."

  Ashaki nodded. "I just need to stop being anxious."

  "There is that—you have a little anxiety problem." Constance smiled. "I remember when I just met you. You were crying under the banyan tree near the school."

  Ashaki nodded. "Yes, I was. There was no space for me in the class."

  "You were just eight," Constance said. "When I took you to the teacher she explained that you were a bit more advanced than the rest of children in her group and she recommended that you be put in a higher grade. You had misunderstood her to mean that you were unteachable. By the time I had dried your tears and sorted out your grade issue, I had already concluded that you were going places and I was going to look out for you in the coming years."

  Ashaki got up. "Thank you, Connie, for believing in me all these years."

  "So polite, but why am I not surprised? I taught you that," Constance snorted. "Go on with you, go and get s
ome rest and do whatever it takes to get out of here."

  Ashaki headed to the door and then turned around and looked at Connie. "But what makes you stay here?"

  "Punishing myself." Connie chuckled and then sobered up. "I have nothing to go home to. This is my life. There have to be people in the world like me that will risk life and limb to help others, huh?"

  Ashaki nodded.

  "Just like there are people in the world, people like you, who would just be wasted marrying an ignorant village chief," Connie tacked on. "We pray for you all the time, Ashaki. God will work out a way for you. If it's by marrying Oliver, it will happen."

  Ashaki turned around and hugged Connie. It was ironic that of all the people she would miss in Africa if she ever left, it would be the mission staff, though none of them were from her homeland.

  ****

  Ashaki exited the mission hospital and stood in the dusty walkway. The sun was out in all of its June vibrancy. It was like two different countries when she stepped out of the mission building. She could feel the steamy effect on her as she walked toward the compound's side gate. Her cotton dress felt like it was too close to her skin even though it was loose. There were two soldiers sitting in the guardhouse. She waved to them as she exited.

  They waved back and nodded. She was a staple visitor to the compound. These days she spent more time there than she did at home. Like Constance said, there was nothing for her to go home to. No one to see.

  She approached the long stretch of road toward her hut, stopping to tuck under a string of her sandals which had broken. It was the only pair of shoes she had left.

  "Hey you, Avanga!" Mango called to her. She could recognize his voice anywhere. It was raspy and had a lilt to it. Mango had been her father's friend, the only person who knew who he was from his Zaire days.

  She spun around. He was sitting in Risella's front door on a low stool. He got up, groaned, rubbed his back and then walked toward her.