EXCERPT
Tonight, I sit in front of my computer. The hum of the fan cooling the disk
drive, the sound of my voice as I read each word aloud that flickers on the
blue screen. Correcting. Erasing. I am the last one in the office tonight.
I have several pictures taped to the front of my desk. A photograph of my
wife, Luján. Her long, dark hair, pinned up by John Lennon sunglasses,
elbows back, leaning against an iron-work fence, her dark, Argentine eyes,
proud Basque nose, one moment captured from our graduate school days
in New York. A picture of Hemingway when he was old and beautiful, his
beard full of butterflies, like Lorca said of Whitman. And a quote from the
Bible; Isaiah - Jesus’ favorite book - chapter 32, verse 13 - 17: “And the work
of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness quietness
and assurance forever.”
The security guard, uniformed-blue, walks through the hall, checking doors,
making sure the tea pots are unplugged for the night. The photo-sensor
beeps as he scans his id., and the door closes behind him with a “click”.
Quietness. Assurance. Peace.
I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I mean, some nights are better than
others. But not tonight. Tonight is a staying-awake night, a staying-alert
night, a night like Martin Luther had, when he sat alone with the inkwell
cocked in his left arm with the Devil staring back at him from the dark corner
of his room.
I work as “Expert-On-Mission” for Physicians for Human Rights at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The
Netherlands. My father has asked me several times, “What is an Expert-On-
Mission? What do you do?” The short answer is - I make studies of other
people’s pain.
I work for the sexual assault investigation team. Every day I walk to work past
the Peace Palace built by Carnegie out of remorse for his millions made. I
make my way to the first security booth, scan my id. over the photo-sensor,
pass through one, two, three revolving doors. I walk up to the third floor and
check my in-tray for faxes. The investigators have already dropped a pile of
witness statements translated from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian to English on
my desk. I read the victim’s name on the first page, and thus the work day
begins.
I analyze the rapes committed in certain detention camps, villages and
schools, forests and barns, carried out by, or carried out against, Muslims,
Croats and Serbs in this recent war of “ethnic cleansing”. Not just rapes
though, but every form of sexual assault imaginable, and, after two years of
this work, I can imagine just about anything. That’s one of the reasons I can’t
sleep tonight.
I’m suffering from what’s called “secondary-stress”, a condition common to
human rights activists. It comes from reading the testimonies I read. I add
up the number of vaginal rapes and anal rapes, blow jobs, cuninlingus,
analingus, and forced masturbation that I come across, circling them with
pink, yellow and green hi-lighters. Then I design columns of data on
Microsoft Excel and Word, with neat, intersecting rows of perpetrator names,
dates of assault, numbers of women who reached the clinics in time to
terminate their unwanted pregnancies, those who did not. . .etcetera.
None of what I read has happened to me. I know. But absorbing these
atrocities five days a week darkens the already dark, deep water inside of
me. It touches me, frightens me. No matter how many doors I shut inside, I
cannot numb myself entirely from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., while I skim
through the fragments of other people’s lives, which often start something
like, “He was my husband’s best friend for thirty years, we used to drink
coffee together. But the day the war began he broke into my house and
raped my six-year-old daughter in front of me with a broken bottle. Then he
slit her belly open with a hunting knife. . .”
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