The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

bags to the walls to help keep out the rain. Goats, sheep and chickens wander among the shacks. A goat chews placidly on a plastic bag as Harmony rushes toward home. I t’s what she dreads. Ibori is already home when she arrives. He’s sitting on the cinder-block steps outside the house, and rises silently when Harmony approaches, following her inside. “Where have you been?” Harmony sets down the bucket of laundry and lays the sleeping Harry on the bed. “At the water pump.” “It’s late. What were you doing down there?” Harmony hesitates, debating which words to use, or whether to maintain her silence. She decides to change the subject. “I’ll make your dinner now. The ugali por- ridge is already done.” “I asked you what you were doing!” Harmony scurries over to the small kerosene stove, but Ibori stands in her way, chest out. Harmony freezes, her head down; her eyes look distantly to the side, to the darkest corner of their shack. The flat blow across her cheek is predictable and familiar. H armony and Ibori have been married for three years and two months. He owns a kiosk on the mar- ket road where he sells assorted bicycle parts, bargaining over each item with the buyer to get the most money for each sale. In the afternoon, he goes for a drink with his friends before coming home for supper. Harmony loved his handsome face, and fell for his charm when he told her she was beautiful. She spent her childhood in poverty, helping her mother raise her four siblings. As a young woman, she owned two dresses. She wore her hair in neat cornrows, and sometimes put henna on her nails, but “beautiful” was not a word she ever thought of to describe herself. So, naturally, she married the first man to say it to her face. She was 21, and soon afterward, was pregnant. The first child died in its first week, and she almost felt that she would die with it. Then Ibori started to hit her. At first, Harmony thought he was mad about the baby, so she was happy when she got pregnant again right away. She even named this baby Harry — like the Swahili word for happiness, heri. But the beatings didn’t stop when she got pregnant. They got worse. She kept trying harder, working harde r, smiling more, trying to be whatever Ibori wanted her to be. Finally she realized that nothing she could do would change him. So she started counting. She knows how long they have been married, that her son is 25 months old, and that Ibori has hit her every day for the past two years, three months, and six days. Every day. She prays. She does not know what else to do. But she knows that she and Harry cannot live like this much longer. H a rmony lets out an involuntary yelp, then presses her lips tightly together to stifle her cries so the neighbors won’t hear her. Ibori’s arm swings back and then, with a fist like a bullet, sinks into Harmony’s soft stomach. She doubles over and falls to her knees. The floor is cool. Holding her hair in one hand, his other hand releases its wrath upon her face two, three, four … too many times to count. It doesn’t matter. Cool earth , warmblood. Salt and metal taste. Somewhere a cry. A hazy numbness before blackout. T he hard, gritty floor presses against Harmony’s cheek. Fiery pain is shooting through her head. She opens her eyes to darkness, and to small Harry, playing, in his toddler innocence, with her hair, and touching her face. She pushes herself to upright and feels her face. It is swollen and crusted with blood. Her tongue runs along the inside of her mouth. Where her front tooth used to be, she feels a gaping hole. She feels around her, but can- not find it. She starts to remember where she is, what has happened, and wonders how much time has passed. Then in sudden fear, she looks around her for Ibori, if he might still be crouched in a shadow, or pretending to be asleep on the bed. She hears the voices of neighbors passing outside, calling out to each other. The room seems to be spinning. Like a new lamb finding its legs, Harmony pushes her- self unsteadily to her feet. She pulls Harry by one arm, and swings him onto her back, where he grabs on, and she ties him there. She pokes her head out the door with only one eye, looking for any sign of Ibori. Every inch of her flesh feels swollen and stiff, and it is a struggle to move. Even stronger than the pain, though, is the new emotion that is surfacing, making her clench her fist and ha rden her jaw. F O C U S 28 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 5 Rachel Herr Cintrón, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, is a public health FSO with USAID. She begins an assignment in Nairobi, her first Foreign Service post, this month. She was a 2004 fiction contest winner, with the story “Awakening” ( FSJ , July-August 2004).