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from the region of Goma in North Kivu, by tribe a Nande,’ she murmurs. ‘And this poor Rwandan man is the enemy of my people.’
    And I will tell you as a matter of unadorned truth that her half-drawn breath, the widening of her eyes, her urgent appeal for my understanding as she says this, declared to me in a single moment the plight of her beloved Congo as she perceives it: the emaciated corpses of her relatives and loved ones, the unsown fields and dead cattle and burned-out townships that had been her home, until the Rwandans swarmed across the border and, by appointing the Eastern Congo the battlefield for their civil war, heaped unspeakable horrors on a land already dying of neglect.
    At first the invaders wanted only to hunt down the
génocidaires
who had hand-killed a million of their citizens in a hundred days. But what began as hot pursuit quickly became a free-for-all for Kivu’s mineral resources, with the result that a country on the brink of anarchy went totally over the edge, which is what I strove and struggled to explain to Penelope, who as a conscientious British corporate journalist preferred her information to be the same as everybody else’s. Darling, I said, listen to me, I know you’re busy. I know your paper likes to stick within family guidelines. But please, on my knees, just this once, print something, anything, to tell the world what’s happening to the Eastern Congo. Four million dead, I told her. Just in the last five years. People are calling it Africa’s first world war, and you’re not calling it anything. It’s not a bang-bang war, I grant you. It’s not bullets and pangas and hand grenades that are doing the killing. It’s cholera, malaria, diarrhoea, and good old-fashioned starvation, and most of the dead are less than five years old. And they’re still dying
now
, as we speak, in their thousands, every month. So there must be a story in there somewhere, surely. And there was. On page twenty-nine, next to the quick crossword.
    Where had I got my uncomfortable information from? Lying in bed in the small hours, waiting for her to come home. Listening to the World Service of the BBC and remote African radio stations while she met her late-night deadlines. Sitting alone in Internet cafés while she took her sources out to dinner. From African journals purchased on the sly. Standing at the back of outdoor rallies, clad in a bulky anorak and bobble cap while she attended a weekend refresher course on whatever it was she needed to refresh.
    But the languid Grace, suppressing an end-of-shift yawn, knows nothing of this, and why should she? She didn’t do the quick crossword. She doesn’t know that Hannah and I are participating in a symbolic act of human reconciliation. Before us lies a dying Rwandan man who calls himself Jean-Pierre. At his bedside sits a young Congolese woman called Hannah who has been brought up to regard Jean-Pierre and those like him as the sole perpetrators of her country’s misery. Yet does she turn her back on him?—does she summon a colleague or consign him to the yawning Grace? She does not. She calls him
this poor Rwandan man
and holds his hand.
    ‘Ask him where he
used to
live, please, Salvo,’ she orders primly, in her Francophone English.
    And again we wait, which is to say Hannah and I stare at each other in dazed, out-of-body disbelief, like two people sharing a celestial vision that nobody else can see because they haven’t got the eyes. But Grace has seen. Grace is following the progress of our relationship with indulgent attention.
    ‘Jean-Pierre, where did you live before you moved to Hampstead Heath?’ I ask in a voice as determinedly dispassionate as Hannah’s.
    Prison.
    And before prison?
    It is an age before he provides me with an address and a London phone number, but eventually he does, and I translate them for Hannah who again gropes behind her ear before writing in her notebook with the fibre-tipped pen. She tears off a page and