Fabulous fiction: What Remains by Denise Leith
I smell the sweet scent of ginger flowers and it begins. I am the vulture circling, but I’m not as bad as Pete. He stalks. I insist there is a difference. I pick my way through the bodies rotting in the afternoon heat: white bones jutting; maggots erupting through bloated, black skin. Treading on something soft I look down to see a small hand under my boot: body parts; tiny body parts; children’s body parts. As I move through the human debris a thick cloud of flies disturbed from their work rise to crawl their putrid business across my skin. The scarf I have tied around my nose and mouth can’t keep out the sickly sweet smell of death.
Words forming into sentences: unspoken expressions of horror disrespectful in the presence of this thing; this obscenity. Our silence separates us as Pete moves where the lens takes him and I, rudderless, drift in the opposite direction. The church of Nyarubuye, this testimony to what man can do, is pulling me down so deep into its darkness that nothing will ever be the same again.
Wandering deeper into the circle of buildings I hear what I cannot possibly be hearing: a moan. As I enter the church I’m initially blinded by its darkness and stumble, scraping my arm down a raw brick wall, and as the blood begins to ooze the flies descend. Before sight there is always smell: the metallic odour of blood, and the sharp, protein-ripe tang of rape. The bodies of two women and a little girl are lying at my feet, their legs spread wide, blood crusted on their open throats, dried semen spilling out from between their thighs to stain dull, dark skin. As I lean down to close the little girl’s legs the flies rise up again and this time they find their way in—up my nose, into my ears, across my eyes—and I am blinded by the soft horror of them and I scream, a deep primeval noise that comes from the recesses of my being, from all the lives and times I have ever lived, and from all that I will ever live, as if the very act can stop the nightmare and it does.
What Remains follows the tumultuous life of journalist Kate Price from her first assignment as a naive and idealistic young correspondent in Riyadh in 1991, to Baghdad in 2004, where she can’t feel anything unless it cuts her to the bone. We track her through the war zones of the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, South Africa, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya and Iraq, through harrowing scenes of violence and destruction as she pays the price of bearing witness to unspeakable calamity and cruelty. Yet in the face of that horror, where friendship can be life’s currency and love is often fleeting, comfort can be found in the smallest and most tender moments.
On her very first trip into a war zone, Kate meets legendary photographer Pete McDermott, and it is their journey together that lights up the pages of this remarkable novel. From a cynical beginning to grudging respect to something much more precious, their meetings and growing attraction frame the danger and terror of their working lives.
In a world that no longer makes sense, Kate begins to question everything she has ever believed in. The answers, when they come, will finally show her the way - but they cannot protect her from what she both longs for and fears.
What Remains is an epic story of love, war, friendship and ultimately of hope: gripping, confronting and unbearably heartbreaking.
