The Bone Woman [antikvár]

Before AT 10.30 IN THE MORNING ON TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 1996, 1 WAS ON A hillside in Rwanda, suddenly doing what I had always wanted to do. I took stock of my surroundings as though taking a photograph. I looked up: banana leaves. Down: a human skull. To my left: more banana leaves. To my right: a forest of small trees. Directiy in front of me: air. I was sitting on a steep slope, in the midst of a banana grove. My knees were pulled up tight to stop me from slipping down—the skull hadn't been so fortunate. It had rolled down to this point from higher up the slope, leaving behind the rest of its body. This particular indignity had not been inflicted on this skull alone; indeed, I was surrounded by skulls, surrounded by people who had been killed on this very slope one and a half years earlier. Most of their heads had rolled away since then. I was there to fmd the heads and get them back to their bodies. After that reunion, there would be a chance at determining age, sex, stature, cause of