Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  Now she yearned for peace, only peace, for a place where no one could hurt her anymore, where she was free from the brutality and debasement of stinking, drunk men who...A place where she was no longer hungry or cold. A place where it was dark and quiet and she could rest. She ached for oblivion. In her tormented mind, death in the jaws of crocodiles was better than life as a slave.

  Akin frantically slapped the water with a blanket to distract the huge beasts that now swam purposefully toward Shontal. She was yelling at her friend and crying hysterically at the same time. Omina and Mbarka were screaming, too, sobbing. All of them watched helplessly as Shontal walked out into the water to meet her doom.

  By the time the guard realized what was happening and grabbed his rifle, Shontal was up to her armpits in the slowly swirling river. The crocodiles had moved in so close to the girl that Shontal was between him and his targets. He couldn’t shoot them without hitting her. He ran down the bank to get a different angle for a shot. But it was too late.

  Shontal was almost neck deep in the water when the nearest crocodile sank slowly below the river’s surface and a powerful surge of water moved toward her. Suddenly, the huge beast bit down on her legs with his massive jaws and yanked her down into the brackish water. But she quickly surfaced again with an awful gasp, shocked back into reality. That’s when the second crocodile lunged at her, mouth open, and clamped his huge jaws on her torso. She let out a small cry as its teeth ripped into her chest, a scream cut off after only a moment, and then the 10-foot monster pulled her under.

  Within seconds, the spot where Shontal had been became a mass of churning, bubbling water as the other crocodiles moved in for a piece of the kill. The boiling water turned crimson as the churning continued. It seemed to go on for a long, long time. Finally, the surface began to smooth out, the dissipating crimson grave marker washed away downstream, the river was quiet again.

  Shontal was gone.

  Even the battle-scarred guard was visibly shaken by the attack. He ignored the remaining girls and the headmistress, turned and stalked away.

  Pasha stood for only a moment immobilized, staring at the spot where there was now no trace of the slave. Then she grabbed her skirt with one hand and waded over to Shontal’s pile of blankets. She picked up the dripping laundry and plopped pieces from the pile down by each of the other girls.

  Under her breath, she swore at the stupidity of these lazy, black animals. And she berated herself for her lack of attention. She knew she would pay dearly for it; the price of the slave would be taken out of her hide.

  For a moment, Akin continued to stare at the dark water where Shontal had disappeared. Surprisingly, no tears came. Then Pasha screamed a command at her and she tore her gaze away. She reached down, picked up a filthy saddle blanket, smeared camel fat on it and began to scrub.

  Chapter 14

  Omar’s foot swelled bigger with every heartbeat.

  Idris stood frozen for a moment, then reached over the big man, yanked Omar’s knife out of the scabbard beside his rifle and began to slash the balanite tree with the razor edge of the blade. He hacked deep gouges into the trunk—whap! whap! whap!—and pried off the loose pieces of bark with his fingers.

  Omar sat quiet in the dirt, tenderly cradling his throbbing foot in both hands.

  Once he had cleared a spot on the trunk of bark, Idris stabbed the knife point into the bare wood again and again, and had just managed to gouge a hole deep enough to draw out pulp and sap when Omar started to gasp for breath.

  Idris shoved the bitter wood pulp into his mouth, chewing frantically, softening it as best he could without his front four bottom teeth. Water would have helped, but he didn’t have time to run back to where he had dropped the containers. As he chewed, he scanned the ground beneath the tree, searching for a piece of fruit. He spotted one wedged between the tree and a large rock next to the trunk, dug it out and sliced it open. Inside the fleshy exterior lay a hard inner shell. He put the shell on the rock and hit it hard with the razor edge of the knife. When it split open, Idris scooped up the two halves before the oil inside could ooze out. He spit the wood pulp out of his mouth into his palm and mixed it with the oil from the piece of fruit. He didn’t know if a balanite poultice would help, but he couldn’t stand by and not try.

  By the time Idris knelt beside Omar with a handful of sticky goo, the mercenary’s calf had swollen so large Idris could barely fit the blade of the knife between the man’s skin and the fabric to slit open his trousers so the leg could continue to expand. Omar didn’t seem to be aware of Idris at all; he just sat in the dirt with his foot in his hands, each breath more ragged and labored than the next. Though he was awake, he didn’t appear to be really conscious. His eyes moved as if he were looking at something Idris couldn’t see.

  What Omar saw that Idris didn’t was the straw ceiling and mud wall of a hut. He was looking at the world through the eyes of someone very short because when the old black man came into the hut and stood in front of him, his eyes were level with the tribal’s bony chest. The man reached out his gnarled hand and put it tenderly on Omar’s shoulder.

  “Come, tenyatta. Help me gather firewood in the forest,” the old man said.

  But the scene was oddly transparent. Omar could see it, but he also could see through it. He could see the morning sunshine and the tribal Idris kneeling beside him, and his own foot, huge and distorted.

  Slowly, the village scene began to melt. Walking beside the old man under the trees, the birds singing—the images blurred together like a freshly painted picture splashed with water, until there was only a mass of random shapes and colors. Then the light in the scene began to dim, and as it did, the light in the world he could see through the transparency of the image slowly went out, too, until there was nothing in front of his eyes but darkness.

  As Idris prepared to place the poultice on his foot, Omar suddenly went limp, fell backward in the dirt and lay there gasping. Idris grabbed him under the arms and dragged him to the base of the tree. The stone he had used when he cut open the balanite fruit was about three feet tall and flat on the top. Using the smaller stones around it as steps, Idris hauled the unconscious mercenary up onto the flat-topped stone in a sitting position. His back rested against the tree trunk and his legs hung over the edge of the rock.

  Idris wanted Omar upright so he could breathe and so the scorpion bites would be lower than the rest of his body.

  Once he had Omar propped in place, Idris knelt in front of him and applied the poultice to the bottom of his foot. The sole had turned completely black, with two lumps the size of plovers’ eggs on the heel.

  There were times throughout the rest of that sweltering day that Idris thought Omar would stop breathing altogether. Every breath was a gasping effort; he feared each one would be the big man’s last. He applied the poultice to Omar’s foot until noon, then made another one, this time using water to soften it—mostly because it made him feel like he was doing something other than just watching the man die.

  Idris didn’t know that the oil from the seed of a balanite tree, called the heglig tree by the Arabs, was rich in steroidal sapogenins—naturally occurring steroids. If Omar had been taken to a hospital emergency room, doctors there would have treated the scorpion bites with steroids.

  Throughout the afternoon, Idris sat by Omar’s side. He tore off a piece of cloth from Omar’s pants leg and used it to hold the poultice on the bottom of the mercenary’s foot and replaced the poultice with a fresh one every couple of hours. It was desperately hot, and Idris considered trying to give Omar something to drink, but feared he couldn’t swallow and would choke.

  Toward evening, Omar’s breathing improved some, so Idris left him alone for a little while to gather firewood. He sat up with the mercenary through the night, tended the fire and applied fresh balanite tree poultices. Shortly after noon the next day, Omar opened his eyes and looked around. Idris wasn’t sure he was completely conscious, but he was responsive enough for Id
ris to give him a drink of water.

  For the rest of the day, Omar drifted in and out of consciousness. By nightfall, an awareness came into his eyes. He was there, confused, but there. Idris tried to give him another drink, and the big man reached up weakly, snatched the water bottle out of the tribal’s hands and drank it by himself. Omar was back.

  They remained camped under the balanite tree for two more days, while Omar suffered the agony of putting weight on his right foot and regaining mobility. Idris went out with his spear every day and came back with small game—quail, partridge, guinea fowl and hares—that he cooked over the fire at night. He could have killed an antelope instead, but he didn’t want to draw scavengers to the smell of blood.

  As Omar watched Idris work, he was both angry and baffled. Any loss of control triggered rage, and Omar certainly hadn’t been in charge of anything for the last few days. Idris had provided food, fire, water, even protection. And the vague, uncomfortable memories of the tribal taking care of him set his teeth on edge. But he was confused, too. If Idris had been stung, Omar would have left him there to die. Certainly, Idris needed Omar to find his daughter, but the tribal could have taken the money and hired somebody else to do the job. Why didn’t he?

  Omar was in turmoil on another front as well. After they broke camp and headed west again, the big man limped along, leaning on an acacia limb he had whittled into a crutch. They hadn’t traveled more than a couple of miles before he began to have flashbacks. It was like he was looking at a series of still photos, but so vivid that the real world around him, the hot dirt under the tender sole of his bare foot--the sweat trickling down between his shoulder blades, the tall Dinka striding along beside him—all of that was gone. The picture was reality. For a heartbeat or two, then the world came back into focus.

  The venom-induced delirium was over, but the images from it hadn’t faded away like the smoke from a dying campfire. They had hung on a nail somewhere in his head. He knew where the hut was. He knew who the old man was who wanted the boy to go with him to gather firewood.

  As he limped along, Omar remembered.

  When his mother escaped from her Mauritanian master, she took her six-year-old son and went home. She’d been kidnapped when she was nine years old and had only the vaguest memories of any other world. But she had traveled the whole length of Sudan to the Imatong Mountains on the border of Kenya to find her family and her life. The hut in the snapshots was his mother’s home; the old man was his grandfather. The hallucination had pulled the scab off his memories, and for the first time in more than 35 years, Omar recalled the day he’d found his mother sitting by herself on the riverbank, sobbing. He’d run and put his arms around her and tried to comfort her, but nothing he said or did made any difference. She cried until she was limp, too weak to cry anymore. When she spoke, her voice was a despairing whisper.

  “You must gather all your things together,” she’d said. “We are leaving in the morning.”

  “Leaving?” the boy had cried. “No, I want to stay here!”

  Life in Mauritania had been a brutal, terrifying nightmare, and the village in the mountains was better than any little boy’s fantasy. He loved the damp, tangled undergrowth in the forest, the cry of the birds and the monkeys in the trees. He loved fishing in the river, the smell of the campfire, and the feel of rough, gnarled fingers wrapped snug around his small hand. He was the old man’s beloved tenyatta—grandson. He didn’t want to leave!

  But even as he cried out in protest, some part of Omar knew. He had seen how the other women in the village treated his mother; he had suffered the taunts of the village children, who called him names he didn’t understand. Some part of him had expected this.

  “I can’t stay here,” his mother said. “I don’t belong.”

  “But this is your home, our home.”

  “No, it isn’t my home. Not anymore. Once, when I was a little girl, before...” Her voice trailed off. Then she looked into her son’s eyes and saw the pain there, and tried again to make him understand. “The little girl an Arab raider snatched out of her dying mother’s arms is gone. She doesn’t live in me. She’s dead. They”--she spit the word out in disgust, and Omar knew who she meant--“They used her, fouled her and killed her! And the woman I am now...” she struggled for words again. “Who I am is a disgraceful thing.”

  She pulled her son into her arms and began to cry softly. “And you, even your grandfather cannot make the rest of the village accept you.”

  At the thought of her father, she burst into tears and rocked back and forth with Omar held tight to her chest. Though her crying garbled what she said to him then, the little boy understood every word.

  “It would be better for my father, better for me and you—all of us,” she cried, between hitching, halting sobs, “if I had died with my mother and sister in the raid on our village.”

  Omar and his mother had left the next morning and he never saw the village or his grandfather again. They finally settled in Port Sudan, where his mother spent a decade as a prostitute, using what she earned to feed her son and to feed her growing addiction to the narcotic quat. Eventually, the addiction cost more than the boy. Omar came home one day when he was 16 and found her dead.

  The memory of how she had looked, sprawled in a pool of her own vomit on the floor of their filthy, one-room shack vanished in a cry of pain when Omar’s bare foot landed on a thorn that buried itself deep in his flesh. He fell to the ground in a heap and lay facedown in the dirt for a moment, wounded more by the memories than the thorn, grateful to be back in the real world, even if it hurt. Then he rolled over, sat up and began to dig the thorn out of the sole of his foot. He waved away Idris’s efforts to help him, staggered to his feet, picked up his crutch and set out walking again.

  It took the two men five days to cross the remainder of the plains, and as they walked, the ghost images in Omar’s mind mercifully faded away. They came upon another herd of antelope but managed to make their way around rather than through it. They disturbed a family of warthogs in the bush, saw giraffe in the distance and heard the trumpeting of elephants. And for one long afternoon, they could hear the roar of lions. Idris led that day’s trek, bearing west but circling downwind of the sound.

  They came out on the north-south road at noon, only a few miles south of the track that led from it to Jonglei. At sunset, Omar hoisted a beer in a dark, smoky bar, and questioned an old friend about slave traders.

  Koto’s shoulder was still puffy and swollen, but it had started to heal. Antibiotics and a steady stream of intravenous nutrients had done a remarkable job, aided by Helena Greinschaft’s African-flavored home cooking. Dr. Greinschaft’s surgical repair of the trapezoid muscle in the boy’s shoulder had been successful. The arm had a limited range of motion now, and with time, it would get better. But the wound and the chipped clavicle beneath it created a deep indentation on the top of his shoulder that the boy would carry for life.

  He sat propped up in the bed on pillows, a new, cushy experience Koto had decided he enjoyed. But it was obvious Koto’s shoulder still hurt badly. It was equally obvious that he wanted nothing in the world more than to tell the people gathered around his bedside what had happened to him, to his family, his village and to the other captives kidnapped by the slave traders.

  Ron and Dr. Greinschaft sat on the empty bed on the left side of the boy. Masapha sat on the edge of Koto’s bed. The boy smiled at the little Arab not much bigger than himself. He had instantly bonded with the only person in the room he could talk to. The bond went both ways.

  Masapha had set up the recording equipment to make an audio tape of the boy’s story. The microphone lay on the pillow beside the boy’s head; the recorder sat on the bed beside Ron.

  “I’m going to ask the boy to begin at the start and from there go to the finish of the story,” Masapha said. “Already, I have heard part of it.”

  The Arab had taken a couple of shifts sitting at the boy’s bedside, and they had tal
ked long into the night. It was plain to see that his affection for the boy had grown along with his command of the Lokuta language. It was nothing short of astonishing how quickly Masapha had become fluent in the dialect.

  “But all of you need to hear the whole of it.” He pointed to the recorder and told Ron. “What you must do is punch the button—here—where it says ‘on.’”

  “Tough job, but I think I can handle it.”

  Masapha turned his attention back to the boy, patted his arm and said to him in Lokuta, “Now it is time for you to tell us all of it, the whole story.” He paused, then continued, “Even the parts it is hard to say. Yes?”

  The boy nodded and began to speak.

  Even though none of them, other than Masapha, knew what the boy was saying, they were mesmerized by the tale and held spellbound by the boy’s intensity as he told it. As he relived the horror, the others watched the drama play out on his face.

  This time, the men allowed Masapha to proceed for long periods without interruption. Finally, the boy began to slow down. His words came haltingly, and his voice began to choke with emotion.

  Masapha stopped him, patted his leg and turned to the others.

  He let out a sigh and cocked his head toward Koto.

  “The boy needs to have some breath,” Masapha said.

  “Needs a breather?” Ron asked.

  “Yes, that, too,” Masapha said. “And, actually, I do as well. This is the story of the happenings in his life. Koto was up early to take the family’s zebu to eat grass in the pasture. He was on his way back when he saw two silver things in the sky. He didn’t know what they were, but they were flying faster than an arrow shot from a bow, right to his village. He said they made a sound like rumbling thunder.” Masapha looked at Ron. “Gu-ships, you think?”