What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  —Just a few seasons ago, Dut said.—You remember when this began? We nodded.

  —They would descend upon a village, and surround it at night. When the village would wake, they would ride in from all sides, killing and looting as they wished. All cattle would be taken, and any animals not stolen would be shot. Any resistance would bring reprisals. Men would be killed on sight. Women would be raped, the homes burned, the wells poisoned, and children would be abducted. You have seen all this I trust.

  We had.

  —It’s worked very well for the Baggara, because their own farms were suffering from drought. They had lost cattle and their harvests were poor. So they steal our cattle and they sell them in Darfur, and then they’re sold again in Khartoum. The profits are tremendous. The supply of cattle in the north has increased dramatically, such that there’s a surplus, and the price of beef has declined. These were all Dinka cattle, our dowries and our legacies, the measure of our men. Stealing animals and food from these villages solved a great portion of the Baggara’s problems, as did the enslaving of our people. Do you know why, boys?

  We did not know.

  —While they’re away stealing our animals, who’s looking after theirs? Aha. This is one reason they steal our women and boys. We watch their herds so they can continue to raid our villages. Can you imagine? It’s an ugly thing. The Baggara aren’t bad people by their nature, though. Most of them are like us, cattle people. Baggara is just the word in Arabic for cowherd, and we use it to talk about other herding peoples—the Rezeigat of Darfur, the Misseriya of Kordofan. They’re all Muslims, Sunnis. You’ve known Muslims, yes?

  I thought of Sadiq Aziz. I had not thought of Sadiq since I had seen him last.

  —The mosque in our village was burned, I said.

  —The militias were mostly young men who are used to accompanying the cattle as they move and graze. In their language, murahaleen means traveler —and this is what they were, men on horseback who knew the land and were used to carrying guns to protect themselves and their cattle against animal attacks. It wasn’t until the war began that these murahaleen became more of a militia, more heavily armed and no longer watching cattle, but raiding.

  —But why couldn’t we get the guns, too? Deng asked.

  —From who? The Arabs? From Khartoum? Deng bowed his head.

  —We do have some guns now, Deng, yes. But it wasn’t easy. And it took quite a long time. We have the guns that the 104th and 105th left Sudan with, and we have what the Ethiopians have given us.

  Dut stoked the fire and put some nuts in his mouth.

  —But the men in Marial Bai had uniforms, too, Deng asked.—Who were they?

  —Government army. Khartoum is getting lazy. They now send the army with the murahaleen. They don’t care. Everyone goes now. Anyone. The strategy is to send all they can to destroy the Dinka. Have you heard the expression, Drain a pond to catch a fish? They are draining the pond in which the rebels might be born or supported. They are ruining Dinkaland so that no rebels can ever again rise from this region. And when the murahaleen raid, they displace the people, and when the people are gone, when Dinka like us are gone, they move into the land we’ve vacated. They win on many levels. They have our cattle. They have our land. They have our people to mind the cattle they have stolen from us. And our world is upended. We wander the country, we’re away from our livelihoods, our farms and homes and hospitals. Khartoum wants to ruin Dinkaland, to make it uninhabitable. Then we’ll need them to restore order, we’ll need them for everything.

  —So that is the What, I said.

  Dut looked long at me, and then stoked the fire again.

  —Perhaps, Achak. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I don’t know what the What is. We were nodding off, precisely where we sat.

  —Put you to sleep, I see, Dut said.—As a teacher, I’m accustomed to this.

  When we woke, our group had grown. There had been just over thirty boys the night before, and now there were forty-four. By the time we had walked through the day and settled again that night, there were sixty-one. The next week brought more boys, until the group was almost two hundred. Boys came from towns we passed and they came from the brush at night, out of breath from running. They came as groups merging with our group and they came alone. And each time our ranks grew, Dut would unfold his piece of river-green paper, write the new boys’ names on it, and fold it again and slide it into his pocket. He knew the names of every boy.

  I became accustomed to the walking, to the aches in my legs and in the joints of my knees, to the pains in my abdomen and kidneys, to picking thorns out of my feet. In those early days it was not so difficult to find food. Each day we would pass through a village, and they would be able to provide us with enough nuts and seeds and grain to sustain us. But this became more trying as our group grew. And it grew, Michael! We absorbed boys, and occasionally girls, every day we walked. In many cases, while we were eating in a given village, there began negotiations between Dut and the elders of the town, and by the time we had eaten and were on our way, the boys of that village were part of our group. Some of these boys and girls still had parents, and in many cases it was the parents themselves who were sending their children with us. We were not, at the time, fully aware of why this would be, why parents would willingly send their children on a barefoot journey into the unknown, but these things happened, and it is a fact that those who were volunteered by their families for the journey were usually better equipped than those of us who joined the march for lack of other options. These boys and girls were sent with extra clothing, and bags of provisions, and, in some cases, shoes and even socks. But soon enough these inequities were no more. It took only a few days before any member was as bereft as the rest of us. After they had traded their clothes for food, for a mosquito net, for whatever luxuries they could afford, they were sorry. Sorry that they did not know where we were walking, sorry that they had joined this procession in the first place. None of us had ever walked so long in one day but we continued to walk, every day walking farther, none of us knowing that we would never return.

  CHAPTER 11

  There are keys in the door. Michael, I am afraid you are in trouble now, because Achor Achor is home and there will be a reckoning for all this. If only I could see this scene through his eyes! He will handle you and your cohorts without much mercy.

  The lock is relieved and the door opens. I see the hulking figure of Tonya.

  ‘Look who’s awake!’ she says, staring down at me. ‘Michael!’ she barks. She has changed her clothes, into a black satin suit. Michael bursts from my room. He begins to apologize but she stops him short. ‘Get your ass ready,’ she snaps, ‘we got the mini-van.’ Michael goes to the bathroom and returns with his sneakers, which he begins to tie. I cannot fathom why he left his shoes in the bathroom in the first place.

  Now there is another man, not Powder, in my kitchen. He is smaller than Powder, with long loose fingers, and he is sizing up the television set, staring at it as if guessing its weight. He unplugs the cable and sets the cable box on the counter. Gathering the electrical cord in one long-fingered hand, he squats before the TV and tilts it against his chest. He is out the door in seconds.

  Tonya walks past me, smelling strongly of a strawberry perfume, and goes to my bedroom again. She is looking through my drawers once more, as if she lives here and has forgotten something. My stomach tightens again as I imagine her, too, finding my pictures of Tabitha. The thought of her handling those photographs makes me instantly nauseous.

  Michael is near the door, with his shoes on and his Fanta in his hand. He will not look at me. I spend a long moment with my mouth open, ready to say something, but finally decide against it. I could ask to be untied, but that would only remind them that leaving a witness might be more dangerous than disposing of one.

  Tonya appears again and in seconds is with the new man at the door. She scans the room one more time, without looking at me. She pushes Michael out the door; he does not
look back to me. Now satisfied, Tonya closes the door. They are gone.

  The finality and suddenness of their departure is startling. This time, they were in my apartment no more than two minutes, though her scent lingers.

  I am alone again. I detest this city of Atlanta. I cannot remember a time when I felt otherwise. I need to leave this place.

  What time is it? I realize it might be a full day before I see Achor Achor again. If I’m lucky, he’ll come home before he goes to work. But he has been gone for days before, at Michelle’s; he keeps a toothbrush and an extra suit there. He will not be back tonight and will likely go directly from her house to work. If so, I will be here, on the floor, until, at the earliest, six-thirty a.m. tomorrow. No, eight-thirty—he has class after work tomorrow.

  I try to yell, thinking that though my voice might be muffled, it might yet be loud enough to attract a neighbor. I try, but the sound is pitiful, dull, a quiet groan.

  Soon I will be able to moisten the tape enough that my lips will be free, but with the tape wrapped around my head, it will be difficult for my tongue to maneuver it low enough. I must make myself heard, I must alert a neighbor, bring someone to my door. The police need to be called, the burglars apprehended. I need water, food. I need a change of clothes. This ordeal needs to end.

  But it is not ending. I am on the floor, and it could be twenty-four hours or more before Achor Achor returns. He has been gone three days at a stretch. But never without a call. He will call and when I don’t answer and don’t call back, he will realize something is wrong. And until then there are other options. There are people in this building and I will make myself known.

  I can kick the floor. I can raise my feet enough that the kick, even through the wall-to-wall carpet, might be audible below. The neighbors below, to whom I have spoken only once, are decent people, three of them, two women and a man, all white, all over sixty. They are not prosperous, living three to an apartment precisely the size of this one I share with Achor Achor. One of the women, very sturdy and with a tight helmet of silver hair, has a job that requires a security-guard uniform. I am not sure whether or where the other two work.

  I know they are Christians, evangelicals. They have placed literature under my door, and I know they have discussed their faith with Edgardo. Like me, Edgardo is a Catholic, but still these neighbors have tried to move us toward their sort of rebirth. Their proselytizing has not offended me. When Ron, the older man who stays at home, approached me once as I was leaving for class, he first wanted to talk about slavery. An earnest-looking man with the face of an overfed infant, he had read something about the persistence of slavery in Sudan; his church was sending money to an evangelical group that was planning to travel to Sudan to buy back slaves. ‘A few dozen,’ he said.

  This is a fairly booming business, or was a few years ago. Once the evangelical circles became aware of the slavery-abduction practices in the region, it became their passion. The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the West to believe. The murahaleen began abducting again in 1983, once they were armed and could act with impunity.

  Christian neighbors below, where are you tonight? Are you home? Would you hear me if I called? Would it be enough to simply bang the floor? Will you hear me kicking? I lift my legs, still tied tightly together, from the knee down, and strike the carpeted floor with as much force as I can muster. The sound is undramatic, a muted thump. I try again, harder now. I kick for a full minute and am winded. I wait for some reaction, perhaps a broomstick banging back in response. Nothing.

  Christian neighbors, because it interests you, I will tell you about the slave raids, the slave trade. The slave trade began thousands of years ago; it’s older than our faith. You know this, or might have assumed it. The Arabs used to raid southern Sudanese villages, often with the help of rival southern tribes. This is not news to you; it follows the pattern of much of the slave-raiding in Africa. Slavery was officially abolished by the British in 1898, but the practice of slavery continued, even if it was far less prevalent.

  When the war began and the murahaleen were armed, the stolen people—for this is what my father called them, stolen people —were taken to the north, and traded among Arabs. Much of what you have heard, Christian neighbors, is true enough. Girls were made to work in Arab homes, and later became concubines, bearing the children of their keepers. Boys tended livestock and were often raped, too. This, I have to tell you, is one of the gravest offenses of the Arabs. Homosexuality is not part of Dinka culture, not even in a covert way; there simply are no practicing homosexuals at all, and thus sodomy, particularly the forced sodomy upon innocent boys, has fueled the war as much as any other crime committed by the murahaleen. I say this with all due deference to the homosexuals of this country or any other. It is simply a fact that the thought of boys being sodomized by Arabs is enough to drive a Sudanese soldier to acts of incredible bravery.

  It must be said that in this war, almost all of us Dinka have grown to vilify all the Arabs of Sudan, that we have forgotten the friends we have known from the north, the interdependent and peaceful lives we once lived with them. This war has made racists of too many of them and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.

  The strangest thing is that the so-called Arabs are not so different in any way, particularly in appearance, from the peoples of the south. Have you seen the president of Sudan, Omar el-Bashir? His skin is almost as dark as mine. But he and his Islamicist predecessors look down on the Dinka and Nuer, they want to convert us all, and leaders in Khartoum have in the past attempted to make Sudan the world center of Islamic fundamentalism. All the while, there are plenty among the Arab peoples of the Middle East who do have their own prejudices against dark-skinned Bashir and his proud Sudanese Muslim friends. There are many from within and without Sudan who don’t consider them Arabs at all.

  But still, the black-skinned Arabs of northern Sudan advocated the enslaving of the Dinka of southern Sudan, and what is Khartoum’s defense, Christian neighbors? First they say all of this belongs in the realm of centuries-old ‘tribal disagreements.’ When pressed further, they claim that these are not abductions, but are consensual work arrangements. Was that nine-year-old girl abducted on the back of a camel and brought four hundred miles north, forced to work as a servant in the home of an army lieutenant—was she a slave? No, Khartoum says. The girl, they say, is there by choice. Her family, facing hard times, made an arrangement with the lieutenant, whereby he would employ her, feed her and give her a better life, until such time as her biological family could support her once more. Again, the brazenness of the leaders in Khartoum is breathtaking: to deny that slavery existed for the last twenty years, insisting that the people of southern Sudan chose to be the unpaid and beaten and raped servants in Arab households. All this while the Arabic word too many Arabs use for the southern Sudanese means slave.

  It is almost comical. This is what they claim, I tell you! And they have convinced others, too. Tribal skirmishes and cultural practices particular to the region, they say. An American diplomat sent to Sudan to investigate the prevalence of slavery returned with this sentiment. They fooled him, and he should have known he was fooled. I have seen the slaves myself. I have seen them abducted—they took the twins, Ahok and Awach Ugieth during the second raid—and friends of mine have seen them. Now, when villages try to repatriate former slaves, children and women, there are problems. Some women were taken when they were so young, six and seven years old, that they remember nothing about their homes. They are now eighteen, nineteen years old, and because they were so young when they were abducted, they speak no Dinka, only Arabic, and are familiar with none of our customs. And they have, many of them, left children in the north. A good deal of them have had children by their captors, and when the women are discovered
by abolitionists and then freed, these children have to be left behind. It is a very difficult life for these women, even when they have returned home.

  It is criminal that all of this has happened, has been allowed to happen.

  In a furious burst, I kick and kick again, flailing my body like a fish run aground. Hear me, Christian neighbors! Hear your brother just above!

  Nothing again. No one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.

  CHAPTER 12

  One afternoon in the first hopeful weeks of walking, we reached a village called Gok Arol Kachuol. On the outskirts, the women gathered along the path to watch our group, now over two hundred and fifty boys.

  —Look how sick they are, the women said as they watched us pass.

  —Their heads are so big! Like eggs sitting on top of twigs! The women laughed theatrically, covering their mouths.

  —I have it, said another, an older woman, as old and twisted as an acacia.—They’re like spoons. They look like spoons walking!

  And the women tittered and continued to point at us as we passed, picking out boys who looked particularly peculiar or hopeless.

  As soon as the first of our group entered the village, we knew we were not welcome.—No rebels here, the chief said, walking quickly out to the path.—No, no, no! Walk on. Keep going. Go!

  The chief, with a pipe in his mouth, was blocking access to the village with his arms, waving his hands as if the wind he generated would blow us to some other place.

  Dut stepped forward and spoke with a firmness I had not heard before.