What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  —Valentine!

  I was walking to Mass one day, always held under a certain tree near where the Ethiopians lived, when someone threw this name to the sky. I had not heard that name in so long. I turned and a familiar man, a priest, came toward me. It was Father Matong, the priest who had baptized me in Marial Bai. He had been visiting other camps in Ethiopia, he said, and was now checking on the boys at Pinyudo. He was the first person I had seen at this camp, outside of Dut and Moses, who I had known from my life at home. I stood for some time, silent, staring at him; it felt, for a moment, that the world in which I had first known him, my hometown and all it held, could regenerate itself around him.

  —Son, are you okay? He placed his hand on my head. It felt wonderful. Still I could not manage words.

  —Come with me, he said.

  I walked with Father Matong on this day and other days, during the two weeks he stayed at Pinyudo. I don’t know why he spent time with me alone, but I was grateful for the time with him. I asked him questions about God and faith; perhaps I was unique in the attention I gave to his answers.

  —Who was Valentine? I asked one day.

  We were on one of our walks, and he stopped in his tracks.

  —You don’t know?

  —No.

  —I never told you? But he’s my favorite saint!

  He had never told me this. Nor had he told me why he had given me this name.

  —Who was he? I asked him.

  We were walking past an airfield. A group of soldiers were unloading enormous crates from a cargo plane. Father Matong stood for a moment, watching, then turned and we walked back in the direction of the camp.

  —He was alive so long ago, son. Before the grandfather of your grandfather. Before his grandfather and his grandfather. Before more grandfathers than there are stars. He was a priest like me, an ordinary priest named Valentine. He worked in Rome, in a place now called Italy, far north from here, where white people live.

  —So he was a white man? I asked. The thought had not occurred to me.

  —He was. And a selfless man. He preached to his flock but also took a particular interest in prisoners. At the time, many men in Rome were imprisoned under questionable circumstances, and Father Valentine did not want to deprive them of the gospel. So he went to these captives and he spoke the word of the Lord, and these men were converted. The jailers did not appreciate this. They resented his presence and the light he brought to lives of the prisoners. So he, too, was punished. He was jailed, he was beaten, he was sent away. But again and again, he found ways to speak to the prisoners, and soon he even converted the blind daughter of the jailer himself.

  As we had been walking, we hadn’t realized that we were so close to the barracks of the Ethiopian troops. We heard voices, and were soon upon a group of soldiers crowded together, watching a struggle on the ground before them. It seemed like some sort of wrestling, though only one of the participants was in uniform, and only one seemed to be moving. One of the wrestlers wore a garment of an Anyuak color, and let out a womanly cry. Again we altered our course.

  —He visited the girl often; she was no older than you, my son. They prayed together and they spoke of her blindness. She had been blind since she was very small. Again he put his palm on my head and again it felt like home.

  —But when the jailer found out about the priest’s efforts, he was furious. His daughter brought the word of God into her father’s house and that was the end of Valentine. He was jailed, he was tortured. But the daughter knew where he was being held, and she came to visit the priest. He was chained to the floor, but still they prayed, and she slept just outside his cell for many nights. And it was on one of those nights, when they were praying together before sleep, that a brightness came into the cell. It blasted through the bars and swirled around Valentino and the girl. The priest was not sure if it was an angel but he held the jailer’s daughter close and after the brightness flew about the cell, circling like a swallow, it finally left through the barred window whence it came. The priest and the jailer’s daughter were again in the dark.

  —What was it? I asked.

  —It was an envoy of God, my son. There is no other explanation. The next morning, the girl awoke and she could see again. Her eyes had not worked since she was a baby but now she could see again. For this miracle, Father Valentino was beheaded.

  I asked Father Matong why this man was his favorite saint, and why he gave me his name. The answer was not yet clear to me, though I believe Matong expected by that point that it would be. He took his hand off my head.

  —I think you will have the power to make people see, he said.—I think you will remember what it was like to be here, you will see the lessons here. And someday you will find your own jailer’s daughter, and to her you will bring light.

  CHAPTER 18

  Most prophecies go unfulfilled. It’s just as well. The expectations Father Matong put upon me took many years to fade from the forefront of my mind. But thank God they did. Free of this pressure, my head was, for a time, clearer than it had been in years.

  It is just past midnight and Lino is asleep. Julian, no doubt tired of seeing our faces and being unable or unwilling to bring help to us, has retreated to an office behind the desk. Achor Achor is watching a documentary about Richard Nixon on the overhead television. He will watch anything about American politics, or any politics at all. He is certain to hold office in a new southern Sudan, should it really become independent. There are plenty of southern Sudanese in the Khartoum government now, but Achor Achor insists that he will only return to Sudan if the south votes to secede in 2011, which the Comprehensive Peace Agreement allows. Whether the National Islamic Front or Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, actually allows this to occur remains to be seen.

  Achor Achor’s phone begins to vibrate on the table between us, turning slowly clockwise. As he is looking in his pockets, I lift the phone and hand it to him. Given the hour, I am reasonably sure it is a call from Africa. Achor Achor flips his phone open and his eyes grow round.

  ‘It what? In Juba? No!’ Achor Achor stands suddenly and walks away, past Julian. Lino does not stir. I follow Achor Achor and he hands me the phone.

  ‘It’s Ajing. He’s going nuts. You talk to him.’

  Ajing is a friend of ours from Kakuma who now works for the new government of southern Sudan. He lives in Juba and is training to become an engineer.

  I take the phone.

  ‘Valentine! It’s Ajing! Call CNN and tell them that the war is on again!’

  He’s out of breath. I beg him to slow down.

  ‘A bomb just went off. Or a mortar. They just bombed us. Huge explosion. Call CNN and tell them to send a camera. The world needs to know. Bashir is attacking us again. The war has returned! I’ll call you back—call CNN!’

  He hangs up, and Achor Achor and I stare at each other. There had been chaotic sounds in the background of the call, sounds of machinery and movement. Ajing, being in Juba, certainly should know what was happening there. My stomach drops to my feet. If the war were to begin again, I don’t know that I could live through it, even safely here in the United States. I doubt any of us could. We live only knowing that rebuilding has been possible in southern Sudan, that our families are safe. But this, a return to blood and madness—I am quite sure I will not be able to bear the burden.

  ‘Should we call CNN?’ Achor Achor asks.

  ‘Why us?’ I ask.

  ‘We live in Atlanta. You’ve met Ted Turner.’

  This is a good point. I decide I will first call Mary Williams and proceed from there. I am dialing her number when Achor Achor’s phone rings again. I answer.

  ‘Valentine, I’m sorry. I was wrong. What a relief!’ Ajing is still breathing heavily and seems to have forgotten the rest of his explanation.

  ‘What?’ I yell. ‘What happened?’

  It was a false alarm, he says. There was an explosion within the barracks, but it was an accident from within, a mista
ke, a nothing.

  ‘Sorry to scare you, friend,’ Ajing says. ‘How are you, by the way?’

  Lino is sleeping with his head tilted back, resting against the wall behind us, and I watch as it slowly begins to slide rightward, until the weight of his head is too much. It falls to his shoulder and he wakes with a start, sees me and seems momentarily surprised to see me. He smiles drunkenly, then goes back to sleep.

  It has been an hour since Ajing called, and Julian has been replaced by an older white woman with a great cloud of yellow hair that sweeps up from her forehead and rolls down her back. I catch her eye. As I am about to approach her, in hopes of appealing to her, she gets up and finds something urgent she must do in the next room. We are no longer considered patients here. No one knows what to do with us. We are furniture.

  And so I sit with Achor Achor.

  With Tabitha, even hours of sitting in a waiting room would be electric. Like many couples in the first months of love, we were content in the most mundane situations. We did very little that might be considered glamorous or even imaginative; neither of us had money to spend on restaurant dinners or shows of any kind. We usually stayed in my apartment and watched movies or even sports on television. One summer night when my Corolla was being fixed by Edgardo, we spent the night waiting for and riding city buses. It was a night of waiting and fluorescent lighting, and yet it was a night of near-rapture. While waiting for a bus home from downtown, where we had took a walk in Olympic Park, she nuzzled my neck and whispered to me how badly she wanted to kiss me, to take off my shirt. Her voice was seductive on the phone, overpowering in person, explosive when hot in my ear. In the bus shelters of Atlanta there has never been such romance.

  But when we were apart, she could be flighty and moody. She would call me seven times in one day, and if I was unavailable that day, her messages would become more agitated, suspicious, even cruel. When we finally would mend our relationship, and our phone conversations would again be enjoyable, she would disappear for days. Her absence would go unexplained, and when she reappeared, I was forbidden to dwell on why or where she had gone. I often struggled to keep up with and decipher her signals. ‘Are you stalking me?’ she would ask one week, while the next, she would wonder if she herself was the stalker. I was so puzzled by her behavior that I asked Allison Newton, my teenage friend, about it. ‘Sounds like she has another flame,’ she said, and I did not believe her. ‘Standard behavior for that situation—she hides, she overcompensates when she returns, she suspects you of the things she’s doing herself.’ That was the last time I asked Allison for advice on these matters.

  Hoping to find food of some kind, I leave the waiting room and walk the salmon-colored halls, passing photographs of the hospital’s past administrators and the artwork of young people. There are watercolors and pastels done by students at a local high school, each work for sale. I inspect every one. There are many renderings of pets, four of Tupac Shakur, and two paintings of rickety piers extending out over placid lakes. The line of artwork ends at a long window looking into the waiting lounge. The room is dark, the patterns of the furniture a plaid of burgundy and blue. I see two vending machines, and am tempted to open the door. But there is a family there, asleep on the couch together. A young father is on the end, his head resting against a duffel bag he has placed on the couch’s arm. Next to him are three small children, two girls and a boy, all under five, lying one against the other. Small pink backpacks lie at their feet, the remnants of dinner on the end table. It is likely their mother who is sick here. Beyond them, in the parking lot, a single tree is illuminated from below, giving its leafless branches a rose-colored glow. From where I stand, the sleeping family appears to be lying below this tree, protected by its great outstretched boughs.

  Though I wish I could enter and buy something to eat, I do not want to wake them. Instead I sit outside their room and read words from Tabitha. I open my wallet and remove the page I keep there, three of Tabitha’s emails. I printed them one night in advance of a phone date we had planned. I wanted to talk to her about her moods, her conflicting signals, and planned to cite the emails, all three written in the span of one week. That night I lost my nerve to confront her, but nevertheless I keep the page folded in my wallet, and I read the messages to punish myself and to remember the way Tabitha expressed herself to me when she wrote—far more effusively than when we were together. Rarely did she say ‘I love you’ to my face, but in her emails, written in the dark hours, she felt she could.

  The first message:

  My Val:

  I just wanted to say that I love you. May the spirit of God keep our love lively and sweet. I love you dear, and my heart always watches you smiling at me. I love your beautiful smiles; I don’t know if I can get enough of them. I am so much in love with you and I can’t stop thinking about you because you are so darling, sweet, touchy, smiley, lovely, respectful, and wonderful. I missed you so badly this week. The little talk we had wasn’t enough for the week.

  I thought you were going to call me but I didn’t receive any call. I don’t know if you did call me or not.

  Love love love,

  Tabitha

  The second message, two days later:

  Hi Val,

  I don’t know if you called me yesterday or not. Just to let you be aware, my cell phone, makeup, and lotion got stolen yesterday during my PE period. I disconnected the line for a while till I replace it. I don’t know how long it will take me to replace it.

  I am doing fine, just feeling confused about everything. I’m puzzled also because I don’t know if we should be together. Atlanta is so far away and sometimes I feel that if you really cared for me you’d move here. You know I can’t move to you, with college and my brothers in Seattle. But if you really loved me like you say you do…

  I guess we’ll just email until my phone is replaced. Maybe it’ll be good for us to take this break.

  With affection,

  Tabitha

  And a week later, when she got her phone back, there was this:

  Honey,

  I was thinking about you yesterday, just before I fell asleep. Then I dreamt sweet warm dreams about you and me. Don’t ask me what happened in the dream. I want to tell you on the phone, I want to whisper it to you when we’re both on our pillows. Could you please not go to bed early today so I can call you? The latest I’ll call will at be at 10 to 11 your time.

  Am I sending too many messages to you? Please let me know. Where have you been? Are you avoiding me? Please don’t play games with me. I need to know that you love me because life is dramatic enough right now without being uncertain about important things, like love.

  Desperate and wanting,

  Tabitha

  I believe that Tabitha liked very much to be pursued, to know that I was so far away but that I waited for her, that I pined for her. I imagine her telling her friends that I was ‘a nice boy’ while she kept her eye open for new opportunities. This is not to say I believe she was otherwise involved. Only that she was a desirable young woman, new to the possibilities of this country, and she needed attention as much as she needed love. Perhaps more so.

  In any case, Tabitha was not the first woman to confuse me, to confound me. In Ethiopia there were four such girls, sisters, and it was remarkable to find such girls in a refugee camp like Pinyudo. I was not alone in my obsession with them, though in the end I would be alone in my success with them. Anyone who was at my camp in Ethiopia knows of the Royal Girls of Pinyudo, but it was a surprise that Tabitha knew of them, too.

  We were talking one day about my name; Tabitha had just told an older American friend that she was seeing a man named Valentine, and her friend had explained the implications of such a name. Tabitha called me immediately after hearing the stories of Rudolph Valentine, and, newly jealous, demanded to know if I was as successful with women as my name implied. I did not boast, but I could not deny that certain women and girls had found me pleasant enough to be around. ‘How long h
as this been going on, this success with ladies?’ she asked, with an uncomfortable mixture of mirth and accusation. I told her it had been this way as long as I could remember. ‘Even at Pinyudo were you meeting girls?’ she asked, expecting the answer to be no.

  ‘There were girls there, yes,’ I told her. ‘There were these four girls in particular, sisters named Agum, Agar, Akon, and Yar Akech, and…’

  She stopped me there. She knew these girls. ‘Were they from Yirol?’ she asked. I told her they were indeed from Yirol. And only then did I make the connection myself. Of course Tabitha would have known these girls. She not only knew them, she went on, she was related to them, she was their cousin. And knowing them made Tabitha temporarily less jealous, then, as I told her the story of the Royal Girls, more so.

  This was 1988. We had been at Pinyudo for a few months when something strange happened: they opened the schools. There was a new chairman of the camp, named Pyang Deng, a man we all considered compassionate, a man of integrity, a reasonable man who listened. He played with us, he danced with us, and, with the help of the the Swedish arm of Save the Children and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he opened schools for about eighteen thousand refugee children. He called an assembly one day, and because the camp had no chairs or microphones or megaphones at that time, we sat on the dirt and he yelled as best he could.

  —Schools will be yours! he roared. We cheered.

  —You will be the best-educated Sudanese in all of history! he yelled. Bewildered, we cheered again.

  —Now we will build the schools!

  We cheered again, but soon the cheering died down. It dawned on us that the task would come down to us. And it did. The next day, we were sent into the forests to cut trees and collect grass. We were told that the forests were dangerous. There were animals in these forests, they said. And there were local people who considered the forests their own, they said, and were to be avoided. The dangers were many but still we were sent into the forests and almost immediately boys were lost. On the first day, a boy named Bol went into the forest and one part of his leg was found eight days later. Animals had eaten the rest of him.