Thirty Girls

by Minot, Susan

  I whispered to Louise, I think this is the time.

  How do you know it?

  We are near a place we know.

  Tomorrow will you take the chance with me? Louise’s head lay on the pillow of her arm, not answering. In the dark I saw the darker holes of her eyes open. She shook her head.

  I am not sure, she whispered.

  Maybe in the morning you will think it.

  We spoke no more. Would this really be the day? I was not sure myself, but I would be ready.

  In the morning Louise showed she was still not sure. Louise was careful and we looked to her, but this day I thought, I must listen to Esther.

  We left that place and walked and soon stopped at another place. Some girls went to make their toilet and I went with them. A guard was just there near us, and there was the shouting that we move. The girls left with the guard to join the others and I stayed sitting on my heels, still. If someone had looked back or called to me I would have stood up, but no one looked back. No one called. I saw them walking in pieces between the trees, I heard their voices grow soft. I heard someone saying, Tomorrow we will … Then it was silent.

  I stayed crouching with my heart pounding in my knees. Soon it was long enough so that if I was discovered it would be known I was trying to escape. And so began the adventure of my life. I stood and walked quickly in the direction opposite from the rebels.

  Soon I was running. I ran for a long time to be far away. I might stop for a moment and listen to hear anything then I would run again. One time I heard a voice. I looked in the direction across a field and saw an old woman walking with a child. I lowered myself in the grass. I was breathing hard from running and the green blades of grass were touching my eyebrows. It seemed as if the grass was friendly to me, not outside of myself, but part of me. Each blade touched me, supporting me in my venture.

  For the next three days I did not know if I would live or die.

  I had little idea where I was going, but aimed to the south. I was hungry those days, but that did not worry me. I was used to hunger, I was not used to being free. Walking on my own, I could go wherever I chose. I had my freedom back, even if I would not survive it.

  When the leaves darkened I looked for a place to sleep. This tree had thorns and another was not so far off the ground. The sky was now growing dark and I had to choose. I came near a trunk split into two thick branches which tilted beside each other with a triangle at their meeting where a person could sit. This would be my tree, the first place I would spend the night alone in a year and a half.

  I climbed up. The two branches were near enough so I could rest across them and not fall out, but not so close that I could relax completely. It seemed that if I fell asleep I might fall through. So I leaned back and closed my eyes, not to sleep, only rest. I woke with a jerk, thinking myself falling. But I wasn’t falling. In the darkness the leaves were ticking in the silence. I could make out a dusty bush with a smaller bush beside it and a dead branch sticking out which looked like a spear. What if they find me? I wondered. Then I thought, No one in the world knows if I am alive or dead.

  Then I must have fallen asleep, because my eyes opened to branches against a lightening sky. I had made it through my first free night. I slipped down to the ground.

  I walked south, at least I thought south. The farther that way, the farther from encountering the rebels. I walked all morning and kept away from villages, worried they would not welcome me.

  In the middle of the day I came to a place with fewer trees and open brush. I heard a baby crying. I followed the sound and saw down a slope at a low dry place a woman sitting, her head draped over with a kanga of purple and yellow. I approached, stepping on loud twigs so she would not be surprised. When I was near she turned and I saw it was not a woman, but a girl. She covered the baby’s face with the kanga to protect it.

  Please, do not hurt us. I suppose I did not look so clean.

  I will not hurt you.

  You are a rebel, she said. I saw now she was very young.

  No. I have escaped from the rebels.

  She frowned. You look like a rebel.

  Yes, I was with them, but I am escaping now. I am trying to go home. I felt a trembling inside as I said these words.

  The baby was crying in a thin slow way, and the girl bounced it near her chest, hiding it from me. My baby is sick, she said. I am afraid for her.

  Let me see.

  Still frowning at me, she pulled the cloth away. The baby’s eyes were closed and there was a white crust around the mouth.

  This baby needs water, I said. Can you feed her?

  I am unable, she said, as if it were my fault. When the kanga slipped back from her forehead I saw her hair was thin and in tufts. She was not so well either.

  Do you know this place? I said.

  She looked at me, her eyes a little crossed, not answering.

  Let us find water, I said. I started in the direction I had been taking.

  I cannot go that way. Her eyes rolled off a little. I began to see she might be crazy. By now I had seen enough crazy people. I thought of Philip, how he did not look crazy right away. She stood and tucked the cloth behind her ears to keep the kanga on. It had green plums and a yellow vine. The baby was strapped close to her chest in a bundle, and it stopped crying when she stood.

  I have not spoken to anyone since escaping, I said. Even if she was crazy I would say it aloud. She walked behind me, not interested. This made it easier to speak.

  I have been gone a long time, I said. It made me dizzy to realize it.

  Every now and then this girl dipped down, almost kneeling, and snatched at the tops of grass and threw the seeds over her shoulder. She concentrated on doing this, as if it was a dance.

  I am Esther. What is your name?

  Do you think my baby will die? she said.

  Not if we get water, I said. But how was I to know?

  Do you think water is this way? she said, bending her knee like she was genuflecting in church. When she faced me I saw she had no upper teeth. I thought then it might be better to go in the opposite direction, away from this girl.

  We got to a hilltop and saw trickles of smoke rising out of the floor of trees and a dark area where the trees made a hole. We headed for the dark area and arrived at a shallow pool of water with dirt polished around it. I drank from the cup of my hands and the girl drank water and poured it from her mouth into the baby’s mouth. Water spilled over their chins. The baby coughed.

  I told her I was choosing now to go an opposite way. You go to the village there, I said, and pointed to where we had seen smoke. They will help you.

  She looked up as I was leaving. I see the baby flying with you, she said. What? I looked into her crazy eyes.

  There, she said, pointing above my shoulder. Is it a boy or a girl?

  I felt pain in my stomach.

  A girl, she decided.

  Yes, I said. It was hard to speak.

  She shrugged as if none of this was surprising. This one, she said, she will guide you home.

  The pain in my stomach seemed to become something warm and for the first time I thought of my baby as a thing I might have loved. It made me feel lighter, even if it was sad. My baby was with me, a maleika in the air. I continued on.

  That night I slept not in a tree but under one. I had not passed any animals. I thought, maybe this place looked familiar. I made a pile of leaves and lay on them and covered myself with more leaves and felt hungry. In the morning I woke. A rooster called far away. People were nearby.

  Things might completely change from one minute to another. I learned this the night of October ninth when my life changed forever. I woke this morning alone in the world and soon after was united again with mankind.

  Something was clicking. I stepped onto a wide path and saw an old man pushing a bicycle. He had a mattress flopped over the handlebars. I moved behind a tree and the man saw me. It was only one instant but I saw his face and he was not afraid
of me.

  He greeted me and offered to walk with me. I felt gratitude for his kindness. He understood I was just a girl.

  I woke this morning and remembered something I thought forgotten, a time they caught a man on a bicycle and cut off his foot. If you are on a bicycle the rebels think you may be delivering news. The man’s wife came out and they told her to eat that foot.

  You do not forget such things, even when they are not appearing. They are just in the back of your mind, waiting.

  Sometimes I want to hit myself with stones.

  The camp in the morning is pale yellow. I am watching, waiting for something I cannot name. I try to think of what I know and I cannot find it. Life is there before me but not close enough for my hand to reach it. My heart is suffocating.

  VII

  Gulu

  15 / Love with Harry

  THEY CHECKED IN to the Exciting Hotel, a group of stucco cottages blackened by mold. Reception had a façade featuring a yellow painted sun emerging from a line of rotting plastic bags. Lana stood at the counter between Pierre and Don, boot heel at a tilt, and asked for a room of her own. Flies buzzed them. A sort of lounge area loomed in deeper darkness.

  A few streets away they found Caffè Roma and sat near the door in a sort of porch area surrounded by windows barred with grating of white hoops. The waitress took their orders with a tenderness implying pity, and they ate a late lunch of chicken wings in thin dark gravy and something called boo with peanut sauce.

  After lunch Jane and Pierre walked through town in the ochre dust. It was still and hot. Thoughts of Harry drifted to Jane. What do you have on under there? Up on the concrete porches shop doors were shut for the afternoon. A hair salon sign was a hand-painted, yellow checkerboard of different hairdos. On some heads, green hair was arranged in a patchwork of braids like planted fields, on others, blue hair sculpted into heart-shaped puffs. Pierre was taking pictures. Look at this, he said, zeroing in on a tattered bit of ribbon around a rusty pole.

  At the end of a street a man stood on a pile of garbage the size of a small hut, picking through it.

  They walked loosely apart. A bony-legged brown dog trotted past with the rare attitude of no interest in the white people.

  They passed a beggar sitting behind bony knees with a few coins on the ground near his toes, and farther along a boy passed out, having slid off a step with white glue caked around his nostrils. He was probably with the rebels, Pierre said. And now this. He stood looking for a long time, then snapped a picture of the boy’s fingers, curled in sleep.

  Jane carried her notebook but kept it closed. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, she said.

  Reporting your story I would say, said Pierre. He was lying on the ground on his side now, his camera jammed against his nose, squishing it, as he clicked, near some rusted cans.

  What do you see there?

  It’s fantastic, he answered mysteriously.

  I mean here on the planet.

  You just want to be free, he said. His cheek pressed the dusty ground beside his camera. You have a wild spirit.

  If anyone back home had said such a thing it would have been met with mockery. But here was mercifully not back home. Sometimes you needed another person to say something out loud. How did Pierre see it? She didn’t think she showed. Maybe she showed to Harry. Come here, take this off. Maybe she showed in bed. It was where she felt most herself, there or away from people altogether.

  Knowing oneself was like smoke wafting into air. Other people might show you the stranger of yourself. The likelihood she’d forget Pierre saying this was high. Clarity was harder to keep than puzzlement. But she would not, however, forget this. It would turn out to return to her: the hot afternoon in Gulu when Pierre said, You just want to be free. Each time it came like a steadying hand.

  Look at this. Pierre stood in a yard of hard dirt sunk with fossils of plastic caps and glass shards. Above the doorway of an abandoned house a faded painting was visible in the peeling concrete. Two carefree figures on surfboards rode a curling green wave. More faded, in pink and green, were the words Surf Club.

  One can always dream, Jane said.

  C’est fantastique. Pierre snapped pictures, then stepped through the doorless doorway to an empty blue floor with two broken chairs tangled in a corner.

  They came out to a boy standing at the edge of the yard with a doubtful face, holding up small baggies of popcorn. He wore a choker of white beads and a tank top that would fit a large man.

  Jane asked him how much.

  One shilling.

  I’ll take them all. She rummaged around in her bag.

  There is tipu here, the boy said.

  The Surf Club? She smiled, delighted. Really?

  He nodded solemnly. His stance declared he wasn’t going any nearer. The joki is there.

  Should we be worried? she said, giving him a fifty-shilling coin.

  He didn’t seem to hear, or understand, more concerned with her gross overpayment. Asante, he said, and nearly tossed the little bags to her, hurrying away before she saw her mistake.

  Don would say you’re going to disrupt the country’s economy, Pierre said.

  Did you hear it’s haunted?

  Everything old is. The ancestors here stay around. Pierre walked past her, his expression already opening to something new. He was gazing toward the long alley of eucalyptus trees. Look at that. He shook his head. The sunlight cut through the trees in dusty swords. Beauty is everywhere, he said.

  The loveliness of sleeping beside Harry cast a spell over the day.

  He was lovely. His shoulders were lovely and wide and his skin was lovely and firm and it was lovely against her skin and his shoulders around her let her feel the particular muscle a man has in his arms. She liked how he was led by his body, not his mind.

  The loveliness of bed sometimes overrode all else. She lapsed into daydreams, scanning the images of the nights to relive the sensations, which were even stronger with the layer of reflection added to them. He was moving in to kiss her. Maybe he was reconsidering, studying her mouth. No, he was looking, he came closer. Still he didn’t kiss her, making her heart thump in its gigantic room. Sleeping, she lay against the raft of him. Inside, he had a secret and maybe if she were close enough she would learn it.

  Her mind emptied through the body, through Harry. She fell into a fugue, replaying his hands anchoring her waist, his shoulder pinning her chin. He twisted her wrist. His mouth covered her mouth.

  One could point to a difference in our ages, she said.

  Yes, I’m too old for you. He tapped her forehead.

  He asked her, Don’t you miss your family?

  Sometimes, she said. It sounded dismissive, which she didn’t intend. I mean, sure, she said with a different tone.

  What about your country?

  No. That sounded spoiled. I miss my friends, she tried.

  Why just friends?

  Because I love them?

  You asking me?

  Because I love them.

  People aren’t loved when you are away from them, he said.

  That’s not true.

  You haven’t even given it any thought.

  She felt the sting of him being right.

  You disagree with me before you’ve even thought about it, he said.

  My friends matter to me, she said.

  How do you love people you aren’t with?

  From afar? She smiled.

  I miss my family when I don’t see them. My sister lives in Ireland. It’s too far away.

  You don’t choose your family, Jane said.

  Isn’t that the point? Harry said.

  Maybe some people are better off without their family, she said.

  Harry didn’t speak for a moment. You show me one, he said.

  How does it feel to be so sure about everything? she said.

  You tell me, Harry said.

  He told her about a girlfriend who did Reiki therapy. She taught him the tec
hnique and he turned out to have a knack for it and when he drove her to the hospital where she volunteered he ended up treating patients, too. He laid his hands on their arms or stomach or head and concentrated on the warmth and energy moving out of his fingers into them, and it seemed to give them relief. One time he had an old man in intensive care whom he worked on for fifteen minutes, and when Harry stood to leave he fainted. He’d drained himself.

  He told her about one time in the locker room being teased by an older boy for being small. He was facing the ceiling, speaking freely not looking at her. It made me shy, he said.

  Kids are mean, Jane said.

  Thing is, I still believe him. It made an impression on me.

  But you know it’s not true, right? She smiled, not at him, but because she was hearing about something from inside Harry.

  He remained grave. No, I don’t.

  A normal kind person might have said, You are fine, you are more than fine, but she found herself strangely blocked, as if reassurance would be a knee-jerk denial of that wound to his younger self.

  Instead she glided onto him to reassure him with her body, the reassurance she trusted. She felt him distant, as if his shadow were walking away up a hill.

  They were napping on the low bed at the Exciting Hotel, lying on their sides facing the same way. She was cupped behind him, her arm along his side. A cobra was chewing a small furry animal. When the cobra saw her it dropped the animal and lunged through the air toward her neck.

  She woke. She turned abruptly onto her back and crossed her hands over a fluttering chest.

  Harry’s low eyes appeared over his shoulder. What is it?

  Sorry. She stared up. Bad dream.

  He kept his head turned, maybe waiting, maybe not waiting.

  She didn’t look at him. The thought of looking in his eyes was terrifying. I just got … She sat up quickly and looked for her shoes.

  The town had come back to life when Jane walked past the flapping kangas and sputtering exhaust pipes in early evening. She followed the map in her World Vision booklet to the red star indicating the location of the largest rehabilitation center in the north. An entranceway was open in a high chain-link fence that bordered a neighborhood of lean-tos. In a denuded yard a small boy with a withered leg was wheeling around on a stick, showing how adept he was. She entered a cement building with a narrow sidewalk around it one step up and found a woman in a blue tie-dyed dress at an empty desk. She made an appointment with her to visit the next day.