Mzei weighed and bought the pieces he’d tasted for about three times what I’d paid for them, planning of course to mark them up again by a factor magnified more than that. The other dealer purchased a few, but not by bidding against him. I realized they must have arranged beforehand not to allow me to create an auction. He seemed not to have tasted as many rock formations as Mzei in his career, but understood instead that the girls should be a better clue, since I was playing my cards close to my vest. He tried some Congolese-French patois on them, such as might be spoken in the areas diamonds usually came from. No dice. Then Swahili; Luganda; Rwandan French. Nope. Then Juba Arabic. “Ah!” they both said, when the girls’ faces lit up.
The tall one they now recognized as being Dinka, but Ya-Ya was more of a puzzle. “The Kit!” they agreed, when she spoke a little Madi in answer to him. That must be where the gold they bought from SPLA go-betweens also drifted in from. “You’ve been to the Kit, not Ituri,” Mzei told me. “Good minerals and not so scary.” Ituri’s conflict diamonds were indeed dangerous to fetch.
Liking women, he teased Ya-Ya by showing her how the diamond on his pinkie would look on hers. He and the other guy disappointed me by not competing against each other, just nodding like bridge players at each piece I produced to indicate which of them should get first dibs. I warned them I had friends in Nairobi I could sell to, but Mzei laughed. “Same here.”
“Okay. Let me ask you this.” I’d been to his house once for sweetmeats after a diamond deal I’d done with some Chinese who may or may not have been connected to him. It was a secure, incognito villa with overstuffed sofas and lots of family photos on the furniture, in an unpretentious neighborhood where he told me he’d moved after the previous owners had been killed by Idi Amin—you didn’t buy places then; you just moved in.
“If one of your daughters had this girl’s eye problem, who would you call?”
Mzei was surprised at the question, but we were through our business, and I had cash, he had the stones, so he picked up the hotel phone and, round-faced, squat, and easygoing, spoke in the Luganda language for a couple of minutes to some physician or office assistant. “Fully booked,” he announced afterward, shaking his head. “At this primitive juncture we are dependent upon you humanitarians.”
We finished our coffee, as Mzei and his friend examined the eleven nuggets of gold-flecked rock I’d brought, rolling them in their fingers for the view from different angles, and I pocketed the three thousand-plus. “Double-oh-seven,” he called me. It was small potatoes, but hydraulic machinery could soon be extracting three million, or thirty, or three hundred million dollars a year for investors when the war wound up, and since foreigners would be needed to invest in that machinery, for the first time it occurred to me, through Mzei’s appraising gaze, that I might be employable to bird-dog for a mining company, despite my zero geological training. In Zaire, with diamonds, it was different: huge open pits of mud where prisoners of war labored like slaves, digging their lives away, whose location militias fought over. I’d met white men willing to stomach witnessing such scenes of horrific servitude in order to buy gems in bulk, but I couldn’t have. Mine were just stray stones a villager might have stumbled across, alone in a bog in the forest, or that had been acquired by a shopkeeper from some dollar-a-day free miner who had swallowed it as soon as he saw it in the dirt, then vomited or shit it out when he got home.
Somebody would come for me on a motorbike, over a jungle range, to where my trucks had been delivering beans or lentils, and I’d perch on the back, cling to this stranger, and be bumped over two or three dozen miles of ridgeline on trails no car could have traversed, to see this storekeeper and haggle awhile and get dysentery from his hospitality, then be brought back to my starting point, wondering if I’m going to be shot off the motorcycle en route, and board my NGO truck with my intestines bursting, for Kampala, if I can bluff through immigration at Katwe or Fort Portal without being stripped.
So, that’s diamond smuggling, if you’re not one of the creeps who fly in and out of Kisangani in a Lear or a Buffalo. Mzei and his friend bought me an early beer on the Fairway’s terrace, while they tapped me for information about the siege of Juba, the politics of hunger in the camps, and gossip from Nairobi, which for them, too, was a hub. Gems trickled into Kampala from disaster zones the way the gem had been formed anyhow: under great pressure, underground. Generals in the Ugandan army brought them in, or Rwandan generals, Zambian generals, Zairean generals, tribal officers, and ragged crooks and fugitives. The crucible of dictatorship had smelted out the straight arrows. However, Mzei didn’t do much export; for Interpol stuff you went to a different hotel terrace.
I tried a few more phone calls, but Kampala is not my town, and cripples lie splayed on the hot sidewalk all day to attract coins as a result of several simple problems that surgery done long ago could have solved. My mood had lightened after the night’s rest, and I let the girls enjoy the novelties of my room—TV, shower bath—not relegating them to the parking lot. Ya-Ya even wanted to continue with our arithmetic and spelling lessons. Instead, I led them downtown to observe the traffic, so Nairobi would seem less intimidating. I was dreading a phone call from Betty at the hospital saying, Pick these folks up, but my phone didn’t ring. Al was ebullating about his daughter starting private school, when we talked. He was in Africa for keeps, but losing interest in our agency, it seemed to me: whether because he was angling for an upgrade to a better NGO or wanted to go into business. He’d told me he was already doing some coldcalling, because there were offshore investment funds looking for money—which wouldn’t be riskier, he pointed out, than leaving your nest egg in Kenya. On his advice I’d wired what I considered a wager to the Channel Islands. After you’d sounded out all of your friends, he said, you merely looked in the daily papers for who might be scoring somehow somewhere and gave them a jingle. It was hairy in Africa. He’d arrived as a “water expert,” traveled all over, till he’d tired of sewage. You didn’t sit still. If Nairobi bored you, you could try Lagos, or real anarchy in Sierra Leone. Africa will best you, if that’s what you want, but it helps being a white man, and especially a Harlem landlord’s son, as Al was, whose father for years had brought him along on rent-collection days.
Al faxed me official instructions to bring Ya-Ya, Nyoka, and Tongkwoit into Kenya for necessary ophthalmological surgery, on Protestants Against Famine stationery, for the purpose of showing at the border checkpoint tomorrow. But I wondered what I would do if the officials said no. That hungry, teasing waitress who was nursing a baby at home, who I’d given a chicken dinner to on the trip in, joined us and the chambermaid with a room-service supper for everybody before the girls went back to the parking lot to sleep in the Toyota. I visited the bar, talking to a Zimbabwean in town on business. When Angela showed up to see if I was feeling horny again, I shook off her cocked eyebrow like a pitcher rejecting a catcher’s sign. Chastened, she sat alone in a booth while I planned for an early bedtime, then winced when the Zimbabwean bought her a drink, since I’d warned her avuncularly against having sex with African strangers the night before. I was rehearsing my speech for the immigration station tomorrow. A condescending leniency was generally displayed to white “missionaries,” as regards their quirky, quixotic gambits, by all concerned: which I hoped was going to apply to these paperless girls. If smart Ya-Ya had been the only one, she could have wriggled past the controls among the fat market women who strolled back and forth through the boundary slot with bundles balanced on their heads, and just the occasional whack by an officer’s cane on a particularly, temptingly waggly, overripe rump. For a thousand shillings one of these ladies might have sworn Ya-Ya was her daughter and given her part of a load to tote.
In the morning I checked out rather crabbily because nobody at the desk could translate into these girls’ tribal languages what I needed to tell them in order to prepare for what lay ahead. They seemed to expect more larking, although apprehensive at the same time at being
carried ever farther from home. Their errant eyes, flicking away in habitual embarrassment whenever you looked at them, were not transparent windows, as many children’s are, but trouble spots, and to glance at all three faces at once was a bit like watching a billiards game. But they leaned against and bumped each other, twined their arms and hugged as the car swayed, chatting in a mix of Madi, Dinka, and Juba’s dialect of Arabic.
At Jinja, we stopped to look at Owen Falls, where Lake Victoria’s weight at its lip powers Uganda’s turbines, and where fish plants were drying loads of protein, copper was being smelted, and tobacco, plywood, beer, and sugar processed: quite wonderful, if you’ve never seen a factory before. They were riveted, when I got them out of the car for a practice inspection—yet not actually knowing what I would have told them if I had been able to communicate. Tall Nyoka acted like a leader, perhaps because Dinkas always do, feeling superior to the more sedentary, agricultural tribes but not rubbing it in. Ya-Ya, whose name Margaret had said meant “floating,” “free spirit,” or “flighty” in Madi, was interested in independence, not leadership, whereas Tongkwoit accepted the fate of the handicapped to be downtrodden.
We drove another seventy miles, to Bumulimba and Busia, where the trucks and buses were lined up in the heat, and ate a front-seat lunch of passion fruit, baked corn, and shish kebabs bought through the window from vendors whose whole livelihood was the slow-moving queue. I made the children wipe their faces carefully so they looked neat in their new clothes, as if securely under the care of an international agency: perhaps even in transit to America—who would quibble with that? I peered through the dusty clamor for an official who might recognize me, but I was not enough of a regular, and my greenhorn notion of having the Land Cruiser washed in the hotel garage last evening so that its white paint and PAF logo stood out bright and clear appeared less authentic than the battered exteriors of the leatherier expatriates’ vehicles: real missionaries and “old Africa hands” who could have gone through the barrier with a passportless albino, though they themselves looked hardly white anymore.
Many lorries were empty, returning from Rwanda, Congo, or Uganda to Nairobi and Mombasa after a delivery, and didn’t require intensive inspection. Just the paperwork and double-checking that a peek in the back provided, and they were waved on. But every bus or van disembarked its passengers laboriously, with boxes, bags, then everybody lining up patiently, while the market women sashayed past, anticipating an approving whack.
A fixer in civvies approached, for speedy facilitation, and I gave him my sundowner grin. But when he saw I just had my own credentials and car registration and Al’s letter for documentation, he wished us good luck and moved to the car behind me. The uniformed young man who followed, eventually, had a sense of humor. My “harem” did not possess papers? he asked. No passports or travel clearance? He looked at each girl carefully, while I thought to bring out my SPLA “visa,” validated by “Jane,” permitting me in rebel-held areas, to prove where I’d been. No, I was not transporting them into Kenya for purposes of prostitution (“Black olives?” he said), but medical care, clearly; and, as a recent language major at the University of Nairobi, he happened to be intrigued to hear the relation of Nyoka’s Dinka words to Kenya’s Samburu or Masai languages, plus Ya-Ya’s ignorance of Swahili yet responsiveness to Arabic in rudimentary form. He confirmed with a flashlight, poking under the car and under the dirty seats, that I’d been bouncing about the bush a good deal, despite the incongruous washing I’d paid for.
“They’re like birds, aren’t they?” he observed, after discovering the girls didn’t know English, and referring to their eyes’ swiveling. “What are your plans for them?”
“My plans are to fix them up properly and bring them back on my next trip.”
“To build the new South Sudan on their slender shoulders! But I’m going to assume you’re an honorable man. An honest Protestant Against Famine!” he exclaimed with a laugh, and stamped my reentry back into Kenya, waving us through. We’d been lucky in our inspector. A trim college graduate with a family doubtless positioned to pull strings and land him this job.
Sweating, we enjoyed sodas and chocolate in Busia, alongside the hustlers and market women whom I’d wanted to secret Ya-Ya among to attempt the crossing. But I noticed their tribal differences were quite marked, in color, physiognomy, and build; and her wand-like eyeball gyrations would have drawn extra attention to these. The officers would have questioned her, found her incomprehensible, and we’d be in trouble now, not Nairobi-bound.
Smugglers were offering me watches and stuff, whichever direction I might be headed, figuring that no undercover cop would be embroidered with the company I had. The girls habitually looked upward a lot—I suppose to avoid meeting the snicker in other people’s eyes—but this was catching, and the sensation of casting your gaze up, watching the sky even in daylight outside a roadside café, was like leaning back in a planetarium. You saw too much, in other words, in a way, as if, disoriented, you took in all of the stars at once because, in concert with them, your eyes or consciousness had become unhitched.
We hit the road and, ignoring hitchhikers, reached Nairobi past nightfall. I aimed for the storefront shelter for street children, not knowing where else to go, though no beds were available there, either. The girls slept in the car yet again but, not being used to softer conditions, regarded this as a continuation of their adventure. I slept head to foot in my sleeping bag in half of the director’s bed, since his wife was on hardship leave in the States.
Chapter 8
• • •
I SLEPT LATE, WAKING TO PLAYGROUND SHOUTS AND BALL-ON-THE wall impacts. My girls had already picked out new outfits for themselves from a bale of church-shipped clothing from Dallas or someplace. I was so tired I made Al come to debrief me at the church office down the street, where cots had been found for Ya-Ya and company, and to pick up the Land Cruiser, which needed a lube job, oil change, springs replaced.
Al’s wife was the sort of spectacularly beautiful Somali woman who could have been posing for leggy accessories ads in front of the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue if she had married another kind of American, instead of cuddling AIDS orphans on her lap in the Kibera slums of Nairobi. But any man who would have taken her to Madison Avenue wouldn’t have discovered and rescued her from death in Mogadishu, in the first place. When other whites ogled her and suggested a modeling career, she remembered that. She had appeared in shoots done for East African publications, or hotels in the Seychelles, displaying the unflappability of a woman rescued from a warlord’s concubinage (boosted surreptitiously into an NGO’s chartered plane at a bare airstrip), who knew she never need worry where her next luncheon yogurt was going to come from. Nonetheless, she wouldn’t have been so unflappable with our street children, as well, if she hadn’t once been in Mogadishu herself.
I groaned, though, when we were alone, telling Al and her that I was beginning to find discouraging the task of teaching the alphabet to kids thinner than hunger, who might be dead of AIDS before they had occasion to use it.
“Well, Ruth enjoyed your company,” he answered dryly, as if to pose an alternative, and handed me my check. “I’ll send you back when her ship comes in. Or you can do a balloon safari for some Japs.” He said she sounded unchanged on the radio, “except in survival mode”—which, of course, was how you would be when you had neither food nor medicines to dispense and a hundred thousand refugees around who needed them.
My girls were learning the rules of hopscotch and soccer from others in the courtyard. But who knew such a surgeon? – Al muttered to himself. Triage ward doctors, yes, that you carried a child to who’d been hit in traffic. The phones were out in much of the city, so even a brain-storm today wouldn’t have solved the puzzle. The hangdog middle-aged Oklahoman who ran this shelter and soup kitchen for street kids, with the Swarthmore interns, didn’t know an eye surgeon any more than we did (and, it turned out, his wife had told him she was going to stay in Am
erica if the interns didn’t leave). But Al was smarter than me. He remembered Beryl: “That San Francisco divorcée you were shtupping in Karen. Why don’t you take them over there? She might pay for it.”
I yawned because, although it was a pretty smart idea, I didn’t have the energy right now for the winsome type of phoning that would be required, and to clean the girls up to look adorable, and myself enough to remind Beryl why she had once accepted me as a housemate. In the meantime I wanted to get back to my rooftop swimming pool at the New Stanley, after mailing everybody’s missives and stopping at the bank, and then to my hideaway across the street at the Arab’s pocket hotel, where I could lie like a lizard on the balcony in dishabille and give myself a Tusker headache. Tension had wrung me out.
First, beside the pool, Alitalia and Swissair crews were rusticating with margaritas, the pilots inevitably outnumbered by the stewardesses, who looked immaculate even in their bathing suits and coverup: invulnerable, too, against anything Africa might throw at them because, of course, no matter what happened they would make the plane. At an airport besieged by frightened and stranded expatriates trying to escape a city afire with mutiny and riots, they’d be on their way to Fiumicino, along with the luckiest few. I remembered, on the Nile, watching with Ruth as the Antonov circled our area for a target to bomb, while, three times as high, tiny but potent, like a platinum cross, the daily British airways flight from Heathrow crossed the sky.
Children Are Diamonds Page 16
