Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  Al was dickering with a pilot we knew who flew rented two-seat propeller Cessnas into hairy airstrips in Zaire, where Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, or Sudan bled into it, usually with some Serb or Slav along who bought and sold items he shouldn’t have—thugs who’d participated in more brutality than most other Europeans lately have, or fought as mercenaries for apartheid in Rhodesia and shot a lot of blacks. Our pilot was the type you needed to deal with to extract a person such as Ruth from a place like Loa, in the absence of an Ed. He looked like Mickey Rooney, so answered to “Mickey,” and had learned to love war in Vietnam, then stayed in the Pacific doing contract flying for an oil company, with Australia as much a home as America. He was a gambler who didn’t gamble much on the ground, although you’d watch him circulate at the Casino with dancing eyes, as if craps, blackjack, and roulette weren’t quite real enough.

  These people liked you or loathed you but didn’t make a lot of distinctions, and didn’t want any “tell” in their face to let you know where the chips fell. On a bush airstrip, you would probably have to shoot them while they were grinning and greeting you, because that’s when they would be likely to think it opportune to shoot you. And on an outlaw militia’s airstrip in the Congo, there are no police or consular officials or coroners: just vultures to do the autopsy and record the fingerprints and dentistry. You’d be recycled into wings.

  Despite their terseness on the radio, the Catholic and Norwegian offices in Nairobi were frank with Al when he phoned. Father Leo, Nancy, and Elizabeth were going to sneak away toward Chukudum, if the coast was clear for half a moment. Once they were in the Imatongs, they should be safe with the mountain tribes, Acholi and Latuka, whom Leo had been ministering to for years. But the strafing had gotten so bad that they would need to hit the road when Khar toum’s two MiGs were on the runway in Juba being refueled, then calculate when to hide underneath the trees somewhere en route during their dash (since night travel was out) when the MiGs jumped airborne again and came back. During daylight hours, however, patients and parishioners still lined up in front of their clinic or chapel for counsel or care, even though their last supply truck had hit a mine in Uganda and they had nothing to give out except affection. “So it’s difficult to leave,” as the two nuns’ supervisor we’d lunched with explained.

  The Norwegians were not out of medical stuff. Since they were furnishing the SPLA’s only surgeon in this theater of the war, minimal night deliveries were somehow reaching them. But the surgeon, his wife, who was the surgical nurse, and the anesthetist were all a wreck, the guy at their Nairobi office said.

  “Can you imagine how he feels, seeing every night young men brought in, howling on a stretcher, whose lives he could save—they need to be sewn up at least to stop the bleeding—if he hadn’t already been operating for twelve or fourteen hours and can’t lift his arms or squint his eyes to focus on the scalpel and the needle, and him dehydrated from diarrhea, himself. His scrub suit is soiled, his hands filthy, and the new ones die on their gurneys while he tries to sleep. But in the morning ten more are carried in before he grabs his breakfast. And his scrub suit hasn’t been boiled because his wife needed to try to sleep, too.”

  In other words, they could neither function nor conscientiously leave, and their transmissions to Nairobi were no doubt being monitored from several directions, not just ours—perhaps recorded for translation by someone who knew Scandinavian. I’d gotten a gander at them—him tense, with thinning hair, already astonished, appalled, pale, and girding himself, as if shedding pounds, after what he had seen along the road, like a drumbeat of preliminary disaster, and his wife edgy, game, but alarmed—only as they’d passed Ruth’s place in their jeep, arriving for their first tour in a war zone. The anesthetist was a younger man than the surgeon, sitting up straight, expecting to be surprised, wearing his idealism on his sleeve. And even the unflappable Felix, across the border, sounded perturbed, because the mine that had exploded under the Maryknolls’ resupply truck in LRA territory near him, mangling but not killing the driver, had caused his usual middleman to radio saying there was a work stoppage. For the first time since he had left Ethiopia, he was running out of food and medicines. “And bandits are all over. They know if the Arabs come, they will get the leavings.” “Emperors,” he called them because of their life-and-death power, point-blank executions, and he was tempted to take a vacation he was owed by his NGO to Capetown for a rest, yet knew he couldn’t, with the landslide of refugees that would be tumbling his way, building. “I need reinforcements,” he told his boss, but using English, not German, for the rest of his radio audience.

  Mickey, the pilot Al and I had a drink with to explore the possibility of a rescue flight, was a short, prickly guy, all pep but a little tone-deaf, like Rooney in the movies; I don’t know his legal name. He’d just enjoyed some R&R in Dubrovnik with a Croatian pal, plus a “wife-for-a-month,” apparently a Romanian illegal he’d found on the scene: “Until the joystick called. The other joystick!” He mimicked how the yoke in his rental plane jutted up between his legs. “But I might retire there if I ever clear my chips off the table.” The charge for Sudan ought to be higher than for going into Zaire, he added, because there were no MiGs or Stingers when you flew into Zaire, just what was scary on the ground. Any MiG in Sudan’s airspace knew you were flying for groups that were helping the rebels, and the rebels had a few dozen Stingers some out-of-sync kid might pick up and point at you “to see what happens.”

  I liked Mickey, though, because the rush for him was in the landings, not the diamonds his Serb or Slav or Croat smugglers grabbed—landing in a clearing and then finding out if it was the right one; and if not, if he could possibly take off again. In New Guinea, while flying for the oil company, Mickey freelanced for an anthropologist who sought to be lowered, naked, on the end of a rope into openings in the jungle canopy in the territories of tribes that had never experienced contact with Europeans before. Being naked, he claimed, frightened them less, since they were the same, and the natives could see he had no hidden arms. For Mickey, to share the first part of the experience had been like when he surfed, riding a wave.

  The Catholics had vanished off the radar. No transmissions as of yesterday. Overland was smarter, Al and Mickey agreed. People would think it was bad luck to hurt them, and there were Christian Dinkas who could have helped; whereas Ruthie was a solo operator, without Rome behind her. Mickey liked Ruthie and could hear the Kamba’s worried voice behind her when she was on the radio. “But no space closer than the Norwegians’ to land.”

  Ya-Ya and her friends awaited their surgical appointments by the gigantic adventure of exploring Nairobi on foot, hand in hand. Parliament, Government House, the Hilton, the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, the U.S. embassy, glassy skyscrapers, the zebra-striped newspaper building. They crossed the gridwork of avenues as red lights turned to green, traffic-dodging, window-shopping, running in the parks, locating the railroad station. I felt bad about spending more for Josephine’s brothers and sisters—who needed those school outfits and uniforms—than on them and, separately, buying an adorable chemise for Josie herself, who was “testing” my “chemistry” or “wiring” by having me comb and brush her hair and dress as well as undress her in my room. But she made me search her out in student hangouts, as the taxi waited, instead of obliging me by coming to the Arab’s on her own. She wanted to be a pharmacist, which lent her a pragmatic take on sex. Although she knew an American was almost certainly free of AIDS, after teasing me with her mouth, she expertly pushed my dick aside as it began to ejaculate so it squirted harmlessly into the air; then waggled its limpness, smiling wryly as I fluffed and buried my hands in her hair, and gazed at me judiciously, as if to gauge how to move from tantalizing to managing me. My voice was too husky to use, but I asked whether she respected what we aid workers were doing.

  “Of course. But you’re so lonely! Maybe I should go over to teach algebra for your country in Harlem. Lick me,” she added, and pointed a red
fingernail at a crumb of coffee cake that had fallen onto her stomach, somewhat south of her navel. I really was speechless, so, smiling into my pleading eyes, she dabbed a drop of honey on each nipple and spilled another crumb or two. “Hurry. I have class.” Finally she straddled and tickled me until my writhing wriggling underneath her vulva completed the trick of causing her to come. Then: “Hurry. Dress me, so I can go to class.”

  I had to get over to Al’s, myself, to meet Attlee’s widow, who wanted a monthly pension, in addition to the lump-sum compensation paid. We didn’t have pensions, being a temporary, if not to say fly-by-night, NGO. But I ought to have met with her in these past couple of weeks to praise the loyalty and courage of the man.

  She handled the heads and shoulders of two gangly, discombobulated boys she’d brought with her to make her case—Attlee’s, although he hadn’t had the chance to teach them English yet—as well as a brother, whether hers or his, for further moral support, who lived with her for her protection, she said, though he was slightly drunk on homebrewed kumi kumi. He worked irregular hours on a loading dock.

  “Do you want them to do that?” she asked, meaning the boys. “No education?” She squeezed their necks—a gaunt woman, not underfed on the African scale but like a Depression photograph from the Dust Bowl era in the United States. And when I mentioned Ruth’s high opinion of Attlee, she snorted.

  “Ruth! She was a funny one,” she said.

  “She is a funny one,” I agreed. “But doing good.”

  “And now he’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  I shook hands with the two young boys, feeling calluses they already had. Al gave them each the equivalent of twenty dollars, as well as their mother: about two months’ worth of bare-bones living. Al had outbid another agency for nine truckloads of beans and cooking oil, and was distracted by phone calls relating to this, and by his diversion of them to a less hard-pressed camp than Ruthie’s, not in a war zone. We were listening for her to turn on her radio and check in, so she could say a few words to Attlee’s widow and end our saddening spate of guilty bickering.

  Instead, Father Leo’s welcome brogue broke in. “Brendan here. We’re in Dublin. Nancy and Elizabeth, too. So, not to worry.”

  Then the Maryknolls’ supervisor we’d lunched with answered: “Okay! Super news! I read you. Ten-four. We won’t! Thank God.”

  Saint Brendan, the sixth-century Celtic explorer was Leo’s nom de plume when he preferred to use one, and of course “Dublin” meant safety, wherever in the mountains he and the two sisters had holed up, eating bushbuck meat and drinking millet beer with a tribal clan. Nancy must have knitting with her, for nieces and nephews in the States, and Elizabeth her dog-eared copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse, which she dipped into nearly as often as the Bible.

  Thereupon, Ruth burst on-air chuckling, transmitting from what she called “Dodge City,” and pretending to try to goad Leo into revealing his location. “I bet it’s Gilo. That’s where the British used to fish and hunt. There’s a golden-skinned woman who lives up in Gilo on the mountainside whose father was a Brit. Are you friends?”

  “Brendan” laughed. “You’d have to ask Liz and Nancy.”

  “I can hear the rats in your thatch. That telltale rustle.”

  He didn’t answer because the Acholis who most likely were sheltering them would indeed have lent them thatch-roofed mud huts.

  “They’d sure be eaten here!” Ruth remarked. “But not much is moving due to our Russian friends.”

  Ruth meant the MiGs; and my memory immediately regurgitated their bass banshee scream, which you didn’t hear until after they’d gone by and the warning was too late. Attlee’s widow left with her boys, quietly, bitterly, hearing no reference to her loss, as I was asking about little Leo and the jackal puppy, in between Al’s more probing questions to Makundi, the Kamba, in Kikuyu and Swahili, languages the average Dinka listener or Arab eavesdropper would not be fluent in. The gist of his replies was that the war of nerves was getting them and everybody down. That sense of emergency caused us to neglect her.

  “You can’t shoot a Stinger at the sunset,” Ruth said, which was where the planes came from. But Al cut her off, lest Khartoum’s monitor be offended.

  “We need to extract you,” he volunteered again.

  “Before the crunch?” No guerrillas were detailed to guard her nowadays, she indicated; and Bol’s schoolboys were at the front. “When somebody dies, one of them gets the gun.” Ladoku, the Madi Anglican minister, was still around—“as thin as Christ in frescoes,” she told me. That she remained so sharp made her rescue seem all the more pressing. Yet thirty miles or so as the crow flies separated Ruth from the Norwegians—if they were ever going to evacuate—as well as the now bridgeless Nile. And they did have a separate road on their own side of the river that wound clear into Uganda at Moyo, toward Felix’s refuge. “There would be a price in added risk for them to detour to fetch me. Besides, I don’t think they’re leaving,” she insisted. And her tone stiffened. “They have a patient load you wouldn’t believe. Witnesses are needed, too, you know? They’re trying to panic us.”

  Loopy as she was, Ruth’s forceful voice made me miss her. Such energy to bend to a task, if she had food to dole out, meds to apply. Was she tramping her Labyrinth obsessively, while an inferno whipped up outside and thousands crowded into her compound to sleep, on the theory that the Muslims wouldn’t shell or bomb it—that the tanks and the MiGs would go by?

  “Is she paralyzed? Can’t say she was wrong?” Al wanted to know after our chat. And had he mismanaged Ruth? In business you didn’t hire screwballs, but people looking out for number one. Yet odd ducks gravitated to the front lines of charity work, and sometimes those right on the rim of being screwballs served Christ best. Al suggested I drive up at least as far as Atiak and pre-position myself with the vehicle and supplies.

  “Mr. Expendable. No kids, no insurance policy. Write him off,” I joked. I was wistful, though, watching a child clasp a bouquet of bananas in her arms in our kitchen—wishing I could whisk that sumptuousness to Ruthie’s churchyard.

  But the splendidly various sky, from the New Stanley’s rooftop, full of clouds scudding, and kites and swallows, exhilarated me—even ignited a sort of continental patriotism, Africa über alles. When I heard several ignorant tourists topping each other’s dictator tales, Malawi’s having kept a special crocodile pool for dissidents, etc., I said to them, “That’s actually not the point. Get out of town for a while. Open your eyes. Womb of the world.” The climate felt that way that day.

  The trouble was, the Arab’s phone rang for me the next midmorning. The Juba breakout had begun, and a bombing accidentally (as Khartoum claimed) hit the Norwegians’ compound along their road, killing all three of them at the dispensary, plus dozens of patients, Al told me. And the Norwegian embassy was organizing a twin-engine Cessna flight with Mickey to their little grass airstrip to retrieve the bodies. That fiercely partisan Irish girl who thought the SPLA was like her country’s IRA and had served as the doctor’s gofer had survived because she was bunking else-where with a Dinka officer when the offensive began. But she wanted to clear out now, with the coffins, and head straight home, she confessed through sobs. It was “a charnel house, horrible,” the gore of revolution, and yet since the Norwegians’ jeep had been with her, it was intact, so Al’s reason for calling me as soon as they got off the radio was to point out that she could give me the key if I went in on the plane during the cease-fire the embassy had arranged and go and round up Ruthie.

  “The plane’ll wait?”

  “No, no. It’s a five-hour truce, including the time in their airspace.”

  “So?” I said.

  “That would get you there safe and sound and give you their jeep. Safer than the hassles of driving in our vehicle all the way from here.” To my silence on the phone, he added, “You can’t beat that logo on the door, and tie white on the antenna. Their logo will get you anywhere unless you�
��re going toward Khartoum.”

  I laughed, but could picture all of the forensic washing and lifting I would need to help with or witness, not even to think of the hospital’s patients strewn around, dead or alive, in agony but not being airlifted anywhere.

  “A sort of head start,” I said ironically, because the tanks would be following me down to Ruthie’s.

  “They’re loading the coffins. An embassy guy’s flying in, too, with Mickey. Double protection. I’ll meet you there with what I’ve got.”

  For a minute I supposed he was coming along, but no, he had children, he said; he meant he’d meet me at the airfield with a trunk of rations and medicines. I could hear in my memory the MiG pilots’ voices, two or three hirelings from the former Soviet bloc who flew the planes Khartoum had acquired, gabbling incomprehensibly to one another in abbreviated Russian, or whatever Slavic language it was, from their cockpits. Once an SPLA officer told Bol their wavelength and Bol tipped us off, we tuned in whenever the jets screamed over Loa like bass banshees, hearing snatches from “behind the Iron Curtain,” as we said. I doubted that they personally cared about having plugged the poor Norwegians—and Khartoum’s had been crocodile tears, since the Norwegians had been aiding the enemy—or, after the truce, would hesitate to zero in on my little jeep scuttling south toward Ruth’s place, with no diplomatic instructions to spare me: unlike Mickey’s little Cessna gliding through the Imatongs with a consul aboard.

  Al understood my mental processes. Without explaining or deciding, I asked if Ruth was willing to be retrieved.

  “Yes. I think the news sobered her, if that’s the term. In fact, she apologized.” When I was quiet, he added, “There’s a window.” Didn’t refer to loading the coffins again but employed comfort-zone phrases like “I’ll meet you” and “The jeep will be yours.” Knowing Al, I wasn’t swayed by these: rather, by Ruthie’s plight. That she had “apologized” was extraordinary. I’d guessed, feeling foolish, she would never let on. Like me, I sensed, she believed she had made something of a hash of her life and, without admitting that, was trying to compensate.