In one of those snap decisions, a one-eighty, a flip-around you come to, I said yes instead of no, and so for the umpteenth time found myself packing my battered kit bag, tossing the extras into another duffel to store in the Arab’s behind-the-bar closet, and crossing the street to the New Stanley’s taxi stand.
Chapter 9
• • •
AT THE AIRPORT, THE COFFINS, AN ELOQUENT PINE THREESOME, AS advertised, had been delivered and loaded. The junior Norwegian diplomat was on hand, and even a pathologist from the city morgue with a camera. Al met me with his hundred-pound, leather-bound, mercy-flight trunk full of necessities, and other medical or nutritional cartons, plus a jerrican of extra gas for the jeep and two fifty-kilo sacks of cornmeal. Because this was so squeaky clean, aboveboard a gambit, with clearance in advance from Khartoum, and reporters on the tarmac to record the takeoff, we didn’t have to stoop to any scuzzy subterfuge in the paperwork, like you’d do in a diamond flight.
Promptly then, Mickey had us barreling down the runway, tilting brusquely into the air, with all Africa and the heavens themselves laid out in front—me in the copilot’s seat. Mickey, sporting a shoulder holster and boodle belt, a coffee-can spittoon wedged next to him, looked raffish. He loved takeoffs like a NASCAR event, and grasping the yoke, he gobbled that great vista of the Rift Valley, precipitously cut in the gargantuan veldt, with Lilliputian umbrella trees stippled about. We flew over the Aberdares and the Mau Escarpment and the pastoral plains between Mounts Kenya and Elgon—both higher than us—and Lakes Hannington and Baringo and the Laikipia Plateau. Then the parched lands east of the Cherangani Hills; the twisty blue of Lake Turkana. Sitting behind me, the man from the morgue was suitably callow, “a convert to atheism,” he informed me, although he had sought a posting to India instead of to Africa, in order to steep himself in the Eastern religions, he said. “Here it seems to be the Crusades all over again. Minarets versus nuns.”
Landing at the U.N.’s relief-operations outpost at Lokichoggio, we tanked up for the Sudan leg, while Khartoum confirmed again that its two MiGs at Juba’s airport would be grounded, expecting us. A chartered Antonov sat on the runway nearby, used by the U.N. for food deliveries to designated famine areas in the southern Sudan, with permission from Khartoum. A mission-of-mercy Antonov, but it was startling to be parked next to the familiar shape of a type of plane I’d watched in other hands on bombing runs over the Nile. The crew, too, gabbing in Russian with each other at the coffee machine in the office, gave me the creeps because they sounded like the hireling Slavs we eavesdropped on from Ruth’s place when a MiG or an Antonov went over, mercenaries bombing the blacks for Khartoum. These guys dropped sorghum instead.
The U.N. operates a delicious cafeteria and pleasant dormitory facilities at Lokichoggio for staff who deserve some coddling after arduous weeks in the field. But with the unrefrigerated bodies of the Norwegians decomposing, and our consular officer and Zanzabari coroner consequently turning antsy, Mickey and I couldn’t hobnob and sample the menu as we would have liked to. Wobbling into the air again, we swung between the drier Karamoja Range and more verdant Dongotona Mountains, with the comely Didinga Hills and Boya Hills off our tail, as we turned west, lifting like a puppet swaying on a string into the serious altitude of the Imatongs. Lotuke, Chukudum, Ikoto, Isoke, and Kapoeta were visible if you knew where to look, but mostly a roller coaster of seething, thrumming, roadless green, an anarchy never logged, underneath us as we surmounted one of Kinyeti’s shoulders.
“Leo!” Mickey called out his window, while we were joggled like a loose balloon in Kinyeti’s private turbulence of winds. Although the peak was turbaned in clouds, we could see the heath above timberline on top. Elizabeth, Nancy, and Leo might have holed up anywhere below, perhaps peering up at our cicada buzz, our minuscule glint in the sun.
“They’re okay,” he told me, as if I didn’t know. “I’ll get the call to fetch them at Chukudum. The Acholis will have passed them off to the Latukas, and the Latukas to the Didingas and the nuns at Chukudum.” He imitated a quarterback doing something of the kind with a football. The Arabs controlled Kapoeta, the district capital but, as in Juba, were under siege, and outlying hamlets like Chukudum, where the Maryknolls had their clinic, were garrisoned by the SPLA. He pointed toward a few huts in a mite of a clearing in the forests three-quarters down Kinyeti’s north massif, where the golden-skinned woman was said to live, left behind among the Acholis in Gilo by an itinerant English officer half a century ago as a baby and a mark of brief and nominal European occupation. He never came back, so she spoke no English and had survived on the shamanistic powers ascribed to her locally, and midwifing and so on. Mickey, though a collector of arcana, had never been to see her; even Leo never had—“Unless now!” he said.
He could point at Katire and Torit, Obb and Parjok, Magwe and Palotaka, Karpeto and Kerripi—settlements like pimples in the heaving ocean of vitality, tracklessly green and stretching twentyeight hundred miles to Liberia and Sierra Leone, sufficient to sap the bravado of any bush pilot except the likes of Mickey, who was beating a rhythm on his knee with his fist, or eating hummus from a can with a forefinger, and drinking thermos coffee. It didn’t seem a particularly funereal or hairy flight to him because he often flew into rebel-held enclaves in the Congo, Somalia, or Sudan without any protective clearance or diplomats aboard for a guarantee. The Allied Democratic Forces, fighting Uganda from Zaire; or a rump Nuer faction fighting the Dinkas from the swampy village of Lafon, north of Torit; or the Equatoria Defence Force, of Mandaris, Baris, and others the Dinkas had persecuted; or the homicidal lunatics of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who cut people’s ears off in the name of the Christian God: all might be operating somewhere underneath us, not to mention the SPLA’s militias, or their Arab enemies. That’s why Leo and the nuns, during the walk from Opari to Chukudum, if the car broke down or had become dangerous to use, would need the protection of people who loved him from his years of pastoral care. Just one jughead with a Kalashnikov could splat them as anonymously as some small band of Somali shiftas searching below a ridgeline for gold or ivory, and themselves fair game for anybody.
Mickey hadn’t known these Norwegians, because they came to Africa on limited stints and left. “But Ruthie’s a good old bag,” he said. “One time I had hepatitis and she could tell by looking at my eyes and told me to lie down and get treated. Otherwise I’d have kept right on flying and collapsed someplace you wouldn’t ever want to be.”
He pointed to the collection of hills surrounding her church at Loa, when we reached the river, and down to the Catholics’ chapel and mission, twenty miles north of Ruth’s. We could also see Juba—my first glimpse: a scattered locality including an airport with a tower and runways expanded for the military, and a dock on the Nile where a defunct ferryboat was moored, two or three blocks of cement stores, a paved street with several squat brick administrative buildings, some bungalows or villas for the honchos in charge, barracks for the soldiers, a down-at-heels, one-story stucco hospital, and an awful sprawl of slum neighborhoods of thatch in disrepair and mud, oily with stagnant sewage, hodge-podged by the three-year siege and housing a couple hundred thousand wretched souls who hadn’t managed to tiptoe through the rings of scrubby minefields both sides had laid irregularly around the city and get safely out. It was ugly. There were vultures on unburied bodies, both goats and humans, in this huge circle, and jackals that glanced up at us with flesh hanging from their mouths. Yet people who made it through encountered famously rough treatment from a Dinka cadre suspicious of why they had remained in Juba for so long in the first place.
Besides the ring of mines—where two goats that hadn’t finished dying, apparently panicked by the birds, were staggering, trying to stand—the city’s spraddled slums had been partly appropriated for military use, and mortar-blasted by the SPLA. Other mortar shells had strayed into the pathetically jammed-together hovels where women, children, and the elderly had been trying to survive the
siege, fed by the Lutherans’ weekly flights into Juba from Kenya, balancing the Catholics’ feeding on “our” side. In Nairobi, the aid facilitators joked mordantly about how they might have unintentionally prolonged the war—Lutherans feeding Muslims, Catholics the animists—which was not what they wanted, regardless of the egging on they might be getting from the diplomats. To look down for the first time at the squalor and privation our side’s siege was inflicting upon tens of thousands of trapped civilians was breath-taking—“enemy territory.” And there was the Antonov that bombed us, and two MiGs, on the airfield waiting for us to do our business and the truce to end. But when Mickey chuckled and reminded me of how I’d demonized those hired Slavs, “you with your CIA guys,” I had to admit that I might be flying against the Dinkas, too, if I were living inside the siege lines.
We saw muzzle flashes, burning huts, and a blackish tank askew on a roadway as we banked. Inside that broken circle of machine-gun sniping and mortar explosions nobody was moving as in a normal provincial city, just scurrying for bare essentials, even though the breakout had loosened the guerrillas’ grip. My sorrow spread so far beyond the three Norwegians who had died for their idealism that I wished I were back in New Hampshire teaching American schoolkids about our own Civil War, instead of watching this one. From the air, you could spot the positions that were crumbling and who, hunkered there, was doomed. The disintegrating siege line reminded me of burning my bridges in Alexandria, after watching my company’s ships being destroyed in the Umm Qasr harbor on CNN during the Gulf War, and how I’d emptied its Egyptian bank accounts and stuffed the cash into my girlfriend’s leotard before we flew to Heathrow. On the flight itself, joking with Amy about the corporate “coffers,” I’d realized I had committed an irreversibly stupid act. She later changed her name by marrying someone else, and she wasn’t a signatory anyhow, bless her, so I was more a target. And here I was, slanting steeply toward the Norwegians’ hand-mown, stone-picked airstrip, a dozen miles south of Juba, wishing I wasn’t, especially when Mickey muttered, “Holy shit.”
The MiGs had vaulted into the sky behind us but, instead of plugging us, were bulleting away toward one of the other government towns under siege: Wau or Kapoeta, Torit or Malakal. Our location being known, every other battleground in Equatoria was open to them. We could see the Maryknolls’ stubby steeple up the curly, gorge-gouged Nile, which boasted a slick stretch near where the Norwegians had built their infirmary, and where the Irish girl and several others were waving frantically. Mickey’s prematurely gray hair shone silver in the sunlight, to match his wicked grin at how bumpily we were going to hit the runway, the crescendo of a trip for him. But the blitzed hospital building wiped us clean of our preoccupations.
The bodies, black and white, were mangled, discolored, concussively dispersed, and not yet in bags, as we had anticipated. The surgeon still registered his amazement, but his wife, the nurse, in her green scrub suit, looked agonized, with ghastly shards of glass and stone and wood embedded in her, punctures that had bled profusely. The second Norwegian man, the anesthetist, appeared to have lived awhile, crawling aimlessly, hemorrhaging from his gashes. Four or five times as many Africans had died, patients and helpers strewn like after an eruption. The wounded had been lying for all these hours untended in the jumble of the crushed building, with any means of helping them also smashed. The Irish girl was not a nurse, had no bandaging or morphine, and felt constrained not to move the corpses until they had been photographed. So, except for a few starvelings who had been scavenging for survival items like dented containers, stained tarpaulins and gurneys, fly-covered scraps of bloody cloth, it was unmitigated horror.
She had assembled a pitiful pile of belongings to go with them. But in the meantime, the injured Africans were begging for water, painkillers, a tourniquet, a situation to recline in without stones poking their backs. We unloaded the coffins. The coroner and the diplomat indeed took pictures. We then washed, adjusted or painstakingly tended to, and wrapped the three eloquently white bodies, which spoke volumes in the din of war, though not so poignantly as the living who pleaded for care. They and the unburied dead had no relatives or buddies around to minister to them. Nobody was digging either graves or foxholes, and it became unutterably sad when a bloodstained English speaker upbraided us, then wilted to the ground.
“We kept our hopes up because we thought a doctor would come,” he said. That is, a replacement on the plane, not merely a burial party. Mickey and I were loading Al’s trunkful of front-line medications into the back of the jeep, along with the hundred kilos of cornmeal he had sent. Moira, the Irish girl, had handed me the key, kissed her Dinka officer good-bye, and vanished onto the plane to keep the coffins company. He radioed permission for me to cross the Nile to Ruth’s side on a certain secret ferry the SPLA maintained now that the bridges had been bombed out, then jogged off to rejoin his unit. The antenna still sported a Norwegian flag, to which I added a square of white sheeting, and topped up the gas tank from my jerrican, in case that got grabbed at the first roadblock. The hospital’s fuel drums had exploded in the raid. Only masculine pride kept me from sneaking back onto the plane.
The moaning of the dying asking for family, for shelter, for water had been a counterpoint to our hasty undertaking arrangements—the folding of amputated arms, closing jellied eyes, capping the doctor’s half-scalped skull. The temporary coffins, one-size-fits-all, seemed uncomforting. No respectful proprieties were possible when we were all in such a hurry, and yet the Zanzabari suggested in passing that it was a much more compact scene than a militia massacre, where the dead and dismembered have run in all directions to escape the machetes: “So you take it in only gradually and forget it more slowly when you are home.”
I nodded. I was digging out ampules of morphine, intending to leave along with the plane in order not to be swarmed by rubberneckers who needed something to eat, if left alone here. But I wanted to give some relief.
“It was not so human.” He pointed upward, at the air. “That you can forget easier than what the machetes do.”
One person was herself a nurse and instructed me as to how much to shoot her with. A Dinka, she thanked me when she saw she wasn’t going to be evacuated, her humor intact. “Tell Ruthie I had a hysterectomy,” she said, pointing at her gory wound. She had managed to crawl into the brush for some shade. Ambulatory patients with shrapnel in them thronged around as I administered a couple of other lethal doses to those worse off; and Mickey yelled.
Under my driver’s seat I’d felt a few days’ worth of Norwegian army rations and a first-aid kit. Mickey started his engines and yelled again, so I walked over, noticing Moira in the copilot’s seat and really no room for me, though I’d half-hoped he was telling me there was. Instead, he surprised me by throwing out his emergency fanny pack containing a compass, duct tape, water purifier, Cipro, hardtack, kippered herring, and the like.
“God luv ya, man! See you in Juba if they catch you—or Khartoum! Al will pay me back.” He laughed, being used to dropping daredevils off in goose-bump situations, and pointed me toward the jeep, so we could leave at the same time. Gripping the yoke, he taxied to the leeward end of the strip. “The doctor, the doctor!” people were shouting, as they recognized for sure that they were being abandoned with no assistance, no food, unless the Arabs brought some. Whiteman-style, I scrammed, slipping my motor into gear to reach the spindly road just as he mounted over the trees and could no longer radio the SPLA to rescue me from the crowd. And now, when Juba’s control tower confirmed his departure, the offensive would no doubt resume.
Once clear of the disaster zone, I drove slowly, with my pennants fluttering from the aerial and the good-guy logo on the door, hoping not to tempt any hair-trigger bozos at either side. Roadblocks might be my least risk, compared to ordnance hidden at free-fire angles to kill an APC or tank with infantry advancing south that you’d never see till you were safely past. And the road was fitfully mobbed by civilians burdened with bundles on
their heads and tired, undernourished, disoriented children frightened by the crump and thump of shelling behind us—which, although the people parted for me without catcalls, sometimes startled them right back into the middle of the lane I had. I drove with one foot on the clutch, the other on the brake, wasting precious gas, as I suppose you must when bugging out of a civil war.
I wasn’t forcibly stopped. Nobody set a baby down in front of my wheels or banged on my fender with a club. But lame, wraithlike people cried out to me in Bari, Arabic, Dinka, or English for a lift, with that edge of hysteria when norms are breached and breaking down. They had self-hacked canes and blistered sores and a mango or a wad of cassava in hand and were bent into the shape of question marks. But the huts along the way had not been torched, the trees not stripped of their leaves for soup, and kids who weren’t clinging to their mothers, piggyback, might hop for fun with a stick like a vaulting pole. The casualties lay behind, where the noise was, and the grief of leaving them. People were in survival mode, dazed, yet trekking by the thousands through the rolling, tawny, still luxuriant landscape in the direction of Uganda. If they were footsore now, they’d be reeling soon.
I’d kept excusing myself for not picking any riders up because I was going to turn off, and finally a wooden crosspiece on a post did finger me left to the ferry landing at a fat stretch of the Nile where islets could conceal the rope and an acacia forest the pulleys on either bank. The Dinka soldier who was preventing civilians from boarding nodded at the sight of me, and the Bari ferryman chocked my wheels on the raft, as he and his son began to pull us toward the opposite side. The currents, greeny brown, revolved like supple cylinders or parallel crocodiles, though I noticed an actual crocodile swimming crosswise to them, like us. The ferryman worked mostly at night, when the MiGs didn’t fly, and said this had been his grandfather’s livelihood, paid for at first by the English and the Italian White Father missionaries.
Children Are Diamonds Page 20
