“Bravo,” said Bol, whose own adoptee was gangly like him.
I was watching for a Bari or an Acholi, in fact, to lead us off this hysterically demoralized passage to a pulverized bridge. We wanted untankable terrain, no planes, and a back entrance into Uganda, which may sound logical until you are in the trackless wilds, which of course are a maze of tracks.
Ruth asked Bol whether during his studies at the University of Khartoum he had “known any generals?”
“You mean who are generals today?” He laughed. “Well, Dinkas like me went to Moscow afterward to be trained because, if you remember, the U.S. of A. was an ally of Khartoum then, against Libya, and you didn’t care if we black men all starved to death down here. So you invited Khartoum to send its military prospects to Fort Benning, in Georgia, for training—and we in the SPLA went to Moscow. And that’s why the Arabs are so kind in these wars, because they were taught by your army at Fort Benning how to be.”
“True,” she said. “And I’m Old Mother Hubbard,” she added, describing herself. The Antonov groaned over, perhaps on reconnaissance. Makundi was fiddling with our radio; we’d forgotten to bring the frequencies list. With a weak signal and the battery failing, the point was to alert one of the NGOs to where we were, not to mention the looming catastrophe when this cataract of savannah refugees fetched up at the Aswa with Uganda’s forests to starve in on the other side. Sure, the crocodiles and child soldiers of the LRA could be disposed of shortly, when a hundred thousand evacuees crossed the river, but what would they live on then? Meanwhile I was squandering fuel to travel at scarcely above walking speed toward a humanitarian disaster, where we would arrive without resources ourselves.
My new lapmate, though clinging to my midriff like a baby primate a bit past the Swee’Pea stage, was still not crying—“A child of the woods,” Bol concluded, after trying both Arabic and Dinka on him—so I wondered if he hadn’t already been an orphan when he was handed to me. The motor’s hum, our magic locomotion, and the theater of cloud shapes and windy treetops against the backdrop of the sky, as he lay on his back gazing upward out the window, kept him entertained or spellbound, as the case might be, but how could we feed him?
“They will find slim pickings, your generals!” Bol told Ruth and me, teasing about the Arab officers who would soon be rolling over this territory, after having been trained at Fort Benning. “No pretty girls wringing their hands for mercy and begging for a banana! Mobutu, Haile Selassie—your government likes brutes. You would have liked Hitler if he had been in Africa.”
Startled, I nodded even so because there was some truth to that; we had let a quarter million blacks starve to death in Sudan in 1988 to hold on to our alliance with Khartoum. And long-haired, limber-limbed, olive-lovely Nyajal would not be hanging around to be toyed with by the conquerors. Slavery was no historic abstraction to these tribes; the Arabs’ name for them remained synonymous with “slave.” Nobody who could walk wasn’t doing so.
We heard a snatch of military Arabic on the radio, and playfully daredevil-sounding Russian from a circling plane in answer, shifting to an undertow of thrill, and shuddering explosions miles away. But we did reach a nun at Chukudum. “You’re weak, Ruth,” she said. “Leo and Liz and Nancy are in Lokichoggio. Going on leave, I think. They came through Dodoth country. A trader helped them.” She couldn’t hear our transmission clearly but said she’d contact her Nairobi office on our behalf and they could call the bishop. “But armies don’t move because of bishops. I’ll call Al. The agency could do more than us.”
After we lost her voice I realized she was probably referring to the CIA, not Protestants Against Famine. But when I’d started describing the mob, slick with sweat and foundering, surging around us at the checkpoints, she said, “Been there,” soothing me.
Our small phalanx of twelve-year-olds, two girls among them, in torn tribal togas or church-basement cutoffs tied tight with a scrap of string, moved ahead to clear an aisle for our wheels. A blind man waved his staff, having been deserted by whoever was leading him, while people paddled by in the disorderly mass. “Shouldn’t we all maybe walk?” Ruth suggested. But Bol and Makundi were intent on turning off. For me, I was transported dreamlike into the World War II Life photographs of a book I’d had, captioned “Ahead of the tanks” or “After the bombs,” when not engrossed in braking, etc. The kids’ enthusiasm, however, seemed less fearful, nor animated by the novelty of helping whites out. Instead, it was the presence of Bol, known to be a schoolteacher—“Two times two!” they chanted. “Three times two!”—as if by preserving Bol they were protecting their chances to go to school again. “New Cush,” the SPLA sometimes called the infant Nilotic nation they intended to build in the southern Sudan, using a biblical term for “Upper Egypt.” Thus New Cush would have schools! It made tears come; yet how would we feed them?
“Ever been trapped in an elevator? I want outa here,” Ruth said, pointing at a trio of vultures wheeling gaily to contemplate us. There were already corpses for them that wouldn’t get buried because people were hurrying too fast, a jumble of souls nearing gridlock. Bol, out his window, comforted those who couldn’t walk any farther by advising them to wait where they were. Help would be sent when the strongest alerted the rest of the world.
“And the Tooth Fairy,” Ruth said, when he translated. We had all turtled into ourselves, as a MiG banked sharply over us to stay out of Uganda’s airspace after one of its lethal runs. Ear-whacked and unstrung by its bass banshee hurricane scream, I felt like the jeep was a dinghy, the ship sinking around us, and watched a dead man robbed. We couldn’t move. Then Makundi spotted some Baris sneaking east-ward on a twin-rut spur, and, without arguing, I swung left to follow them, although they scowled their displeasure and shook us off as soon as the forest permitted so we couldn’t tail them to a source of food. Father Leo might have known what lay ahead of us in the way of settlements or river crossings, access to Uganda, or maybe that rogue airstrip the Israelis had supplied the guerrillas from before the U.S. took over. If it hadn’t yet grown knee-high, Mickey might land there for Ruthie and me.
Streams flowing off Mount Kinyeti’s foothills, some requiring a push from our posse of kids to ford, and the guesswork of trails made this unconscionable but tempting scenario unlikely—that is, climbing into a Cessna, abandoning practically everybody else. More plausible was that we’d break down and starve in a cul-de-sac. The choppy terrain of thorny woods and elephant grass offered few clues as to what we were going to encounter in the next mile or so. It was dicey, sliding down into a muddy cut, our options zero if we got stuck. The war wouldn’t stop while a hunt was mounted for us, like the diplomatic imbroglio of the Norwegians being killed by an Antonov’s bomb. In the glove compartment was the Norwegians’ map, but even if you could figure out where you were and mustered the strength to walk to a village your finger was on, it might long since have been leveled and burned.
An ibis flapped out of a froggy marsh, to Mig’s delight. Knobbyboned, he was struggling in my lap, eating raisins from a box Ruth had flavored her oatmeal with.
“Thank you,” she said—at first I thought ironically, because she must have intended them for Leo.
“Oh, you mean for coming back?”
“Of course.”
“You’re welcome.” The peaceful moments of this precarious excursion were precious. There were songbirds and lizards that hadn’t been slingshotted and eaten—indeed, red meat on the hoof, in the shape of a warthog trotting off, tail high, that, to our painful regret, we had no means to kill—and paths that hadn’t been matted by strangers floundering around. The kids scouted in front with our one machete for traces of where our road in its heyday had gone, slashing at the brush and sticking poles in the mudholes. Bugs that fluttered up, they grabbed. What an emaciated crew they really were, and watching for the fat, fingery rosettes, in the wild and woolly moil of natural vegetation, that could signify a banana tree. A family’s shamba would be designed to be hidden behind
a hump of ground so bandits might pass unsuspectingly—the garden of peanuts and yams, plantains and sesame. Hunger made me predatory, too.
We had serious altitude to avoid toward the north. I tried a dry creekbed south, and ultimately a boy did spot a yellowing patch in a plantation of extravagantly elliptical foliage in a distant hollow tangled with vivid green. Five trees—thank god—but we approached cautiously in case anybody had a gun. Being an ordinary slash-and-burn Acholi farm family, they did not, and feared us, hearing our approach. Two white faces changed the complexion of the encounter but were almost as hard to deny fruit to as men with a firearm would have been, and our kids were soon munching industriously. Fortunately, I was able to pay for everything we consumed, and in Ugandan currency. Sudanese money could have gotten them shot as spies by the SPLA, or American cause the Arabs to suspect them. This they could spend, about a day’s hike away through the forests, the man conceded, although protesting, and wouldn’t show us the trail. His women had already fled, with his parents and children, at the sound of the car, but in Arabic with Bol, he volunteered no more.
Each of us began with a couple of bananas, while the okra and cassava boiled, some plantains fried, and Makundi wrung the rooster’s neck to barbecue him for Ruth and me. Who knew when we’d feast again? From comfy daylight, the sky grew rosy, then a cleansing yellowy silver, and silvery yellow, as the moon lit the tumid canopy of trees. We’d let the poor gentleman keep his three hens, but a civet or a genet or mongoose or wildcat was after them, to judge by the squawking, so we ate them, too, paying another three thousand Ugandan shillings toward his fresh start in Acholi territory in that country. Both Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni had treated the Acholis harshly, as had the loonies of the LRA—themselves Acholi—and so, squatting on makeshift plots like this, they trundled back and forth between persecution there and the mercies of Arab or SPLA rule in Sudan. Embittered, he slipped away from us for good on an indecipherable path in the balmy dark.
We had bats twittering, amphibians trilling, a jackal yapping, an owl, world-weary, hooting. Even a lion grunted, which was a fine omen to hear because people with guns shot lions and elephants first thing. We had outrun the battle zone, but a wind shift combined with Kinyeti’s contours above us to deliver faintly concussive reverberations from what must be going on.
“I love this work,” Ruth muttered mirthlessly, though hugging Leo. My own charge, Mig, equally stuffed with food, scarcely knew me as a person yet and restricted his reactions to watching the eightyear-old Dinka boy for tips, who in turn was cued by Bol. The moonlight bathing a swaying stand of equatorial trees let me anticipate unwinding under the palms at a hotel I knew in Mwabungu, on the Indian Ocean, and taking stock, angling for a stationary, safer job, teaching again. But my mind insinuated a premonition: Your number is up. Too many chances taken and tragedies witnessed unscathed.
“No mines so far,” I said. But we were going to need to drive back up our creekbed to the track we’d been on; for a vehicle it had dead-ended. Ruth’s view seemed to be that, like her recurrent symptoms of malaria, which she’d had for a decade or more, Africa got chills and fevers off and on wherever you were. I thought of the young bodies, including the three small ones who rode with us, processing almost as in a physiology diagram the mammoth meal consumed. Like the gas in our tank, how long would it last?
In the morning we finished the rest of the yams and millet mush, plus some porridgey home brew Makundi found buried and ripening under a hut. It was tempting to close one’s eyes, sink back down, and procrastinate in the shimmering sun, except he was concerned that the Acholi farmer might have “put bad words out.” More pressingly, numbers of fugitives from the war had followed our route of flight by now and collected nearby overnight. Bol and Makundi were jittery that the politesse accorded Ruth would break and instead of the begging they were hearing, we’d be rushed. Okay: I roused my aching shoulder to drive again, refusing Makundi’s offer because I doubted he would nurse the pedal and our mileage as well. I wished the farmer whose crops we’d eaten could see that they would have been devoured today anyway, and no money given in exchange. We missed Margaret’s presence, too: an Acholi translator when we needed one to find the road to Kitgum. Kitgum was a junior version of Gulu, Atiak-sized, but none of us had been there.
Cool drafts snaked down from Kinyeti’s massif to this lovely, various country of pretty brakes and bluffs, elephant-grass parkland and gallery forests. We were still driving east, into the sun’s glare, but wanting to go south. In the region’s forty-year history of war, our ruts must have sometimes accommodated military lorries; we did pass a blunt, same-age strip of bush where planes may have landed to load them, but it was now grown to head-high scrub even a helicopter couldn’t have managed, if we’d had the coordinates to report on the radio. Mickey had been in Vietnam when the Israelis were flying in arms; he wouldn’t know where.
We saw a baboon scampering round a windfall and a waterbuck leap from a lope into a gallop, signs of leaving our famine far behind; then an elephant’s platter-prints next to a spring. When we met a spearman he sprinted to escape, until Bol yelled in Juba Arabic that we had no guns. “Boom, boom,” he enunciated, grinning at our white faces, Norwegian logo, and pennants. As we grinned back, wondering whether he was an Acholi or Latuka, the next tribe in this tier of territory alongside the Imatongs, it occurred to Makundi that he might be joking about the gamble of mines in the road, not referring to guns. No army, not Khartoum’s or Uganda’s or the SPLA’s, controlled this border strip, and Bol, using Juba’s pidgin dialect of Arabic, confirmed that he did mean mines. Flourishing his hands in dough-kneading motions, he represented how one would explode under our chassis, and, taking our eight-year-old’s hands, showed how the Lord’s Resistance Army utilized their kidnapped children to set the trap because of their small fingers and footprints at the site. Then the thugs emerged from hiding to cut throats and loot the wreckage afterward. He plucked at my shirt to indicate how it would be valuable to outlaws who never went to a town.
He also demonstrated how to throw a spear, and rubbed his fore-finger and thumb, in case I wanted to pay him for a lesson in how to do that. But oh, no, he laughed again when Bol spelled out our proposal in the Juba patois. Being hired to guide us was not what he had in mind.
“He’s telling you you people have the atom bomb, so what do you need him for?” And, further, Bol followed his narrative by pointing far up the mountainside. “And he’s telling you somewhere there’s a sacred ancestor cave no white man or Arab has ever visited, where the wind growls and bats whirl like swallows and a magic leopard eats them if they fall, and he dedicates his soul and spearpoint every year.” The spearman vanished down a footpath bright with light and succulent scenery—fingers of forestland broken by rolling openings—leaving us lonely and to our own devices. We knew where south was, but how to get to Kitgum?
Mig, my four-year-old, as if hardened into his orphanhood, was perky but untroublesome, sensitive to the rules of the road without a common language between himself and his meal ticket. His history thus far would remain a blank until we reached someplace like Gulu, where Margaret could translate, but already I felt guilty for having half-wished we could palm him off somewhere along the line, if we’d bumped into a party of his own people, most likely the Baris: which, except for the first, scurrying bunch, we hadn’t. He was experimenting with the wonders of a jacket zipper.
Being perhaps midway between the nuns in Chukudum and Felix’s feeding station, west from Atiak toward the Congo, Makundi was trying to raise either one on our faltering radio. But the nuns couldn’t read us anymore; we just heard a faint salutation, “God bless you,” from their frequency. Felix said, “I envy you. I’ve got ten thousand people in the yard—and there will be ten thousand more tomorrow. And no food!”
“So nice to be envied,” Ruth murmured. I thought of Ya-Ya’s monkey, probably in a pot. Gazing up at Kinyeti’s complex lower slopes, the most massive in Sudan, she looked wis
tful more than intimidated—to know where your sacred places were. Her own beliefs, pantheism dappled with Christianity, were “like the back side of a cow,” she liked to say, triangulated between the Labyrinth and Bible-thumping. Like me, she believed heaven was nowhere if it wasn’t on earth, but for me a double negative wasn’t necessarily a positive. She believed there was a heaven.
What worried me right now, ahead of suppertime (one meal a day was fine for these kids, more than they were used to) was watching the most energetic of them still jogging ahead of the jeep, trouble shooting—looking for axle-bending boulders, mudholes, and the like—instead of behind. They were snake-smart and wary of other savannah dangers, but how could I justify the zanily criminal idea of employing twelve-year-old kids as mine sweepers? “Boom, boom!” I warned them, with Bol helping to translate: whereupon they would stoop more closely to scrutinize the surface of the ground.
Just as in that old creekbed, we took a blind-alley turn, wasting gas and time in avoiding sand traps at about walking speed. But then we did reach a three-corner junction—maybe the auspicious thoroughfare leading north to Ikoto and Dongotona, or south toward Kitgum, where we wanted to go. It seemed a luminously leafy location, like the right-angled right turn we’d been praying for, and somewhat more traveled. Months ago, the SPLA might have run guns up this way from Uganda to Ikoto for the siege at Torit, Bol said. No recent tire tracks, but a passable lane. The only not-so-propitious sight, as we stopped to congratulate ourselves, was the lowslung figure of a happy hyena galumphing away from the scene. Not a big deal: something was dead; vultures flapped sidewise, too—till we saw a ransacked tukl, and another hyena swinging a fleshy scrap in its jaws, then its jumbo tongue licking its chops, a leisurely departure that indicated firearms weren’t a regular feature here. That was good, and we needed to scavenge the shamba for edibles, but I wanted to shield our kids, shy away from any terrible little massacre. They saw jackfruit, plantains, papayas, a melon garden, peanut flowers, sweet potatoes, and darted in, skirting the bodies, whatever their number and condition was. I didn’t investigate, either. The less you knew, the less guilt you felt about not holding up our escape to become a burial party. We had been exceedingly lucky to spend last night short of this point. A white chicken was hanging in a tree, and sometimes families were slaughtered by the LRA for owning a white chicken. But it could have been any reason. They had accomplished the job with machetes, including gratuitously slashing the trees, hacking at garden produce they couldn’t carry away, as if to deprive later travelers of nourishment. A dog had been butchered and eaten, but a few goats, whose pellets we saw, driven north daintily: that is, their prints were dainty, and thank god, headed north.
Children Are Diamonds Page 23
