Out of sight of the murdered bodies—I never entered the hut—none of us was too fastidious to consume a split melon, a fallen banana. Outlines remained in the grass where the marauders had slept, a party around our own size, and the area still smelled of spilled millet beer and sex, Makundi said, with women who “I think were not having fun.” The imprints, so fresh the grass had not begun to recover, were creepy. Nevertheless, the kids scoured the area for mouthfuls of food, and we encouraged them despite the scent of scorched thatch, the notion that the same pangas chopping the yams we now salvaged had chopped arms and necks.
Borrowed time, my mind kept intoning. Borrowed time. In the Congo, bordering Sudan, Mai-Mai guerrillas—their name translates from Congolese Swahili to “Water, Water”; because they believed bullets shot at them would turn to water—committed atrocities as random as these, and when pursuing diamonds, you might hear about similar havoc but avoid the bloodier scenes yourself.
“It’s too much. Let’s go. We can’t sleep here,” I said, rotating my throbbing shoulder before gripping the wheel again. There was nothing ghoulish about our kids scavenging some calories from a massacre scene. Certainly the victims wouldn’t have objected; and they had survived by doing the same before. I was antsy, crabby, cowardly, picturing the eerie LRA band half a dozen miles north of us, moving on toward Ikoto, Dongotona, Torit, killing folks they caught unawares and outnumbered, kidnapping the kids who didn’t resist to draft as porters, but circling the towns or other armed groups. At Torit’s airstrip, if the Arabs had broken the Dinkas’ siege, they could be resupplied with arms—one child per Kalashnikov—because Khartoum helped them bedevil Museveni tit-for-tat for Uganda’s allowing its territory to be used as a pipeline by the SPLA.
Although this high-bush Africa, with clotted gullies, ridgebacks curving like a sickle, and leopardy trees overhanging the road, favored guerrillas, I acquiesced in Bol’s allowing the older boys to continue trotting in front of us as scouts. He or Makundi sometimes walked with them, ready to shout ahead to a roadblock that we were mzungus, white, not to be casually shot. Also, even if another LRA gang wasn’t following the first in order to plunder refugees and maybe rearm at Torit’s airfield, now that Khartoum’s victory around Juba had become a rout, the soldiers we had been lucky enough to miss might have laid mines behind them in the road in order to hamper pursuit. And if so, they would have tied signals for themselves, like a feather on a branch, to beware of when they returned.
Makundi and Bol were watching for these, Bol much preoccupied now, too, with the fate of the bloody town of Torit, which had changed hands repeatedly since the south’s revolution against the Arabs had begun there, way back in 1955. If Arab garrisons besieged in Torit and Kapoeta broke out, the SPLA might lose Dongotona, Ikoto, Chukudum, and other villages: pushed into oblivion.
My damsel in distress was not groveling in gratitude to me for coming back. Nor did I want her to; she was right that a few expatriate witnesses had been needed here—I just regretted being one of them.
“You want to go home?” she remarked, reading my thoughts, but remembering my tales of school board fracases: “That guy in Keene, New Hampshire, that garage owner who didn’t vote for the new school building to have enough windows put in because he said it might increase the furnace bills, and since his garage had no windows, why on earth should the children?”
I laughed, as I had in New Hampshire. You might as well laugh as cry.
We met two civilian families, who were terrified of us, however. Specifically, our children frolicking on the road in front of us panicked them because the Lord’s Resistance Army utilized children tactically to trigger an enemy’s ambush and draw its fire; then, later, to bind, blind, and mangle prisoners. These individuals simply fell on their knees, surrendering, till the jeep appeared, when—greatly relieved, and armored from us and our questions and curiosity by their nakedness—they professed to understand no language except Acholi, which prevented us from obtaining any information. Once they were sure we had no weapons, they slid into the forest like fish wriggling into a reef.
We’d communicated the danger ahead of them, and they the fact that they couldn’t vouch for the road being safe in front of us, either. Yet now I got us stuck in a washout, squandering fuel, tire tread, and a lot of noise, which in Makundi’s view was the worst because it could draw guerrillas to intercept us who weren’t traveling or camped nearby. His snappish fear seemed out of character and thus alarmed me, whereas Bol’s more abstracted attitude reflected not different assumptions but what I realized were twinges of guilt that he wasn’t at a proper post, among his defenseless countrywomen, directing foot traffic in the chokepoint back at Nimule, instead of dodging that crisis.
This was enough of a crisis. “Its muchness,” as Ruth agreed when I kept pacing, chewing my fingers or nails, and groaning, “Too much!”—if not helping to lay sticks under the wheels and gunning the engine to spin them free.
“So, are you going to stay in Nairobi?” I asked her, meaning long-term. But she replied that she was thinking of Crete. This took me a moment to process.
“Have you ever been to Crete?”
I laughed. “To Rhodes, not Crete. But what I meant was, after your vacation.”
“The problem is, with no papers, Leo can’t go to Crete. I can’t leave him with strangers, even responsible strangers, after what he’s been through.”
I sighed in agreement, but also because by ignoring my question she sounded undismayed to be Nairobi-bound.
“Bound to Nairobi,” I said, playing on the words. Both of us knew I’d been asking partly about myself. Where should I land? “Well, not necessarily for life.”
The children were chanting their tables of numbers. “Two plus two”; “Four plus four.” And just so, Leo was two, Mig was four, Bol’s little nameless boy—actually, he called him Chol—was eight. In an hour we were moving; then, at a smoking hut, we saw a scrounging pye-dog and a frantic hen that evidently had escaped a massacre. Again I tried to discourage the kids from poking about for any remnants of food, but they turned up no bodies and little to eat. By now we must have crossed into Ugandan territory, a lemony, tawny, undulant, lightly broken forest full of secretive, abbreviated vistas radiating all about, implying the hundred miles or so stretching intricately eastward toward the mountains at Kaabong and the next scraggly dirt road that might parallel this one. It was the original Africa, the riot of life seen by Speke, Stanley, Burton, and Bruce, with primeval bluffs and cuts and turbulence, giant trees, buffalo thickets, black and silver creeks tunneling through to elephant pasturage, grass half the height of a giraffe.
The trees’ tentative shadows pushed me to hurry. Kitgum, a town of several thousand, had a military post, a hotel, and a bus schedule, although I’d just glimpsed it once out of Ed’s cockpit window. “Gracious,” I said, “is it lovely or scary?” Mig, maybe sensing my tension, had climbed over the seat into Bol’s lap, but Bol got out to coach the several youngsters who were jogging slowly as scouts in front of the car. Ruth, who hadn’t yet ever visited Crete, kept speaking of dipping her toes in the Mediterranean there: “More character” than the lesser islands. I was touched. Fractionated was what we were, like riding two horses, one foot on each, standing up—half not in Acholi land at all, but with the Eurotrash in Rhodes or Alexandria or wherever. Meanwhile, the airwaves being full of the SPLA’s catastrophe, these Lord’s Resistance Army units must have heard the word on the radios Khartoum provided them, and would naturally leave off their God-given task of purging Acholi land and the rest of northern Uganda and adjoining regions of what they considered forbidden behavior, on behalf of a grisly Jehovah, and infiltrate the conflict zone—every commander an emperor, with life-and-death whimsy and a mission to breed a new populace from the loins of captured girls.
Common calculation, as well as telepathy and the unfortunate hour of extra racket our motor had made, prepared me a little for the dreadful conclusion. I heard my tire burst with a crac
k. The rear sagged at a tilt. I also heard Bol yelling and saw that a child had been hurled into the air—another sideways!—by an explosion in the roadway in front, which immensely augmented the crack. Bol was pointing, I was yelling, Ruth cursing. Makundi hopped out of the back seat, but then buckled like a puppet jackknifing.
“Stay,” I said to Ruth.
Makundi had been shot through the abdomen and was trying to hold himself together. Bol, in front of the bumper, also fell, hit through the back, with a shriek of surprise. Fathoming that it would be better from the gunman’s standpoint to capture the jeep intact, just with one wheel bent, I thought we should sit frozenly, waiting for instructions—except that Ruth now reached under her seat for the first-aid kit because of the cries of our friends.
There came an incomprehensible shout from somebody hidden. But we put our hands up, even the eight-year-old—Bol’s skinny Chol—and finally Mig and Leo, imitating me and Ruth. Three teen agers carrying machetes and looking like the Wild Man from Borneo on a larger scale approached from the bushes and motioned us to step out, which we clumsily did.
Bol was gushing blood from his midsection, both front and back, into the dirt, lacking breath enough to flop about or scream. Or possibly his spine had been split. His voice box had no certain pitch but, like an accordion closing for good, exhaled all the last sounds a groan can contain.
Makundi’s agony was louder, high, low, more blasphemous, and he thrashed weakly while trying to close the holes in his intestines with his fingers, or at least squeeze them inside the rip in his skin. He lay on the gray road, pitifully close to a green thicket that would have at least afforded him more privacy in which to suffer and die. Ruth and I, our hands awkwardly raised, had to watch his face contort, its energies alternately spent on panting groans or opening and closing his eyes. The boy who had been blown into the air, torn partly in two, by stepping on the mine, seemed half-conscious but stiffening horribly, like some kind of roadkill, in a weird curl. The other child, thrown sidewise, lay twitching in shock, whimpering or mute, red next to white, all tissue and bone.
More youngsters clutching pangas emerged, as fast on their feet as our own kids were—in fact caught one who was making a break for the woods and promptly hamstrung both his legs in the space of a moment, throwing him as a fifth casualty sprawled on the road. The surviving children whom we’d brought, aged twelve or thirteen, were being forced to kneel in front of the car, near Bol, while their hands were tied, according to the directions shouted in Acholi by an adult who still remained concealed. Then they murmured to each other, hearing the anger of our captors, that they had grabbed only six. Two Dinkas must have gotten a jump on the LRA kids during the turmoil and outrun their pursuit.
“Oh, Mac!” Ruth exclaimed to Makundi. Bol coughed painfully, trying not to strangle. I remembered how easily I had expected we could cure his TB with the facilities in Nairobi. The “Fuzzy-Wuzzies,” as I dubbed them, being reminded by their unkempt hair of old films of Australian bushmen, though their robotic manner was more like science fiction, soon outnumbered our pinioned children. They emptied the car of its leftover medical stuff and food as well as spare trophies like sneakers, socks, and pants. When they pointed at us, waggling a finger to tell us to strip, we didn’t, however, because they appeared so young. And probably because we were white they refrained from chopping our hands off, although flourishing a fire axe they’d discovered under the back seat that I hadn’t suspected was there. Neither Leo nor Mig intrigued them, but Chol, Bol’s eightyear-old, was clutched, weeping, by the ear and made to kneel in the row with the others in front of the bumper, with his elbows tied together behind him.
So Ruth and I spontaneously submitted. Wordless except for a grunt—I don’t even know whose reflexes flicked first—we knelt between Chol and Bol, who was still alive, on his side, unable to move, as if his cord might indeed have been severed. The Lord’s Resistance Army children surrounded us in puzzlement, less meek or sadistic than astonished, perhaps never having captured a white person before, due to the deep bush they operated in, and wondering about our rule book.
A rawboned, ragged man in dingy fatigues with a battered Kalashnikov, the stock cracked and splinted, and a face like a bowling ball, revealed himself as our shooter. He checked the condition of Bol and Makundi, each dying in the dirt like a stepped-on spider, in excruciating pain. The hamstrung boy was scrabbling along on his elbows toward the weeds to hide, but the two children who had triggered the mine looked mercifully inert, in their separate comas, or dead. With a lopsided, feast-or-famine grin, the man examined his booty, picking up my spare shirt, which might fit him.
Semaphoring with his rifle muzzle, he signaled us to stand again. Yes, little Chol could, too, who’d understood our gestures; we were all to strip quickly. My money belt pleased him, and he let a frenetic lad with cactus hair try it on like a bandolier, before wearing it that way himself. The girls in his party picked up Ruth’s blouse, purse, and skirt—in that case a mismatch, except for the purse, which the commander again appropriated for himself. The process had a berserk but practiced efficiency, and robberly laughter. Then he walked down the kneeling line of Dinka children and pumped each one’s face against the crotch of his pants by yanking their ears. A couple of girls had kept up with us all this way, and as their clothes were given away, he wet his finger and poked it up their vaginas to see if they were virgins.
“NGO!” he said to me, as if that were my name, and signaled “naughty, naughty” with his finger.
Ruth and I, hands covering our nakedness turned our attention toward the possibility of comforting our dying friends. Ruth called out Makundi’s wife’s name, but the commander interrupted. “NGO!” he warned: again, the “naughty, naughty” signal. Speaking in Acholi to the nearest child soldier, he had him fetch our radio, which he dialed to the wavelength he wanted, but it produced only static. “NGO!” he repeated, when he found no key in the jeep’s ignition. The child retrieved it from my pants pocket for him; but he was next startled when the car, being in gear, jumped and stalled, fortunately before hitting the children kneeling in front of it. He ordered them moved, but then sounded as though he were stripping the gears, before throwing the key away.
Another grown-up appeared. His face, not as round as the first commander’s, was about as affectless, and he was carrying a single-shot, King’s African Rifles–type World War I or II gun. He, too, insisted that each newly captured child kiss his crotch, jerking the muzzle like the tip of a fishing rod under the captive’s chin to produce the desired buzz. Ruth was shielding Leo’s eyes, so I covered Mig’s, then pointed to our medical kit on the ground, remembering a few morphine shots that might be left. The first guy, jagged, peremptory, not used to contradiction, divined my meaning and rolled up his sleeve. It occurred to me that if I popped air into his vein I could kill him—if I wanted to die very slowly, roasted alive with my friends in retaliation. But he wasn’t serious, either. Instead of asking for a vaccination, he beckoned to an angular late-teens boy whose pride in sharpening and brandishing his machete blade seemed like a fencing master’s.
“NGO!” our adversary announced again. He waved at Bol, spidered belly-up, whom I especially hoped to help, and the boy strode to. If you had one howl left in you, one allotted final shriek, this was the scream Bol, who knew all about the LRA, emitted now. The boy inserting the point of his panga into Bol’s bullet exit hole, sliced him from gonads to breastbone, crosscutting afterward to lay him open for autopsy. Using the flat of his blade like a spatula, he brought out the long intestines for display and draped sections around a couple of other boys’ shoulders like two dripping shawls.
Makundi was trying to hold in his innards by closing the hole in his groin, while the commander who had shot him examined the jeep’s blasted wheel rim, as if he had forgotten he’d already stripped the gears and thrown the key away. His exasperation swelled until he had the car tipped over to salvage wiring from the underside and so his people could cu
t the tires up for sandals. Our shoes didn’t fit anybody, though they had occasioned a Cinderella scene. The secondin-command, holding the single-shot rifle, was pumping a Dinka girl’s nose against his crotch while staring at Ruth’s nude boobs, as if to demean them both. But the guy with the Kalashnikov was cleverer. Observing that our attention didn’t stray from our surviving friend, he whirled his index finger again and pointed at the boy in the badly fitting army tunic, obviously pulled off a corpse, whose finesse with the machete had just been proved, and then to Makundi, cradling himself on the ground.
With our voices constricted in horror, Ruth and I were squeaking in protest, swinging away to limp toward Kitgum without waiting to witness the last. “Mister!” the poor hamstrung boy screeched, realizing he was going to be abandoned. The uninjured children, hands behind their backs, had knives at their throats, as grinning child soldiers taught them how to grin as well. Though whimpering for help, they were learning that in the discipline of the LRA they were required to smile or be put to death. Ruth in her anguish kept sidling in Makundi’s direction, which left her vulnerable to further pain and humiliation. He was swiftly eviscerated and his intestines hung around the necks of nearby kids in uniform.
Children Are Diamonds Page 24
