Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  “NGO, go,” suggested the round-headed man, emotionless as a bowling ball. I almost sprained my ankle in wrenching around; then panicked momentarily, feeling two hands grasp my leg, until I noticed it was only Mig, knee-high, who I had originally set down when forced to strip, and picked up and set down again in the dismal confusion, but who knew enough not to attract attention by bawling out loud—his face spoke it all.

  We stumbled off, carrying Mig and Leo; I held Chol by the hand. Yet the commander had one more outrage in store. A boy scarfed with Makundi’s intestines brought Ruth his cock and balls as well. Numbly, in bewilderment, she turned, accepting them in her hand—then, bleating like a lamb, dropped them in the dirt and muffled her mouth. When the goo, the bloody smear, began to register, she spat and scrubbed at her face, retching in grief and disgust. Soon, though, we were out of sight of our tormentors, but in a cloud of mosquitoes drawn to our bare skin. I put an arm around her, till it seemed inadequate or unnatural to walk for long that way. Instead, I squeezed Chol’s hand, the eight-yearold whose history was still unknown to us but who must already have left many, many dead behind along the Nile. He was a trouper, his feet of course in much better shape for this hike than ours, and willing to tag along with me, Bol’s friend, and Ruth, whom he knew had helped to save him from the row of kneeling captives, wherever we went. Nor was he catatonic, as they might soon be.

  “Am I accident-prone?” Ruth finally asked me.

  I laughed, though she did not. “No, more likely a hero manqué.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I confessed, meaning for deciding to leave the Nimule-Gulu road. Despite the bombings and crush, we probably would have come to no harm and been rescued quicker, even as a group.

  Poxed with bruise-colored bites, her breasts and buttocks joggled, provoking a feeding frenzy among the bugs, and causing her to transfer Leo from her shoulders to ride crosswise in her arms as a shield who could slap some of them himself. “I’m sorriest,” she concluded with finality, as we watched Chol retrieve the occasional morsel, a yam or mango, that an LRA porter as young as himself might have dropped after that group had looted a ruined shamba. Not that we passed too many. This wild border had never been subjugated by either the colonial order or the dictators after independence. There were no markets or police; you ate what you killed or grew and could defend.

  “But I think we’re in the clear,” I insisted, and mentioned seeing Ya-Ya as a reward awaiting us when we got to Nairobi.

  “And Attlee’s family?” she countered, trailing off. Night descends fast in the tropics, and hyena tracks were scribbled on the roadway. “In the clear,” she parroted me, then reached to rub my bad shoulder apologetically because I’d been trying to cheer her up. “Dismal,” she added. “Mayhem!”

  But at dusk on the outskirts of a deserted settlement, probably Madi Opei, we happened upon a hut that boasted an intact roof, a door that latched. Also a rat Chol killed with a rock; and another in the next tukl; plus an incautious mongoose, whose hip he broke with his throwing arm. Promptly all three were dangling over a twig fire as their fur was singed off and he foraged for fallen fruit and overlooked vegetables the raiders had missed. We found no pots to boil water in, or scraps of clothing—only a flat tub of broken metal to sizzle some smelly eggs and plantains on. The chickens were gone.

  Like a pair of old marrieds, we sat cross-legged in our blotchy birthday suits, nibbling raw okra, drinking risky brook water. It was frustrating but sufficient to fill everybody’s tummy and cut the crying a little. Having been too frightened to utter a peep this afternoon, Mig and Leo were making up for it now. Out and about with a stick for protection, I saw a leopard crossing through the mottled shadows, but did come up with three white sorghum sacks, inscribed A GIFT OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, of the sort so often pilfered from aid deliveries and sold by local traders. Regrettably they were empty when I prodded them with my stick. When Chol pulled one over his head, however, I realized that, yes, we might wear these for warmth tonight. A sharp bit of metal served to cut three holes in each; this delighted Ruth, who could feel clothed.

  “My shortie,” she called hers. “When were sack dresses in fashion, about ’fifty-eight?”

  I was less pessimistic, too. I’d be back at the Arab’s in a week or less, chatting up a KLM stewardess crew at the rooftop pool across the street—although, sure, hollowed out by our ordeal. Wasn’t that what you did in life: bring back Ya-Ya and Mig, and jolly some international adoption agency into placing them decently abroad, then feel hollowed out? People of Ruth’s and my type defined ourselves in part by where we were. Alexandria, Nairobi, Kampala, instead of Chicago, Atlanta, Paducah, and “after it’s over” didn’t apply as a nostrum because it was never over. Our self-medicating self-drama would need to be further swamped.

  In fact, we had one more grisly discovery. Leo was howling with colic—Ruth worried that he’d “picked up an amoeba”—while the wind whinnied outside like hyenas searching for a skeleton to crunch, yet answering his wails, and blew brush around that sounded like the footfalls of fighters creeping near. I’d grabbed a broken panga for a sense of protection, which may have lent me the courage to follow Chol to a hut we hadn’t looked inside but seemed the source of unidentifiable sounds, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” as my mind asked, to defuse my fear. By the moon’s illumination, this was inevitably not a baby mammal abandoned by its mother but a man tied by his hands to a king post, with his feet chopped off. Tourniquets had prevented him from bleeding to death, in order to prolong his misery. The stumps were suppurating.

  Faint from shock, blood loss, or early gangrene, he didn’t reply to my English yet understood it and indicated, when his hands were freed and his thirst relieved, that riding a bike had been his crime. Broken, it lay beside him; the LRA was known to forbid the use of such contraptions. As a teacher, he now breathed—he had had to. His stumps were bulging, coagulated pustules, but neither of us could liberate them from those infernal hide strips half-buried in dribbling flesh. Although I wanted to spare Ruth the experience, minor surgery with the point of the panga was required. I won’t describe how she worked; it was our worst hands-on interlude. Then, after praying with him, we slept until the sun was high and, in the other hut, he had crossed the blessed threshold of unconsciousness.

  Not just Mig and Leo were complaining and bumping about; Chol was chatting in Dinka through the door to somebody standing outside. Nobody scary would be speaking in Dinka, we reminded ourselves, if only so that our pulse rate could go down. Boys’ voices: I remembered the two youngsters who had been so quick off the mark they’d outrun the whole LRA crew. Maybe they’d followed us when the coast was clear. And soon, indeed, we were hugging them and cooing as intensely as if they could somehow represent everybody who’d been lost.

  Besides not being hungry, they rustled up a few bananas for us, and the ingredients for a gumbo, which we fried instead of boiled, and killed a resident cobra or two we hadn’t known about. Our plasticized white canvas grain sacks made us look like the Tin Man and the Michelin Woman, but I kept wearing mine, instead of cutting it into a loincloth, in solidarity with Ruth, who was acutely worried by a touch of fever she felt Leo had. The desperately emaciated condition the priest had found him in along the Palotaka road must have weakened him.

  Mig, rolling the busted bicycle around to persuade me to show him how to ride it, seemed to possess an indestructible constitution, and the oldest two flashed their fingers competitively to solve a problem in addition they had set for themselves to remind me of our classes together. Seeing that Ruth and I had survived the ambush without needing to either run or kneel must have convinced them that sticking with us was their best bet—not that they could have trekked back to Dinka land. But watching a vulture spiral, I was anguished, remembering the hamstrung boy holding his mangled thighs, waiting to be eaten when we and the LRA left the scene; and the nibbling already on the body of the man here who had
died last night enclosed in a hut but whom we should be burying, except we hadn’t the tools or strength.

  The helter-skelter night vocalizations had been dispelled by gloriously sunshot corridors of color, a starburst of shapes, a millennial spectrum, radiating through the jungle. No more dreams of fighters stealing toward our tukl to set the thatch afire. I thought of Craig or that other CIA guy, Herbert, going back to the wife who raised show dogs in Maryland, after a hairy assignment, to play golf and cleanse his memories with Bach and Mozart in a cozy “den,” while I might perhaps aspire to take over Al’s desk job when he left, or the street shelter.

  “Another day, another dollar,” I told Ruthie. Like Nairobi’s kids, ours skipped along, winging a stone at a dove or hefting a chosen stick. The plywood shell of Madi Opei’s health clinic remained, next to a giant shade tree with a blackboard nailed to the trunk for lessons, and a curl of logs poignantly arrayed around to sit on, if there were any inhabitants. In the crapshoot of war, these children didn’t blame us for errors of judgment. They lived—others not—and simply cocked an eye for the generous rosettes of a fingery banana tree or a well that didn’t smell poisoned. Gradually the country became more hillocky, checkered with clearings for goat grazing or farming, as we trudged south. Mig was hiccuping but not feverish, and not mincing on the soles of his feet, like us.

  “Okay, buster, I owe you, I’ll admit,” Ruth said, although I sensed that her more serious preoccupation was the loss of Makundi as an anchor in her life. “You should get yourself a little family,” she added, mentioning a former priest we knew who had left the church to marry a ravishingly pretty Nuer girl and worked for secular aid groups now but maintained a joshing, side-by-side relationship with the Catholics, too. “Like Al’s wife does, she would keep you at home.”

  Ruth was right that I was secretly afraid of floating off like a balloon, whereas she was afraid of that suicidal gene she imagined lurking in her. Cut loose from this job, both of us were going to be regarded as employable. Nothing that had gone awry would be blamed on us, just as Father Leo would not have taken flak if his exit had slammed into an ambush. The question would fall to us of what to do: often a puzzle for NGO people. The well-heeled ones apply for a post in Geneva and tour disaster sites white-collar-style. They have villas and careers.

  Our two surviving older youngsters, trotting restlessly in front of our sore feet, suddenly whirled around and dived into a gully to hide. Though recognizing the Dinka word for “soldiers,” we were too exhausted to conceive of any action other than waiting in the middle of the road to learn our fate. It was highest noon, but Leo’s temperature was hotter than that, and he was letting us know we all were quite thirsty.

  A file of ten or a dozen dispirited-looking, olive-drab-clad, adultsized figures were approaching, holding their rifles crosswise because our own running children had alarmed them. However, noticing two mzungus, even so weirdly costumed, eased their concerns. This was a patrol of regulars, of respectable age, and we slumped down on a log to rest at last, hoping for an English-speaking officer with a radio, perhaps, who could summon a truck to rescue us.

  They were cautious, in case we turned out to be captives set out as decoys. But Ruth put her hand on my arm as we sat waiting. “We’re out of the woods!” She laughed, feelingly. In Tanzania, she said, there were refugee camps with just the nuts and bolts of helping people—no civil war going on in the vicinity. The soldiers clustered around us, registering their curiosity, but not in English. Ruth’s Swahili sufficed to assure them that our two Dinka boys, Malual and Manyok, were not LRA, not to be shot. In that and rudimentary Luganda we talked of Kampala, Jinja, and Mbale, because government policy was to send troops from other Ugandan tribes—the Ganda, Luo, Batooro, Kiga, Nkole—to police in Acholi land, reducing fraternization; and they had still less interest in Sudan’s wars. If not stationed here, they might have been at the Zaire or Rwandan fron tier, or trying to prevent the Dodoths and Turkanas from killing each other on the Kenyan border.

  “What a luxury, to be guarded!” Ruth said, rubbing her feet and encouraging the soldiers to laugh at our grain sacks if they wanted to, so as to build rapport. “I feel like a well that’s refilling.” They were glad to have stumbled across us anyway because it cut their walk short for today, and they shared some peanuts. But no, no radio; a private with the physiognomy of the Rwenzori Mountains was dispatched to hike back to the base and fetch the truck early. I pinched my sackcloth to remind myself that I was not actually naked. I didn’t feel as if I had a “well” to fill—more like an acid spill in part of my mind—yet even so I didn’t want to trade Africa yet for New Hampshire’s mingy winter slush and property-tax politics, that perpetual spirit of cutting your losses. Ruth was a centripetal force. Her future seemed predictable enough, at least until Africa blindsided her again. I was more of a floater—not centrifugal, but more like a balloon. At Kitgum, when the truck got us there, we could borrow clothes and bus fare, and, in Gulu, we would situate our three Dinkas of age eight and above, Chol, Malual, and Manyok, as bona fide refugees in a U.N.-sponsored camp. Then we’d smuggle Mig and Leo (loaded with antibiotics) on toward the cities, and Ya-Ya and Al. A year from now, I might still be at the Arab’s, or not.

  Nibbling peanuts, Ruth drank out of somebody’s canteen. “Isn’t this the life of Riley?” she said, then cupped her ear, hearing the rumble of the army truck.