Acts of faith (13 page)

“A better ending than the one that could have been,” Douglas observed.

“I can’t argue with that, but—”

“You will anyway.”

“Sudan being what it is,” Tara said, “one has to wonder if you spared them from their fate or merely postponed it.”

“Hey, I made my call. I stood by it. I stand by it now. Okay?”

“Fair enough. Do you know what happened to the pregnant girl?”

“You just said it. Sudan being what it is. The things that happen there break your heart when they don’t turn your stomach.”

“Either she died or the baby or both.”

“The kid.” Douglas nodded. “It happened on the plane, when we were only an hour from Loki. The loadmasters told me about it after we landed. I saw the girl holding the kid in a blanket, a piece of cowhide really. She wasn’t crying. Like she expected it.” He paused just long enough to highlight the next statement: “Maybe I should have, too.”

A lilt in his voice turned it into a question, and Tara, her expression softening, told him he could not have possibly expected any such thing and shouldn’t blame himself. Biting his lip, Douglas nodded to accept her reassurance, which could have been what he sought; the appeal for solace implicit in the way he’d spoken those final five words seemed intentionally to draw her sympathies toward him and his feelings, as if they and not the girl’s tragedy were what mattered in the end. That was Fitzhugh’s impression, but being in love, he immediately dismissed it as a figment of his imagination, telling himself he was making too much of a mere phrase, a tone of voice.

“Didn’t mean to sound like such a scold,” Tara was saying. They were getting used to her quirk of being brutally candid, then apologizing for it. “You already got your paddling in the headmaster’s office. You don’t need another from the likes of me.”

“Two paddlings,” said Douglas. “First PanAfrik’s boss told me that if he had anything to say about it, I’d never fly anything for anybody ever again. And then the flight coordinator, that Dutchman, told me I was no better than a common hijacker. That son of a bitch. Can you imagine that coming from him? Every day he has to fax Khartoum a list of every destination the UN is flying to and ask permission to land. How can he look at himself in the mirror? So I told him he was on the wrong side, he was on Khartoum’s side, and he said the UN wasn’t on anyone’s side, that the situation was so complicated that if it did take sides, it would quote turn a disaster into a calamity unquote.”

“You don’t think he had a point?” Tara asked, meaning that she thought so.

“C’mon, Tara.” He presented his most engaging smile and leaned over to lay his palm lightly on her wrist. He had an instinct for knowing where and how to touch someone he wanted to win over, but the instinct failed him in this instance, Tara sitting with cool rigidity, demanding that he respond, and not with pretty smiles and intimate touches. His hand rose to her elbow, then lighted on her shoulder, and finally dropped in defeat. “All right, here’s what I think. I told that dude that sometimes people make things more complicated than they have to be so they don’t have to get off their asses and take a stand. Sometimes neutrality is just another word for cowardice.”

“And how did he react to
that
?”

“Oh, he got cute and said that ‘neutrality is another word for cowardice’ sounded like one of those bumper stickers Americans are so fond of.”

Tara laughed. “Well, it does, doesn’t it? Let me tell you about something that happened a couple of years before you got to this part of the world.”

Tara then related the tale, with which Fitzhugh was familiar, about the conflict that arose between Riek Machar, second in command of the SPLA, and John Garang, the commander in chief. Machar and one of his deputies attempted a coup to remove Garang from power. Irreconcilable differences over war aims were the stated reasons—Machar wanted an independent southern Sudan, Garang a united, secular Sudan.

“But that was rubbish,” Tara went on. “It was tribal. You do know, don’t you, that Machar is a Nuer and Garang a Dinka?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Douglas muttered.

“So the Nuer and the Dinka are rather like the Serbs and the Croats. Hated each other ever since, oh, the big bang. The Nuer, most anyway, decided to follow Machar, and the Dinka lined up with Garang, and the next thing you know, there is no longer one SPLA but two. Machar’s men attacked Bor—that’s Garang’s hometown—and slaughtered two thousand people. Tied children up and executed them. Hung old people from trees. They disemboweled women, whether after they’d shot them or before, I don’t know. After, one hopes. The rest, thousands of them, fled into the swamps, and a lot of them died of starvation and malaria. I evacuated some of the victims, by the way. I
saw
it, Douglas. Garang’s troops retaliated in kind, and it goes on to this day.”

“Okay, proving what exactly?”

Tara looked surprised by the question, its answer was so plain. “Well, Machar and Garang both hold doctoral degrees, so to get philosophical about it, I suppose it proves that education is no vaccine against savagery, even though many people persist in thinking otherwise. More to the point, it proves that one cannot take sides. You’re on the side of the southern Sudanese? But which southern Sudanese? The Nuer or the Dinka? And what of all the smaller tribes, some allied with the Nuer, some with the Dinka, some with their own armies? The southerners are their own worst enemy, and—”

“The fanatics in Khartoum are their worst enemy,” Douglas interrupted.

“Oh, have it your way, then. I must say all this chatter makes me glad I fly planes instead of make policy.”

“Fly planes instead of make policy? Hey, what are we? Bus drivers? It’s our responsibility, yours, mine, Fitz’s, everybody here”—he made a wide sweep of his arm—“to think about what we’re doing, and if it’s the wrong thing, make it right. Otherwise, we might as well pack our trash and go home. There’s things we can do, big things, and Fitz and I are going to start doing one of them tomorrow, and you’re going to be part of it, even if you think all you’re doing is driving the bus. Sorry if I sound like I’m lecturing.”

“Oh, I suppose it’s good for the middle-aged soul to be lectured by the young now and then. My children, and there are four of them, do it all the time.”

“I haven’t spent the last couple years out here just playing Herc jockey,” Douglas carried on, as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’ve read a lot about Sudan’s history. How the Brits divided the country, just about built a great wall of China between the north and south, and when they left, way back before I was born, told the Arabs and blacks that now it was up to them to figure out how to get along.”

“Oh God, don’t remind me that nineteen fifty-six was
way
before you were born,” Tara said, with another restrained, backward toss of her head. “I remember when we—when the British left. I was one of the ones doing the leaving.”

They each gave her a questioning look.

“I was raised in Sudan, you know. My father was an engineer, in charge of a postwar development project. A sort of social experiment. Provide land and income to tribesmen without either.”

“Then you know better than anybody what I’m talking about.”

“Actually, no.” Tara smiled, but the stern look, returning to her eyes, nullified it. “I’m not defending colonialism, but I rather think the argument that it’s to blame for Africa’s problems has worn a bit thin. Something else is going on. As far as Sudan goes, I think it’s up to the southerners to sort themselves out.”

“And up to us to pitch in and help them do the sorting.”

“You don’t make a good carpenter by building his house for him,” she said.

“Right. You give him a hammer, show him how to use it. But then you don’t stand back and feel real good about yourself and say
tsk-tsk
when he bends a nail or whacks his thumb. Sometimes your arm has to get sore with his. Sometimes your sweat has to drip on the ground with his. Sometimes you have to swing the hammer with him, and yeah, sometimes you have to swing it
for
him, not sit in the air-conditioning like Timmerman with maps and pins and fax machines.”

“And you don’t eat Danish ham and drink French wine while the other guy gets by on his porridge and bad water,” Fitzhugh added, his own fervor rising with the fervor in Douglas’s voice. “And when the job’s done, you leave with the shirt on your back, not a hundred thousand in back pay.”

Douglas made a fist and rapped him on the shoulder. They were at that moment like two wires, feeding off the same current.

“I’m impressed with your passion, and I mean that.” Tara’s body canted forward to emphasize her sincerity. “But Sudan, it’s a vast place, and there’s something about it—” She hesitated, searching for words; she was a pilot, accustomed to expressing herself in the language of action. “Something bigger than its size. All that distance is inspiring, it gives you the impression that anything is possible, but then it deals you a nasty setback, and you think nothing is. That’s the physics of Sudan. For every emotion there is an equal and opposite emotion.” A slight, uncertain smile—she was pleased with the turn of phrase but unsure if it made any sense. “My father’s project didn’t come to much. He knew our time in Sudan was coming to a close, he wanted to leave a legacy. Toward the end he saw nothing of the sort was going to happen. Dad left a disappointed man, wondering if all he’d accomplished for all those years was to draw a paycheck and provide an interesting life for himself and his family. Oh dear, listen to me! Nattering on. I’m afraid I’m not doing a good job, getting my point across.” She stood abruptly, straightened her shirt, and tugged at her jeans, a little too tight for her figure. “So I’d best shut up. My vocal cords aren’t used to all this talking. See you tomorrow, then? Wheels up at eight. I’ll have a driver come round to pick you up. Half past seven.”

They watched her walk off, her steps quick and short, her honey-blond hair bouncing over the back of her upturned collar.

“My goodness, looking at her from behind, you would think she was thirty,” Fitzhugh observed. “Her and that Diana.”

“Yeah,” Douglas drawled, stretching with a long, languid movement. “What do you figure all that was about?”

“Some advice from an old hand?”

“More to it than that, it seemed to me.”

Tara was by now out of sight, but Douglas continued to look after her, as if following her movements in his imagination.

“Pretty nice operation she’s got going here.” His head turned in a slow arc to take in the stone-walled tukuls, the bar and pool, the groundskeepers raking the dirt pathways bordered by whitewashed rocks, the gardens that scented the dry air. It was more of an examination than a casual survey, as if the place were for sale and he a prospective buyer. “Has her own airline and her own hotel. Yeah, pretty nice. It’s a safe bet that when she leaves, it won’t be with just the shirt on her back.”

Fitzhugh’s own words, but he didn’t care for the inference—if, that is, Douglas was making one.

“What are you getting at?”

“Ask you something? Do you think she’s on our side?”

“Of course she is!” The question shocked Fitzhugh. He rather liked Tara. “Would she be taking a big risk for us if she wasn’t? I think maybe you’re rankled by some of the things she said to you.”

“Doesn’t pull her punches, for sure. But I admire her for that.”

Fitzhugh finished his now-warm beer, put the back of his hand to his mouth, and belched.

“Now let me ask you something. Of all the sides in this war, which one do you think
is
ours?”

A
GAME OF
bau
was in progress under a tamarind, men in homespun robes and bark skullcaps gathered with their treasuries of stones around egg-shaped holes scooped out of the ground in double rows. Tara’s driver braked as a goat with prominent ribs ambled across the main road, toward a market where women cloaked against the chill were buying and selling charcoal. Its smell mingled with the smells of woodsmoke and dung, the scent of backcountry Africa. Beyond the town the cliffs of the Mogilla range looked like copper battlements in the new light, the crests of the ridges like copper roofs. In the pickup’s cab, with Douglas wedged between him and the driver, Fitzhugh smoked his second cigarette of the day. The feeling that he was a twig in a current was still with him. He glanced at the plastic bags and cardboard boxes drifted alongside the rutted streets—the detritus of modern life had come to Loki without its blessings—at the rundown shops with signs that were reductively simple—
TAILOR
—or pretentious—
MADAME
’
S EUROPEAN BEAUTY SALON
—or baffling—
GOD DOES NOT FORGET YOU
,
YOU FORGET HIM
—and for a slivered moment regretted leaving this tumbledown, fly-plagued, rubbish-strewn crossroads. It would seem like the heart of civilization after a few days in the Nuba.

Douglas reached across his lap and swatted the smoke out the window.

“How did a big-time soccer player get hooked on those damned things?”

They were passing the aid agency camps now. Brown storage tents as big as barns. Stacks of blue fuel drums. Razor wire. Radio antennae soaring.

“After eight years of keeping in training, I felt that I needed a vice,” Fitzhugh grumbled, annoyed at Douglas, not for criticizing his habit but for making them late.