Acts of faith (16 page)

“It’s shrapnel from a Russian bomb,” Douglas said.

“Precisely! More precisely, a Russian cluster bomb, one of the four that fell on the mission six months ago.”

“That would be St. Andrew’s?” asked Fitzhugh.

“Twenty-seven people killed, sixteen of them children. Thirty-one injured. I know the precise number because I was summoned there to stitch the wounded back together. I did not entirely succeed.” He handed the implement back to the gardener, who returned to his labors. “So after the funerals, after the proprieties were observed—the Nubans set great store by the proprieties of death, they believe in the immortality of the soul, yes, they fear that if they neglect their obligations to the dead, the dead will neglect their obligations to the living and perhaps bring calamities, although one wonders what calamities could be worse than cluster bombs.”

Frowning, Manfred went suddenly silent. He appeared to have lost his original train of thought.

“You were saying, after the funerals?” Douglas reminded him.

“The funerals, yes. After the funerals, local farmers returned to the mission and collected the bomb fragments and from them made hoes. So that shows you how little we have here. The war has taken almost everything away, but sometimes it gives a little back. Swords into plowshares, bombs into hoes. Write that down in your little book. We need hoes so we don’t have to wait for another bombing to get new ones. Ah! This is all so silly.”

“Silly?”
Douglas made a show of wriggling a finger in his ear, as if he hadn’t heard right. “What’s silly?”

“What is not?”

Turning sharply on his heel, Manfred stomped off. His two visitors didn’t realize they were supposed to follow until he looked over his shoulder and gave them a jerky wave. He brought them to a tukul identical to those in the village. Manfred flipped a light switch, and they beheld a spotless X-ray machine that rested on the dirt floor.

“A Siemens, my young friends. It was flown to Khartoum from Germany more than a year ago, then on to Abu Gubeiha and delivered from there by lorry. A fine instrument, not so?” He stroked the padded table and the smooth steel arm of the camera as if they were living things. “My X-ray technician is an Arab fellow, quite competent, trained in the U.K. Only one thing is missing. Can you guess what it is?”

Another riddle. Fitzhugh yearned for a smoke and a long nap.

“Film!” the doctor shouted into their silence and then laughed. “I have no film! I have not had any for six months! I have made several requests by radio for film to be sent, I have been assured it has been sent, but it never gets here. I have no idea what happens to it, though I have my suspicions. The Sudan military confiscates it for their own use. What do I do when someone comes to me with a broken bone? I poke, I prod, I guess. When someone comes to me with a persistent pain here or here or here”—he touched his liver, his stomach, his back—“and I suspect cancer? I cut them open and have a look. Exploratory surgery, performed with instruments sterilized over an open fire. I return to medicine as it was practiced a hundred and fifty years ago. Ha! Longer ago! I could be a surgeon in the Roman army. Silly, silly,
nicht wahr
?”

“Criminal is what it is,” Douglas said.

“Criminal? Are you a prosecutor? And whom will you prosecute?” Manfred faced the machine while words tumbled from his mouth like rocks in an avalanche, and his pale blue irises shot back and forth as if they were looking for a way to fly out of his head. “
Absurd.
Yes, that is the better word than
silly.
This entire century has made friends with the absurd, and none are better friends with it than the Sudanese. A war whose beginning no one can remember, whose end no one can see, whose purpose no one knows. Yes, they are best of friends with the absurd.”

Thinking,
Count on a German to go abstract on you,
Fitzhugh wrote “X-ray film, sterilizer, hoes, diesel” in his notebook.

Probably the man hadn’t had anyone’s ear for weeks. There were two other Europeans at the hospital, a German nurse and an Italian logistician, but Fitzhugh would bet that they’d listened to their boss’s rants once too often and had made his silence on certain issues a condition of their continued service.

Manfred turned off the light with a swat—there was a savagery in almost all his movements—and ushered his visitors outside.

“And this mission you two are on is absurd also. I hope you realize that.”

The remark struck them like a backhanded slap.

“If that’s what we thought, we wouldn’t be on it, would we?” Douglas said.

“I shall enlighten you, then. Even if you find places to land big planes and even if those planes are not shot down, how do you propose to get what you deliver to the people who need it? There are hardly any roads to speak of, and the only vehicle I know of is my Land Rover, which I need if I am called away and which can’t carry very much in any case. So tens of porters will be needed. What a tempting target a column of porters will make to some Sudanese pilot. He will not be able to resist. The first time such a procession is strafed, you will find it difficult to recruit others for the job.”

“Let us worry about that problem.” Douglas’s expression had gone blank, and Fitzhugh now knew him well enough to recognize that studied blandness as a sign of anger.

“I fully intend to,” Manfred stated. “I have too many problems of my own.”

Half of them probably self-inflicted,
Fitzhugh thought, following him into the U-shaped courtyard formed by the breezeway and the two long buildings. Infants in their laps, several women were sitting against a wall, some wearing the sorts of dresses collected by church groups in the West, while two were nearly naked, rows of bright beads girding their waists. Their bellies were ornamented with ritual tattoos, the raised scars on dark brown flesh resembling rivets in leather. The women sat with the listless postures and lifeless expressions Fitzhugh had seen everywhere in southern Sudan, the faraway stares and slumped shoulders and bent heads forming their own kind of ritual tattoos, marking all, regardless of native tribe, as members of the single tribe the aid agencies called “affected populations.” Manfred, squatting down, read the notations written on the strip of surgical tape plastered to each mother’s forehead. He spoke to each gently, patted the infants’ heads, even sang a few bars of what must have been a Nuban lullaby. It somehow pleased Fitzhugh to see that his personality had another, more attractive dimension.

“The little ones are going to be vaccinated, and they’re afraid, the mothers,” he explained, rising. “It is the unknown. They have been told their babies should be vaccinated, but of course they have no idea what is involved, so I explain it to them in a way they can understand.”

He spoke to them again, and the women stood and filed inside, the half-nude females displaying on their backs and buttocks, brown as burnt cork, round as bubbles, the same intricate patterns as were stitched into their stomachs.

“They’re from a part of the Nuba where the old customs haven’t died out,” the doctor said, noticing Fitzhugh’s stare. “They believe that certain tattoos prevent disease, and that is not pure superstition. It is done like so. First, a small cut with a knife, then the flesh is lifted with a thorn. Germs enter the cuts, and the system develops antibodies, creating immunities. Not that the Nubans know anything about antibodies and immunities, they only know what works. So that is how I explained vaccinating to these women. Their babies will be pricked by a special thorn filled with healing spirits that will make their babies strong against sickness. Those two walked here from their village, by the way. Four days.”

An infant’s cry came from inside.

“There, the first one. They think of us, the Nubans, as powerful
kujurs
—their word for witch doctors. I told the women that the healing spirits in the thorn were brought by you two from the sky.”

“You didn’t really,” Douglas said.

“Of course I did. As a favor to you. It will help you make a favorable impression on these people.”

“That’s incredibly condescending.” Douglas had found a way to retaliate for the doctor’s earlier remark. “These people aren’t children.”

“Certainly not. But what do you know about them? You’ve been in the Nuba all of what? Twenty-four hours?”

“Long enough to know that they aren’t children who need to be told that we brought spirits out of the sky. I’d think they know what an airplane is.”

“Most certainly! They have been bombed by airplanes, but you, my young friend, don’t know anything to make such a cheeky comment as you just now made to me.”

Douglas started to reply; Fitzhugh nudged him to keep quiet.

“Condescending indeed,” Manfred carried on, arms crossed over his chest. With another movement of his divided chin, he pointed at the breezeway’s screen, through which they saw one of the tattooed women, in all her six-foot beauty, standing in front of the nurse’s table while a Sudanese aide daubed her infant’s arm with cotton. “Look there. You have had a taste of what it’s like to walk in these mountains. Now imagine please walking in your bare feet, carrying a child for four days. I try to imagine some fat cow in my country—
eine grosse Kuh,
it sounds more like what it is in the German,
nicht wahr
? I try to imagine the
grosse Kuh
walking barefoot from Bonn to Berlin to have her child vaccinated, and I cannot imagine it. Condescending? I have for these women nothing but admiration, but I overlook your comment. I think you are perhaps too tired from your journey to remember your manners.”

Fitzhugh winced, fully expecting Douglas to say that Manfred was no one to lecture about manners. Instead, he switched on his charm, as quickly and effortlessly as someone turning an ignition key. The broad, guileless smile, the touch, the sincere gray eyes framing the doctor like a portrait lens, so that he, like everyone else upon whom Douglas bestowed that unique look, felt that he was the only one in the picture.

“You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say, and I’m damned sorry I said it.” This in his slow, calm drawl, the smile turning ever so slightly abashed as he let go of Manfred’s forearm and extended his hand. “I’ll feel like hell all day if you don’t accept my apology.”

“Not necessary. I said I overlook what you said.”

“If you don’t mind. I won’t feel right otherwise.”

“Very well.”

Douglas cupped his left hand over their clasped rights, as if sealing a solemn agreement.

“And you’re right about another thing.” His gaze held the other man as firmly as his grip. “I don’t know anything, except two things—how to fly planes, and that you’re gonna get your X-ray film and your fuel and your new sterilizer. The farmers will get their hoes. And anything else you need or they need. I’m gonna see to it. Don’t mean I’ll try. I mean I
will
see to it, count on it.”

An effective little touch, Fitzhugh thought, that folksy, cowboy
gonna
instead of
going to.

“So this is American confidence?”

“Doesn’t have a nationality. This mission will work.”

“Ah, that.” His hand now free, Manfred slapped the air. “That was a stupid thing to say also. So you will please accept
my
apology.”

“No problem. Okay, Suleiman and I—” gesturing at Suleiman and the porters, resting in the shade of silver-barked trees—“are going to start scouting today for a place we can turn into an airstrip, closer to here than Zulu One, so it won’t take a day to get the stuff here.”

“Not too close. An airfield would be a tempting target also.” Manfred looked off into the middle distance. “It will be a risk for me, to be supplied without Khartoum’s sanction.”

Douglas clutched the doctor’s shoulders, and he didn’t object to the familiarity; he was under the Braithwaite spell.

“You already took that risk.”

“This one time, yes, but flights coming in here, once, twice a week, every week—”

“If you want the stuff, I don’t see that you’ve got much choice,” Douglas said, tucking into the statement a tone of regret, as though he wished Manfred had more options. “Got a favor to ask. Okay if I send one of the porters over to the village to ask Michael for a couple of his men to come back here? That wouldn’t be breaking your rule too much, would it? Suleiman and I are going to need some security.”

“I suppose that would be—”

“Hey, thanks. We’ll be out of here in no time. While we’re gone, it would be good if you sat down with Fitz, drew up a detailed shopping list. What you need, how much, what’s priority.”

Manfred nodded and said Fitzhugh could join him on his morning rounds; they could make the list then.

“Okay, I’ll get rolling.” Douglas strode off to speak to Suleiman, who woke one of the sleeping porters. In a moment the man was on his feet, loping toward the village.

Looking at the American, the doctor pronounced him “an interesting fellow,” a statement Fitzhugh interpreted as a tribute to the masterful way the younger man had subdued him and taken control without trying to do either.

U
NDER SPUTTERING FLUORESCENTS
and bare bulbs of middling wattage, the ward looked like a dimly lit cavern. A fine dust blew through the wire window grates and powdered the beds, the night tables, and the steel poles from which IV bags hung like transparent cocoons, plastic tubes trailing from their undersides into the veins of the famished, the fevered, the wounded. With his eyes shut, Fitzhugh would have known he was in a bush hospital by the smell—the indefinable odor of sickness crowded in with the musk of unwashed bodies lying on unwashed linen in unwashed clothes. Manfred said, apologetically, that circumstances had forced him to compromise his standards of hygiene. He wished he could keep the infernal dust out with proper windows, but one might as well try to import ice cream as panes of glass into the Nuba; they could never survive the journey over the rough roads. He would prefer a tin roof to the one he had. Snakes and spiders nested in the thatch, and what trouble it was, keeping them out. Yes, corrugated tin—he could use that. Franco, his logistics man, could tell Fitzhugh how many square meters were needed. And the bed linen! Of course it should be laundered and changed daily; of course that was impossible. In the Nuban dry season, there was nothing so rare as water, and Khartoum’s recent military activities had made it rarer still. Arab raiders had destroyed a lot of wells. Poisoning a well was forbidden by the Koran, but the holy book was silent about plastic explosive, so that was what the murahaleen used. A charming distinction. There was only one well for the hospital, and it didn’t produce near what was needed. The rest was delivered by lorry in fifty-liter drums during the dry season when the track to Abu Gubeiha was passable; but this year, the deliveries had become sporadic.