Acts of faith (25 page)

She looked at him and the vintage one-gear bike, with its rust-pitted rims and wide bald tires. “And just how do you know where we’re going?”

“Bush telegraph,” said Ken. “It’s faster than e-mail and you don’t need a modem.”

He told her it would be all right if she accepted the offer—the town was less than two miles away and this was a liberated area, firmly under SPLA control.

Matthew stripped off his shirt, folded it, and lay it on the carrier over the rear fender. She climbed on and sat with her hands on the carrier for balance, her legs thrust out to keep her feet off the ground. They rode past fields of harvested sorghum; the strewn brown leaves and chopped stalks brought to mind her father’s lost acres, the memory causing her old grief to jab her with a keenness that caught her off guard; then the needle withdrew and the hurt passed from her. Trees bordering a stream, some tributary of a tributary, spun a filament of green across the sere grasslands. There were women bathing in the stream, skirts hiked up and knotted around their thighs, and they stopped and stared at the bike in shock, then doubled over in laughter.

“They have never seen before a lady on a bike,” Matthew explained.

“Dinka girls don’t ride bikes?”

“Oh my, no,” he said, as if she’d mentioned some inviolable taboo.

Standing up on the pedals, Matthew pumped hard to get over a gentle rise. The back side was steeper than the front, and they coasted down with alarming speed. He locked the brakes, the rear wheel slewed to one side, and Quinette flew off, landing on her rear end, clutching the camera close to her tummy, like a mother protecting an infant.

“Oh! Kinnet! You are all right?”

“No bones broken,” she said, and laughed, and the Dinka laughed with her.

“Please hold on to me the rest of the way,” he said, retrieving his shirt from where it had fallen and putting it back on the carrier.

She did as he asked, though she couldn’t see what good it would do if he lost control again. There was no fat on him. Holding him below the ribs, Quinette felt that she could have squeezed his narrow trunk like a toothpaste tube if not for the hard, tensile stomach muscles, moving under her fingers. His back, coated with sweat, had the sheen of a black lacquer table, and he gave off a strong but not unpleasant musk. She felt a stirring she knew she shouldn’t and let go of his waist and returned her hands to the carrier.

They entered the town. Well-swept dirt yards, pavement smooth and shrouded by mahogany trees faced each other across a street that was more like a cowpath, full of potholes and deep, meandering ruts made, she guessed, by rainwater sluicing through in the wet season. Some tukuls had religious petitions painted on their clay walls—“God Bless All Within,” “Christ Jesus Bless this House.” What was Phyllis talking about, saying that most of these people were heathen ancestor-worshippers? The bike ride ended in the marketplace. From stalls made of woven branches and sheet metal and roofed by plastic tarpaulins, men and women sat selling cigarettes, canned goods, amber bricks of soap, spices in small burlap sacks. There wasn’t a whole lot more—a few cotton dresses hanging from a door on wire hangers, hand towels, and flour in cloth bags stamped with a drawing of a white hand shaking a black one and a stars-and-stripes shield and the word
USAID
. She wondered how even those meager goods had found their way to such a remote place, and she thought of the mall where she worked, with more bounty in one square foot than in this whole market.

Matthew led her by the hand to one of the stalls and offered her a wooden stool to sit on and asked if she would like a cup of tea. She preferred coffee to give her a lift, for she was light-headed from exhaustion, but this didn’t look like the place to get picky. Matthew spoke to the woman sitting inside, in a darkness that would have been like a closet’s but for a kerosene lamp and the light infiltrating through the latticework of the twig-and-branch walls. In a few minutes, she set a small china pot and two cups on the counter, and Quinette’s chauffeur filled them and dipped a spoon into a bowl of brown crystalline sugar, asking how many she wanted. She said one.

“Your tea, mah-dam,” the Dinka said with a mock bow. “I was one time a waiter in the hotel in Wau.”

“Wow?”

The cup looked pretty dirty, but she decided to drink from it, to be polite.

“A big town to the south. Far away. Government town. I cannot go there now.” He swung the Kalashnikov from behind his back and slapped it. “SPLA! They would shoot me down!” His glance lifted quickly, toward a pair of men outside a stall across the way. They were watching Quinette and Matthew. Both wore turbans and long white robes, like bedsheets, and they weren’t Dinka, even she could see that, noticing their cherrywood complexions and noses like eagles’ beaks. One had a short beard, the other was clean shaven.

“Salaam aleikum,”
said Matthew, his hand fluttering past chin, nose, forehead before it swept outward with a comically exaggerated flourish.

“Aleikum as-salaam,”
said the bearded one. A knife in a hide scabbard was strapped to his upper arm, and he didn’t appear to be amused by the Dinka’s theatrics. He jerked his pointy chin at Quinette, in a kind of contemptuous way and said something in a language she didn’t recognize, though she could tell that he was asking a question. Matthew answered, and the man grunted without expression; then he and his friend walked off, robes swirling around their brown ankles.

“Messiriya,” Matthew said.

She cocked an ear.

“Those fellows. They are from the Messiriya tribe. Arabs.”

“What are they doing here?”

“That is what they asked me about you.”

“I thought the Dinka were at war with the Arabs.”

“We are, yes.”

“Then what are they doing here?”

“We are not at war with all Arabs.”

“You mean, with their tribe? You’re not fighting this Miserya tribe?”

“Messiriya. We are fighting them all the time. The Messiriya and Dinka—” He made fists and knocked them together, knuckle to knuckle.

She gave him a long, searching look. “I’m confused.”

“Oh, yes. The war makes a big confusion. Sometimes I am confused by it.” He gazed down the street in the direction the Arabs had gone. “The
omodiya
of those fellows is not at war with us. For now. A few months from now—” Matthew twitched his shoulders to indicate the unpredictability of future events.

“The
omo
what?” Quinette asked.

“Omodiya. It is like a very big family. How in English? A very big family?”

“Clan?”

“Yes! The clan of those fellows has made peace with the Dinka for now because they need to graze their cattle on Dinka land and also to come to Dinka towns to buy things. Soap. Sugar. Tea. Also to sell slaves. That is what those fellow are here to do. They go about in the north, buying slaves from the people who own them, and when they have so many, they bring them here to sell them back to their families for cows or goats, sometimes for money.”

Trading cows and goats for human beings? Her brain was swimming.

“Three cows for one person,” Matthew continued. “But many Dinka don’t have three cows to give. That is why you, your friends are so very welcome. You have the money for buying them, return them to their families.”

Looking past him, she observed that several women and children had gathered on the street to gawk at her with fixed, quizzical stares. Well, she was probably as conspicuous here as one of these Dinka females would be in Cedar Falls.

“Was anyone from your family taken?”

“My sister. Two years ago. I have heard she will be among those to be given freedom, so I got the permission from my commander to come here and bring her home.”

The small crowd edged closer, approaching as if she might be dangerous.

“Hello, bye-bye,” said Quinette, raising a hand.

A young woman in a long black skirt and Chicago Bulls T-shirt turned her face aside shyly and giggled.

“Ha-lo. Bye-bye,” replied another woman with two small kids at her side, a girl in a ragged dress, a younger, naked boy. The woman touched Quinette’s forearm, the way you would touch an iron to test its heat, and then spoke in a soft, musical voice.

“She is saying that you are her sister,” Matthew translated.

She liked the sound of it. It persuaded her that she’d read the glances of the two women down the road accurately.

“Tell her that I’m honored to be her sister,” she said.

She reached down and lifted the naked boy into her lap, a gesture that brought a murmur of approval from the crowd. She loved kids and occasionally regretted that she and her ex hadn’t had any (though she was more often not the least bit sorry, knowing that she would now be a single mother working two jobs, battling for child support, and probably not getting any, because Steve was an odd-job handyman five days a week, a guitarist in a tenth-rate country music band on weekends, imprisoned by the futile hope that he would be discovered and asked to come to Nashville).

Ken and Jim came parading in with the others, surrounded by a welcoming mob.

“See you’ve made friends,” Ken said to Quinette. “Our ambassador of good will.” He gave the boy’s head a knuckle rub. The movement was stiff and awkward. “C’mon. Let’s get settled in. Big day tomorrow.”

She joined the procession, holding each kid by the hand, their mother walking alongside on bare, dust-reddened feet and chattering away.

“This woman,” Matthew translated, “she wants for you to stay in her house this night.”

Quinette hesitated, looking to Ken. He shook his head and said the local commander already had designated places for them to stay. He wanted them all together, for security reasons.

She was disappointed—it would be interesting to see how a Dinka woman lived—yet her heart beat quickly with a secret excitement. Here she was, a stranger, and the woman had invited her under her roof with hardly a word exchanged between them. Why was that? Now that she thought about it, why had Matthew offered her a ride and not Phyllis and Jean? A spontaneous harmony seemed to develop between her and these towering coal-black people.

The parade ended at a compound enclosed by a straw and branch fence. The soldiers wouldn’t let the townspeople inside. Quinette let go of the children’s hands and followed Ken and Jim through a rickety gate. The soothing shadows of fruit trees striped the bare ground and climbed low tukul walls to spread a tracery of leaves and branches on the grassy slopes of the roofs. Fallen mangoes lay here and there like big ochre eggs, giving off a sharp, ripe odor just short of rotten. The place would have had the sad, romantic atmosphere of a neglected orchard if it had been uninhabited, but there were quite a few people around: a couple of soldiers stirring a blackened pot over a fire, a few more playing some sort of game with stones, two others raising on makeshift poles a canvas enclosure about the size of a phone booth—“that’ll be the ladies’ room,” Jean said in her singsongy Canadian accent. An SPLA officer in a red beret and a civilian wearing a baseball cap sat at a table in front of a small whitewashed bungalow, with a sign over the door reading
SOUTH SUDAN RELIEF AND REHABILITATION AGENCY
, the name of the indigenous NGO that cooperated with Ken on his missions.

The soldiers who had been carrying the rucksacks went off to drop their burdens at the doors of the tukuls, and Quinette noticed, with a sinking feeling, that she and Phyllis were going to be roommates. Ken and Jim approached the table. The two men seated there stood up and shook hands with the Americans. Ken introduced Quinette, and when he mentioned that she had raised half the money, the civilian in the baseball cap, whose name was Manute, enveloped her hand in both of his and thanked her “on behalf of the people of southern Sudan.” She knew it was just a phrase; all the same, she felt a tingling in her chest, picturing a forest of bony black arms lifted up in gratitude.

During the flight from Loki, Ken had briefed her and Phyllis on the procedures for redeeming captives. The retrievers—the men who had bought the slaves back from their owners—were to be paid in Sudanese pounds, which were supplied by the SRRA. Now it was time for a currency exchange. Manute went inside the bungalow and came out with a metal file box, from which he drew bundles of crisp multicolored bills. He made some calculations on a pocket calculator, then turned it around so Ken could read the numbers.

“What rate did you use?” Ken asked.

“The one our Loki office gave me. I called them on the radio just this morning.”

Santino, in the meantime, began counting the Sudanese money, the airline bag with the dollars at his feet.

“It’s not what the bank quoted in Nairobi,” Ken declared. “Look, the retrievers will be expecting twenty-nine thousand four hundred a head.” He paused to tap the calculator keys. “Six million one forty-four total. I’ll be coming up fifty-seven thousand short with the rate you’re using. Fifty-seven thousand buys two people. What do I do? Pick out two and tell them, sorry, better luck next time? Do I pay for them out of my own pocket?”

“Of course not! I will make up the difference if it comes to that.” Manute pulled out his wallet for emphasis. “But it won’t. The retrievers will use the same rate like me. If they insist on the other, we can tell them, ‘Take it or leave it.’ They will take it. You know what they pay the owners for the captives. Nine, ten thousand for one. At the most fifteen. So a lot of profit for them. They will take it.”