Acts of faith (27 page)

The liquid light of the dying sun poured that same color across the savannah. And was that another reason she felt at home here? Dinka boys in tattered robes tied over one shoulder were herding cattle toward a byre, the cattle with horns shaped like crescent moons and the boys striding so effortlessly on their wiry legs, they seemed to float over the plain. She watched them tie the calves to tethering pegs and start a fire, its smoke turning a faint peach in the sunset. Some of the boys were singing, a few others laughed while the cows bellowed for their bound calves and the calves lowed for their mothers and the bells on the oxen chimed. As the red sun vanished, the birds in the tree above her began to chorus, as if to celebrate dusk’s commutation of the sun’s sentence. From somewhere back in the town, a drum call sounded, slow and rhythmic, like the heartbeat of a man asleep, and birdsong and man-song, laughter, drum, bell, bleat, and bellow merged into a whole as harmonious as a symphony: Africa’s natural orchestra, and it was playing just for her.

Twilight was a brief intermission between day and night. Just as Ken had said, it was light and then it was dark. The stars began to show themselves, sharp and clear in the moonless sky. She searched for the Southern Cross, which she’d read about in the guidebook she’d bought in Nairobi, and found it: not so much a cross as a diamond. The Dipper was there, but much closer to the horizon than it was at home. The birds had fallen silent, the cattle had settled down. Soon crickets filled the silence, so many chirping at once that they made a single high-pitched cry, like locusts in late summer. Frogs croaked in the green corridors along the stream forming the town’s northern border. They also made one unbroken chorus, the croak of each individual lost in the din of countless throbbing throats. Quinette felt the racket of insect and amphibian more than she heard it; it seemed to penetrate her skin and vibrate inside her, becoming one with the rush of blood through her veins; then in an instant her flesh became like the smoke from the herdsmen’s fire, all sense of herself as a separate being evaporating as her soul, set free, dissolved into an ecstatic union with frog song and cricket screech and the vast dark plain lying under the stars of an alien hemisphere. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, and when she came back to herself just seconds later (though she felt as though she’d been gone for hours), she tried to make sense of it. There was no drug or drink on earth that could have produced such a sensation, such an intense joy. Starting back toward her tukul, her head as buoyant as a balloon, her limbs tingling, she remembered something Pastor Tom had read to her in one of the counseling sessions she attended when she joined his church.
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
That was the transcendent emotion she’d sought but hadn’t found in her spiritual rebirth. She’d discovered it here. More than ever she wished she could remain. In this immense, unknown country she could begin her life anew.

I
N THE MORNING
, with the smells of woodsmoke and dung fires lingering in the air, a small army mustered to escort the redemption team to where the slaves had been brought during the night. Two dozen soldiers, a few armed only with spears, lined up in front of the bungalow. Shellacked in dried sweat and dirt, Quinette felt in need of a shower and also a few more hours’ sleep. Phyllis’s snoring and pungent bean farts had kept her awake till past midnight. She’d tried to read herself to sleep with a Christian romance novel, holding a penlight between her teeth. When that didn’t work, she got her diary, propped it against her upraised legs, and attempted to describe her out-of-body experience, but it was impossible to find the words. Finally, a wave of exhaustion washed her into unconsciousness, but soft thuds above her head woke her up. She flicked on the light and saw spiders and beetles dropping out of the thatch ceiling onto her mosquito net, crawling down the sides with a scratching of busy legs. A bat darted through the flashlight’s beam, quick as an apparition. She lay wide-eyed and cringing until dawn. Two cups of freeze-dried coffee barely cleared her head, but now the scented air and the soldiers standing at attention and the early light glinting off rifle barrels and spear points quickened her senses.

The walk was a short one down a footpath through the dun grass, past a dried-up water hole ringed by palm trees, a background against which the spear-carrying soldiers made a picturesque sight—
click.
They came to a small homestead, with a beehive hut where two Arabs waited, sitting on bamboo chairs—the same two she’d seen in the marketplace yesterday, the one bearded, the other clean-shaven. The retrievers. We are the redeemers, they are the retrievers. She heard Ken call the one with the beard by name, Bashir, but the other remained anonymous. They’d put on their Sunday best for the occasion—fresh robes and turbans, leather shoes instead of sandals, rings on their fingers, dressy watches on their wrists. The soldiers fanned out to encircle the homestead and an enormous mahogany tree nearby. It cast its branches out for fifty feet in all directions, the lower branches hanging almost to the ground to form a tent of leaves. The Arabs stood and greeted Ken and Jim and Manute. There was a bit of conversation, then the retrievers led everyone to the tree; the one called Bashir parted the branches and held them aside. Ducking her head, Quinette followed Jim into the shaded circle, and there the slaves huddled in the cool red dust, faces blending with the shadows so that all she saw at first were four hundred eyes, shining white and lifeless, like fragments of clamshells set in lumps of mud. They were all women and kids and teenagers, barefoot, dressed in rags, in shorts, in what looked like feed sacks with armholes. Her vision adjusting to the dimness, she saw a naked chest ridged with scars, and the absence of pattern told her that they were not the decorative marks with which some Dinka ornamented their bodies. No one spoke, even the babies were silent, lying limp in their mothers’ laps, hair reddened and tiny bellies bloated from malnutrition. The only sound was the hum of flies, the only movement the flutter of bony hands brushing the flies away, and one adolescent boy did not have a hand, swatting with the puckered stump of his wrist. Another, sitting with his legs spread-eagled and a crude crutch at his side, was missing a foot.

Jean and Mike began a head count. Quinette volunteered to help, because she wanted to do more than gawk at these wretched souls as if they were a sideshow attraction.

“Okay, take the bunch on the right, we’ll take the ones on the left,” Mike said. “Count ’em twice to make sure.”

Quinette moved in closer, her finger wagging left to right, right to left.
These are people, these are human beings,
she said to herself, for the slaves sat so passively, so devoid of emotion that she felt as if she were making an inventory of inanimate objects. Swaddled in unlaundered clothes, bodies that hadn’t known soap and water for weeks or months threw off a dense, sour, salty stench. People, human beings who’d been whipped, who’d had a hand or a foot lopped off because they tried to escape. Making her second count, she noticed a small, deep scar gouged into many faces, beneath the left eye. Wondering what the marks signified, she lowered her gaze, squinting at an emaciated woman with a stained blue scarf on her head. She tried not to make her curiosity obvious, but the woman noticed and hissed. Quinette looked away, a little ashamed. The woman hissed again, pointed at the scar, and stabbed the air with a fist.
Hssss.

“She’s trying to tell you that she was branded,” Jean said matter-of-factly. Jean was a nurse back in Canada, a pert woman with curly chestnut hair and a bowed mouth. “That’s what most of the owners do, brand them with the same brands they use on their cattle. It’s always under the left eye. If you look closely, you’ll see the brands are different. That way each owner knows who belongs to who. How many?”

“Fifty-eight.”

Quinette backed away, trying to imagine what that felt like. A branding iron in your face. She wasn’t ready for this.

“Takes some getting used to,” said Jean, giving her a maternal pat on the arm. “But you don’t ever want to get
too
used to it.”

She and Mike had counted a hundred and fifty-one, so that made two hundred and nine all together. The Arabs had “delivered the merchandise,” as Mike indelicately phrased it. He was a paramedic, with a wrestler’s torso and a streetwise toughness about him, and Quinette wondered if his wife was thinking of him when she warned about getting “too used to it.”

Now it was time to pay the retrievers. Ken passed the bricks of Sudanese pounds to the Arabs, who licked their thumbs and counted, slowly, carefully. When Phyllis’s crew moved in for a close-up, they stopped, the clean-shaven one ducking behind a pair of windowpane sunglasses, Bashir masking himself with a length of his turban. Mike, who was standing just behind them, lit a cigarette. Both men flinched and whirled around, wadded bills falling from their laps.

“Jumpy as long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs, that’s what my dad would’ve said,” Quinette murmured to Ken. “What’s the matter with them?”

Ken laughed his cold, enigmatic laugh and said they must have mistaken the click of Mike’s lighter for the cocking of a pistol.

“They’re worried we’re going to rip them off?”

“No. They’re playing a dicey game. If the government found out they’re dealing with us, they’d be shot or thrown into a ghost house. That’s what they call the jails in Khartoum, and for damned good reason.”

Phyllis jumped in, practically hitting Ken in the teeth with a thrust of her microphone. She looked rough and disheveled, swollen half-moons beneath her eyes.

“It’s a dicey game that pays pretty well, isn’t it?”

A note of distaste was folded into the question, and for once Quinette found herself sharing the reporter’s sentiments. The gold rings, the watches, the sheen of greed on the retrievers’ lips as they counted the money and stuffed it into canvas sacks stirred feelings of shame and taint, as if she were watching something she was not supposed to see. She wished this part would end; it had the trappings of a drug deal.

“If I understand the economics right, your retrievers pay around fifteen bucks a head, and you pay them more than three times that,” Phyllis went on. “Pretty hefty markup.”

“They take big risks, rounding up these people, so I have to pay them a risk premium.”

“That’s what you call it?”

“You’ve got ideas for a better word, put it in the suggestion box. Look, I don’t particularly like these guys. They’re a necessary evil, and maybe not an evil. The Dinka respect them. Without them—”

“Right, right,” Phyllis said impatiently. “But my information is that if this slave trade were left to—to—ah . . . market forces, it would just disappear. Goes like this. The Arabs who own them have to feed them, house them somewhere. It’s trouble and expense. And if the owners want to sell them back to their families or to some other Arabs, what they would get out of the deal is a few bucks at most, a couple of goats, a cow. Not worth the trouble of capturing them in the first place.”

“The question, Phyllis? Oh, hell, you don’t have to ask it. You’ve talked to the UN people in Kenya, right? They don’t like what we’re doing any more than Khartoum does. Just leave the slave trade alone, and it’ll go away—that’s the UN party line. By buying freedom for these people, are we promoting the trade instead of ending it? That’s the question?”

“It’s the UN’s criticism. What’s your response?”

He turned on her, a quick snap of his head, and snatched the mike from out of her spindly fingers and held it close to his mouth, like he was about to sing a tune.

“Bullshit!” He handed the mike back to her. “See if that gets on the air.”

“Think you could explain your response?”

“I already told you,” he said, a weariness in his anger. “This is politics. Economics has nothing to do with it. You’re making me sorry I asked you along.”

“I’m a newswoman,” Phyllis flashed out. “You want a PR agency, hire one.”

“I’m tempted to leave you. A few weeks out here might do you some good. You might learn something.”

Jim stepped up and, resting his hand on Ken’s shoulder, said, “Easy now, my friend. You’re on candid camera.”

Ken turned aside.

“You start early in the varnish-removal business,” Quinette whispered to Phyllis. Looking at her blowsy hair and baggy eyes, and having listened to her snores and intestinal rumblings half the night, she didn’t find the woman quite as intimidating as before.

“Ya, Eismont.
Tiyib,
” Bashir said, rising with brown hand extended.

She gathered that
tiyib
meant that everything was okay. Ken shook hands and said thank you in Arabic—
shukran.
The Arabs, each holding a sack of money, went down the footpath, their white-clad figures growing smaller in the oceanic expanse of grass and trees.

“Do they just walk home, across all that, with all that money on them?” Quinette said, thinking out loud.

“Not something you’d try in L.A. or New York, is it?” Jim remarked with a shrug. He studied his feet, mopped his forehead with his fingers. “I don’t like it either, this end of it.”

“O
UR HEARTS ARE
heavy with your sufferings.” Ken stood making a speech before the assembled slaves, pausing between phrases to let Manute translate, his flat American voice and Manute’s sonorous bass alternating with chantlike rhythm. “Many people who care about what you have endured. . . . Donations from people in America. . . . I am happy to tell you that you are now free.”