Acts of faith (28 page)

The flies hummed, leaves rustled in a breeze, the people sat in a slack-jawed, dull-eyed silence. Quinette’s hands rested on the camera, loaded with a fresh roll for the photographs that she hoped would match those already printed in her imagination—the emancipated captives singing and dancing, embracing their liberators. Thinking ahead, she saw the pictures projected on a screen whose light reflected the rapt faces of worshippers filling every seat in Family Evangelical; she saw herself at the podium, describing the scene and her own exalted emotions as grateful arms encircled her. It would be the high point of her presentation. Everyone who’d worked so hard would be thrilled to see images of the happiness and thanksgiving their efforts had brought. But what could she tell them now? That the people just sat and stared when they heard they were free? She didn’t feel cheated this time; irritated, rather. Ken’s delivery was all wrong. The people knew they were free, but they didn’t feel it because they didn’t hear any passion in Ken’s voice. The man who’d testified before Congress and the Human Rights Commission with such conviction sounded as if he were reciting a speech he’d given once too often.

Jim did a little better; in the cadences of a radio evangelist he told the story of Jesus, sowing the seeds he hoped would sprout into a whole new crop of souls. People had given money, he said, but in the end it was Christ’s love that had broken their chains. Still, the crowd barely stirred. Maybe they already knew the story of Jesus. When Jim was finished, he asked Quinette if she would like to add a few words.

“Wha—what should I say?”

“Whatever comes to mind. Maybe you could tell them about the kids.”

She hesitated, a mild terror streaking through her. Nothing whatsoever came to mind; then she recalled Pastor Tom’s sermon that one Sunday and tugged her fanny pack around to her front, unzipped it, and pulled her travel Bible from between the bug spray bottle and the squashed roll of toilet paper.

“I want to read you something from one of our prophets. He told about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah.”

She turned to Isaiah, chapter 61, and began, “ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,’ ” and waited for Manute. Coming from him, Isaiah sounded more like the word of God, even in Dinka; his deep and solemn voice could make a recipe like the word of God. “ ‘He sent me to bind up the broken-hearted’ “—pause—” ‘to proclaim liberty to the captives’ “—pause—” ‘and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.’ ” She was determined to coax a response from her listeners and repeated that last ringing verse. Pastor Tom did that sometimes, recited a biblical phrase three, even four times over, stressing different words with each repetition, building a rhythm that lifted people out of their seats to cry out, “Praise Jesus! Praise His name!”

When Manute was finished, she raised the Bible up over her head—one of Pastor Tom’s patent gestures. “Praise God. Praise Him for sending His only son, Jesus Christ, to save us all.” Two hundred pairs of eyes looked up at the book. When she lowered it, they fastened on her, clinging with an almost tactile pressure that evaporated her terror and summoned out of hiding the confident girl who years ago stood to recite and didn’t beg or call for her classmates’ attention but seized it effortlessly. “Jesus Christ proclaims your liberty”—pause—“He has opened your prison.” She told them that the river of Christ’s abiding love had flowed into the hearts of schoolchildren on the other side of the world; it made them care about the sufferings of people they had never seen, moved them to bring those sufferings to an end. She didn’t have to search for the words or think about them, but heard them with her inner ear and then uttered them, as though she were reading from a teleprompter scrolling in her brain. A rapture filled her. She felt powerful and commanding and absolutely sure that every word was right.

“That will never happen to you again.” She pointed at an adolescent boy with scars balled up into an ugly knot on one shoulder; and as Manute converted her declaration into Dinka, she waded into the crowd without a second’s forethought, lifted the boy by the arm, and led him to the front so all could see. Somehow she knew that this too was right, exactly the right move to make. “This will never happen to any of you again”—pause—“That’s what it means to be free.” Taking a step forward, she picked up the woman in the blue scarf, the one who had hissed, and turned her around to face the assemblage. “And this will never happen to any of you, ever again.” She laid her finger on the mark beneath the woman’s eye. “You will never be beaten, ever again. You will never be branded, ever again. You will never be made to tend the Arabs’ cattle, ever again.” She was really cooking now, an electric current surging through her and out of her, seeming to sweep over her audience. “You women will never be raped, ever again. You boys will not have your hands and feet cut off, ever again.” Manute, struggling to keep pace with her outpouring, seemed to catch her fervor and threw up his arms with the last repetitions of “ever again.”

“You are free!” Quinette cried out, and spread her own arms wide.

Someone made a soft clicking noise. It was echoed by another, and another, and in a moment, every tongue was making it so that it became like the crickets and frogs she’d heard last night, a single sheet of sound.

“The Dinka way of saying they like what they have heard,” Manute explained, grinning from beneath the bill of his baseball cap.

Applause! And it sounded to her ears like a standing ovation. A woman began to sing; high clear notes rose out of the chorus of clicks. The other women answered in unison, and the boys took up a contrapuntal melody and beat their hands against their thighs, all swaying to the rhythm. It was a jubilant song but not a lively one, with an undertone of sorrow, and it was haunting and lovely, that slow beat, that smooth, rich flow of voices, there under the mahogany tree. Quinette never imagined she could touch people as she just had, breaking the seal to the rejoicing she’d known was in them, setting it free.

“What is it you do for a living?” Jim asked, and his voice had the same effect as an alarm clock.

“The Gap. Salesperson.”

She almost grimaced, it sounded so banal.

“Missed your calling.”

Ten minutes ago she would have feasted on the compliment, but it seemed meager fare after the banquet of approval laid out for her by all those people. Yet it wasn’t their approval that satisfied her most, but her ability to bring them some measure of joy. Looking at the faces before her, listening to their song, she felt the craftsman’s gratification, beholding his creation; and that was a pleasure she’d never experienced in her daily life, retailing commodities she’d had no hand in making.

M
Y NAME IS
Aluet Akuoc Wiere. I am twenty-five years old. I was captured four years ago. The Arabs attacked our village in the early morning—

“Manute, her village,” Ken interrupted. He was sitting with his laptop in the chair previously occupied by Bashir. It and the other chair, in which the people being interviewed sat, had been moved under the tree. The sun was well up now, so white it looked like a gigantic light fixture.

“The village of Aramwer,” Manute said, and spelled it, Ken typing with sparse brown eyebrows knit, lips pursed. He was a hunt-and-pecker, and his fingers were turning a tedious process into a torturous one.

On every mission Ken collected stories from the former slaves, for inclusion in the reports he sent to the WorldWide Christian Union’s board of advisers and the Human Rights Commission. He needed specifics—the names of the villages the people came from and of the places they were brought to, the names of their captors and the masters to whom they were sold, the dates when they were captured and details about the raids and how their masters treated them.
An Oral History of a Crime Against Humanity,
that was what Ken called it. Quinette’s job was to hold a microphone between Manute and whoever was being interviewed, so it could pick up both voices, and to keep an eye on the battery light and flip the cassettes in Ken’s tape recorder, a big old-fashioned thing gloved in vinyl.

They came on horseback, many, many of them . . .
The woman called Aluet Akuoc resumed her tale. With her oblong face and narrow mouth, the upper lip curled to perpetually bare two front teeth, Aluet was not as pretty as some of the other women. She wore a shapeless striped shift, pulled down over one shoulder so her baby, a boy of perhaps two, could suckle her breast. . . .

Some wore white jelibiyas. Some in light brown uniforms. Some rode two on a horse. One to guide the horse, one to shoot. They shot the men and the old people.

Ken raised a hand, asking Manute to give him time to catch up.

“I think I could do that a lot faster,” Quinette ventured.

Ken looked at her.

“I took a typing and dictation course in high school,” she said, and thought she sounded as if she were applying for a job.

“No end to your talents, is there?”

Another of his hard-to-read remarks. Something he just tossed off, or did he think she was being presumptuous? Whatever, he got up and took over on the tape recorder. She sat in his place, settling the keyboard on her lap, tilting the screen forward a little, to keep the light that speared through the branches from bleaching the contrast. Unlike the tape recorder, the computer was brand-new, state of the art, and a long cable snaked from the DC outlet and across the scalloped circle of tree shade to a small, collapsible solar panel.

My father was running away. He didn’t go far. The Arabs were on horseback. They shot my father. They shot my husband. His name was Kuel. He tried to defend us, but he had only his shield and fighting stick. The Arabs’ bullets went through his shield. I saw him shot down in front of me. Everyone started running, but the Arabs shot anyone who ran, so I stopped running. They caught me and tied me to a long rope with twenty other women. I was separated from my little daughter. I have not seen her since.

Aluet’s was the fifth—or was it the sixth?—story Quinette had heard, and although Ken chose his subjects at random, each story seemed worse than the one before, a chapter in a narrative building toward some unbearable climax of atrocity.

They made a zariba in the forest and put us in it. It was a bad night for all the women. Three men raped me. I was then three months pregnant. That night I had a miscarriage. We had to walk seven days, seven nights to the Jur river. A woman and a child died on this journey of thirst. We rested at the Jur and then walked three days more to the river Kir. There I was given to a man called Abdullai. I worked for him and his wife, Nyangok. My job was to grind sorghum. I did this from morning till night for no pay. At first they treated me harshly. Abdullai put a branding iron to my face so I could be identified if I ran away. Nyangok beat me with a bamboo stick if I did not grind the sorghum fast enough to suit her. Sometimes she beat me for no reason and called me jengei.

“That means ‘nigger’ in Sudanese Arabic,” Ken interjected dispassionately. “Put that in parentheses, Quinette. Put ‘nigger’ in parentheses.”

The soft tap of the keys. (Nigger.)

But I was lucky. Nyangok’s mother was Dinka and lived with Nyangok and Abdullai. She told Nyangok to stop beating me and calling me jengei. “Would you call me, your own mother, jengei also?” was what she said to Nyangok, and the beatings stopped. Things were not so bad after that, except when Abdullai’s brother, Iskander, came to the house. He would come to the house when no one was there and force me to have relations with him. That’s how I got pregnant and gave birth to Hussein.

Quinette looked up from the screen and saw Aluet stroke Hussein’s head.

Then the Arab called Bashir came to Abdullai’s house. They had a long talk and reached an agreement. I was sold to Bashir for some money and Bashir brought me here. I hope I will find my daughter. She will be nine years old now.

Ken thanked her, and Aluet rose and walked over to the homestead to stand with the others. They were lined up behind Manute’s Land Rover, parked beside the tukul with its rear doors open and a row of jerry cans inside. Soldiers were pouring water out of the cans into tin cups and giving each person a drink. While they stood waiting, Jean listened to their heartbeats with a stethoscope and Mike took their pulses and temperatures and made notes on a clipboard. The people then filed off to where more soldiers were cooking porridge over an open fire. The soldiers ladled the porridge out of a big cast-iron pot into wooden bowls, and the liberated slaves found whatever shade they could and sat down to eat with wooden spoons that looked like ice cream scoops. Phyllis’s cameramen were shooting the scene. They had filmed the first three people Ken interviewed but seemed to get bored with the repetitious accounts of rape and murder and forced labor and went off to get some videotape of the slaves’ picnic.