Acts of faith (55 page)

Douglas led his pilgrims to a dusty flat surrounded by low hills, forming a natural arena. It was thronged with people, assembled under fluttering flags, and here the atmosphere was festive.

“All right, folks, you’re about to be greeted Nuban style,” Douglas announced.

A weird noise split the air as a man sporting a pith helmet and sunglasses blew on an antelope horn with a long wooden tube fitted into one end. A mob of warriors, wearing loin cloths and feathered circlets tied to their arms and ankles, sprinted toward the visitors, waving spears longer than the men were tall, and they were quite tall, built like football players. Quinette saw Phyllis’s cameraman heft his video camera to his shoulder, then lower it, as if he were afraid the onrushing wild men would mistake it for a weapon and turn him into a human pincushion. They peeled off and began to dance around and around the visitors, stomping their feet to a drum; around and around, loosing incomprehensible cries with a trancelike glassiness in their eyes until, with a leap and a single ear-splitting yell, the dance ended, the mass of bodies parted, and Quinette and her companions found themselves facing two uniformed giants.

In a bass voice, smiling a smile that could have advertised toothpaste, the one on the left welcomed them and introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goraende, the other as his adjutant, Major Kasli. At six feet five or six, Goraende was the shorter, but also broader, his shoulders and chest suggesting the solidity of a monument. He wore the badges of a high-ranking SPLA officer—scarlet beret, red and gold shoulder boards, carved walking stick, pistol—but the gold earrings that were pierced through the top of his left ear, the crucifix hanging from his throat, and the slight upturn to his full lips saved him from looking too stern and military. He shook everyone’s hand. When he enveloped Quinette’s, she had an urge to curtsy, his bearing was so dignified.

He brought them to a small wooden stand, shaded by a canvas tarp and facing a platform with a stand-up mike wired to a relic of a speaker wired to a solar panel. Quinette was surprised to see Diana Briggs and John Barrett sitting on the topmost bench. She almost didn’t recognize them, out of their usual context. A third person was with them, a stocky, frowning man with flaxen hair. She waved hello and took a seat in the front row. The crowd of Nubans had moved off into the shade of the surrounding acacia trees. A few men in turbans and jelibiyas remained nearby, standing in a line alongside Douglas.

For two sweltering hours, the delegation listened to speeches. Barrett led off, talking about the work International People’s Aid was doing in the Nuba, and pleading that it could not do it without help from other agencies. The stocky man followed, Gerhard Manfred, a doctor who ran a hospital in another part of the mountains. The gist of his address was that the government of Sudan made things difficult for him by stealing the supplies and equipment sent to him from Germany, forcing him to seek clandestine help from outside.

Then came the turbaned men, who were called
meks.
Like a master of ceremonies, Douglas introduced each by name. Their speeches took a long time, because they had to be translated from Nuban into Arabic by one man, then from Arabic into English by another. They told tales of bombings, raids, and abductions, of families driven off their farms and into concentration camps. That plucked a sympathetic chord in Quinette. Her family had not been exiled by bombs or raids, but she knew what it was like to lose your land and your place in the world, whether you were robbed of it by a violent tyranny or by the tyranny of banks and mortgages and big corporations.

The meks went on, and their stories added up to one long cry of need, one long appeal for the gears in the machinery of compassion to begin turning for them. The reporters and relief workers took notes during the first two or three speeches, but the litany of sorrows grew so repetitious that they stopped and just stared as if hypnotized. Until, after the last mek had said his piece, Michael Goraende mounted the platform with a stunning young woman six feet tall, with a kanga knotted over one shoulder, the top of her skull shaved, and the hair on the back of her head trailing in tight braids down past her shoulders. Her skin was as black as a panther’s and she moved like one, and the look of proud ferocity on her strong square-jawed face, accentuated by the tribal scars stitched across her eyebrows, completed the picture of dangerous beauty.

Goraende said that her name was Yamila and that she’d been taken captive a while ago and sold into slavery. Now she wished to tell the distinguished guests what had happened to her. Quinette removed her tape recorder from her fanny pack and handed it to the Arabic-to-English translator, instructing him to speak into it. The young woman’s fierce expression melted into one of fright as she stood awkwardly at the microphone and faced a score of strangers. The commander whispered to her, and she began in a halting monotone. Her story was one Quinette had by now heard hundreds of times, but it had one unusual twist: Yamila had escaped her Arab captor. One of his wives, jealous because Yamila had delivered a son whom the man doted on, helped her get away. With her child, she fled back into the mountains, found her home village a deserted ruin, and went on to a neighboring village, where she was given food and water. But the people there were from a different tribe and, fearing the Arabs would come after her, told her to leave. They directed her to New Tourom, where other refugees had settled. She arrived after a three-day journey on foot, but not before her breasts ran dry (from fear, exhaustion, lack of nourishment, Quinette surmised). Her son died on the night of the second day, and she carried his corpse the rest of the way and buried him in the mission cemetery.

Yamila stopped there, looking uncertainly at Goraende. Lily and a few other women in the stand choked up, but Quinette’s eyes were dry.
“Takes some getting used to, but you don’t want to get too used to it,”
Jean, the Canadian nurse, had advised her that first time in Sudan. She didn’t think she’d become hardened, she was only being professional when, as Yamila was about to leave, she asked her when and where she was captured, and the name of her master and how he’d treated her. The translator passed the questions on. “It was in the Moro hills, south of here,” the girl replied. “He was called Ibrahim Idris. He treated me not so bad.” She hesitated. “Not so bad as some others, if I did what he wanted.” She wouldn’t say more, stepped down, and with her head and back erect, walked away, toward the long shadow of a tree.

The audience’s bodies and emotions were given a break. A lunch of hard-boiled eggs, millet bread, and soda was served under a fly-tent lashed between two tall mahoganies. Quinette left the eggs alone and stuck to the millet, washing it down with a nearly boiling ginger ale.

Sitting on camp stools at two joined cafeteria tables, the group must have looked like one big safari party. Goraende was at the head, his adjutant to one side, eyes cloaked by opaque sunglasses. Fitz was giving an interview to the
Times
correspondent; Barrett, Diana, and the German had been cornered by Phyllis, while Douglas held court at the foot of the table, talking up his airline to Lily and a couple of other NGO representatives. Quinette had yet to form a firm opinion of him. Except for the squint lines at the corners of his pilot’s eyes, he looked like the frat boys she used to see on the UNI campus, and he sometimes displayed a frat boy’s cocksure, superior attitude. At the same time he had charm, a way of talking to you as if he considered you the most important person in the world, and his winsomeness was having an effect on Lily. She all but batted her eyelashes at him.

At the end of the meal Goraende rose to announce that his guests were to be treated to some traditional entertainment, wrestling matches.

Everyone returned to the field where the speeches had been made, once again alive with crowds gathered under their village banners, women in the background, men up front in a big circle. Wrestling, said John Barrett, who’d taken over from Douglas as master of ceremonies, was the Nubans’ national sport. Wearing ratty shorts or skirts made from strips of cloth or wide leather belts to which eagle and ostrich wings had been attached, the contestants came out blowing tin whistles and making animal noises or bird cries, their bodies daubed in ash from burned acacia leaves—it was supposed to protect them from harm, so Barrett said. Two men would square off, watched by a referee wearing a red fez. The object was to toss your adversary onto his back. Most bouts didn’t last more than fifteen or twenty seconds; several minutes if the wrestlers were evenly matched. They would go at it, locking arms, locking legs, bear-hugging each other. Sometimes two men would become so intertwined, with the ostrich or eagle wings flailing, that they looked like one eight-limbed being, part human, part bird. All the while, drums throbbed, antelope horns blew, the crowds yelled and cheered their favorites—a frenzy of noise, wild and breathtaking.

At the end of the last match the victor, a house of a man, was carried around by his fans. After they let him down, he strutted over to where Goraende and his adjutant were sitting, dropped to his knees, and made odd dancing movements with his hands and arms. At first Quinette thought he was dedicating his triumph to the SPLA commander. He looked amused by this demonstration, but when the wrestler raised his palms and lowered them, pressing them flat on the ground at his feet, Goraende’s expression turned serious. He strode into the center of the ring, conferred with the referee, then snatched, from a man nearby, a long pole with a wooden triangle at its top and banged it on the ground several times. A cheer went up, rippled through the crowd, and swelled into a roar.

“Well now, you are about to see something interesting, an unscheduled event,” Barrett explained to the bewildered visitors. “That fellow has challenged Michael to a match, and when one man challenges another like that, getting down on his knees, it can’t be refused. Michael, you should know, was a champion in his day, never defeated, but of course it isn’t his day anymore.”

Michael.
Quinette decided she preferred his given name. Sitting at the far edge of her row, she had a clear view of him, stripping his clothes off some distance away. Apparently he was so at ease in his own skin that he didn’t mind baring it with a crowd of foreigners nearby. His one concession to modesty—if it was a concession and not merely an accident—was to stand facing away from them. Quinette averted her glance, but her own sense of decency wasn’t equal to her curiosity, and she looked again, watching him squat over a mound of ash to scoop handfuls over his shaved head and chest while an assistant covered his back. The ritual took a few minutes. When he stood, an arm crooked to rub ash into the back of his neck, his strong legs, taut buttocks, and flaring back, every inch powdered gray, arrested her gaze. She thought he looked like Adam the moment after God molded him from the dust of the earth and breathed life into him.

He did a literal girding up of loins, wrapping a red sash around his midsection, tucking the end between his legs and tying it off. Walking into the arena, he seemed shut up in his own world. His opponent was shorter but younger, with a tree trunk of a chest. The two men crouched face to face, elbows on their knees, hands out, and circled each other, looking for an opening. The younger man’s arm lashed out for Michael’s ankle, but he saw it coming, shot both legs backward, and as the challenger stumbled forward from his own momentum, whirled and gripped him around the waist from behind. The SPLA soldiers in the crowd let out a yell. The challenger twisted free, and both combatants were head to head, hands clasping the backs of each other’s necks. In that position they pushed, shoved, waltzed back and forth. Suddenly the challenger sidestepped, turning his immense torso at the same time. As his supporters bellowed, he hooked his left arm through Michael’s right and drove him to his hands and knees. Dropping to his own knees, he attempted to flip Michael onto his back, but with one palm on the ground, Michael spun away and got up to face his adversary once again. The challenger lunged with both arms for Michael’s head—a feint, for as Michael drew out of the crouch, raising his arms to block the move, the younger man ducked under his guard and clutched him in a bear hug. In that moment, their foreheads clashed with an audible crack. Michael wasn’t cut, but blood was streaming into his adversary’s eyes. Red blood on black skin, the coats of protective ash streaked with sweat—Quinette gasped at this exhibition, at the pure, raw maleness of it. Michael hooked one leg over the back of his opponent’s and tried to trip him. He might as well have tried to trip a stone block. Straining, grunting, his face a mask of pain and effort, the half-blinded challenger lifted Michael off his feet and pressed forward. Michael began to topple backward but pulled the challenger down with him, breaking the bear hug; then, in a quick, fluid motion, he locked his adversary’s arms in his, twisted sideways, and rolled him onto his back.

The defeated man lay there for a moment, panting. A couple of men rushed in to bind his wounded forehead with palm leaves. There was a delirium of shouts and yells as soldiers hoisted their champion onto their shoulders. Two women in Quinette’s group, sitting just in back of her, complained that this had been a bit too brutal, a bit too much. Maybe it had been, but there had been a real passion in it, too, Quinette thought. She jumped up and applauded as Michael was paraded by.

A fascination had been awakened in her, but she couldn’t admit that it was the reason she went to speak to him after he’d cleaned up and got back into his uniform. She persuaded herself that she needed more information about the slave trade in the Nuba. A few yards short of his circle of aides and bodyguards, a fit of shyness overcame her and she hesitated, lurking like someone who wants to join a cocktail party conversation but lacks the nerve. The adjutant spotted her.