Acts of faith (56 page)

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh!” she said, startled. “I—I just wanted to say that we were all thrilled by the matches, and to congratulate the commander on his win.”

Michael laughed a laugh that sounded the way velvet felt and said he was lucky. He shouldn’t have accepted the challenge. The military commander of liberated Nuba had a certain dignity to uphold, and tussling in the dirt with a man ten years younger wasn’t the way to do it.

“We were told you had no choice, that you couldn’t turn him down.”

“I could have,” he said, twirling his walking stick in his long fingers. “I’m thirty-six years, and everyone knows that’s too old to be wrestling. Pride made me do it, and I was taught that pride goes before the fall.”

“Well, the other guy took the fall.”

“Ha! Yes, he did! That guy is strong, but he’s not very good, he only thinks he is. He was also tired from his previous match.”

She drew closer. It was a tad awkward, talking to a man she’d glimpsed in the buff only an hour ago.

Michael tapped the stick’s ivory handle in his palm. “And you are who?”

“Quinette Hardin.”

“American, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And you are with which agency?”

“It’s not an agency exactly. A human rights group, the WorldWide Christian Union.”

“Which does what?”

She told him and complimented his command of English.

“I see,” Michael said. “So, Miss Hardin, what do you speak besides English?”

“Nothing. Unless you want to count two years of high school Spanish.”

“I would be delighted to meet someday an American who speaks more than English. You Americans own the world now and you don’t have to learn.” There was no edge to the remark; he made it as if stating a mathematical fact. “But someday someone else will own the world, and then you’ll have to learn their language. Who do you think it will be? The Russians? The Arabs? The Chinese?”

“Couldn’t say. Never thought about it.”

“I’ll bet on the Chinese. The Arabs are too crazy to be masters of the world. The Russians are too drunk. But the Chinese, oh, they’re so disciplined and hardworking, and there are so many of them!” With a languid movement, he pointed the stick toward the mission, hidden in the trees a few hundred yards off. “I learned there. The Englishman’s English. The American English I learned taking military training at your Fort Benning in Georgia state. Do you know Georgia?”

“Not really. I’m from far away. Iowa.”

“Where our commander in chief went to university.”

“Yeah. Someone told me Garang went to Iowa State.”

“Iowa State,” Michael said distantly. “He studied agriculture, animal husbandry, I think. He’s a Dinka, and the Dinka are like the Arabs. How they love cattle. Cattle are their lives. They’re African cowboys, and the Arabs in Sudan are Arab cowboys. So this war, it’s not cowboys and Indians, it’s cowboys and cowboys.”

“What is it you wish to speak to the commander about?” the adjutant growled, bootlegging into the question an impatience with the chatter.

“I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” Quinette said.

“Major Muhammad Kasli.”

You can’t get more Muslim than Muhammad,
she thought. Lord, you needed a program and a scorecard to keep track of who was on whose side in this war. To entice the major out of his dour attitude, she offered her hand and the wide, friendly smile that came naturally to a midwesterner (the tyrannical farmbelt grin, Kristen used to call it, because it announced that the one who wore it was so inoffensive that the one upon whom it was bestowed didn’t dare to be otherwise). The pleasantries of the American heartland didn’t apply out here. Major Kasli merely nodded, without so much as a pleased to meet you.

“The major, Miss Hardin, sees to it that my time isn’t wasted,” Michael added, with the faintest trace of sarcasm.

She took the cue and stated her business. What was the extent of the slavery problem in the mountains? Any estimates of how many people had been seized?

“I don’t know much more than what I told you earlier,” Michael said with a weary shrug. “How many have been taken?” Another shrug. “A few, like that young woman who spoke to you, escape and give us some names. We get some informations from people whose families have paid Arab traders to return them.”

“We work a lot with a trader named Bashir. Is he one of them?”

“I have no idea.”

“I know of this Bashir,” Major Kasli interjected. “He’s gotten rich selling slaves back to freedom.”

Michael glanced at him sidelong, then said, “The taking of captives isn’t our problem, it’s the symptom of a problem.” Looking away, he waved his stick at the red wafer of the sun, suspended on the rim of the far ranges.”There’s the problem.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Quinette said.

“Those hills, and those over there, and those behind us. These mountains are so isolating. You have in one valley a village and you have in another valley another village and the people don’t even speak the same language. This makes it easy for the Arabs to give rewards to one tribe if they will join with the government. Yes, I’m sorry to report that many Nubans have been bribed to fight against their own people. The old tactic, divide and conquer, and we do half the work for them by dividing ourselves. Tribalism is the problem here, in all Sudan, in all of Africa. Who brought the first African slaves to the slave ships? Other Africans.”

He fell into a silence, looking at her as if he expected a response. She couldn’t think of any. Her only thought was that he was a strikingly handsome man.

He turned from her to glance over his shoulder, toward the mission and its surrounding village. “I would like to show you something, Miss Hardin. If you care to see it.”

“What?”

“What I hope will be a solution to the problem.”

In the dusk that had dropped like a stage curtain, they walked a rutted lane, past tightly clustered huts, Michael presenting verbal snapshots of the town when it had been home to more than two thousand souls. The thriving marketplace, the harvest festivals, the church filled with congregants, the school with pupils, their voices and laughter ringing in the air when classes were over.

“And then Khartoum’s bombers came, and then the raiders, and it became a village of ghosts,” he said. “Only a few people escaped death or captivity. Those drifted back and discovered that the Arabs had failed to destroy the wells. Why, no one knows. News of this traveled, and in time refugees from elsewhere began to arrive. Because there was water. Water is hope. These new settlers began to rebuild the houses, to plant gardens and tobacco and sorghum fields.” He stopped and motioned at a cooking fire, its glow illuminating the face of an old woman squatting before it. “She and her family are Moro tribesmen. And over there”—he walked further, toward the wink of a paraffin lamp—“are Nubans from the Tira hills. And there in those houses are Masakin Nuba.”

Quinette nodded to be polite. None of the tribal names meant anything to her. Off in the distance, men and women were dancing, drums and chants providing a kind of background music to Michael’s soliloquy.

“After I was given command of the SPLA forces in the Nuba and I saw what was happening here, I made my headquarters nearby. This is my main task—to unite the Nuba in a common cause. Very difficult, maybe impossible, but it begins here”—he stomped a foot—“because here the people have been uniting themselves. Without intending to, out of necessity, they’ve planted a seed. When you plant a garden, you build a fence around it. We fighters are the fence. Since we came, more people from all over the mountains have been settling in this refuge, and there have been no attacks. We now have almost half the original population, but from different tribes, learning one another’s dialects and customs, discovering what they have in common. New Tourom belongs to no one tribe, it belongs to all. Out of destruction, the seed of a new society, with the old divisions and suspicions set aside. Now we must nurture it, help it grow into a fine big tree.”

Darkness had fallen, a full moon had risen, and he stood in its light, a tall soldier speaking improbably like a visionary.

“Do you know what I think of when I see what’s happening here?”

“N-no,” she said, struck by the way his hands moved when he spoke; his fingers seemed to be plucking invisible harp strings in the air.

“My year in America, and the soldiers I trained with at Fort Benning. White soldiers, black soldiers, brown ones. Soldiers with English names and Spanish names and Chinese names, all fighting for the same flag. I read about your history. You people began with one small colony, no bigger than this village. And it drew others like a magnet. A nation of immigrants, you call yourselves. Aren’t these people here immigrants also? The relief organizations call them internally displaced persons, but I like to think of them as immigrants and of what’s happening here as a . . . what is the word I want? An experiment? And I intend to make this experiment a success.”

He led her to the mission, their legs swishing through knee-high grass. Michael stopped in front of the building that was under reconstruction, moved on to the long bungalow with flayed brick walls, then on to the row of roofless huts—living quarters for the teachers, he said—and from there to a shell that had been a clinic, to the carpentry and blacksmith shops, and finally to the church, crouched under the rock pinnacles. It had looked merely sad in the afternoon, but the moon transformed it and the damaged structures all around into something mysterious and romantic.

“For almost forty years this was here, not touched, till that day the Antonovs came.”

He pointed to a plaque, bolted into a stone pedestal, over which a brass bell hung from a tripod of steel rails.
CHURCH OF ST
.
ANDREW
. 1957.

“Catholic?” she asked.

“Oh, no. ECS. The Episcopal Church of Sudan. Let me show you inside.”

He opened the tall wooden door. Arrows of moonlight pierced the holes that bomb fragments had torn in the roof, and a diffuse beam fell through a gaping rip in the altar dome, illuminating the simple altar, some wooden pillars, and the halved logs that served as pews.

“I was baptized here,” he said, the words echoing in the cavernous interior.

She didn’t know why, but she was pleased to learn that he was Protestant.

“And the small man who spoke today, John Barrett, do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“He preached here some years ago. He was once Catholic, a priest, but one of our local girls caused him to change his mind.” Michael smiled. “Who could have thought then what would happen? That bombs would fall on a church?”

They went out and stood very near each other. In the cool night air she could feel the warmth coming off him and caught the rich, loamy scent of his skin, mingled with the sour odor of his unwashed uniform.

“When I was in school here”—looking directly at her—“the minister at the time taught us about doing certain things to show that we are true Christians. Acts of faith, he called them. To bring all this back would be an act of faith. Faith in the future. John’s agency and one other are helping us to rebuild the school. With more help we can rebuild the clinic and train nurses and medical assistants. We’ll rebuild the tailor shop and bring in sewing machines and teach women to use them. We’ll rebuild the carpentry and blacksmith shops so the men can make useful things. We’ll restore the church. It will be as it was, but better. All tribes living together in harmony. That’s the tree I hope will grow from the seed, and perhaps the winds will scatter its seeds through all the Nuba, all of southern Sudan.”

His voice seemed to set off vibrations that she could feel inside, like bass notes from an organ. She laid a hand on his forearm.

“What is it, Miss Hardin?”

“If you’d spoken like this today, all those other speeches would have been unnecessary. You should go back right now and tell everybody what you’ve just told me. You’ll have them lined up, ready to give you whatever you need.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve got to get back to my base.” He jerked his head. “It’s over that way.” He stood quietly for a few moments, tapping the ground with the walking stick. “Perhaps you could speak to the others for me?”

She sensed that this was more than a request; a commission, rather. “I will. I will do that.”

W
ITH OPEN EYES
, she lay on her sleeping bag on a tukul’s floor. It wasn’t the long peals of thunder and the furious spatter of rain on the grass roof that kept her awake; it was the recordings of Michael’s voice playing in her mind, the mental pictures of his smooth blue-black skin dusted in ash that produced a euphoric insomnia, a little like the crystal-meth highs she’d experienced in her bad-girl period. What a difference between him and other rebel commanders she’d met in her travels, with their narrow, foxhole views of things, their petty squabbles and conspiracies. Here was a big man with big ideas, and how privileged she felt that he’d chosen to share them with her. She’d carried out her commission and shared them with her colleagues at a lamplit dinner under the fly-tent. Lily had interrupted her at one point, asking, “Did he appoint you as his spokeswoman? Why doesn’t he tell us what he’d like us to do himself?” Quinette told her why, but now she wondered if there might have been another reason for her appointment. She sat up and, peering at the prone forms of Lily and two other women, pondered the possibility that God was urging her to work on behalf of Michael’s plans. God would give her a clear signal in His own good time.