Acts of faith (70 page)

“I like this,” he said, passing a hand through her braids, the beads clattering softly.

“I was wondering when you’d notice.”

“Oh, I noticed straight away,” Michael said, then after the girls left, “Wesley told me, when we were walking here from the airfield, about what you did. That was quick thinking, and I’m grateful.”

“It seemed like the right thing. I hope so.”

“This is Sudan. The choice is never between the right thing and the wrong thing, but always between what is necessary and what isn’t. And the supplies brought in today are necessary. Without them, I would be unable to carry off the operation.”

“Is it still top secret?”

“For now, yes. I’m tired of thinking about it.”

“It’ll be dangerous?”

“Of course, but more dangerous for the men than for me.”

“You’ll be gone a long time?”

“If all goes well, it will be over in one day. But no more about it. I want to hear more about where you come from. Iowa.”

“We pretty much exhausted that boring topic the last time.”

“As I told you then, I like being bored. Boredom to me is a luxury.”

“I had enough of that luxury to last me a while. A long while. Forever.”

“Then tell me more about this work you do, this redeeming of captives.”

She described the field missions, and the satisfaction she derived from seeing the joy on the former slaves’ faces. It was the worthiest work she’d done, but, she was quick to add, the sights she’d seen in the Nuba had made it seem insufficient, awakening an urge and a will to do more. She thought she should be playing a larger role, though she didn’t know what it could be. They fell into an intense discussion about the war, about the aid campaign, about restoring St. Andrew’s mission and Michael’s vision of creating a new Sudan, with the divisions of tribe and faith swept aside. Their shoulders occasionally touched as they talked, she watched the movement of his fabulously long fingers, and she smelled his sweat, but it was his voice and his ideas that generated the same magnetism that had drawn them into a kiss more than a month ago. She was sure he felt it, too, yet something restrained them now. Something like fear.

They lapsed into a silence, then he pointed at the cicatrix stitching his brows. “Do you know what these mean?”

“They’re decorative aren’t they?”

“Yes, but it is also believed that they improve eyesight.”

“And do they?”

“My eyes saw you, didn’t they? That day when all of you came to New Tourom, out of all the women with you, I noticed you first and then noticed no others.”

This confession, coming so suddenly, left her momentarily breathless.

“I’m very plain. I know that.”

“I don’t think so. I looked at you and thought, ‘She has legs like a gazelle.’ ”

“Every woman around here has legs like a gazelle.” She paused. “All right, I’ll tell you something. When I saw you getting ready for your wrestling match, covered in that ash, I thought you looked like Adam, the second after God made him. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

He brushed her plaits again. “How can I say it sounds ridiculous when you compare me to the father of the human race? You wouldn’t be Eve, would you?”

From a distance, the sounds of drums, horn and whistle blasts, and singing spared her from answering.

“That’s the dance?”

“There is dancing now almost every night. For the harvest. It is a ceremony we call
sibr.
Sibr is the name for sacred spirits and the ceremonies that honor them. This one is the Sibr of Fire. Would you like to see it?”

“Would you?”

“I’ve seen it a thousand times. I would rather be here, talking to you.”

“You knew that’s what I wanted to hear.”

“I’m not a fool. But it’s true all the same. If you want to hear music, I will make it for you.”

He went into one of the huts and came out with a small handmade harp with three strings. Sitting again, he strummed and sang. She couldn’t understand the words, but an undertone of sadness in the melody came through plainly enough. He finished the verse, then translated.

It is a big sibr, and they are happy
They are celebrating because today is the sibr
Of those who died long ago.
Because today is the day the spirits have said
We will celebrate the dead.

“Is it about her?” Quinette asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“No. It’s only a song.”

“I’m sorry. That was unfair of me,” she said.

“I remember her and honor her,” he said. “We always remember and honor our dead. We pray to their spirits for aid, but that is very different from loving them.”

She wondered if he was being completely honest. No matter how much death he’d seen, how could his sorrow fade after only two years? And if he still grieved for her, was there love in his grief, breathing and beating still?

Then he kissed her forehead, and she almost wept when the carapace of his reserve broke and he clasped the back of her neck, pulling her mouth to his. She craved him more than she’d craved anyone, and yet was relieved when he drew away. There was another silence, and in that silence a distance grew, and filling the distance was the understanding that if they made love, it would change their lives in ways neither of them could foresee.

I
N THE COOL
of early morning she trekked to New Tourom with her personal bodyguard, a scrawny youth nicknamed Negev after the Israeli machine gun he carried, and a procession of students, children of Michael’s soldiers. Pearl and her friends were among them, wearing white uniform dresses, gifts from the Friends of the Frontline.

In town workmen were roofing the new school, weaving makuti through the beams and rafters. There she was met by a teacher, Moses, a gaunt, middle-aged man in a white shirt who would be her translator. The meks, some of whom had come from villages as far as fifty miles away, were assembled inside St. Andrew’s church. The retriever, Bashir, was with them, looking none too comfortable within Christian walls.

“Salaam aleikum,” Quinette greeted, thus exhausting her Arabic.

“Aleikum as-salaam,” Bashir replied, and sat on one of the halved logs that served as pews.

Breaking out her notebook and tape recorder, she took a seat alongside him. Some of the meks presented handwritten lists of abducted people; the others, illiterate, had committed the names to memory. Deciphering the scrawl, extracting detailed information like ages and dates of capture, was exceedingly tedious. The translations drew the business out even longer. The meks knew no English, each spoke a Nuban dialect different from Moses’s. The only common language was Arabic, which few spoke well, requiring Moses to ask them, over and over, to repeat what they’d said. By midday Quinette had completed interviews with only two of the eight men and had not had a chance to speak to Bashir.

They broke for lunch, to resume in the afternoon. Moses invited her to eat with him and his wife. She might have turned him down had she known that he was also going to invite Ulrika.

They picked her up at her clinic, a square hut in front of which stood a queue of old folks and mothers with babies. Inside, a man sat handing out prescriptions through a window and writing in a cloth ledger that looked like an artifact from the nineteenth century. Ulrika was taking a child’s temperature. When she came out, looking much thinner than when Quinette had last seen her, her face drawn, her long hair limp in the heat, she said that the child was suffering from severe diarrhea and that she had sufficient medicine to treat him for only two more days.

“After that I will be like a kujur and feed him the inside of a baobab gourd. That is supposed to cure the diarrhea, but if it doesn’t, maybe he will die. I don’t know.”

She had heard that her supplies had been confiscated, and was that true? Her cheeks flushing, Quinette nodded.

“There was no way to stop them?”

“There were twenty, thirty of them with rifles.”

Never a choice between right and wrong, only between what was necessary and what was not. She pleaded with God to not let the child die, trusting Him to understand that swapping the medicine for weapons could save the lives of many children.

They sat down outside Moses’s tukul, in the shade of a mango tree. His wife had cooked a chicken that must have trained for the poultry Olympics, the meat was so stringy and tough. Quinette asked Ulrika about Dr. Manfred. The nurse had heard no word from him and very little about him, only that he’d returned to Germany and was recovering from his breakdown. “A temporary madness,” she said in her brusque way, “but I don’t think he is coming back for a long time, maybe never. He suffers from too much of Africa.”

After lunch Quinette returned to the church and conferred with Bashir. Speaking in Arabic, he affirmed that he and his associates would be able to act as middlemen in the Nuba, as they did in Dinkaland. But travel in the mountains was more difficult and more dangerous, and therefore he would have to charge a higher “risk premium”—seventy-five dollars a head.

Outside a dog barked, the sound jarring in the scorched stillness of the afternoon. “I’ll have to speak to Eismont about that,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll agree to it.”

“Sixty, then,” Bashir countered.

She regarded him, with his Rolex and rings and spotless jelibiya. “I can’t tell you how much you disgust me,” she said, smiling.

Moses looked at her, alarmed. “Miss, do you wish me to translate?”

She said no and returned to interviewing the meks.

H
ANDY WARMED UP
for his debut as a combat cameraman by filming the training exercise, a live-fire rehearsal for the attack on the garrison. It was conducted some distance from town, on an open plain where there weren’t any people and the soldiers, thanks to the ammunition Dare had delivered, could practice with real bullets. They were a motley lot. Michael’s bodyguard and assault troops wore uniforms; the rest were got up like they’d looted an army surplus store and maybe the used clothing bin at a Salvation Army depot. There were men in bathing trunks and shorts and T-shirts so full of holes they showed as much skin as they covered; men wearing camouflage trousers and brightly colored shirts that negated the camouflage. A couple of soldiers had donned skirts and petticoats so that they looked like armed cross-dressers. They wore sneakers, sandals, and shower shoes and covered their heads with World War II British officer hats and heirloom pith helmets passed on by grandfathers who’d served in colonial constabularies.

Dare had a low opinion of African fighting abilities, except for the Ethiopians and the Somalis—who’d shown their prowess at Mogadishu—but he looked past the sorry appearance of Michael’s troops and observed that they moved well in the field, listened to their officers’ commands, and handled their weapons as if they knew which end to point. The Archangel had taught them the lessons he’d learned at Fort Benning. With bundles of grass and tree branches tied to their belts, they advanced in choreographed rushes, one platoon sprinting forward while another laid down covering fire—short, disciplined bursts, not the unrestrained volleys of amateurs who liked to make noise.

Handy had come down with a slight fever and diarrhea, but he’d rallied after an overdose of Lomotil and now brimmed with enthusiasm, his camera trained on a mortar crew drilling with smoke rounds. He focused on the one who dropped the shells into the tube—he wore a shiny crucifix around his neck, a regular Crusader. “This will look terrific!”

“A few months ago these dudes were carrying spears,” Doug said. “Now look at them.”

Dare said, “From the bronze age to the twentieth century quick as a wink. Nothin’ like progress.”

S
HE
’
D SPOKEN TO
all the meks but two. They would have to wait until tomorrow. She was worn out, and so was Moses, practically hoarse from his translating work, and he still had teaching to do.

“An English class for some older students,” he said. “Possibly you could assist me.”

“Me?” Quinette said, her hand going to her chest. “I’ve never taught.”

“This is only the English alphabet. Very easy.”

“All right. You helped me, I’ll help you.”

The class was held outdoors, with a chalkboard propped against the trunk of a tree. There were ten students in their late teens or twenties, and among them was the woman of fierce beauty who’d spoken about her captivity on Nuba Day. Quinette couldn’t recall her name, but her tale of escaping her master she hadn’t forgotten. Moses spoke in Nuban, motioning at Quinette to introduce her. The young woman said something.

“Yamila says you have met before,” Moses translated.

“Yes. Hello, Yamila.”

“Ah-lo,” Yamila replied without a smile.

Moses passed out the copybooks and pencils. No computers or visual aids here, no desks—the students sat on rocks or on empty cooking-oil tins—no nothing, not even a roof over their heads.

Moses wrote an
A
on the chalkboard. “What is the letter?”

The class, in unison: “Capital letter
A
!”