Acts of faith (71 page)

“Write, please.”

Heads bowed over copybooks.

He wrote an
a.

“Small letter
a
!”

It took half an hour to get to
z.
Moses checked the class’s work. This was where Quinette was to give him a hand. It was difficult to read the students’ scratchings. Yamila’s were the most illegible of all; the letters looked like aimless scribbling. Quinette squatted, took a stick, and wrote an
A
in the ground.

“Ay,” she said. “Capital letter ay.” Motioning to Yamila to make the sound, stretching it out like she was pulling a rubber band. “Ayyy.”

Silent, the young woman looked fixedly at her.

“Ayyy,” Quinette repeated, and meeting with the same stare, she called Moses over. “I don’t think she understands what’s going on here.”

“Oh, but she does,” Moses said. “She wishes to learn to read and write, but she can be stubborn. Please try with her again.”

Gesturing at the ground, Quinette encouraged her pupil to write the letter: “Ayyy.” There was something intimidating about Yamila’s expression, so untamed that the wonder was that anyone had been able to subdue and enslave her in the first place.

Yamila bent down and formed the letter and said “Ay,” and turned to Quinette as if defying her to find fault with her writing or her pronunciation.

“Good. Now, bee.”

She made an awkward but recognizable
B.

“Now, cee.”

“Cee.”

They went on—dee, ee, ef, gee, aitch—with never a moment’s softening in Yamila’s countenance. Well, after what she’d been through, what else could she be but hard and full of rage? You couldn’t expect her to grow mellow and tender just because a stranger was helping her learn the English alphabet.

Numbers were next, and then a spelling lesson, and by late afternoon the adult education class was over. The pupils stood, Moses leading them in prayer. “Father in heaven, watch over us. Do not kill us, do not allow us or our children to go hungry, do not make us sick. Father in heaven, bring peace to the Nuba, deliver us from war, deliver us from evil, Amen.” This God wasn’t the God Quinette prayed to. This was the God of Sudan, who had to be asked not to kill people, or starve them, or make them sick.

She walked back to the garrison with Negev. After they’d gone through the passage in the hills, she saw several figures dancing on a wide ledge atop a promontory.

“What are they doing?”

Negev replied vaguely that it was “for the sibr,” and when she suggested they have a look, he shook his head. “Men are not allowed. Women only.”

Now her curiosity was piqued. “Well, I’m a woman. Could I go by myself?”

“You are white lady, missy, and I don’t know if it is permitted. If someone tells you to go away, please to do it.”

She turned up a path, her approach masked by the ring of boulders that made a natural wall around the ledge. With the excitement of doing the forbidden, she hid behind one of the boulders and cautiously raised her head. High oblong rock formations leaned into one another at the back side of the ledge, like the poles to a teepee, and in the cave-like space between them, a pair of older women sat observing several girls, circling one another, holding long, supple branches or whips. They were naked, except for their beads and bracelets, and their bodies had been lacquered in oil. Three of the girls were Pearl and her cousins, Kiki and Nolli. Their white school dresses were laid out on a boulder. Pearl pirouetted, and as she did, her partner struck her hard across the back with a stick. She winced but made no sound; then her partner offered her back, and Pearl lashed her with a whip plaited of leather. Kiki, Nolli, and the remaining girls were similarly engaged, and they all bore the blows without a cry, only their faces registering pain. Soon blood began to flow, its color shocking against the lustrous black of their skin.

Flinching sympathetically with each crack of wood or leather but unable to turn away, Quinette wondered what she was witnessing. As the older women watched with critical eyes, the girls flailed one another several times more, their heads thrown back and eyes squeezed shut, the scarlet rivulets streaming over their buttocks and down their reed-thin legs. They seemed to be in a state beyond pain, a transcendent rapture, like the passion of saints. One of the women clapped her hands, and the witches’ sabbath was over. Almost immediately the girls came out of their collective ecstasy and gathered around their mentors. The women wiped the blood with palm leaves, then dipped their hands into a mound of white ash and powdered the wounds. Quinette ducked down before she was discovered and rejoined Negev.

“They were beating each other,” she said, short of breath, her heart fluttering. “Beating each other with whips and sticks. Why?”

He stood up, holding his machine gun by its carrying handle. “For the sibr,” he replied—a flat declaration that closed off further inquiry.

She followed him home, confused less by what she had seen than by what it made her feel.

That evening, in response to her questions, Michael explained that the ritual was a rite both of initiation and of purification. The girls were beating the evil out of one another, in honor of the Fire Sibr, and at the same time subjecting themselves to a trial of their womanhood. No less than boys, who were tested in other ways, Nuban girls had to prove they possessed the bravery and strength to withstand the ordeals they would meet as adults. Those who failed suffered disgrace and scorn, which were worse than the sting of a whip. That was why Pearl and the others had not cried out under the blows.

“Was it wrong of me to watch? What would they have done if they’d seen me?”

“I don’t know. Our customs don’t say one way or the other what would happen if a strange woman observes the ceremony.”

In the darkness he was all but invisible. It was good she couldn’t see his face; otherwise she wouldn’t have had the nerve to confess what she was about to confess.

“Watching them,” she began hesitantly, “I felt . . . something.”

“Shock? Disgust?” Michael prompted.

“Nothing like that. What I felt was . . . a longing. I envied them.”

“But why?”

“I envied them for their pain, and the way they got beyond it.”

He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “You already are a woman, Quinette. Your strength and bravery have been tested. I was there when they were, and you did not fail.” After another, longer silence, he clasped her chin and turned her head to face him. “That is when I knew I loved you.”

She sat inert, her heart pummeling her chest.

“There is no need for you to say anything.”

“I can’t. I—I don’t know . . . Tomorrow? You will be careful, won’t you?”

D
IRE
S
TRAITS PLAYED
softly on Doug’s cassette player. Dare was seriously considering stomping on it.

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire

“Can’t believe this is happening,” Handy groaned, stretched out on his air mattress. “Two weeks here, not a problem, and this hits me now.”

“A hundred and three,” Doug said, squinting at Handy’s thermometer.

“They’re leaving before daybreak.” Handy kneaded his stomach. “They’re going to make a night march to the garrison.”

“You haven’t thrown up, so it probably isn’t amoebic,” Doug said encouragingly. “You could be good to go.”

He switched on his headlamp and occupied himself with a bird book—it went everywhere with him—while Nimrod poked at the remnants of his dinner and Dare carefully snubbed a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers and put it back in the pack. He had ten left, enough to last another three days with strict rationing. The prospect of being stuck here without the solace of tobacco wasn’t one he relished. Besides the heat, the ticks, and wretched food, the boredom was beyond anything he’d experienced before. This afternoon, after the training exercise, he’d walked to the radio room, contacted Fitz, and asked if there was any change in the fuel situation. There wasn’t.

As he left, he pilfered a few sheets of paper from the radio operator. Now, in the intervals between budgeted puffs on his cigarette, he composed by flashlight a letter to Mary. He missed her more than he thought possible; missed her smell, her sarcasm, the tuft of fine atavistic down at the base of her spine that he liked to tickle and that embarrassed her. Nights weren’t the worst time; his ache for her was sharpest at dawn—the waking up without her beside him. He was reminded of something an old Air America jockey had told him years ago in a bar in Vientiane: “If you feel like hell when the sun goes down, you’re all right—it’s when you hate to see it come up that you know you’re in trouble.”

At the moment he was thinking selfish thoughts that her father get his dying over with and speed her back to Wesley Dare’s arms and bed. There wasn’t much chance she’d receive the letter before she returned to Africa, even if he mailed it the moment he set foot again in Loki; his only purpose, aside from the mental communion the writing offered, was to keep himself occupied so he wouldn’t go insane.

“Heavenly Father, cure me of this sickness that I’ll be able to film the operation.” Handy was praying aloud. The only thing worse than having a Jesus freak for a roommate was having a sick Jesus freak for a roommate. “You know, Lord, that this footage will bring in the dollars to help your children fight the enemies of your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.”

Dare left off his letter and relit the butt. Two things occurred to him: One, the Muslims in Khartoum were petitioning the same God to aid their fight against the followers of Jesus Christ, so did God ever get confused about which side he was on? Two, people like Handy had an exaggerated sense of their importance, thinking that a Supreme Being with a universe to manage would take time off to play doctor to a guy with the runs.

Handy suddenly popped up and scurried to the latrine—a pit enclosed by a grass fence. It appeared that the Divine Physician had other patients to attend to.

“Doug, do you know how to use a video camera?” Handy asked when he returned.

Doug said he did.

“If I’m not good to go—this is a lot to ask, the risks and all—could you take my place?”

At that Dare glanced at his partner and wasn’t surprised to see the look of zest on his face.

Handy got his camera, a big Sony, then flopped onto the air mattress as if he’d just finished a long run.

“This is a professional’s model,” he said, then showed Douglas how to work it, paying special attention to the zoom. He would be shooting at a distance, and it was critical to use the zoom properly. Then something about light metering, the battery pack, and so on.

When the tutorial was finished, Dare took Doug aside. “What in the fuck do you think you’re doin’?”

He had a logical explanation—he always had logical explanations for every illogical thing he did. The Friends of the Frontline were a client; therefore he would be doing nothing more than a favor for a client. Also, if Handy’s film was successful, the increased contributions it raked in would ultimately translate into more business for Knight Air.

“Aren’t you mixed up in this shit a little too much already that y’all have to risk your ass to help make a propaganda movie?”

“You’re as mixed up in it as I am, and in some ways a little more.”

“In some other ways, a little less. I mean to get unmixed up when the time comes. This isn’t my war, and not yours either.”

“Yeah, it is,” Doug said with an affectless expression and a spooky tranquillity. “There are times when it’s plain inhuman not to take sides.”

“Me, I’m on Wes Dare’s side. Take some advice from an older man. Tell that Bible-thumpin’ propagandist y’all have changed your mind. You might get hurt, and old Wes doesn’t want to see his partner get hurt, or worse.”

“You’re forgetting. I’ve been in combat.”

“Goddamn it! This is gonna be
ground
combat, blue-collar combat, in your face and personal, not playin’ computer games in an airplane.”

“It’ll be all right. It might even be fun.”

Dare knew when to quit. Some kinds of ignorance were flat-out invincible.

The next morning, almost hallucinating from fatigue, his tongue swollen from thirst, his feet blistered, and every bone and joint aching, he called upon his sleep-deprived brain to produce one good reason for doing what he’d done. The brain offered a multiple choice: (a) Loyalty to fellow aviators being one of his pillars of wisdom, he’d decided to play the role of the experienced noncom to Douglas’s young, impetuous officer; (b) corollary of (a) he’d realized he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if, for lack of a restraining influence, his partner did something stupid and got himself killed; or (c) the boredom of hanging around camp was so colossal that anything was preferable to it. He chose (d), none of the above, because there was no good reason for subjecting himself to the ordeal of a forced march. He must have acted on blind impulse at three this morning, when, awakened by the sounds of the troops moving out, he saw Douglas shouldering the camera and said, “I’d best go with you.” The younger man grinned and replied, “Knew you would.” Nimrod saw them off with a face that said, “I hope to see you again.”