Acts of faith (77 page)

With business concluded and with a light heart, he called on the nazir to tell him that peace had been restored among the Salamat. All its lineages were again brothers. The nazir lived in a fine house with a walled courtyard scented and shaded by frangipani, where they sat drinking tea and talking. Their conversation was interrupted by a knock at the metal gate. One of the plump nazir’s Dinka servants answered.

“Ya, omda, there is a man to see you,” the servant said. “He says he has news for you, which must be given in private.”

Excusing himself, Ibrahim went out into the dusty street.

“Salaam aleikum,” said Bashir, his beard freshly barbered and his clothes spotless.

“Aleikum as-salaam. It’s not a good thing for us to be seen together. How did you know I was here?”

“I make it my business to know things,” the Messiriya trader said. “And among the things I know is where she is.”

Ibrahim, his heart stammering, regarded Bashir, trying to gauge if he was telling the truth. “Where?”

“A town in the eastern Nuba. New Tourom.”

He seized Bashir by the arm and pulled him away from the gate. “How do you know?”

“Because I was there one week ago. I made inquiries and I saw her. Yamila, the one you call Miriam. I don’t blame you for wanting her back.”

“You saw her?” First the jinn had vanished; now this, a still clearer sign that his troubles were at an end.

“A tall young woman with bird’s wings tattooed on her belly.”

“Al-hamduillah!”

“Our agreement. Two hundred thousand pounds.”

“Two hundred once I have her again, you criminal.”

“I will take half that now, the rest once you are in possession of her.”

“I don’t go about with that kind of money on me. What do you think I am? A moneychanger?”

“Your pledge to deliver it by this evening will be sufficient,” Bashir said with some insolence.

“Very well, then. You’ll get it. Now, tell me what else you know.”

“This New Tourom is west of Kauda, well into the hills. The Christians have a church there.”

“She’s become a Christian?”

“I have no idea. All I do know is that she has been there since she fled from you, and that your son by her, Abdullah, is dead. He did not survive the journey.”

“
Dead?
The boy is dead?”

“I regret to tell you he is. And I have further bad news. This New Tourom is very near to where the rebel army in the Nuba has its chief base. I saw a lot of black soldiers about, maybe a thousand, and all very well armed.” Bashir paused. “I would say it isn’t a place you could shoot your way into, and if you tried, she could be killed in the crossfire. That’s what I would say, but then, war isn’t my business.”

Looking directly at the trader, Ibrahim asked, “Are you saying there might be some other way? Could you and your friends get her out of there and bring her to me?”

“Kidnapping is also not my business. I leave it to you to figure out how to retrieve her, but if I can be of service, please to tell me.”

“For a price.”

“Of course for a price. We can negotiate that later. As to the price at hand, I am staying with a colleague, a man named Aderrahman. His house is behind the souk. This evening, after prayers. Inshallah, I will see you there with a hundred thousand pounds.”

“Inshallah,” Ibrahim Idris said, and returned to the courtyard, unable to think for the voice calling her name in his head, over and over.
Miriam.

Redeemer

A
FTER SHE RETURNED
to Kenya, Quinette thought that a graph of her moods would resemble the electrocardiogram of someone suffering from acute arrhythmia. Her own heart twitched erratically—spasms of joy when she recalled the dance and their lovemaking, but also convulsions of shame brought on by the thou-shalt-nots of her evangelical faith. Michael’s absence caused fits of loneliness, the uncertainty of when she would see him again quivers of anxiety. She would experience dips of melancholy, spikes of excitement, and flutters of terror, all within five minutes. Her emotional fibrillations were impossible to hide—at one point her roommate, Anne Derby, asked if there was a history of bipolar disorders in her family—but she had to hide their cause. Loki was like the small town she’d left behind, prone to brushfires of gossip. Most everyone was liberal about liaisons between whites and Africans (more liberal when it came to white men and black women than the other way around), but a love affair with an SPLA commander was definitely out of bounds. If her involvement with Michael became public, more than her reputation would be tarnished; Ken could very well fire her. So she had to keep her thoughts and feelings to herself, and the lack of a confidant aggravated her symptoms.

She wrote Michael an uninhibited letter—five pages in her peculiar handwriting, slanting so far forward it threatened to topple into illegibility—marched to Knight Air, and handed it to Fitz. Was that a knowing smile he gave her? If it was, he was discreet enough not to ask questions, promising the letter would be delivered in two days, when the next flight was scheduled for New Tourom.

She then suffered the torment of waiting for a reply, and her moods for the next two weeks rose and plunged with greater violence. At last Fitz told her a letter was waiting for her in Knight Air’s office. She retrieved it immediately and read it as she walked to her tent.

My Darling Quinette,

     
With happiness and surprise I received your letter. Forgive me for taking so long to answer. I have been very busy, and of course I had to wait for a plane to deliver this to you.

     
You begin your letter, “Dear Michael,” I begin mine as you see. Is it bad manners to call you “My Darling” on the basis of one night together? (How I wish to have another like it!) I don’t care. You are my darling.

     
I do not feel for you what you feel for me. I feel twice as much! I have thought about you day and night since you left. Before I met you, I had no belief in “love at first sight.” Now I do.

     
I must see you again soon, but I am a soldier and cannot leave my post. I know you also have your responsibilities, but if there is a way for you to return here, I beg you, take it! Please write to me straight away. If I cannot hold you, I must be content to embrace your words. All my love,

Michael

In a delirium, she read it again, hungering for more. Her instinct was to fly to him that day, but those responsibilities he mentioned stopped her. By luck—or was it by God’s design?—her responsibilities came to her aid. Ken had studied her report and called her on the sat phone to make arrangements for a redemption mission in the Nuba. This took time, but finally Michael contacted her by radio: Bashir would be arriving in New Tourom with more than one hundred captives. She informed Ken that everything was ready. He and the team arrived in Loki within the week.

In some ways, being near each other was a worse trial than being apart. Michael was aware of her dilemma, and when she landed with Ken and the others, he greeted her with a serious mien and a handshake. Throughout the afternoon the feigning of disinterest strained their nerves. Quinette and her colleagues were put up in a compound of empty tukuls near St. Andrew’s mission. She shared hers with Jean, the Canadian nurse. To know that Michael was at his headquarters, less than a kilometer away, and to be unable to go to him was an agony. The next day, as they waited for Bashir’s arrival with the captives, she resolved to take a risk. That night, after Jean was asleep, she crept out and walked to Michael’s compound, daring not to carry a flashlight though it was a moonless night. Two armed men stood watch by the entrance. His bodyguards! She’d forgotten about them. There was nothing for it now but to brass it through. She approached them and asked to see the commander. While one stayed with her, the other went inside and soon reappeared with Michael, clad only in his shorts.

“Are you mad?” he said. “This is dangerous.”

“I couldn’t bear it any longer. I had to see you.”

“Dangerous in more ways than one,” he scolded. “There are leopards in the Nuba, and they hunt at night.” He murmured to the guards, who went off.

“What did you tell them?” Quinette asked.

“Never mind. I sent them away. They can be trusted.” He drew her into the courtyard, and as he embraced her, she felt ready to jump out of her skin. “You are a madwoman, but I am happy you are.”

Not another word was spoken for the next hour. Their lovemaking had the desperation and intensity of an adulterous affair, the addictive quality of a drug, the satiation of their hunger only creating a deeper hunger.

“Quinette,” he said afterward, “perhaps you should go before your friends see that you are missing.”

“No!” she whispered with ferocity. “These couple of days are like a gift, and I’m not going to refuse it.”

“A gift? From who is this gift?”

Combining her piety with her desires, she clasped his face with both hands and said, “From God. He’s given us this time because He understands we’re in difficult circumstances. He wants us to be together, and He forgives us.”

“Ah, so you have spoken to Him?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“This isn’t wise,” he said.

“It isn’t supposed to be.”

“True. Love is the enemy of wisdom.”

She basked in his voice, inhaled his scent mingling with her own, that fragrance of unwashed bodies after sex on a hot night, like vinegar and shellfish and crushed bugs.

“I’m not sure what—” He began, stopped, and began again. “It isn’t only the people you work with who would condemn this. Some of the people I work with, they would, too.”

“Who?” she asked, recalling the dance, the cries and songs of favor that had greeted her entrance into the circle.

“Major Kasli for one. He thinks all the white people who come here come as spies.”

“Spies?”
She rose to her elbows and looked down at him, profoundly disturbed that Kasli would see her in such a lurid light. “Spies for what? For who?”

“The CIA. He has a lot of strange ideas, but let’s not talk about this.”

She wasn’t ready to let it go. She had an enemy, and she was determined to learn what she could about him. “He would think I was sent here to sleep with you so I could spy on you?”

“Yes.”

“But America isn’t exactly on good terms with Khartoum, so why would it send a woman to spy on you?”

“You have to understand, logic, reality has nothing to do with Kasli’s views. He is . . . If he is not paranoid, he is almost.”

She laid her head on his chest. “I wonder what we’ll do.”

“I’ve been wondering as well.”

“And?”

“I have no answer, but trust that I will have.”

The following day, as the redemptions were progressing, her old bodyguard, Negev, approached her with a note. Pleading that she had to relieve herself, she went off and opened it: “When you are finished, please see me. There is something I wish to show you. M.”

Distracted, she made many mistakes in recording the slaves’ accounts on the laptop. When at last her work was finished, she left with Negev, who escorted her to a place she recognized: the path that led to the promontory where she’d, well,
spied
on the Rite of Sibr.

“Commander wishes to see you there,” Negev said, pointing, and then sat to wait.

She climbed the path. Michael took her by both hands and looked her up and down. “I wish you could have come here with your hair as it was the last time, and in the dress I gave you.”

“You were going to show me something?”

He gestured at the leaning slabs of rock that formed a dim cavern behind him. They stepped inside to stand on a floor worn to the smoothness of marble, the rocks tapering toward a point far overhead. It was like entering a cathedral spire, the numinous atmosphere heightened by a silence almost tangible, by the thin sunlight planing through a crack between the slabs to fall on a rounded block of stone in the middle of the cavern. The sibr stone, he murmured, was so sacred that anyone who touched it would die instantly. She could make out faded paintings high on the walls.

Michael squatted and asked her to climb onto his shoulders. Effortlessly, he raised her up. Ten feet above the floor she looked at a drawing of what appeared to be a leopard, surrounded by hunters wielding spears. Michael walked her slowly around the cavern, past friezes of animals, trees, and people painted in faint shades of amber, green, and red. Powerful-looking men chased lions and buffalo, their pursuits observed by women with bulging hips and oversize breasts. Some ancient story in pictures, frozen in time, unfolded before her—a narrative she couldn’t understand and that was all the more captivating for its mystery.

“Those were made by the ancestors,” Michael said. “The legend is that they were a race of giants, but I think whoever made those paintings did so sitting as you are now.” He set her down. “I want you to know about us, where we come from.”

She sat next to him against the cavern’s side and listened to a saga that began three thousand years ago, when a people known as Nubians had a mighty kingdom called Kush that was in time conquered by the Egyptians. The pharaohs ruled it for centuries, until a great king named Kashta arose to conquer the conquerors and establish a dynasty that reigned for a thousand years from its capital, a city called Meroe. It was, he said, the most powerful kingdom in black Africa, trading with the Roman Empire, exporting copper and gold and sandalwood. The Nubians of Meroe were conquered again, this time by Ethiopians from the Kingdom of Axium, who converted them to Christianity. So they remained for another millennium, some worshipping Christ, some following their ancestral faith, until the armies of the Prophet Muhammad swept out of Arabia and Muslim Egypt to win the peoples of Sudan for Islam. Then as now, the Arabs captured blacks for slaves, but some Nubians escaped the slave caravans bound for the Red Sea coast and fled into the safety of these remote hills, to which they’d given their name, its
i
lost over time.