Acts of faith (78 page)

“And those were the ones who made the paintings?” she whispered. It was a place that compelled whispers.

“Possibly. Or they could have been made long before. This has been a sacred place for centuries.” He stood and drew her to her feet. “We were once a great people. We conquered and were conquered in turn, but we always endured, and this war today is only a chapter in a very long story.”

They went outside, blinking against the sunlight. “We’re leaving on another operation,” he announced suddenly. “You can say we’ll be adding another sentence to the chapter.”

“And you told me all this so I’ll be strong and brave and not worry?”

“I told you about our history because I want you to be part of it.”

“You’re being awfully mysterious,” she said.

“Mysterious? No. I am being awkward because this is awkward, what I have to say.” He paused, squeezing the handle of his walking stick. “In so much of that history, we have fought with Arabs but we have also mingled our blood with them. You can see their blood in our faces, ours in theirs, but I have never heard of us mingling with white people.” His expression had become almost mournful. “I want to believe your pretty thought that God forgives us, but I can’t. I know now what we have to do.”

She drew in a breath and held it for a moment. “Michael, if you think we should . . . if you think we have to end it, I’ll be . . . You can guess what I’ll be, but I suppose it’s better to end it now, before—”

His somber look brightened a little, and he gave a faint smile. “Why do you think I said I want you to be part of our history if I wish to end it?”

“What does that mean, ‘part of our history’?” she asked with quick irritation. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means a great deal. It means I want us to be married.”

Wartime. Emotions accelerated, everything accelerated. It was all going too fast for her. She was mute.

Beads of sweat trickled over the marks on Michael’s forehead. “Can you give me an answer?”

Her heart was the organ she always listened to, but it wasn’t telling her anything now.

“You don’t have to answer immediately. It would be a very great step for both of us, but I think a greater one for you. You need to think about it.”

Step?
she thought. It would be a leap, of a magnitude she could not yet imagine. “Think, yes, think,” was all she managed to say.

I
F
Q
UINETTE
’
S THOUGHTS
and feelings had been erratic before, they were now thrown into anarchy. On the return flight to Loki, she didn’t speak to anyone, she was almost catatonic, the reverse of a cyclone—still on the outside, turbulent inside. As the team got out of the plane, Ken took her by the arm and asked what the matter was. She said, “Nothing.”

“C’mon, I know you well enough by now.”

She looked at his spare, stern face and noticed the mole on his jaw, just beneath his left ear. She must have seen it before, yet its ugliness had escaped her attention. Dark brown, sprouting tiny hairs, it resembled a tick. Somehow it awakened her to the realization that he hadn’t, in the past three days, revealed what action he’d taken about the fraud she’d uncovered. She assumed he hadn’t taken any, and wasn’t going to, and that was contemptible. “What do you suppose ‘nothing’ means?” she said, pulled his hand away, and stalked off.

That night, while Anne slept peacefully in the next bed, she gave free rein to her romantic imagination, picturing herself as the wife, lover, confidante, and counselor of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goraende. She supposed it would be very strange at first, with only Michael and Pearl to talk to, but she could learn the language and weave her life into the fabric of the Nubans’ lives. She would teach at the school and aid him in fulfilling his visions of the New Sudan that would rise when the war was won—as she didn’t doubt it would be. They would make fierce love at night, and if she were blessed, she would bear him a son to take the place of the one he’d lost.

She woke up full of doubts, stirred by a sentimental memory that came unbidden with the dawn. It was of the first time her father took her for a ride on the new John Deere. She saw him in jeans and a canvas barn coat, sitting on the tractor, its grasshopper-green chassis and bright yellow wheels set against the gloomy sky of an Iowa autumn, and that vivid, dreamlike image brought on the most acute spasm of homesickness she’d experienced since coming to Africa. It stayed with her as she dressed, as she ate breakfast, as she pedaled to her office, hearing the calls of “
Jambo habari,
missy” from the townspeople and as she sat at her desktop, transcribing names and tales of captivity. She was an ordinary small-town American girl and could never be anything else. Her place was there, not here—that was the message encrypted in the memory. It was madness to think she could she live in those half-known mountains as the wife of a rebel commander. She’d gotten a taste of what a hard, dirty, dangerous life it would be. Ticks and meager food and no toilet paper, the ever-present threat of an air raid. She would miss a shower at the end of the day—a real shower, not the drops that trickled from the calabash. A life like that demanded a heroic personality. Heroic personalities didn’t care about hardships, never gave a second thought to amenities like showers, toilet paper, or a soft bed. When her contract expired, the sensible course would be to go home and to look upon her two years here the way Dad did his year in Vietnam: as a dramatic episode in the otherwise prosaic narrative of her life, which she would pick up where she’d left off, like a dull book that had been set aside for one more exciting.

But that would be dreadful. Her homesickness, that powerful, nostalgic tug, was a kind of gravity, pulling her back to the familiar and away from Michael. Midwestern caution was making itself felt once again; more than caution, it was cowardice.

In this confused state, the absence of a confidant became intolerable. She could think of only one person it would be safe to speak to. One morning, instead of going to work, she biked to the Catholic church, an unprepossessing structure on Loki’s outskirts, closer to a chapel in size, with a school and an office in back. Looking through the window, she saw Malachy, crouched over a computer keyboard, tapping his gray head with a pencil.

“Quinette!” he said, answering her knock. “What brings you here? Well, come in, won’t you.”

The interior of Malachy’s office was a cheerful mess, books piled helter-skelter around a desk covered with papers that looked as if they’d been dumped from a wastebasket. He motioned for her to take a seat and asked what she was up to. The same, she replied, and what about him?

“I’m doing a revised edition of this.” He pulled from one of the piles a thick paperback:
The Turkana Branding System: Iconography of Desert Nomads.
Under the title was Malachy’s name.

“I didn’t know you’d written a book,” she said, feeling uneasy. Catholics were not true Christians, because they didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus—that’s what Pastor Tom used to say—yet here she was, about to confide in a priest of that religion.

“Oh, more than one,” he said, and turned the volume to its back cover, on which a photograph of a younger Malachy appeared—more brown in his hair, a thinner face, but the same windowpane eyeglasses. He was identified as “Rev. Professor Malachy T. Delaney, S.P.S. Ph.D.,” and the biographical sketch said that he’d obtained a doctoral degree in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, had been dean of the social sciences department at the Catholic University of East Africa, and had authored several books about the Turkana people.

“I didn’t realize we had a distinguished scholar in our midst,” Quinette said.

“You don’t. I’m just a hack. This book is about the branding system as a cultural institution. Do you recall that Sunday I took you to a Turkana village and the headman—the fellow with the ostrich feather in his skullcap—said that he and I were of the same brand? That to say you are of the same brand means that you’re brothers?”

Quinette nodded and saw that he’d provided her with a smooth transition into the subject on her mind. “I remember something else you told me. That for a missionary like you to be effective, he has to identify with the people he ministers to. You have to become one of them, you said.”

“I did. I believe I also said that you must never forget who you really are and what you come from.”

“I want to talk to you about that. A missionary like you has given up his home, his family, everything he’s familiar with. In a way, you’re married to Africa.”

“Not to the whole bloody continent—to this little part of it, yes, I suppose you could say I am, though the better way to put it is that I’m married to my vocation. What are you driving at?”

“I was wondering what it’s been like. How you’ve coped with it.”

“It hasn’t been easy, but if you’re asking if I’ve worked out some formula for coping with a life like this, I’m afraid I haven’t. There is no formula. The missionary’s calling is a bit special, don’t you know. It’s not for everyone.” He crossed his ankles and swiveled back and forth in his chair. “What is it, Quinette?”

She shifted her glance to the chaotic bookshelves, to the photographs on the walls, hanging askew. “A Catholic priest can never reveal what he’s heard in the confessional, right?”

“In all kindness, if you’re here to make a confession, I can’t hear it. You’re a Protestant.”

“I’m asking if—”

“You wish me to keep my mouth shut about whatever it is you have to say.”

“My job, my reputation around here could depend on it.”

“How so?”

“You know how people who work for aid agencies, or for human rights groups like the one I work for—you know how we’re not supposed to take sides.”

“Your employer isn’t neutral. Your boss has been very public in his denunciations of Khartoum’s policies.”

“Right, but he couldn’t let the WorldWide Christian Union be, uh, associated? Associated with the SPLA.”

“I suppose not. The SPLA doesn’t have an enviable record in the human rights department. Now then, what is it?”

She asked if he knew Michael Goraende, and he replied that he did not, he had only heard of him through their mutual friend, John Barrett. She laughed nervously—having kept mum about her affair for weeks, she couldn’t bring herself to reveal it, even now. The priest gave her some help.

“You and this Michael are romantically involved, and it’s become serious, is that it?”

“Last week he asked me to marry him.”

Malachy lowered his chin and gazed at her over the frame of his glasses. “And you said . . . ?”

“That I’d have to think about it, and that’s what I’ve been doing. Tied myself in knots.”

“But you’re leaning toward a yes, aren’t you? Hence the questions about what my life has been like.”

“Yes. Hence,” she said.

“Do you love him?”

“Of course! We’ve had a meeting of the minds, of the soul even.”

“And I imagine of more than the mind and the soul.” Malachy waved his hand—the thick, knotty hand, she observed, of a working man rather than a scholar. “No need to respond to that. Well now, if you did say yes, you’d be giving up the advantage that all you young people who come over here have got—the ability to quit when you choose and go home. With a three-letter word, you’d be tearing up your return ticket. You’d keep your American passport, but in all other respects you’d be an African.”

He’d said nothing she hadn’t thought of before, but to hear the consequences phrased so starkly renewed her misgivings.

“And then there’s my family. My dad’s dead, but my mother, my sisters—I’d feel like I was cutting myself off from them—from everything, everyone.”

“You could well be doing that.” He scrutinized her for several uncomfortable seconds. “In the thirty-five years I’ve been in Africa, I have run into people like you,” he said. “They find something in Africa they cannot find at home. People for whom the idea of being cut off isn’t really so dreadful. “

Quinette squirmed at the accuracy of this perception. Having listened to people admit to their sins for so long, Malachy must have learned how to catch omissions or lack of complete candor.

“So now,” he went on, “We’ve covered what happens with the three-letter word. What happens if you say the two-letter word?”

“I would spend the rest of my life wondering, What if? Heartache, regret, a lifetime of it.”

Malachy clasped her wrists. “You might get your share of heartache and regrets with a yes as well. You’re sure you love him?”

“Do I have to say it more than once?”

With a gentle but irresistible pressure, the priest drew her closer to him.”You’ve got to ask yourself one big question, my dear young woman. Is it him I want, or is he a means to some other end?”

Quinette said nothing, troubled that Malachy would think her capable of looking upon Michael as a means to an end, as if she were in love with a man for his money.

“You need to ask yourself if by marrying Michael you would be, let us say, finalizing a divorce from the life you once had, from your own past.”

“My God, no!” she protested. “I’ve been in love before, I’ve been married once before, I know the real thing when I see it.”