Acts of faith (82 page)

She retreated into the friendly confines of Michael’s walled compound, where she took off her Western clothes and wrapped herself in a kanga. In the courtyard Pearl and the other two girls were grinding sesame nuts. With three empty days of waiting stretching before her, Quinette offered to help. Pearl shook her head. “Remember last time, how cross my father was with me.”

“He isn’t here, he won’t know, and I have got to have something to do,” Quinette pleaded.

She knelt by the grinding slab, locked her ankles, and rocked forward and back, mashing the nuts into a light brown paste. In minutes she was dripping sweat, but she reveled in the mindless effort, the flex of her back and arm muscles. She and the girls took turns, then pounded sorghum in the pail-sized wooden pestle. A camaraderie grew between her and them, and there was pleasure in that, too: the feeling that by sharing in their labors she was breaking down barriers, knitting the thread of her life into the tapestry of theirs.

“Your hair, I don’t like it again,” Pearl remarked when the work was finished and the doura was cooking over the fire.

“The braids came undone weeks ago,” Quinette said.

“May I fix it? You should look beautiful for my father.”

She sat on a stool outside, in that welcome hour when the heat softened its blows, and submitted to the long process of having her hair woven into plaits.

“I would like to ask you a question, Pearl. But you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Yes?”

“How do you feel about your father and me getting married? I’m going to be like your mother.”

“My mama
penngo.
She is died.”

Pearl’s command of English, Quinette realized, didn’t mean they could communicate all the time. “What I meant is, will you be happy when I become your father’s wife?”

“Toddo buna Kinnet,”
she answered. “Means Pearl likes you.”

“Kinnet buna Toddo,”
Quinette said.

It’s going to turn out all right,
she said to herself that night, lying on the air mattress thrown over the crude bed, the paraffin lamp lending a sheen to the rubbed walls, on which moths drawn to the light cast shadows twice as big as themselves.

The next morning, in the interests of keeping herself occupied, she went to New Tourom to see if Moses needed help with his classes. She arrived as the pupils lined up in a military formation outside the newly completed school building. After Moses called the roll, she volunteered her services, which he said would be most welcome. At a clap of his hands, the children, with an obedience Quinette found touching, trooped inside to sit on benches, copybooks in their laps.

After three hours of checking spelling and basic arithmetic, she joined Moses, his wife, and Ulrika for lunch, at which the nurse revealed that Quinette had become the subject of much local gossip. Good gossip, Ulrika added quickly.

“Some people are saying that you must be a woman with great powers. That you have—
ach,
I cannot think of the English word. There are many girls here happy to be his, but to them he pays no attention. Only to the foreign woman.
Bewitched.
That is the English.”

As much as she wanted to think of herself as bewitching, Quinette had to laugh.

She returned to the school for the adult education session. She was dismayed at how little progress the older students had made since her last time here. They were still struggling with the alphabet and numbers. Yamila was having a particularly difficult time, her copybook blackened with incomprehensible marks.

Leaning over her, Quinette turned to a blank page and drew a straight line. “One. The number one. Say ‘one.’ ”

Yamila only looked at her, wildly, defiantly. Was she “on the slow side,” as Quinette’s mother would have put it? It didn’t seem so. A complicated light shone in Yamila’s narrow anthracite eyes.

“Write it, the number one.” She handed her the pencil.

Yamila made a mark, said, “Wan,” and without further prompting, wrote the next numeral, forming it like a
Z.
“Wan, tuh.”

“No, not ‘tuh.’ Two. Toooo.”

“Toooo.”

Was there mockery in the singsong way she’d repeated Quinette’s exaggerated pronunciation?

“Good. Now try three.”

“Tree.”

“No. That—” pointing out the window—“is a tree. This—” Writing “3” with her fingertip—“is a three. That’s a tree, this is the number three. Tha-ree.”

“Tha-ree,” Yamila echoed. “Wan, toooo, tha-ree.” Then, with quick, violent movements, she inscribed the rest of the numbers and named each one, spitting the words, “Fuh, fi, seestah, sayvan, aytah, nye, tin,” before she sprang to her feet, tossed the pencil aside, and walked out.

There was no cause for such an outburst, and Quinette’s temper flared. She went after her, calling, “Yamila, get back here, get back here right now!”

The young woman halted and spun around with a look of pure hatred that startled Quinette. Then Yamila walked away, haughty as a queen.

“What is the matter?” asked Moses.

“I don’t know,” Quinette said, her cheeks burning. “She’s got something against me.”

“Yes,” the teacher murmured.

“What is it? Do you know?”

“I will try working with her tomorrow,” Moses said.

She could tolerate Kasli’s animosity—there wasn’t much choice but to tolerate it—but Yamila’s, because it was so at odds with the favor the other women had shown her, disturbed Quinette, undermined the confidence with which she’d gone to bed last night.

In a preoccupied mood, she walked toward the ruined mission, where Fancher and Handy were already making their presence felt. They had a gang of workers cutting the knee-high weeds with pangas and scythes, and another clearing the rubble from the bombed buildings, while a third crew lugged the boxes of Bibles and hymnals, the generators, solar panels, and other equipment into a large wall tent pitched in a lemon orchard. A flag flew over the tent—a dark blue cross on a white field, with a scroll that read
FRIENDS OF THE FRONTLINE
.

Handy, seated on a campstool, was reading a booklet,
Muslim Evangelism: Do’s and Don’ts,
Fancher speaking to one of the workmen. Both men projected an air of command, and Quinette struck up a conversation, prompted by some vague idea that their self-assurance would rub off and restore her own.

“You know Nuban?” she asked Fancher.

“A little, and only this dialect. Your hair looks different.”

“That’s because it is.”

“So you’re teaching school?”

“Only helping out.”

“These people need help, don’t they?” he said with an undertone of disapproval. “Mostly they need help to help themselves. Look at that.” He waved at the work crews. “They could have cut weeds and cleaned up the mess without waiting for Rob and me to light a fire under their feet. Well, at least it’s under way now.”

“Jesus Christ is building his church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” Handy interjected. He appeared to be fond of speaking in slogans and aphorisms.

Quinette glanced at his booklet. “And you’re going to preach to Muslims?”

“Try to,” he replied. “It’s tricky. You don’t grab them by the collar and tell them to believe in Christ. You expose them to Christ’s message and hope they get it. We want to bring as many of them home as we can.”

The talk was not having the desired effect. The image of Yamila’s face, with its expression of raw hostility, would not leave her mind. The turning of her back was a rejection that Quinette saw as a threat to her acceptance into this world. Just then Negev came across the mission grounds, his long arms swinging, his Israeli machine gun strapped across his back. “Missy, will you be going back soon?”

“I know the way. You can go if you want to.”

“I am to protect you. My orders, missy.”

With Negev matching her step for step, as if attached to her by an invisible cord, she went down the road and through the notch in the hills into the valley. The garrison and the tukuls of the camp followers and the soldiers’ families lay ahead, partly veiled by smoke from burning sorghum stubble. Pausing, she looked up at the ledge and the mouth of the cavern on whose walls the ancestors had painted their inscrutable tale in pictures. At that moment she thought of Malachy’s words,
“You have got to meet these people halfway, you have got to become one of them.”
She knew what she must do and resolved all at once to do it.

“I’d like to stay here for a little while,” she said.

Negev shrugged uncertainly. “As you wish, missy.”

“Without you. I’m perfectly safe. Please go and speak to Pearl,” she added in a peremptory tone. “Tell her to come here. I want to talk to her.”

When Pearl arrived, Quinette made her request. The girl said nothing, puzzlement and a little alarm showing on her face, along with a question. She’d anticipated this reaction—what she was asking was without precedent, and Pearl wanted an explanation.

“I know that a Nuban’s wife must be strong and brave and have no evil in her,” Quinette said with slow formality. “Your father told me.” She pointed toward the ceremonial ledge above. “There. He took me there and showed me the ancestors’ paintings, the day he asked me to marry him.”

The girl’s expression did not change. She said, “Please wait here, Kinnet,” and went off, almost at a run. Quinette had anticipated this as well: Pearl would have to seek the counsel of her elders.

Sitting against a sun-warmed rock, the overheated air tingling in her nostrils like steam, she admired the landscape, the mown sorghum and wind-rippled grass taking on the color of burned butter in the slanting light. Minutes passed, she didn’t know how many. The light now fell at a near horizontal, slicing over the heights on the valley’s western side. Then she saw Pearl below, coming up the path followed by two women, one in a faded shift, the other in a blue kanga. The same pair who’d presided at the ritual Quinette had witnessed, the judges of female courage and virtue. The woman in blue was carrying a coiled whip.

“They will do it,” Pearl said.

Quinette took off her shirt and let it fall to the ground. From a clay jar Pearl poured sesame oil into her hands and rubbed it into Quinette’s back and shoulders, then sat down at the mouth of the cave, next to the woman in the faded shift. The woman in blue spoke. Quinette turned to Pearl for a translation.

“She asks that you do what she does,” the girl said.

Her chin jutting proudly, torso pushed forward, hips out, the woman began to dance to a silent drumbeat. With the knotted lash bent over her head, the tip in one hand, handle in the other, she stepped out wide to one side, lowering the whip to hold it across her back, then crossed her right foot over the left and repeated the movement until she’d described a full circle. She could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy—it seemed all women in Sudan passed from young to old with only a brief transit through middle age—but she danced with the grace of a girl. Quinette followed her lead, her movements, stiff and uncertain at first, becoming more supple and confident. The woman clucked approval, then demonstrated a refinement, turning as she sidestepped so that each large circle became a series of smaller circles, a ring of connected rings. Quinette did likewise, going around once, and again, and the whip’s sting went through her like an electric shock, bringing reflexive tears to her eyes. She willed them dry, clenched her jaw, and flinched as the oxhide cracked again.

She spun once more, forcing herself to look into the face of her tormentor and examiner. And around again, the whip’s slap as definite as a gunshot, its burn like a bullet’s. A third crack. Her eyes did not grow wet, she did not flinch, a gasp never left her throat.

The woman in blue danced before her, clutching the bowed lash in both hands. Quinette spun, offering her back in sweet surrender, and felt the knots tear flesh, the blood trickling down the culvert of her spine. She looked at the ruby droplets glimmering in the dust, each one a bead in the seam welding her to Pearl, to the woman seated next to Pearl, to the woman in blue, and to every soul in this alien world that was to be her own. A bond no one could break.

The knots ripped her again. She shut her eyes, in a state of ecstatic anguish, and soaring beyond pain, she did not feel the next bite of the leather teeth.

And then it was over, and she knew she’d passed her trial when the women began to ululate. They cupped their hands at the corners of their mouths and faced the valley, announcing Quinette’s initiation. They faced the cavern, their tongues flicking between half-open lips, the wavering shrieks echoing back, as if spirits of the ancestors were answering.

S
HE TOOK ALMOST
an entire morning to prepare for Michael’s return, darkening her eyes with kohl, putting on gold hoop earrings and then the dress he had given her. Her notion was to transform herself from a plain prairie flower into a brilliant and irresistible African orchid, but as she waited in the courtyard, she wondered if she’d succeeded only in making herself look ridiculous. Her fears were dispelled when he came into the courtyard, dusty from his journey, and stood gazing at her with admiration. “How much I have missed you. I was a very bad officer at the conference. All I could think of was you and the moment when I could do this.” As if to show that his military duties were a distant second to her, he flung his canvas map case aside and covered her with kisses. “Oh my, oh my,” he murmured, then pulled her inside and tugged at her sleeves. “You look so very beautiful in this, it’s a pity to take it off.”