Acts of faith (86 page)

He stripped off his uniform while she wriggled out of her shorts and tossed them and her shirt carelessly aside. Their unwashed bodies gave off an ammonia-like odor. He stroked her back, as if he were strumming his harp. She’d had to rein in the raw carnality awakened by the dangers they’d faced together; now his touch and their isolation from the others unleashed it.

They lay without talking for a while, the sand cool against their skin. She turned sideways and held his face between her hands. “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if this was the time? If he were conceived out here tonight, under that star?”

He didn’t answer, sitting upright at an ominous sound, like a herd of charging buffalo. Michael snatched his sidearm from the pile of clothes and stood outside the outcrop, Quinette beside him. Except for the pistol, they might have been their own remote ancestors, naked and fearful in the African night. One ridge over, they made out a dust cloud and hundreds of huge, dark shapes flowing over it, but the darkness and trees and tall grass made it impossible to see what manner of creatures they were. A distance away the men were awake, shouting over the racket made by the stampeding animals. Then, fifty yards directly in front of her, the grass parted and a prehistoric beast appeared, six or seven feet tall, running on two long legs with clawed feet, its stalk of a neck sprouting from a body the size and shape of a bathtub. Michael gripped his pistol with both hands, then thought better of it, grabbed her by the wrist, and pulled her back under the outcrop. The surging mass broke around the koppie, the dust filling the small space where the two people huddled. Ostrich. The thunderous noise grew fainter. In a moment all was silence again. Quinette heard Negev calling for her. Dressing quickly, breathless, she called back that she was all right. She and Michael looked at each other and laughed with relief. Thank God they had had the outcrop to hide under, Michael said. The giant birds, fleeing in such blind fright, would have trampled them, and an ostrich’s talons could tear a human being open like a paper sack.

“Fleeing from what?” Quinette asked. “We heard hyenas earlier. Was it hyenas?”

Michael looked toward the ridges, where a swath of flattened grass marked the path of the ostriches’ flight. “It could have been. Or lions. Or a leopard. Or something else. Or they were like a mob in a riot, running for no reason. I don’t know.”

The wind soughed through the acacia and rippled the long grass that concealed whatever had menaced the ostrich. Hyena, lion, leopard, or nothing at all, some figment of ostrich imagination. She asked no more questions. This was the land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, where a lot of things lacked explanation.

A
FTER THEIR RETURN
she discovered that she was, for all her exotic circumstances, in an essentially prosaic role—the officer’s wife. She endured one of its trials, and that was her husband’s absence. Michael was there physically, but in all other ways he was gone, immersed in staff conferences, poring over maps and operational plans, overseeing military exercises to hone his troops to a fighting edge. New recruits, arriving from nearby villages and from as far as a hundred miles away, had to be trained. Radio messages from Garang’s headquarters had to be decoded and answered. Quinette was grateful for the moment they’d shared under the star at the river’s end. Her heart and body lived off the memory of it, as one would live off stored fat in a time of hunger, for in matters of sexual passion, if not of love, she was suffering a famine. At day’s end Michael was too tired and preoccupied to pay much attention to her. She joked that he’d broken his habit of not being able to keep his hands off her, but he didn’t think it particularly funny. Nor did he laugh when, one night, she remarked that here they were, married such a short time, and he’d already taken a mistress.

“What are you talking about?” he snapped.

“The war. The war’s your mistress.”

“What nonsense. I do not love this war, and you know that.”

“Darling,” she said, “you’re losing your sense of humor.”

He massaged his forehead with the heels of both hands. “You are right. And it is that damned second in command of mine causing me to lose it.”

“More nonsense about me being a CIA spy?”

“No,” he said wearily. “He argues with me all the time about this offensive. He thinks it will be a big mistake. I assign him a task, and either he drags his feet or he does not do it at all, to show me how much he objects. If I had someone to replace him, I would sack him.”

He revealed then that the operation was going to be more ambitious than she had thought. The raid on the oil-field airbase was to be the main act in a whole concert of destruction. While the Nubans struck it from the north, Dinka troops would assault from the south. This would be coordinated with a general offensive throughout the Nuba. Outposts and garrisons would be attacked to keep the Arabs pinned down as commando teams, armed with plastic explosives, sabotaged the pipeline.

“What’s Kasli’s objection?” Quinette asked. “That you can’t pull off something this big? That it will fail?”

“He’s afraid it will succeed.”

“What? Whose side is he on?”

“There are times I wonder,” Michael said, hanging his pistol belt on a peg. “But I understand his concerns. There is a kind of balance in the fighting in this zone. The government bombs a village, we attack a garrison. The murahaleen seize some captives, we ambush a convoy. A successful campaign on this scale will upset the balance. It will be a provocation, and Kasli fears Khartoum will retaliate in a very bad way. The people will suffer more and blame the SPLA for bringing it down on their heads.”

“And you say you understand that?”

“Yes,” he replied, frowning. “But that does not mean I agree with it.”

“I hope not.” She took his hands in hers, convinced he hadn’t told her all this to make conversation. Kasli had put some doubts into his mind, and he was calling on her to put them out. “Just think of what we saw in that Masakin village,” she said. “Kasli is comfortable with the status quo, and he wants it to continue. You can’t let that happen. The people don’t want you to, and I don’t want you to, and God himself doesn’t either.”

He looked a little amused. “Ah yes, your conversations with the Creator. And what does He have to say about it?”

Actually, she didn’t know what God had to say about it. What she did know as she imagined the spectacle unfolding—tall, black soldiers sweeping out of the hills, mortar shells bursting, cyclonic flames whirling from the shattered pipeline—was that the battle had to happen and that she must encourage her husband to make it happen. The vision stirred her into a warlike mood, and she thought of what God had to say. She went to her trunk and took out her Bible. After some searching, she found the passage from Isaiah and read it aloud. “ ‘In that time a present will be brought to the Lord of Hosts from a people tall and smooth of skin, and from a people terrible from their beginning, a nation powerful and treading down, whose land the rivers divide.’ A people tall and smooth of skin,” she repeated, her fingers running lightly down Michael’s bare forearm. “The Nubans and the Dinka. Whose land the rivers divide—the Nile. It’s almost like a prophecy.”

“And what is the present?” he asked, with a slightly sardonic smile.

He wasn’t taking her seriously. She would correct that. She laid the Bible in his lap and said calmly, “The airfield and the pipeline blown to hell and as many dead Arabs as your men can kill.”

He looked startled. “Would your missionary friends approve of you speaking like that?”

A voice spoke in her memory, the voice of the liberated slave woman, Atem Deng.
“I wish I was a man so I could carry a rifle . . . I would massacre them all.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “They wouldn’t approve of this either. I wish I could go with you.”

He said nothing.

“I know, it’s no place for a woman.”

“Certainly not for a woman who is my wife and hopes to be the mother of our son,” he said. “But perhaps there is something you could do short of that. I will think about it.”

The next day he brought her to the far end of the valley to watch the recruits training. An encampment of weathered tents and crude lean-tos was pitched at the edge of a dusty field where, under an unmerciful sun and to the commands of unmerciful sergeants (Quinette saw one crack a boy over the head with a stick for facing right when he should have turned left), they were marching with wooden rifles, like kids playing soldier. A lot of them
were
kids, no more than thirteen or fourteen. In Sudan, childhood was another casualty of war.

He gazed off to a corner of the field, where some recruits were advancing in single file, their make-believe rifles at the high port—they reminded her of a high school marching band coming onto the field at halftime. “Ah, they are doing it wrong,” Michael said under his breath. “Please wait here.”

He strode off and called a halt to the drill. She watched him grasp the lead recruit by the shoulders and move him to one side, then the man behind him to the other side, then the next and the next, until he got the file into a staggered formation.

“They think this is a parade,” he said when he came back. “They have to understand that if they went into combat one behind the other, one automatic rifle would knock the lot of them down like ninepins.”

“One round will get you all, I remember my father saying that,” Quinette said with a wistful smile. “When he took my sisters and me hiking in the woods. We were scared of the woods, and we’d walk very close behind him, sometimes bumping into him, and he would turn around and tell us to back away because one round would get us all. We never knew what he meant.”

He sat next to her and tapped her knees with his walking stick. “A soldier’s daughter, a soldier’s wife. So now I will tell you what you can do. When the regular soldiers are away, those boys”—he pointed at the recruits, now marching at the double, chanting in time to their stomping feet—“are going to help defend this base and New Tourom, but they cannot defend with toy rifles. I sent a radio message to Loki yesterday requesting rifles and ammunition. It means nothing, it is nonsense without a certain word.”

She gave him a puzzled look.

“I can no longer trust the radio to send my shopping lists in the SPLA code,” he explained. “Every commander knows it, and—you recall the time that one fellow tried to hijack one of my shipments?—another tried it recently, and he succeeded. Wesley was forced to deliver the cargo elsewhere. I’ve complained to the high command about this nonsense of one commander stealing from another, and they have promised to put a stop to it, but I don’t trust them either. So I have worked out a new system, a private code between me and Douglas and Wesley. To decode, a keyword is needed.” He produced an envelope from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “It’s in there. It says, so you know, ‘Please do not forget the handbook.’ A relief flight arrives tomorrow morning. You are to be on that flight when it returns to Loki and bring this to Douglas or Wesley personally.”

She slipped the envelope into the bodice of her dress. “Thank you, Michael.”

“Thank you?”

“For trusting me with something this important.”

Now enlisted in the military as well as the spiritual offensive, she arrived in Loki in a utilitarian outfit—khaki shirt and trousers—to look businesslike. The immigration officer in the hot little shed at the tarmac’s edge didn’t care about her appearance. With the surliness of the petty official granted a moment of power, he told her that her visa had expired and that she would not be allowed into the country. Quinette, who had forgotten about her visa (in the Nuba, passports and visas seemed irrelevant), reminded him that she was already in the country and that he could issue her a temporary airport visa. A modest gift, from the money Michael had given her for expenses, caused him to acknowledge that this was true. He shoved a form across his desk, which she filled out, checking “Business” in the box labeled “Purpose of Visit.” She paid the fee, but the officer, desiring to prolong his moment of power or perhaps extract another gift, held on to her passport. Flipping through it, he noted that she had departed Kenya some time ago, but he saw nothing to indicate where she’d gone. This was peculiar. What was the nature of her business? She replied that she’d been in Sudan, and he repeated that he did not see anything in her passport to show that she’d been there. He asked—that is, demanded in the form of a question—to see what was in her fanny pack.

She hesitated, her heart beating faster, “There are some personal things in there. Female things.”

With a backward curl of his fingers, the official told her to give it to him. Drawing herself up to her full six-one, she unbuckled the pack and tossed it onto the desk—just to show this officious character that he couldn’t push her around. He pulled out a fistful of tampons, her makeup, and the envelope, which he opened with a knife.

“ ‘Please do not forget the handbook,’ ” he said, then looked up at her with an interrogator’s gaze. “Is this a personal female item?”

“It’s a reminder,” she answered, her heart rate accelerating further. Now she felt like the spy Kasli accused her of being.

“To do what?”

“To not forget the handbook.”

“What handbook?”

“First aid,” she said. “A handbook on first aid. Now if you don’t mind . . .”

The officer leaned back and, shaving a mustache of sweat with his finger, looked at the ceiling and sighed to show that his forbearance was not infinite. “Miss Hardin, it is known that you are married to a commander in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. It is therefore important to know what your business is here. Now, if
you
don’t mind, you will tell me what it is.”