Acts of faith (95 page)

Quinette was expected to take part. In the afternoon she lay naked outside her hut while Pearl, Kiki, and Nolli covered her with a homemade wax, then peeled it off, removing her body hair—it was considered unsightly among all of Sudan’s blacks. She was relieved that Fancher and Handy had declined an invitation to attend. If they hadn’t, she would have been forced to be an observer rather than a participant; it took no imagination to picture what their reaction, Handy’s in particular, would be to seeing her dance with virtually nothing on and her midriff marked by cicatrix. But she considered herself Nuban in all but the color of her skin and saw no conflict between her duties as a minister of Christ and her obligation to follow the customs of the people who had adopted her as she had adopted them. Malachy would have understood. It was the way of Africa.

And so she came to the Nyertun in the traditional costume—a skimpy barega below her waist and a bead bodice to cover her top—and danced under the moon. She had become quite proficient and gloried in her art. At the climactic moment, when the woman claimed her man by kicking a leg over his shoulder, she heard some onlookers gasp. She had been so transported, so lost in the sound and movement, that she hadn’t noticed Yamila, who now stood beside her, glaring defiantly, a leg resting on Michael’s opposite shoulder.

As Quinette discovered in a moment, custom ruled that when two women chose the same man, the decision rested with him. When Michael nodded to Quinette, Yamila hissed and would have scratched her if several girls hadn’t restrained her. Yamila broke free and ran off. Quinette couldn’t say who was more mortified, she or her rival.

So Yamila had at last declared her feelings. The dance went on without her into the early morning. When it was over and Quinette and Michael retired to their hut, she did not make love to him, she
fucked
him.
Fucked
him on the bed and then on the floor mat with a wanton ferocity, as she imagined that wild girl would have done had his nod gone to her. She used her body like a weapon to pummel whatever polygamous, adulterous thoughts Yamila might have put into his head.
Fucked
him until even that vigorous man had nothing left to give, and as they lay on the mat in mutual exhaustion, she asked, “If she had gotten to you first, would you have gone with her?”

He laughed. “No. I want only you, and I am very happy you were first.”

“She’s a beautiful woman, I have to say that for her.”

“If that is your way of begging a compliment, I’ll give you one. You’re beautiful, too. Haven’t I told you so many times?” His hand moved to her belly, tracing the cicatrix. “As beautiful as any Yamila, as any Nuban woman.”

“I am going to be the mother of your son. I am going to give you back what you lost.”

“Yes, you have said so,” he said, with the melancholy of someone wishing for the unattainable. He moved his hand from her stomach, and she sensed with its withdrawal a withdrawal of himself, a sudden distancing.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, feeling a panic. “Is it her? I am not going to share you, Michael.”

“Stop, please! It isn’t her, it isn’t that. There are times I ask myself if we in this country should allow ourselves children until the war is over. It’s like giving birth when you have AIDS. The child is doomed as it’s born.”

“You can’t let yourself think that way,” she counseled.”It’s giving up hope. You have to think of what life will be like when it is over.”

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“You have to imagine it before you can have it. You have to imagine children in it.”

“Imagine it, imagine it,” he said in an undertone, lying on his back, hands clasped behind his neck. “And what would I be in a new Sudan? A minister of parliament? Then I would dress in a suit instead of camouflage and we would live in a fine house with servants instead of this tukul in the bush. Would you like that, my darling Quinette?”

She answered that the tukul was fine and so was the camouflage and that she could not picture herself with servants.

“Or I could be an officer in the new army of the new Sudan. You would see me in a fine dress uniform, like the kind I wore when I first joined the army. I was a ceremonial guard at the Presidential Palace in Khartoum, in a dark blue tunic and white gloves and a white topee. The government used to take Dinka and Nubans for that duty because we looked impressive in those uniforms.”

“I’ll bet you did,” she said.

“I must admit, I did.” In the darkness, she made out his grin. She had stopped him from slipping into morbid thoughts, brought him back to her. “And I’ll wear one like it in the new army of the new Sudan, but not with a corporal’s stripes, no, with the pips of a general. Brigadier General Michael Goraende. Or would you prefer a husband with a higher rank? Major general?”

“I like brigadier. I like the sound of it. Brigadier and Mrs. Michael Goraende.”

“We will be invited to diplomatic receptions and military balls. There I will be in my splendid blue uniform with the pips of a brigadier, and there you will be at my side in a gown, a Nuban gown, but finer than the one I bought for you. And who will know that we once lived in a tukul in the bush? Who will know that this beautiful American woman in her fine gown”—his finger played around her breasts—“once danced naked in the Nuba mountains before a thousand eyes.”

“No one,” she whispered. “It’ll be our secret. We’ll laugh about it when we’re alone, and how I said yes to you like a Nuban girl.”

“This is a fine future we are imagining for ourselves when the war is over.”

“With children, with a son,” she said, and rolled over and straddled him.

“My God, you are mad tonight. You are shameless.”

Mine,
she thought, working him into arousal.
Now and forever, mine.

The confidence with which she spoke those words to herself didn’t last. It was a brief remission in a fever of jealousy that flared each time she saw Yamila, and in so small a place as New Tourom, it was impossible not to see her almost every day. As the disease progressed, she began to suspect Michael of secretly desiring the girl, and the suspicions fostered images of Yamila swollen with his child, presenting him with a son, beating Quinette to the punch.

A week after the dance her period arrived on schedule. She cursed her body, then prayed, then, a cramp binding her abdomen, cursed again. A new fear arose that she would not be forced to share Michael but that he would divorce her because she was unable to conceive. One fear spawned another. She became convinced that the respect and adoration she commanded from the Nubans, though it had been won by her alone, was now sustained by her position as his wife. To lose him would be to lose them. She would be an outcast, a woman without a country, cut off from the home of her birth by her own choice, from her adopted home by circumstance. Therefore, according to the addled logic bred by her fever, her whole future depended on her giving birth.

She grew emotionally demanding, seeking reassurances that she had exclusive claim to him. “Stop this!” he said one night, after another interrogation about the state of his feelings. “She is an ignorant, illiterate peasant girl, she knows nothing about the world outside these mountains. I wouldn’t want her even if I didn’t have you. What is the matter with you?”

“There is nothing the matter with
me,
” she answered with some bitterness. “You’re all I’ve got, that’s what the matter is. I’ve given up everything to be with you, my country, my job, my family, my friends, everything.”

Sitting at the big ammunition crate that served as their table, its ugliness masked by a woven mat, he rubbed his temples and said patiently, “Did I force you? You gave it up of your own free will. I think you were even eager to give it up. Why are you blaming me?”

She was and she wasn’t. Her own desires for him and a different, bigger life with him were to blame; but because it was he, by the mere fact of his existence, that had moved her to act on her desires, she blamed him as well. Having surrendered all, she was sensitive to any threat to what she did possess. There was something about Yamila that Quinette sensed intuitively—she was an implacable natural force, as unconscious as a lioness seeking a mate. Her ignorance was her strength. She couldn’t see that she wasn’t suitable for Michael and, with no family or clan to care for her, too desperate herself to take Michael’s choice as his final word. She wanted him, that was all, and it was everything.

The rains arrived in mid-April, and so did Quinette’s next menstruation, an unwelcome but persistent visitor. She confessed to Fancher and Handy her longing to get pregnant and asked for their prayers, figuring that if the Creator was deaf to hers, He might listen to theirs. Later she decided to give the Creator a hand. She went to Ulrika with a request for fertility pills. It was not an item the nurse kept on hand, but she promised to do what she could to obtain them.

A
FTER AN AUSPICIOUS
start, with downpours pounding the hills nearly every afternoon, the rains failed at a critical time, after the sowing of the early-blooming doura that fed the Nubans until the main harvest in November. A dry week passed, then two, and the dread of drought and famine spread like a contagion. The kujur reprised the rituals he’d performed earlier, but the spirits did not respond favorably. (Nor, it must be said, did Allah, beseeched in New Tourom’s small mosque; nor did the God prayed to in St. Andrew’s church.) The skies grayed but yielded only a few drops.

One morning, going to the tailor shop to check on the dressmaking project, Quinette noticed that three of the women did not join in the chorus of “Good day, Kinnet,” that always greeted her entrance. Sullen and silent, they pumped the treadles and averted their eyes when she inspected their work. She felt like the resented boss of a sweatshop. On another occasion, meeting the kujur’s wife on the road, she said hello and got the cold shoulder. This from the woman who had presided over her initiation and tattooing. She was not imagining things. She learned from Pearl that a kind of whisper campaign had begun against her. It made sense in its way. The Nubans might be involved in a twentieth-century war, but their minds remained in the ages of bronze and iron. Confronting a drought that was proving resistant to the prescribed ceremonies and magic, those minds sought an explanation, and someone gave it to them: the ancestors were offended because a pale-skinned stranger had married the commander, and they had signaled their anger by drying up the well of the heavens. Quinette’s flat stomach, after months of marriage, was further proof of their disapproval.

So her fears of losing the Nubans’ affection and acceptance were not entirely irrational. The gossip was accepted by only a handful, but the kujur was among them—Quinette’s marriage got him off the hook, accounting not only for the failure of the rains but for his magic’s failure to cure it. He was an eminent and prestigious figure. With his advocacy, the notion that she was to blame could gain wider appeal. She made discreet inquiries, discovered that the rain-maker was not the source of the talk, and concluded that it could only have been started by the two people who had the most against her.

She confronted Yamila first, accosting her as she and several other women were filling calabashes at the town well. There she stood, all feline sinew, leverage in her braided muscles, but Quinette was sufficiently incensed not to feel intimidated.

“Here is something I know,” she said. “You’ve been talking against me, and it is going to stop. You are going to keep your mouth shut. Here is something else I know—you don’t understand my words, but you can see that I’m angry and you damned sure know why, don’t you? Sure you do.”

Taken by surprise, Yamila shrank back, uncertainty clouding her usual belligerent expression.

“You were put up to this, I know that, too. You’re not clever enough to have thought it up all by yourself. So I’ll give you some advice—it’s not going to do you any good.”

Quinette hadn’t the slightest idea how to enforce this ordinance; the important thing was that Yamila realize she was no one to trifle with.

Satisfied that she’d gotten her message across, she marched off to Kasli’s hut and lashed into him. How sly of him to take advantage of Yamila’s feelings and to use her to exploit the Nubans’ superstitions for his own purposes. Well, she was on to him, and he wasn’t going to get away with it.

Predictably, Kasli first professed not to have any idea what she was talking about. Then he accused her of being out of her head, and finally he all but admitted his guilt by expressing what she knew was his deepest wish: She should go back to Loki, or better still to America, where she belonged. She was a liability to Michael. She had made him the subject of much unfavorable comment throughout the SPLA; at the highest levels his judgment in marrying a foreigner was being criticized, and his fitness for further command was being questioned.

“And I’ll bet those unfavorable comments started with you,” Quinette shot back. “If anyone is going to leave here, it’s going to be you.”

After Kasli reported that remark to him, Michael took her by the shoulders—the first time he’d laid hands on her other than affectionately—and shook her. He was in command here, and Kasli was his adjutant, not hers to recklessly threaten.

“Is it his place to threaten me?” she asked. “To tell me that I ought to leave?”

“Of course not, and I gave him a good dressing-down about that. He came to his senses, and you must,
must
do the same.”