2006 - What is the What (12 page)

In the morning, there was no doubt what had been done to Bol Dut and who had done it. A group of women had found him on their way to gather kindling. My father was despondent, then methodically went about making arrangements to return to Marial Bai. It was decided we would leave the next day. We would pack up the compound immediately and a lorry would be arranged.

I wanted to see Bol Dut and convinced a local girl I had befriended to come.

—Let’s look, I said.

—I don’t want to see him, she said.

—He’s not there, I lied.—They buried him already. We’ll only look at the tracks of the tank.

We followed the treads through the dirt and the mud and into the forest. The tracks penetrated the earth deeper there, and disappeared occasionally where the tank had encountered a thicket or roots.

—Have you seen one of these move? she asked. I said I had.

—Are they fast or slow?

I couldn’t remember. When I thought of the tank, I pictured the helicopters.—Very fast, I told her.

—I want to stop, she said.

She saw the man first, sitting, legs crossed, on a chair where the tracks ended. He sat still, alone, his hands on his knees, his back rigid, as if standing guard. Near his chair, in the mud, was a blanket, some kind of wool material. It was the grey of a river at twilight and was matted into the tracks left by the tank. I told the girl it was nothing, though I knew it was Bol Dut.

She turned from me, and began walking home. I followed.

Early the next morning, the day my family left, bullets sprayed the fence of corrugated steel around our compound. It was a message for my father.

—The government wants us to leave, my father said. He threw our last bag onto the lorry and then climbed in to join us.—On this subject I agree with the government, he said, and laughed for some time. My stepmothers were not amused.

We had been gone three months. When we returned, we found only a series of circles of charred earth. I do not know if any homes were still standing. I suppose there were a few, and the families who remained in Marial Bai had crowded into them. My father’s homes were no more. When we left, our compound, though damaged, still comprised three huts and a brick home. Now there was nothing, just rubble, ash. I jumped from the lorry and stood in the frame of the brick house where my father had slept. One wall stood, the chimney intact.

I found my sister Amel, returning from the well.

—The murahaleen just came, she said.—Why are you here?

Her bucket was empty. The well had been contaminated. Dead goats and one half-charred man had been thrown into it.

—It’s not safe here, she said. Why did you leave Aweil?

—Father said it would be safe. Safer than Aweil.

—It’s not safe here, Achak. Not at all.

—But the rebels are here. They have guns.

I had heard that Manyok Bol’s militia, a rebel group based in Bahr al-Ghazal, were occasionally seen in Marial Bai.

—Do you see rebels? she said, raising her voice.—Show me the rebels with guns, monkey. Here comes Mother.

Her yellow dress was a blur sweeping over the land. She was upon me before I could sob. She grabbed me and took me and choked me by accident and I smelled her stomach and let her wash my face with water and the hem of her sun dress. She insisted to me and to my father that we needed to leave Marial, that this was the least safe of places, that the army had targeted this place almost above all other villages. The message from Khartoum was clear: if the rebels chose to continue, their families would be killed, their women raped, their children enslaved, their cattle stolen, their wells poisoned, their homes plundered, the earth scorched.

I ran to the hut of William K. I found him playing in the shadow of his home, which had been burned but otherwise was in better shape than any other hut in the village.

—William!

He lifted his head and squinted.

—Achak! Is it really you?

—It is me. I have returned!

I ran to him and punched him in the chest.

—I heard you were coming back. Are you a big-city boy now?

—I am, I said, and tried to walk like one.

—I think you’re probably stupid still. Can you read?

I could not read and neither could William K, and I told him so.

—I can read. I read anything I find, he said.

I wanted to walk with him, to explore the village, to look for Moses.

—I can’t, he said.—My mother won’t let me leave. Look.

William K showed me a line of sticks, set end to end, encircling his family’s compound.—I can’t walk over those without her. They killed my brother Joseph.

I didn’t know anything about this. I remembered Joseph, much older, dancing at my uncle’s wedding. He was a very thin man, small, considered fragile.

—Who killed him?

—The horsemen, the murahaleen. They killed him and four other men. And the old man, the one-eyed man in the market. They killed him for talking too much. He spoke Arabic and was cursing the raiders. So they killed him with a gun first and then with their knives.

This seemed to me a very stupid way to die. Only a very bad warrior would be killed by the murahaleen, by a Baggara raider. My father had told me this many times. The murahaleen were terrible fighters, he’d said.

—I’m sorry your brother is dead, I said.

—Maybe he didn’t die. I don’t know. They dragged him away. They shot him and then they tied him to the horse and dragged him away. Here.

William brought me to a small tree off the path near his home.

—This is where they shot him. He was over there. He pointed to the tree.

—The man was on his horse. He yelled at Joseph, ‘Don’t run! Don’t run or I’ll shoot!’ So Joseph stopped there and turned to the man on the horse. And that’s when he shot him. Right there.

He pushed his finger deep into the hollow of my throat.

—He fell and they tied him to the horse. Like this.

William K arranged himself on the ground.—Pick up my feet.

I lifted his legs.

—Okay, now pull me.

I pulled William K down the path until he began kicking wildly.

—Stop! That hurts, damn you.

I dropped his feet, knowing the moment I did, William K would leap up and punch me in the chest, which is what he did. I allowed him this because Joseph was dead and I had no idea what was happening anymore.

My mother arranged my bed for me and I rolled left and right to warm myself under the calfskin blanket.

—Don’t think about Joseph, she said.

I had not thought about Joseph since dinner, but now I thought about him again. My throat was sore where William K had pushed his finger.

—What did he do to them? Why did they shoot him?

—He did nothing, Achak.

—He must have done something.

—He ran.

—William K said he stopped.

My mother sighed and sat next to me.

—Then I don’t know, Achak.

—Are they coming again?

—I don’t think so.

—Will they come here? To our part of town?

I harbored the dim hope that the Baggara would attack only the outskirts of Marial Bai, that they would not attack the home of an important man like my father. But they had attacked the home of my father already.

My mother began drawing on my back, triangles within circles. She had been doing this since I could remember, to calm me in my bed when I could not sleep. She hummed quietly while rubbing my back in slow circles. Every other time she circled, using her forefinger, she made a triangle between my waist and shoulders.

—Don’t worry, she said.—The SPLA will be here soon. Circle, circle, triangle within.

—With guns?

—Yes. They have guns just like the horsemen. Circle, circle, triangle within.

—Are there as many of us as there are Baggara?

—There are just as many of our soldiers. Or more. I laughed and sat up.

—We’ll kill them! We’ll kill all of them! If the Dinka have guns we’ll kill all the Baggara like they’re animals!

I wanted to see it happen. I wanted it more than anything.

—It won’t be a battle! I laughed.—It’ll end in seconds.

—Yes, Achak. Now sleep. Close your eyes.

I wanted to see the rebels shoot the men who had killed Joseph Kol, William K’s brother who had done nothing. I closed my eyes and pictured the Arabs falling from their horses in explosions of blood. If I was near, I would stand over them, beating them with rocks. In my vision there were so many of them, at least one hundred, the Arabs on horseback, and they were all dead. They were shot by the rebels and now William K and I were crushing their faces with our feet. It was glorious.

In the morning I found Moses. He was living with his mother and an uncle in his uncle’s half-burned hut. Moses was unsure where his father had gone. He expected them to return any minute, though his uncle did not seem to know his whereabouts. Moses thought that his father was a soldier now.

—For which army? The government or the rebels? I asked.

Moses wasn’t sure.

Moses and I wandered through the cool darkness of the schoolhouse. It was empty, the walls punctured by bullet holes. We put our fingers in one, two, three—so many that we gave up counting. Moses fit his fingers, bigger than mine, into five holes at once. The schoolhouse was abandoned. Nothing was happening anywhere in Marial Bai. The market now was a few shops only; for substantial goods, one had to travel to Aweil. That trip could be undertaken by older women only. Any man traveling north to Aweil would be detained, jailed, eliminated.

Most of the men of Marial Bai were gone. The men who remained were very old or very young. Everyone between fourteen and forty was gone.

We watched two ostriches run after each other, pecking and clawing. Moses threw a rock toward them and they stopped, shifting their attention to us. The ostriches were known to the village and were considered tame, but we had been told that they could kill any boy quickly, could disembowel someone our size in seconds. We ducked behind a half-burned tree, its trunk scorched black.

—Ugly birds, Moses said, and then was reminded of something.—Did you hear Joseph was shot?

I told him that I had heard.

—It went through him here, Moses said, and then, as William K had done, he pushed his finger deep into the hollow of my throat.

D
o you want to know when I left that place forever, Michael?

The day was bright, the ceiling of the sky raised high. My father was gone, in Wau for business. This was only one week after we had returned to Marial Bai. Again I was feeding the fire when my mother looked up. She was boiling water and again I had brought kindling. I saw her eyes looking over my shoulder.

Tell me, where is your mother, Michael? Have you ever seen her terrified? No child should see this. It is the end of childhood, when you see your mother’s face slacken, her eyes dead. When she is defeated by simply seeing the threat approaching. When she does not believe she can save you.

—Oh my lord, she said. Her shoulders collapsed. She splashed hot water on my hand. I squealed for a moment but then I heard the rumbling.

—What is it? I asked.

—Come! she whispered. Her eyes darted around the compound.—Where are your sisters?

I had not seen what my mother had seen. But there was the sound. A vibration from under our feet. I looked for my sisters, but I knew they were by the river. My brothers were grazing the cattle. Wherever they were, they were either safe from the rumbling or had already been overtaken by it.

—Come! she said again, and pulled me with her. We ran. I held her hand, but I was falling behind. She slowed her running and pulled me up by my arm. She ran, jostling me, finally arranging me over her shoulder. I held my breath and hoped she would stop. It was then, over her shoulder, that I saw what she had seen.

It was like a shadow made by a low cloud. The shadow moved quickly over the land. The rumbling was horses. I saw them now, men on horses, bringing the land into darkness. We slowed and my mother spoke.

—Where are you hiding? she breathed.

—Come to the woods, said a woman’s voice. I was placed on the ground.

—Hide in the grass, the woman told us.—From there we can run to Palang.

We crouched in the grass with the woman, ancient and smelling of meat. I realized we were near my aunt’s home, on the way to the river. We were well hidden, in the shade and amid a dense thicket. From our hiding place, we watched the storm overtake the town. All was dust. Some horses carried two men. They rode camels, dragged wheeled carts behind them. I heard the crack of gunfire behind us. Horses burst through the grass to the right and left. They were coming from all sides, converging in the center of the town. This is how the murahaleen took a town, Michael. They encircled it and then squeezed all within.

—There were only twenty last time, the woman said. There were easily two hundred, three hundred, or more now.

—This is the end, my mother said.—They mean to kill us all. Achak I am so sorry. But we will not make it through this day.

—No, no, the woman scolded.—They want the cattle. The cattle and the food. Then they’re gone. We’ll stay here.

At that moment, the shooting began. The guns were like those the government army carried, huge and black. The sky broke open with gunfire. The pop-pop-pop came from every corner of the village.

—Oh lord. Oh lord.

Now the woman was crying.

—Shh! my mother said, grabbing for the woman’s hand and finally finding it. Now quieter, she soothed the woman.—Shhhhh.

A horse carrying two men galloped past. The second man was riding backward, his gun aiming left and right.—Allah Akhbar! he roared.

A dozen voices answered him.—Allah Akhbar!

A man lit a torch and tossed it onto the roof of the hospital. Another man, riding on the back of a great black horse, prepared some kind of small round weapon and threw it into the Episcopalian church. An explosion splintered the walls and eliminated the roof.

When I thought to look for her, I saw the horsemen circling Amath’s hut. Four horses carrying six men. They guarded the hut from every side and then threw a torch. The roof smoldered first and then blackened. Fire finally overtook it and leapt upwards first, then crept down. Brown smoke billowed. A figure emerged, a young man, his hands surrendering. Guns popped from the perimeter and the man’s chest burst red. He fell, and no one else left the hut. The screams began soon after.