2006 - What is the What (49 page)

Tabitha, these past months without you, when first I wondered where you might be, whether you were in heaven or hell or some purgatory, I have had the most intolerable thoughts, homicidal and suicidal. I have struggled so fiercely with the harm I have wanted to do to Duluma and the futility I have seen, in my darkest minutes, in living. I have found some respite in the nightly consumption of alcohol. Two bottles of beer typically allow me to sleep, if fitfully. Achor Achor has been worried about me, but he has seen me improve. He knows I have been here before, that I have approached the precipice of self-termination and have walked away.

I never told you of those dark days, Tabitha, when I was much younger. Achor Achor does not know, either, and had he and I been together then I might not have fallen so low. We had been separated at Golkur, though both of us were on our way to Kenya, to Kakuma. We were on the same road, but days apart. The last I had seen Achor Achor he was in a Save the Children medical tent, being treated for dehydration. I had been cowardly; I thought he would surely die and I could not bear it. I ran away and did not say goodbye. I left the camp with another group, wanting to be away from his imminent death, from all death, and so I walked with one of the first groups into the wind and desert that awaited us in Kenya.

In those last days of my walk, Tabitha, I walked in the dark. My eyes were nearly swollen shut, and I walked blind, trying to lift my feet to avoid tripping, but finding myself barely able to drag them across the gravel. My head swam with fatigue and disorientation, just as it does this morning, Tabitha, when I have been beaten and I miss you. That night, when I walked as such a young boy, it seemed a good time to die. I could continue to live, yes, but my days were getting worse, not better. My life in Pinyudo worsened as the years went on, and Achor Achor, I feared, was dead. And now this, walking to Kenya, where there were no promises. I remembered my thoughts about buildings and waterfalls in Ethiopia, and my disappointment when, after crossing the border, I found only more of the blight we thought we had left. For many years, God had been clear to boys like us. Our lives were not worth much. God had found innumerable ways to kill boys like me, and He no doubt would find many more. Kenya’s leadership could turn over just as Ethiopia’s had, and there would be another Gilo River, and I knew that would be too much to bear. I knew that if that came again, I would not find the strength to run or swim or carry a quiet baby.

So that night I stopped walking. I sat and watched the boys shuffle by. Just to stop was such a great relief. I was so tired. I was far more tired than I had realized, and when I sat on the hot road I felt relief greater than any I had known before. And because my body so welcomed this rest, I wondered if, like William K, I could simply close my eyes and pass away. I didn’t feel so close to falling from this world to the next, but perhaps William K did not, either. William K had only sat down to rest, and moments later was gone. So I lay my head back on the road and I looked into the sky.

—Hey, get up. You’ll get run over.

It was the voice of a boy passing by. I said nothing.

—You all right?

—I’m fine, I said.—Walk on, please.

It was a very clear night, the stars carelessly splashed across the sky.

I closed my eyes, Tabitha, and I conjured my mother as best I could. I pictured her in yellow, yellow like an evening sun, walking down the path. I loved to watch her walk down the path toward me, and in my vision I allowed her to walk the entire way. When she came to me I told her I was too tired to continue, that I would suffer again, and would watch others suffer, and then wait to suffer again. In my vision she said nothing, for I didn’t know what my mother would say to all that, so I let her remain silent. Then I washed her from my mind. It seemed to me that to die I needed to clear my mind of all thoughts, all visions, and concentrate on passing on.

I waited. I lay with my head on the gravel, and I waited for death. I could still hear the scuffling of the feet of the boys, but soon no one bothered me and that seemed a blessing. Perhaps they assumed I was already dead. Perhaps, in the dark and the wind, they could not see me at all. I felt on the verge of something, even if only shallow sleep, when a pair of feet stopped. I felt a presence just over me.

—You don’t look dead.

I ignored the voice, that of a girl.

—Are you asleep? I did not answer.

—I said, are you asleep?

It was very wrong, that this voice was so loud in my ear. I stayed still.

—I can see you closing your eyes tighter. I know you’re alive.

I cursed her with all my heart.

—You can’t sleep here on the road.

I continued to try to leave the earth through my closed eyes.

—Open them.

I kept them closed, tighter now.

—You can’t sleep when you’re so trying so hard.

This was true. I opened my eyes enough to see a face, no more than five inches from my own. It was girl, a bit younger than myself. One of the few girls walking.

—Please leave me alone, I whispered.

—You look like my brother, she said. I closed my eyes again.

—He’s dead. But you look like him. Get up. We’re the last people now.

—Please. I’m resting.

—You can’t rest on the road.

—I’ve rested on roads before. Please let me be.

—Then I’ll stay here with you.

—I’ll be here forever.

She knotted her fist in my shirt and pulled.

—You won’t. Don’t be so stupid. Get up.

She lifted me up and we walked. This girl was named Maria.

I decided that it was easier to walk with this girl than to argue with her in the dark. I could die tomorrow easily enough; she could not watch me forever. So I walked with her to please her, to quiet her, and at first light, we were in the middle of the desert with ten thousand others. This was to be our next home, we were told. And we stood in that land and we waited that day as trucks and Red Cross vehicles came and left more people there, in a land so dusty and desolate that no Dinka would ever think to settle there. It was and and featureless and the wind was constant. But a city would grow in the middle of that desert. This was Lokichoggio, which would soon become the staging ground for international aid in the region. One hour south would be Kakuma, sparsely populated by Kenyan herders known as the Turkana, but within a year there would be forty thousand Sudanese refugees there, too, and that would become our home for one year, for two, then five and ten. Ten years in a place in which no one, simply no one but the most desperate, would ever consider spending a day.

You were there, Tabitha. You were there with me then and I believe you are with me now. Just as I once pictured my mother walking to me in her dress the color of a pregnant sun, I now take solace in imagining you descending an escalator in your pink shirt, your heart-shaped face overtaken by a magnificent smile as everything around you ceases moving.

W
hen Tabitha was taken, Phil called me often, Anne and Allison called, only to talk, to listen, they said, but I knew they were worried about my health and state of mind. I suspect that they had lost their grasp of me. They knew now that the Sudanese in America were capable of murder, of suicide, and so what, they wondered, might Valentine do? I admit that I spent many weeks largely unable to move. I rarely went to class. I asked for time off from work and spent that time in bed or watching television. I drove aimlessly. I tried to read books about grief. I turned off my phone.

Bobby had suggested that Tabitha’s murder was made possible by the madness of this country, and on occasion in those dark weeks after her death I allowed myself to find America complicit in the crime. In Sudan, it is unheard of for a young man to kill a woman. It had never happened in Marial Bai. I doubt that anyone in my clan could remember it ever happening, anywhere or at any time. The pressures of life here have changed us. Things are being lost.

There is a new desperation, a new kind of theatricality on the part of men. Not long ago, a Sudanese man in Michigan, I do not know the town, killed his wife, his innocent child, and then himself. I do not know the full story, but the one that blows through Sudanese society holds that this man’s wife wanted to visit her family in Athens, Georgia. He refused. I do not know why, but in traditional Sudanese society, the husband does not need a reason why; held over the woman’s head is the possibility of a beating, perhaps months of beatings. So they argued, she was beaten, and he thought he had made his point. But the next day she was gone. She had, weeks before, bought a plane ticket to Athens for her and their daughter, even before discussing it with him. She had either assumed she would have her way, or she simply didn’t care. But the man in Michigan cared. While his wife and daughter visited aunts and cousins in Athens, he boiled at home. The loss efface, I tell you, can do awful things to a man. When his wife returned with her daughter, he met them at the door with a knife he bought that weekend. He killed them in the foyer and an hour later, himself.

I cannot help but think that Duluma got the idea from this man, this notion of being able to punish she who left you without having to be punished yourself. That, too, would be impossible in Sudan. A man does not kill his child, does not kill himself. In southern Sudan, too many men abuse their wives; wives are beaten, wives are abandoned. But never this sort of thing.

Some say it is the fault of the women here, the clash of their new ideas and the old habits of men unwilling to adapt. Tabitha may or may not have had an abortion—I did not ask her, for it is not my right—and then she left Duluma on her own accord. Both choices would be unprecedented in traditional Sudanese society, and still quite rare in the relaxed moral context of Kakuma. In southern Sudan, even a sexual relationship before marriage is unusual, and very often precludes that woman being married at all. Virgins are preferred, and for a virgin, the bride’s family receives a far higher dowry. Telling Americans about this yields fascinating reactions. They cannot conceive of how one’s virginity could even be determined in the absence of a gynecological examination.

The Sudanese way is simple. On the eve of the wedding, two or three members of the bride’s family, usually the bride’s aunts, bring to the marriage bed the cleanest white sheets. On the first night that the groom is permitted to visit his bride, these women hide inside the home, or just outside the door. When the groom first penetrates his bride, the women ululate, and as soon as they are able, they go inside to inspect the sheets for the blood of a broken hymen, to prove that their niece was indeed a virgin. With this evidence in hand, they return to the relarives of both bride and groom.

But here there has been premarital sex, and there was an assertive young woman who decided to break off a relarionship with an angry young Sudanese man. He thought she was leaving him for money. He assumed that because my name was well-known at Kakuma that I was a wealthy man here in Atlanta. And it began to twist his head in knots. He made furious calls to her, during which he gave her terrible names. He threatened her and even warned her that should she choose me over him he would do something drastic, something irrevocable.

This is where I direct some frustration toward Tabitha. She did not take his threats seriously, and this seems, to me, madness. Duluma had been in the SPLA, he had fired a machine gun, he had walked over corpses and through fire. Would he not act on a threat? But she did not tell me of these warnings. I knew that he would act on such a threat, but had been placated by our phone call, assuring me he had accepted that she was no longer interested in him.

When Phil called me, he apologized for what had happened to me in his country, just as Bobby had. Bobby was not a religious man, but Phil is a man of faith, and we talked at length about our beliefs when tested. It was interesting to hear Phil talk about those instances when his faith wavered in times of great crisis or needless suffering. I am not sure if what I’ve felt is doubt. My inclination is to blame myself: what have I done to bring such calamity down upon myself and those I love? Not long ago, a gathering of Lost Boys in the Southeast was scheduled to take place in Atlanta. On the way, a carload of representatives from Greensboro, North Carolina, spun off the highway, killing the driver and injuring two others. The next day, another Lost Boy of Greensboro, distraught by the accident and other disappointments in his life, hanged himself in his basement. Is the curse upon me so great that it casts a shadow over everyone I know, or do I simply know too many people?

I do not mean to imply that these deaths were simply trials for me, for I know God would not take these people, would not take Tabitha in particular, simply to test the strength of my own faith. I will not guess His motivations for bringing her back to Him. But her death has proven to be a catalyst for me to think about my faith and my life. I have examined my course, whether or not I have made mistakes, whether I have been a good child of God. And though I have tried to remain on course, and I have redoubled my efforts to pray and to attend Mass regularly, I have also realized that it is time to start my life again. I have done this before—each time one life has ended and another has begun. My first life ended when I left Marial Bai, for I have not seen my home or family since. My life in Ethiopia also ran its course. For three years we lived there and I became aware of my place in the grand plan of the SPLA and the future of southern Sudan. And finally, with our arrival at Kakuma, I started again.

After my walk to Kenya, when Maria found me on the road wanting to be lifted back to God, I spent many months thinking about why I should have been born at all. It was a grave mistake, it seemed, a promise that could not be fulfilled. There was a musician at Kakuma, the only musician in those early days, and he would play one song, day and night, on his stringed rababa. The melody of his song was cheerful but the lyrics were not. ‘It was you, mother, it was you,’ he sang, ‘it was you who birthed me, and it is you I blame.’ He went on to blame his mother, and all the mothers of Dinkaland, for giving birth to babies only to have them live in squalor in northwest Kenya.