Acts of faith (18 page)

He’d begun his military career as an enlisted man in the Sudanese army, won a commission as a lieutenant, been sent to America for further training, and shortly after his return, deserted to join the rebels when his commanding officer told him he would have to convert to Islam and adopt a Muslim name if he expected to rise in rank. He’d been fighting ever since. If all that combat had brutalized him, as it had brutalized just about everyone else in Sudan (
“Even your mother, give her a bullet! Even your father, give him a bullet!”
Fitzhugh had once heard SPLA recruits chanting.
“Your rifle is your mother! Your rifle is your father! Your rifle is your wife!”
), he hid it well. He gave the clear impression that the mellow, muted ballad he was singing now was much more in keeping with who he was.

“I believe you can ease your mind, colonel,” Manfred said abruptly, and squinting under a visor made with his hand, he pointed toward the savannah that lay between a mountain range to the west and the hill occupied by the hospital compound.

Michael and Fitzhugh stood and looked, the low sun almost directly in their eyes, and made out five figures, moving single file across the plain. In the liquid light of Africa’s magic hour, they seemed to be walking on the bottom of a translucent copper sea.

“I think someone’s been hurt,” Fitzhugh said; as the figures drew closer, he’d seen that two, lagging well behind the others, were carrying what appeared to be a litter.

“But who? I sent three men to guard the American and Suleiman, and I count five men out there.”

“Yes, five,” Manfred confirmed. “But we’d better see if something’s wrong.”

Instructing Ulrika to prepare a bed in case one was needed, he set off with Fitzhugh and Michael, following a footpath around the garden and down the hill. The sun dipped below the western range and a wind sprang up and the grass on the hillside danced in the wind, as if rejoicing in its release from the heat that had baked it dry as paper. When they were about halfway down, they met Suleiman and two of the guards, both shirtless. Michael fell into an incomprehensible conversation with them, Suleiman gesturing at the third guard and Douglas, laboring up the hill with the litter.

Fitzhugh called out and started toward them with Manfred. Douglas and the soldier set the litter down. It had been made with a pair of crooked poles, between which the guards’ shirts had been stretched, tied down by the sleeves. On it lay what at first looked like a heap of rags but on closer inspection revealed itself to be the emaciated body of an old man.

“Hey, Fitz”—he gave a tired wave—“glad to see you. We could use a hand the rest of the way.”

“And damned glad to see you. But what is this?”

He looked at the body, lying motionless on its back, more bone than flesh, and the black flesh shriveled and the hair on its head sparse, grizzled, and white.

“Found him about three miles back, in a riverbed,” said Douglas, his face raw from sunburn, his shirt drenched clear through.

“But why carry him all that way? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That’s what we thought when we found him.”

Manfred kneeled beside the litter on one knee and looked for a pulse. As he did this, the man’s eyes half opened, his lips parted, and he made a dry sound, half gasp, half whisper. Fitzhugh felt a small chill; it really was like seeing a corpse come to life.

“Three miles that way, in a riverbed, you say?” the doctor asked. “You saw a village near there?”

Douglas shook his head.

“Well, there is one. Not very big. Perhaps you didn’t notice it. He must have come from there.” The grass all around had grown pale in the twilight and the distant mountains turned gray, and in the gloom and steady breeze, the man’s hair moved as a cobweb moves when a door swings open in a room. “I suspect he’d been in that riverbed for a day or two.”

“Wouldn’t know. I spotted him under a tree. First glance, I didn’t think it was a human being, and then, maybe a few seconds later, it hit me, and I said to Suleiman, ‘That was a body back there,’ and he said that, yeah, he knew and that he was dead. I wasn’t so sure, so I went to check. He opened his eyes and made a sound, like the one he just made now. Tried to get him to drink from my water bottle, but he spit it up. I told them we had to get him to the hospital before it got dark.”

“But of course your companions told you to leave him where he was.”

Douglas glanced at his fellow litter-bearer, who seemed to be listening with great concentration, as if he could understand what was being said through sheer effort. A few pale stars had come out, signaling the end of the brief equatorial dusk.

“How did you know that?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

There was no way Douglas was going to abandon a starving old man in the bush. He took a guard’s panga and cut some poles, then tied his own shirt between them. It wasn’t long enough to accommodate the man’s body, so he turned to the soldiers and asked them to contribute their shirts. The demonstration of his resolve appeared to shame them, and they stripped. The litter was assembled, the man laid on it, but he didn’t seem to realize that he was being rescued; he marshaled some hidden reserve of strength, rolled himself off, and tried to crawl away. He hadn’t gone a yard when he collapsed. Unconscious, he was placed back on the litter.

“Quite remarkable of you, convincing those men to bring him such a long way when they knew it was pointless.”

“How do you mean, pointless?”

“You did a fine thing, your good deed for the day. But tell me, you found your airstrip?”

“Yeah. And it’s not too close. What was pointless? ”

“Really, it was remarkable. A testament to your powers of moral persuasion. I commend you.”

“I’m not looking for any commendations. Anyone would have done the same thing.”

“I commend your modesty as well. I, for example, would
not
have done the same thing.” Manfred rested his palm lightly on Douglas’s shoulder. “Your companions were right. There is nothing to be done for him. He isn’t dying of starvation or thirst or a sickness. He is dying of living too long.”

The American scowled in confusion.

“When Nubans get to be very old, they often choose to go off somewhere to die.”

“And they’re just
left
?”

“Their relatives usually know where they’ve gone. They keep a watch, and when the person dies, then come the proprieties. I imagine this fellow’s people will be looking for him in the morning, and they’ll wonder what became of him. They’ll be worried that he was dragged off by a leopard or some other wild beast. They will be very anxious to find his body so the proprieties can be observed and his spirit not become meddlesome.”

Douglas rubbed his forehead with a thumb, seeming to massage his brain into puzzling out how his actions could produce effects he’d never intended.

“So what the hell do we do now? Bring him back to where we found him?”

“Impractical, now that it’s dark. Also, you’ve brought him here, he is still alive, and I have my own proprieties to observe. I am required to do what I can, which I think will be to make him as comfortable as possible for the night. If he dies, he dies. If not, then not. Either way, we’ll send word to the village where he is.”

“And that’s all?”

“Douglas! Listen to me, please. Can’t you see why he tried to crawl away from you? Come on. You must be famished. I will see to it that he is brought up to a bed.”

“I’ll give a hand,” Fitzhugh said.

As he bent down to pick up the litter, the man looked up at him, and he fancied that he saw a plea—no, a demand—in those yellowed eyes in their cavernous sockets. A part of him, the part that was heir to his African ancestors’ wisdom, felt obliged to obey that silent imperative; but the rest of Fitzhugh Martin did not belong to his ancestors’ world; it dwelled in Douglas’s and Manfred’s and Ulrika’s world, which had imperatives and obligations of its own.

S
OMETHING HAD PUT
a rat in Fitzhugh’s belly, and it began to chew its way out after midnight, waking him from a deep sleep. Flinging his mosquito net aside, he grabbed his flashlight from the night table and, keeping it pointed at the floor to avoid waking Douglas, fled out of the room for Manfred’s front door. The rat took a breather, allowing him to leave the house and cross the compound without too much pain. He was dismayed to discover padlocks on the doors to both pit latrines. How Germanic to padlock a latrine. How un-Germanic to fail to tell one’s visitors where the key was kept. The gnawing in his gut began again. There was nothing for it now but to bolt for the bushes. Just then he spotted the small circle of a penlight bobbing toward him. His own light revealed the nurse, clad in a shift, with an object gleaming between her breasts like a pendant. The key! He could tell by her walk that her need wasn’t half as urgent as his.

“Ulrika! Give that to me! Now, please!”

She hesitated a beat, startled by his assault; then she took the key from around her neck and handed it to him.

He quickly opened the padlock and, slamming the door behind him, squatted over the hole. With deep gratitude for Ulrika’s fortuitous appearance, he commenced to evict the rat. There was a click outside as the nurse pulled the key from the lock—he’d had the presence of mind to leave it there for her.

“Is the Sudan beer,” she said. “I never drink it. Pfooey! God knows what is in it.”

The beer? He’d never known any brand of beer to have an effect like this. Finished with her business in the adjacent enclosure, Ulrika gave him a knock.

“Fitz, you are all right?”

He came out, feeling embarrassed, although there was no reason to; a bush nurse wasn’t likely to attach any opprobrium to the most disgusting functions or dysfunctions of the body. During his emergency, he’d failed to notice that she’d taken her hair down for the night. He noticed it now, cascading over her shoulders, lending a little flair to her sturdy, peasant looks.

“In case it wasn’t the beer, something more serious, do you have any pills?”

“What a stupid question. This is hospital.”

In the dispensary, she rummaged in a cabinet filled with boxes and bottles while he stood behind her holding the light. The back of her hair, an extravagance of waves and curls, shone with a brightness that reminded him of Diana.

“Cipro.” She slapped a foil-wrapped packet in his hand. “Good for many things. One a day.”

They headed back to the living quarters, he in his undershorts, she in her shapeless shift, past the sleeping forms of patients’ relatives camped out on the hospital grounds. A breeze fanned the ashes of their dead cooking fires and a faint aroma of smoke tinged the night air.

“How do you say ‘thanks’ in German?”

“Gedanke,”
she answered, and leaned a little further forward, neither innocently nor with seductive intent but with a lack of self-consciousness that meant she was completely comfortable in his presence. And that amounted to a seduction.

“Gedanke,”
he repeated.

They returned the way they’d come, past the sleeping people, down a footpath bordered by rocks. Out here the night sky was almost intimidating in its clarity; the numberless stars seemed to assault you. Fitzhugh and Ulrika walked straight to her cottage and went inside without a request or invitation being spoken. She sat down on the edge of her bed and peeled off his shorts as if she were undressing a patient; then she pulled her shift over her head and held the mosquito net aside, motioning to him to get in first.

Less than half an hour later, with a friendly pat on the ass, she asked him to leave; she couldn’t risk his staying the night. Herr Doktor wasn’t a puritan, but he expected discretion, she said, although Fitzhugh suspected she was more worried that he would be seen by Franco.

He felt a little ridiculous, tiptoeing into Herr Doktor’s house like a kid who has violated a parental curfew. He crept into the room and saw that Douglas was still asleep. Returning to his bed, Fitzhugh was nagged by the guilt that always assailed him when he’d indulged his appetites. The guilt, however, was mitigated by the fact that he hadn’t enjoyed himself very much. Something had blocked his climax, despite Ulrika’s skillful manipulations and sexual choreography. Maybe they were what blocked him—a bit too skillful, too clinical, too, well, nurselike. She touched him everywhere the way she would tap his knee to test his involuntary reflexes. What finally brought him off was a fantasy. Shutting his eyes, he pretended it was Diana grinding away beneath him, Diana’s lips nibbling his ear, her breasts offered to his mouth.

In the morning, after he and Douglas had finished washing up, there was a commotion at the hospital. They saw a knot of people clustered around the door to the medical ward and went to have a look. Inside, the old man lay on his side on the floor, his eyes open and still. The bedsheets were still wrapped tightly around him from his shoulders to his feet, which didn’t make him look like a mummy so much as like a giant larva with a human head. Whether he’d fallen out of bed or had deliberately thrown himself to the floor, it was impossible to say.

Ulrika, dressed in her uniform, stood over him, speaking quietly to Manfred in German. The doctor nodded, instructed a couple of Nuban aides to remove the corpse, and came outside.

“So, gentlemen,
gut schlafen
?” He rubbed his beard with his knuckles; the nurse must have summoned him before he’d had time to shave. “You slept well?”