Sudan: A Novel (2 page)

With the fire going strong, Dada sat back on her heels and relished the early morning. The cool air that caressed her skin was a welcome balm, a short, gentle reprieve from a life sentence of soaring temperatures in the glaring Sudanese sun. The stillness was just as soothing. She cherished the quiet. It nourished her soul, strengthened her for the demands of her family and her life. It was a good life—a gentle, hardworking husband, healthy children, enough to eat. She asked for nothing more. But she loved the stolen minutes of the morning because they were hers alone. In that delicious time before the village awoke, she was not fetching water in a clay pot balanced on her head from the river that flowed southwest into the White Nile, grinding sorghum for the next family meal, washing clothes, gathering wood, tending to a child or nursing an infant. For a brief moment in time each morning, Dada was alone with her thoughts, at peace with her world.

But the solitude of the moment as she knelt by the fire was soon shattered by the piercing cry of her youngest child. Dada poked a few more sticks into the growing flames and then stepped back inside the tukul. As she did, she pulled her left breast out from under her wrap, one long piece of red-and-purple cloth draped under her right arm, with the ends tied together in a knot over her left shoulder. She snuggled her daughter close and took care of motherly business.

Reisha sucked frantically for 15 minutes until she’d finally had enough. A single drop of milk hung suspended from Dada’s breast like a raindrop above the baby’s pink lips, but Reisha turned her head away. She was finished. Dada smiled as she reflected on how different her oldest and youngest children were—had been since the moment they were born. Koto had been easily satisfied, hardly demanded any attention at all, and ate solid food before he could walk. Now 15, Koto was tall for his age but thin, not yet filled out with the muscles of a man. He had a high forehead and wide, round eyes, and like the other members of the Lokuta tribe, he was as black as the night sky. Koto had always seemed vastly more mature than his years. His gaze was steady, his movements compact and economical, his temperament calm and confident—almost like a grown man in a child’s body. Ah, but this Reisha!

She placed the baby back on the sleeping mat, smiled and tickled her bare tummy. The baby’s giggles mingled with another sound. Running feet. Her neighbors shouting. A strange keening noise rumbling in the sky before...

No more than a few seconds after her mind had rejected it, Dada was sucked back into the reality of agonized screams and the stench of burning death, back into the deep, airless ditch of terror. And when she felt Isak wrap his small arms tight around her leg, his body trembling, she knew she had to stay there. She couldn’t abandon her children, couldn’t leave them alone in this nightmare while she escaped into hysteria. With every ounce of will she possessed, she forced herself to stand perfectly still, to calm down—to
think
.

John! She had to find her husband! He would know what to do. He would save them. She scooped Reisha into her arms, grabbed Kuak’s hand and told him to hold onto his brother. Together, they left the tukul and headed toward the sorghum fields where the men had been working. They cut behind two burning huts and came out into the open where Dada could see the fields, and her heart leapt with hope when she saw all the Lokuta men—40 or more of them—sprinting toward the village.

Then she saw why they were running.

Behind them, soldiers in jeeps bounced across the dark earth of the freshly planted fields, the weapons in their hands shiny in the early morning sun. The sharp crack of a rifle shot reached her ears a heartbeat before one of the Lokuta men crumbled and fell. Then another shot rang out. And another. Two more men fell. The gunfire grew more intense; the bodies kept falling, one after another, until there were no more targets left.

Dada did not see John, her father or brothers fall. She couldn’t make out anyone in the crowd of running farmers. But she knew John was there somewhere, knew that a bullet from one of the gunshots she’d heard had ripped into his back, and he lay dead in the field beside the bodies of all the other men in her family.

Kuak and Isak stood speechless beside their mother, too dumbstruck even to cry. But there was no time now for grief. The men in jeeps raced toward them, and Dada spun around and began to run with the boys back into Nokot.

In less than 10 minutes, the idyllic village in the green mountain valley had become a fiery deathtrap. Mothers grabbed their children and raced toward the river where they hoped to find safety in the marsh and reeds. Bellowing zebu and bleating goats ran helter-skelter in wild-eyed panic. Dada and the boys dodged burning huts, zigzagged past blast craters and stumbled over the body parts of dismembered villagers, as they made their way to the northern edge of Nokot to the field where Koto had taken their small herd of zebu that morning to graze.

Dada’s eyes frantically searched the field for her son, but there was no Koto. Her mind flatly refused to countenance the possibility that he had been hurt or killed. Koto was fine, she assured herself desperately; he had escaped the convoy of trucks carrying well-armed soldiers in combat fatigues that barreled across the field toward the village.

For just a moment, Dada stopped and stared at the approaching trucks bumping down the rutted path, scattering the terrified zebu and kicking up an ominous cloud of dust as they drew near. They reminded her of a pack of jackals she’d seen once, as they had circled a wounded doe and fawn. Then she turned to join the rush of other families that scrambled toward the river. But there was no escape there either. Soldiers ran up from that direction, too, cut off any flight, grabbed the screaming women and children and herded them into groups.

Dada stood very still on the dirt path she’d walked every day of her life. She realized she was utterly alone and totally helpless. With all her options gone, she turned toward the village and led her sons back to the only refuge she had left—their own tukul.

Once inside, Dada clasped the still screaming Reisha to her chest and sat the boys against the far wall of the hut. They obeyed her direction without protest. With identical faces that wore identical looks of abject terror, they scooted as far as possible back into the shadows and huddled close with their arms around each other. Then Dada placed herself between the boys and the doorway, and waited.

The sounds outside were hard to follow. She could make out some of the voices, but others shouted in a language she’d never heard before. She tried to soothe her frightened baby—
Shhhhh! Shhhhhh! Hush now, shhhhhh
—as she edged to the lone window her husband had cut in the side of the tukul and peered out. The entire village swarmed with soldiers. She saw one of the trucks parked only three tukuls away. Already, groups of women and girls had been bound with lengths of rope, strung together like beads on a necklace.

She jumped back, startled, as a soldier ran by. He stopped in the doorway of the tukul where the newly wed Sama Pomwe and her husband, Karal lived. Karal had gone out with John that morning to work in the sorghum fields.

The soldier stood for a moment and stared into the tukul, then shouted something in his strange tongue and two other soldiers ran to him. The first soldier began to unfasten the pants of his uniform and stormed into the tukul with the other two close on his heels. Then Dada heard Sama scream, a high, piercing wail that went on and on and on.

Dada’s knees almost buckled out from under her, and she had to grab hold of the pole that supported the wall to stand up. She leaned there for a time, trembling violently; the sound of Sama’s cries sliced into her soul.

Then she slowly lifted her head and straightened up. Her hands steadied. The trembling stopped. Desperation had wedged steel down her spine.

She kneeled and whispered instructions to her sons, then picked up the backpack she’d used to carry each of her babies when she gathered sticks or food. She placed Reisha inside and tied it snugly across her shoulders. Reisha loved to ride in the backpack and her cries quickly changed to soft sniffles. Dada had counted on that; Reisha
had
to be quiet now. Then Dada peered carefully out the window. To her far left, soldiers herded a group of women and children into a circle next to a large truck as Dada readied herself for one final flight.

A detachment of soldiers went from hut to hut and dragged out the few remaining inhabitants. They had reached the tukul two down from hers where an older couple lived. If Dada meant to make a break for it, time was running out. With her baby daughter on her back, she gripped each son’s small hand, stepped to the door of the hut and prepared for the most important two minutes of her life.

The path leading into the village, the one the trucks had used, looked to be her only escape route. She had been the fastest runner in Nokot when she was a young girl. If she could make it just 200 yards down the road, there were large fields of elephant grass where she and the children could hide.

As soon as there were no soldiers in sight, she eased out her door, hurried toward the road, and caught a quick glimpse through her neighbor’s doorway as she passed Sama’s tukul. The young girl sobbed quietly as two soldiers pinned her down while a third raped her.

Dada led the children stealthily from the back of one tukul to the next. She saw no one. Most of the soldiers were on the other side of the village, where they herded women and children into transport trucks. She reached the last abandoned tukul on the edge of the village by the road and paused. She edged slowly around the circular hut and searched for soldiers. When she saw none, she prepared to make her move.

Ron Wolfson looked down at the little girl who sat in the dirt at his feet and wanted to cry. Or rip somebody’s throat out.

But if he cried every time his heart broke for a brutalized child, or a dead baby, or a slaughtered villager, he wouldn’t be able to do what he’d come here to do.

And if he went looking for somebody’s throat to rip out, where would he start? The Murahaleen raider who burned down her village, killed her parents and carried her away? The slavetrader who sold her to the highest bidder? The master who bought her? The government that condoned it? Where would he stop?

He knelt beside the vacant-eyed child, flipped the catch on his camera case, reached inside and took out his battered old Nikon. He slid the camera strap over his head and around his neck and wiped the sweat out of his eyes on the dirty sleeve of his shirt. Was it hotter today than usual? Better question: Could a—Masapha would say “pampered”—American from a little Indiana town on the bank of the Ohio River ever get used to the frying-pan heat of Africa?

The blond man moved so the glare of the sun was at his back, set his knees in the dirt and made his body a human tripod. Then he put his game face on.
I have to tell this little girl’s story without any words.
He lifted the camera to his eye and began to fire.

The girl rocked back and forth as she tenderly cradled the cold, stiff body of her little sister in her arms. She was oblivious to the other refugees huddled together in groups around her speaking in dialects she couldn’t have understood even if she’d been listening. She was oblivious to the American, too, who knelt in the dirt in front of her, his aged Nikon click, click, clicking as he captured her pain on film. The child was oblivious to the blistering heat, to the stench of unwashed bodies and human excrement, to everything except her little sister’s face—at peace, finally at peace. As she hummed the ancient melody her grandmother had sung to her mother, and her mother had sung to her, she shooed the flies away from the blood clotted in her sister’s ears and smeared in caked, dry streams down her neck.

“Some tribals brought her in this morning,” Jack Hadley said, as he came to stand beside where Ron knelt. With his red hair and freckles, the Canadian looked even more out of place in a Sudanese refugee camp than Ron did.

“From what I understand, they found her staggering across a field in a daze, carrying the body,” Jack continued, his words colored by the Irish-sounding lilt of his native Prince Edward Island.