Sudan: A Novel (24 page)

Animal bones picked clean littered the ground; the hum of flies buzzed in the hot, stagnant air; and the choking stench of open sewers filled every breath. Even the uneducated Mondala villagers understood that this was not a normal living environment. Nowhere in their experience had they ever encountered anything that compared to the overwhelming filth and fetid squalor of the encampment; it disgusted and offended them.

When they came to an alley between two of the buildings, Michael turned down a narrow passageway. At the end of the passageway, he held up his hand, indicating for the men to wait. Then he opened the door of a small building literally vibrating with loud music. He and Chewa stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind them.

Idris and the others looked around in wonder and disgust. Empty cans and beer bottles lay on the ground at their feet, along with piles of human excrement. What looked and smelled like vomit was splattered on a nearby wall.

Suddenly, the door opened, and Chewa indicated for the others to follow him. They stepped into the dimly lit room where an assortment of oil roughnecks, gamblers and other malcontents sat at makeshift tables or on crude stools that faced a bar made of planks stretched across oil drums. A battered boom box rested on the far end of the bar, blaring loud rock music in a language no one in the room understood.

Most of the bar/gambling hall’s patrons cast curious glances at the tall Dinka tribesmen, Akec towering above them all, as Chewa threaded his way through the tables toward the far end of the building.

Michael stood near a group of three men sitting at a makeshift table of concrete blocks and wood slabs in a corner of the room that was shrouded in shadow. Idris could not quite make out their faces. Chewa stopped and his brother leaned over and spoke quietly to a tall figure seated in the middle.

Turning to Idris and the others, Chewa told them, “Michael will interpret for you.”

The big man in the center of the group said something and his two companions rose and pushed briskly past the Dinkas without acknowledging their presence. Michael motioned for the villagers to come closer.

“I have already told Omar your story,” Michael said to Idris. “He wanted to see you face to face and tell you his price and his conditions. If you can meet them, he will help you. For a price. He says everything is for a price.”

Idris studied the seated man as he spoke to Michael, trying to make out his features in the dim light. He was a heavily muscled man, with massive shoulders and a wide, broad chest, where a thick mat of black hair curled out of the V of his shirt. Idris could see several tattoos beneath the dark hair on his arms; one of them was a snake wrapped around his right forearm, the head on the top of his hand, its forked tongue licking out toward his knuckles. The tattoo was so detailed and lifelike it seemed almost real, like the snake was an added weapon Omar could use against an adversary. And in an odd way, that was comforting. The mercenary spoke in a deep, raspy voice, and his smirk—he did not smile—revealed a gold cap on the left of his two front teeth. The brim of his hat cast an ominous shadow, but Idris could make out deep, unblinking dark eyes and a hawkish nose that hooked over a thick black mustache. The man had the face of a predator. The hat reminded Idris of Leo, but he resolutely pushed the memory out of his head.

“He says that you do not need to know his name,” Michael said. “Omar will do for now. He wants to know if you have brought dinars or pounds.”

Akec pulled out some Sudanese pounds for them to see and then shoved them back into his traveling pouch.

“Omar also says he works alone.”

Idris responded immediately. “I am going with him. I am paying. Besides, he doesn’t know my daughter.”

A quick exchange followed, then Michael reiterated, “He says he works alone.”

“Where our money goes, I go.” For Idris, the point was nonnegotiable. “The others will be turning back, but I am going on, with or without him. He can stab me in the back if he wants to, but he will have to kill me to take my money. I will never again give it freely to someone who disappears.”

After hearing Michael’s translation, Omar snorted a short, guttural laugh and then spoke in gruff Arabic.

Michael turned to Idris. “He says he will tell you one final time: do not come! But if you refuse to listen, you may accompany him. Just understand that if you cannot keep up, he will leave you behind. If you get hurt, he will leave you behind. He will use you as bait if he has to. You have been warned. Omar works alone.”

Michael let that sink in for a moment and then continued.

“He says the price will be five hundred Sudanese pounds plus expenses, whether he finds the girl or not. It will be another five hundred if he brings the girl back alive.”

Akec stepped forward and laid a handful of bills on the table.

Another exchange took place between Omar and Michael, this one longer and more animated. When it was over, Michael translated for the group what Omar had said.

“Another thing is, he says there are to be no questions asked about his methods. He says very bad things sometimes happen along the way. He hates the Murahaleen and the Fedayeen, and it would be a privilege for him to kill any that he comes across—along with returning your daughter, of course.”

Magok stepped up and spoke for the first time, his words, as always, blunt and to the point. “How do we know he will do what he says?”

Michael already had the answer. “You don’t. But he’s the best chance you have of getting the girl back.”

A
kin and Omina were pack animals. They hauled wood for the cooking fires—armload after armload, from small sticks to logs it took both of them to lift. They carried water for cooking and for clean-up afterward, huge jugs of it, all the way from the river to the cooking tent at the far end of the encampment.

Their day began in the dark before sunrise, preparing for the morning meal; it ended in the dark after sundown, cleaning up after the evening meal. Every minute in between was filled with drudgery.

On stomachs so empty the girls were sometimes dizzy, they served food they could not eat. Their clothes filthy rags, their bodies dirty and tormented by spider and scorpion bites, they scrubbed and cleaned the clothes of their Arab masters. They slept in the cold, were tied in their shelter during the heat of the day, were beaten, slapped, kicked, humiliated and intimidated.

The older girls were raped, too. Every night.

Mbarka and Shontal quickly discovered that being a slave meant they existed for the sexual pleasure of the men in the camp, and they were handed around from one man to another like what they were—property.

In southern Sudan just to fatten and trade his horses and camels, Sulleyman al Hadallah had brought only a few of his household servants and staff, and none of his five wives or seventeen children. He and his herders accepted that as Bedouins they must spend time away from their families. But none of them expected or intended to give up sexual activity. Mbarka and Shontal, both virgins and both pledged to be married before the raids, had been deflowered by Sulleyman and then given to any man in the camp who wanted them. Every night, soldiers came for them and took them to the men’s tents. Usually, there was more than one man waiting for them there. And every night or two, one or the other of them would be summoned to Sulleyman’s tent. They always spent the whole night there, and both girls dreaded those nights the most.

A pretty girl with a well-shaped body, Mbarka had caught Sulleyman’s fancy. He had decided the night he took her virginity that he would give her to one of his sons instead of selling her to a brothel as he had planned. Shontal was a different matter altogether. She was almost as pretty as Mbarka, but there was a deadness in her eyes that made Sulleyman uncomfortable.

And he was very aware of the other two slave girls as well. He particularly lusted after the little one, the child. He got his greatest pleasure from bedding the young slaves.

Mbarka held up remarkably well under the humiliation and degradation of unending sexual assaults. Her experiences with the men in the camp had toughened her, made her stronger. Though not defiant, neither was she broken. She was a fighter, a survivor.

Shontal had neither Mbarka’s courage nor her strength of character. Every encounter with the debasement of rape left her more shattered inside. It grew harder and harder for her to disassociate from the brutality; the psychological shield that protected her soul from total destruction was wearing gradually away.

Akin and Omina watched in horror as Mbarka and Shontal were dragged away to the Arabs’ tents. Every night when the men came up the hill to their shelter, the two younger girls cringed back into the darkness, terrified that this would be the night strong hands reached out and grabbed them, too.

Though only the older girls had to endure the brutality of the men in the camp, they all shared an equal dread of Pasha Drulois. In her black dress and turban, she was a daily angel of torment to the slave girls—vicious, brutal and merciless. Decades of cruelty, abuse and humiliation had warped her iron will, twisted her into a bitter, angry woman as callous and ruthless as her master.

Pasha had a hair-trigger temper. Carrying a heavy bundle of wood too slowly or not fetching water quickly enough would occasion a tirade of unintelligible Arabic and a flurry of blows from her leather camel strap. Its tough surface bit into the girls’ flesh, leaving angry, painful welts. If she hit hard enough, the whip would break the skin and draw blood.

Since the nightmare morning when the raiders attacked her village, life for Akin had become mere survival, a struggle simply to endure. Though she and the others were unaware of it, their psyches were being transformed, molded into a “slave mentality” that asked for nothing and expected nothing. At different levels, all four had come to accept that they were the property of someone else and that they existed for no other purpose than to serve their master. They were slowly losing all concept of personal rights.

The only break from the torturous existence in the camp came during trips to the river to wash clothes. It was hard work. The clothes baskets were heavy, the camel fat used for soap was disgusting, and bending over and washing the filthy garments in the river was back-breaking labor. But for Akin, clothes-washing days were the only ray of light in a dark existence totally devoid of hope.

She longed for river days so she could push her toes down into the sand and feel the water rush over her feet. Trips to the river brought back some of her humanity. The river was a connection, a tiny thread that kept her tied to a life filled with love, an emotion she had not seen a single Arab display toward anyone.

But like every other aspect of her life now, the river held danger, too. Crocodiles lurked in the reeds not far from the shore on the other side of the river. They watched, always alert, ready to strike. The girls never ventured more than a few feet from the riverbank, never got more than ankle deep in the water.

Pasha always brought along one of the hired men with a rifle to the river. If a crocodile became too brazen—and it had happened a time or two—the soldier would fire a few shots at the creature to hold it and its cronies at bay. It would take more than a round or two to kill a crocodile, of course, but a few shots were enough to make the creatures think twice about the source of their evening meal.

At dawn, the Sudanese farmer and the mercenary set out from Kadriak in Omar’s jeep, which was in much the same state of disrepair as the bus Idris had ridden from Bor. Without mechanics or spare parts, few vehicles in southern Sudan fared any better. As soon as he struck a deal with the Dinka, Omar had begun to put together a strategy. If anyone would know where to look for a slave girl, it would be Julian Barak, who owned a bar in Jonglei.

The issue, of course, was getting from Kadriak to Jonglei, which lay almost due west on the edge of the Sudd Swamp about 150 miles away. The dirt tracks stretching out in that direction from Pibor City petered out after about 40 miles. In the 322,000 square miles of southern Sudan, there were only four miles of paved road. There was no road of any kind across the vast southeastern plains, no towns, no villages, no people. Omar would just have to follow the setting sun overland until he came to the main north-south road between Jalle and Kangor that lay a few miles east of Jonglei. He was prepared; he’d packed plenty of supplies and gasoline for the trip.

The sun climbed into the sky, turned up the burner on the day’s heat, and the two men bumped along in silence. Idris’s companion never uttered a word or returned a glance. Omar had warned the villager not to come along. He had said he worked alone. And as far as he was concerned, he was alone. Idris’s physical presence didn’t change that. Besides, they couldn’t have talked even if Omar had been the kind of man who wanted to chat. Neither could speak the other’s language.

Omar focused the intensity of his attention on the task at hand—finding the girl. If he could locate the girl, he could make more money than most Sudanese made in two years.