Sudan: A Novel (3 page)

Jack had told Ron about the child when the 36-year-old photographer showed up that morning to process film in the makeshift darkroom Jack had allowed him to hide in a closet behind the kitchen at CARA, the Canadian Aid and Relief Association’s refugee center near Nimule in southern Sudan.

“The other little girl was already dead, had been for some time apparently, but she wouldn’t let them touch her. The villagers didn’t know what else to do with her so they brought her here.”

Ron removed the 28-mm wide-angle lens from his camera and replaced it with an 80-mm portrait lens. He framed the child’s expressionless face in a couple of shots, then focused on the still-raw burns on both the little girls’ left shoulders. Click-click.

“Those brands are fresh,” he said as he stood up and dusted the dirt off his pants. “Slavetraders don’t waste time branding captives, so these two must already have been sold. Doesn’t look like it’s been more than a few days since their new owner put his mark on them to identify his property.”

Ron spit the word “property” out of his mouth as if the taste of it on his tongue made him nauseous. “I wonder how they got away.”

“Don’t know, but perhaps I can find out. Let me see if I can locate somebody who speaks her dialect.”

Jack cocked his head to one side and studied the child. “She has a certain look, don’t you think? High cheekbones, a thin nose. I’ve seen that look before.”

Ron watched Jack disappear into the teeming city of tents, lean-tos and makeshift huts that housed more than 25,000 people who had nowhere else to go, the hemorrhage of humanity from a society that was rapidly bleeding out. The camp was home to just about every one of the country’s 597 tribes—men, women and children speaking 400 languages who had fled the plains, valleys and mountains of southern Sudan to escape the indiscriminate, brutal slaughter of genocide.

Ron turned back to the child and decided that Jack was right. She did, indeed, have a certain look, and he’d seen that look before, too. It was the look of vacant, hollow-eyed shock occasioned by horror way beyond a child’s capacity to process. He’d seen it on children’s faces in Rwanda, in Kosovo and in Uganda.

“You know what killed her.” It was a statement, not a question. Ron’s assistant, Masapha, had stepped up un-noticed beside him, and the smaller man’s words came out in a voice gruff with restrained emotion.

Ron turned to face the Arab; their eyes met and locked. “Yeah,” Ron struggled to keep his own voice under control, “I know what killed her, all right. The insect treatment.”

Idris Apot was tired, bone-weary tired. The day had begun at first light in his small field on the village communal land, where he’d hacked all morning at the ground with a grubbing hoe to break the crust on soil baked rock hard by the unrelenting, dry season sun. It had ended as evening crept into the sky from behind the forest, after he’d scattered handfuls of tiny anyanjang seeds onto the ground for hours and then gently covered them with a thin layer of dirt. When he harvested the sorghum he was planting, his wife, Aleuth, would grind the kernels into flour to make the staples of his family’s diet, including injera, the yellow flatbread Idris liked to eat hot and dipped in melting moo-yahoo butter made from shea nuts.

The 33-year-old Dinka farmer grimaced when he arched his back and stretched his cramped muscles. He was stiff from bending his lanky, six-foot, four-inch frame almost double all afternoon as he checked to make sure the anyanjang seeds lay no deeper in the freshly raked soil than the distance from the tip of his finger to his first knuckle. He looked toward the western horizon, squinted and shaded his eyes, to gauge how much daylight he had left. When he turned from the glaring sun, he spotted wispy gray-and-white streaks slowly rising from the first evening fires in Mondala. The broad smile that lit his face revealed the gap where four of his lower front teeth had been pulled at age 12 as the first part of his rite of passage into manhood. He took in a great gulp of air that held the faint scent of rain and let it out slowly. It was good to be home, he thought.

His village of Moinjaang, “the people of the people” as the Dinka called themselves, had just gotten settled in after their annual migration across the western floodplains to graze their herds of zebu on the banks of the great river. At the beginning of the dry season in mid-December, everyone in Mondala, except the old, the sick and nursing mothers, had gathered up the village cattle and herded them to temporary camps along the Bahr el-Jebel, the White Nile, where the annual floods laid down a rich layer of silt that produced lush, plentiful grass. They had remained there for three months, then returned home, a little earlier than usual this year, before the rains came and the river overflowed its banks, making the shoreline camps uninhabitable and turning the verdant grasslands into swamps.

It would never have occurred to Idris to question whether he liked his seminomadic life. He had never known any other. He had only twice ventured more than 100 miles from his home, had only been in a city once. But Idris knew that a profound peace always settled over him when he left the vast, featureless, grassy plains behind and returned to Mondala, to the hills and the forest. And he knew that the fulfillment he felt when he harvested the millet he’d planted with his own hands was rivaled only by the satisfaction of bringing home an antelope, gazelle or eland he’d tracked down and killed with a spear or his bow and arrow. Both experiences made him feel strong and capable and in charge of his life.

Some of the other farmers gathered up their tools, and two of the older men headed up the hard clay path toward the village. They shouldered their hoes, spades and rakes as they walked along together, chatting. Like Idris, they wore nothing but loincloths and beaded necklaces. They were tall men, too—several were taller than Idris—with very dark skin, almond-shaped eyes and narrow, square shoulders. Their height identified them as Dinka, the tribe that had given American basketball fans one of the two tallest players in NBA history—Manute Bol, the seven-foot, seven-inch Washington Bullets’ center known as the Dinka Dunker. The intricate pattern of scars on their foreheads identified them as Dinka, too.

Idris stood for a moment, undecided. He wanted to plant one more row. He surveyed the partially seeded field and estimated he would have to work three more full days to get the crop in the ground. Given the early planting, he hoped the harvest would yield a bumper crop, like the one he’d produced 11 years ago, the year his first child, Akin, had been born. He hadn’t said anything to his wife at the time, but he’d yearned for a boy. As a Christian, Idris no longer believed the ancient traditions that required a man to produce a son or face oblivion after death. He didn’t want a son to carry on the family name, to maintain the lineage link from the past, through the present to future generations. He just wanted a boy who would one day help him farm the land, care for the cattle and hunt for game, a boy he could teach to hold a bow steady, shoot an arrow straight and throw a spear accurately. He’d struggled mightily to hide his disappointment when he learned his firstborn was a girl.

Idris almost laughed out loud at the memory. It was hard to imagine that he’d ever been dissatisfied with Akin! She’d been the absolute delight of his life since the moment the midwife placed the squirming infant into his arms. The child had instantly stopped wiggling and looked at him solemnly, her round eyes wide and unblinking. And then she had smiled at him—a wide, happy smile that planted twin dimples in her chubby cheeks and bathed her tiny face in joy. Oh, everyone said he’d imagined it, that newborn babies didn’t smile. It must have been some trick of the flickering campfire light, they said—or gas!—and they chuckled good-naturedly at the fancy of a proud, new father. But Idris knew different.

As she grew older, that same dimpled smile lit Akin’s face whenever she saw him. She’d toddle toward him on wobbly legs, her chubby arms outstretched, her face beaming, and he’d scoop her up and cuddle her close, certain that she was the most beautiful little girl and he was the most fortunate father in the world.

The image of Akin’s smiling face, and the eager faces of his other two children, nine-year-old Abuong and five-year-old Shema, waiting at home to greet him sealed his decision. He’d stop now; the rest of the work would just have to wait until tomorrow. He picked up his hoe and rake and headed up the clay path toward home.

A village of about 100 tukuls, Mondala was built on a knoll overlooking the river that flowed down out of the range of hills to the north and wrapped around the east side of the village. Beyond Mondala, the river continued southeast, one of hundreds of tributaries feeding the White Nile.

On the other side of the river, the landscape changed, gradually becoming flatter, with small stands of trees scattered here and there in a sea of grass that in some places grew waist high. It was there that the villagers hunted bigger game like reedbuck, gazelle and kudu.

To the west and south of the village lay the woodland that supplied the tribals mangos, papayas, dates, shea nuts, guavas and kindling the women carried back to their tukuls in baskets balanced on their heads. The forest of stately mahogany and ebony trees, palms and date palms, was home to flocks of colorful tropical birds, chittering monkeys and hooting Hamadryad baboons. The villagers hunted dik dik and bushbuck there, tracking them through the woods as soundlessly as the leopards that also stalked the small antelope.

North of the village lay the sorghum fields and the grassland where the villagers’ cattle, sheep and goats grazed. Beyond the fields, tall, rocky hills rose high above the village, with a trail winding up the side of the nearest one. Steep, narrow and cluttered with rocks, it was the only path north from Mondala.

His stomach began to rumble with hunger, and Idris quickened his pace along the path. Aleuth would be preparing boiled potatoes and fava beans by now, and perhaps fresh injera, too. His mouth watered. As he started up the last rise in the path that led to Mondala, he could just make out the form of a young girl running toward him. The light was failing, but Idris didn’t need the sun to see the smile on the child’s face. He could see her dimples with his heart.

     W
hen he stepped out of the blistering sun, the rush of cool air inside the Bata Hotel hit Ron Wolfson like a blast off a glacier. With his last reserves of energy, he gripped his weathered travel bag, reshouldered his equipment bag and battered camera case and marched resolutely into the crowded lobby.

If the clash of incompatible cultures, the cacophony of 400 languages, the utter chaos in the city’s streets and the abject poverty didn’t do it, the searing heat in Khartoum usually reduced Westerners to a state of semicatatonic submission in less than a week. After three months in southern Sudan, Ron had grown as accustomed to the brutally hot weather as he ever was likely to be, though he shuddered to think that the scorching sun had not yet taken its best shot. Temperatures in Khartoum at the end of the dry season in May and June would reach a balmy 110 to 120 degrees, made even more enjoyable by the appearance of ferocious haboob sandstorms.