Sudan: A Novel (32 page)

Akin was sick. A pain deep in her belly had awakened her, and it still gnawed at her. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever felt. She knew she’d incur Pasha’s wrath if she didn’t grind the grain in her bowl, but the pain took all her strength away.

She hadn’t felt this bad since a millipede sting when she was five years old kept her on her sleeping mat for days. A sense of terrible loneliness suddenly washed over her. She felt so hopeless and abandoned, she feared she might burst into tears.

Pasha came out of the tent with a larger pestle for Omina. As she approached the girls, she stopped a couple of paces away from Akin and just stood there without saying a word.

Akin finally looked up to see what she wanted.

Pasha spoke, but Akin didn’t understand. She repeated the phrase again and pointed at Akin’s legs. The little girl didn’t take her eyes off Pasha’s face, just lowered her hand below the wrap-around skirt that reached halfway down her thigh. She felt something warm and sticky. When she looked at her hand, her eyes widened. Her fingers were red, covered with blood, and she saw a trickle of blood working its way down from between her legs on a slow journey toward her knee.

She stepped back in horror and looked up, terrified into Pasha’s face. She had seen Mbarka and Shontal, going through menses, but the sight of her own blood drove all those thoughts from her mind. Pasha turned abruptly, walked back into the supply tent and emerged a few moments later with a brown rag.

In the closest thing to kindness she’d ever shown to any of the girls, she walked to the still speechless Akin and handed her the rag. Akin began to daub frantically at the small streaks of blood. In a moment, she felt Mbarka’s arm around her shoulder

“Don’t be afraid. We all go through it.”

For the next few minutes, Mbarka helped the shaken little girl clean herself, and showed her how to attach the rag to her wrap-around, so it could catch the flow of blood. When Mbarka had finished her explanation, a thought popped into Akin’s mind. She couldn’t remember the last time Mbarka had been off limits to the men, which she was during her monthly flow.

“Does it happen always? I haven’t seen you with blood like this in a long time.”

Mbarka looked into the distance and said quietly. “I am pregnant.” She turned her gaze back to Akin. “When a woman is pregnant, with child, she stops her monthly flow of blood until after the baby is born.”

Pasha couldn’t wait to tell her master the little slave girl had become a woman. She had seen how he lusted after her.

When he heard the news, a wide smile spread across Sulleyman’s face, and he instructed his stewardess to have the girl prepared for her master’s bed after the celebration meal on their last night in camp.

“In the morning after I have taken her, I want you to circumcise her before we break camp,” he said. “She will be healed enough by the time we arrive home that I can use her until my youngest son returns from Senegal.”

He had planned to give Mbarka to his son, but she had turned up pregnant. After her baby was born and he disposed of it, she’d be sent to a brothel. Akin would be a good substitute.

“But my son cannot have her until after she has developed.” He was not talking to Pasha, he was thinking aloud. “As long as she looks like a child, she is mine.”

Omar’s mercenary friend, Julian, had squinted over the top of a glass of aragi in his smoke-filled bar in Jonglei and roared with laughter when Omar described his mission. Find one slave girl? Impossible.

But if he was determined to try, Omar should start his search in Kosti. Slaves passed through the river city 230 miles south of Khartoum like dark ghosts. Julian gave Omar the names of people to contact, and two days later, Idris and the mercenary were on a barge floating slowly north on the White Nile River through the largest swamp in the world, 12,000 square miles of black water. The Sudd was roughly the size of Belgium.

Idris sat on the side of the barge, watched the pattern of ripples spread back from the bow, and prayed. Prayer was all that brought him peace. The silent Omar leaned against a mango crate nearby. He watched the tall grass glide by and saw flocks of birds rise and settle in the swamp beyond the riverbank in a choreographed ballet of color. But he was not at peace. He never was. He mulled over the names Julian had given him, made a mental list of the people he would approach first and which ones he would pay and how much. And which ones he would threaten and with what.

When he turned from the sun’s glare on the water, Omar’s gaze fell on Idris. Even in repose, the African’s face had a determined set to the jaw. Omar had learned in the past weeks that there was absolutely no quit in the man.

“You would have been far better off to stay in your country village,” he said. Idris looked up. Omar knew he couldn’t understand. “I doubt that you will ever see your daughter again, and even if Allah smiles on us and we find her,” he paused, and there was something akin to pity on his face, “I don’t know that you will be able to stand what you see.”

L
eo Danheir had developed many skills over the years and plied many trades. All his endeavors had one thing in common: The only rule was there were no rules. Leo did whatever Leo wanted to do. His behavior was bound by no moral code of any kind; self-gratification was his only aim in life.

He and his black sidekick, Joak, had traveled from Bentiu to Kosti to lose themselves in the mosaic of the city, to blend into the layer of society there that had no soul. The pair had money. They had conned or stolen enough in the past few weeks to set themselves up for a while, so they could afford to be a little selective about their next business enterprise.

Such was the joy of life in a country torn apart by civil war. With government-sanctioned--no
encouraged--
murder, rape and pillaging unleashed on half the population, who would notice, or care, about the petty larceny of a sewer rat like Leo? Anarchy was, indeed, a fertile ground for the common criminal.

Leo and Joak were an effective team. Leo’s skin and language granted them access and unhindered travel through the Muslim portion of the country. And Joak, though he dressed garishly in brightly colored floral shirts and mismatched Western-cut pants, was a clever chameleon. He could use his skin color to find out what he wanted to know from the SPLA or to gain the trust of an unsuspecting tribal, like that stupid villager in Bentiu looking for someone to find his kidnapped daughter. Seldom in his checkered career had Leo met an easier mark. Fleecing that naive farmer had been a joy and a privilege.

In the past few years, the pair had gravitated more and more toward slave trading. You could make good money with little effort working as middlemen. If you were clever, you could find slaves to purchase at a bargain price from the Murahaleen, the guerillas, soldiers, anybody who had flesh to market, and then sell the captives to a larger, established slave trader who had customers in northern Sudan and other neighboring countries.

The standard operating procedure for Leo and Joak was to set up shop in a seedy bar or gambling house. There, they would simply wait, watch and listen. Criminals for hire could always find sources of income if they were willing to be patient and see what flotsam and jetsam the river of life washed their way.

The bar they selected in Kosti had been a thriving, fashionable business establishment, with a polished wood floor and shutters on the windows, in the early 1950s when Sudan was under British-Egyptian sovereignty. It had once had a name, too, but nobody remembered what it was anymore. Nothing was left of the sign that proclaimed its identity but two rusty hooks stuck in the ceiling of the roof that stretched out over the big double doors.

To its patrons, it was merely “the bar.” Like most everything else in the country, it had rotted like the carcass of a dead tree and was infested with the kind of slithering creatures that only come out at night. Roaches as big as a man’s thumb lived on the accumulated grime, spilled food and liquor on the uneven wooden floor. Pieces of wall had crumbled away, exposing holes and tunnels where rats came and went like paying customers. In the back of the dilapidated building was a room divided into three small sections by hastily erected cypress poles and scrap pieces of lumber. In those sweltering cubicles, smaller than most American closets, desperate Sudanese and Ethiopian women plied their trade and spread disease throughout the quarter.

Leo and Joak ordered a bottle of rice wine and found a table. The fermented liquid smelled so strong and tasted so bitter most Westerners couldn’t swallow it. Leo and Joak drank it like water. They made their best plans a little drunk.

As the brew began to warm their insides like the relentless heat warmed their outsides, Joak turned to Leo. “Are you sure it is such a good idea to do business with Faoud?” He didn’t often question Leo’s leadership, but he was far more frightened of the slave trader than he was of Leo.

“Oh, it is never safe to crawl into bed with a snake. But Faoud’s got the connections and the reputation to sell anything he can lay his hands on. If we hook up with him, we could buy cheap from freelancing soldiers who don’t know the value of their captives and sell them to Faoud at a good price.”

Joak nodded agreement, though he was far from convinced it was a good strategy. But Leo was a dangerous man to cross too.

“Maybe we can get on his good side by showing up for our meeting this afternoon with a few ‘presents’ to sell to him cheap,” Leo thought out loud.

“In Bagwe, I heard that the Murahaleens made a good haul in the south,” Joak said. “They could go up for sale any day now.”

“Go into the market and nose around. See if there’s any word yet on the Murahaleen raids. Maybe we could get to them early and buy something to take as a present to Faoud. I do not want to meet that man empty-handed.”

Ron, Masapha and Koto browsed the fruit stands in the Kosti marketplace and loaded up their packs with raisin cakes, bread and fresh fruit. They were scheduled to hook up with Dr. Greinschaft’s contact from the Swiss feeding center in Chumwe, several hours’ drive from Kosti, midmorning at the dock next to the market.

As Koto wandered around nearby, drinking in the sights of the first city he had ever seen, Ron and Masapha sat down to rest in the shade provided by a pile of boxes leaning against the last fruit stand on the street. Only a few passersby took notice of the light-skinned foreigner; Ron certainly took no notice of a particular African, dressed in a brightly flowered shirt and smelling of rice wine, who had edged up to the other side of the boxes of fruit in an effort to eavesdrop on their conversation.

Joak did not often see white men who were not Arabs, and the big blond man obviously was not. That made him out of place here, and the out of the ordinary was always worth investigating. Joak took a position behind the stretched muslin awning the vendor had erected over the ripest fruit. Cocking his head, he concentrated hard to block out the ambient noise around him.

“You have not written
any
of the stories yet?” Masapha asked incredulously. “Not a word? All that time at the doctor’s compound, and you did not write?”

“How was I supposed to do that—in longhand on the doc’s unlined typing paper? I’ve never met a reporter anywhere who could write a story in longhand. Olford’s got a laptop I can use.”

Ron was so dedicatedly nontechie that it had grieved him mightily to purchase a laptop several years ago, which was loaded with a word-processing program and absolutely nothing else. He had left it with his darkroom equipment at the Canadian refugee center, hundreds of miles away.

“I can type just about as fast as I can think, which says something about the speed of one or the other of those processes. If I tried to write with a pen and a piece of paper, the words would back up in my brain like a clogged sewer.” Ron reached down and wiped pineapple juice off his hands onto his pants. “Can’t be done, my friend. Can’t be done.”

Joak’s command of the English language was not perfect, but he understood enough to know that the white man on the other side of the fruit stand must be a journalist working on a story. He leaned closer, as if examining the fruit, and strained to hear more.