Sudan: A Novel (5 page)

“I’ve looked forward to this ever since the news desk told me ‘Mr. C. Dundee’ had called.” Olford took huge strides on his long, spindly legs as the two set off down the hallway.

Though he wasn’t much older than Ron, Olford had gone mostly bald in his twenties. Now, he no longer
combed
his hair, he
placed
it, though his strategically positioned comb-over actually highlighted his lack of hair more than it concealed his shiny, pink scalp.

“After we talk and I see your photos, you can get cleaned up in my room. If you’re spending the night in Khartoum, it would probably be best for you to stay with me. I didn’t get you a room of your own—I wasn’t quite sure you’d show, what with the state of transportation, or lack thereof.”

Olford paused, leaned a little closer and lowered his voice, “Actually, I didn’t want to bandy your name about, don’t you know. If the lads in the government offices down the road knew who your brother was, I suspect they might just string you up from the nearest borassus tree. You’d best hang out with me, no pun intended.”

Ron nodded gratefully and slogged on, trying hard to keep up with the Brit, who walked like a stork in the water. When the two got to the end of the hallway, Olford opened the door that lead into the stairwell.

“It’s even worse than I thought it would be,” Ron began. “And I thought it would be bad. The Nubas, the Neurs and the Dinkas are being decimated...”

Olford put his finger to his lips.

“Hold off until we get into the room,” he said. “I suspect you wouldn’t be any more popular here than your brother if the wrong people found out what you’re doing in Sudan."

They climbed the four flights of stairs in silence. Olford fished the room key out of his deep pants pocket and unlocked the door.

“My home is your home,” Olford said, with a bow and a sweeping, come-in gesture.

Ron set his travel bag and equipment bag on the stained duvet covering the bed near the window and glanced around the room. Apparently, the hotel owners had sunk the lion’s share of their investment into the lobby, the fancy restaurant and the penthouse suites, and consigned ordinary guestrooms to redheaded stepchild status. The walls were unfinished, the paint on the windowsill was cracked and peeling, the spreads on the two beds didn’t match, and there were cigarette burns on the nightstand and coffee table.

But on a small table on the far wall sat a perfectly appointed china tea set! Cups, saucers, sugar bowl, milk pitcher, silver spoons and a pot with a cord and a plug that obviously heated water.

“That’s
hot
tea, I take it, “Ron said. He set his camera case on the floor by the bed and shook his head in disbelief. “How’d you manage to get a bunch of Arabs to provide all
that
?”

Olford looked stricken.

“I certainly wouldn’t expect Arabs to make proper tea,” he replied, indignantly. “I brought ‘all that’ with me. The water’s hot. Would you care for some?”

Ron rolled his eyes. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

“The water’s been properly boiled,” the Englishman hastened to point out. “It’s safe to drink. I got a nasty case of dysentery once in Ethiopia.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Horrible place to be sick, absolutely dreadful. Ever since that distasteful experience, I’ve been extremely careful. I drink bottled water, or boil it, or put those little tablets in it that make it taste like rusty pipes.”

“I figured bottled water was likely to be a little hard to come by where I was going so I bit the bullet as soon as I got here.” Ron unzipped the travel bag he had set on the bed. “It’s a trick an old hippie in Uganda taught me. You add a little tap water to every bottle of bottled water you drink, like one part tap, 10 parts bottled. And you gradually increase the percentage of tap water. I got a little sick a couple of times—actually, I got very sick once—but eventually I could drink whatever the locals drank.”

“If I tried something like that, I’m sure I should be dead within the week.” Olford shuddered.

Ron reached into his travel bag and took out something wrapped in muslin. He stood for a moment and just looked at the package. “You won’t believe what’s going on here.”

“We never do, do we?” The Brit shook his head. “Until it’s too late.”

Ron turned and looked at Olford with the hint of a quizzical expression on his face. Even now, it was still hard to believe. “Do you realize there’s been more genocide in Sudan than in all of Rwanda, Bosnia, Liberia and Kosovo combined? Two million people are dead. Six hundred thousand have fled the country. Another four hundred thousand are in refugee camps here.”

“I didn’t know it was
that
bad,” Olford sat down on the bed across from Ron with a thump, as if his legs might have collapsed out from under him.

Ron placed the muslin-covered object on the bed beside the bag and carefully unwrapped it. Clearly, what lay inside was precious. Beneath the final layer of cloth lay a three-inch-thick stack of photographs.

Olford still was amazed that Ron used “film” and produced “photographs,” and carried nothing in his camera bag but half a dozen old metal lenses and an equally old, no-bells-and-whistles Nikon that didn’t even have auto-focus. Every other photojournalist he knew had long since gone digital.

Of course, Olford had asked why. Everybody always asked why, eventually. One late night when the two worked in South Africa—and Ron had been well on his way to becoming a legend in Olford’s mind even then—the Englishman had peered at the American over the foam on his beer and suggested that perhaps Ron might want to consider coming in out of the hot sun someday long enough to participate in the technological revolution.

“I don’t do technology,” Ron had replied simply.

Olford had pressed the point, made all the arguments for advanced equipment and instantaneous transfer of images.

Ron had only smiled. “Gadgets” were temperamental—get a little sand in them, and they were useless, he said. He’d stick with what he knew. Just a few moving parts. Nothing to break down. He didn’t need a camera that was smarter than he was.

It was probably equal parts superstition and stubbornness, Olford thought. Professional baseball players had their special bats, pro golfers their custom-made putters—and Ron Wolfson still used the first camera he ever bought.

But there was certainly no arguing with the quality of his work. Ron was an absolute magician with a camera. His photos were stunning. Some of them packed such emotional wallop they almost took Olford’s breath away. Though many of Ron’s photos were black-and-white, the quality of light he captured, the contrasts, the shadows--it looked like each picture had been individually hand-painted. Ron was far and away the best photographer Olford had ever met.

“Where do you want to start?” Ron asked as he straightened up and held out the stack of pictures. “It’s a photo tour through hell.”

“I want the full monty. Everything. I’ll filter out later what to send on to the newsroom. The problem we have is that every time we get a solid, verified report of atrocities, a government official—sometimes, it’s even a U.N. correspondent—releases a report that says just the opposite.”

Ron’s gaze was unyielding. “The dead are piling up in southern Sudan like Budweiser bottles at a frat party.”

The analogy blew right by the Englishman. Guinness had been the beer of choice in the Wheat Sheaf Tavern in the little village south of Coventry in Buckinghamshire where he grew up.

He took the stack of photos, set them beside him on the bed and began to untie his shoelaces.

“It’s absolutely unconscionable how Khartoum has managed to bully the rest of the continent—the rest of the world, actually,” he said contemptuously, his accent as crisp as fresh lettuce. Ron smiled just a little. Even as tired as he was, he reveled in the flow and cadence of Olford’s speech. An upper-class British accent conferred instant brilliance. Olford could read aloud the ingredients label on a can of Spam and he’d still sound like a nuclear physicist.

“In every way that matters, the Africa Union and the United Nations are impotent.” His shoes untied, he took them off, lined them up neatly side by side on the floor and then scooted them carefully under the bed. “Not to mention that the silence coming out of your country is positively deafening.”

“Tell me about it,” Ron muttered. “Everybody stands by and watches what’s going on here without saying a word. Just silence--cold, cruel silence.”

“Not everybody. There’s certainly no silence coming from your brother, none a’tall. He’s shaking things up a bit. I’ve a little something off the wire about him that I thought you might be interested in reading.”

Even the dirt and grime couldn’t hide the genuine smile that lit Ron’s face.

Olford reached over and opened the nightstand drawer to retrieve his pipe and tobacco. “You smoke?”

Ron shook his head.

“I know, I know, your ‘Surgeon General’s Report’ and all that.” He wrinkled his nose and muttered softly under his breath, “Rubbish!” He looked up and told Ron with a degree of belligerence, “I am absolutely certain that my food would not properly digest without a smoke after a meal!”

The Brit loaded the small basin, lit the stringy tobacco, took a couple of puffs on the curved mouthpiece and sighed a sweet-smelling poof of white into the air. He propped himself against the headboard with a couple of lumpy pillows, stretched his long legs out on the garish orange-flower bedspread and peered at Ron over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Fire away. I’m listening.”

“Just look at those,” Ron nodded at the pictures. “They tell the story better than I can.”

Olford thumbed through the photos; Ron moved to the window and stared out.

Olford’s room was on the front of the hotel and a wide view of Khartoum spread out below the fourth-floor window. It was not a pretty sight; the capital of Sudan was not a pretty city. It was hot, dry, dirty, poor, crowded and chaotic. And brown. The dominant color outside the windows of the bus that brought Ron downtown from the dock had been brown. Brown dirt streets, brown thatched roofs, brown bamboo fences separating one brown mud house from the next. No grass, no trees, no shrubs, no flowers, no hills or streams. Khartoum was flat, profoundly drab and almost colorless. Ron looked up and shaded his eyes against the glare—except for the blue, he thought, the relentlessly blue sky that sat like an upturned bowl on top of the city.

The crowds of people and vehicles crammed into the street below also granted a reprieve from the brown. Arab men and women in robes and scarves of white mingled with tribals dressed in bright primary colors—red, orange, purple, green and royal blue. Their wild floral and print dresses stood out against the black skin of women who balanced on their heads everything from water pitchers and trays of fish to baskets of bread and fruit.

It occurred to Ron that the streets of the capital were a word picture of the whole country—diverse, complicated, confused and in disarray. Without traffic lights, drivers of every conceivable kind of conveyance fought their ways through the noisy, clogged streets and stopped wherever and whenever it suited them. Battered blue buses, yellow taxis with loudspeakers mounted on the top blasting words in Arabic that Ron couldn’t understand, camouflaged jeeps carrying green-uniformed soldiers, rumbling motorcycles, black stretch-limousines with tinted windows, horse-drawn carts, buzzing mopeds and bicycles all clawed their way forward in the traffic war below.

Ron could see a large white sandstone mosque on a busy corner three blocks away, with the spike of a minaret reaching into the cloudless sky. The muezzin proclaimed
azan,
summoning the faithful to Dhuhr, the midday prayer. The crowd of men streaming into the building had traffic snarled for blocks in both directions.

“What is
this?”

Ron glanced over his shoulder at the photo Olford held up.

“A young man I ran into in the Mangalatore Refugee Camp near Kajo Keji, about ten miles north of the Ugandan border.” He pictured the camp—14,000 people living in mud and straw huts surrounded by plots of limp, leaning corn.

“When the militia raided his village, they tortured him. To finish the job, they tied him down and burned a log on his stomach. Amazingly, he lived through it. His father was the ranking Episcopalian bishop in the region. The militia chopped the man’s head off in front of his family.”

Ron turned toward Olford and leaned back against the window sill.

“Being an Episcopalian bishop in southern Sudan is like walking around with a Shoot me! sign taped to your forehead. There are a good portion of animists and traditionalists mixed in, but most of the people I’ve run into in the south are Christians of some flavor.”

“I got a quote from Lieutenant Gen. Omar Bashir’s office I plan to use in a piece I’m working on,” Olford said.

Bashir was the Sudanese army general who had staged a military coup in 1989 that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Sadeq al-Mahdi. Al-Bashir had immediately banned all political parties, dissolved Parliament and allied himself with radical clerics in the National Islamic Front. Two years later, al-Bashir implemented strict Sharia law throughout Sudan—for Christians and animists who predominated in the south as well as for Muslims in the north. The law was enforced by Muslim judges and a newly created Public Order Police.

In 1993, al-Bashir was appointed president, and within a decade, he was an annual contender on the Ten Worst Living Dictators List compiled by Freedom House, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.

“Bashir says he intends to accomplish something neither we British nor the Egyptians were able to do, unite northern and southern Sudan. And do you know how he intends to do that?” Olford answered his own question before Ron had a chance. “By Islamizing the whole country.”

Olford wasn’t saying anything Ron didn’t already know, but he enjoyed the accent so he let the Brit talk.

“I’m serious—the bloke’s dead set on it. In his radio address last week, he said that within a couple of years, he intends to see every man, woman and child in the whole country facing Mecca five times a day to pray—whether they like it or not!”