Sudan: A Novel (8 page)

Olford peered at the raw burn marks on the girls’ shoulders.

“And everybody would have lived happily ever after--except her sister had the audacity to fight back when they tried to perform an excision.”

Olford looked confused.

“A clitorectomy!”

Olford almost choked on his tea. “I didn’t think they did
that
...” He couldn’t bring himself to use the word for the barbaric procedure that was supposed to keep proper Muslim women pure for their masters. Ron was less squeamish.

“The clitorectomy’s just the beginning," he said. “Sometimes, they also sew the girls’ bodies shut with thorns or catgut, leaving just a small opening until their wedding night—at which point they have to be torn open.”

“But these girls are so young,” Olford sputtered. “They’re probably, what, eight and ten, maybe. Why?”

“I couldn’t tell you why, but this guy was thorough. He apparently castrated the boys, too, the day after he bought them at the slave auction. He had a whole lot of slaves to manage, from the girl’s description, so I guess he had to run a tight ship. That’s probably why he responded the way he did when the little girl dared to challenge his authority. You have to put slaves in their place from the git-go, you see, or they might actually continue to behave like human beings, to having a mind and will of their own. I guess he decided it was worth losing one slave to keep the others in line.”

Olford wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to know what the slave owner had done to the child, but he had to ask. Ron answered in three words: the insect treatment. When Olford looked puzzled, he explained.

“They put insects in her ears—it’s usually termites, but any boring bug will do—and stopped her ears up with wax. Then they tied her to a tree and watched the insects eat her brains out. From what I understand, most people go completely insane from the bugs running around in their heads before they die.”

Ron had held it together pretty well through the explanation, but he began to lose it when the images from the little girl’s description started playing on the video screen in his mind. He could hear the tortured child’s screams, had heard her shrieking in his dreams for weeks. What kind of human being could do a thing like that to a kid?

“If I had that guy in this room right now,” he said through clenched teeth, his voice ragged and his hands balled into fists at his side, “I’d kill him with my bare hands and he wouldn’t die fast!”

The two men were silent. The ticking of the windup alarm clock on the bedside table was the only sound in the room.

“You can’t keep doing this if you let it get to you.” Olford spoke softly, compassionately, in his proper British accent. “If you do, you’re no good to them or anybody else.”

Olford was right, of course. Ron had to disengage somehow, had to reclaim that celebrated “journalistic detachment” he’d left in the ashes of the burned village he photographed two days after he got off the plane in Sudan.

Ron had to...just let it go. He rubbed his face with his dirty hands, took a couple of deep breaths, and exhaled slowly. Then he finished the story.

“The older girl managed to escape. She jumped out of a moving truck on a bridge into a river—can you imagine it—and somehow found her way back to where they’d left her sister tied to a tree. I guess it’s the good news that her sister was already dead when she got there.”

Ron motioned for Olford to keep moving through the stack.

“I heard of other tortures that I don’t have shots of. Tortures just as bad, if that’s possible. One of them’s called the camel treatment.”

“What’s that?” The Englishman dreaded the answer.

“Prolonged torture they save for a slave who disobeys his master.”

“‘Treatment’ seems to be a popular word with these people,” Olford muttered.

“Beatings, no food for days, tied out in the sun without water. Those are the routine punishments for misdemeanors—spill a drink or drop a piece of firewood or walk too slow. But for felonies, there’s the camel treatment. The guilty slave is strapped spread eagle to the underbelly of a dehydrated camel. The camel is then given water slowly, the belly expands”--Olford cringed; 
his face crinkled in a grimace--
“and the slave’s limbs are slowly torn off.”

The British correspondent shuddered.

“I can go on,” Ron’s voice was flat and tired. “Just about anything ghastly you want to see, I can find it for you somewhere in southern Sudan. All the ghastly I could document is sitting right there in that stack.”

Olford’s hand went up.

“I’ve heard enough. These photographs are absolutely gripping. I’m sure I can get some of them published, along with your notes. But the slave trade piece is what I’m here to talk about.”

He puffed on his pipe only to discover it had gone out. He set it on the nightstand beside the bed and looked at Ron.

“I
have
to have documentation—pictures!—of a slave auction, whatever that looks like here. My editor in London says when we provide those, he’ll pull out all the stops on the series. But the train doesn’t leave the station until we have pictures.”

Olford picked up the cup of tea that sat on the nightstand beside the pipe, took a sip and wrinkled his nose. It was cold.

“Without pictures, we sound like the
Globe
reporting sightings of Princess Di’s face in a lunar eclipse.”

“I’m close.” Excitement briefly revitalized Ron’s voice. “I’ve found a northerner, an Arab. Lost his job at the university because he was a moderate Muslim instead of a card-carrying, wild-eyed fanatic. He speaks at least a dozen different dialects, probably more. I think he’s just what I need. I left him to snoop around and I’ll meet him in three days.”

“You be careful!” There was more emotion in Olford’s voice than he intended, and he was briefly flustered. He was far too compassionate to conform to the British national character; it was always a struggle for him to maintain a stiff upper lip.

“You sound like my brother. What have you heard about him, by the way?”

“I picked up a UPI wire today about U.S. Congressional hearings on the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act.” Olford was grateful for the opportunity to pilot the conversation into less personal waters. “That’s your brother’s bill, is it not? He certainly seems to get quite a lot of press, doesn’t he.”

“Yeah, that’s why my psyche is all messed up. Mama always loved him best,” Ron joked. He stuck his lower lip out and tried to look pathetic as he sat down on the bed again. “Spent years on my back counting the ceiling tiles in a shrink’s office because of it.”

“As I believe you Americans would say, ‘Put a sock in it.’ ”

Ron smiled and kicked off the shoes he’d untied.

“I’m fried. Look, let me hear the latest on Dan after I’ve had some sleep and I’m not slack-jawed and drooling.”

Then he stood up and began to undress. When he slipped out of his pants, a lone Sudanese coin slid out of his pocket and bounced on the carpet at his feet. He picked it up and turned to Olford.

“You did bring along the big bucks so I can keep my Porsche polished and pay off my yacht, right?”

Olford patted the black briefcase tucked against his bed. “Be grateful for the strength of the British pound sterling.” There was more than a hint of pride in his voice. Though the Sudanese pound had been replaced by the dinar in 1992, the pound was still in circulation, and that’s what Olford had stuffed in the briefcase.

“The international exchange rate of something like 2,000 to one has transformed your pittance of an expense account into a king’s ransom.”

Olford looked at the American. A fine man, lots of spunk. It would be such a shame if...

“You do know, don’t you, what happened to the journalist from the Paris newspaper last year? The word at BBC has it that he was begging to die by the time they got through with him.”

“Thanks for the happy thoughts to send me off into La La Land.”

Dressed only in his boxers Ron collapsed on the bed and lay spread-eagled on the tacky bedspread.

The Brit was horrified. “Aren’t you going to take a shower first? You do know there’s a shower in there. Soap. Water. Personal hygiene products, things like that.”

“In the morning...”

“You smell like a goat!”

“Long as I sleep like one.” And then he was out.

Ron had gotten up just after dawn. He felt rested and refreshed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept as sound and deep, and he treasured the good night’s rest as a gift. A shower, shave and clean clothes had transformed his spirit as well as his appearance. Add to that a good breakfast with Olford in the hotel restaurant, which he wouldn’t have given five stars, even though it was certainly better than any cuisine he’d had in a long time. He’d have preferred American ham and eggs, but he’d ordered maschi, tomatoes stuffed with chopped beef, and his all-time favorite dessert, a Sudanese custard called crème carmela.

He and Olford had quietly talked business, and agreed that when Ron had the shots he wanted, he’d contact Olford at the BBC Cairo Bureau using the Crocodile Dundee password.

Ron had looked at the clock on the restaurant wall—7:30 a.m.—and decided to try to reach his brother. Olford had left to catch the 8:00 a.m. flight back to Cairo, and Ron needed to get to the dock before the 9:00 a.m. departure of the passenger barge for the return trip upriver. It would be 1:30 in the morning in Alexandria, Virginia, but knowing Dan, he would still be up.

Ron left the restaurant and found a comfortable seat in the hotel’s phone bank, half a dozen payphones on a wall with carved wooden privacy partitions between them. He punched in the number of his telephone calling card and then followed the instructions of the computer un-person.

Ron heard several clicks and then a female voice, as clear as if she sat right next to him, “Hello, Wolfsons.”

“How’s my favorite redheaded sister-in-law?”

“Ron?”

“What in the world are you doing up at this hour?”

“Ron! It’s so good to hear your voice! How are you?” Sherry didn’t wait for him to reply, just laughed tiredly. “And why am I still up? I have two words for you: History. Project.”

“What?”

“Don’t ask. You don’t want to know how I got roped into helping Jonathan build a replica of the Alamo out of sugar cubes.”

Jonathan. Ron smiled at the image of the bundle of energy everyone said was the “spittin’ image of his uncle Ron.”

“Sugar cubes?”

“Or why I’m still up working on it while your favorite nephew snoozes away upstairs.”

Ron’s smile widened. He could picture Sherry with her long curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, carefully arranging sugar cubes one on top of the other and—was she gluing them together? Would glue work on sugar?

As Sherry continued her bubbly chatter, Ron thought, as he had hundreds of times before: Bro, you
scored.
Sherry had been his brother’s high school sweetheart, and Ron had secretly had a crush on her when he was a lowly sophomore and she and Dan were seniors. He had been the best man at their wedding. Even though a lifetime of serial relationships testified to Ron’s determination to remain a free spirit, in his heart he knew that if he ever found a woman who loved him like Sherry loved Dan, he’d get married in a heartbeat.

“So how are the kids, I mean, the
other
kids?” he asked when she paused to take a breath.

“Running me ragged. David made varsity and just started two-adays, Jennifer has band practice after school, and she’s determined not to give up cross-country. And Jonathan—don’t get me started!”

“And my brother?”

Sherry paused, and her tone grew somber. “Truth?”

“No, lie to me. Come on, Sherry, of course I want the truth."

“I’m worried about him, Ron. He works way too hard, drives himself like...like...oh, I don’t know.” Sherry’s voice trailed off. “I don’t want to exaggerate, but if he doesn’t slow down—and it’s not just the long hours. It’s the tension. He’s wound up tighter than...well, I can see the stress in his face. That frown crease between his eyebrows, it’s so deep right now you could grow ivy in it.”

“Don’t tell me my big brother is worried he won’t get reelected! I figured all our Hoosier homies made him representative-for-life after last year’s landslide.”

“Well, it’s a different world out there now than it was a year ago. Lots of things have changed. He faces a hunker-down, put-on-your-flak-jackets battle this term. But that’s not it. That’s not what’s eating at him.”

“Problems on the Appropriations Committee?”

“No, that takes a lot of his time but...”

“It’s the Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill, isn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question. And in this hotel lobby in Khartoum, Ron said it quietly.

“Ron, that’s all he thinks about.” There was a mixture of irritation, confusion and concern in her voice. “I’ve never seen him with this kind of--”

“Fire in his belly?”

“Yes, fire in his belly!”

Ron knew exactly what Dan felt. He felt the same kind of burning urgency to make the world understand what was happening in Sudan. But even if he hadn’t, there was a clear picture in his head of that kind of passion.