Sudan: A Novel (9 page)

“It’s a shame you didn’t get a chance to know Dad very well, Sherry.”

“You felt like you knew him, though. Everybody in southern Indiana did. We saw that face on television—the Reverend Paul Wolfson—in a crusade against drunk driving or child abuse or pornography or...”

“Riverboat gambling or toxic waste or...”

“You know, I never told Dan this, but the first time he asked me for a date—to the Valentine’s Day dance when we were freshmen—I almost said no because I was so intimidated that his father was famous. I wish now I could have spent time with your father, but he was never around.”

You got that right, Ron thought; he was never around. “If you’d spent more than five minutes in his presence you’d have seen the fire-in-the-belly syndrome coming a long way out, Sherry. Dan’s so much like Dad it’s spooky.”

“Funny you should say that because he always says the same thing about you.”

“Does he
really?”
That genuinely surprised Ron. Dan was the one who looked most like their father—tall, broad shoulders, dark hair and eyes. Dan was the one who stepped into their father’s shoes as the crusading social reformer. Dan was the gifted speaker, the charismatic leader. Ron was, well, none of the above. OK, maybe the social reformer part.

“You know, I think deep down in his heart, Dan wants to be you when he grows up.” Then she shifted gears. “Look, this call’s expensive, and you want to talk to Dan. He’s downstairs doing research on a bill, guess which one, and you’ve given me a dandy excuse to disturb him.”

“Tell the kids I miss them!”

“I will. Jonathan never shuts up about you. He thinks you’re braver than Indiana Jones.”

“Tell him I’m better looking, too,” Ron said, but Sherry had already put the receiver down on the table beside the sugar-cube Alamo.

Sherry was wrong. Dan wasn’t working on the Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill. He had taken a break to recharge his batteries. He sat on the couch in his basement study, his head thrown back, his brown eyes focused on nothing, tenderly cradling his Martin D28 guitar as he finger-picked and sung along. While his deep, booming bass was only a little better than average, his skill on the guitar was nothing short of astonishing. A man with hands as large as his should barely have been able to play at all, but Dan with a guitar was like Ron with a camera—a magician. The big man’s musical wizardry had only one limitation...

I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire. I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher
.

...his musical taste. Dan Wolfson loved country music. Johnny Cash. The Charlie Daniels Band. Allison Krauss. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. And though he had suffered the raging ridicule of every black basketball player on his team at Purdue—which was just about the whole team—his heart remained true to what Ron had not so affectionately dubbed his “twang-twang” music.

And it burned, burned, burned, the ring of fire, the ring of...

The phone. Who on earth would call at this time of night? Then he heard Sherry’s shout from the top of the stairs, and he couldn’t get to the extension fast enough.

“It’s about time you called!” Dan said—more like bellowed. Ron could have sworn it was the voice of their father. Both men could address an auditorium full of people without using a mike, and the old ladies in the back row could hear them without turning up their hearing aids. “Where are you?”

“I’m sitting right here in beautiful downtown Khartoum, home of the hottest kebabs and the ugliest women you’ve ever seen.”

“Not exactly a tour bus destination, huh.”

“It’s best described as the sphincter of the rectum of the universe.” Then the playfulness drained out of Ron’s voice. “Dan, what’s going on in Sudan is worse than anything you’ve heard.”

“Are
you
OK?” There was apprehension in Dan’s voice.

“As what’s-her-name the housekeeper used to say..."

Then the two responded in unison in a singsong duet: “I haven’t had so much fun since the last time I cleaned the oven.”

“Really, I’m fine. Tired, dirty—well, actually, I happen to be rested and clean right now, but it’s the first time in weeks, and it won’t last. I’m good to go—just massively frustrated. I still haven’t found what I came here for.”

“And that is?” Dan knew the answer to the question before he asked it. Still, there was always a chance his younger brother had set his sights on a different,
safer
goal. Not a very big chance, but still...

“A slave auction.”

Even though Ron spoke barely above a whisper, Dan could hear the steely determination in his voice and recognized it instantly. It sounded just like their father.

“I won’t leave here until I get pictures of one. I think I’ve finally found a guy who can help me. He lost his job as a professor at the university because he committed the heinous crime of being a normal, reasonable, moderate Muslim.”

“And the ruling lunatic Muslim fringe only wants wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth crazies to incite the masses to jihad.”

“You’ve done your homework.” Ron wasn’t surprised by his brother’s quick grasp of the situation, but he was glad to hear it all the same. Sometimes, when he was in the middle of a nightmare like Sudan, he’d get to thinking that there wasn’t a soul outside that world who grasped, or cared, what was going on. It was reassuring to know that his brother did.

Dan stretched his long legs out in front of him and leaned back. “Yeah, but you’re right there in the classroom.” He paused. “It’s ugly, isn’t it?”

“Uglier than you can possibly imagine. I just delivered a stack of documentation to a correspondent.” Ron brushed his sun-bleached hair out of his blue eyes in a gesture that had become habitual, and wondered if he could possibly snag a haircut before the barge chugged out of the dock. “I’ve talked to former slaves in refugee camps. Real horror stories, Dan. You need to be very, very grateful that your kids don’t have to grow up on this side of the planet.”

There was a heartbeat of silence while Ron switched his focus to his brother’s side of the world. “How’s the bill going?” He looked around to be sure nobody lingered nearby before he continued. “Unless the U.S., the U.N., or somebody gets some help to southern Sudan soon, there won’t be anybody left to save.”

Dan’s voice sounded flat and tired. “Next Monday I’ve got a meeting to talk about the bill with a few of my esteemed colleagues, at least one of whom has likened this particular piece of legislation to the warm, sticky substance you find on the south side of a horse going north. I’ve worked all evening to gather information to include in my presentation.”

“You want information, I got information.” For the next 10 minutes, Ron told his brother much of what he’d told Olford. Even without the graphic pictures, the descriptions sickened Dan.

“That’s really happening?” Dan was incredulous. He’d picked up a pen and had taken notes while Ron talked. He looked down and noticed he’d also doodled spiraling dark circles, like bottomless whirlpools. “Human beings are actually doing that to other human beings?”

“That’s the issue—‘human beings.’ What precisely is the definition of human? It’s all about semantics.” Ron turned and leaned back against the wall beside the phone bank and surveyed the hotel lobby as he spoke. “Hitler re-defined human to exclude the Jews and eight and a half million ‘subhumans’ died. The Arabs here have redefined human, and their definition excludes blacks and Christians. Most of the population of southern Sudan has the misfortune of being one or both.”

“Well, this bill’s moving as slow as a tick on a dog’s back.” Dan felt frustrated and helpless. “I don’t even know who my friends are and who my enemies are on this one.”

“Don’t the Christians support you? Christian people have been massacred by the thousands because they won’t convert to Islam! And African Americans. I mean, we’re talking slavery here. Surely--”

“There are lots of people who
should
get behind this bill,” Dan interrupted. “But when push comes to shove, I just don’t know how many of them actually will.”

“I couldn’t do your job.” Ron raised his voice a little as a group of noisy tourists passed by in the hotel lobby. “I don’t know how you have the self-control to sit still while everybody whines and moans and comes up with one lame excuse after another. The real reason your esteemed colleagues won’t stand with you, and stand up to this government, is the ‘standing’ part. Remaining vertical requires a backbone, and those guys are jellyfish in three-piece suits. I think you ought to just deck somebody.”

“I couldn’t do your job either.” And it wasn’t just because Dan had never taken a single in-focus photograph in his life. Dan didn’t have his brother’s wanderlust; he wasn’t wired to be a gypsy, a nomad traipsing all over the globe. And he didn’t need the adrenaline rush of adventure and danger his brother seemed to crave. He was a fighter, too, but his weapon of choice was persuasion, his battlefield relationships.

Both men fell silent for a moment.

“You do realize, don’t you,” Dan said, drumming his fingers on the spiraling whirlpools on his legal pad, “that the Wolfson brothers are both tilting at the same windmill this time. That’s a first.”

“Yeah.” Dan could hear the smile in his brother’s voice. “I noticed.”

Then Ron’s voice got soft, distant, and Dan couldn’t read it. “I think Dad would be proud of us—both of us.”

Before Dan had a chance to respond, Ron changed the subject. “Listen, I need to get down to the docks to catch the boat.”

Dan suddenly remembered the pesky man with the nasal voice.

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you. There’s a guy who wants to do a documentary on Sudan, calls my office a couple of times a week trying to track you down. Since
Newsweek
used some of your stuff, he figures you’re the go-to guy on the slavery issue. You might want to consider going to work for him.”

Having a
boss
? What a horrifying thought! Ron was accustomed to doing things his own way; he couldn’t imagine being encumbered by somebody else’s expectations. He liked to travel light.

“Thanks for the advice, but I work better on my own.”

“I know—that’s what keeps me awake nights.” Dan wasn’t joking. “If you get into trouble out there...” He didn’t finish; he didn’t need to.

“Indiana Jones always gets away with the treasure, the girl and all his body parts intact. Says so right there in the S’posta Book.”

When the brothers were kids, they’d assumed that grownups had a book stashed away somewhere that explained to them precisely how life was s’posta be.

“Give my love to Sherry, and I’ll call you again as soon as I can. But don’t start to worry when all is silent on the Ron front for a while. There’s no phone service where I’m going.”

As soon as Dan put the receiver back in the cradle, he went upstairs to the kids’ bedrooms and stared down at his sleeping children. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be unable to protect them, to be powerless when madmen on horseback swooped down out of nowhere to carry them off into slavery. Slavery! David forced to work in the fields; Jennifer turned into a... He leaned over and stroked his 10-year-old daughter’s strawberry blonde hair—someday it would be as red as her mother’s—then kissed her tenderly on the forehead and went back downstairs to work on his bill.

Ron hung up the phone, checked his equipment, and headed out of the hotel lobby to catch a bus to the riverfront. Three days later, he stepped off the Nile barge onto the gangplank leading to the dock in Conglaii.

R
on ambled along with the flow of humanity up and down the Conglaii dock for two hours. And still no Masapha.

Half a dozen different tribal dialects babbled around him, mingled with the animal sounds from a menagerie of creatures— cows, pigs, goats, chickens, guinea hens—in a background noise he heard but didn’t really listen to.

But it was a lot harder to tune out the stink than the noise. The reek from the fish laid out on the dock when he stepped off the barge that morning had been heightened and magnified by the midday sun to create a stench that was foul beyond description. There was no wind, and the odor hung like a fetid fog in the air.

Ron began to make a mental list of all of his favorite smells: coffee brewing, honeysuckle after a spring rain, steaks on a backyard grill, the upholstery in a new car, a pretty girl’s hair.

But the game faded from his mind as his eyes studied the crowd, one person at a time, searching, hoping.

Come on, Masapha. Don’t do this to me. I need you, man. Just show up—I don’t care if you stink, I don’t care if you’ve been rolling around in zebu dung!

Ron had set up today’s appointment the day before he left for Khartoum to meet Olford. He and Masapha had talked for hours and discovered they shared the same theory. Both suspected that the main marketplace for kidnapped southerners had shifted away from Khartoum; what they hadn’t figured out was where it had shifted
to.

Even by conservative estimates, more than 150,000 men, women and children had gone on the auction block in Khartoum since 1990. But with international human rights pressure on President Bashir’s government, it was a whole lot easier for him to deny the existence of slavery when human beings weren’t being sold to the highest bidder within a few miles of his palace.

While Ron was in Khartoum, Masapha had been out among the people. He’d asked questions, collected information, tried to learn where the slave trade had gone, tried to do what no investigator had ever done—pinpoint the location of a slave auction. That was, as Ron had remarked at the time, a tall order for a short Arab.

The slave traders had perfected a portable collection and distribution system that had operated undetected for decades. It was a ghost, a phantom, a shadow, here and then gone, whispered about in hushed tones in refugee camps and around cooking fires in every village in southern Sudan. Like the hot wind blasting across the Sahel, it was invisible. You only knew it was there because you could feel it and because you could see the damage it left behind in its wake.