The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (14 page)

Soon after sunrise, the commander of the base came over, expecting to see only Ali. He saw the two of us sitting untied and talking.

“Daoud. Please come walk with me. I want to talk to you,” the commander said.

We walked for a half hour or so. He knew my family and he knew that Ahmed and some of my cousins had been killed when our village was attacked. He didn’t like having to kill his own people now that there was this new arrangement, but he hoped for peace someday.

“When the other rebel groups stop fighting us, the killing will stop,” he said, perhaps mostly to himself.

“You think that is true?” I asked him. “Why do you think the rebel groups spring up all the time?” He looked at me but could not admit what we were both thinking. He was in all this for himself now, thinking perhaps of getting a promotion someday in the Sudanese Army. War does this to people. There would always be rebel groups as long as the government was attacking villages to push people off the land. Like these rebel groups that were now killing their brothers, he had lost his way and had forgotten his people and was thinking only of himself.

“So, you know Ahmed, my brother Ahmed?” I asked him.

“I knew of him. I may have met him once in El Fasher.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to do more than bring Ahmed’s spirit to walk with us. Maybe it would remind this commander to do the right thing.

He asked if I was sure that I wanted to share Ali’s situation. I explained to him the same things I had been explaining all night. He looked sad and left me to go sit again with Ali.

Five soldiers, perhaps only sixteen or seventeen years old, soon came and asked us to stand. I saw the commander drive very fast away down the wadi. He glanced at us as he passed, and he looked to be in pain.

The boys tied our wrists tightly behind us and led us down the road to a tree-lined wadi away from their base. The wadi was strewn with human bones and clumps of hair and the horrible stench of death. This smell can actually stay for many months in such a place, but these bones were new and didn’t need to try hard to smell bad. I tried not to walk on these bones but it was impossible. I shuddered at each step.
So, this is where I will die,
I said to myself.

Ali’s prayers, usually silent, were now loud and clear as the young men took positions four or five steps from us. I recognized some of these boys, but I didn’t know their first names. I had known them as small children. From the way they stared back, some of them clearly remembered me. I looked to see who was going to shoot first. A small noise to my left, a sudden movement to my right—each time I braced myself. I called to the boy who looked like their leader.

“Please,” I said to him, “can you get us something for blindfolds?”

He asked why we would want that.

“I know some of you boys and I don’t want to watch you shoot us. You do what you have to do, but don’t make us watch you shoot your own people. We don’t have to watch that, not for the last thing we see.”

I knew the relatives of one of the older boys—not the
leader—and had seen some of his sisters and cousins in the Touloum refugee camp. I looked hard at him.

“You know, I have seen some of your family in Touloum. Many of them are alive and are wondering where you have been for a couple of years. Some of your brothers are dead, from the same army that you now eat with. You should go find your family in Touloum and help them.” I could see he was very moved by this and happy to know some of his family were alive.

The boys retreated a little ways and were perhaps talking about how to make us some blindfolds. They came back slowly, talking about other things and standing around with their Kalashnikovs.

“So you should get us the blindfolds,” I said again to the main boy. He walked close to me.

“Daoud, we don’t know what you are doing here or if you are spies or not, but we have talked and none of us are going to kill you right now.”

“Why is this?” I asked.

“Because we already lost a lot of our Zaghawa people. And now we are having to fight them, which we don’t like. We have to do that. But we don’t have to shoot you. So we are just going to wait for our commander to come back and he will have to shoot you if he wants to do that.”

This was very good. I thanked the boys and they smiled a little. These boys had been through a lot and they still were human beings. Ali was thinking they would shoot anyway, and would not open his eyes or stop saying his prayers, which were of course good prayers and always worth praying.

I asked if we could move away from the bones and go under a tree, and we did. I asked for the first names of the boys, and we talked for an hour about their families. I had news for many of them about their families in the camps. They found some food for us, which was our first in a long time. They untied our hands for this.

“Why does everyone think I am a spy just because I am from Chad?” Ali asked them with a great deal of food in his happy mouth.

The main boy said that Chad was not Sudan. Chad was the enemy.

“You think that?” Ali said. “And you are Zaghawa boys from Darfur?” Because he has two children, he was now talking like a father to these boys.

“Did you know that Darfur was a great country long ago, so great that it was both in Sudan and also in Chad? Did you know that the French, who later controlled Chad, and the British, who later controlled Sudan, drew a line, putting half of Darfur in each new nation? Did you know that? What do you care about this line if you are Darfur men? What business is it of yours if the British and the French draw lines on maps? What does it have to do with the fact that we are brothers?” The boys were moved by this.

“And here is something else for you. Do you know that your people in Chad hear stories about the bravery of the big army you are now a part of—you and your new friends, the Janjaweed?” The boys gathered around him a little closer.

“Yes, your brave new friends attacked a girls’ school in
Darfur. They raped forty young girls and their teachers. Some of these girls were eight years old. Fifteen of them had to go to the hospital for a long time, bloody with their injuries. When the nurse working in the hospital told about this, she was taken and beaten and raped for two days and nights. They then cut her seriously with knives. Would you do this?”

The boys looked at one another. “Of course not,” their leader said for them. “These would be our sisters.” The boys nodded. At this time a heavy rain started and the boys gathered closer under the scrawny tree.

“And if they were little Arab girls?” Ali pressed them. “Would they not also be your family?”

“How would this be so?” the boy asked.

“In the way that they are human beings, and that is also your family.” Ali had opened his arms for this and the rolling thunder of the storm gave his speech a wonderful music.

“Yes, of course,” the boy said, and in all these boys I could see the light of their souls come back on. The rain, now too much for this tree, washed their young faces.

These boys had not eaten well for a long time. They were discouraged by life and had started to drink bad alcohol made from dates. They had not lived long enough with their fathers to be good hunters and provide for themselves; when they went out on little hunting trips during this time, hoping to shoot a big bird or other game for dinner, we saw them come back with nothing.

Ali advised them that the camps in Chad would feed them and take care of them, and that they could even go to
school and find their families, and not have to hurt anyone again. For someone who was no spy, Ali was very good at turning these little soldiers around.

I asked a boy who had been quiet why he was fighting.

“Where am I to go?” he replied. “What do I do? My family is dead, I have no money, no animals, nothing. At least I can eat every day.”

“You can go to the refugee camps in Chad, like Ali said,” I replied. “They will give you food and you can go to school. That would be good for you.”

“No, I do not want to be in the camps and leave my land,” he said. “When I die, I will die in my home.”

Ali was better at this than I.

When the commander’s vehicle came speeding back in the mud, he saw us having our little party and began shouting at the boys. They had not done the thing that needed to be done. He scolded them, but the head boy said to him, “We cannot shoot them. We decided that you have a gun. You are like our uncle, and you will have to do this for us, because it is not right for us to do it.”

The commander was pained to hear this. There seemed to be everything in his wet face: anger, exasperation, and maybe some relief. He retied our wrists himself and then walked away, leaving his Land Cruiser running until one of the boys turned off the engine.

In the evening, I was untied and taken to the commander in a mud room that was open to the stars because it had been burned.

“Daoud, you know that if I shoot you there would be trouble between my family and your family someday, so I
can’t do this. I talked to my cousins and they told me it would be very bad, so here is what we are going to do…”

I liked this so far.

“You and Ali need to go back to Chad. So these boys will drive you to another rebel camp and they will take you back from there. So, good luck.”

He shook my hand. I was taken back to Ali, and I told him the good news.

“And you believe this?” he said. “You believe they can’t find some other boys to shoot us at this new place?”

“That’s a good point,” I said, “but maybe they believe what we said when they were torturing us and that we are not spies. Maybe they just want us to get out of here. Why waste bullets on us if we will just go?”

He looked at me as if I was very stupid. Indeed, the more I talked, the less I believed my own words.

It was hard to sleep with our hands behind our backs as usual. That night it rained heavy on us. When the rain stopped, some foxes came up to us. We were too tied up to wave them away, so it was not good; there were quite a few of them. But some other animals scared them away—probably wild dogs or jackals. Finally we went to sleep.

In the morning, four of the five young soldiers took us to a camp about two hours away. The boys played a cassette of Sudanese songs and sang along as they drove. When we arrived we were asked to sit under a tree.

Two other young men were tied there. They had been badly beaten. One had a broken arm and was tied at his ankles instead of his wrists.

When we told them our names, one said, “Oh, you are the ones! We came to rescue you guys.”

I asked what he was talking about.

“You called us three times and begged us to help with
your truck, and to bring food and water. You said the area was very safe.”

“I never called you,” I said. Gradually, we figured out what had happened.

The rebels had used Paul’s satellite phone to call for some mechanics to come help, and they used my name. This was the rebels’ way of stealing another vehicle.

We spent the night under the tree. The next day we were told that all four of us would soon be on our way to Chad. Again we were told that Paul was already there.

Ali had a theory: they could not let us live if they were going to keep our trucks. That would make them ordinary thieves. If we were spies and had been shot, or had been shot in a fight, then it would be okay for them to keep the trucks. So they were going to kill us and didn’t want to tell us that.

The young mechanics laughed at him. In their minds, they were already eating food in the Bahai market.

Before we were moved, there was another long meeting of commanders. Afterward, a vehicle approached and Paul was taken out. He was not in Chad at all. He looked exhausted and drawn, and as if he had not eaten since our capture. His face was burned and blistered by the sun.

“Thank God you two are still alive,” he said. I told him we would soon be safe in Chad. It was not so far away. Paul shook his head; he did not believe anything they said, especially this. Good reporters smell lies just as dogs smell deeply buried bones.

Paul, Ali, and I were put in one Land Cruiser with its roof cut off; the two mechanics were put in the same kind
of vehicle behind us. We began our trip; we headed east instead of west.

The commanders had decided to turn us over to the government of Sudan.

“We are as good as shot,” Ali said quietly.

We were driven for an hour to a Sudanese Army camp in the ancient Darfur city of Amboro, the city of my own sultan’s home, where his great drum had been beaten in times of war, where good schools and a hospital built by the British in colonial days were now, like the rest of the town, in unnecessary ashes. In their place, soldiers and tanks were everywhere.

Our vehicles stopped near three tanks. When the soldiers went out of the vehicle, leaving the three of us inside for an hour, I told Paul, “I don’t know what will happen to you and Ali here, but I know that I am going to die here, so, if you don’t see me after this, that is what happened. This is the worst idea the rebel commanders could have for us.”

Paul was too tired to say anything. The trip had not helped him.

Soon we were waiting in the sun of the parade ground, whispering to each other. A commander came up to us and stopped in front of me.

“Daoud, you are the biggest problem we have, so we are going to interrogate you first.”

Paul, who knew me as Suleyman, was confused to hear me called by another name.

“What is going on?” he asked.

I explained why I used two names in the two countries, and I also told him that I had a problem in Israel that made
me wanted by the government of Sudan. I explained that Ali used to be in the Chad Army.

Paul said I should have told him these things. I replied that I could not tell many people. Everything is complicated like that in Africa. Nothing is simple. No one is simple. Poverty generously provides every man a colorful past.

“But you may want to separate yourself from us as much as possible,” I told him. Even in such a place a prisoner can demand to be treated separately from the others arrested.