Thirty Girls (21 page)

Grace spoke so mildly it was hard to picture her screaming.

Those children’s faces on the tractor told me. They didn’t speak, their faces did. Mama Louise, their faces said, we have nothing to give you. You have nothing to hope for.

Everyone sat silent. It must have been horrible, Jane mumbled.

Grace stood up. The sisters will be waiting, she said.

Jane stood. She said goodbye to Milton and the children. Grace, how many children do you have?

There are six, she said blandly. Let us go.

W
E SOON LEARNED
things. You would always be tired from walking and your feet always sore. You would always be hungry. You did not forget your life before, but it was like a movie you saw, not believing you were really there in a bed with sheets or eating chicken from a plate or putting on your purple skirt for Mass.

The rebels told us in any case our families did not want us anymore. They would teach us to be in Kony’s family.

What they taught me was to hide—my fear and myself. Sometimes it was like dragging a dead animal behind me. Sometimes I felt a thick pad of cotton come over my head.

How were our days? We searched for food. We gathered vine leaves and cooked them. We ate cassava leaves, simsim, boiled sorghum. We carried the radio, carried water and were always thirsty. We cut grasses for thatched roofs and collected firewood, dug for potatoes and planted maize beans. Our blouses were filthy. We washed clothes. We would
walk from place to place and find other groups of rebels in deserted villages or sleeping in dry riverbeds.

Some days were worse than others. You walked past children sleeping on the ground then saw they were not sleeping, they were dead.

The rebels had many rules. There were certain rocks you must not step on. No farming on Fridays. You could not eat pig, but could eat warthog which others might say is a kind of pig. Some fish was okay, if it had scales, like mudfish. But eat lazy fish and you become lazy. No pigeon was allowed, or gazelle. They once ate gazelle till the time Kony was detained in Khartoum and a gazelle was sacrificed to cause his release. After that, gazelles must be respected.

Rebels were not to eat with strangers. The Greeks we studied in school believed the opposite. Sister Alba showed us that welcoming strangers was the sign of an advanced civilization. The rebels were not an advanced civilization.

They prayed many times a day. First you must set down your gun. Sometimes they prayed with a rosary, other times bowing to Mecca. Before a battle you must prepare. You would not eat that day. They clapped and sang. One time an angel instructed Kony that rebels must not sleep with a woman before battle, but this was not always observed. You would draw a cross in oil on your forehead and chest and shoulders and also on your gun. The Holy Spirit in the oil protected you. If you had not offended the Holy Spirit then you would not be killed in battle, otherwise you would be. Clean water flicked from a stick onto the path in front of you was also protection; it would drown the bullet coming. Or a stone sewn inside cloth worn around your wrist would also stop a bullet. The bracelet turned you into a mountain, so the person shooting saw a mountain, and how could he harm that mountain? If you wore a cross on a necklace you would remove it and place it around your wrist to grip during battle.

Orders came from Kony. Destroy all the white chickens. He had twenty of his own soldiers killed by firing squad because he said they had killed innocent people. It was not explained how those people were
more innocent than others killed. He also killed soldiers who slept with someone else’s wife or men sleeping with other men. One rebel died for practicing witchcraft. If you died in battle it was because you had broken a rule. If you were shot in the penis it was because you had sex on duty; in the stomach, you had eaten in the wrong order.

Some children believed what they told us. Some of us became rebels. When you were given a gun you started to kill and after a while you would look at yourself and say, I am a rebel now.

Here at Kiryandongo the children are still cruel. We often have bad behavior. Girls and boys are always fighting, so it is fortunate we no longer have guns. The boys are perhaps more cruel. The rebels got us in the habit of cruelty. We may be grateful and wish to leave cruelty back in the bush, but it is not so easy. They gave us the habit of hate.

I noticed then how maybe I was becoming hard. You watch a rebel in battle use a boy as a shield, with a rope around his neck to keep him from crying out, and after seeing such things your heart changes. The heart turns to the side and looks away.

In the bush it was not always easy to remember people might be full of love. If you were stubborn you could hold on to the view. My mother said I was a root hard to yank, so being stubborn perhaps helped me in this case. I would think of home and what was good there. I would sit in my father’s lap with my sisters, smelling the beer in his mouth. I would think of Philip and what swam through me when his skin touched my skin. Those things existed in the world even if they were not before me.

I had odd thoughts. I have not seen a curtain in a year. I have not had ice cream or worn a belt. I have not done my homework or sat at a table. I have not hugged my mother or father.

Slivers could take me away. I would sit with my knees on the kitchen table while my mother cooked at the stove. Is there not work you could be doing? she says. She wants me to be like her, always doing something. I like doing nothing. There is our yellow table, the smell of rice boiling. No one else around and I have my mother to myself.

I held these twigs in my hand. If I did not, a cloud would fill my head and I would feel lost. I would say to myself, Remember those good things.
Some people call those twigs God. The rebels did many things in the name of God, but I did not see that God of theirs. I saw only my twigs.

There was a tree by our house in Lira I used to climb. The bark was smooth with scars where it split and grew back. I would lie on the thick branch like a cheetah and in rain the roof of leaves kept me dry. Before falling asleep with the rebels I might imagine that the leaves I heard rustling in the bush were instead the leaves of my tree and would feel the same way I had at home.

Each month we would receive haircuts. We sat on stumps and were shaved with an electric shaver. Closing my eyes I pretended it was my mother’s hands on my head and would receive the feeling of being cared about. But sometimes thinking about what you no longer have would not help. A sharp pain told you, Think of something else, not so important. You said to yourself, For now this is the life I anyway have. You thought instead of a folded skirt your mother left for you on your bed. So that is okay. You thought of music class at St. Mary’s, when birds flew in the windows and how everyone would sing loud near the end.

Philip I waited to think of at night. I would think of his arms. I would think of him pushing me over swimming in the river. I would think of him saying, You are the right size, and the feeling near my soul which I got only from his voice. I’d think of kissing.

You can love a person right away from seeing him. This happened with Philip. I saw him and my body immediately felt it was so. Louise and I were passing by a group sitting on the veranda outside the grocery, and there was a boy I didn’t know with wide shoulders and his T-shirt hanging loose. When we came near he looked at me, with his chin held up and eyes sort of sly. I looked away, shocked. I felt I had run up a hill and was not at all tired. We stopped with the group and I looked everywhere but toward him. Why does a person do that? Soon he was standing beside me. He said, I have met you before. It is not so, I said. Yes, you
had ribbons coming off your hair just here, he told me, and touched my head. It was not me, I said, but he was describing a hair band I once had. Philip noticed these small things, and noticed them in girls. That is the good news and the bad news.

Sometimes he would laugh out loud for no reason. What is it? a person would say.

You, he says. You are funny.

I know some things about myself and one is that I am not so funny. But to Philip I was.

Even if I liked Philip soon I was finding things about him which might bother a person. For instance, he talked with his face very close to other girls, smiling and finding them funny also. I was not being jealous. I was just thinking, Why does he have to be so close?

And he does not come when he says he will. He will only do what pleases himself. Once, I was plucking a chicken while he sat beside me and I asked him why he did not help me and he said, I am happier watching you and your fingers moving.

There was the time we parted when Philip went with Jessica. When it happened my body felt split down the middle by a claw. I cannot tell you what pain spread through me. You must feel it yourself to understand such hurt in your heart.

When I heard the news is frozen for me like a painting. It was after English before geography on Monday morning and I was crossing the grass. I remember which trees were in the shade and seeing Janet and Agnes and Louise coming from the sisters’ building. Esther, Louise said, walking up, her notebook over her chest. The hem of her uniform was far above her knees, because she was growing faster than her clothes. Philip was here yesterday.

Yesterday was Sunday, and I had been with Louise and Agnes, and she knew we had not seen Philip. No, I did not see him.

I did, Janet said. She did not like saying this.

Tell her, Louise said.

I saw him go with Jessica.

Jessica? I said, not believing it, but my body believed it.

For a long time just the word Jessica was that claw splitting me. Then I learned if you love a boy you are no longer free. The boy may become more important than your own self and if it is so, you will find trouble there. The first time you are hurt in your heart, you do not forget the lesson. It stays forever.

When Philip went with Jessica I had to ask why it was so. I saw she was a happy girl. She wasn’t always asking, Why do you say this? Why do you do that? Maybe he did not like those questions from me. I asked because I wanted to understand him. Maybe I wanted him to understand me also. Maybe I did not smile a lot. Maybe I did not feel like smiling all the time. People smile sometimes for no reason. I save smiling for when I feel like it, okay?

When Philip joked with me I liked it and I got the feeling he was tipping me over onto a bed of feathers. Do not be so serious, Esther, he said. Your face will freeze that way. When he came back, it was after I had stopped hoping for it. We sat in the garden and I knew why he had come but I still had the hurt.

I know you are mad, he said. He was not joking for a change. But I want to come back with you. I do not know why I went with her.

You just want to come back because I am the one beside you now.

No, Esther. You are the one.

I kept my face hard.

Esther. Do not be this way.

You used to like the way I am.

I still do. He tried to touch my hand.

Stop.

All right. But I will come back tomorrow. Maybe you will want to hear this tomorrow. He threw a stone at a chicken.

My friends say, why should I even let you in the door?

He nodded, his head between his shoulders showing his long neck and the muscle like a smooth trench. But here you are, outside the door talking with me, he said, about to laugh with his eyes squinting, and the old thing happened. I looked away.

Esther. He pretended he was staggering around while still sitting beside me. But I was the one falling over. I was falling back into that pile of feathers.

What you did with her, I said, I do not want to know it.

So I was with him again, and my feelings had sadness in them which they did not have before.

For no reason I will get dizzy. It happened in the bush and still happens here at camp. Bright spots and dark spots appear in the air close to my face. In the bush this was dangerous. If you were walking you might fall. You hoped someone would catch you then. We helped each other. Now I wake in the night, the ceiling is spinning.

Last night my mother appeared to me in my bed. Her face looked down at me from a ripped-out corner of the roof. Her face was calm, but my heart beat with wildness to see her. I was frightened.

Today I got my blood test back. I do not have the virus. I think that is why my mother appeared, to offer me this news.

In the bush I sometimes dreamed I was at home, then waking up would make home disappear.

Here in the camp girls wake screaming.

V

It Is Possible

O
N THE DRIVE
to Aboke, Grace reported the rebels had attacked a grocery nearby in Atipe and there were three abductions.

How do you get this news with no phone lines? Don said, hungover, with pink eyes.

Grace shrugged. One hears it.

A dented van packed with bodies careened past them, its back doors swinging open, and people hanging off.