Children Are Diamonds Read online

  “This is a war. It was a mistake. I’ve sent the men who did this to the front. You think I haven’t lost my friends to stupider mistakes? You think your revolution didn’t kill people who didn’t deserve to be?”

  I pulled in my horns—not being his cup of tea—except for reminding him that Americans knew one another, even an insignificant cipher like me, by asking whether he’d liked Craig. Then his stare was what a prisoner must see, as Salva decided how long he ought to live.

  “The children you are feeding,” he said to Ruth, “We are going to give them their own country. They will be very happy to have their own country. Not to be slaves, but citizens.” He stopped, not used to eloquence, or to people who might not know that the words for “black” and “slave” in Arabic were the same. “I hear you on the radio,” he added approvingly, placatingly.

  Ruth was silent, before needling him: “I don’t see you at the feeding stations.”

  “What else do you want? You want us to give up?” he asked. “I’m sorry about what was done to you. That was not us.” He now meant her capture by the raiders at the outrider clinic. “We are fighting them.”

  “You don’t need to be. You should be on the same side,” she insisted: which must have disgusted him, because he agreed.

  “They should be on ours!” Loud, exasperated, with military brusqueness, he turned, time a-wasting.

  Ruth was finished with him but not with me. After letting me poke my head into the two shops functioning in Opari to ask about gold nuggets, which nobody would admit knowing existed anyway for fear that the rebels would seize them to sell for guns, she stopped to greet the Maryknolls, Elizabeth and Nancy, who gave us tea and their sense of life paced not in sprints but as a marathon. Their clinic was less hectic but more hazardous than Ruth’s, being nearer the front but farther from the camps, and was the post she’d walked to naked after her release. They fathomed, in fact, before I did that our present errand was to revisit the scene of that crime.

  “He’s leaving,” she explained, which unaccountably sufficed for them. Like gears, they appeared to fit together as a team for peace and continuity—fiftyish with thirtyish; pragmatist with idealist; morning person, afternoon dynamo; magazine reader, watercolorist—and they loaded a modest packet of the one’s drawings and both their outgoing mail in my Land Cruiser to be delivered to Nairobi. Another chapel of the White Fathers in deteriorating condition was located here, but Father Leo had reconsecrated it for their use. We looked in, knelt, and prayed for Attlee’s welfare in the afterlife. I didn’t balk when Ruthie disclosed her further plans, partly because the nuns weren’t astonished. She had patients to see, her jeep was out of commission, I could transport her. A long, popish view can be comforting. She told them little Leo had been sleeping when we left but would be crying now, at their first separation. He was lopsided, as his body stacked on belated muscles and fat in irregular form. God bless!

  Our drive north from the Maryknolls’ was blessedly uneventful. Not only no mines; not even a roadblock. The people walking were sparse, and mostly from the local Madi or Bari tribes, a foot shorter than the Dinkas and thicker-set, scrambling along like forest-andmountain folk, not striding like cattle herding plainsmen. As food got shorter again next week, they would disappear into the woods and gaunt Dinkas take over the roads, stalking, famished, for something to eat. Instead, we saw a burly man with a bushbuck slung over his shoulder that he had snared; he started to run when he heard the motor, till he realized we were aid workers and not about to steal his meat, as guys in an SPLA vehicle would have done. Another man, two miles on, was squatting on his heels, quietly collecting wood doves one by one every few minutes, when they fluttered down to drink at a roadside puddle he had poisoned with the juice of a certain plant that grew nearby. He, too, was frightened that this clutch of birds he had already obtained might be snatched away, until white faces in the window proved we weren’t hungry. He showed us the deadly root, and how pretty his half dozen unplucked pigeons were, as well as a pumpkin he wanted to sell.

  Close to the rope ferry from Kerripi to Kajo Kaji, we passed several Dinkas with fishing nets, and spears tall enough to fend off a crocodile or disable a hippo—which was what they were good at, when not embedded in the intimacies of their cattle culture, with five hundred lowing beasts, and perhaps a lion outside the kraal to reason with, the rituals of manhood to observe, the myriad color configurations and hieroglyphic markings of each man or boy’s specially selected ox or bull for him to honor, celebrate, and sing to, and the sinuous, cultivated, choreographic eloquences of its individual horns, which he tied bells and tassels to. The colors were named after the fish eagle, the ibis, the bustard, or leopard, brindled crocodile, mongoose, monitor lizard, goshawk, baboon, elephant-ivory, and so on. Like the Nuer, who were so similar, they had been famous among anthropologists but were now shattered by the war. Adventure, marriage, contentment, art, and beauty had been marked and sculpted by the visual or intuitive impact of the cattle, singly, and in their wise and milling, rhythmic herds—as bridewealth and the principal currency, but also the coloring registering like impressionistic altarpieces, the scaffolding of clan relations and religion. A scorched-earth policy by the Arab army and militias needed only to wipe out their cattle to disorient and dishearten them.

  In our white man’s bubble, we tooled along, noticing women balancing baskets of plants they’d collected for food, the minutiae of woodcraft that smaller tribes who’d always lived off wild things on the shelves of the mountains had. A man was carrying a black-andwhite colobus monkey three feet long, plus the three-foot tail, that he’d shot with an arrow and could provide meat for a family. This was the defunct Juba culture, with an occasional charred tank hulk to go around, and I was anxious or suspicious that Ruth was taking us farther than anticipated. Footprints (at least not bootprints!) kept turning off at every junction, as if the ordinary joe had been trying to clear off to Karpeto, Fagar, Kit, or wherever.

  “You’re leading me astray,” I protested.

  “I’m getting you a souvenir. The Kit River has gold in it.”

  “How do you know who’s in control?” I muttered, but startled also that some truck driver must have gossiped to Ruth that I smuggled, besides collecting souvenirs.

  “I heard ours are again. It’s a one-shot. When can I come back, even with a car?”

  We’d met not a single vehicle for an hour. “The scene of the crime?” I complained. I had the jitters. “I hate macho men. I mean it; I wouldn’t have come here with a man. Never. Is this like an exorcism for you?” At the same time my mind skittered back over the past twenty miles, where she must have had to walk. My respect for her fortitude was mixed with uneasiness that I was trapped in a foolhardy repetition stunt.

  In a hardpan yard out of sight of the road we found a concrete one-story bungalow that had been gutted of its equipment and window sashes, the wooden roof burned. Hemmed in by thickets, the location was deserted except for airborne and crawling bugs, and a cobra prowling the veranda, where we then sat sweatily on the bare cement, munching our peanut butter sandwiches, joking about “No plague,” because any rat carrying the plague would have been eaten by the snake.

  “You’d think they’d recognize by now, with this war going on so long, that if you capture a place, you’re going to need a hospital there, too,” she observed, grimacing. She stood then and, with her waddle, stiff from the jolting car but energetic, paced, while waiting for us to be discovered. Not knowing who was there, you didn’t simply blow your horn.

  After a while she pointed out that people were emerging from the bush. One man was burdened by a goiter the size of a bagpipe’s bladder; another with a hernia bulging like an overnight bag. Breathless children had run to find out if the rumor was true that Ruth had returned; they spun around to carry the news. They were Madis, Baris, the so-called Juba peoples, displaced by the war and siege, and she put on her nurse’s hat and white coat, as emblems of authority, gathered her penli
ght, tongue depressors, a scalpel, tendon hammer, syringes, needles, stitching thread, bandages, her meds satchel.

  “Our dog and pony show,” she said. Not a stick of furniture was left in the room where she had examined patients—only scraps of a deflated soccer ball she’d once brought for the kids to kick around, which somebody had since cut slices out of for making sandals from, and wisps of tropic grass sprouting from cracks in the floor. She had palliatives like vitamins, chloroquine, acetaminophen, atenolol, mebendazole, metronidazole, Phenergan, Valium, co-trimoxazole, even some iodine pills for the goiter man, although, like the hernia character, he needed surgery.

  There were perhaps patients with cataracts, VD, bronchitis, scabies, nosebleeds, chest pains, Parkinson’s, thrush cellulitis, breast tumors, colon troubles, a dislocated elbow, plus the usual heartbreaking woman whose urinary tract, injured in childbirth, dripped continuously, turning her into a pariah, although it would have been as easy as the hernia for a surgeon to fix. Ruth could do the elbow, with my help, and knock back an infection temporarily, but not immunize the babies or anybody else because our vaccines had had no refrigeration for so long. She bestowed her smile, having logs carried inside to serve as benches. The line that formed, the fact that she was going to finger and eyeball everybody, was reassuring.

  “We can’t spend the night. We have to leave before word spreads too far. But I wanted to look in on my old bunch. Picture a pebble dropped into a pond,” she told me. “If the ripple reaches the far shore before we’re gone, we could be dead ducks.”

  Employing the Arabic word for gold, dahab, and pointing at me as I waited like a chauffeur for her to complete her mission, Ruth produced from the crowd a frazzled though stalwart, furtive man who spoke to me in that language. I tried pidgin Swahili back, but we had few tools in common.

  “Don’t cheat him. You have all the cards in your hand,” she warned as we walked into the brush. This was arguable, as easy as I would be to mug. But the scenery opened out into a parkland of copses, swales, and savannah, with plots of cassava, millet, or sesame hidden about where a party of fast-traveling raiders could miss them in moving through, and scattered banana trees, some damaged years ago by elephants, before the herds were shot. Because it might be death for him to be caught by the SPLA in possession of any gold, I could understand why hundred-dollar bills would seem safer. Yet if buried, they wouldn’t keep as well, and were only marginally more portable. As we talked with our hands, he signaled that he had five children, none dead (or not counting whoever had died), and two wives. I hadn’t seen people who appeared pathetically underfed; and yes, he agreed, here the civilians were surviving, unless they got shot in a firefight by mistake, or had asthma, or bloody flux. He mimed these different fates and showed me some Kaopectate tabs Ruth had slipped him. The bodies discovered by the wayside were strangers fragmented off from tribes far away and fleeing nobody knew where. Nobody of his group either harmed or helped them, except perhaps to strip their remains. They fed their own children and aged folk what they had, but not refugees.

  In the privacy of these open spaces, sitting down underneath an acacia tree to be less visible, he showed me by circling his thumb and forefinger the size of the several nuggets he claimed to own. I showed him currency, in return, whose numerals and pictures he already knew—pointing to Benjamin Franklin with a grin.

  I opened my palms and rolled my hands to indicate not “hurry up” but “what can you spend it on?” He then made his hands take off like a little plane, and specified it wasn’t him but that a child or children of middling height might fly to safety, maybe on an empty aid plane if somebody—he indicated this by rubbing his finger and thumb pad together—was paid. So we now traded a Ben Franklin for every rough nubbin of bicolored rock he had: each of us trusting the other, via Ruth’s okay, as, indeed, he would have to trust a pilot with his child eventually.

  We were seated in scented elephant grass, seven feet high, under the umbrella of the lonely tree—lovely, but not entirely a good idea in central Africa unless you’re trading in contraband. I could feel a leopard grabbing the back of my neck, or a mamba slithering close to measure me for a fatal bite. My companion must have had many questions corresponding to mine, which were how and where he or his friends had found the gold, and was it before the war or lately? And what was going to happen to this designated child, once he or she was in Lokichoggio or reached Nairobi? He himself had a disturbing cough. Had he caught TB? Had it spread to his family? How much longer, under these new circumstances of the Nuer-Dinka war, which was becoming worse for the likes of him, Ruth said, than the Arabs’ war on the blacks, could this small Madi tribal band hold out without splintering? What had he witnessed? Centrally, maybe, that was what I wondered.

  Ruth, although displeased at the length of my absence, had made the most of it. “And you’re going to be a Good Samaritan,” she told me.

  “I thought I already was!” I waved at this dangerous cul-de-sac where we were lingering on borrowed time.

  “No, no,” she said, while dispensing the various capsules she had brought. “You’ve just been making money.”

  People had been summoned from farther off and were straggling into sight, one handicapped because his foot had been blown off, with a false construction attached in its place, jerry-built from wood and home-cut straps of hide and spongy padding. Another family included a girl who was walleyed, with the father or her grandfather above military age, like my gold prospector, and therefore not already conscripted by the Dinkas, the government, the Nuer, or the Madis’, Mandaris’, and Baris’ own self-defense force, which had coalesced between the pincers of the rest.

  Ruth was peering into an old woman’s mouth, lancing abscesses, although the lady also wanted Ruth to pull her teeth.

  “No surgery and no dentistry. I see people die of appendicitis, or tumors showing right on the surface, or a childbirth impaction that could be fixed but would be a bloodbath if I tried to. The midwives who could help with obstetrics have been scattered, too. These are the rabbits, the ones who ran fast,” she said. “The rabbits are left—or the ones who would be a liability to anybody else.”

  “Which liability am I supposed to be a Good Samaritan for?” I asked. It had dawned on me that she intended for me to bring someone back. “I see plenty.”

  “You can guess, if you want. Ultimately it’s up to you.”

  I said I knew that, but she didn’t reply. It was like Father Leo deciding who to pick up—out of the untold number of orphans he had seen dying—to bring to our doorstep. Who would somehow get surgery—the man with the goiter? The one who had whittled his own wooden foot? The woman who was going to get blood poisoning as soon as we left, for lack of a dentist? The one dripping urine all the time from a fistula or prolapsed bladder? Triage is not my specialty and I’m squeamish, besides. Snobbish, perhaps, in favor of the young and the cleanly. Our excuse when turning down the veritable sea of supplicants along the roadsides of Africa who want a ride is the roadblocks. Can’t get you through the roadblocks. But of course the man with the grotesque goiter could have passed through any roadblock in an NGO vehicle, if you just muttered the word “hospital.” No one would want to unload him. He didn’t know enough to ask me for transportation, however, and I didn’t want him sitting beside me, smelling of death for hours and hours.

  The clue would be found, I surmised, in Ruth’s face. She was bustling to treat patients faster, as though running out of medications as well as time, yet probably our window of safety was shutting down. Her waddle seemed twice as endearing when her intuitions caused her to hurry at the same time as, while swabbing a gangrenous sore, her conscience kept contradicting and slowing her. Most everybody understood this was partly a sentimental journey, not a visit they could count on again. They were people she’d handled before and, like a doctor, you did for them whatever you could; whether they survived later on was in other hands. But her glance did light up when she looked toward the gangly girl with the wa
ndering eye.

  “That girl with the walleye,” she remarked over her shoulder—after noticing my attention had turned that way at last, among the hundred or so spectators we had. “Figure out if you want to take her with you to Nairobi. Otherwise she’s better off staying with her own people than just coming back with us.”

  “You mean for surgery?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  Yes, she was scrawny, yet not yet pitiable, still had her vitality, reaching for a rubber band that Ruth held out for her to do her hair. Because of the eye, she was likely to succeed at the roadblocks without being hauled off and raped. I sensed, astonished, that the karmic point of our entire trip might be this very moment, and I nodded, primarily because Ruth wanted me to. Quickly, she asked the parents and the girl, using the assistance of another aged village survivor, who had graduated from a mission school before independence and spoke English, if they would like to have her eyes fixed. Ruth was anxious that we be on our way but simultaneously panted ever so slightly, the way you do when you’ve been thinking about doing something and feel inspired.

  Ya-Ya was her name; and she had no belongings to fetch. Although they obviously hadn’t heard of the proposal before, her parents were not amazed so much as caught by surprise. The idea that two white people should descend upon this clearing and repair her eye problems, free her from the misery of being a freak, and turn her life around was not as astounding as that we would. Because they already knew Ruth and what she’d suffered from the Nuer raiders for trying to maintain the community’s medical care, they trusted her. Mucho manga-manga was the term we heard for Ya-Ya’s ailment, and though they didn’t really know where America was, the translator said—they thought you could walk—would she be going there?

  She was bouncing on her feet, faced with this fait accompli, and I wouldn’t have turned her down for the world, but neither Ruth nor I was acquainted with any ophthalmologists in Nairobi, or Kampala either, for that matter, or a place to deposit her upon arrival for an extended preoperative or postoperative stay. Who would pay for it, and what would then be done with her between now and the end of the war? Ya-Ya inspected the Land Cruiser from the outside, circling on tiptoe—it would be her first car ride, the translator said—yet all wrapped up in the magic of maybe becoming like other girls. Her parents hadn’t much chance to cuddle and reassure her, or debate and think through the proposal, because Ruth’s sixth sense was reported to be accurate. Raiders were on their way on foot, said the Madis, who were melting away themselves.