Children Are Diamonds Read online

  Borrowed time, my mind chanted. I was almost less afraid of being shot than of being captured, stripped, and losing the agency’s vehicle. When Ruth gestured “finished” with her hands, I waved at the girl to get in, as I helped Ruth pack up our leftovers. Her parents boarded, too, carrying their younger child. I was teasing Ruth that she must have planned this all along—“I bet you just came back for Ya-Ya” then smiled at the girl, since she had recognized her name.

  “No,” Ruth insisted, repeating Father Leo’s mantra about his regular visits to places riskier than here: “You have to give them hope!”

  Before the translator fled, Ruth made sure the girl and her parents understood that they couldn’t accompany Ya-Ya to Uganda, or wherever else they thought she might be going. But the light of intelligence irradiated their faces and they were holding her hands, helping her gulp down her panic as the motor roared to life and, all together, we pulled out of the empty clearing onto the dirt road, heading upriver, south.

  I wondered whether she’d be carsick. Courage wouldn’t solve that. Then I was afraid her father might. But they were all exhilarated, like riding on a roller coaster, instead and, underneath the fun of jolting along, convinced that their daughter, touched by Ruthie’s wand, might soon become a beauty—in any case, whisked out of the war zone. I thought how parents must have felt as their children were evacuated from Europe during the lead-up to World War II—so happy but sad, her mother patting her and crying. The other child, half Ya-Ya’s age, was a comfort but also a limitation, because they were going to have to walk back from wherever they chose to be dropped off, using the honeycomb of trails they knew.

  We had clear sailing for a while. Ruth assured them in her fractured Arabic that no soldiers had stopped us on the trip north. Too smart to trust that, however, they tapped me on the shoulder after ten or fifteen miles to stop. I let them out at a small runneled tributary, the brush impenetrable to eyes like mine. Mercifully fast, after wails, tears, hugs, and thanks, they vanished into a thicket. Mercifully, too, because around another few bends we did run up against a blockage of soldiery, who made us get out of the car while they searched for weapons or stowaways, scrutinized our passports and the big pasteboard visas “Jane” in Nairobi had signed for us, and at Ya-Ya herself, glancingly, who Ruth explained in English and Arabic was going to the “hospital.” They nodded in approval, not bad guys, though you never could predict this in a civil war.

  For her, it seemed to have been a rite of passage. We’d been tested—able to protect her, and not unduly frightened ourselves. So she began to enjoy the swell of unfamiliar scenery, the rising foothills and bulk of the Imatongs, the twisting, occasionally frothy, Nile below, and just the speed and bucking of our car. I handed her a stick of gum but forgot to indicate that it wasn’t food. After swallowing it, she observed us gingerly but closely, and tasted with some amazement the tuna fish from a tin we opened. “Na kima Bahrini,” “like the ocean,” I told her in my version of Swahili, which she didn’t understand. “Jogul baharr,” said Ruth in Arabic. Despite the jouncing, she let us know that yes, she was ravenous and not about to be sick, so we bought her two baked ears of corn and a goat’s rib, the last rib the owner had, at a shamba we passed. The children who gathered laughed to watch us drinking out of our jerrican rather than the nearest stream, but also at Ya-Ya’s cockeye, which put me into a bad mood for changing a tire in the rainstorm that followed. Ruth snuggled an arm around her and nuzzled her ear to persuade her that a man’s grumpiness was silly and meant nothing, however.

  Having missed the curfew at sundown, we needed to drive exceedingly slowly in the blanketing dark, not just to avoid losing the road but in order not to draw gunfire. It was better that we appear humble and tardy, than like the sneaky spearhead of an Arab attack. Whatever gun emplacements had been laid in ambush let us pass without a challenge, and the church compound had never looked so cozy. We all fell asleep after sipping sweet cocoa and scrambling some powdered eggs, which made Ya-Ya laugh because she’d naturally assumed they were going to turn out to be some kind of vegetable porridge. Next morning, she wanted an exact repeat.

  The next morning, though, she also took in the complexities of her new situation quite bravely—the towering Dinka soldiers and civilians all around, whom, along with the Nuer, her people had been frightened of; the skeletally bloated toddler, Leo, who’d cried all night, though allowed into Ruth’s bed, because she’d been away during the day; Otim, the escapee from the Lord’s Resistance Army, who clung to his corner of the kitchen like it was the one true star and was comparably jealous of Margaret’s attentions but wildly preoccupied and traumatized. Yet Ya-Ya was hopping with curiosity. In fact, I taught her to hopscotch, after showing her the church, the clinic, the hospice, the flimsy boundaries of our little compound, she watching carefully because her parents had told her (the last time anybody had spoken her language) that, beyond Ruth’s period of kindness, I would be the one carrying her on. She didn’t want to miss spotting me slipping into my car in an emergency and wind up left behind. Her fugitive eye, by its jiggling leaps or tangents, expressed both joy and jitters, whichever was predominant, and you could learn to tell the difference.

  She was considerate in her manners, which moderated her bottomless appetite at the table, as did Margaret’s severity, whose Acholi was not comprehensible to her. But going along the fence, listening or talking through the wire without venturing to leave the protection of the yard, she looked for other Madis to talk to— short people like herself but not the Baris or Kakwas, whose languages were intelligible but accented queerly, and who constituted most of the short people about. Meanwhile, at Margaret’s suggestion, she tried taking over Attlee’s duties at my ten-cot hospice, tactfully spooning water or cornmeal into the mouths of the patients. In that survivorly pattern, nothing seemed to amaze her—no request or condition. Having seen deaths, thirst, and hunger, and as though to compensate for her unmoored eye, she appeared unusually focused for a youngster, inside her head, when I coached her about sponging the lips and forehead of a person who was dying and how to scratch their scalp to gently distract them from the pain. She’d never been permitted the margin for error other children got.

  Word traveled. A Madi man, an Anglican deacon, who knew some of her clan, showed up at the wire asking for Ya-Ya. We went outside to talk to him because, after Attlee’s murder, Ruth didn’t want strangers inside the gate if they weren’t patients. I was able to have him convey a promise to her, however, that I wasn’t going to desert her. She needn’t watch the Land Cruiser so nervously. And he confirmed for her that big-city surgery would be able to mend her eyes, although telling in English that he’d never visited a city larger than Juba himself. He needed glasses—begged me to find him some. His had broken. He couldn’t read his Bible. In the sunset’s afterglow he led us to the straw church he had built, quoting Isaiah, chapter 18, and Matthew, chapter 24. “For nation will go to war against nation, kingdom against kingdom; there will be famines.” Ladoku was his name; and it’s no exaggeration to say that his church was constructed mainly of straw, or that any big drugstore would have had ten-dollar glasses that would have helped him a lot.

  I could promise my young pal Ya-Ya not to abandon her, but not Ladoku, her translator, that he might be wearing spectacles again anytime soon. Bol had joined us, because schoolteachers know ministers, and Bol was watching my moves in any case. He was unencumbered by Ladoku’s scaffolding of belief—and flabbergasted disbelief at the scale of this suffering—compelling quotations from the Book of Zephaniah regarding desolation and destruction in the Land of Cush (Sudan) and the necessity of staying here right on until the bitter end in order to bear witness to it. Each felt a responsibility to his students or parishioners, but Ladoku’s went beyond that, being scriptural and theological. Even if there were no parishioners, “like a captain going down with his ship,” he said, his eyes ought to be the last eyes left. Bol, on the other hand, felt compromised: not truly “teaching”
so much as monitoring a bunch of boys who might well be killed before they’d even learned to read and write. Ladoku, not engaged with cannon fodder in the war effort, could devote himself to his religious passions, and hadn’t dreamed of walking the streets of London and Paris, like Bol, anyhow. He only wanted to walk the straight and narrow. But when people didn’t have enough to eat, that didn’t work out.

  They both kept watching me for hints of when a food delivery was going to come, yet not trusting each other much—Ladoku because Bol was a Dinka, who ruled these camps with arrogance, and Bol because what he really hoped to do was clear out entirely, and if anybody except me learned this, he could be shot. The presence of the girl—springy with hope and curiosity and the sudden confidence of being with somebody who spoke her language—also put a damper on the two men’s urge to speak frankly to me. How could this be happening? Ladoku’s body language kept emphasizing, although he told Ya-Ya that she herself should expect all good things. And Bol, by contrast, was trying to plot an escape, of which I didn’t want to know the details, because I assumed they involved cutting cross-country for umpteen miles and materializing beside the road at the Uganda border as I went by. Bol wanted to help his country from exile—something I could certainly understand, since I couldn’t go back to the States at the moment for fear of being prosecuted by the American owners of that Alexandria shipping company. Instead, I was doing some good over here. And my heart went out to him; he was such a conscientious, lively teacher, who wanted to work in a refugee camp run externally: not by guerrillas, in other words, but by the U.N.

  My girl might have to manage to bluff a bit at the Kenyan border, I explained to Ladoku, for him to translate. Without papers, we might have to be inventive and resourceful to get Ya-Ya across, and also exercise a mutual understanding in the big city after that. Did she realize there was to be no magic involved, just teamwork? Ruth was planning to adopt the starvation-stunted boy properly, with formal papers and all, and send him eventually to Northwestern University (whose nursing school was her alma mater) when he grew up. But we were going to need to be creative for her not to wind up in some high-fenced, catchall detention center for aliens in flight, such as Kakuma, in the northern Kenyan desert. Nor would the street children I worked with in Nairobi treat her kindly, since she didn’t know Kikuyu, Swahili, or any other languages they spoke. She wasn’t leery of me by now, or any of the other adults who had proven they weren’t going to laugh at her, and was not callous to or revolted by people who were at death’s door. In fact, Ruth bawled me out for letting her tend to a woman who coughed as if afflicted with TB. I’d come to my senses about that.

  Civil war winnows out the nitpickers who dither on the station platform as the last train is leaving—people paralyzed by their own crabbiness or indecision. But Ya-Ya wasn’t thrown for a loop by any unpredictable development, and enjoyed playing in the ruined church, that stone-and-beam labor of love of some long-dead Italian friar or “White Father,” whose shaping hands had somehow enabled it to retain its eloquence and dignity. She delighted in gazing up, lying on one of the pews that remained, in this first playground she never needed to share with other kids. She had a bushbuck horn, hollowed out and pierced so she could blow notes on it with a trumpeter’s lips, that her father had given her at the last minute, and she used to sit up on the altar blowing that, after watching Ruth’s and my reaction to be sure this would be okay. She swept the church, to please me, and helped Ruth trim her Labyrinth with a trowel and clippers or shears.

  Instead of leaving immediately, I took a few more long walks. In part, the beauty kept me lingering, where Africa had not been logged, mined, safari-ized, or industrialized. The human catastrophe hereabouts did not mar the vistas but, of course, was the other reason I stayed: that Ruth was refusing to leave. A food delivery still hadn’t been contracted for, or whatever the bottleneck was. And no partner was en route from the States to help her—it should be a doctor. Maybe the powers in Little Rock were waiting for one to volunteer for service with the Lord. Margaret, the long-suffering woman-ofall-work, had shown me her Ugandan passport so I would be aware that she was eligible and wanted to go. Those children whose support she was responsible for in Gulu preyed on her mind, outweighing her loyalties here. Al, from the office in Nairobi, told her on the radio that he’d paid the individual who was supposed to be feeding them, but having been away for nearly half a year, she was torn. My ride would be the only one foreseeable, and with rumors of another offensive to be launched on us from Juba with armor—extra government flights from Khartoum landing at their strip with reinforcements—once she got home, she might find excuses not to return. I couldn’t stomach turning her down; nor would Ruth have asked me to. Better to postpone leaving, with the excuse that Otim needed more time to adjust. The more you heard from him, the worse it got. He and his sister, still a sex slave with the band, had been forced to eat their parents’ hearts.

  As I say, not being a labyrinth type of person, when I wasn’t teaching with Bol underneath the tamarind tree, I walked. Children might follow me a while, till the lassitude of undernourishment wore them out, but there was no scary wildlife left to worry about, just the shifting drama of the African play of light, the surflike tier of eastern mountains, green and blue. In a tightly military region such as this, you didn’t risk much chance of getting mugged when you were by yourself but instead were watched by the occasional suspicious junior officer who couldn’t understand that a tourist from the U.S. might be gazing at the loveliness. One said he thought I was “scouting” for a place where enemy parachutists could land. “You will be shot!” he warned, until his commander, less officious, intervened with a laugh.

  We were located in sort of half a bowl. So at night they were burning brush off the slopes up where an attack by one of the militias opposed to us—Lord’s Resistance Army crazies, or Equatoria Defence Force, or Nuer commandos—might commence, perhaps to coincide with the Arabs’ tanks rolling down the road from Juba. It was important to clear a field of fire, offering no cover for a raid, and the crawling tongues of red created a pretty scene uphill—with shouts like Mardi Gras from all the young people chasing protein. Every creature fleeing the flames had more than one hunter after it, throwing a stone, swinging a club. But you couldn’t see that, exactly. You saw controlled burning, heard revelry. Like so much in the landscape—the gorge of the Nile during the day, with the crocs waiting for somebody to get hungry enough to wade out too far after lily roots or with a fishing net—it was stunning. And never having heard a horde of white folk enthuse about their shimmering, supple, layered horizons or seen TV shows about New York, they neither wanted to be living among the skyscrapers nor conceived that New Yorkers might want to be here.

  Ruth, indeed, wouldn’t consider leaving. Eventually, sure, she was going to have to send that clinging little boy to Northwestern, but not during the emergency. She realized, however, that both Margaret and I were planning to. The nuggets in the money belt I wore under my clothes rubbed against me like pearls in a bed of oysters, and knowing this, Ruth would tell me to take my pants down for a hernia exam, which made Margaret laugh also, without being in on the secret. We had two girls living with us now, because as soon as word spread that Ruth had brought back Ya-Ya, with the wandering eye, to be healed by surgery in the big cities, a Dinka girl, Nyoka, stranded in Amei Camp, who suffered from the same ugly problem, heard about it and summoned the courage to walk the dozen miles and stand outside our gate in the subdued, straggling medical line. She might have sat there the whole night, but Ya-Ya spotted her first and agitatedly brought me over. This was a more bashful person, and even more afflicted; or it seemed so because, being taller, she was more conspicuous when trying to efface herself, and flustered when we waved her inside. There were women with week-old babies waiting, a boy with a sore throat and a cleft palate, an elderly blind man bent over in considerable pain, led by a timid child, and numerous other patients, though not the same numbers who had shown u
p when I’d arrived to replenish Ruth’s medical supply. She had some Cipro left now for the boy’s strep throat, for instance, but told him to come back each morning—mostly, I think, to shame me into taking him along so that his lip could be sewn up.

  Ya-Ya had apparently never seen another girl with her own condition and hugged Nyoka in excitement, which embarrassed her. Nyoka remained reserved and tentative after I’d invited her to jump the line, whereupon Ya-Ya proudly showed her the expanse of the church—sweeping a few leaves out—and a folding cot ready for the next patient at our little hospice. Naturally this alarmed the Dinka girl, who assumed it must be meant for her, among these dying people. She and Ya-Ya shared no common language except a fragmentary Arabic, and not only was she still displaying her best behavior, but was more austere, cautious, or maybe bruised to begin with. Her parents turned up that midday to bestow their blessing on what was now another fait accompli and to give Nyoka an amulet to wear around her neck, some strings of beads and trinkets, and a small skirt, a cape, a smock, a water gourd, a rolled-up antelope skin to sleep on, and a forked headrest. They gave me a pipe fashioned from different calibers of brass shell casings, fitted together and framed in a reddish hardwood. Both of them and especially the girl were relieved to hear from Ruthie in broken Arabic and Dinka that she wouldn’t be required to fly anywhere but instead would be traveling on the ground. Unlike Ya-Ya, she’d ridden in motor vehicles before, but her vision seemed worse, causing her to twist her head oddly back and forth to focus her good eye, and I guessed that one reason why she tried to minimize all of her reactions was to avoid attracting attention with this swinging motion and, therefore, mockery.