Children Are Diamonds Page 14

  “You must tell them,” Makundi said, meaning not the bombing but the hunger—an anguish increasing daily—which was what the Norwegians were gabbling about in Scandinavian on the radio, trying to reach not only their group’s area officer but their nation’s ambassadors elsewhere on the continent: as were the Maryknolls their mother superior in America. Even the Lutherans, weighing a series of infants in a sling in besieged Juba, and measuring the shriveling flap of flesh under their arms, sounded alarmed.

  Chapter 7

  • • •

  IN AFRICA, WHEN YOU SAY GOOD-BYE IT MAY BE FOR KEEPS, SO THERE is an extra squeeze in the handshake to register that. Bol had assembled eighty kids or more in front of our cracked blackboard with multiplications on it underneath the tamarind tree, his sad, long, aging face carefully devoid of added expression, as they hollered, “Saaarreee!” to me.

  “Tell them!” urged Ladoku, hurrying up in a frayed, left-behind, High Church Anglican cassock that he saved for exceptional occasions. Never having been to a city with multiple streets, restaurants, movies, clothing and magazine shops, he wasn’t wistful, like Bol, or particularly distracted by apprehension about his own safety. He led a child who was limping badly, almost capsizing, not from an injury but from some orthopedic problem that even a layman could perceive might interest a surgeon.

  “This isn’t a bus,” I told him, pointing to the fact that Margaret was already in the passenger seat, with the paper sacks that were her luggage and Otim in her lap, the little poleaxed Acholi boy who’d been forced to eat strips cut from his parents’ vital organs, next to the gearshift; plus Ya-Ya and Nyoka, the two walleyed girls, at sixes and sevens in the back; and Tongkwoit, the cross-eyed, diminutive Kakwa; the harelipped Bari boy, Ladu; and the Wild Man from Borneo, whose name was Oryean and whose hair we had decided to leave like a Fuzzy-Wuzzy’s in order to improve his prospects at the early roadblocks, because although he claimed not to care if the soldiers shanghaied him, we didn’t believe that.

  “It’s an ambulance,” Ladoku corrected me quietly, as thin as a cormorant. He had been shrewd enough to bring along a couple of mothers, since the boy with the nightmarish hip, for instance, named Pityea, was too young to travel without a parent. The other woman thrust forward a post-toddler who had tripped horribly into a cooking fire and, somehow surviving the burns, needed skin grafts and other medical care. Resigned, I waved them toward the Land Cruiser.

  The Dinka major had materialized to observe our departure and nodded at Ladoku. “We are fasting,” he agreed.

  I was irritated. “If you hadn’t killed those four U.N. people, you wouldn’t be starving.” It was absurd that only children needing surgery and deportees could go, and I put my forefinger to my temple to recapitulate how gratuitously two of the U.N.’s aid experts had been executed. Ladoku looked alarmed on my behalf, but Ruth laughed because she figured that the Dinkas had finally learned that white people are tribal, too. If you killed them, the others got mad. So I was in no danger from the major’s anger. And actually, he wasn’t mad. He nodded, acknowledging tacitly that that action by his superiors had been a mistake.

  Ruth waved, vanishing into her clinic shack. Our few fly-in Baptist doctors—who arrived intermittently, and maybe because of a midlife crisis they’d been having in somewhere such as Little Rock—knew no big wheels east of Arkansas whose strings they could pull, and neither did Ruthie or Al. So it was my ball game, as two soldiers in tiger-camouflage suits cleared me to push on the accelerator and bounce along. Ya-Ya hummed. Margaret joined in. In Nairobi, as anybody knew, there were plenty of street children with webbed fingers or crossed eyes, and nobody’s taxi screeched to a halt to take them to a doctor. So how was I going to handle it? I missed Bol; he would have helped. Till the last few minutes, when the major showed up, he might have imagined that he could twist himself into the space for a spare tire in the wheel well and escape. The kids of his who weren’t regarded as fighting material were already red-haired from kwashiorkor, bent-boned from rickets, or twitchy and cataleptic as they sat in our class. And me with my hospice—deserted behind me. We had no clout to feed or help anybody. Even the Catholics, with Rome in the wings, had gotten no food in.

  Yes, I had my stony nuggets taped uncomfortably inside my money belt, next to my groin; but the pedestrians we passed still blanked out their expressions for fear of who might be in a motor vehicle, where there was nothing civilian money could buy, no rich, no poor, just those who were armed and those who were not. The guerrillas at Nimule, before the bridge, made me step out to show my passport and “Jane’s” cardboard visa, but after peering at the forest of disordered faces inside, didn’t search the Land Cruiser. Therefore we reached Uganda without incident and, to Margaret’s amusement, I changed from the British to the American side of the altogether empty road. But this next stretch, being Lord’s Resistance Army territory, was the most dangerous for my two escapees, not to mention Margaret herself, who, like the LRA, was Acholi and thus might hold a prurient interest for them. Because they had no history of killing whites, I was more fearful on my passengers’ behalf.

  After miles of silence in this nail-biting no-man’s-land, we let our breath out in relief as Ugandan army sentries appeared at their forward outpost. Luganda speakers from the capital, they regarded northerners like Margaret as primitives and paid more attention to me, as I used Luganda words for “hospital,” eddwaliro, and “eyes,” amaaso, and told my passengers, via Margaret’s Acholi, to hop around spryly so they could see nobody was sick with something horrific like Ebola fever. The children, being stiff, were glad to. And we were right to have left the Wild Man from Borneo unshorn, because once they understood that he was ex-LRA they wanted nothing to do with him.

  “Gulu,” I kept repeating, and “Ruth,” till they signaled us through. Margaret smiled broadly. Her daughter, sons, nieces, nephews—more than ten in total, who her next-door neighbor had been feeding—were less than a hundred miles away. But we still had plenty of depopulated country to navigate, with cat-and-mouse rebels from two local groups operating: remnants of both Idi Amin’s and Milton Obote’s armies who hadn’t dared to surrender. So you wondered whether there would be a log blocking the next bend in the road. Once they realized you were not a military vehicle and emerged with their guns to help you move it, they might toy with you. But was this scarier than traveling with Ed over the same wilderness—him two months out of flying school and come to central Africa to pray at full voice to the Lord, with his finger trailing the plane’s shadow across the terrain on a map in his lap?

  I’d stopped to let the kids relieve themselves. But we had no food. Their hunger nagged me. At a turnoff near Atiak I backed up and went west, instead of south, impulsively, past a concrete prison the government maintained, to another defunct stone church from colonial times, this one manned by a German who offered NGO help to refugees close by.

  Felix was in. “Where else would I be?” he asked, and with calming amusement he had Margaret boil up a pot of porridge for everybody to share. A before-his-time graybeard, he let the children ride on a rocking horse that he pretended he’d made for his monkey—which indeed did ride it, but otherwise could swing in two fruit trees as far as the length of a leash clipped to a belt around its waist that slid down a wire between the trees—the first monkey any had seen that wasn’t about to be eaten.

  “Handy,” he said; handy also in English and French. The latter he utilized with Congolese fleeing from Watsa, Aru, Adi, or Dramba who’d managed to travel on foot much farther than we had driven, chancing the buffalo and lion lands, and swimming the Albert Nile. Yet his church had no shell holes, no foxhole alongside, no starvation or training camp immediately nearby. His modesty and equanimity, annealed in Nigerian and Mozambican emergencies, were additional protection when bands of combatants passed in the night. Though sorry about what had befallen Americans like Ed, whose crash at Bunia he had happened to overhear live on his radio scanner, and the unfortunate famine speciali
st whose leg had been smashed off in the drop zone by a sack of sorghum intended to feed stick-armed Dinka children, he felt a bit bemused by the spectacle of a country endowed with such a surplus of do-gooders that, like grain, it could afford to ship over the disposable ones.

  Ya-Ya wanted the monkey passionately now—to cherish, not eat—so Felix explained in pidgin Kakwa-Swahili-Arabic that if she was exceptionally good between here and Nairobi, I would buy her one when we got there. Since I couldn’t yet talk to her, I thanked him sincerely, when he told me, for committing me to an inconvenience I didn’t desire and implanting in her the idea that her first international city would possess all the charms of a jungle home. He knew me slightly from a sojourn in Malindi, where he spent his breaks, and remarked that, as jammed in as we had been, he’d thought we looked like the car in circuses that all of the clowns pile uncountably out of.

  Felix served us goat’s milk he bought from his neighbors. “I live on a volcano. We all do, as you know. But, oh, the vegetables I can grow!” he said. “Lava is fertilizer.” Foundations sometimes sent their executives to stay with him because it seemed so peaceable in this tan, rolling, half-wooded savannah, as did he, resilient and competent, smoking his pipe like a gentleman farmer, whatever the circumstances. Thus he was able to scribble the name of a lady doctor the Rockefellers liked in Kampala who might prove to be helpful. Linguistics and herpetology were his hobbies here. “But diamonds are a man’s best friend,” he teased. The bush telegraph had tipped him off to the imminence of a Juba breakout, which would provoke a torrent of refugees, and his German office was responding by shipping a triple order of everything. But would that be enough? he asked, pumping me.

  “Ruth, the Norwegians, the Catholics have nothing,” I said.

  “All the more reason for me to.” He called his new housekeeper from the kitchen, or, rather, led me to her, where Margaret was bathing her scraped feet—a wordless Congolese whose life he had probably saved.

  I said the closer Ugandan villages, like Larepi, Moyo, Atiak, Palabek, would catch thousands pouring south in the flood, being already known about, as he was not, and the U.N., World Vision, and similar groups who had quit dealing with the SPLA leadership in disgust would come in again, quickly, if Felix was lucky. He was a praying Christian, like a plainclothes monk, and serene in a way that stemmed from a belief that the best you can do does matter, whatever its quantity, and beyond the results.

  “Why leave Africa?” he asked when I mentioned Ruth’s recalcitrance, though he agreed that “repositioning to the fleshpots” might be advisable. He knew her foibles, but “Saint Peter will like her,” he suggested, joking. Like Ruth, he tried not to drink until nightfall, or talk much before he did, so it was not hard to depart, except for the magnetic monkey.

  At Atiak, we had to disgorge ourselves from the clown car again for inspection, while the police, who were used to a trickle of LRA escapees, confirmed that my two did speak Acholi and knew the names of hometowns no impostor would have. The chief also welcomed Margaret back with explicit irony that she should have “jumped from our frying pan into Sudan’s fire, in the first place.” And he wanted to confirm visually that my eddwaliro patients were not hemorrhaging, like Ebola victims, but only needed reparative surgery—again with an African twist.

  “Why do you whites always save the least fit instead of the most fit? How can any people survive if you just ‘Save the Children,’ and the crippled ones at that?”

  The skinny customs official, who must have been living on air for many months, was still not permitted by the chief to extract a modest bribe from me, in lieu of his unpaid salary, but I laid my hands on his gaunt old shoulders and promised to look into what was happening to it amidst Kampala’s bureaucracy. Obviously somebody was pocketing it, since Uganda didn’t need a customs inspector at its border with a civil war. He begged me for a ride south so that he could investigate for himself, but Margaret interrupted in Acholi to tell him to display more dignity. The car was full.

  We reached Gulu at about six P.M., or twelve, Uganda time, since their twelve-hour calculations begin, logically enough, at equatorial daylight. Margaret excitedly directed me straight to her well-roofed mud hut in a dirt-street suburb. Nobody was expecting her, but she patted the bag her pay was in, so thankful we hadn’t been robbed en route, because she would be able to pay the gentleman next door who’d been feeding the children all of this time, as well as their school fees. Two were playing outside. She cried out in relief, opening the door as I braked. We all needed to stretch, so there was a crowd, plus the children inside dashing out, running to fetch others and friends, plus neighbors. Indeed, everyone seemed to have survived, and Margaret briskly became Atta again, or jjajja omukazi, “Grandmother,” ceasing to speak English. She examined each—none lost yet to HIV or malaria—hugging them, and also the elderly neighbor who had made sure they all shared a big wooden bowl of posho once or twice a day, as well as some fruit, for the values that porridge didn’t contain. He was a practical-looking person unfazed by so much hubbub, but pleased to be praised and paid. She was promising new clothes while weeping because of course individual children reminded her of her dead sisters, brothers, even her own two eldest, who had died of AIDS, leaving their offspring for Margaret to raise.

  I was back in the world of AIDS, after not being preoccupied with it. The Sudan’s war had kept most infected people out of the zone we’d been in, but within a few minutes I noticed that several youngsters clustered around were not healthy. They weren’t wasted from starvation, or fascinated by a motor vehicle, like the crowds of kids where we’d come from. With the whole neighborhood gathering to welcome Margaret, I couldn’t tell whether they were orphans or belonged to someone, but their stumbling, discolored emaciation reminded me of Nairobi’s street children who were dying of AIDS. Inside Margaret’s hut, one boy had not been able to come out. Crying, she hugged him where he was lying and gave him a piece of the candy we’d bought when entering town. The children, by creating a hierarchy to govern the place, had kept it remarkably orderly, for a home to as many as ten little personages.

  It was quite mesmerizing, how in soul as well as body they had survived as a de facto family with just the food doled out daily by the guy next door, who, addressing me as “sir,” told me he was a retired policeman. But early night had suddenly descended. I was nervous about where my other charges and I were going to sleep. Since Margaret’s joy and worry absorbed her, the neighbor recognized the problem, slid into my passenger seat, and we drove to the reception compound of the social agency for Lord’s Resistance Army escapees, while he explained in Acholi to Oryean, the Wild Man from Borneo, that the police were going to protect him, that here everybody else had been under sentence of death by those crazies, too, and therefore in this sanctuary the reign of terror was over for him. A blond Dutch therapist (I thought of Bol’s lost love) was summoned by the guard at the gate for additional reassurance, the guard and the retired policeman meanwhile translating.

  Thus I was able to unload the older boy—but not Otim, the frail, small one, who, devastated by Margaret’s abandoning him for her own family, clung to me, raucous and horrified that retribution for all the bad he’d done must now be at hand. Luckily, the exhausted but pretty Dutchwoman, the compound guard, and even my new friend already understood approximately what graphic horrors the poor child must imagine he deserved punishment for.

  “Look,” she said, “keep him with you until tomorrow.” When—nodding at Ya-Ya—I asked her, by the by, if there might be an eye surgeon attached to the hospital in town, she, with her hand at her sweaty collar, raised her brows like a burlesque comedian.

  The retired policeman obliged me by taking Otim in his arms as we drove to the Gulu Hotel to see if one of their cottages was available for all of us to crowd into, but nothing was: just a room for me. The two women I’d brought from the war zone, with the child who’d been burned and the other child with orthopedic difficulties, hadn’t visited such a l
arge town before, or any foreign country, so they pleaded with me in sign language not to have to trust the old cop to take them off somewhere else to spend the night. Instead, he arranged through a friend among the security guards for all of them to sleep right in my Land Cruiser in a far corner of the parking lot, once they’d gotten a bite to eat. Not knowing Dinka, Arabic, or Bari, he couldn’t speak to them directly, but he signaled significantly that the soldiers here might feel trigger-happy if they wandered anywhere in the dark. Somebody then gave him a lift home; and I had the room blessedly to myself for a spell—bathing, boozing, watching CNN via the satellite hookup. I did try going to the bar but found my black-and-blue sentiments too close to the surface—I turned beery and teary when a stranger asked where I’d been. I had Ruth’s, Father Leo’s, and the Maryknolls’ letters to mail as soon as I got to Kampala, but none of my own. So the floodgate opened. I wrote my mom, and to my former wife. Then came a timid knock. It was Ya-Ya with the little LRA boy, Otim, sobbing; he could neither sleep nor abide his frightening dreams. Having no twin bed in the room, I pulled the cushions off the armchair for them to use as pillows on the floor and muted the television set, which even so was miracle enough to quiet him right away. We all fell asleep at about the same time with it flickering blue and white; or he and I did. Ya-Ya may have stayed awake in order to marvel some more.

  By morning the strain caught up with me. I simply didn’t want to get up; had breakfast brought to the room and sent Ya-Ya out with money for the others, while the little boy, cross-legged, safe in the corner, watched the TV and ate flatbread with mango jam. Truth to tell, my mind was fixed on that Dutch NGO girl in her twenties in the unironed work shirt and shapeless jeans, her face so tired, but so very nice! Was she lonely? After reserving my room for another night, I soaked again in the tub. Eventually, we all swung by Margaret’s zinc-roofed tukl to see how she was doing—she had never seemed happier!—and to ask if she wouldn’t take on the care of little Otim for a while, as he adjusted. But I was secretly delighted when she declined because it meant we could go on to the camp for rehabilitating child soldiers, where the Dutch lady should be on duty. I’d dreamed, indeed, that I was traveling through the channels of my own amputated leg toward a meeting with her, then reached her blond wreath of shoulder-length curls, and her kind smile, to confess that her shipment of grain had broken and spilled in crashing into me.