Children Are Diamonds Read online

  You draw up lists of refugees, so no one gets double their ration by coming through the corn queue twice. Use ink stamped on the wrists if you have to—if their names are always Mohammed or Josephine. And you census the children, as well, and weigh a sampling of them in a sling scale, plus measure their upper-arm fat, if they have any, with calipers to compile the ratio of malnutrition in the populace, severe versus moderate, and so on. I’ve helped inject against measles, tetanus, typhoid when not enough licensed people were there, having been a vet’s assistant at one point in my teens. I’ve powwowed with the traditional clan chiefs and tribal healers, the leopard-skin priests and village shamans and elders, and hard-butt young militia commanders, and have delivered babies when nobody competent was around. I’ve squeezed the rehydration salts into babies’ mouths when they were at death’s door, and mixed the fortified formula that you spoon into them, and chalked the rows of little white squares in the dirt where you have them all sit individually at their feeding hours so that every one gets the same amount of protein, the same units of vitamins A, C, E, B, calcium, iron, out of the fifty-five-gallon steel drum you’re stewing the emergency preparation in. Hundreds of passive, dying children sitting cross-legged in the little squares, waiting for you to reach each of them. You don’t think that breaks your heart? Chalk is never gonna look the same, even when you’re teaching sixth grade again.

  So, I’d met Ruthie one time the previous year, when her group, Protestants Against Famine, received a shipload of corn at Mombasa and needed to distribute it fast because of limited warehouse space. In fact, the sheds were full of other organizations’ beans and sorghum and corn, storehoused for Somalia, and it was expensive to guard outdoors, against the nightly pilferage, or protect from the rains. Better to have the pilferage going on close to the refugee camps than in Mombasa, anyway. I was hired to supervise part of this hasty dispersal. PAF had eight or ten small splinter missions in eastern and central Africa, all serviced from Nairobi, and I took the overnight train down to the coast, getting a compartment easily at the last minute because of tourist cancellations after a washout and a wreck two weeks before, in which a lot of people had been killed. A hundred and seven bodies were trucked back to the capital and displayed for identification on open tables, naked or practically so, in the Nairobi morgue. I’m ashamed to say I went to stare, like every other rubbernecking lout in the city, because, along with the zaftig Africans laid out here and there among the less intriguing corpses, was a Nordic-looking white girl, as if at some dirty peep show. Her passport, in her purse or baggage, had washed downriver like everybody else’s after the crash, so the authorities, instead of sensibly turning her remains over to the Swedish or British embassy, decided, perhaps with relish, to treat her just as bad as everybody else. That was before my phone call. So, on the same railway route, after enough jerry-built repairs had been performed to get us across that particular river where it joins the Athi, I felt doubly regretful, as if I were going to be lying on that selfsame slab myself pretty soon, and serve me right. Not to mention, coincidentally, the news from the PAF office manager, Al, that I ought to be forewarned that one of their mission women, Ruth Parker, had recently been captured at an isolated clinic in Sudan by a rump (“no pun intended”) guerrilla group of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which had overrun the clinic in order to seize the supplies and medicines. But eventually they’d turned her loose to walk naked (“as is their wont”) twenty miles south to the nearest outpost that had white people at it. Whether she’d been raped, like the Maryknoll nun I’d mentioned earlier, he didn’t know. (“Couldn’t ask over the radio, could I?”) But since she was refusing evacuation, he asked me to try to evaluate (“Yes, I know you’re not a therapist”) her state.

  What with the sudden cancellations, I got a roomette for the rattling rail trip across the lion-colored gamelands of the Athi Plains—wildebeests, zebra herds, tommy gazelles, and a cherry sun when it sets—down to the sisal farms, sugarcane fields, and coconut palms on the coast. I thought I might have the adjoining accommodations to spread out in, too, on account of the scare; but no, just as the conductor was about to hoist the steps, two German business types came huffing-puffing along the platform toward my sleeper, hauling wheeled suitcases, with two brawny, blowsy African women keeping up with them, panting and hollering bye-bye, who were obviously going to stay behind. The Germans, in German, appeared to be amused by, but at the same time now wished to be well rid of, them. And just then one did turn back, as if giving up the hope of wangling a parting tip for her services performed, muttering as much in Kikuyu to the other. But the bolder woman, after hesitating, pressed ahead. The Germans were wrestling their bags up the stairs into the vestibule, but she called out, “Please take me! I’ve never been to Mombasa. I’m a Kenyan and yet I’ve never been to Mombasa!”

  It’s a refrain I hear often in Nairobi. Americans will be standing around in safari togs—twill pants, brimmed hat, open-collared tan shirt—and the desk clerk, bellhop, taxi driver, or restaurant greeter, recognizing me as a regular, will say with more than a twist of irony: “You know, I’ve never seen an eland or a leopard.” So, speaking again in English, which was apparently their lingua franca, she pleaded: “Save money! You can fuck me there instead of new people.”

  The laggard of the Germans, who looked more sensual in the shape of his mouth, was tempted. He let her mount the steps, though motioning to the conductor please to wait until they’d made their minds up. He glanced into the compartment their tickets had paid for, then at me for a reaction, because their side door opened into my own space.

  “Save money. You can fuck me there instead of new people!”

  “Are you broad-minded?” he asked me. I nodded, so he nodded and turned. “Must go back on the bus. We fly to Europe,” he explained to her—the bus of course being joltier and cheaper. Probably about thirty, she’d never ridden on a train before and was so eager that she promised him she’d sleep on the floor. She opened a window so she and her friend could squeeze hands and exchange purses because the other woman’s was bigger and had more inside.

  Otto, the German who was her champion, told me he was a vintner, his pal a hydraulic engineer. As the train began to rollick and roll, he pumped his arm like his joystick. “Ava, maybe,” he said to her, “the rocking will make me come too fast.”

  Ava—as she called herself, she later told me, because a customer who liked Ava Gardner had dubbed her that—assured each of us that he was “very strong, very strong.” A tall highlands woman from the Nairobi slums, she was excited to be speeding along in this famous Mombasa sleeper train—not just a jam-packed, plebeian, pothole-bumping bus—and on the same railroad roadbed where we could see thousands of her fellow citizens traipsing home at this evening hour from their jobs downtown. I asked her where she lived, whether she had walked beside the tracks innumerable times into or out of the city herself from Mathare, a railway-siding slum, to save the bus fare, like all these countless men in office shoes and shabby, respectable suits using the cinders as a thoroughfare. She smiled and waved her hand, only vaguely agreeing. I didn’t ask whether she’d told the Germans about the crash, or mention it myself. The lower and upper berths where they were going to sleep fascinated her, and the windows, with a cooling, exhilarating wind, despite the muddy fetid slums going by and people in torn jerseys shitting in the open—until the limitless horizons of the veldt began.

  “I want to see a lion,” she said, when I pointed out how each railway section master’s bungalow was fenced high for protection.

  The dining car had spacious windows, too; they complemented the table linens, crystal glasses, and silverware, although we kept them closed so our soup and rounds of beer and plates of fish and beef would stay clean. Sunset bled into dusk as Ava ate a Herculean meal, reaching over exuberantly to finish the leftovers on each of our plates, even to the last string bean or sliver of fat and strand of carrot or dab of mashed potato. This was a banner trip, and she wouldn’
t deny herself any of its perks. The attitude of the waiters and other diners didn’t faze her. Yes, she was going to be able to handle all three of us who were at the table with her tonight, if I was given to her as well—though of course I didn’t intend that.

  Sitting next to her, facing the grinning Germans, with their vacation fares (this jaunt was part of the advance package for them, Otto said, and Ava’s company was only costing them an extra coach ticket because she was going to sleep on the floor), I was only nonplussed when I tried to ask her a serious question, such as what she thought of Daniel arap Moi, the nation’s president, or if the accent of the Mombasans, when they spoke Swahili, would be recognizably different. She apparently thought I was patronizing her. Bristling, she stared at me as though to say Do you think I’m an African? But, realizing I meant no offense, she would then put her hand on my knee and slide it to my crotch, to reassure me that she was competent to handle everything.

  Munching cake, after Ava had finished the trimmings off the steak on their plates, Otto and Hans kept talking about getting inside her after supper, pistoning their fists. Should we rename her Betty, after Grable? We could decide when she was naked, during the gymnastics, when they could see her legs. Meanwhile, outside, a maintenance shed occasionally provided a bulb or two in the darkness, where a generator had been placed. Our twenty yellow-lit railway cars coiling raffishly around the curves behind a blackplumed engine was a more glamorous spectacle, and we might hear kids faintly shouting from a hovel beside a campfire. At first I’d be alarmed on their behalf—they sounded as if they were dashing toward the train (was their mother dying in childbirth?!)—till I realized they were only wildly seeking to register their existence on our consciousness.

  We had three hundred miles to go in about ten hours, from the relatively recently British-built city of Nairobi (previously a Masai watering hole) to the Arabs’ eleventh-century port settlement on the Indian Ocean, which had been conquered by the Portuguese five hundred years later. Ava’s English was better than that of Otto and Hans, and she knew a smattering of German, too, so she could translate a bit when we talked European politics, besides quizzing the waiters for us in Swahili or Kikuyu while reaching out to finish off a rind of cheese or scrap of cake frosting on anybody’s plate. She took my mind off the train crash and rested her hand on my knee rather pleasantly whenever she fathomed that I might be on the point of mentioning it. Although she ate like a survivalist, she drank watchfully, clutching her purse. No one could have snatched it.

  Later, however, as I fell asleep, I could hear them fucking her in the adjoining compartment like an athletic event. Having told them that Ava could sleep in my extra berth whenever they were through with her, I hoped they wouldn’t actually wake me up, it began to take so long. And they didn’t. But I felt guilty in the morning, she looked so bedraggled from slumping on the floor through the wee hours. Didn’t even go to breakfast. Napped on a bunk disgruntledly, complaining that she missed her children; her auntie was taking care of them. Her first train trip was ending badly. “Good jig-jig,” Otto complimented her, handing her enough money for the bus ride home. Hans told me they’d decided that they wanted to find themselves new women in Mombasa who had “some India in them. The Goa eyes, the Bombay brown.”

  Barefoot toddlers waved at the train, and older kids were running to register their presence on us from the huts they lived in on the citrus plantations. It was tropical here at sea level, with vegetation rioting for any foothold along the roadbed, as I leaned out the half door of the vestibule to feel the warming wind. On the causeway to the island, Mombasa-bound workers were hiking to their jobs, much as they would be in Nairobi just now. On my last trip down, I’d picked up the companionship of a Canadian professional woman with a heavy knapsack full of asthma medications who was on the touching mission of trying to meet an English boyfriend who might resemble the one she had suddenly lost. He’d broken off with her, and from Toronto, she’d flown to Nairobi and gotten on our rattly train, and from Mombasa I soon put her on a bus for Malindi. Not that they had met in Malindi, but her beau had talked about this string of Indian Ocean beach resorts, and she believed a man like him might be found vacationing there. It was a slender and forlornly different agenda than mine, but we went together to the massive stone watchtowers of Fort Jesus and climbed into a high, snug cranny to gaze out toward the crinkly bay. She was haggard from her asthma seizures and the loss of her love—inaccessible to me, of course, when I’d knocked on her hotel room door the night before—but another of the gallery of lovelorn whites you meet in Africa who at least have the grace, I suppose, to try to do something about it. I still remember her grim, plaintive face, battling for breath, when she opened to my knock. “Don’t you think it would kill me?” she said.

  Hungry Somalis sail down the coast from Kismayu, and hungry Tanzanians drift up from Dar es Salaam, to make the warren of Mombasa’s Old Town a dangerous place. No more so than a dozen others on the continent, but its flavor combines Islamic complexities with the Hindu and the Byzantine; plus, it’s prostratingly hot. I found that our smart local fixer had already preloaded PAF’s corn onto trucks to keep it dry and had loaned the rest of the grain to other organizations, like the Lutherans’ and Catholics’, that could use it quicker and later pay us back. So we got started.

  One delivery was headed up into Turkana and Toposa country, past Nairobi (where they picked up Al), into northernmost Kenya, past Lodwar, Kakuma, Lokichoggio, to Chukudum, in Sudan near the Ethiopian border area. Another, including my own bunch of trucks, turned northwest from Nairobi, through Gilgil, Nakuru, Kisumu, and Jinja and Kampala, in Uganda, continuing from there on into the Congo, via Fort Portal. I was going to turn north, like the Nile, from Lake Victoria toward Masindi and Gulu, in Uganda, and then Equatoria in the southern Sudan. But first I accompanied the Congo trucks to Kisangani, which I always take the opportunity to do, even though my French is bad and it’s scarier than anywhere else. Thus a couple of weeks had passed before I did meet Ruthie at last: altogether a couple of months after her ordeal.

  Wiry though round-shouldered, with a short torso and wide hips, and quite sputteringly electric, as if plugged into a faulty cord, Ruth did not greet me as placidly as Dr. Livingstone had Henry Stanley. She walked in a half-rotating manner because of hip trouble, which made her look older than the color of her hair, Airedale-brown and cut short for the climate or to reduce attention to her gender, as did the unbelted smocks she wore.

  Her feeding station at Loa was in a moribund church school, built of fitted stones with a sheet-iron roof. We could imagine the stones being rolled laboriously into place a century ago by the Italian priests or monks and their convert crew; then, the original rats’ nest of a thatch roof proudly replaced later on. This section of the Nile had been delegated to the Italians to Christianize, whereas the Anglicans were granted more northerly and southerly pieces of the river, and the Belgians, needless to say, the Congo and its watershed.

  Not that the rats disappeared with the thatch. Along with a new medicine chest and personal staples, Ruth and her Aussie assistant had asked for traps, which she now set strategically, as men unloaded the bags of millet and corn and little boys collected whatever kernels spilled—as they would the rats. Except for one truck to bring me back, I let the drivers stay only overnight because they were being paid per diem, but I could report at once in a note to Al that it was Ruthie’s Aussie assistant who was having panic attacks, more than her. Yet neither was quite ready for evacuation. I had no right to raise the “R” question in so many words because a war was under way, with no one to complain about a crime to. Her captors had been Nuer—enemies of the Dinka people we were feeding, and who they themselves might be surrounded by. The Dinkas were no doubt committing comparable daily crimes up the road toward Juba a ways. Her limp did give me an opening, without being personal, to ask if they had kept her shoes when they let her go.

  “Sure,” she said. “Anything and everything.”
r />   I’d been primed to extract either of them chivalrously from their precarious position, but they didn’t leap at the offer, not even the jittery Aussie, who I should have perceived was cracking, and stuck into one of the trucks when they departed the next morning. I was still preoccupied with my trip into the Congo because my bad French had been a disaster. In the complexity of a “mission of mercy,” and a tribal web that is extravagantly hallucinatory, with Lendu massacring Hema, or vice versa, I also buy diamonds, frankly, when I’m in the Congo—which, unlike Sudan, has them—whether stolen rough from an open-pit mine or from a streambed. In your hotel room, or to your restaurant table, a guy comes sub rosa to present you with a pouch you can sell afterward to a Ganda in the Chinese hotel in Kampala, who also knocks on your door, once you’ve registered, and gives you a three hundred percent profit for defying death, going through those roadblocks on the track back from Kisangani or Bunia to Fort Portal and Kampala.

  I’d been primed, too, by Al to flinch at the hunger. But we’d arrived soon enough to prevent these skeletal scenes. I’d had a companion on this last leg north, a CIA guy, as it turned out. Three passports spilled out of his luggage when we roomed together in Ruthie’s parsonage, as he unpacked. One “Herbert” had been born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and another in Tunis. He grabbed the third away from me before I could look at it. “Are you with Mossad or our own spook?” I asked. I’d made him travel in the cab with another driver, not to be squeezed for many hours against his professorial chest on the bumpy road. But he insisted he was a genuine Baptist preacher and preached at me like an Anabaptist to prove it until I said uncle: “You know your Bible.”