Children Are Diamonds Read online

  “I don’t know who Herbert is. I’m with the Baptists.”

  “Great. You’ll see what a fine job Ruthie does. She ought to get a medal or a million dollars.”

  “From Mossad?” he said, teasing.

  “We do a good job, but I’m a temp, unlike Ruthie, and I meet a bunch of people. Even CIA.”

  “That must be titillating for you.”

  “I’m a temp,” I repeated, more disarmingly, not wanting to jeopardize his view of Al and Ruth or make our trip unpleasant. “A soldier of fortune.”

  He laughed. “Bully for you. And I’m a Bible-thumper.”

  Over supper, in a chesty soldiers’ joint that Museveni’s troops frequented, with rifles stacked in the corner and a wheezy jukebox, Craig—no offense taken—tried to get me drunk on Kampala’s Nile beer. But he mentioned with genuine concern that if the Ebola epidemic at Masindi grew any worse, the road our food trucks followed might be blocked by the quarantine—it had climbed toward thirty deaths now. Both Gulu and Juba had had their own Ebola emergencies in the past, I said, and people died so fast the virus didn’t fester. Unlike AIDS, it burnt out quickly.

  The do-gooders, whether gimpy or gaunt, I usually traveled with seemed to look for signs of malnutrition wherever they were, even in a bar; they’d notice rags on a rib cage, as if on automatic pilot. But Craig, in his “BAPTIST FELLOWSHIP” white T-shirt, had a sort of military bearing. Or was it just that he had better gym machinery when he was at home? The soldiers loafing around were noticing his posture or physical conditioning, suggestive of a SEAL or a “security contractor,” perhaps, in civvies. He wasn’t aggressive, though, even when a jolly, antic sort of fellow tippler, an African, began snapping “souvenir” photos of us.

  “I sell ’em to you,” he explained. “When I develop them. For your scrapbooks. When you come back.”

  Of course we hadn’t said where we were going or if we were going anywhere. Craig waved his hand in front of his face, halfheartedly attempting to cover it. “You wait till you’re in Khartoum next time, in some dungeon in a ghost house, with your hands tied behind your back, and they show you those,” he muttered, finishing his supper of fried potatoes, chicken, boiled beans in a few efficient gulps. “See you later, alligator.”

  Two officer-looking types in civilian clothes sitting at other tables stood up to join him, and soon I heard the grating engine of their jeep recede. Since it was not important that we hang out together, after checking on the PAF’s Land Cruiser, I went to sleep. A guard had the hotel parking lot under surveillance.

  The streets of Gulu, a garrison town, were orderly, with clusters of barracks, a motor pool, a quartermaster’s warehouse, a prison, and off-duty soldiers strolling—an island of short-hop traffic in contrast to what had otherwise been for me a solitary drive—when we got under way bright and early. We sped through more deserted forests, in a free-fire shooting zone. Uganda’s guerrilla wars pale only by comparison with Sudan’s, and I asked if Craig’s new friends last night had told him who our photographer represented.

  “I guess they don’t mix business with pleasure,” he answered, without disclosing whether he himself might have. I said I’d noticed that the plainclothes police circulating in Kampala had crueler faces than the ones in Nairobi. So even though Museveni was a much more civilized dictator than his predecessors, he must not have cleaned house. They looked like torturers; the humor inscribed on their faces was blistering.

  “It’s not something I know about,” Craig answered again. He missed Houston’s shrimp dinners, he said, the scent of the bayous, and the cosmopolitanism of Washington, D.C., where he’d once taken a couple of courses but no parish assignments, he told me.

  Northward toward the village of Atiak, we saw sparser hamlets, fewer footpaths or human disturbances of any kind, and only a single straggly infantry squad patrolling, at one point. But it was lovely broken scenery, often wooded and hilly, Africa at its lightest, if you like the short brushy views that maintain the mystery: eight-foot yellowish thickets that would conceal guerrillas (or “Charley,” as Craig put it) until the last minute—or a lion, for that matter. Somebody had run over a python, but nobody had eaten it. Speke and Stanley, Grant and Burton had traversed a similar terrain, and rather as in that simpler era, white men were not a special target in these quarters. You could be shot by accident or mistaken identity or because of your own reckless behavior, but not for a calculated purpose.

  When I asked Craig about Vietnam, he said he’d “found his faith there”—which, if you doubted whatever else he claimed, was mildly funny. But he didn’t act like a war junkie, or the gunslingers that private companies hire to protect their installations in Africa. He talked about airports—Amsterdam’s duty-free shops were the best—and the British parliamentary system, where you could change your government’s leadership more swiftly, and how Khartoum’s relationship with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, which fluctuated pro and con, had been the determinant of America’s attitude toward Khartoum: something any newspaper reader knew. Although I wanted to test his knowledge of the Bible, I hadn’t enough myself to do so. How mid-level was he, I wondered: this product of the evangelicals who sent us our money but were also glad to oblige the agency in any way they could? I didn’t want to offend him, having no desire to be catechized, myself, or to rattle the cage of anybody who, come to think of it, might possibly be able to access Interpol on his laptop. I had indeed been a middle school history teacher when in New England, but I’d also left Alexandria, Egypt, for Cyprus one time in a great hurry with my girlfriend’s leotards stuffed with greenbacks because we’d just been watching, to our surprise, on CNN, several ships of the international transportation company we worked for being bombed to smithereens in Umm Qasr, Basra’s port, during the 1991 bombings of Iraq (the Iraqis had embargoed them). And so, realizing that our outfit was going to go bankrupt very shortly, we’d emptied the local bank account we had signing privileges for. And from Cyprus via British Airways to the hospitality of Heathrow, never so cash-rich before or again: I can’t go back to Cairo—big deal.

  Atiak had a police station, where we had to show our passports and permits for the paperwork we would display at the army post ahead, on the border with Sudan. It was a bare-shelved town, built for trade as the last village in Uganda on the road, but the war had obliterated those opportunities. While stretching our legs, we bought candy, pens, notebooks, soda pop, and other odds and ends to cheer up Ruthie’s people a bit. Also nine live chickens with their feet tied, to stow underneath the front seat. Two civil servants, a teacher and a cultivated customs man, begged us to intercede for them with the bureaucracy in Kampala when we got back. They hadn’t been paid for six months—were they forgotten, or was their money being stolen? The teacher at least was a local Acholi, being fed a daily bowl of posho by his pupils’ parents, but the inspector, painfully frail, with crispy white hair, a Tororo from far away, and marooned at this defunct crossing point—but who wanted us to know that he had read Charles Dickens—was not so lucky. He had neither pupils nor grandchildren to take care of him. More beggar than patriarch, he tentatively, then righteously, tried to wheedle a bribe out of us, in order to “clear” our load, but the police chief laughed at, then roared at him. I felt a twinge on his behalf, driving away. How did he eat?

  Craig had jogged through Gulu early this morning with one of his military friends from the night before, a tour during which the guy had lent him a few useful names to drop with this police chief as well as at the army post ahead. He’d arrived in Gulu “by crop duster,” he said, “the same as your Ed’s.” And “the Pearl of Africa,” he quoted Churchill on Uganda, though Tororoland, where the customs man came from, was very pretty, he said. But we’d entered a no-man’s-land without settlements—primeval after a few huts at Pabo—and I spotted one of those super-sized eagles nobody sees anymore, ripping at the mongoose clutched in its claws, as it flapped toward a bluff. A trotting jackal looked up enviously. The vegetation, too, wa
s moving significantly, not from a breeze. It was a savory-smelling, dry-season jungle, with elephant grass as tall as an elephant and zigzag bluffs of distant relief. At one point we saw six dispirited foot-soldiers, with bolt-action firepower, resting under an umbrella tree; but no civilians. Later, what I thought was a waterbuck, or one of the other meaty antelopes, crashed away. This was the center of Africa, choppy, leopardy, where an infinity of species go at it for sunlight and space, but emptied by war of the creep of modernity.

  The army post, once we reached it, was encircled by wire but not trenched for combat, as if the soldiers and guerrillas roundabout were engaged in a live-and-let-live charade. Nevertheless, a handful of gingerly hangers-on had congregated outside the fence to be near the soldiers’ protection, but took pains not to offend them. I noticed, for instance, as we waited beside the gate after submitting our papers to the sentry, that locals who passed had to remove their sandals and walk by with footwear in hand as a sign of respect or be beaten with clubs. Nor were we allowed to enter, though our shoes could stay on.

  After keeping us waiting for the requisite half hour or so in the heat to prove that whites received no special consideration from him, the commanding officer stepped to the door of a cabin fifty yards away and waved us toward the real no-man’s-land. Ten miles or more of forest stretched to the international boundary, and appeared to have been abandoned to the elements long ago: where you truly wouldn’t want to meet anyone. For safety’s sake, in our cream-white vehicle, we were unarmed. That’s how you don’t get shot, because if people stop you, they know you’re always unarmed. To cut the tension, I joked about traffic driving on the “British side” in Sudan, so we might as well switch to the left lane now. Finally we rattled across a rickety-rackety pilings bridge over the Unyama, a tributary of the Nile, and its swamp bed, into Sudan People’s Liberation Army territory at the town of Nimule. This was a sketchy, streamlined checkpoint, and we were quickly cleared by a bookish clerk. We’d each obtained a “visa” earlier at the rebels’ office, back in Nairobi, and there was the brusque sense of discipline of a war zone. It was not only a hamlet but a supply point for the rebels; and a firing squad here had recently executed twenty-two of their own soldiers for the sin of being Nuer, not Dinka, after the tribal split had occurred. Ruthie had sounded apoplectic over the radio about this.

  I was interested in whether they were expecting Craig as more than just another aid worker. His visa—a cardboard placard six inches by eight, like mine, with a passport picture stapled on and the signature of the revolutionary cadre, “Jane,” who had validated him—listed him as being a pastor, the occupation he had given her. So the Dinka lieutenant, who in age and attitude resembled a university graduate student, asked noncommittally if he was “going to preach at all.” Craig responded genially, and we continued on, although I did remark upon not having seen his Bible.

  “The little gray cells. The gray matter,” he answered, tapping his head.

  I’d shifted to the left side, from Uganda’s right-hand driving, but of course there were no other cars. Yet one sensed more of a belt of military control on the road than in slipshod Uganda, whose anarchic areas were exhausted, spotty, disillusioned. Bandits wouldn’t kill you where we were, or even a lion; though, on the other hand, the SPLA entry officer—that studious young man who’d looked up from his novel to clear our papers—had pointed out his window to a tiny herd of five elephants at the bend of the bank down below on the purling Nile and told us they were being preserved to draw “ecotourists,” once the rebellion had established their new nation. Nimule had been the scene of other ugly internecine episodes at the time of the split that had broken the momentum of the SPLA’s offensive against the Arabs, but now he wanted peace.

  I asked what Craig knew of the course of this war, as we bounced north, trying to guess what must be a wider experience of conflicts than my own. Central as well as Southeast Asia? Ethiopia and Angola as well as the Congo? Here they had martial law but starvation. We could smell the burnt grasslands where rodents had been rousted out of their burrows to be eaten; see skinny boys with slingshots after the last bush birds or grabbing a grasshopper.

  “Our focus isn’t on the war,” he said, although I didn’t know which employer he was pretending to sound sanctimonious about.

  “Do you have family?”

  “Yes, high school age. My wife’s a nurse. They’re in good hands.”

  “Has she ever been over here to work?”

  “No, no,” Craig murmured, as if that were absurd. Politely, he asked my own status, which was divorced. “Are you sorry?” he asked. When I shook my head, he asked about Ruthie.

  “She’s the salt of the earth,” I said, so he could judge for himself. Maybe the rebels would cut her more slack the more visitors she had.

  A few wattle-and-daub, straw-roofed, round tukls of the local Baris had shown up by the road—settled abodes, by the look of the small gardens in back for millet, cassava, peanuts, sesame, and the three or four flourishing banana trees. It was hard to know if they’d been left unstripped by the Dinka soldiers for appearances’ sake, since they were alongside the road, like the little collection of elephants left at Nimule, for future tourists, although tusks bought Kalashnikovs, just as surely as bleeding the Arabs procured them from Mossad. When Craig asked where the camps were, I said farther on. “So they’ll be too far to walk to Uganda without getting caught.”

  He didn’t reply, and I didn’t either for a while.

  “Cynics say they’re ‘farming’ them for food,” I informed him, “because we or the other NGOs have to bring it in for the civilians or they starve, and the fighters go to each family at night and take half.”

  “And what do they say?”

  “That they’re building a black-African, non-Muslim nation, instead of being peons to the bigots in Khartoum, and everybody should participate. Women and children, too, should remain on the soil.”

  “Not just the shooters?” he remarked with amusement. “It’s an argument, isn’t it? Starvation instead of sharia.”

  “Yes, but some of the folks would rather be allowed to get to Kenya, where the U.N. would feed them. Have you seen a lot of camps?”

  “I’ve been around the block,” Craig said. Not the glassy type who might be smoking a pipe in a faculty club next year like Herbert, he didn’t have a brutal air, either, like a former “shooter” detailed to a CIA consultancy.

  “The Catholics have an operation near us—and some Norwegians. Plus, the publicity you’ve read goes to the Bible Belters who buy slaves back from the Arabs for fifty dollars apiece. They fly over us because they need to reach the front for the exchange to take place. If there is a front. The front moves.”

  He knew that the U.N. had already pulled back to Kenya after four of their people had been killed by the SPLA, as had a main-stream Protestant group, also. The Dinkas’ commanders were controversial. He said his exit wasn’t planned. He would charter “a crop duster” to pick him up if I wasn’t going out.

  We fell silent because we had begun seeing devastated women by the roadside, and I noticed Craig’s lips moving, possibly in prayer. Maybe he wasn’t an Agency bruiser. By devastated, I don’t mean they were living skeletons, but these were people who’d been moving— walking—for years. May have had five or six children altogether, and been carrying the small ones who had survived for hundreds of miles, seldom finding enough to feed them. Walking from a home ground like Wau, Aweil, Rumbek, or Gogrial, west of the Nile, across the savannah and then the swamps of the Sudd, to Ayod and Waat, on the Jonglei Plateau, east of the great river, gradually losing their cattle herds to the enemy or by attrition all the way along, cattle being the traditional axis of the Dinkas’ culture. The cattle shot or rustled, by a MiG from the air, or on horseback (the Arab tribesmen rode, the Dinkas walked). Harried on into Ethiopia, hassled and chased to Gambela, where the army and Arab militias couldn’t follow because Addis Ababa was aligned against Khartoum. That was t
he first half of the story, and, depending on when they arrived, they’d had a year of handouts before Mengistu, the dictator there, was overthrown and the SPLA and its refugees were chased out of Ethiopia, too. Then they had to walk back, under fire off and on much of the way.

  Where the Aswa River flows into the Nile, the first of these new camps was laid out, and Ruth, on the radio, had asked me to swing through for a survey because her jeep was up on blocks and she couldn’t. Hunger, not discipline, is generally the problem in this revolution, so a looping track was laid out with orderly mud habitations, the people in front of them hoarding their energies. Children who hadn’t died of dysentery during the trek back from Ethiopia were playing with a saddening lassitude, the mothers looking haunted by the toll of the ones not alive. It’s not a sexy sight, such gaunt and lackadaisical grief. Wartime rape is motivated by unexpended adrenaline and sadism, not because there are any “dolls” around. A war correspondent—a Brit who runs with the rebels in several countries—once told me in a bar how you’re so pumped up you have to do something.

  I didn’t slow down, in order not to precipitate a rush on the car by people thinking we had food to distribute. Even so, the kind of boys who will run out from the brush with their last strength at the sound of a motor to represent their families showed up. Not that they were that far gone today; but I’m speaking of a type of boy who would die to bring food to his mother and little sisters and brothers and will brave the Nile’s crocodiles after water lilies you can eat or to find a frog or fish. I told an old man who I knew spoke English that, alas, no trucks carrying corn were behind us: not to wait anticipating them. But we did have medicine for an epilepsy patient in one of these huts, and malaria medications, if they came to Ruthie’s during office hours.

  Five miles up the road, Ruth in her sun hat was “talking to the line,” as we used to say, telling them in fractured Arabic that unless somebody had just broken his arm, she was through at the clinic for today. Attlee, the Kikuyu from Nairobi, glowered like a bodyguard beside her—small protection, really.