Children Are Diamonds Read online

  Our wire fence, though any strong man could have lifted each post out of the ground, functioned as a sort of magic barrier. So, unafflicted by the begging that might occur outside, I used to pace its dimensions for exercise. Ruth predicted that the next time the Arabs’ tanks decided to break the siege of Juba, with extra infantry flown in from the capital to flank the armor, they would clank clear past our church at Loa all the way to Nimule with no effective opposition. The Dinka troops would run into the higher forests of untankable terrain, as they always did, but the civilians, in their panicked tens of thousands, would be tearing down the road in front of us. As a mote in the mass, it could hardly matter whether your jeep worked or not. Unless you’d gotten a head start, with no particular malice, but their spear points flashing like fireflies, they would strip you and the compound in a quarter hour.

  We were inoculating babies against measles, before the dry ice that kept the vaccine fresh was gone. But an elephantiasis sufferer was in the line. How could she have survived this long? We gave her cephalexin, for whatever that might be worth. The queue was checkered with people with rag-fashioned bandaging on, and blue robes for one clan, red for another, or body paint, headcloths, loincloths, tribal scarifications on the person’s forehead, and possibly a giraffe’s scrotum as a carryall on a rawhide strap from his shoulder. Yet he was wearing a garage-sale apron from Peoria to cover his family jewels. Having never lived in a trading town like Juba or Malakal, rubbing shoulders with Greek or Lebanese storekeepers and Africans of half a dozen alien tribes, they were amused by the church-basement, Wal-Mart froufrouerie somebody like Ruth was able to hand out from the bales of clothing she received, without finding it demeaning. She made sure no school-age child lacked clothes who wanted them, even though they had no school to go to, and every woman was as covered as she wished to be.

  Some hadn’t walked from the Nile to Ethiopia and then endured the harrowing escape back from Gambela, through Pochala—with hundreds drowning in the Gilo River, crocs in the water, but being shelled on the bank, or while swimming the Akobo after that—toward Boma; then Kapoeta, two more weeks from Boma; and Torit, two weeks from Kapoeta, the question continuously how to fuel the walk. In the Kenamuke Swamp, the local Murle and Toposa tribes, freelancers who were neither allied with the government forces nor against them, robbed or killed stragglers from any side.

  But we’d get naked Dinkas who hadn’t seen that much of the world or all this miscellaneous cruelty. They’d plunged instead into the Nile’s own infinite braidwork of papyrus swamps, when the Arabs had attacked their cattle camps, surviving on bush pigs and river perch as their cows were stolen or died, and had gravitated here by the grapevine afterward, or to join the fight. Not having experienced the catastrophic reversal in policy of the Addis Ababa government, which had cost so many thousands of Dinka lives, followed by the loss of the Nuer as allies, costing thousands more, not to mention the government coups in Khartoum, whose vacillating policies had previously pretended to advocate a multiracial society tolerant of other creeds, they were less baffled. They hadn’t attended college in the capital, worn suits in London, or maybe converted to communism when Washington and London shiftily deserted them, hadn’t served in a ministry or as chums in the army with Arabs who now, after their mutiny, wanted to kill them, like the SPLA’s leading figures. Barefoot, six-and-a-half feet tall, wearing a cape or just a kob skin covering their privates, they’d walked for hundreds of miles under duress themselves but could still negotiate with a lion until its behavior became reasonable, or bleed and milk a cow to make a balanced meal, along with merissa, millet beer, out of the mixture. They felt no inferiority to these uniformed Dinkas who had been to Cairo, Cuba, or Fort Benning, Georgia, to train. What had it got them? Their children, too, were starving, and if they yelled at you bossily, you could vanish again, naked or in your cape and kob skin, spear in hand.

  Ruth was known along the river for not refusing to treat nude patients, as the Catholic nuns did. “I’ve seen other cocks,” she said, not afraid to feel a man for a hernia, either. Naked folk, whether Dinka or Didinga, didn’t understand English, so how could you explain your objection, as she teased her Maryknoll friends? “Just treat them!” On the other hand, you could “set your watch by” how regularly those women prayed; and she’d once witnessed “the faith which passeth understanding,” when invited to an SPLA confab over at Chukudum, in Didinga country, beyond Torit, where the Maryk-nolls maintained another station, a little doctorless hospital near an empty church, like Loa’s. The conclave was a military one, a number of commanders attending, as well as the more gung ho NGOs who supported them. The problem was that the Dinkas, having been brutalized and evicted from their homeland, had brutalized the Didingas and burned their valley villages, driving them into the hills, and created a number of indigenous enemies or “spies.” And when the Antonov droned over every morning, on the lookout for a target to bomb, somebody was signaling to it with a mirror from the ground. Probably a kind of Morse code or a visual parallel to what the Dinkas themselves had developed for their radio transmissions—whose best operators talked rapidly in sequences of pops and clicks that nobody not in the know could understand. Over coffee in the clinic we used to listen to these for fun; and then whichever Dinkas were present would grin at how smart their leaders must be to have invented a language neither the Arabs nor the Americans could comprehend. They didn’t simply use Dinka on the radio because their old allies, the Nuer, now with the Arabs, knew that, as did the many Arab traders and army officers who had served for years in Dinka land.

  Anyway, this spy—who was himself either an educated Didinga or embedded with them—was signaling to the Antonov’s crew from a hillside when it cruised over every midmorning, as was indicated by answering mirror flashes originating from the plane. So when this splendid SPLA get-together with speeches was held on what had been a prewar parochial school soccer field, it wasn’t the big, slow, noisy Antonov that came chugging over to try to kill the leadership and disrupt the ceremonies, but two of the MiGs based in Juba or Malakal—roaring out of nowhere to strafe and bomb. Soldiers, civilians, and NGOs like Ruth dived for the drainage ditches. Ruth was burrowing like a mouse in the high grass, and the bigwigs scrambling in mud. Two young nuns did also, but the old one, who prayed like clockwork three times a day, just stood there upright in the middle of the field, trusting God, while bullets kicked up spray patterns of dirt on both sides of her and the MiGs’ bombs, too, exploded all about. After they’d made their second run, she’d suggested to her colleagues and Ruth, “This is over. Shall we have a cup of tea?”

  “So, she won’t know if you have a hernia! Big deal! They don’t have a surgeon anyhow,” said Ruth, recounting it.

  In our own compound, a ten day’s walk west, on the Nile, and closer to Juba, the new hub of the war, we had more shell-shocked, hungry refugees coming to our church nowadays than to those sisters posted in Chukudum, although not more than to the pair north of us, nearer the siege. The church was actually superfluous to most except as a relic where white people preferred to distribute food, but we did have a tamarind tree that was a natural gathering point, which Ruth had tactfully left outside her fence, and here a schoolteacher named Bol was conducting impromptu classes. He and I went and salvaged a blackboard from a building the Antonov had bombed, under the correct assumption it was being used by the SPLA command. Attlee, when he returned, helped us fetch and nail it up, saying Craig was on a tour and “in good hands.”

  Ruth’s “equation with God,” as she put it, fluctuated when the stubbornness that I thought was her saving grace reared up and fussed. Although she did not consider Him responsible for every famished child, the accumulation of outrages was undermining her faith. She prayed less, walked her Labyrinth more; and feeding little Leo every few hours helped a lot. “I’d wake up anyway,” she claimed. Misproportioned, he wobbled when he walked, and fixed his eyes on Ruth with intensity, when awake, hugging her thigh and hip like an oak
tree in a windstorm. She hadn’t been aiming to serve in Africa since her teens, like the Maryknolls. She was a “wash-ashore,” like me. In fact, I’d never told her that I’d heard from Al in Nairobi how she had found her mother floating in a swimming pool, in Toledo, when she was small, and then been handed around among indifferent relatives before being sent to nursing school, instead of to a regular college, like her cousins. Ruth was from southern Ohio, a pretty swath of bottomland her father had let go to seed. He was a jailbird, in fact, always phoning for bail, in Ruth’s critical memory, or else born-again at the Pomeroy church, and she’d creamed him lightly with a frying pan on her last visit. Ruth was a lay sister and glad to feel those looser parameters, able to withdraw from the commitment if she wished to. She suspected that people like her needed crises for grounding, like the proverbial social worker whose job always surrounded her with clients plagued by problems more severe than hers. She was seldom tempted by conventional sins like avarice or sloth, only (as when no task lay at hand, when she went home on leave) suicide—which was insulting to the Lord: not to be infatuated enough with His world and its opportunities for service and love.

  Bol could translate English into fluent Dinka or Arabic, as our Acholi cook and Kikuyu and Kamba assistants could not do, and wanted to practice his English, although he seemed adept enough already, having gotten a degree from Makerere University, in Kampala. In his skinny wistfulness he reminded me of the young women in that city or Nairobi who wanted to make friends, pretending to offer sex but really after money for the bare necessities or a chance to earn an honest living or carry on a wider conversation than in the claustrophobia of where they were. He was in charge of a koi, a group of a hundred or so underfed orphans, or Unaccompanied Minors, younger than the regular recruits but being trained by the cadre to dig a trench, attack a gun emplacement, and as a schoolmaster, he felt used like window dressing, because they were going to become cannon fodder and studied almost nothing else. Nor had the military people trusted him enough to let him translate for Craig, for example. Ruth and I, comparatively, were of no importance. It was not that any Dinkas opposed the revolution—some Islamists being so extreme they still tolerated slavery—but what they thought of its leaders. But if you were a Dinka and didn’t disguise your doubts, you might find yourself digging one of those pits in the ground with a log laid over the top that would serve as your prison cell. All of the black Equatorians had been supposed to rise up and drive the Arabs back to the Sahara, but instead you had the Zandes, Baris, Madis, Mandaris, Morus, Kakwas, Acholis, and Latukas lukewarm in this area, or entirely withholding their support, not to mention the Murles, Toposas, Didingas, Anuaks, Nuer (a true misfortune) and the Kingdom of the Shilluk, in the eastern regions of the south. The Nuer, ancient foes if only because their cattle-centered culture was so similar that they shared a basin of the Nile, were killing more Dinkas now than the Arabs were: foes historically so tough that the Nuer used to like to boast, in the early years of the century, that they needn’t bother carrying shields on a raid against the Dinkas. Only their spears would be enough.

  It had become a mess, but noncombatants in particular couldn’t say so, and Bol’s idealism had trapped him, because now there was no leaving. If he had stayed in Uganda after Makerere, or sidled to a nearby country such as Tanzania, or returned elsewhere from the scholarship he’d won to Moscow during the SPLA’s Marxist phase, when Khartoum was allied instead of at odds with the U.S., he would have been all right. Elsewhere, he could be regarded as a sympathetic neutral, not a traitor, if encountered by the rebels’ enforcing cadre outside their narrow band of territory. Like the other Dinka professionals—physicians, veterinarians, bureaucratic paper shufflers—who were being protected until the fighting ended, schoolmasters were scanted, yet tolerated, by the warriors for now. They had to tiptoe in advancing a proposal to improve conditions for their kids, however, because the kids were supposed to be undergoing a hardening process.

  “Studying is for later,” a sector commander remarked, glancing at our blackboard sessions under the tamarind tree. With a face severely lined, he wanted to be sure no one of soldiering age was there, and he noted my presence as mildly complicating. Once a teacher, always a teacher, you do find yourself haranguing in your mind’s eye a classroom of upturned souls even where they no longer exist—and especially when the alternative is the wetter work of a health clinic, like swabbing throats, incising pustules, changing compresses to poultice a festering wound. But nothing is cost-free in Africa. If I appeared within sight of the gate, Bol would inevitably turn up accompanied by several of his Unaccompanied Minors needing tutoring. (He may have kept one on duty as a lookout all the time.) A bomb from the Antonov at ten thousand feet had killed Bol’s wife in Wau a year ago, when that town, way northwest of us, kept changing hands. His in-laws were sheltering his children, under occupation, in Malakal, and we talked about them, or London and New York, where he’d never been and wished he was, while showing the children where they lived on a map of the world.

  Since Bol was an unassertive fellow of about my own age and inclinations (skeptical, secretive, prudent), I withheld judgment on whether this new commitment was going to be such a sensible idea. Ruthie, who hadn’t an ounce of the executive in her personality, expected to have to do everything herself anyway. When she put her foot down, it was to my suggestion that we invite him inside the fence to help. That’s why she employed the two Kenyans, and Margaret from Gulu, she said. If you took in adult employees of the country, you might have to save their lives. One of the Nuer men who had been seized, lined up, and shot in Nimule after the tribal split had worked for Ruth. It broke her up. She had been trying to sneak him out, but they ran into a roadblock and there was no disguising the tribal insignia incised into his forehead. Up in Juba, she insisted, when Khartoum’s politics reversed within the Arab world and the Americans hastily closed their consulate, they of course got out all right, but not two Sudanese employees, who were tortured to death.

  I’d instituted a sort of hospice under a sheet of canvas on the opposite side of the church from where our quarters were. On about a dozen cots lay aged people with no families to care for them, some mission-educated, who had not sought a more animist sanctuary for their death throes. Makundi, the Kamba, helped when the few bowel movements occurred, or spooned porridge and bestowed sips of water. I happened to have volunteered one time on my travels at Mother Teresa’s death house in Calcutta and knew about scratching the scalp to lend distraction, ease the passage, if you lack morphine. You couldn’t manage a hospice during a famine, but this was a respite between famines; the pace of death had moderated. Nor did I need to know what they were dying of. There were no death certificates to fill out, no cholera epidemic to report, and few children were dying, to wrench your heart.

  Craig showed up after supper, after three days, but Ruthie said good night abruptly when she noticed he’d acquired a hand grenade—“protection,” which pleased him but flew against the NGO principle of no weapons inside a compound. He seemed played out but quite invigorated by his investigations or whatever he’d been up to. A bald spot glistened hot as he lay on one elbow on the bed next to mine, in our monkish cubicle, jotting notes in a shorthand that was unreadable to a snoop and grinning at my furtive attempts to do so.

  “Have they got an obstacle course now over there? Did you show ’em how to build one?” I asked, because the shouts from the training camp on the next hill already had a different pitch, more strained and breathless. Bol’s boys had been warned of something precipitous ahead of them. “Or did you interrogate anybody?”

  “Perish the thought. You’ve got to be kidding,” Craig murmured good-humoredly. “But is it different from Laos?” I asked with genuine curiosity.

  He hesitated, surprised I’d mentioned that.

  “Yes.”

  “The warlords?”

  “Oh, everybody’s a warlord. Oliver Cromwell. Alexander the Great. Ethan Allen.”

  “B
ut are these lugs different from in Laos?”

  He didn’t answer for a couple of minutes while writing in his notebook—he had a miner’s headlamp on—or squinting at the bugs that consequently circled him or were burning their wings in the candle we also had.

  “I heard they pounded nails through one guy’s feet who they were torturing. One of their own. One of the dissident Dinkas, up on the Opari road, where my blackboard came from.”

  Craig shook his head without undue reaction. “No, I would know nothing about that.” I didn’t want to alienate and shut him up; but, no, he received the information as imperturbably as though inscribing it in shorthand for his report. I asked if he would like to lecture Bol’s collection of kids about world history.

  “My cousin does that at Rice,” he said, smiling at my effort to soften him up. “But you want a warlord story, so you’ll know what a warlord is? Okay. I was in the military: try this one. I was a corporal, and we had an airfield at Longcheng that was controlled by this anti-Commie, anti–Pathet Lao chieftain named Vang Pao. They were Khmu, a hill tribe like the Hmong—Plain of Jars stuff. And we had the runway fenced, because of course they were pouring in for help or resupply—food, ammo, meds, or wanting to get the hell out of there to Bangkok on the Hercules. If we couldn’t hold the field we were going to have to abandon them. That is, their fighters needed to hold it with what we gave them to hold it with. But so this general, this clown, comes back from a battle and hears that a girlfriend of one of his commanders has been sleeping around, and he has her spread-eagled naked upside down on the fence for people to put their cigarettes out on, et cetera. That could happen in Liberia, yes?” Craig added. “But not yet in Sudan. Neither Islam nor these guys would do it.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “And, no, we didn’t stop it. She screamed slowly, there all day, hundreds of us Americans in the area, and the officers saying, Oh, Vang Pao would kick us out if we cut her down, knowing that his resupply wouldn’t be stopped just over an incident like that.”