Children Are Diamonds Read online

  “You were a youngster?” I asked.

  “I was. I went to seminary after that.”

  When I asked if he had later dropped out, he shot me a look.

  “Five minutes,” he reminded me. “Sweet dreams.”

  Back when her jeep had been operable, Ruthie left the vicinity of her compound only once a week, for the ten-mile trip to another compound she maintained, when possible, for chronic patients at a refugee camp up the Juba road: beyond which the route became more dangerous and led to where she had been captured. Father Leo traveled it more regularly, as well as to the troubled towns of Magwe, Obb, Parjok, and Palotaka, to the east of Opari, and Kajo Kaji, across the Nile.

  He shambled into our kitchen, when he drove by Loa, always bringing a dab of food to replace whatever he ate from our dwindling larder. Ruth kept a room vacant for his use. Her Leo’s progress in gaining weight and coordination were a pleasure to him, since he’d snatched the boy from being “recycled into vulture,” and he enjoyed the blunt-thumbed, dig-in-the-ribs bantering celibate men and women sometimes engaged in. He had been informed that he had bone cancer but considered staying out here a better treatment than going back to the doctors in Ireland, as Ruth later confided to me. So the perils of the road—the Mandaris’ self-defense militia; the Acholi Lord’s Resistance Army moving more into the mountains on our side of the border as the Ugandan army attacked them—fitted into a wider perspective for him. Nobody, not the Acholis or Mandaris, would want to kill Leo, per se. Like a leopard-skin-priest of the traditional Nuer, or a master-of-the-fishing-spear of the traditional Dinkas, he was not to be messed with by Joe Average and remained politically radioactive for a military commander, since one wasn’t likely to kill a brogue-speaking, dog-collared Roman Catholic priest even to hide an atrocity. But that didn’t mean it mightn’t happen accidentally from a mine or ambush, intended perhaps for the commander himself. He saw whip marks on people, mauled corpses, and panga cuts on the survivors, and bottomless grief for deaths that had occurred purely gratuitously during a raid to steal a cache of grain, much of which was burned, for lack of means to carry it off.

  Over a glass of wine, after giving Margaret, whose Acholi name was Atta and who was a Christian, the comfort of Communion, Leo shared opaquely much of what he’d seen—polite to Craig but more indulgently oblique with me, as a partial colleague, although religiously squishy. I found his shamble disarming, as it was so often in passing him through bristly situations where the potential for villainy was palpable; and then he’d leave the next morning as early as he woke.

  He’d delivered another child, this boy older than Ruth’s inseparable appendage, and not abandoned by unfriendly neighbors, like the toddler, Leo, but an escapee from the Lord’s Resistance Army’s herd of kidnapped children: sex slaves, soldiers, porters. He had been eating leaves and caterpillars while walking away as fast as he could for several days, he told Margaret in their common language of Acholi, which was the only one he spoke. Ravenously hungry, forlornly posted beside a scarcely-ever traveled jeep track, he hadn’t run from the sound of Father Leo’s motor because he knew the Lord’s Resistance Army had no vehicles. They chased you down on foot instead and tied you into knots and slowly beat you to death, which always took a while because the other children were assigned the task.

  Otim was his name. We didn’t immediately invent another but set a pillow on the floor of the kitchen for his head, put a pot of rice next to it for him to dip from if he woke during the night, and showed him the outhouse and what it was for. His extraordinary scrawniness did not appear to result from dysentery or any fever Ruth and Margaret could detect by candlelight, although he would certainly need worming, and his jaundiced eyes showed their yellow color better in full-spectrum illumination, after the sun rose. The brutalities of the Lord’s Resistance Army did tend to isolate its conscripts from epidemics that might have hit a normal village or refugee encampment. In the morning, there he was, occupying his corner of the kitchen, cross-legged on the floor with a conspicuously full tummy and observant eyes. He told Margaret that since he knew no white people were members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, he’d felt safe for the moment. The night before last, hyenas had circled the tree he had slept in, after all day trying to make his ten-year-old legs travel quicker than any fifteen-year-old’s who might be trailing him. He had dreamt of that, and heard the chanting songs of recruits marching or else, crammed into stakeside trucks, being ferried from the training camp up to the siege lines surrounding Juba. What was that?

  They were our protection, Margaret told him. He believed her, knowing to begin with that the Dinkas were enemies—to be either attacked or avoided—of the bunch that had grabbed him, and were located along the Nile, which he had seen from Leo’s car for the first time. Margaret next pointed at me, to my surprise, and informed him in Acholi that I would be his future helper. We peered at one another dubiously, unknown quantities, and I wasn’t of the gentler sex, nor did I understand his language. Without standing up, he reached for her skirt. She laughed and reassured him. The usual protocol was for these children, who had been force-marched for hundreds of miles through the bush, to be returned to their own country’s army at the Ugandan border, when they escaped or were freed during a skirmish. The Ugandans then eventually repatriated them to a collection point in Gulu, if they weren’t drafted for menial duties in the meantime, or hadn’t been, indeed, by the SPLA here first. That sounds cruel, but not all were fit to be shuttled home. Otim looked more like a gnome than a zombie, which is what the Lord’s Resistance Army tried to create with its captured children. Zombies in the sense that the ritual was that they should help kill members of their own families or neighbors in the village before being allowed to survive, so that they couldn’t think of running home, and eat a piece of their parents, to sever them forever into pliancy.

  I would be driving him to Gulu was what Margaret meant, so no soldiers would be involved, and no orphans’ “holding pen,” as Leo had expressed it: Leo, who had told me he was glad for his lifelong celibacy in the burned hamlets he went into, when consoling the raped widows left behind. Saint Brendan, the peerless sixth-century traveler from County Kerry, Leo’s own birthplace, and his boyhood hero, had explored Limbo, too. Leo’s gimpy, rolling gait made me wonder whether his hipbones hurt him. Otim’s sister, Margaret said, was still a prisoner, and he had seen her frequently raped, or “bred,” one purpose of that group being to repopulate the earth with righteous offspring.

  Ruth took care not to mention our acquisition of Otim over the radio, lest the sister be punished. The Lord’s Resistance Army had radios, furnished by Khartoum. Margaret could translate their Acholi, though they were “madmen” to a person such as her. And we listened to the Morse code vocalizations of the two Dinka operators, and to the Arab officers’ frequency, and to Al and another NGO administrator warning of a looming shortfall of food. Ruth returned to work, with her toddler accompanying her because he cried so desperately if she was out of sight, and Attlee to help. Craig had paid Margaret to wash his clothes for him because he was leaving tonight, presumably in a dilapidated rebel truck and via their route, which we were not allowed on, through Kitgum instead of Gulu, toward Lira and Tororo, to the airstrips in Tanzania where they got their weapons. They excluded us from all the roads at night.

  Craig was touched by Ruth, bothered that her jeep remained disabled, in fact stuck his head under the hood again, then agreed with me that we should siphon her gas into my tank before the Dinkas took it. He was antsy on her behalf, as if from what he’d learned while with the SPLA chain of command, but let no hints slip. He did point up ironically at the brazen drone of an airplane, not the Antonov we feared but the “Lutherans’ plane,” a Buffalo, which flew three times a week from Kenya to keep the two hundred thousand souls trapped in Juba fed, while under siege by the rebels we were feeding: just as the U.N. folks were feeding, by air, the Nuer, whose bands of militia were thrashing “our” Dinkas. So, from their angle
, you couldn’t blame the SPLA much for their suspicions of visitors. The French, for instance, they believed, were surreptitiously helping Khartoum through the Congo, in retaliation for Anglo-Saxon interference in Rwanda.

  “See you again.” He left on foot at sundown for his rendezvous.

  We rarely heard firing because the SPLA didn’t have enough bullets for live rifle training. They let their recruits learn how to shoot by sniping directly at the front. So we were flabbergasted, a few nights after Craig’s departure, to hear shouting at the gate and the voice of Attlee, the Kikuyu, who was on duty as our watchman at the time, shrieking with fear, a pitch I’d never heard before. With my flashlight I ran out and found him twisting on the ground, bleeding at the ears and head, and soldiers with clubs milling around. They told me—the officer speaking English—that they were searching for deserters from their boot camp and he had tried to stop them.

  “He’s right. You can’t come barge in here like this, you bastards!” I yelled. But they pushed past, looking for conscripts who had run away, as if nothing had happened, while Attlee lost consciousness and bled and jactitated quietly. Ruth was speechless, banging her fists on her hips, tears blurring her eyes, when the lanky officer in charge shone his light at her.

  “You are in our country,” he stated, in good Khartoum English—where so many Dinkas had attended the national university, in the capital, during the decade of truce they’d had. “And we are doing a police search. If I was in America and the police were searching for a criminal, I would not complain.”

  “They wouldn’t beat a bystander to death!” I interrupted.

  “They wouldn’t beat a black man?” He laughed. “Did you ever read a newspaper? Besides, he was interfering with our duties; he wasn’t a bystander. You don’t like us? The Norwegians like us better, and the Irish lady at the airstrip, so that’s a comfort,” he remarked sarcastically.

  It was true that the Norwegian NGO, run by a retired military officer who had never been able to fight in a shooting war in Scandinavia, was very partisan. He often took a video camera to sites where Dinkas had been massacred to show the armchair journalists back in Nairobi, or hurried to witness mortar skirmishes himself. The brutalities the Dinkas themselves inflicted that Ruth and Father Leo agonized about were not in his purview. Married to a willowy one, he was for the Dinkas rain or shine, and so this officer looked at us unlovingly in my flashlight beam, as Attlee died—Ruth squatting beside him.

  I wanted to leave at dawn; we certainly didn’t go back to sleep. But Ruth dug in her heels. First, we’d have to bury the poor man, once his family, via Al at headquarters, had been notified. We couldn’t transport him anywhere, although Al and Ruth had known him and his family for a couple of years. Offices had to open in Nairobi, a driver go to his house, while the body waited on a pew inside the church and job seekers who had heard the news collected around the gate. Ruth sent Makundi to size them up for grave diggers as she mused over the choice of a grassy site, near to but not disruptive of her Labyrinth, her toddler clinging to her because her change of mood had terrified him. Attlee was “not replaceable”—that acrid sophistication you could almost lean against: white being his “lesser of evils.”

  Al was so mad for a minute he was glad to tell us that the corn delivery for these camps was going to be further delayed. A low-keyed, curt assent was radioed from Kenya when the sun was at about quarter height, and a few petitioners were permitted to excavate a coffin-shaped trench, though we had no coffin. Ruth skipped her clinic in order to wash him, except for chronic patients who were receiving amodiaquine or amoxicillin or Cipro for fevers, or mebendazole worm treatments or eye-ear ointments for crying babies. She used her best sheet to wrap him in, and kept checking the grave to be sure it wasn’t “heaving,” then smoothed the soil by hand, may have thrown up once or twice, walked distractedly, and took to her bed. I had diarrhea myself and lay propped in an improvised deck chair under a fig tree reading a mystery set reassuringly in San Francisco. Nevertheless I peeked at the site repeatedly, remembering turning the first shovelfuls of flowers, thinking we shouldn’t kill flowers, before giving the implement to somebody else.

  Ruth sent away an apologetic lieutenant, not the same individual who had supervised Attlee’s beating, but wanted to lodge a protest when we could gear ourselves up for it. Fashioning a cross would be another priority.

  Makundi was close-mouthed except to wonder if Craig had “displeased them”: Was it a message? I didn’t think so, but from his perspective this was a natural guess. He said Attlee had supported at least two families, and the one we’d informed would not tell the others, lest they needed to share the death payment. Attlee’s “temper” had served him badly when the posse stormed in. Was it courage to stand up to them, or should he have recognized that they weren’t going to hurt Ruth? “Maybe because she was raped,” Makundi murmured: another explanation that hadn’t occurred to me.

  Joining my new friend, Bol, near evening at the blackboard underneath the tamarind tree was a relief, although I just sat at the side while he sounded words the children could repeat. They had no pencils with which to write, but until his ration of chalk ran out, he could show them what a sentence should look like—the lessons slow because, since they were underfed, they were accustomed to husbanding what energies they had.

  Ruth and I got high on wine, watching egrets fly toward roosts upriver and sunbirds flitting, wheeling, in the crescendo of the Nile sunset. She had set a broken arm, dusted somebody else’s gash with antibiotic powder, and inoculated two new babies but suggested we burn a little of the gas she’d given me to confront the higher-ups tomorrow. I would have wanted to invite Bol to join us on the terrace—we even missed Craig’s ambiguous presence—but knew it might not be in his best interest. We were “rinky-dink” as an NGO, she said, to be bludgeoned that way or, indeed, to lend ourselves so transparently to the convenience of an intelligence agency. I was wondering whether she might not pack it in and go back to Nairobi with me for a break, but in fairness, not to stack the deck toward that outcome, reminded her that the rebels had killed four U.N. employees recently and imprisoned the Catholic bishop. “Not just us,” I said.

  “Indulge me,” she replied. I was fidgeting, thinking of clearing out when I decently could. She followed me into the room Craig and I had shared, as if to talk more privately, and then sat on my lap when I sat on my bed, as if to cry and seek a bit of comforting. I was surprised, but not too: not enough to be rude. I remembered that around Otim’s age she had found her mother floating in the swimming pool and that the coroner had inadvertently used the term “suicide” within her hearing. But she hadn’t described the episode in detail to Al—whether there’d been a lap to sit in—since her father had been in jail at the time, in one of his periods of incarceration.

  I was game; but she surprised me again by moving my obliging, limp, and neutral hands from the back of her head, where I had placed them as if to comfort a hospice patient, to her breasts, which were quite ample, as the saying goes.

  “I’m an old bag,” she punned, and began to wriggle on me with her conception of a lap dancer’s technique. “You can squeeze.”

  I soon hardened, whereupon she laughed in triumph and stood up—“Aren’t you forward!”—but told me ceremoniously that she would see me tomorrow, “If you can handle it.”

  Tomorrow I’d hoped to consider taking off again, with my eligible passengers, such as little Otim—the traumatized Lord’s Resistance Army boy, who had indeed been forced to “eat his parents,” Margaret said—and perhaps Margaret herself—who, as the breadwinner for that baker’s dozen of related children in Gulu, wished to check on them—and even Ruth and her toddler, if she quit resisting. But now I was committed to a visit to the commander’s compound near Opari.

  Outdoors, from Aswa’s civilian camp there was drumming that night, celebrating some clan or family affair, and the sky overhead tingled with stars, the air womb-warm. Ruth asked if I was all right, lik
e a pal, her gamine face scrunched concentrically by the hardships she had witnessed.

  In the morning I blushed when we raised our coffee mugs together.

  “We need doughnuts, glazed doughnuts,” she said, smiling, two nervous eyes and a serviceable nose peering out. “Got a nix on the food, on the radio, for another day.” The light was buoyant, clean and clear, opening out toward the intricate landscape, and the prospect of bugging out on Ruth immediately because of Attlee’s murder seemed less defensible.

  Chapter 6

  • • •

  THE BUNGALOWS SCATTERED AMONG THE SPLA’S COMMAND CENTER were colonial-era but hard to find in the grown-up forests near Opari, so that the Antonov would have difficulty as well. We were fobbed off at first, only our white faces permitting us access at all. But abruptly Salva Garang, the Number Two, appeared. He’d been a colonel in the regular Sudanese army before the revolt and, with that air of authority, asked how much foodstuff we had for distribution, as though this were the point of the conversation we’d requested and would determine for him how important we were. In fatigues, rangier than the average Dinka, but with a face that indicated he had executed many prisoners, he was impatient.

  Ruth stepped forward so close to him that he stumbled backward slightly, losing the advantage of his military panache.

  “Why did your goon squad kill our man? Outrageous!”

  “I’m sorry about it. They must have lost their cool. They weren’t authorized.”

  “You bastards!” I exclaimed.

  “Murderers,” Ruth said.

  Irascibly he bridled, adjusted the holster of his pistol, then glanced at me dismissively, knowing I was just a temporary hire. He had contemplated enough corpses that emotional outbursts alone wouldn’t make him flare up.