Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  The path leading into the village, the one the trucks had used, looked to be her only escape route. She had been the fastest runner in Nokot when she was a young girl. If she could make it just 200 yards down the road, there were large fields of elephant grass where she and the children could hide.

  As soon as there were no soldiers in sight, she eased out her door, hurried toward the road, and caught a quick glimpse through her neighbor’s doorway as she passed Sama’s tukul. The young girl sobbed quietly as two soldiers pinned her down while a third raped her.

  Dada led the children stealthily from the back of one tukul to the next. She saw no one. Most of the soldiers were on the other side of the village, where they herded women and children into transport trucks. She reached the last abandoned tukul on the edge of the village by the road and paused. She edged slowly around the circular hut and searched for soldiers. When she saw none, she prepared to make her move.

  Ron Wolfson looked down at the little girl who sat in the dirt at his feet and wanted to cry. Or rip somebody’s throat out.

  But if he cried every time his heart broke for a brutalized child, or a dead baby, or a slaughtered villager, he wouldn’t be able to do what he’d come here to do.

  And if he went looking for somebody’s throat to rip out, where would he start? The Murahaleen raider who burned down her village, killed her parents and carried her away? The slave trader who sold her to the highest bidder? The master who bought her? The government that condoned it? Where would he stop?

  He knelt beside the vacant-eyed child, flipped the catch on his camera case, reached inside and took out his battered old Nikon. He slid the camera strap over his head and around his neck and wiped the sweat out of his eyes on the dirty sleeve of his shirt. Was it hotter today than usual? Better question: Could a—Masapha would say “pampered”—American from a little Indiana town on the bank of the Ohio River ever get used to the frying-pan heat of Africa?

  The blond man moved so the glare of the sun was at his back, set his knees in the dirt and made his body a human tripod. Then he put his game face on. I have to tell this little girl’s story without any words. He lifted the camera to his eye and began to fire.

  The girl rocked back and forth as she tenderly cradled the cold, stiff body of her little sister in her arms. She was oblivious to the other refugees huddled together in groups around her speaking in dialects she couldn’t have understood even if she’d been listening. She was oblivious to the American, too, who knelt in the dirt in front of her, his aged Nikon click, click, clicking as he captured her pain on film. The child was oblivious to the blistering heat, to the stench of unwashed bodies and human excrement, to everything except her little sister’s face—at peace, finally at peace. As she hummed the ancient melody her grandmother had sung to her mother, and her mother had sung to her, she shooed the flies away from the blood clotted in her sister’s ears and smeared in caked, dry streams down her neck.

  “Some tribals brought her in this morning,” Jack Hadley said, as he came to stand beside where Ron knelt. With his red hair and freckles, the Canadian looked even more out of place in a Sudanese refugee camp than Ron did.

  “From what I understand, they found her staggering across a field in a daze, carrying the body,” Jack continued, his words colored by the Irish-sounding lilt of his native Prince Edward Island.

  Jack had told Ron about the child when the 36-year-old photographer showed up that morning to process film in the makeshift darkroom Jack had allowed him to hide in a closet behind the kitchen at CARA, the Canadian Aid and Relief Association’s refugee center near Nimule in southern Sudan.

  “The other little girl was already dead, had been for some time apparently, but she wouldn’t let them touch her. The villagers didn’t know what else to do with her so they brought her here.”

  Ron removed the 28-mm wide-angle lens from his camera and replaced it with an 80-mm portrait lens. He framed the child’s expressionless face in a couple of shots, then focused on the still-raw burns on both the little girls’ left shoulders. Click-click.

  “Those brands are fresh,” he said as he stood up and dusted the dirt off his pants. “Slavetraders don’t waste time branding captives, so these two must already have been sold. Doesn’t look like it’s been more than a few days since their new owner put his mark on them to identify his property.”

  Ron spit the word “property” out of his mouth as if the taste of it on his tongue made him nauseous. “I wonder how they got away.”

  “Don’t know, but perhaps I can find out. Let me see if I can locate somebody who speaks her dialect.”

  Jack cocked his head to one side and studied the child. “She has a certain look, don’t you think? High cheekbones, a thin nose. I’ve seen that look before.”

  Ron watched Jack disappear into the teeming city of tents, lean-tos and makeshift huts that housed more than 25,000 people who had nowhere else to go, the hemorrhage of humanity from a society that was rapidly bleeding out. The camp was home to just about every one of the country’s 597 tribes—men, women and children speaking 400 languages who had fled the plains, valleys and mountains of southern Sudan to escape the indiscriminate, brutal slaughter of genocide.

  Ron turned back to the child and decided that Jack was right. She did, indeed, have a certain look, and he’d seen that look before, too. It was the look of vacant, hollow-eyed shock occasioned by horror way beyond a child’s capacity to process. He’d seen it on children’s faces in Rwanda, in Kosovo and in Uganda.

  “You know what killed her.” It was a statement, not a question. Ron’s assistant, Masapha, had stepped up un-noticed beside him, and the smaller man’s words came out in a voice gruff with restrained emotion.

  Ron turned to face the Arab; their eyes met and locked. “Yeah,” Ron struggled to keep his own voice under control, “I know what killed her, all right. The insect treatment.”

  Idris Apot was tired, bone-weary tired. The day had begun at first light in his small field on the village communal land, where he’d hacked all morning at the ground with a grubbing hoe to break the crust on soil baked rock hard by the unrelenting, dry season sun. It had ended as evening crept into the sky from behind the forest, after he’d scattered handfuls of tiny anyanjang seeds onto the ground for hours and then gently covered them with a thin layer of dirt. When he harvested the sorghum he was planting, his wife, Aleuth, would grind the kernels into flour to make the staples of his family’s diet, including injera, the yellow flatbread Idris liked to eat hot and dipped in melting moo-yahoo butter made from shea nuts.

  The 33-year-old Dinka farmer grimaced when he arched his back and stretched his cramped muscles. He was stiff from bending his lanky, six-foot, four-inch frame almost double all afternoon as he checked to make sure the anyanjang seeds lay no deeper in the freshly raked soil than the distance from the tip of his finger to his first knuckle. He looked toward the western horizon, squinted and shaded his eyes, to gauge how much daylight he had left. When he turned from the glaring sun, he spotted wispy gray-and-white streaks slowly rising from the first evening fires in Mondala. The broad smile that lit his face revealed the gap where four of his lower front teeth had been pulled at age 12 as the first part of his rite of passage into manhood. He took in a great gulp of air that held the faint scent of rain and let it out slowly. It was good to be home, he thought.

  His village of Moinjaang, “the people of the people” as the Dinka called themselves, had just gotten settled in after their annual migration across the western floodplains to graze their herds of zebu on the banks of the great river. At the beginning of the dry season in mid-December, everyone in Mondala, except the old, the sick and nursing mothers, had gathered up the village cattle and herded them to temporary camps along the Bahr el-Jebel, the White Nile, where the annual floods laid down a rich layer of silt that produced lush, plentiful grass. They had remained there for three months, then returned home, a little earlier than usual this year, before the rains came and
the river overflowed its banks, making the shoreline camps uninhabitable and turning the verdant grasslands into swamps.

  It would never have occurred to Idris to question whether he liked his seminomadic life. He had never known any other. He had only twice ventured more than 100 miles from his home, had only been in a city once. But Idris knew that a profound peace always settled over him when he left the vast, featureless, grassy plains behind and returned to Mondala, to the hills and the forest. And he knew that the fulfillment he felt when he harvested the millet he’d planted with his own hands was rivaled only by the satisfaction of bringing home an antelope, gazelle or eland he’d tracked down and killed with a spear or his bow and arrow. Both experiences made him feel strong and capable and in charge of his life.

  Some of the other farmers gathered up their tools, and two of the older men headed up the hard clay path toward the village. They shouldered their hoes, spades and rakes as they walked along together, chatting. Like Idris, they wore nothing but loincloths and beaded necklaces. They were tall men, too—several were taller than Idris—with very dark skin, almond-shaped eyes and narrow, square shoulders. Their height identified them as Dinka, the tribe that had given American basketball fans one of the two tallest players in NBA history—Manute Bol, the seven-foot, seven-inch Washington Bullets’ center known as the Dinka Dunker. The intricate pattern of scars on their foreheads identified them as Dinka, too.

  Idris stood for a moment, undecided. He wanted to plant one more row. He surveyed the partially seeded field and estimated he would have to work three more full days to get the crop in the ground. Given the early planting, he hoped the harvest would yield a bumper crop, like the one he’d produced 11 years ago, the year his first child, Akin, had been born. He hadn’t said anything to his wife at the time, but he’d yearned for a boy. As a Christian, Idris no longer believed the ancient traditions that required a man to produce a son or face oblivion after death. He didn’t want a son to carry on the family name, to maintain the lineage link from the past, through the present to future generations. He just wanted a boy who would one day help him farm the land, care for the cattle and hunt for game, a boy he could teach to hold a bow steady, shoot an arrow straight and throw a spear accurately. He’d struggled mightily to hide his disappointment when he learned his firstborn was a girl.

  Idris almost laughed out loud at the memory. It was hard to imagine that he’d ever been dissatisfied with Akin! She’d been the absolute delight of his life since the moment the midwife placed the squirming infant into his arms. The child had instantly stopped wiggling and looked at him solemnly, her round eyes wide and unblinking. And then she had smiled at him—a wide, happy smile that planted twin dimples in her chubby cheeks and bathed her tiny face in joy. Oh, everyone said he’d imagined it, that newborn babies didn’t smile. It must have been some trick of the flickering campfire light, they said—or gas!—and they chuckled good-naturedly at the fancy of a proud, new father. But Idris knew different.

  As she grew older, that same dimpled smile lit Akin’s face whenever she saw him. She’d toddle toward him on wobbly legs, her chubby arms outstretched, her face beaming, and he’d scoop her up and cuddle her close, certain that she was the most beautiful little girl and he was the most fortunate father in the world.

  The image of Akin’s smiling face, and the eager faces of his other two children, nine-year-old Abuong and five-year-old Shema, waiting at home to greet him sealed his decision. He’d stop now; the rest of the work would just have to wait until tomorrow. He picked up his hoe and rake and headed up the clay path toward home.

  A village of about 100 tukuls, Mondala was built on a knoll overlooking the river that flowed down out of the range of hills to the north and wrapped around the east side of the village. Beyond Mondala, the river continued southeast, one of hundreds of tributaries feeding the White Nile.

  On the other side of the river, the landscape changed, gradually becoming flatter, with small stands of trees scattered here and there in a sea of grass that in some places grew waist high. It was there that the villagers hunted bigger game like reedbuck, gazelle and kudu.

  To the west and south of the village lay the woodland that supplied the tribals mangos, papayas, dates, shea nuts, guavas and kindling the women carried back to their tukuls in baskets balanced on their heads. The forest of stately mahogany and ebony trees, palms and date palms, was home to flocks of colorful tropical birds, chittering monkeys and hooting Hamadryad baboons. The villagers hunted dik dik and bushbuck there, tracking them through the woods as soundlessly as the leopards that also stalked the small antelope.

  North of the village lay the sorghum fields and the grassland where the villagers’ cattle, sheep and goats grazed. Beyond the fields, tall, rocky hills rose high above the village, with a trail winding up the side of the nearest one. Steep, narrow and cluttered with rocks, it was the only path north from Mondala.

  His stomach began to rumble with hunger, and Idris quickened his pace along the path. Aleuth would be preparing boiled potatoes and fava beans by now, and perhaps fresh injera, too. His mouth watered. As he started up the last rise in the path that led to Mondala, he could just make out the form of a young girl running toward him. The light was failing, but Idris didn’t need the sun to see the smile on the child’s face. He could see her dimples with his heart.

  Dada was drenched with sweat. Her heart pounded so hard she could literally hear it thud in her chest. Peeking around the edge of the last tukul, she could see women—her lifelong friends—and children, their hands bound behind them, tied one to the next by a long length of rope. The soldiers herded them into the transports like cattle.

  She paused to gather her strength, stood as still as the big rock in the river. Then she sucked in a great gulp of air, leapt like an antelope from behind the tukul and sprinted down the road.

  Even with a chubby 10-month-old on her back, she ran so fast she had to drag her terrified sons, gripping their little hands tight in her sweaty palms as they struggled to keep up.

  She didn’t feel the sharp edges of the stones on her feet nor hear the crying/shouting/screaming death throes of the mangled village behind her. Every molecule of her consciousness was riveted on the elephant grass that swayed in the morning breeze 100 yards away, a refuge that beckoned her and her children to safety.

  If Dada could make it to the tall grass where they could hide, she and her children would live. If she could not...

  Chapter 2

  When he stepped out of the blistering sun, the rush of cool air inside the Bata Hotel hit Ron Wolfson like a blast off a glacier. With his last reserves of energy, he gripped his weathered travel bag, reshouldered his equipment bag and battered camera case and marched resolutely into the crowded lobby.

  If the clash of incompatible cultures, the cacophony of 400 languages, the utter chaos in the city’s streets and the abject poverty didn’t do it, the searing heat in Khartoum usually reduced Westerners to a state of semicatatonic submission in less than a week. After three months in southern Sudan, Ron had grown as accustomed to the brutally hot weather as he ever was likely to be, though he shuddered to think that the scorching sun had not yet taken its best shot. Temperatures in Khartoum at the end of the dry season in May and June would reach a balmy 110 to 120 degrees, made even more enjoyable by the appearance of ferocious haboob sandstorms.

  Ron’s present state of semicollapse had not, however, been occasioned by life in a microwave set for popcorn. The issue was sleep, or rather the lack of it. After he’d snatched only a couple of hours a night of it for more than a week, he suspected he might literally be slack-jawed and drooling. His weary face, gray with fatigue, looked as worn and tired as the Nile steamer that had been the instrument of his unintended sleep fast.

  As he fought the numbing exhaustion, he wandered through the lobby and searched the passing faces for his contact from the BBC. A poof of dust coughed out of his pocket along with the crumpled scrap of paper as he checked t
he time and date once more. “Noon, 15 March, Bata Hotel, R. R. Olford, BBC.” Ron smiled weakly. The R. R. stood for Rupert Reginald. Not many mothers naming their babies that anymore, he thought. The two of them had met briefly, had a few beers together a couple of times when both were in South Africa. Ron was confident they would recognize each other. He knew he could pick Olford out of a police lineup: tall, skinny, glasses, and bald—with a really bad comb-over.

  An Arab woman wearing a powder blue, knee-length salwar kameez and a black shayla wrap that revealed nothing but her face, brushed by him without acknowledging his unkempt appearance. If she saw him, or smelled him, she pretended not to notice. Dark-skinned businessmen dressed in Western-style suits with smaghs on their heads were caught up in a heated argument about something, their voices loud, their Arabic as rapid-fire as machine guns. To Ron’s American eye, all men in smaghs looked like Yasser Arafat. A half dozen Zande porters dutifully stood by the hotel’s front entrance, and scanned the crowd for potential business. Ron couldn’t help noting that none of them had offered to carry his bags.

  The first time Ron had stayed at the Bata, he gave the establishment a five-star rating based solely on the gold standard for American real estate—location, location, location. In that department, the Bata Hotel had no equal in all of Khartoum. Half a mile from the Presidential Palace and just over the bridge from the Omdurman markets, the aging edifice offered a sweeping view of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers, a 50-yard-line seat at the birth of the mighty Nile.

  Built by a wealthy ex-patriot Spaniard shortly after World War I, the Bata featured an elegant Mediterranean-style red tile roof; spacious balconies and a peach-colored stucco exterior. Though the stucco could have done with a fresh coat of paint, the building still managed a shabby chic that made the peeling paint something of a fashion statement. Inside the lobby, an incongruent mixture of styles testified to the diversity of the hotel’s many owners in the past 75 years. Sturdy leather chairs, loveseats and couches rubbed elbows with delicate French ladder-backs, faux Louis XIV tables and porcelain lamps. The most magnificent Moroccan tile floor Ron had ever seen lay beneath the eclectic collection of furniture, and he was convinced the heavy emerald draperies on the huge windows by the door had been stolen off the set of Gone with the Wind. Where a fully stocked bar once stood—pre-Islamic revolution—a fairly well-appointed phone bank had been installed that offered remarkably good service. Large double doors on the wall past the phone bank led to what was listed in the Khartoum guidebook as a “five-star restaurant.” Ron sincerely doubted the claim, though he’d never eaten there.