by Ninie Hammon
Masapha had Ron’s concentrated attention as he continued. “And Khartoum would surely turn its eye looking the other direction if southern tribals are sold to northern Arabs in a government place. In fact, it would be making a good guess that Sudanese officials have certain knowledge of slave sales in the oil fields, and the government is—how is it you Americans say?—smiling on the way to the bank.”
“The oil fields,” Ron said, and this time it wasn’t a question. Ron had to admit Masapha made a good case; his logic made sensible. That didn’t mean he was right, of course, but his step-by-step theory was a vast improvement over the investigative technique Ron had employed so far. He called it the RGM—Random Guess Method. It had not served him well. But was he convinced enough by Masapha’s plan to go for it?
Suddenly, he almost laughed out loud. I need serious psychiatric care if I’m so delusional that I think I’ve actually got a choice here, he thought. Without his Arab guide’s help, the possibility of finding a slave auction downshifted from a “slim chance” to “pack your bags, pal, and head back home to Poughkeepsie.”
Ron flashed Masapha a broad grin and said the two words the Arab most wanted to hear. “I’m in.”
Masapha beamed, and Ron asked, “So where do we go from here?”
“We go toward Bentiu, by a route that is not straight.” Masapha already had it all planned out. They would travel northwest on the road, such as it was, that led out of Malakai through Talodi to Kadugli, then turn south toward Bentiu. The route would take them through the heart of the Heglig and Unity oil fields, the two biggest oil fields in Sudan.
As Masapha described where he intended to conduct his search, he picked up a coin off the rough tabletop and began “walking it” across his knuckles. “What everywhere I am hearing is that more and more it is government troops who are attacking the villages,” he said, “and not just the Murahaleen guerillas and the Fedayeens loyal to Khartoum.”
“That’s nothing new. They’ve done that for fifteen years.”
“True. But the SPLA has been making victories in battle in the past few months, and the north is sending out even more soldiers.”
“Goody.” Ron pulled back the dirty muslin that served as a curtain and looked at the river.
“My contact in the Ministry of State told me that it has been counted, like a census, and seven from every ten people in northern Sudan are Sunni Muslim.”
“That should be a great comfort to the tribals asleep in their tukuls tonight.” Ron let the curtain drop back in place. “Like living next door to the Branch Davidians.”
“Branch Davidian?”
Ron waved it off. “Just a fringe group in the western part of the U.S. who dressed hate and paranoia up to look like Christianity.”
Ron leaned back in his wood-slat chair, extended his long legs out in front of him and shook his head sadly. “My country has been blessed with the screwiest radical Christian groups and the worst religious, wild-eyed crazies in the world.”
Masapha stopped flipping the coin across his knuckles and held it in his palm. He fixed his intense, dark eyes on Ron, and there was no good humor in his voice when he spoke. “When the religious wild-eyed crazies in your country take over it, as they have taken over mine, when they do murder and rape, when they make of any people who are not like them slaves, when they desecrate and defile their own religion—and when the rest of the world looks another way to make believe it is not happening—then you can complain about radical groups!”
Ron met his gaze. “Point made,” he said quietly.
It was easy to forget sometimes that what were random acts of violence in America were everyday occurrences in a country where the lunatics really did run the asylum.
The two men sat together in silence for a few moments. Then Masapha flipped the coin out of his palm with the end of his thumb and began to walk it across his knuckles again.
“It has been told to me that the SPLA set free more than a dozen villages in just a few months past. And shot to the ground two government planes, too.” Masapha’s grin displayed the Omar Sharif gap between his teeth. “Our beloved president in Khartoum is not a happy camp!”
“Camper,” Ron corrected.
“He is not that either. And his camp is very not happy that the count of Muslims was also a count of Christians, and in the south, the number of Christians has grown from 5 percent to 20 percent.”
Ron thought about explaining camps and campers, but wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble. He had figured out that Masapha’s almost accent-free English made it appear he understood more “American” than he actually did. Instead of explaining camps and campers, Ron asked a question.
“Where’d you learn to do that walk-a-coin trick?”
“A Mabaan tribesman from the Blue Nile valley taught me,” Masapha said, and the memory painted a warm glow on his face. “His name was Sharmad Lemue.”
Masapha deftly slid the coin down from the knuckle of his thumb to the nail, flipped it up and snatched it out of the air in one motion. “He was my brother.”
Ron waited but Masapha didn’t elaborate, just flipped the coin back onto his knuckles and began to move it across again.
“And you’re just going to hang that out there like a dead fish on a stick? No explanation? You’re a northern Arab, and that makes you a Muslim, right?”
“I am not just a Muslim of culture or geography, as are too many of my countrymen. I am a believing Muslim, in here,” Masapha tapped his chest, “in my heart. I am a servant of Allah, may his name be praised.”
Ron suddenly wished he were more than an occasional-Sunday-in-church Christian. It once had been in his heart, too, with the same fierce dedication as Masapha’s to Islam. But not anymore, though the son of a preacher couldn’t have explained what happened to his faith if Masapha had asked. It was just gone, and he had long since stopped picking at the scab that covered the wound of its passing.
“So you’re an Arab from the north, and your ‘brother’ is a southern tribal, and that doesn’t strike you as odd in any way? Like perhaps people would be curious about how that came about?”
Masapha held the coin between his thumb and forefinger.
“Sharmad’s mother was the housekeeper of my home and cooked food for us, and his father was the driver of my father’s car. Sharmad and I were the same age, even our births were on the same day. I have no memory from my childhood that is without Sharmad in it. When we were boys, we witnessed many American westerns. In one of them, a cowboy and an Indian cut their wrists and held them together, mixing their blood up with each other and making them blood brothers.”
Ron smiled. He could think of half a dozen movies with that scene.
“There was a lot of that going around in the Old West.”
“And it was plain to look in the mirror that the two of us were as different each from the other as American cowboys and Indians. So we cut with a knife our fingers—it would be too much hurt to cut our wrists, and we were afraid—and we made of ourselves blood brothers.”
Masapha sat back in the chair, and even under the weight of his small body, it creaked in protest.
“My mother died when I was 2 years old, and Mama Lemue was like she was my mother. They were a Christian family, but never did it matter that I was a Muslim and an Arab. Almost it was real that I was Sharmad’s brother.”
Ron thought about telling Masapha about the death of his mother when he was a toddler. But he didn’t. He just listened. He had a sense that Masapha was edging further and further out onto a fragile thread, and if he interrupted, the thread would snap, and the little Arab would not tell the rest of the story.
“My father worked with the Ministry of State, but he stood against the extremists, and never do bullies like it when you say their bluff.”
Ron caught himself before he blurted out call their bluff.
“He was not a large person on his outside—my father—but a giant lived on his inside. Nothing scared him. Thei
r threats frightened him like a flea frightens a rhino.”
There was more than admiration in Masapha’s voice. There was awe. And a strange quizzical quality, as if he still didn’t understand the man he most admired in the world. When he continued speaking, his voice was quiet.
“Then, one day he was gone. He woke me up to say me good-bye before he went to work. He hugged me very tight, like he wanted not to let go. Always I have had curious—did he know a thing was to happen? But I do not know. He was vanished—poof!—like never he was there at all. Still, I do not know what happened to him.”
Masapha paused for a beat and then went on.
“And I lost my job teaching electrical engineering at the University of Khartoum two years ago for the reason that is the same. My mouth was running too many times to complain that only radical Muslims were allowed professorships.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I should be having grateful that only they fired me.” He didn’t sound grateful. “Many worse things there are than getting fired. Or getting killed.”
Ron said nothing. He wanted to know more, but he wasn’t sure Masapha wanted to share it. So he didn’t push, just sat quietly, waiting.
When Masapha continued, he wasn’t talking to Ron at all anymore. He was narrating a movie that was playing on a screen behind his eyes.
“After my father was gone poof, I was all alone. Just ten years old, with no family anymore of Arabs. So Sharmad’s family took me just like I was their son as was Sharmad. Mama and Papa Lemue no more had jobs, so they moved back to their village on the Blue Nile, and I was moved with them.”
Sharmad’s father had become a Christian pastor with a wide circuit of churches.
“Not even one time in all my days with them did Papa or Mama Lemue or Sharmad try to make of me a Christian. When I knelt to pray five times a day as I was taught to do, they had respectful for my prayers. I served Allah in my way; they served Jesus in theirs.”
Often Papa Lemue took both boys with him when he preached, traveling from village to village, tribe to tribe. That’s when Masapha discovered his gift for languages; his new family was stunned by how quickly he learned.
Masapha looked up at Ron, who could see him slowly reconnect with the present.
“Those years were the best of my life.” He smiled down at the face on the coin in his hand, as if it were an old friend. “Sharmad and I went to a Christian mission school. I was the only Arab, the only Muslim, and Sharmad had so much proud that I was his brother. I learned all to be learned there in a short time, and the teacher said I had very smart and wanted for me to take an examination to be a university student.”
Masapha took it, passed and left the lush green of the Blue Nile Valley to attend the university in the capital. He finished in three years, a math prodigy as well as a language sponge, and went right into graduate school, working at two jobs to support himself and going home to visit his adopted family on the Blue Nile as often as he could. Sharmad became a minister like his father, and Masapha often traveled Sharmad’s circuit with him between semesters at the university.
Masapha had leaned his rickety chair back on two legs as he talked, and he set it back down on all four. A lock of dark hair fell over his forehead, and a wide smile graced his mustached face.
“Sharmad got married, and his firstborn was a boy. He and Odella named the child Masapha.” The Arab conjured up the image of the child’s face in the air in front of him and gazed at it lovingly. “So handsome and smart was he! Even he could speak Arabic and Mabaan when he was just three!”
As Masapha talked about the boy and the two little girls that followed, Ron thought about how much he loved and missed Dan’s kids, David, Jennifer and Jonathan. He suddenly was stabbed by a pang of longing—to shoot free throws with David, to listen to Jennifer’s little-girl chatter, to play video games with Jonathan. He was so engrossed in memories, in fact, that he failed to notice at first that Masapha had stopped talking. When he did notice, he saw the look on Masapha’s face, and a hole suddenly opened up in his belly. He knew what was coming.
“The Murahaleen came in the night,” Masapha said. “A neighbor pretended to be dead and saw it all and told me of it.”
His voice was flat and emotionless, and he stared with sightless eyes out the window. “Many of the village escaped, and the guerillas thought Sharmad knew of their hiding place. He knew no place to hide, but to make him say, they beat him with their fists and sticks until no more he had a face. They raped Odella—every one of the raiders took a turn—with Sharmad to witness it all.” His throat tightened in remembrance. “They had their way with the girls, then killed them both. Still, Sharmad could not say what he did not know, so they tied him to Odella and threw them both into the river and watched the crocodiles eat them.”
Ron was so stunned and sickened he could barely breathe. Every time he thought he’d heard the worst story, seen the worst atrocity, witnessed the worst evil, the soul-less fanatics upped the ante.
Sharmad’s son, Masapha, was six. The guerillas picked him up and carried him away.
“That was eight years ago, so Masapha is fourteen now.” The Arab stopped. He turned back from the window and looked at Ron, and dropped his next words like smooth, hard stones. “He’s out there somewhere!” The edge of his voice was as sharp and cold as a dagger. “My brother’s son is somebody’s slave! Somebody owns him, owns him! He’s been beaten, branded and probably...” The last word came out in a strangled half sob. “Castrated! Masapha will never, can never...And every day, every day, I...” He couldn’t finish, just gritted his teeth, and looked away from Ron and out the window.
Ron’s heart went out to his friend as Masapha struggled manfully not to break down. He wanted to comfort him somehow, but he didn’t know how.
“Masapha, I’m so sorry.”
Masapha took a deep breath and let it out slowly, shook his head and steadied himself. And then the window on his soul that he’d opened wide slammed shut. Vulnerability vanished from his face, to be replaced by his ever-present smile. The smile was plastic, but it announced to the world, to Ron, that that part of the conversation was over.
“We must talk now about Bentiu and how we are to get to there from here,” he said, his voice shaky.
Ron stumbled, tried to shift gears. “Uh, yes...you do have a plan, don’t you?”
“A plan, yes. First, we buy a jeep.”
Buy a jeep? Ron almost choked. “Do you know how much a jeep costs?”
“No jeep, no pictures,” Masapha told him matter-of-factly. “Can we chase the slave traders running on our feet?” Masapha paused. “In a city, we could rent. But here...” He thought for a moment and then added, “Of course, if there is not money for a jeep, we could buy camels.”
“No camels!” Ron said a little more adamantly than he intended. “I don’t do camels. Or yaks either, for that matter. Just a personal policy of mine.”
Camels spit; yaks bit. He sighed. Well, it was only money.
“Where, pray tell”--Ron gestured out the window at the remote little river village and continued sarcastically--“is the nearest dealership?”
Now it was Masapha’s turn to sigh. He gave Ron a you-still-don’t-get-it look.
“There is no dealer ship to the oil fields,” he said slowly and patiently. “No river launch or steamer either. It is no water there; it is desert. We need a jeep!”
Ron put his elbows on the table, leaned toward the earnest Arab and opened his mouth to explain. But he simply smiled instead.
“You say we need a jeep, then we need a jeep.”
“I know a man who will sell to us one, if the money is enough. But you must not display to him your white face or the cost will be bigger times two.”
Ron reached down, opened his travel bag and took out a leather pouch stuffed with bills. He opened the pouch just wide enough for Masapha—and no one else—to see what was inside. Masapha looked at the money, then smiled approvingly and nodded. Ron nodded back.
“Hi-ho, Silver,” Masapha said.
Idris opened his eyes in the gray, predawn half light, and for the first time in his life, was sorry he was such a good shot. His marksmanship had always been a special source of pride. Even as a boy, he’d had a keen eye and a steady hand. His grandfather had recognized his natural ability and worked with him patiently, hour after hour, until Idris could plant an arrow in a knothole on a tree 75 yards away. At shorter distances, he was just as accurate with a spear.
As he grew older, his family often feasted on kudu, antelope and gazelle, courtesy of his skill. Today, he almost wished he couldn’t hit a zebu just 10 paces away.
He got up carefully off the mat where Aleuth still slept, tiptoed past Akin and Shema and out the doorway of the tukul. He sat down beside the glowing embers of the cooking fire, began to poke them with a stick, and added twigs and bark to rekindle the blaze. His nine-year-old son, Abuong, would be baptized today, he thought miserably, and he would not be there to rejoice with the boy because he would be hunting.
When the itinerant Christian pastor came to the village today, new converts from Mondala and two other small villages would be baptized beneath the rock cliff in the bend of the river. That evening, the three villages would gather for a celebration. And it was the task of the best hunters from each of the villages to provide meat to feed the crowd.
The hunters from the other villages would arrive soon; game was more plentiful before the sun became a torch in the sky. So Idris set his bow and larger-than-usual supply of arrows aside and went to find Abuong.
Dawn had just bathed the valley in golden light when Akin rolled over and opened her eyes. She lay there for a time and enjoyed the comfort of her sleeping mat. Then she sat up and noticed her father and Abuong in deep conversation by the cooking fire. Suddenly, the little girl was stabbed by an unfamiliar emotion—jealousy. Akin had always enjoyed a special closeness with her father. She was so snug and secure in her place in his heart that she’d never felt threatened by the affection and attention he also showered on her younger brother and sister.