Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  Leo folded the pile of bills and stuffed them into the front pocket of his shirt. He leaned his chair back against the building and continued to sharpen his knife. He ignored Idris as if he were not there and spoke with the interpreter in Arabic.

  Idris turned and left the two of them in the alley behind the bar. He had much to do before sunset. As he headed to the edge of town to find the big palm tree, it was obvious his countenance had changed. His mind was filled with plans instead of the pain, grief and fear that had darted around in his head like angry bats. He had something he had not had since he spotted the smoke on the horizon rising from the village. He had hope.

  Chapter 9

  The noon sun was a flaming torch overhead, but the man feeling his way down the path he had walked hundreds of times neither noticed nor cared. In two weeks, he had aged a year. He had eaten almost nothing, slept very little, stayed constantly on the move. His eyes had sunk deep into his skull, and his trancelike gaze was a guide wire that led him down the meandering trail.

  Idris played and replayed in his head all that had happened to him after he left the village to find a mercenary to bring back Akin. And with every replay, despair weighed heavier on his shoulders. With each rehash and recounting, the pain intensified. As long as he’d had hope, as long as he’d had a purpose and a plan, he could keep his anguish at bay. Now that he had nothing, all his sorrow crashed down on him, and he was buckling under the weight of it. His son was dead. His precious little girl was gone. He had gambled everything the family owned on a one-shot chance to get her back, and he had lost.

  A villager on his way to the river to water his zebu spotted him on the path. The gait was unmistakably Idris's. Word quickly spread through Mondala. Women who had been preparing the noon meal stopped and rose to greet him. Men at work in the millet fields set their hoes aside to welcome him home. The wounded recovering in their huts from the attack heard the commotion and came out to see what was going on.

  Aleuth was in the family’s tukul caring for a baby whose mother had been slashed across the back with an Arab saber when she heard someone call out, “Idris is back!”

  Suddenly, hope shot through her like a bolt of lightning playing on the mountaintop. Akin, their precious daughter. Akin! Riding home on her father’s shoulders! And she would grab the child off his shoulders and into her arms; she’d drink in the smell and the feel of her and hold her so very tight.

  She leapt up and raced out the door of the tukul. She got as far as the cooking fire out front when she saw him. And she knew. No one could look at him and not know. The joy and hope drained out of her like water from a broken pot.

  Her eyes filled with tears. As she watched Idris’s slow, deliberate walk, her heart went out to him. But she had no comfort to offer; she felt as dry and barren as the desert. She wiped tears off her cheeks and returned to the tukul. Shema sat in a corner, her face blank. Aleuth looked at her and thought wildly, I have lost all my children! The little girl who had run giggling through the village and chased butterflies in the field had died in the attack on the village as surely as her brother; her spirit had been kidnapped as surely as her sister had been carried away. Now, she was a shadow, a hollow-eyed doll who neither spoke nor responded to the world around her.

  Aleuth clamped down on the scream that threatened to rip her heart out, leap from her throat and roar through the village—leaving her behind, dead on the floor of the hut. She gritted her teeth to stop her lip from trembling and picked up the baby lying on a sleeping mat, held him close and rocked back and forth, humming groans more than a melody.

  The other villagers could read Idris’s demeanor, too. He had not found his daughter, that much was obvious. What other calamities might have befallen him, they were anxious to hear.

  Idris walked slowly into the village, head bowed and shoulders stooped. Men gathered in a group with their farm tools and spears by their sides, silent sentinels showing their support. Akec was among them, and he tried to make eye contact with his neighbor, but Idris merely acknowledged the presence of the men with a slight nod of his head and continued toward his hut.

  As he passed them, one of the men spoke his name softly. “Idris.” And he stopped, didn’t look at them, just stopped where he was like a leaf temporarily stuck in the reeds before it floats on down the river.

  A small, old man stepped out of the group of men and approached Idris. His hair was the color of clouds, his skin as wrinkled as leather. His name was Durak. A village elder, he was a man respected as much for his kindness as for his wisdom.

  “We are your friends, your kinsmen,” he said quietly. “We can see that you carry a heavy burden. If you will tell us, we can help you carry it. Many backs will make the load lighter. But if you try to carry it alone, you will be crushed.”

  Idris turned and lifted his gaze to the men he had known all his life.

  “It’s gone, all gone, everything I have.” His voice sounded hollow and dead. “I went to find Akin and bring her home, but I came back with nothing. No, less than nothing.”

  There was a despair in Idris’s voice that no one had ever heard there before.

  Akec stepped out of the group and stood before Idris. “What happened?” he asked, as kindly as he could.

  Idris sighed, looked into their sympathetic faces and decided they deserved an explanation. It didn’t take him long to give them one. He talked about going to Bentiu, about telling the people he met there what he was seeking. He described his meeting with Leo and his strange, toothless companion.

  “He told me to go and get my money and meet him in the alley at sunset to give it to him. I was there an hour before the sun left the sky. He came right on time. He took my money and told me what supplies he would purchase with it for the journey and advised me what I should bring. Then he said he would meet me at first light on the dock and we would go north together.”

  Idris paused. “He never came.”

  Even now, the memory still punched him in the belly. He had been early. He couldn’t sleep; he was too excited. He stood at the appointed place beside the front posts of the building that hung out over the river and expectantly scanned the dock as the dawn began to break. He remembered the tickle of fear he felt when the sun began to rise and the man named Leo was not there, remembered the growing knot of fear that settled in his belly—and grew bigger and bigger with every passing minute. First light came. Midmorning. Noon. No Leo. Idris had waited there until sundown. As the day wore on, his emotions had downshifted from elation, through apprehension and fear, to despair.

  He had looked for Leo for two days, searched up and down the streets and back alleys of Bentiu, prowled through the bars, questioned anyone who would listen to him, and used what little money he had to bribe people for information. But he could not find a single person who knew, or would admit they knew, a man named Leo with scars on his arms and a flattened nose.

  He had finally given up. He had no food and no money to buy food. He wasn’t sure how he had ended up on the steps of the mission church. He must have seen the cross. And his memory of the compassionate aide worker who listened to his story and offered him a ride was equally muddled. She was on her way to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and he’d traveled with her in the back of her truck until she’d let him out south of Bor. He had walked the rest of the way home.

  His friends saw the heartbreak in his eyes, and it broke their hearts as well. He wasn’t the only villager who was suffering, of course. Women had lost husbands; men had lost wives. Brothers, sisters and children had been killed in a bloody carnage that would forever mark the memories and souls of the survivors. But those people were gone—beyond the sun. Akin was still alive, and they did not realize how much hope they had pinned on Idris, that he would be able to do the impossible, that he would be able to save just one little girl.

  Idris turned in silence and went to his tukul. Aleuth greeted him, and they shared grief, pain and heartache with just a look. Idris had had nothing t
o eat, so Aleuth gave him injera bread and fruit; he was exhausted, so Aleuth took his small pack and put a sleeping mat on the floor so he could lie down and rest. But he did not eat, and he did not lie down. He merely sat beside the door of the tukul, too exhausted to do anything else, and stared with sightless eyes into the embers of the cooking fire. Shema did not even acknowledge his presence. He didn’t know that his face and Shema’s now wore the same blank, dead look.

  Idris and Aleuth said little to each other. There would be time enough tomorrow, and all the other tomorrows out there, to talk about their loss and figure out what to do with no money and no cattle. For today, it took all their strength to live in the moment, struggling not to look at the smooth spot in the dirt where two sleeping mats once lay. They did not speak of Shema. Tomorrow. Tomorrow they would try to figure out what to do, try to help the child. But now, she merely looked with emotionless eyes that recognized her father, but held no joy in that recognition. It was like someone had blown out the light in her soul and now there was nothing left but darkness.

  When Aleuth lay down beside her husband on their sleeping mat that night, he took her into his arms.

  “We must pray,” he whispered into her hair. “We must pray that the God who loves us will help us somehow. That he will make a way for us where we cannot make our own way.”

  So they held each other in the darkness and prayed. Neither had any sense of the presence of God, any hope that their prayers were heard. But what else were they to do?

  When Ron sat up, he moved slowly. He was stiff and sore from another uncomfortable night sleeping—well, at least lying down—in the back of the jeep. The likelihood that he had actually slept more than an hour or two was pretty slim.

  “Two days, Masapha, and still no game. You don’t suppose we heard those fellows wrong, do you?”

  The Arab did not get up. He lay flat on his back for a moment and rubbed his eyes with his fists, just like Ron’s nephews did when they woke up.

  “Perhaps our hearing of the words was not right.” Masapha squinted into the sun as it cleared the horizon. “But still is this the most excellent spot for the slave traders to meet. They proved that by coming here two days ago. Even if we did not hear the words we thought we heard, it is still a good spending of time to wait here. The slave auction pictures we took are the first ever anybody has taken, and we took the pictures here.”

  Masapha rolled out his prayer rug, knelt and began to pray shurug, the sunrise prayer. He seldom managed all five daily prayers, but he did the best he could.

  Ron climbed out of the jeep and put his shoes on after he shook out each one to make sure it contained no multi-legged stowaways. He folded his sleeping bag and tossed it into the back of the jeep. Then he leaned against the vehicle and waited quietly for Masapha to finish his prayer before he spoke.

  “Well, if we don’t see something soon, we’re going to have to head back,” he said as Masapha rolled up his prayer rug. “We’ve got enough water for three more days. Enough food for the same, though we can maybe grub up some stuff to stretch it.”

  Masapha nodded. “Three days it is.”

  They set up their equipment on the hilltop, then seated themselves a few feet behind and below its crest, constantly shifting to keep up with the small umbrella of shade provided by the handful of skinny, almost leafless acacia trees that grew there.

  The two observers scanned the horizon, dispensed hourly rations of water and waited. For entertainment, they tossed the crumbs from the morning’s roll into the air to be snatched by the circling sparrow larks.

  A sand grouse that had a large chunk of bread clasped in its beak flew a few feet into the air and then dropped it on the sand at the top of the hill. Ron reached out to pick it up and froze. A moving column of dust was progressing slowly across the desert, headed straight at them.

  The two men flattened themselves on the ground and hastily made one last check to ensure that everything was operating properly. There were no problems with the equipment, but there was a problem of a different sort. A floating advertising billboard of larks and sand grouse gyrated up and down a few feet above their heads, announcing their presence to the world.

  Ron couldn’t very well stand up and shoo the annoying birds away. But he could remove the food supply so the birds would tire of hovering and go somewhere else for lunch. He picked up the bread, tucked it into his carry pouch and tossed the pouch onto the sand beside him. Then he turned to watch the swirling clouds of dust.

  Five...six...seven...nine...eleven...twelve trucks! A dozen trucks! And maybe a couple more obscured by the dust. His heart raced. This was it, really it, this time. This was what he had been waiting for.

  The undulating heat waves on the horizon warped and fractured the image, slicing the vehicles into shimmering, horizontal layers so the convoy emerged from the swirling whirlpool of dust in sections.

  As they neared the area where the other trucks, jeeps and camels had parked several days earlier, the vehicles moved into position to form a large semicircle with an open area in the center. Because there were so many more vehicles, the line of them stretched all the way across the hollow, with the nearest one directly below Ron and Masapha’s hilltop perch.

  Each truck carried captives from a particular tribe who spoke only their own dialect. When the trucks unloaded their wares in the open-air market, buyers could select a few slaves from each tribe. It was easier to train and dominate the slaves if they were isolated, unable to communicate with their fellow captives. Absent a common language, the slaves could not plot with each other, could not band together for revenge or escape.

  Once the trucks rumbled into position on the desert floor and stopped, their trailing dust clouds overtook them and shrouded the area in an impenetrable haze. Though they could see nothing through the veil of dust, Ron and Masapha could hear the Arabs shout orders, truck doors bang and tailgates slam open. Gradually, the dust dissipated, and the transports and their cargo materialized.

  Ron swallowed hard. His fingers were sweaty as he focused his camera, and it had nothing to do with the heat.

  “It’s as bad as people have been telling us.” He was awed at the immensity of the evil. “There must be three hundred of them, maybe more.”

  The soldiers herded the captives out of the backs of the trucks as the dust cleared. Boys, girls and women were tied together by lengths of rope, and the soldiers tethered them to the trucks or to stakes driven into the ground, much like the villagers tethered their cattle outside their huts at night.

  Masapha felt a small stir behind him. He turned and spotted two hungry grebes. Bolder than the others, the birds were only a few feet away, pecking at the remaining crumbs of bread left from lunch. He waved them off, much to the satisfaction of the crew of smaller larks waiting hopefully in the tree above him.

  Ron concentrated on a group of captives in front of the last truck that had just pulled to a stop directly below them. As a guard pounded a stake into the ground, he pulled the focus in tight and captured the face of one little girl—frightened, bewildered, like a lost rabbit. She turned toward the morning sun, squinted and crinkled up her pixie face. When she did, Ron could see that she had dimples.

  Akin looked up and squinted into the sun as the guard drove a wooden stake into the ground in front of the truck. Akin, Mbarka, Omina and Shontal had been batched as a package deal, tied together with a rope the guard looped around the stake. Once the rope was secure, the guard walked back to the puddle of shade beside the truck, leaving the girls to broil under the sun.

  Better here than in the truck, where the girls had struggled to breathe in the cloud of dust that had swirled for hours around the last truck in the convoy. Still dizzy and disoriented, her wrists raw from the rough rope that tied her hands together, Akin was totally and utterly miserable. But in the noisy world that ebbed and flowed around her, nobody noticed one hungry, thirsty, frightened little girl, sitting despondent in the sand.

  Except Ro
n. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click.

  The auction unfolded faster than Ron or Masapha expected. They photographed, videotaped and recorded the action, amazed at how quickly the buyers selected their wares, paid for them, loaded them up and left. There was a steady stream of arriving and departing vehicles, and the number of captives quickly dwindled.

  When only about 50 or 60 remained, Ron slid down behind the crest of the hill to load a fresh roll of film into his camera. Masapha scooted down beside him to adjust a setting on the camcorder. They couldn’t have been away from their observation posts more than a couple of minutes, but that was long enough for them to miss the departure of three soldiers.

  The soldiers were guards for the captive villagers in the truck next to the one parked directly below the crest where Ron and Masapha were filming. When the last of their prisoners had been purchased and hauled away, they set their rifles aside to take a break, laughing and talking as they walked together toward the base of the hill. Then they separated, moved about 50 feet apart for privacy and began relieving themselves in the bushes.

  When the soldier nearest the hill finished and turned to head back to the truck, he noticed something odd nearby. At least a dozen larks and grouse circling in the air above the hill were diving at something on the ground there. He straightened his robe and headed around the side of the hill to see what so interested the birds.

  Something in the squawking and chirping caught Ron’s attention. He glanced over his shoulder and realized he had knocked his pouch of bread down the embankment when he’d loaded the last roll of film. The pouch had opened and spilled its contents onto the dirt.