by Dave Eggers
The older boy ran into their hut and returned with the food. I gave them the only shirt I had. Soon I rejoined the walking boys at the water; others had traded with the villagers and were cooking and eating. Naked but for my shorts, I boiled my maize and ate quickly. As we waited to be brought over the water, those boys who had not eaten now went about bartering what they had. Some sold extra clothes, or whatever else they had found or carried: a mango, dried fish, a mosquito net. None of us knew that only one hour away would be the refugee camp where we would settle for three years. When we arrived there, at Pinyudo, I would curse my decision to trade my shirt for a cup of maize. One boy traded all of his clothes, leaving him naked completely, and he would remain naked for six months, until the camp received its first shipment of used clothes from other parts of the world.
In the late afternoon, it was finally my turn to cross the river. I had eaten and felt sated. Dut and Kur, however, seemed very tired. They spent much of my crossing on their backs, mistakenly kicking me, splashing slowly backward. When we reached the far bank, I sat with the other boys, resting and waiting for our hearts to settle. Finally, as night fell, Dut and Kur finished crossing the river with boys. We thanked them for pulling us over and I kept close to Kur as they led us up from the river, through a thicket of trees, and upon a clearing.
—This is it, Kur said.—We are now in Ethiopia.
—No, I said, knowing he was making a joke.—When will we reach it, Kur?
—We’ve reached it. We’re here.
I looked at the land. It looked exactly like the other side of the river, the side that was Sudan, the side we left. There were no homes. There were no medical facilities. No food. No water for drinking.
—This is not that place, I said.
—It is that place, Achak. Now we can rest.
Already there were Sudanese adults spread out across the fields, refugees who had arrived before us, lying on the ground, sick and dying. This was not the Ethiopia we had walked for. I was sure we had farther to go.
We are not in Ethiopia, I thought. This is not that place.
BOOK II
CHAPTER 15
First I hear his voice. Achor Achor is close. Talking on his cell phone, in English. His wonderful high-pitched voice. I look up to see his form pass through the window. Now the scratching of his keys against the door and finding their place in the lock.
He opens the door and his hand falls to his side.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks in English.
To see him is too much. I had a secret fear that I would never see his face again. I manage to make a few grateful squeaks and grunts before he kneels and removes the tape from my mouth.
‘Achak! Are you okay?’
It takes me a moment to compose myself.
‘What the hell is this?’ he asks.
‘I was attacked,’ I finally say. ‘We were robbed.’
He spends a long moment taking in the scene. His eyes rest on my face, my hands, my legs. He scans the room as if a better explanation will reveal itself.
‘Cut me loose!’ I say.
He is quick to find a knife and kneels next to me. He cuts through the phone cord. I give him my feet and he unties the knot. He switches to Dinka.
‘Achak, what the hell happened? How long have you been here?’
I tell him it has been almost a full day. He helps me stand.
‘Let’s go to the hospital.’
‘I’m not injured,’ I say, though I have no way of knowing.
We walk to the bathroom, where Achor Achor inspects the cut under the bright lights. He cleans the cut carefully with a towel soaked in warm water. As he does, he takes in a quick breath, then corrects himself.
‘Maybe a few stitches. Let’s go.’
I insist on calling the police first. I want them to be able to begin the case; I’m certain they will want the warmest trail to follow. The assailants could not be far.
‘You pissed your pants.’
‘I’ve been here for a day. What time is it? Is it past noon?’
‘One-fifteen.’
‘Why are you home?’
‘I came to get money for tonight. I was going to Michelle’s after work. I’m supposed to be back at the store in ten minutes.’
Achor Achor looks as concerned about getting back to work as he does about me. I go to my closet for a change of clothes. I use the bathroom, showering and changing, spending too long on basic tasks.
Achor Achor knocks. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m so hungry. Do you have food?’
‘No. I’ll go get some.’
‘No!’ I say, almost leaping off the toilet. ‘Don’t go. I’ll eat whatever we have here. Don’t leave.’
I look in the mirror. The blood has dried on my temple, on my mouth. I finish in the bathroom and Achor Achor gives me half a ham sandwich he has retrieved from the freezer and microwaved. We sit on the couch.
‘You were at Michelle’s?’
‘I’m so sorry, Achak. Who were they?’
‘No one we know.’
‘If I had been here it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘I think it would. Look at us. What would we have done?’
We discuss calling the police. We have to quickly review anything that could go wrong if we do. Are our immigration papers in order? They are. Do we have outstanding parking tickets? I have three, Achor Achor two. We calculate whether or not we have enough in checking accounts to pay the tickets if the police demand it. We decide that we do.
Achor Achor makes the call. He tells the dispatcher what has happened, that I was attacked and we were robbed. He neglects to mention that the man had a gun, but I figure it will not matter for now. When the police cars arrive I will have plenty of time to describe the events. I will be taken to the station to look at pictures of criminals who resemble those who assaulted me. I briefly imagine myself testifying against Tonya and Powder, pointing at them across an outraged courtroom. I realize I will know their full names, and they will know mine. Making them pay for this will be satisfying, but I will have to move from here, because their friends will also know my address. In Sudan a crime against one person can pit families against each other, entire clans, until the matter is thoroughly resolved.
Achor Achor and I sit on the couch and it grows quiet between us. Having the police in this apartment causes growing anxiety. I have little luck with cars or police. I have owned a car for three years and have been in six accidents. On January 16, 2004, I was in three accidents in one twenty-four-hour period. All of the incidents were small, at stoplights and driveways and parking lots, but I had to wonder if I was being toyed with. Now, this year, has begun the ordeal of near-constant towing. I have been towed for parking tickets, have been towed for an out-of-date car registration. This happened two weeks ago and began when I passed a police car leaving a Kentucky Fried Chicken. He followed me, turned on his lights, and I pulled over immediately. The man, very tall and white, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, quickly told me that he might take me into jail. ‘You want go to jail?’ he asked me, suddenly, loudly. I tried to speak. ‘Do you?’ he interrupted. ‘Do you?’ I said I did not want to go to jail, and asked why I would be going. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and I waited in my car as he returned to his. Soon enough I learned that he had pulled me over because the sticker on my license plate had expired; I needed a new, different-colored sticker. For this he saved me—he used the words ‘I’m gonna stick my neck out and save you here, kid’—from jail, instead simply forcing me to leave the car on the highway, from which it was towed.
‘I think I have to go back to work,’ Achor Achor says.
I say nothing. I know he is just thinking through his options. I know he will come with me to the hospital but needs first to assess how difficult it will be to call his supervisor. He feels he could be fired any day for any reason, and taking an afternoon off is not a decision easily arrived upon.
‘I could tell them what happened,’
he says.
‘There’s no need,’ I say.
‘No, I’ll call them. Maybe they’ll let me work the weekend to make it up.’
He makes the call, though it does not go well. Achor Achor, and most of us, have learned various and conflicting rules of employment here. There is a strictness that is new, but it also seems shifting and inequitable. At my fabric-filing job, my coworker seemed to operate under vastly different rules than I. She arrived late each day and lied about her hours. She did not seem to work at all while I was present, allowing me—she called me her assistant, though I was no such thing—to do all the day’s work. Short of reporting her poor work ethic, I had no recourse but to work twice as hard as she, for two-thirds her pay.
‘I wonder if they turn on the sirens for something like this,’ Achor Achor mused.
‘I think so.’
‘Do you think they catch people like them?’
‘I bet they will. These two seemed like criminals. I’m sure the police have pictures of them.’
Thoughts of Tonya and Powder being pursued, being caught, fill me with great satisfaction. This country, I am sure, does not tolerate things like this. It occurs to me that this is the first time an officer will act on my behalf. The thought gives me a giddy strength.
Ten minutes pass, then twenty. We’ve made a list of the major items, but now, with more time than we expected to have, Achor Achor and I begin to catalog the lesser things stolen. We gather all of the user manuals for the missing appliances, in case the police need the model numbers. The information will likely help them recover the stolen items, and the insurance companies, too, will expect this information.
‘You’ll have to reprogram all the birthdays into your phone,’ Achor Achor notes.
He is one of my few friends who did not laugh when he knew I was recording the birthdays of everyone I knew. To him it seemed logical enough, providing as it did a string of stopping points along the path of a year, sites where you could appreciate who you knew, how many people called you friend.
Achor Achor is now righting the apartment—the table, the lamp, the couch cushions that are still on the floor. Achor Achor is exceedingly practical, and effortlessly organized. He finishes his homework one day before it’s due, because when he does, it affords him that extra day to recheck it. He brings his car in for an oil change every twenty-five hundred miles and drives as if his DMV tester were with him at all times. In the kitchen, he uses the proper equipment for each task. Anne and Gerald Newton, who spend a good deal of time cooking, watching television shows, and reading books about cooking, gave us a vast array of utensils and potholders and other kitchen objects. Achor Achor knows what each is for, keeps them well organized, and tries very hard to find occasion to use each one. Last week I found him cutting onions while wearing goggles, the strap of which said ONIONS ARE FOR WEEPERS.
After half an hour, Achor Achor has the idea that the police might have written the address down incorrectly. He opens the door to see if there is a squad car in the lot; perhaps an officer is checking the other apartments. I tell him about the officer that was there for forty minutes the day before, though I can tell that it is too strange a concept for him to begin to understand. Instead, Achor Achor calls the police again. The response is perfunctory; they tell him a car is on its way.
‘I’m cursed,’ I say. It is the thought on both of our minds. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
He doesn’t immediately relieve me of this burden.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he lies. There can be no other explanation for the things that have happened to me since moving to the United States. Only forty-six refugees were scheduled to fly to New York on September 11, and one of them was me. I have lost my good friend Bobby Newmyer and Tabitha is gone and now this. It is the sort of thing that causes one to laugh, frankly. And at the instant this thought occurs to me, Achor Achor begins to laugh. I smile and we know what we’re smiling about.
‘They even took the clocks,’ he says.
Achor Achor chose poorly when he chose me. Yes, there are far worse men, young Sudanese who enjoyed themselves too much, who involved themselves in any mess a young man can find, and I am not that, and neither is Achor Achor. But I have not brought him much good fortune. As we sit, I find it difficult to look at him. We have known each other for too long, and being with him here is perhaps the saddest of all of the situations in which we have found ourselves. We are pathetic, I decide. He is still working in a furniture store, and I am attending three remedial classes at a community college. Are we the future of Sudan? This seems unlikely. Not with the way we attract trouble, not with how often we are victims of calamity. We bring it upon ourselves. Our peripheral vision is poor, I think; in the U.S., we do not see trouble coming.
It has been fifty-two minutes when there is a knock on the door.
I begin to stand but Achor Achor gestures me to sit. He grabs the knob and turns it.
‘Wait!’ I yell. He doesn’t hesitate; I believe for a moment it could be Tonya again. Instead he opens the door and finds a small Asian woman with a ponytail, dressed in half of a police uniform. She has no hat, and her pants do not match her shirt. Achor Achor invites her in, looking at her with unmasked curiosity.
‘I heard you had an incident here,’ she says.
Achor Achor invites her in and closes the door. She sweeps her eyes around the living room without seeing the blood stain. Her toes are touching its outline on the carpet. Achor Achor stares at the stain for a moment, and she follows his eyes.
‘Ha,’ she says. She steps back from the stain.
‘Which one of you is the victim?’ she asks, her hands on her waist. She looks at me and then Achor Achor. I am sitting four feet from her, dried blood on my mouth and temple. She returns her attention to me.
‘Are you the victim?’ she asks me.
Achor Achor and I say yes at the same time. Then he gets up and points to my face. ‘He has been wounded, officer.’
She smiles, tilts her head, and sighs loudly. She begins to ask me questions, about how many and when.
‘Did you know the perpetrator?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say.
I recount the events of the night and morning. She writes a few words down in a leather-bound notebook. She is thin, miniature everywhere, with dark hair and high cheekbones, and the movements of her hands are the same—tidy, small.
‘You sure you didn’t know these people?’ she asks again.
‘No,’ I repeat.
‘But then why did you open the door?’
I explain again that the woman had needed to use my telephone. The officer shakes her head. This doesn’t seem to her a satisfactory answer.
‘But you didn’t know her.’
I tell her I did not.
‘You didn’t know the man, either?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Never seen them before?’
I tell her that I saw the woman on the way up to my apartment. This is of interest to the officer. She writes something in her notebook.
‘Do you have insurance?’ she asks.
Achor Achor says he has insurance, and finds his card. She takes the card and frowns down at it. ‘No, no. Renter’s insurance,’ she says. ‘Something that covers theft like this.’
We have nothing of the kind, we realize. I tell her that the woman made at least one phone call from my cell phone.
‘That should be helpful, Mr. Achor,’ she says to me, but does not write this in her notebook.
‘I’m Achor Achor,’ Achor Achor says. ‘He is Valentine.’
She apologizes, pointing out how interesting our names are. She sees this as a segue into the inevitable question of our origin. She asks where we’re from, and we tell her Sudan. Her eyes come alive.
‘Wait. Darfur, right?’
It is a fact that Darfur is now better known than the country in which that region sits. We explain the geography briefly.
‘Sudan, wow,’ she says, half-heart
edly inspecting the locks on our front door. ‘What are you doing here?’
We tell her that we’re working and trying to go to college.
‘So were you part of the genocide? Victims of that?’
I sit down, and Achor Achor tries to clarify things for her. I allow him to expound, thinking that perhaps she’ll open her notebook again and take down more information about the assault. Achor Achor explains where we came from, and our relationship with the Darfurians, and it’s only when he mentions that some from that region have come to Atlanta to live that she seems interested.
They arrived one day at our church in Clarkston, officer. Our priest, Father Kerachi Jangi, turned our attention to the guests at the back of the church, and when everyone turned, our eyes set upon eight newcomers, three men, three women, and two children under eight, most dressed in suits and other formal clothing. The young boy was in a Carolina Panthers jersey. We greeted them then and after church, surprised to see them among us, and curious to know what they had planned. It was not customary for Darfurians, most of whom were Muslim, to be mixing with Dinka, and unprecedented for them to be attending a Christian church on a Sunday. The Darfurians historically had identified more with the Arabs than with us, even though they resembled us far more closely than the ethnic Arabs. Our feelings about them had long been complicated, too, by the fact that many of the murahaleen raiders who terrorized our villages were from Darfur; it took us some time to know that those who were suffering in this new stage of the civil war were not our oppressors, but were victims like ourselves. And so we let them be, and they us. But all is different now, and alliances are changing.
When Achor Achor is finished, the officer sighs closes her notebook.
‘Well,’ she says, and looks once more at the stain.
She hands me a piece of paper the size of a business card. It says COMPLAINT CARD. Achor Achor takes it.