What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  Achor Achor became my closest friend in Ethiopia. At Pinyudo he was small like me, very thin, scrawnier than the rest of us even, but very smart, cunning. He was expert at finding things we needed before I realized we needed them. He would locate an empty can one day, full of holes, and save it. He would bring it to our shelter and clean it and patch it until it was an excellent cup—and only a few boys had cups. He eventually found fishing line, and a large undamaged mosquito net, and sisal bags large enough to tie together and use as a blanket. He shared with me always, though I was never sure what I brought to our partnership.

  Some food was provided by the Ethiopian army. Soldiers rolled drums of corn and vegetable oil to the camp, and we ate one plate each. I felt better, but many of the boys overate and fell ill soon after. We traded anything we had for corn or corn flour in the nearby village. Soon we learned to recognize the wild vegetables that were edible and common, and we went on expeditions to harvest them. But as the days went on, and more boys came, the vegetable hunters were too many, and the vegetables were soon scarce and then exhausted entirely.

  More boys arrived every day, families too. Every day I saw them crossing the river. They came in the morning and they came in the afternoon and when I woke up more had come in the night. Some days one hundred came, some days many more. Some groups were like mine, hundreds of emaciated boys, half of them naked, and a few elders; some groups were only women and girls and babies, accompanied by young SPLA officers with guns tied to their backs. The people came without end, and each time they crossed the river, we knew it meant that the food we had would need to be further divided. I came to resent the sight of my own people, to loathe how many of them there were, how needful, gangrenous, bug-eyed, and wailing.

  One day a group of boys threw rocks at a group of new arrivals. The rock-throwing boys were beaten severely and it never happened again, but in my mind, I threw rocks, too. I threw rocks at the women and the children and wanted to throw rocks at the soldiers but I threw rocks at no one.

  When order came to the camp, life improved. We were organized, divided, groups were created: Group One, Group Two, Group Three. Sixteen groups of boys, each group with over a thousand boys. And within the groups were groups of one hundred, and within those, groups of fifty and then of twelve.

  I was put in charge of a group of twelve, eleven boys and me. We were twelve and I called them The Eleven. Achor Achor was my deputy and we all lived together, ate together, and divided tasks among ourselves—fetching food, water, salt, repairing our shelter, our mosquito nets. We had been thrown together because we were from the same region and spoke similar dialects, but we convinced ourselves that our group was one of all-stars. We came to consider our group superior to all others.

  Beyond Achor Achor, there was Athorbei Chol Guet, outspoken and fearless. He would approach anyone, and quickly made allies; he knew Pinyudo’s refugee chairman, the UN aid workers, and Ethiopian traders. Gum Ater was preposterously tall and perilously thin and was a distant cousin of the camp’s second-in-command, Jurkuch Barach. Akok Anei and Akok Kwuanyin each had light, copper-colored skin, and were feared by many boys because they were older and fiercer than the rest of us. Garang Bol was a great catcher of fish and was highly skilled at finding edible fruits and vegetables. He had replaced a nameless boy who was part of the Eleven for only a few days, a boy who had sipped from a puddle to quench his thirst and died of dysentery shortly thereafter. I suppose there are too many boys to mention, Julian.

  But there was also Isaac Aher Arol! He was the only boy of the Eleven who had traveled as far as I had. The boys who came to Ethiopia had walked from all over southern Sudan, but the majority came from a place called Bor, which is not far from the Ethiopian border. I had walked months, whereas many of the boys walked mere days. So Isaac Aher Arol was from my region, Bahr al-Ghazal, and he called me Gone Far and I called him Gone Far, and everyone called both of us Gone Far. To this day, when I see certain boys from Pinyudo, they use this name for me.

  But I have many other names, too, Julian. Those who knew me in Marial Bai called me Achak or Marialdit. In Pinyudo I was often Gone Far, and later, in Kakuma, I was Valentine, and sometimes Achak again. Here in America I was Dominic Arou for three years, until last year, when I changed my name, legally and after much effort, to a combination of my given and appropriated names: Valentine Achak Deng. This is confusing to the Americans who know me but not to the boys who walked with me. Each of us has a half-dozen identities: there are the nicknames, there are the catechism names, the names we adopted to survive or to leave Kakuma. Having many names has been necessary for many reasons that refugees know intimately.

  In Pinyudo, I missed my family, I wanted to be home, but we were made to understand that there was nothing left in southern Sudan, and to return would mean certain death. The images they painted for us were stark, the destruction complete. It was as if we were the sole survivors, that a new Sudan would be created from us alone, when we returned to a barren land ready for regeneration. We settled in at Pinyudo, and found a way to be thankful for what we had there: a measure of safety, of stability. We had what we had sought: regular meals, blankets, shelter. We were, to the best of our knowledge, orphans, but most of us held out hope that when the war ended, we might find our families again, or portions thereof. We had no basis on which to believe this, but we slept on this hope every night and woke up with it each morning.

  For those first weeks and months at Pinyudo, it was only boys and duties, attempts to make order of the camp. Most of my group, being among the youngest, became water boys. My duty was to go to the river to bring back water for drinking and cooking, and each day I trekked down to the riverbank with a jerry can to fill and return to camp. I was told that the water at the bank of the river was not suitable, that I needed to wade into the middle of the river to find the cleanest water.

  But I could not swim. I was no more than four feet tall, maybe less, and the river could exceed that on any day, and moved with a rapid current. I had to ask others, taller boys and young men, to help me find the highest-quality water. Four times a day I had to go to the river, and four times a day I had to ask another boy to wade into the river to fill the jerry can. I badly wanted to learn how to swim but there was no time and no one to teach me. So with help, I retrieved the water twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon, carrying the six-liter jerry can back to camp. The weight was significant for an insect like me. I had to rest every ten steps, small steps I hurried together.

  Sometimes I would encounter local boys—of a river people called the Anyuak—playing by the water, building houses in the sand. I would hide my jerry can in the tall grass and crouch with the boys, helping to dig trenches and construct villages from mud and sand and sticks. We would jump in the water afterward, laughing and splashing. During these times, I would remember that only months before, I had been a boy like this, too.

  One early morning, the light still golden, I played with the Anyuak boys and then returned to the camp. Immediately I was confronted by one of the elders.

  —Achak, where is the water? he asked.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was a forgetful boy, Julian, though I like to think it had something to do with malnourishment.

  —We sent you to the river to get water. Where is your jerry can?

  Without saying anything, I turned and ran back to the river, jumping over logs and holes along the way. I had seldom run so fast. When I reached the water, I found the riverbank empty; the boys were gone. I slid down the bank with my jerry can, and when I arrived at the bottom, my foot met a large stone. Immediately I drew back. It was a large rock, and covered in a sort of dark moss. It was difficult to see in the shadows, so I crouched down to see if there were any creatures underneath. When I brought my face closer, a smell assaulted me. The rock was a man’s head. It was a man’s body, dead for some time, floating in the river. The rest of the corpse had been hidden in the grass at the river’s edge. The man’
s eyes faced the river’s bottom, arms at his side, his shoulders moving slightly with the current. There was a rope around his waist, and the torso was bloated, seeming about to burst.

  Later, the body was identified as that of a young Sudanese man, an SPLA recruit. He had been stabbed three times. The Sudanese elders surmised that the dead man had been killed by the Anyuak; he had likely been caught stealing. They used the dead man as a lesson: if the Sudanese steal, they will be killed by the river people.

  After that day, I didn’t want to return to the river. I thought of the man all day and particularly at night. Though life in Ethiopia was not comfortable in any way, there was a measure of safety there, so much so that I believed that I would not live so close to violent death. But evil could happen at Pinyudo; of course it could. I spent the next day sleeping, hiding from the elders’ voices that called me to work, to eat, to play. Nothing was over. Nothing was safe. Ethiopia was nothing to me. It was no safer than Sudan, and it wasn’t Sudan, and I wasn’t near my family. Why had we come so far? I did not have enough strength, enough life in me for this.

  The elders told me that I would not see another man stabbed, that this would not happen again. But this was not the case. More SPLA were killed, and more Anyuak were killed in vengeance, and relations between the Anyuak and us, the interlopers, deteriorated quickly. There were charges that SPLA soldiers had raped Anyuak women, and Sudanese were killed and lynched in return. The SPLA, better armed, escalated the conflict, burning homes and killing resisters. When, much later, the Anyuak shot a pair of SPLA soldiers along the riverbank, it brought on what was known as the Pinyudo-Agenga Massacre. The Agenga village of Anyuak people was torched, women and children and animals murdered. Thereafter, the Agenga Anyuak left for safer surroundings, but many of its men remained in the area, forming gangs of snipers whose goal was simple and frequently successful: to shoot SPLA soldiers, or any Sudanese, really. When we Sudanese were finally chased from Ethiopia, two years hence, the Anyuak heartily joined in firing shots at our backs as we crossed the river Gilo, its water thick with our blood.

  But for a time, there was relative peace between the Sudanese and the Anyuak, and there was even a sense of security at that refugee camp. When, after some months, the international aid community recognized Pinyudo, there were new sources of food for the Anyuak, and trade between our camp and the riverside villages was brisk and agreeable to all involved.

  Though we were told not to visit the riverside villages alone, Achor Achor and I did anyway; he was bold and we were bored. In the villages, we were watched by everyone, all eyes suspecting that we came to steal. We explored daily, though, investigating the life along the water, peeking into huts, smelling the food and hoping someone might feed us without our solicitation. One day this very thing happened, though Achor Achor was not with me; he had gone to the airfield to watch a landing that was expected that afternoon.

  —Come here, you.

  A woman cooking in front of her home spoke to me in Anyuak. One of my stepmothers in Marial Bai was half Anyuak, so I knew enough of the language to understand the woman. I stopped and stepped toward her.

  —Do they feed you at that camp? she asked. She was an older woman, older than my own mother, almost like a grandmother, her back bent and her mouth a loose, toothless cavern.

  —Yes, I said.

  —Come inside, boy.

  I went inside her hut and smelled its smells of pumpkins, sesame, and beans. Dried fish hung from the walls. The woman busied herself cooking outside and I settled against the wall of the hut, resting my back against a bag of flour. When she returned she poured a dish of flour and water into a bowl. When I was finished with that, she took a bowl of corn foo-foo and into it poured a cup full of wine, a concoction I had never seen before. When I ate that, she smiled a sad toothless smile. Her name was Ajulo and she lived alone.

  —Where are you people going? she asked.

  —I don’t think we’re going anywhere, I said. This surprised her.

  —You’re not going anywhere? Why would you stay here? I told her I didn’t know.

  —There are too many of you here, she said, now deeply troubled; this was not the information she expected. No one along the river had seen the Sudanese as permanent guests.—Until your people leave, you can come here any time. Come alone and you can eat with me any day, Achak.

  When she said that, Julian, she touched my cheek as a mother would, and I crumpled. My bones fell away and I lay down on her floor. I was in front of her, heaving, my shoulders shaking and my fists trying to push the water back into my eyes. I was no longer able to know how to react to kindness like this. The woman brought me close to her chest. I hadn’t been touched in four months. I missed the shadow of my mother, listening to the sounds inside her. I had not realized how cold I had felt for so long. This woman gave me her shadow and I wanted to live within it until I could be home again.

  —You should stay here, Ajulo whispered to me.—You could be my son.

  I said nothing. I stayed with her until evening, wondering if I could indeed be her son. The comfort I would know could not be approximated while living with half-naked boys at the camp. But I knew I couldn’t stay. To stay would mean I would abandon the hope of returning home. To accept this woman as my mother would be to deny my own, who might yet be living, who might wait for me the rest of her years. And then, lying in the lap of the Anyuak woman, I wondered, What did she look like, my mother? I had only a shifting memory, as light as linen, and the longer I was with this woman Ajulo, the more distant and indistinguishable my vision of my mother would become. I told Ajulo I could not be her son, but she fed me still. I came once a week and helped how I could, bringing her water, portions of my rations, things she could not otherwise procure. I went there and she fed me and let me lie in her lap. During those hours I was a boy with a home.

  After a month, my stomach was no longer wailing and my head ceased spinning. I felt good in many ways, I felt like a person the way God had intended a person to feel. I was almost strong, almost whole. But then there were jobs for healthy boys.

  —Achak, come here, Dut said one day. Dut was a high-ranking leader at the camp now, and because we had walked together, he made sure my needs and those of those of the Eleven were addressed. But he expected things in return.

  I followed him and learned we were going to the hospital tent, set up by the Ethiopians. Inside were those wounded in the fighting in Sudan, and those sick and dying at Pinyudo. I had never been in the tent and only knew it by its smell, which was rancid, piercing when the wind passed through.

  —There is a man inside who has died, he said.—I want you to help carry him and then we’ll bury him.

  I could not object. I owed Dut my life.

  Inside the tent, the light was blue-green and there was a body wrapped in muslin. Around the body were six boys, all of them older than me.

  —Come here, Dut said, directing me to the dead man’s feet.

  I carried the man’s left foot, and the other six boys each took a region of the man’s cold hard form. We followed the path, Dut holding the man’s shoulders and facing away. I looked to the clouds, to the grass and the brush—anywhere but at the face of the dead man.

  When we arrived at a great twisting tree, Dut told us to begin digging. There were no shovels, so we clawed at the ground with our fingernails, throwing rocks and dirt to the side. Most of us dug like dogs, scratching the dirt between our legs. I found a rock with a bowl-like edge that I used to scoop dirt to the side. In an hour, we dug a hole six feet long and three feet deep. Dut directed us to line the hole with leaves, and we gathered leaves and made the hole green. Dut and the larger boys then lifted the body into the hole, the man’s face turned to the east. We weren’t sure why this was the case, but we did not ask when Dut told them to do this. We were directed to place leaves over the body, and once that was done, we dropped dirt onto the body of the dead man until he disappeared.

  This was the beginning
of the cemetery at Pinyudo, and the first of many burials in which I participated. Boys and adults were still dying, for our diet was too limited and the dangers too many. Most days, we were given just one meal, yellow corn grains and a few white beans. We drank water from the river and it was impure, rife with bacteria, so the deaths came from dysentery, diarrhea, various unnamed afflictions. There was very little medical expertise at Pinyudo, and the only patients who were brought to the Pinyudo One General Health Clinic were those who were already too close to death to save. When a boy would not rouse himself from bed, would refuse food, or fail to recognize his name, his friends would wrap him in a blanket and bring him to the clinic. It was a well-known fact that any patients admitted to the clinic did not leave, and so that tent became known as Zone Eight. There were seven zones at the camp, where the boys were housed and worked, and Zone Eight became the last place one went on this earth. ‘Where is Akol Mawein?’ someone might ask. ‘He’s gone to Zone Eight,’ we would answer. Zone Eight was the hereafter. Zone Eight was the end of ends.

  Burying Zone Eights became my job. With five other boys, we buried five to ten bodies a week. We took the same parts of the bodies each time; each time, I was the carrier of the deceased’s left foot.

  —You’re a burial boy, Achor Achor said one day.

  I smiled, at that time thinking it was a job holding some prestige.

  —That’s not a good job, I don’t think, Achor Achor said.—I think this could be bad for you in some way. Why are you doing that job?

  It was not as if I had a choice in the matter. Dut had asked me, and I had to agree. He had promised benefits for being a burial boy, including extra rations, and even another shirt, which meant that soon I had two—an extravagance at Pinyudo.