What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  —Now, Commander Santo said.—We have a special guest tonight.

  A man who had been sitting behind the commander now stepped forward, a twisted cane in his hand. He was a robust old grandfather, grey-haired and toothless, with a frail jaw and tiny eyes. He wore a black suit jacket and light-blue pajama pants, and a camouflage hat on his small wrinkled head. Commander Santo shook his hand and presented him to us.

  —This man before you, a chief from Nuba, will illuminate how despicable are the methods of Bashir and his army. Perhaps he will convince the rest of you to follow the courageous young man who has already volunteered. Kuku Kori Kuku was a powerful and respected man. But he made a mistake: he allowed himself to trust the government of Khartoum. He’s here to tell us the results of that demonstration of trust.

  —Thank you, Commander Santo.

  —Tell them the treachery you experienced.

  —With your permission, Commander, I will.

  —Tell them the deception and the murder you witnessed.

  The chief opened his mouth to speak but did not get the chance. Not yet.

  —When you’re ready, please tell us. Take your time, Santo added. Finally the chief waited, his hands on his cane, eyes closed. When he was satisfied that Commander Santo would not interrupt him, he opened his eyes and began.

  —Boys, I was the chief of a village called Jebel Otoro. As you know, we in Nuba were the victims of repeated attacks from the government and the murahaleen. I lost my son in one of the attacks; he was burned in our home while I was traveling to another village to mediate a dispute. And as you know, thousands of Nubans have been sent to the ‘peace villages,’ the internment camps you have heard about.

  At this point I took notice of Achor Achor, who was sitting near the front. Watching his face became more interesting than watching the words come from the mouth of Kuku Kori Kuku. Already, from the man’s first words, Achor Achor was rapt.

  —This way, the government can watch us, and make sure we cannot fight against them. And these camps have attracted many Nubans who want no part of the conflict. There they are kept under the watch of soldiers, and are fed poorly. At these peace villages, the women are repeatedly abducted and raped. The government has made clear that if the people of Nuba do not bring themselves to live in the peace villages, they are therefore taking the side of the SPLA and are thus the enemy. Like you, the people of Nuba had suffered for some time and we longed for a way to end this.

  Achor Achor’s tongue extended from his lips, as if he were tasting the air for the next turn to the story.

  —We were happy, then, when the government asked for a meeting. Bashir was said to have personally requested a meeting with all the chiefs of Nuba. And I must admit that this affected our pride; we were very impressed with ourselves. We were called by Khartoum for a meeting and we went willingly, like fools. We trusted, and we should not have trusted. Will we ever learn a lesson from this war, from the history of this country? We trusted! Our grandfathers trusted, and their grandfathers trusted, and look where it’s gotten us.

  The chief’s voice was rising, and when it did, it cracked and wavered. I remembered the story of the chiefs who had originally agreed to stitch southern Sudan together with the north, a mistake most knew enough to regret.

  —So yes, we were proud and so we went. All sixty-eight Nuban chiefs arrived for the meeting at the appointed day. Many of the chiefs traveled many days to get there, some by foot. When we arrived, we realized that we had not been brought to meet with representatives from Khartoum. It had been a trick. All of us, the chiefs of dozens of villages, were herded onto trucks and taken to a new prison, in a former hospital; I had been to the hospital as a young man. They held us in two small rooms for two days, with little food or water. We demanded that they free us. We thought that perhaps this was the action of a rogue group of government soldiers. We imagined that the government, who had organized this conference, would be outraged by this action and would soon intervene on our behalf. But not all of the chiefs were this optimistic.

  I looked around me, and the faces of the boys in the room seemed already to know the fate of the assembled chiefs. Already they were ready to fight. Achor Achor’s face was twisted into a terrible frown.

  —We tried to plead with the guards, explaining that we were tribal chiefs who had committed no crime. You are enemies of the government, and that is crime enough, one guard said. That is when we knew that our future was in question. But we thought the worst they would do would be to keep us in a sort of peace camp for chiefs—perhaps more severe, perhaps just separated from our people. We expected that we might be detained there for years, even, until the end of the war. But the government had different plans. That night in the early hours, they roused us and pushed us out of the hospital prison and into the night. We were loaded onto military transport trucks, and as we sat in the back of these trucks, finally we were scared. They had tied our hands behind our backs, and we felt very helpless. In the truck, we tried to assist each other, tried to undo our bindings. But the truck was traveling up a rough mountain road and it was very dark. We could see nothing in the truck, and we were thrown about by the winding and poorly made road. Also, many of these chiefs were old men, you must remember, and not very strong. So there we were: we were the leaders of Nuba, and we had no way to help each other. It was humiliating. Achor Achor was shaking his head slowly, tears in his eyes.

  —Soon the trucks stopped. Get them out! the officer of the soldiers yelled. We stepped out of the truck one by one, and soon the soldiers lost patience. They threw the last chiefs from the trucks and those chiefs, one very old man, fell hard on the road, for his hands were bound. We all stood on the road and they made us march. The moon was half full and bright. We saw the faces of the soldiers, and among the soldiers saw one Dinka man. I remember looking at him for a long time, trying to see what had happened to him. I assumed he had become a Muslim, and then had been convinced that we were the enemy of his country and his faith. Still, though, I thought I saw him look away from us. I thought that perhaps he was ashamed. But I could be imagining all that. I wanted him to be ashamed but perhaps he was as committed to his task as were the rest of the soldiers.

  Achor Achor was the picture of barely suppressed rage.

  —We were taken to a ridge on the mountain, and they lined us up. There were twenty soldiers with automatic rifles. One chief attempted to run down the mountain. He was shot immediately. At that point the soldiers began to shoot. They shot each chief, in the back of the head if they could. A few men tried to fight with their feet and they were shot in the chest and face and anywhere else. It was the worst thing I have ever seen, to see such men fighting for their lives, kicking and jumping with their hands bound. This was no way to die. It was a terrible mess, all of it.

  —This took some time, the executions? the commander asked.

  —No, no. It was all over very quick. It was over in a few minutes.

  —But they didn’t shoot you. Why not?

  The chief snorted.—Of course they shot me! They shot me with everyone else! I was a chief, and I had to die! They shot me in the back of the head, yes, but the bullet went through and came out my jaw.

  Some of the boys in the room did not believe this and the chief took notice.

  —You don’t believe me? Look at this.

  He revealed a jagged scar at the corner of his jaw.

  —That is where the bullet left me. And here is the bullet. From his pocket he brought forth a rounded and rusted thing, looking nothing like something that could have penetrated a man’s skull.

  —It didn’t hurt. I thought I was dead, so I felt little pain. I lay on the ground, wondering at the strangeness of my sight and my thoughts. I was dead, but I could still see. I was seeing the body of another man, another chief, and I could hear the boots of the soldiers. I could hear the truck starting again. And all the while I wondered why I was hearing all this. I did not expect to see and hear after death like thi
s.

  —I thought that perhaps I was not yet dead. That I was still dying. So I lay there, unable to move, waiting to die. I thought of my family, of the people of my village. Here was their chief, lying among sixty-seven more, all dead. All trusting fools. I thought of the shame of all this, all these chiefs dying in one place, killed by these young government soldiers who knew nothing about life. I cursed our stupidity. We were trusting and foolish, as our ancestors had been fifty years earlier. This would be the end of us, I thought. If it was this easy to kill all the chiefs, then certainly killing our children would be a very easy task indeed.

  —I did not realize until later that I was still alive. The light came in the morning and I was still seeing and thinking, and this caused me to believe that I might still be alive. I attempted to move my arms. To my surprise, they moved. It occurred to me that there might be a new group of soldiers coming soon to bury us, the evidence of the massacre, so I rose and I walked away. I simply walked back to my village. It took me three days and I saw very few people along the way. When I reached the first village on my journey, I met the deputy chief there and he greeted me with great enthusiasm. He wanted to know how the meeting had gone. I had to tell him that it had not gone well.

  —He and his people nursed me and brought me to a clinic nearby, where they sewed the hole in my face. After a week I walked on, escorted by the deputy, back to my village, where they had heard about what had happened. I wouldn’t be safe there, so I was kept hidden until I could escape one week later. Eventually I met others traveling to Kakuma. It was decided this would be the only safe place for me.

  —Boys, we can never be one with the north, with Khartoum. We can never trust them. Until there is a separate south, a New Sudan, we won’t have peace. We can never forget this. To them we are slaves, and even if we are not working in their homes and on their farms, we will always be thought of as a lesser people. Think of it: the end result of their plan is to make the entire country an Islamic state. They plan to convert us all. They are doing it bit by bit already. Three-fourths of this country is already Muslim. They don’t have far to go. So remember: we have independence, or we will no longer exist as a people. They will subsume those they can, and kill the rest. We cannot be one with them, and we cannot trust them. Never again. You promise me? We nodded.

  —Now fight these monsters! he roared.—I beg you.

  Twelve others pledged their support that night. Ten of those ended up leaving with the SPLA on Thursday, along with fourteen more who had not been at the meeting—mostly sons, brothers, cousins, and nephews of SPLA commanders. I cannot say that I ever seriously considered joining the SPLA at that time. I was busy in the camp, with my theater projects and Miss Gladys, but Achor Achor spent two days in turmoil, coming to me each night to help with his thinking.

  —I think I have to go. Don’t I? he asked.

  —I don’t know. I don’t know if it makes a difference, I said.

  —You don’t think the war can be won.

  —I don’t know. It’s been so many years already. I don’t know if anyone would know if the war was won. How would we know?

  —If we had independence.

  —You really think that would ever happen? We sat with that thought for a moment.

  —I think I need to go, he said.—It’s me who should be fighting this war. I’m from Aweil. If I don’t go back and fight, then who will?

  —They won’t station you at Aweil.

  —Then I’ll get my own gun and go back to Aweil.

  —There won’t be anyone in Aweil. No one will still be there.

  —Commander Santo said the SPLA is different now.

  —Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But look at you. You’ve never fought in your life. You wear glasses now. How will you shoot if your glasses break?

  I did not really think this argument would work, but it did. It worked immediately, and that was the end of Achor Achor’s army career. I am fairly certain that he was simply looking for a good reason not to join, something he could say when or if he were ever asked. He never spoke of the SPLA again.

  I do not want to be indelicate but it is important to note that we were not long past puberty, and some of the younger boys in the class were still in the thick of hormonal change and a deeper awareness of the opposite sex. Thus what Miss Gladys did next stirred havoc among us young men at a time when there was already sufficient physiological turmoil. My first hairs had recently appeared in small thickets, a few patches in my underwear, one in each armpit. I was later than many other boys, but we were all developmentally tardy, we were told, due to the trauma we had endured and our ongoing state of malnutrition. But at that juncture of our development, our Miss Gladys had a very strong impact on our lives. With her open and confident sexuality, she was the constant igniter of everything flammable within us. It was enough to see her twice a week with the drama group, but when she walked into our history class she took it too far.

  —Ah, Dominic! Good to see you! she said.

  This was a semester after she began with the Napata Drama Group. We had not been told that there would be a new history teacher. Our previous instructor, a Kenyan named George, seemed capable and permanent.

  —You’re teaching this class? I said.

  —You sound unhappy to see me, she said with a theatrical pout.

  I did not know what to say. Her presence in Napata was manageable, given I could mask my nerves and weak stomach under the guise of my acting. But with her as my history teacher, I knew immediately that I would not be able to concentrate; my grades would drop. All of the inherent problems issuing from her presence were doubled by a new wrinkle to her personality. Something about history brought out the provocateur in her, and this simply destroyed most of the fifty-eight boys who sat on the ground beneath her.

  She didn’t talk about sex outright, but she seemed to find a way, during her lectures, to include the sexual habits of whomever she discussed, no matter how incongruous the context.

  —Genghis Khan was a very harsh dictator, she might begin.—He was cruel to his enemies but he loved women very much. He had a great appetite, it was said. The rumor is that he had impregnated over two hundred women with his seed, and often visited three or more women in one night. He was also known to take certain tools into bed with…

  The first day, one boy fainted. We were utterly unprepared for both the discussion of sexual appetites and for such discussion to spring forth from the mouth of the goddess named Gladys. Why was she doing this? She controlled us all, fifty-eight boys, she possessed us utterly and sometimes without mercy. The discussion about the sexual mores of Genghis Khan and his ilk went on for the full period and left us spent.

  Our confused and longing faces had an effect on her, and that effect was to spur her on, to the point where she made a point to insert some sexual fact or aside in each day’s lesson, and we could count on it, and dressed appropriately. The fainting boy brought with him wads of paper to stuff in his ears when she began expounding on the subject, for his parents were in the camp and he was sure they would know if he returned home with that sort of information in his head.

  Among the few girls in the class, there was a broad sort of annoyance with Miss Gladys’s antics and the boys’ obsession with her. But there was one girl, younger than the rest, who seemed to enjoy Miss Gladys, and laughed at her jokes even when we didn’t recognize them as jokes. This girl was Tabitha Duany Aker. I had not seen her for a semester and a summer, since we had been in home economics together, but I was very happy to see her again, and to see that it was only she who laughed when Miss Gladys made the joke about Idi Amin in the sauna. The joke was met by silence by all except for a loud guffaw from the side row. Tabitha covered her mouth and exchanged a long look of mutual admiration with Miss Gladys, and from that day on I took an interest in her, and tried to see her outside of class, at any opportunity at all. In many ways she reminded me of Maria—in her wit, her quick way with words, her heart-shaped face—but
she was more girlish than Maria. She had a wild femininity about her that she tamed and mastered, I believe, by studying every movement and gesture of Miss Gladys.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the boys, those who had just become acquainted with our new history teacher, spent a good deal of time alone and together thinking about our new teacher, about her various lessons. Miss Gladys became the most famous and sought-after teacher at Kakuma, and with her, the notoriety of us Dominics grew. There were four Dominics in that history class, and because she seemed very familiar with us, the rest of the boys looked at us with murder in their eyes, for we clearly had an inside track to her heart. Whenever Miss Gladys was mentioned, her favorites were also noted, the four Dominics from the Drama Group. Our real names were all supplanted by Dominic only, and our notoriety bound us closer. When we played basketball together, our team was the Dominics. When we walked by, people said, ‘There go the Dominics.’ And the numbers of random boys wanting suddenly to study acting—and history, in our class, no matter where in the camp they lived—grew unabated. Miss Gladys allowed none of them to join, because we did not need more boys.

  We had too many boys already, and it was becoming a problem that because the troupe had only two girls, the majority of the women in our plays had to be played by men. In particular, the women’s roles were played by one of the Dominics, whose real name was Anthony Chuut Guot. He was fearless about wearing a dress, or any other female clothing, and was unafraid to walk and talk like a woman. It was for his courage that we nicknamed him Madame Zero, after a cross-dressing comic-book spy. This was a name he enjoyed, at least initially. It was when the nickname extended beyond the Dominics that he became less amused, and this led to his and Miss Gladys’s insistence that we recruit or somehow find at least one young woman for the club.

  Thus, on one glorious afternoon, Tabitha joined the Napata Drama Group.