Disturbed in Their Nests

by Alephonsion Deng

  “Each wife has a hut,” Benson said. “If a man’s brother dies, then he must take that man’s wife.”

  “Just like the Old Testament. How many wives can a man have?”

  “He can have many wives if he is rich with cows. My father had five wives.”

  Five wives meant a lot of children growing up together. What a wonderful childhood he’d lost.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Isn’t the war going on there, too?”

  “This village very remote. No war there now. But the Sudan government give the northern tribes guns. They come on horses and steal the cattle and shoot people.”

  In spite of my progressively worsening headache and the video going on nearly three hours, Benson’s narration and excitement at seeing his old homeland made time fly by.

  Alepho, who sat across the aisle, was quiet throughout. Headache or homesickness, I couldn’t tell. They’d been on the run or in a desolate refugee camp for fourteen years and now, for the first time, were watching the life they’d lost forever.

  Excited chatter had erupted occasionally throughout the video, but for most of the people now gathered in that windowless basement, I suspected that seeing what they’d left behind was a profoundly painful experience. It left me stunned.

  Dr. Jok went to the front for a Q&A. I expected the audience to erupt with questions about what they’d just seen but heard nothing. I looked around the room. Everyone wore serious expressions. Even the children were silent.

  BIG GUN BATTLE

  Alepho

  In the evenings, news came on the TV and anyone who was home gathered to watch. The news reported about car accidents and crimes. Sometimes the criminals had drugs and the police had caught them. They also reported the traffic and the weather. I liked the way they showed the map and could tell us how the weather would be several days ahead.

  What we were most eager to hear was information about the situation in Sudan. We never did.

  One evening, when the news had a story about dogs who could jump up and catch a flying round thing they called a Frisbee, James said, “In my class at IRC today they said you can find anything on the computer.”

  I had been wanting to learn to use the computer Judy had brought us.

  “The computers know everything,” James said. “Even when I spelled my own name wrong it corrected it for me. You can find jobs in the computer, even people. Maybe we can find news about Sudan.”

  I’d like to find news about what was happening back in Sudan. Could I even find my family through computers? I liked this idea of a machine that knew everything, yet it did not altogether make sense to me.

  I asked Benson, “How did people come up with something like this computer? How was it created? I am not sure about it.”

  “Don’t be hasty,” Benson said. “Take time to understand before we jump to concluding about things.”

  That led to a discussion among us. “This place is really strange.”

  “It might have been better to stay in camp.”

  “How can someone stay in the camp? That was the worst place.”

  I said, “There was no hope in a refugee camp. Here we have hope for our future. We must learn new ways.”

  We turned off the TV and Benson and I went to our room.

  I liked to read in bed. I read for a while, but my eyes grew tired. I closed the book.

  Boom!

  My heart leapt like a rabbit.

  “What was that?” Benson jumped from the bed.

  Boom! Boom!

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Boom! Boom! Boom! Explosions. Coming faster. We looked at each other. We knew those sounds.

  I slid under the blanket and covered my head. “Those are big guns.”

  “It sounds like it’s in the next town.”

  The gun sound grew louder. No time between explosions. A raging battle. A shrill sound whistled before one exploded. “Did you hear that?”

  “Sounds like bombings. War.”

  “Should we go under the bed?”

  “That won’t help if a bomb hits the house.”

  We were on the second floor. If a bomb hit the house we’d fall through the floor. “Should we go downstairs?”

  Benson didn’t answer.

  I stayed under the covers. “What will we do if the house is destroyed? There are no refugee camps in America. People just sleep on the street.”

  “I don’t know.”

  We stayed under the blankets. After about fifteen minutes the battle grew more fierce, with louder explosions that came closer together. Suddenly it stopped.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “Maybe for tonight,” Benson said.

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  STORIES

  Judy

  “The stories you wrote are wonderful,” I told the guys the next day as we got into my car. “The writing was very good.” It was true, and I assumed that’s what they were most eager to hear.

  Benson climbed into the front, Alepho and Lino the back. They buckled their belts. They looked depressed. “Ready for your class today?”

  “My writing is not good,” Alepho said.

  “Good writing is storytelling. Not perfect grammar. Your stories were powerful.”

  No response.

  “Keep writing. It’s a good way to practice English.”

  “We have more,” Benson said.

  From his pocket he pulled lined sheets, covered front and back in small writing.

  “You do like to write, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Alepho said.

  An idea came to me. “I was just thinking …” Stop. Don’t finish that thought out loud. Don’t get them caught up in your writing pipe dreams.

  “We don’t understand American food,” Alepho said. “Can you take us shopping and teach us to cook?”

  I was happy that he’d asked about food. The empty red Coke cans still metastasizing in their kitchen concerned me. They only seemed to eat once a day, at least when they were with me, and were still as thin as the day they’d arrived. Finding jobs was priority number one, but they couldn’t work without energy.

  “How about tomorrow after class?” I’d picked up a large bottle of multiple vitamins on my way and handed it to Benson. “These are for all of you. Take one a day.”

  Benson shook the bottle.

  “They are vitamin pills,” I said.

  “Like Tums? In the camp if there was no food, we stood in line at the clinic and said our stomach hurt so they would give us Tums.”

  “That was smart. But these are different and better to take with food.”

  “They didn’t always have Tums and they would tell us to go away.”

  I started the car.

  “Our cousin Benjamin is coming,” Benson said. “He called from Nairobi. He’s going to Brussels and then America. He will be here on September eleven.”

  “That’s tomorrow, Tuesday.”

  “He was small boy with a huge belly. He is very, very tall now. He talk a lot too. He tell many, many stories. He is the most black of all of us.”

  The most black? I wondered what that meant to them. Was it a positive thing in their culture? “I look forward to meeting him.”

  “You can be his mentor.”

  Alepho saved me from responding. “The Lost Girls are coming too.”

  “Really, that’s great. When?”

  “We don’t know when,” Alepho said. “But when they come, you could be their mentor, too. You would be good at that.”

  Girls might be interesting. “Thank you. I will think about that.” Yet, a houseful of young girls in their neighborhood sounded overwhelming.

  Alepho’s voice turned more solemn. “I think it will be difficult
here for the girls.”

  We agreed on that. I wondered what his reasons for thinking that were. Perhaps something I didn’t know about their culture. I didn’t want to disparage their neighborhood here but it certainly wasn’t where I’d locate a household of girls, or anyone for that matter. I nodded in agreement.

  Lino showed me a shirt and backpack. “You have machine?”

  The shirt had a small tear that could be easily repaired. The nylon backpack was ripped near the binding. Not something I could fix. “I have a sewing machine. We can give it a try when you come to my house.”

  We hadn’t planned a specific time yet for them to visit our home. Their classes at IRC kept them busy most days. This week was job preparedness. How to fill out an application. Do an interview. Becoming comfortable with looking into someone’s eyes when you spoke to them. I could see that their habit of looking down would take time to break.

  As I pulled out of the parking lot, Benson asked, “Did you see shooting in the television?”

  “Shooting? What shooting?”

  “Guns. Lots of shooting. Big guns.”

  “Here? In your neighborhood? Are you sure?”

  They talked all at once. “Yes. Big battle. Guns. Bombs. It go a long time.”

  No wonder they seemed so sad today. This wasn’t the safest or quietest neighborhood in San Diego. It made the news frequently for its crime and gangs. But a gun battle? Surprising that they hadn’t mentioned that when I first arrived. Were they that accustomed to violence? “What did you do?”

  “I stay in bed,” Alepho said. “Go under the covers. Very big guns.”

  If anyone was familiar with gun sounds, they were. I didn’t doubt what he said. The news had been covering the busting up of a large drug cartel that worked both sides of the border. Big guns could only be SWAT or really serious drug dealers with those custom-­made automatic weapons I’d seen in movies. I had begun to think this area was more interesting than dangerous. How naive was I?

  “Very, very bad,” Alepho said in a resigned tone.

  That stunned me into silence. They’d come all the way here only to be thrown into another kind of war zone. There had to be a way to move them to a safer neighborhood.

  A few blocks from their house, I topped the rise and waited at the traffic light. Mission Valley lay below. Malls, secured apartment complexes, condos. Too bad they couldn’t afford the rent to live there.

  Qualcomm Stadium came into view. A thought popped into my head. “What time did you hear the guns?”

  “It was about nine-­thirty,” Alepho said.

  Relief flooded through me. A fireworks show after the game. “That wasn’t guns. You heard fireworks.”

  “Fireworks? What is fireworks?”

  “Fireworks. Little rockets that explode and make pretty lights. After the baseball game last night, they had a celebration and shot fireworks.”

  “Like the Chinese,” Lino said.

  “Yes, a big party, not a battle. You may hear it again. Don’t worry.”

  “We don’t want more war,” Alepho said.

  “I know you don’t. But you’re in America now. You’ll never hear a real gun battle or experience war again.”

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Judy

  My car careening, sluggish foot seeking the brake, not fast enough, not hard enough. The steering wheel doesn’t work. I’ll crash …

  The crash never came. A slamming heart awakened me. Drenched sheets. Nothing more than a nightmare. No way to sleep again.

  I’d been driving over thirty years and never had a car nightmare. Was PTSD contagious?

  Paul’s side of the bed was empty. He must have had an early surgery.

  Even though the big gun battle had ended up being only fireworks, I wanted some way for Benson, Lino, and Alepho to move out of their neighborhood. Their priority was education. They kept asking about school, but their financial support would end soon and it wasn’t clear they understood the ramifications of that. Work had to be the first step. Job-­preparedness training all this week at IRC would give them some skills and allow me time for research and exploration on my own. Next week, we could look for work in earnest.

  Their hearts were set on a college education. They deserved it. Too often, first-generation immigrants sacrificed themselves for the benefit of the next. Their childhoods had already been sacrificed to something not of their doing. Dues paid.

  Still young, unmarried, no kids, they should go for their dreams. Maybe they didn’t have BMW values, like Roslyn said, but ten years from now they might. Toyota values anyway. They came to America to get educated. It wouldn’t be free, as they’d been told or assumed, but it was possible. That’s what counted.

  How to make it possible was the puzzle. I didn’t question their abilities. If overcoming adversity were a sport, they’d be X Games champions. I did question my aspirations for them. Some minorities still found it difficult to achieve the dream.

  Money or lack of it stood in their way. They couldn’t go to high school at their ages, so they needed their GEDs to get into a community college while supporting themselves at minimum wage and adjusting to a foreign culture and language. A lot to juggle. Laundry was still a challenge.

  Dare I think of my book idea again? Their stories were amazing. I’d had no idea that was happening to tens of thousands of little boys in the 1980s while I went about my work, driving my car to a grocery store or Macy’s, never thinking about hunger, much less thirst. If they were willing to tell their stories, people needed to hear them. With one incomplete book, it felt flaky and irresponsible for me to start another. Not to mention going down my well-­trodden path of too many diversions to really do something well.

  Writing wasn’t easy for me. Once the idea for my first book had come to me, a year went by before a word hit the page. I wrote in the closet that next year. Rumors that I was an alcoholic or having an affair were preferable to declaring, “I’m writing a book,” and having to admit later that I never finished it.

  Books demanded immense amounts of time. They impacted family and friends. Chances of financial benefit were minuscule. Every writer knew that. However, even if this book was never published, the stories would be theirs, something that memorialized all those years of hardship. After all, they didn’t have photos.

  The phone rang. Paul’s car phone on the caller ID. “Turn on the news. There’s a plane crash or something in New York.”

  I ran downstairs and turned on the TV in time to see an airliner plunge into one of the World Trade Center towers. The other tower was already a huge plume of black smoke. Two jets crashing into both the World Trade Center towers on the same morning couldn’t be an accident. Who? Why?

  I woke up Cliff. He loved the World Trade Center towers, knew all their facts and figures, and had models and pictures of them in his room. I dreaded his reaction but wanted to be with him when he saw the news.

  From the couch we watched together in disbelief and horror as the first tower crumbled into an ash cloud. Then the second. “I’m going to call Dad,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you.” I dialed over and over. “The lines are jammed.”

  How would Benson, Alepho, and Lino react to this? This time it wasn’t just fireworks. Just yesterday I’d promised that things like this never happened in America.

  “Oh God,” I said. “Benjamin is leaving Brussels today. They all came through New York.”

  “What will happen to him?” Cliff asked.

  “I’m sure he’ll be safe. I’ll call Joseph when the office opens.” Benjamin could not have arrived on a worse day. I’d call Alepho, Lino, and Benson too. I hoped they weren’t in complete panic mode.

  Cliff and I watched replay after replay of the jets obliterating the towers, people fleeing, falling, jumping to their deaths to escape the pain of burning jet fuel, and the awful a
sh cloud. Two jets had to be intentional. Where had this evil come from? It could be a Timothy McVeigh–type, product of some hate-­incubating cult, pissed off we’d killed McVeigh, or that they had to pay taxes, or that their guns might be taken away. What if the perpetrators were from outside, like the group that failed to bring down the towers the first time? Question was: How would we react? Would war come to America?

  AMERICA ATTACKED

  Alepho

  I awoke early and lay in bed. This was America. No need to jump up and stand at the water tap for hours with my jerry can or line up before daylight to get rations. Food and water were only a few steps away in the kitchen. Our own TV was on in the main room.

  What a long journey it had been to reach here. We’d left so many people behind. The friends we’d made on the trek. Our communities in the camp: Sudanese, Rwandan, Somalian, Zairian, Congolese. Many countries were at war at that time, many people displaced from their homeland. Only a very lucky few, like us, were taken to the United States.

  Benson and Lino still slept. Setting our feet on the American land was a blessing. I had no words to describe my feelings. My life would be an amazing experience. I’d go to school. Education would allow me to help those left behind and help me in my life here. My hopes were as high as the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.

  I pulled up the blanket, warm and safe, dreaming of my future.

  James shouted from the main room. “America has been bombed!”

  Bombed? More bombs? No!

  James turned up the TV. Something was happening. I swirled out of bed and jumped to my feet. Still in my pajamas, I went to the front room.

  James stood akimbo, staring at the TV. I’d seen that look of terror too many times before in my life. “What happened?”

  James motioned to me with his eyes to look at the screen. A plane flew into a tall building and made a fiery explosion. Debris flew everywhere like birds scared off a fruit tree.

  “That’s not a bomb. It’s a plane crash. The pilot ran into the building.”

  “Watch,” James said.