Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  “Where?”

  “Port Sudan. Down at the docks. It had been there for a while, apparently—it was totally stripped, doors, tires, seats, engine, everything, even the license plates. But the serial number checked out.”

  “Did anyone see him?”

  “Who?”

  “Rehv, for Christ’s sake.”

  Fairweather looked embarrassed. “No,” he said. “Not so far.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “Nothing about him either.”

  “What about the Saudis?”

  “They have no record of anyone entering at Jeddah or anywhere else with a U.S. passport in the name of Quentin Katz.” Krebs thought he heard a hint of challenge in Fairweather’s tone.

  “That doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “He could have slipped across in a dhow and landed somewhere up the coast. Keep checking with the Saudis.”

  Fairweather gazed out the window. “Okay, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Don’t get mad.”

  “But what?”

  “Are you sure it was him? That’s all. I mean it’s been a long time since you’ve seen him, and you’ve had a lot of time to think, and maybe—”

  “It was him.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t take it personally.”

  But Krebs knew it was personal, now. He hated Isaac Rehv. He lay back on the pillow. He had to decide whether Rehv had deliberately left him to die. If he had, it meant the Jeddah story was probably true. If he hadn’t, it was probably false.

  “Fairweather?”

  Fairweather turned from the window. “Yes?”

  “I want Gillian Wells to keep looking around Muglad.”

  “But Port Sudan’s a thousand miles from there.”

  “Just do it, Fairweather.”

  “Right.”

  Fairweather went away, leaving the Thermos behind. Alone, Krebs began to brood about what he had said: “Are you sure it was him?” It was not like Fairweather to come up with an idea like that by himself. It was like the office. He thought about the office. Then he thought about Rehv.

  Later a doctor came to examine him. Krebs gave him the Thermos. The doctor tasted the drink. “This is the real thing,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Gillian Wells reported from Muglad: “Nothing.” Krebs sent her south to the Uganda border, and later west into Darfur, where the fighting was. She found no sign of Isaac Rehv.

  The day Krebs left the hospital he arranged private instruction in Arabic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Mahdi lay quietly in the tent. He had grown too big for the bedstead, and at least partly because of that he no longer slept as deeply as he once had. His feet hung over the end and there was barely enough room for Neimy beside him. She pressed against him, her chin, her breast, her thigh. Her skin was hotter than his; wherever they touched, pores opened and joined their bodies in a sticky bond. It did not bother him. He was used to sweat by now. It was always with him, like the beating of his heart.

  He listened to the sounds of the night. Nearby a woman murmured. A child began to cough in mounting wheezy spasms that finally died away for lack of breath. Farther away a donkey brayed. They were in the south, beyond the Goz, where sometimes a leopard came in the darkness. He listened hard for nervous sounds from the animals, but there were none. The child coughed and could not stop.

  He turned over and tried to sleep. It was no use. He was waiting for Bokur, who should have come back the night before. Bokur and the other western omdas who were still loyal to the remains of the central government had been called to Khartoum to talk about taxes. Even some of the tribes that were not in arms against the government had stopped paying taxes. “We pay tax,” Bokur had said. “Maybe it won’t matter if I don’t go.”

  The Mahdi had looked at him and seen that he was afraid. But if Bokur did not go it would mean an open break with Khartoum. He was not ready for that. “Go,” he had said. Bokur had gone, taking Hurgas with him.

  He stood up, lifted the tent flap, and went outside. There was a crescent moon, lying on its rounded back. It was the driest season, and the dust in the air made the moon red: a thin red smile. The child began to cough again. He followed the sound, passing several tents until he found the one with the coughing child. The coughing went on for a long time. When it was over, the child gasped for breath, then panted and finally breathed normally. The coughing came again, harsh and dry. In the tent a woman sighed. The Mahdi walked away. The hospital in Wau was still open. He would have the child taken there in the morning.

  In front of his tent he lay on the ground and looked up at the red smile. A man had walked across that smile once, or had it been two men? He couldn’t remember the story very well. But his father, excited, had shown him a picture to prove it: a man dressed as a machine trying to plant a metal flag on an airless rock. “It doesn’t look like the moon to me,” he had said. His father had put the picture away.

  The Mahdi closed his eyes. When is the time, he asked himself. When will I be ready? It had never been discussed. When the time came his father would tell him, and tell him how to do what he had to do, and say what he had to say. But his father was dead. Or he had changed his mind and gone away. Or he had never intended to return to the railway bridge, and had planned all along that his son would decide when it was time. The Mahdi imagined his father waiting, back at the cabin on Lac du Loup. Of course it would not be that cabin and that lake, but somewhere like it; chosen perhaps even before they left. He would be there now, waiting. His father was prepared to wait.

  But most of the time the Mahdi thought he was dead.

  A leather sandal slapped against the sole of a foot. The Mahdi looked up and saw Hurgas coming out of the shadows. Hurgas too had grown tall, but not quite as tall as he, and not nearly as broad. He rose. Hurgas saw him and started.

  “What are you doing?” Hurgas whispered.

  The Mahdi heard the fear in his voice, and the anger. He wondered if the fear and anger seemed stronger to him than they really were. Most people hid emotions like those from him now. Hurgas was one of the few who still showed them in his presence. “Waiting for you,” he replied. “Where’s your father?”

  “Where do you think?” Hurgas said bitterly. “Khartoum.” The Mahdi looked at him without saying anything. In his eyes Hurgas saw something that made him back away slightly. When he spoke again there was less rawness in his tone. “They won’t let him leave.”

  “What do you mean? Have they arrested him?”

  “No. It’s not like that. He’s at the Grand Hotel. They say they want him to stay for more talk, that’s all. But there’s a guard outside his room, and he can’t go anywhere by himself.”

  “What do they want to talk to him about?”

  “The same thing they talked to him about the whole time I was there.” Hurgas lowered his eyelids a little and tilted back his head. The lower half of his face disappeared in the shadows cast by his high cheekbones. “You.”

  “And what does he tell them about me?”

  Hurgas looked down. “That he believes.”

  The Mahdi walked slowly away, past a few tents and a tethered goat standing very still. He turned. Hurgas had been watching him; now he lowered his eyes. The Mahdi went back to him.

  “They must have given you a message for me.”

  The corners of Hurgas’s mouth rose very slightly. “They said you would know what to do.”

  “What do you think that is, Hurgas?” the Mahdi asked quietly. Hurgas’s thin lips parted for a moment as though he would speak, but all he did was shrug; he kept his thought inside. “You’re tired, Hurgas. Go to bed.” Hurgas turned to go. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” the Mahdi asked.

  “What?” Hurgas said.

  “What your father told you to say to me.”

  After a long pause Hurgas spoke: “‘Don’t go to Khartoum.’ That’s what he said. The fool. The stupid old fool.” Hurgas’s voice rose, and broke. He walke
d quickly away.

  “Hurgas.” But he was gone.

  The Mahdi went inside the tent and lay down beside Neimy. He could not sleep. He saw Bokur’s eyes silently asking him to say what he should have said: “Don’t go.” But he had not been ready. He still was not ready. He lay awake until dawn. Everyone else in the camp slept. All except the coughing child.

  In the morning Neimy and a few other women walked down to the water hole with large calabashes on their heads to fetch the water for the Mahdi’s bath. Because the rains had been so poor the water holes had all shrunk in only a few months to shallow ponds. The Mahdi did not want to waste water on a daily bath, but he knew it was expected. Already as Neimy carried the calabashes into the tent and emptied them into the little galvanized tub he heard the gathering outside, soft talking and shuffling feet.

  He stepped into the tub and sat down, his knees drawn up almost to his chin. The water from the pond was warmer than his body. Neimy cut a few chips from a block of yellow soap and began washing him. Her hands were slow and gentle.

  “Hurgas came back,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “But not father?”

  “No.”

  Her hands, slippery with soap, slid down over his shoulders and down his back. She waited for him to say more, but he was listening to the shuffling feet and the murmuring voices all around him on the other side of the matted straw walls.

  “Are you worried?” Neimy asked quietly. He felt her breath on the back of his neck. Her arms circled his chest; her hands ran over his stomach and began soaping his penis and testicles. “Don’t worry.”

  She squeezed him and rubbed slowly, the way she knew he liked. Little waves rose on the surface of the bath water and slapped softly against the sides of the tub. The Mahdi shifted his hips slightly forward and closed his eyes. In his mind he saw his semen drifting in the water like jellyfish. “Don’t,” he said. “Stop.”

  Neimy had followed his thoughts. “It’s all right. No one will notice. And if they did it would make them happier.” She kept rubbing.

  She was probably right but to have them drinking his bath water was bad enough. He sat up and opened his eyes. “No,” he said.

  Without letting go of his penis, Neimy moved around the tub. Her broad face reminded him of Bokur’s. Even her breasts, now full and heavy, touching the rim of the washtub, seemed like the kind of breasts Bokur would have if he were a woman. It was the same body: old and male, not quite ugly; young and female, almost beautiful. “You don’t understand,” Neimy said, rubbing harder. “They love you.”

  “Stop.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Stop.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll catch it in my mouth.”

  She did.

  Afterward Neimy filled the calabashes with the bath water and took them outside. The Mahdi lay alone on the bedstead. His worries had gone away. For a little while his mind was empty. Then he began to hear the low voices, the moving feet, and from time to time the trickling of water; his worries returned. He did not love Neimy. And he could not be sure exactly what she meant when she said she loved him. She loved the way the Baggara loved. He, if he loved, would love partly like that, but partly in other ways as well. Even forgetting that, did she love him as a man or as the Mahdi? It did not really matter because there was no Mahdi and he was not the man she thought he was.

  But of course there was a Mahdi. He got off the bedstead and went outside. The calabashes lay on the ground in front of the tent. A crowd had gathered, perhaps four or five hundred people, maybe more. There were more every day. He saw the light brown Arab faces of camel-raising nomads from the north and the black faces of cattle herders and millet farmers from the south. He saw Fur faces and Fulani faces and even a few Berber faces; and faces of other peoples he did not know, who came from the states that had been torn apart far away in the west. One by one they stepped forward, men, women, and children, and Neimy dipped a brass ladle into the bath water and held it to their lips for a ritual sip.

  When they saw him they fell silent, like a concert audience when the conductor raises his baton. The Mahdi looked over their heads and saw the tents that covered the ground in all directions, as far as he could see. There were the round tents of his own people, and pointed tents and flat-topped tents. Some were big, some were small. They were all there because of him.

  Slowly he turned and walked back into the tent. Outside, the low murmuring rose again. Water trickled. He covered the entrance to the tent with a large straw mat and paced back and forth in the hot darkness. He knew he could not wait much longer. Many of the people in those tents, especially the ones from the west, were armed. They had American guns, Russian guns, French guns; it depended on which war they had been fighting, and on whose side they had fought. Soon they would need food. So would their animals. Already the herds had eaten most of the grass for miles around. The few pools that still had water were now very small. Even the deep wells were drying up. Everyone was waiting for some signal from him.

  Three and a half steps forward, three and a half steps back.

  But what? How could he do anything before he knew more about the world beyond Kordofan, beyond the Sudan, beyond Africa? Only his father could have told him what he had to know; Bokur could not tell him. It was no use trying to find in Bokur what he needed from his father. All that did was make Hurgas hate him more.

  Three and a half steps forward, three and a half steps back.

  He heard horses outside the tent. A man spoke. Neimy answered. She pushed back the straw mat and entered the tent. He stopped pacing.

  “A problem?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “At the watering hole. Dinka.”

  Someone brought him the black mare. He rode across the camp, following the rows of tents like streets. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch him. He did not look at them, but rode on. He was thinking about power. He began to realize how smart his father had been. Yet from the time he was a very little boy he had always thought himself much smarter than his father. Had he been wrong? His whole life had been a dream in his father’s head. How could he be smarter than the dreamer? The dreamer had given him power. Now he would have to be smart enough to use it on his own.

  Or he could go away. But how? Where? Why? He wanted to be what he was becoming. Was that part of the dream too? He forced himself to stop thinking about his father.

  At the edge of the camp was a shallow depression about one mile wide. Bokur had told him that years before it was always entirely filled after the rains. Now there was nothing more than a little pool of brackish water in the middle. By the pool stood men from the camp; some of them held rifles across their chest. A few yards beyond them were twenty or thirty Dinka, and about a dozen cattle, short-horned animals smaller than the Baggara cattle.

  The Mahdi rode down into the depression and halted in front of the Dinka. They were tall black people, naked except for the little scraps of hide that hung over their genitals. He looked at them and saw the bones under their dusty skin; the swollen bellies of the children; the sickly rust-colored hair of the babies. He felt the eyes of his own people on his back. It was time to begin.

  “What do you want?” he asked. A gaunt old man answered in his own language. “I do not understand Dinka,” the Mahdi said. “Do none of you know Arabic?”

  A boy stepped forward. He had a bloated belly and a cataract that covered one eye like a white glaze. “Water,” the boy said in Arabic. “We are thirsty. Our cattle are thirsty.” The old man called the boy to him and said something in a sharp voice. The boy nodded and looked up at the Mahdi. “Water, master. Let us drink.”

  “I am not your master,” the Mahdi said. “There is only one master.”

  “Please, master.”

  A rusty-haired baby began to cry. Its mother held it to her thin and wrinkled breast. It kept crying. “Are your people Muslim?” the Mahdi asked the boy.

  “No.”

  “Are they Je
ws? Or Christians? Because,” he raised his voice so his own people could hear him better, “the Koran says that there is a special place for Christians and Jews.”

  “No,” the boy answered.

  “Then you cannot drink here.”

  The boy turned to the old man and spoke to him. The old man listened and said nothing. The boy looked up at the Mahdi. “We are thirsty,” he said in a low voice.

  “Your people may drink on one condition,” the Mahdi said. “You must accept Islam. To accept Islam you must give up all your old gods forever.”

  The boy said something to the old man. The old man shook his head and began to walk away. A woman spoke to him. He answered her. She began to scream at him. Others began to scream. The old man argued with them. They shouted over him. After a while the old man stopped arguing. They all became silent. Another man spoke to the boy. The boy turned to the Mahdi and said: “We will accept Islam.”

  “Then drink,” the Mahdi told him. “And after, come to my tent. I will give you food and show you how to be a Muslim.”

  The naked people ran toward the pool of water. Their cattle followed. Only the old man stayed where he was. After a while he walked slowly away, across the depression.

  The Mahdi looked at his people and saw the approval in their eyes. He knew that he had done something his father could never have done. He would be better on his own. His father had dreamed. He would act.

  For a few moments he watched them drink. Then he remembered the coughing child and rode quickly back to the camp, straight to the tent he had noted during the night. He jumped off his horse and looked inside. A red-eyed woman told him the child was dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Slowly the Mahdi walked back toward his tent. He led the black mare by the bridle. Above him the afternoon sun made the pearly sky shimmer and writhe in the heat. He had grown used to the African sun: It was part of normal life like rusty hair and swollen bellies. Now, suddenly, he felt it very strongly—its heat, its weight, its bite. The mare nudged his back with her nose. He walked faster.