Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  Congratulating the captain for having no observably military material on board, the guerrilla officer told him that from now on he would be inspected on each and every trip. Any soldiers he carried for protection would be shot. This meant that he himself, although an Arab, was not going to be arrested now. His wife had saved his ass, and Bol could see the Shilluk lady restrain herself from yelling any further imprecations about the plain stupidity of interrupting these monthly Nile River supply trips, which several villages depended on. She also relayed in English his message to the Tanzanian kids that they’d be staying put on the bank. There was some pity in her voice, but no shrill protest. They looked to Bol, of course, for solidarity and help. He could meet their eyes, but that was all. He did hand over their mosquito nets, water jugs, and remaining bag of food—afraid, even so, of angering the guerrillas, especially because of the lie he had told about his own destination, while four of them searched the boat stem to stern and then below the deck. He’d named the church he sometimes went to in Juba, and claimed his father’s second wife lived in Malakal and was going to find him work. But the commander laughed. He wasn’t interested in Christians; he was interested in killing Muslims. All the Tanzanian boys’ stuff he gave to the crowd of gleeful children who had collected from the nearest settlement, to taste or wear. Ropes were now tied around their necks, and their wrists fastened to these in such a way that they could balance loads on their heads and shoulders as porters. He’d already had their clothes removed, and whipped them with a switch to show how it was going to be.

  “They’re going to Lebanon,” he told the captain sarcastically in Arabic that everybody except the boys themselves could understand. The Shilluk woman and both of the traders who had been spared capture retreated into their cabins so as not to have to witness it, and their departure made the face of the most hopeful boys change.

  “I doubt they will ever drink water again,” the commander said.

  Bol told me, “I didn’t think I wanted to live in my country anymore.” That ineradicable memory was the most painful of all the pain he’d seen. But he had applied himself to his studies in Khartoum and lasted a couple of years, tiptoeing there as a Southern black, with the ticklish tests of loyalty, official and unofficial, constantly directed from the opposite camp. Even the great Mahdi’s grandson, Sadiq al-Mahdi, a hard-line Muslim but not hard-line enough, was under house arrest after being overthrown in a coup. Bol’s friends needed to huddle in a safe house to endure a citywide conspiracy to beat up blacks on one particular night. Then he won his Friendship Program semester in the Soviet Union—chilly Moscow—before undertaking a return journey to the south that required him to detour through Ethiopia to reach the SPLA’s lines, whereupon they were naturally suspicious of him also. Not just the fundamentalist Muslims had splintered into purist sects; so had the warlords here, enforcing a personal, not religious or even tribal, loyalty.

  And the lions—as he’d found when hiking across the Boma Plateau from Ethiopia together with sundry random refugees, a collection of people who were simply trying to survive, and would abandon anybody who was a drag—had also lost their sense of propriety. They were rattled, eating human carrion like hyenas, and hauling down live individual human beings, as if there hadn’t been a truce in force between the local people and the local lions for eons. Before the war, lions always knew and taught their young where they would be trespassing—what domestic beasts they shouldn’t kill without anticipating retaliation—and people, as well, knew where it was asking for trouble for them to go. Deliberately spearing a big black-maned male might be a manhood ritual, but had lost all significance with a Kalashnikov. Neither species was a stranger to the other, or its customary habitat—whereas many of these poor refugees had been on their last legs, eating lizards, drinking from muddy puddles, wandering displaced hundreds of miles from their home ground, where they belonged. And so, on the one hand, young lionesses grew up stalking staggering people, and, on the other, soldiers in jeeps were shooting lions that they ran across with tommy guns, for fun. No rite of passage, no conversation or negotiation was involved: no spear thrown into the teeth, which then became a cherished necklace worn at dances. Bol regretted not sneaking south from Kapoeta into Kenya during the crush of the 1992 retreat, when people momentarily weren’t being stopped from doing so.

  “I was an idealist,” he said.

  He made me cherish my green passport, multivitamin tablets, inoculations, and money belts. I remembered driving across my own country at eighteen to experience its continental scope, like those Tanzanian boys wanting to see Lake Victoria, Lake Albert, the White Nile, Blue Nile, Nubia, Cairo, the Red Sea, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Atlantic, as Pan-African as Nyerere and Nkrumah and Qaddafi had preached. But a do-gooder like me was a sort of elf, in and out. If you had a cross-eyed girl, you brought her to him and he was charmed, whisked her off, fixed the eyes, fed her, and brought her back; yet not the multitude of children who were starving but not cross-eyed.

  I did have such a girl waiting for me at the end of our latest walk, delivered from a Kakwa village somewhere to the west. She was small, defensively alert like the other afflicted girls had been, and Ruth had also allowed the parents of the Bari boy Ladu, with the cleft palate, to camp with a cooking fire on the perimeter close to our gate, in order to encourage me to stick him in the car as well. I realized I’d better hurry, or more children would be added. God knows what would happen to my hospice project. Without Margaret—only the inseparable Kamba houseman to help her at the clinic—how could Ruth keep juggling the balls? She knew that once Margaret reached Gulu, she would almost certainly stay there till the military situation resolved itself, and Ruth had given Margaret enough of her wages to enable her to do that. But she didn’t like the juggling metaphor; she preferred to compare herself to the decoy duck who draws down other birds loaded with maize and sorghum to feed everybody their essential posho.

  Bol wanted to try to cut cross-country for thirty miles or so and meet me beyond the bridge into Uganda, but I doubted we could synchronize our timing for such a rendezvous, or that without a mass migration to guide him, as he’d had in fleeing from Ethiopia before, he wouldn’t get lost. And if he didn’t, but emerged from the forest to meet me at the right moment, so we wouldn’t be stalled, I wasn’t convinced the Ugandan army wouldn’t hand him back to the SPLA at its first roadblock, or agents grab him when he appeared in Gulu overnight. Since a friend from his hometown of Wau was a major, we went to ask him privately if it could be arranged for Bol to obtain permission to help me transport the handicapped children to Nairobi for treatment.

  “How many?” the major asked, laughing sourly. “And what would happen to the hundred he’s responsible for here? They don’t count; you can dump them? I know Bol. He wants to be a scholar and a gentleman, and yes, we watch you guys hanging out together. Bol wants to go to London and join us again after the Arabs are defeated and it’s as civilized here as London is. But we want him to help us build it up from scratch so he can be a scholar and a gentleman in it and not just inherit it from us.”

  He’d been examining a map on a piece of plywood that served as his desk, but laid another piece across it so I wouldn’t see the map. Jerking with blunted energy, he was engrossed in the business of war in a way I didn’t often observe, from the civilian side, and their boyhood memories counted for little now.

  We were worse off now as plotters, having asked for clearance and been denied. I went to Ladoku’s straw church, amid a huddle of mud shacks on the spacious shelf between the Imatongs and the shallow canyon of the Nile. Yes, he had letters to mail, including to “the bishopric,” but betrayed no hankering to leave. “We are fasting, I told him,” he said. He was curious about Ruth’s plans. The Maryknolls were “hardened for solitude, even martyrdom, but how about her?”

  I just said what she said about herself, which was that “Baptists are Methodists without the shoes on.” And, about the Maryknolls: “At least I know what I’m m
issing.”

  She was like a tuning fork, I thought, hysteric—but registering the hunger vibrating variably outside. Once, when I’d reached to flick away a grain of rice that was stuck to her lip, she had gasped, wrenched her face away, and blurted, “No,” as if I’d tapped into an awful memory. Levels of frenetic anxiety and then recurring apathy surrounded her anyhow, when people recognized again that they had better save their strength because they were going to starve, even as they expected the tanks to roll down the road in another breakout from Juba, clear to the Uganda border, destroying, along the way, these temporary shelters—which the guerrillas would then rebuild after they had cut the Arabs’ supply lines and forced them to retreat to Juba all over again. No baby she handled wasn’t wizened.

  I wondered how terrified Otim might become, while traveling to Gulu with me. His captors in the Lord’s Resistance Army had drilled him to fear the tall Dinkas as monsters who would blind you and leave you to starve, Margaret had told me—which, of course, was one of their own techniques, if a village resisted them: that, or cutting off the leaders’ noses. Margaret would help with him, and Ya-Ya with the harelipped boy.

  Ruth had acquired a baby jackal that somebody had forgotten to eat; or maybe they’d sold it to her instead of eating it. Little Leo was jealous, watching it nurse from a bottle, but Ruth smiled at me joyfully while accomplishing this and pointed out that Otim had ventured from his corner of the kitchen. The new cross-eyed Kakwa girl and Ladu, the Bari boy with the cleft palate, were also observing.

  “Just like for your trip. All squeeze in one car.”

  But she indicated that I should look outside by the bomb shelter. An SPLA squad had delivered another Lord’s Resistance Army escapee. A sergeant, drinking tea with Margaret, told me the boy was lucky not to have been shot.

  “He’s old. He’s like a wild man. He has no tribe.”

  Margaret, glancing askance at me, asked if the Land Cruiser wasn’t already too full. He’d “frightened the old people,” by which she meant my hospice patients; then, in fairness, she explained, “Not on purpose. Only seeing him.” She had left him outside with a small helping of posho on a banana leaf to eat, and instructions to split a week’s worth of stove wood.

  I wondered why the Dinkas didn’t want to keep him around for digging trenches, but the sergeant said, “He ate his parents. He wore their intestines around his neck”—showing with his hands how the child soldiers would drape them. In fairness again, Margaret said, “No, they don’t know that.” They had assumed it because some children, when captured, had been forced to.

  She had a cough with a disturbing hack that, it occurred to me, might be TB. It hadn’t before, and that might explain why Ruth kept her toddler mostly out of the kitchen, and wasn’t wheedling Margaret not to leave, please. But Margaret’s polite impatience to be off was persuasive, as well. She didn’t like the parties to any of these civil wars—her own country’s assorted Idi Amins or the spillover from Zaire’s and Rwanda’s atrocious conflicts. So many manifestos and commando raids, torched villages, and amputees that nobody had hated enough to kill. A bit like Ruth, in reaction to all she’d seen, she fed stray children by hand to be sure not a single grain fell to the ground.

  I led Otim out to learn if he was frightened by the other boy. That would have clinched it; I would have kicked the new boy out of the compound. But no, although they didn’t know each other, Otim spoke to him without fear. Twice as big, and burly for a starveling, the creature—who looked like the Wild Man from Borneo, of carnival fame, with muddy hair growing everywhere and a face like an avalanche waiting to happen—held his hand lower than Otim’s head to show me his size when he had been stolen, his eyes pointed sideways to avoid mine. He wanted to melt into the woodwork—yes, sleep in the bomb shelter. We had no hose to clean him, so I handed him a pail, motioning for him to improve his appearance, and Otim, to my astonishment, added a few encouraging words. He had a flat reality to him, the physical collectedness of somebody who had killed: but how many?

  We joined him shortly in the bomb shelter because a MiG ripped out of the sunset, deafening, to strafe the training camp and release its bombs. Looking for it, you would have been blinded, and it arrived simultaneously with its blast of sound anyway. After passing over, it banked and climbed against the profile of Mount Kinyeti, the highest of the Imatongs, with a treeline above nine thousand feet, snarly, glinty, mocking, to dart back toward Juba, more brutal and unnerving than the Antonov’s slowly spiraling deliveries (like a UPS truck, we’d begun to joke). The swelling agitation in the outlying camps, where food had run out, was already hastening my departure, like how startlingly the car was filling up.

  After the raid, both of us being out of breath, Ruth and I gravitated into her room, which was homier than the rest. It had a rug and a wall hanging from Iran and Pakistan, a closet improvised from curtains so her clothes could be hung, and a cradle-crib Makundi had built for Leo, when he was not sharing Ruth’s bed.

  “You should leave,” I urged. “Al wants that. Till there’s food and meds to distribute and you have a vehicle.”

  Curtly, she said no, as though she had put that temptation to rest.

  “Makundi, no? Isn’t he itching to go?”

  She said his salary was paid directly to his family by Al, and since his wife was past childbearing age, what was the point of him being there? This made me laugh. Whether because of his evangelical faith or plain affection for Ruth, he had been with her for a decade or more. Once, when she had rented a place in the city but felt herself “outright suicidal,” she had sent Makundi on a shopping errand on his bicycle, then started for the airport in her car to fly to the U.S. pronto. Passing him on the road, pedaling back toward what would simply be a cowardly note left in an empty house, “almost broke” her heart, she told me. But she found the States “more teetery” for her health than Africa and “after a hairy spell” bid good-bye to relatives and former friends and fled right back to Nairobi “to save my life.” Miraculously her Fiat had not been stolen from the parking lot and Makundi was still holding the fort, awaiting further instructions, though he had received no wages for two months. So the house hadn’t been stripped by robbers. Nor had he sold anything, or tippled her Beefeater gin.

  “Come,” she remarked casually. “Since you’re leaving and I sometimes confide in you.” She took my hand and, shushing the alarm expressed at first by the baby jackal and little Leo, led me to her bed, where she sat down facing me. “We can do our own confession.”

  She directed my hands under her sweatshirt and to her breasts, always bra-less, as I knew from our laundry line plus, inevitably, the bounce. They were ample, as was her chest cage itself.

  “Say, ‘Please, miss, may I hold them?’”

  “Please, miss, may I hold them?”

  “Don’t move an inch from where you are,” she warned me while undoing my pants. “Say, ‘Please, miss,’ again.”

  “Please, miss, again.”

  “Smart-ass,” she answered, massaging my cylinder, but now grasping my balls in her other hand so strongly that I caught my breath.

  “Whose are you?”

  When I gasped, she repeated her question, both gripping me and massaging me. “Whose are you? Should I stop? I will.”

  “No.”

  “Please, miss.’ You can’t have one without the other. This hand and this hand. And you don’t dare move your hands.”

  “Please, miss,” I parroted, clutching her breasts.

  “Whose?” she persisted. By rubbing me and squeezing me, she kept my penis alternately stiffening and shrinking, almost to ejaculation but then wilting small and timid again. “Who’s your absolute life raft?”

  “You!” I groaned.

  “Whose are you?”

  “Yours!” I begged and grunted.

  She laughed and let me remain hard awhile. “I always wanted a clarinet to play with. Will you ever jack off again?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. No, mi
ss.”

  “Margaret told me you did. She saw it in your wash. She smelled it in your wash. Is that true?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “‘Yes, miss. Please, miss,’” she corrected me. “Though I was right here? Tweak my nipples, please. I like them nibbled.”

  I started to duck my head to obey, but those weren’t her instructions yet, and so she squeezed my balls reprovingly. “I didn’t say to.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No, miss.’ Do you want me to let you come? Tweak me. Ask me.”

  “No, miss. Yes, miss, please may I come.”

  “I want you to suckle me first.”

  When I rose up for air, she let me harden and then hung a towel on my penis to see how strong it was.

  “Say it,” she insisted. “But keep your hands on my boobs.”

  “Please may I come?”

  “Life raft,” she said. “You’re in the water. Hands on boobs. They’re all you’ve got. Whose are you?”

  “I’m yours.”

  “‘Pretty please?’”

  “Pretty please with sugar on it.”

  “And who is never going to jack off again without permission?”

  “I guess me.”

  She laughed and took the towel, milked my penis briefly, and caught what I squirted into its folds.

  Exhausted and well “raped,” I thanked her and fell asleep. Ruth, however, went and slept in my room of the rectory, I suppose not to feel possessed. In the morning, recovering my cocky personality, I told her she had been scared I would hear her snore.

  “Life Raft!” she jeered back.

  Still, there wasn’t time for us to semaphore a change in our relationship because, by breakfast, and despite a panoramic rainbow in the mists above our coil of the Nile, the Antonov droned over and excreted or disgorged an end-over-end clutch of tumbling bombs, random as usual, and people ran.