Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  “No oil here. Why this war?” he asked. The oil was beyond Juba and Malakal downriver; he hadn’t been that far north. When I tapped his biceps, he showed me trotlines he had strung from an island into the river that kept his family well supplied with protein. When I asked what he would do when the Arabs arrived, he waggled his thumb at a dugout pirogue hidden next to the slip he was pulling toward.

  “They don’t swim. I know them! Not watermen. No camels here.” He pointed at a mountain torrent joining the river beyond where we were. “Scared,” he said, as if shivering; then pointed at a black-and-white fish eagle soaring to dive on the fish bewildered by the water’s change in flow, and gave me a piece of white crocodile tail meat to chew.

  A Dinka guard helped him, me, and his son to push the jeep up the landing to the dirt road on this east bank, where an equivalent crowd, inflamed by rumors that the guerrillas were no longer able to hold their positions surrounding Juba, was fleeing south. Mostly Dinkas, not from these local river tribes, they weren’t afraid to step right up and berate the Dinka soldiery: If you have already lost your cattle herds and homelands, do you want to lose your children and old people, as well? They couldn’t melt into the forest on ancient footpaths and shelter with relatives who may have never made either army aware that they existed. It was their fight, not mine, but being on Ruth’s side of the river, I could fill my empty seats with a handful of the thousands of souls who needed a ride. Fearfully raucous, shedding the discipline the SPLA had imposed on its refugee camps, the retreat was not yet a free-for-all, and neither deferential nor hostile to my NGO logo. I wanted to find Bol, but the name is a common one and nobody responded to my inquiries except with puzzlement.

  I let a broken-legged old man with a spear lie on top of the grain sacks and medical gear, on the understanding, conveyed by sign language, that he would defend them if necessary. Next to me in front, I allowed an exhausted, bulgingly pregnant woman to sit; her stained toga indicated that her sac had burst. It was a crazy notion, but could you have turned her down? Ruth might help; she had no one else. And children climbed in and out, over the back bumper, because I drove with stymied intensity, seldom above five or ten miles an hour in the crush. Crones and geezers were attempting to evacuate, and women of all ages with or without toddlers in tow—long-legged savannah folk but limping from the downed timber hereabouts, with shins barked, knees knobbed from weeks on a meal or less a day. Some figures leaned or lay a few yards off the line of march, awaiting their fate or for the pain to let up, or their marrow to release more calories. If they were already dead, nobody knew.

  I met no vehicles. The guerrillas had thrown their stake-side trucks and pickups into carrying troops, not acting as ambulances, and mounted machine guns in the latter. So I was afraid that a cruising MiG might spot me, only a minute’s flying time south of the fighting, and assume I must be a commander. I didn’t want to go slower than I could help, yet couldn’t drive fast. Whole families were walking in front of me, their ears hearing echoes of the crackle of battle, not attuned to a minor motor nudging their heels. Gamins and gravid ladies strode like marathoners, carrying whichever members of the newest generation who had endured. All turned in vague alarm at the snout of my jeep, expecting a hollering commandant. SPLA politics were so lethal, their expressions showed relief mixed with chagrin that a last NGO was leaving.

  I thought of Herbert and Craig, who always cleared out before the shit hit the fan. Herbert, after his three passports spilled out of his bag in my presence, had opened up a little, not to speak of his work but saying he had “a cocoon” at home (wherever that was) where his wife raised dogs and he had a “den” with all of Bach and Mozart at his fingertips and the finest technology to render it. “Soothing,” he said.

  Passing a man stumbling in gait, his hip bones, almost fleshless, wagging as laboriously as a sick fish’s tail, needing both food and first aid, I realized I would have picked him up at any other time. Too many blackish birds were spiraling in the sky, as if congregating off the mountainsides to head toward the civilian conclaves where Ruth’s clinic was. Her fence had been knocked down. Her compound was filling, Makundi, her Kamba assistant, had told Al, sounding uncommonly worried on the radio, with a babble of squatters as background noise behind him, not because they imagined she still had rations to feed them but in the belief that the Arabs might not bomb her church for fear of “angering America.” When the exodus reached them, a panic would block our route.

  I was still wondering whether Ruth’s baby jackal had gone into one of Makundi’s stews and whether Bol was at the front or if I might meet him again when suddenly, on a hunch, I spun the car to the right into the tall grass, a dip in the ground practically flipping it, simultaneously with my ears registering the bass banshee hurricane scream of a jet cannoning the road where we’d just been. I lost my back-seat passengers, wrenched my shoulder, bloodied my nose, and the lady beside me began to shriek. I was gasping in simpleton’s shock, spitting nettles and spiderwebs out of my mouth, till the pain in my shoulder, almost out of its socket, became nothing compared to hers. The baby must have been crushed: it would have to be extracted. I dragged her out of the jeep.

  The tangly turf of the jungle, such as it was, had cushioned the falls of the old spearman and the two or three small orphans who had been riding with him. He reassembled his dignity and his three good limbs, scrambled to the road, and began badgering passersby to help. The trouble, of course, was that things were worse. I had never assisted in a birth, aborted or not, but wiggled the inert fetus out of the canal—the mother’s hands like trapped birds beside mine—along with a horrendous flow of blood. Easing her into a peaceably woozy position in which to lose consciousness, with the inert child beside her was the saddest moment so far, but a wider devastation had been inflicted on the stream of pedestrians next to the shell craters and strafing pattern scribbled on the road. They were now in louder agony, and nobody could minister to them, either. In the chaos and congestion we did enlist enough bystanders to right the car, and I found another vial of morphine, good for ten quick shots, and some absorbent compresses.

  A stillbirth in the midst of a famine, a bombing, an auto accident, and triaging. I tied tourniquets onto stumps; these, alone, were not going to save anybody’s life, but the anguish of the surviving family was diminished. We bounced on, another very pregnant woman in the passenger seat and the broken-legged man, with a retaped splint, lying on the bags and trunks, yelling imprecations in Dinka when necessary at the new arrivals, unmaimed, who surged around, walking south but begging for a ride.

  She was a Kakwa, with relatives in Atiak, she said in storekeeper English, watching the MiG perform more important errands on the horizon than coming back for us, its afterburners banging as it climbed away from any Stinger that might be fired in retaliation. I believe in premonitions, or a sixth sense that can save your life, but the plane had probably not been supersonic so close to the ground on its strafing run at us: so I might have heard it, as an assist to my hunch. The Kakwa had seen our escape but lost a sister in the attack and thus was betting on me, split between hope and grief. The Dinka had a herder’s voice, sharp and loud, rattling his spear, but she could negotiate us through a crowd better, using Juba’s Arabic argot or Kakwa, which is close to Bari. She was also soft-hearted. We soon had kids perching on both front fenders and the spare tire bolted to the rear, which disarmed the walking wounded who otherwise might have yelled at us. Another woman, stick-armed yet pouch-bellied, tall yet bent, with pain creasing her face, and too timid to look at me, swung herself aboard in the back-seat area at the invitation of my friend with the spear—he explained the reason in Dinka, and she yammered to him in her distress like, perhaps, a fellow villager.

  People stepped around the more outlandish dead, depersonalized by ghoulish wounds or grotesque postures, when a sort of all-fours, slaughterhouse animalization had occurred in the throes. But where I couldn’t drive around, I needed to drag them, with the kids’
help, out of the road. I might stop anyway, visualizing how the tank treads would chew them up if they were left where they must have collapsed. Sensible individuals would have availed themselves of the woods to die; but who’s so sensible, or not afraid of hyenas, at that tipping point? Better the company of the living before the vultures land. We hauled them underneath the nearest tree, as well as people in convulsions, not finished with the process yet—braying in misery at the departure point. There is no dignity to dying of dysentery along the roadside among the myriad feet of a retreat. The tanks would suspect an ambush and grind right over them.

  Waifs and walking wounded I steered around, as if becoming acclimated. The spearman growled half-sympathetically at how I trembled: our close call catching up with me. New crowds swallowed us, oldsters wagging their bones like a carp’s tail, laboring south on the shoulders of the road. The adrenaline still had me panting. I ached. My wrists and fists remembered how hard they’d wrenched us off into the ditch. A granny holding hands with four children blocked our way, but I didn’t honk, or even regret leaving Nairobi. I was in the flow, Uganda incongruously the safest haven. Incidents were blurring together because people held their youngsters up for me to see—whether to take them or inoculate them or feed them—and I didn’t stop, except finally in the case of one woman who appeared to be dying. Afflicted as though by a stroke caused by some shrapnel, she could use only half of her face, which worked to express her urgency. She was besmeared and encrusted, with another girl, who was shattered likewise. I’d spread my hands to indicate my inability to take them anywhere that would have mattered, even if I’d had the space, and pointed at a shady tree where they might sit. My motor stalled in the milling crowd. Then the jeep felt jostled, but before I could get irritated, the detonations of the Antonov carpeting a refugee camp followed. More panic and congestion would ensue.

  What good would it do? I signaled. They were supporting each other at my window. Bandages, penicillin, if I stopped and rooted them out to administer, and wasn’t swamped by other petitioners, would be of no real use now. What the mother with aphasia or semiparalysis wanted, however, was to pass, with the help of her friend, a boy of kindergarten age, catatonic with fright, from their slippery arms into my lap. Whatever might happen to him was better than watching her die. The mortuary immobility of her face told me that; and he didn’t begin to grab for my ears and eyeglasses until I drove away. The kid on the rear fender yelled at him in Dinka to quit doing that.

  I needed a sling to ease my shoulder’s ache, but would see a person losing blood at a catastrophic rate. Even though I didn’t stop, the armor behind me would be less merciful. It would be a rout by then. My spearman’s bad leg looked badly set, lucky perhaps that it didn’t smell of gangrene yet, and his spear mostly functioned as a cane. But he groaned at the anxious scenarios we squeezed through, the dramas of families split by who could continue to walk and who could not, believing, I think, that needier people ought to have his space in the car and he should be facing the Arabs with his spear: take one with him. I hadn’t stopped, for him to catch the chance to slide out, but at the Maryknolls’ former post, now teeming with refugees, I felt duty-bound to check in, as if Father Leo’s voice were prompting me. A few parishioners and a Tanzanian X-ray technician left behind, whose machine had broken long ago, were preserving order inside the shell of each building, and my presence bolstered them, especially when I said that the NGOs were all coming back, regardless of who won the war. Who could survive for a month or so, was the question. Those whose starvation had progressed to the monkey-cheeked, eye-socket stage had been provided with a dimly illuminated concrete room to lie in; malarial patients, another. The latrines had flooded.

  My car was claustrophobically surrounded, and I was surprised to find the Tanzanian stranded, but, raising his eyebrows, he indicated the thronging children, the veneer of civility still masking desperate circumstances, so how could he desert? Leo and the nuns were “precious, God’s instruments.” It was crucial they not be killed by mistake, like the Scandinavians. I hugged him and gave him one of the fifty-kilo bags of maize I’d brought (Leo’s brogue prompting again), which was immediately set boiling in the fifty-five-gallon steel drum they cooked mush in. My spearman lay down on guard in the weeds, and we lost our collection of urchins to the prospect of a palmful of cornmeal apiece.

  I took the opportunity to skedaddle, but my remaining passengers, the heavily pregnant Kakwa and the other woman, were so dismayed I gave them energy bars from Meals Ready To Eat packages and snacked on one myself. Around a couple of bends we met more waifs in the middle of the road, who mounted the fenders and the spare tire fastened upright in back. I picked up a third ailing woman, to fill the back seat—the eye is hardwired for triage, I think—and peeled a tangerine for the child in my lap. Unfortunately he was wetting it from more than one orifice, but I had resisted the awful impulse to leave him at the Catholics’ place, to be smothered in terror. A railroad train could not have collected all of the women and children in need of rescue. The listlessness of true famine was spreading, people eking out their last calories by as little exertion as possible, and I had no radio to start the aid groups in Gulu moving north to receive them.

  We slowed to a crawl again when a soldier with a Kalashnikov, although nodding in recognition at my logo, squeezed off a warning shot and peered at my passport, then asked for a candy bar. Imagining the furor in the European press about the Norwegians’ deaths, I wondered what the rumor mill in Nairobi’s NGO community was doing with Ruthie’s holdout status. Selfless or neurotic and pigheaded? She and our piffling organization, Protestants Against Famine, were minor players on the overall scene, but this disaster would train a spotlight on her. She was probably going to apologize for endangering me, but would she even be considered employable out on the edge again? Combined with what was already some gossip about her Labyrinth and witch’s globe and spirit stick (maybe the truck drivers had snitched), would this seem a stunt signifying unreliability? People knew of her sudden return to Ohio a year or two before, but not that she’d come back to Africa precipitously because she’d felt suicidal there. Burning out was okay; anybody might do that. The code involved how you handled it.

  “I don’t believe in tragic sacrifices,” I muttered to myself, as if rehearsing my first comments to Ruth. My shoulder hurt as I eased the tires over the bumps, praying that none would go flat, and blaming her was easy. On the other hand, I’d begun to anticipate seeing Bol. Now, in the anarchy of the rebels’ defeat, I might be able to rescue him, help him fulfill his dream of reaching the cities of the West. The river in its purring gorge was lit by curvaceous intensities of tawny light, the hills like combers over it, over-enthusiastically endowed with flora. But in my lap the little kindergartener who had been thrust upon me, and was clinging to my sore ribs and interfering with my driving, had also vomited up the pieces of an energy bar he had eaten and further dehydrated himself by releasing more of his diarrhea onto my pants, as though to remind me that this was an ambulance I was driving, and I was probably going to dump the patients out in Ruth’s churchyard to await the tanks. The pregnant woman next to me, in tribal dress, with necklaces, amulets, earrings, a hair band but bone-thin, offered the scrawny boy the bits he had thrown up in her tweezer fingers. When he shook his head, she popped them into her own mouth. Good god, was I kidding myself that I could save her and him as well as the carload of people I had undertaken to pick up?

  “God luv ya!” Mickey had called from the cockpit, when he’d tossed me his crash rations and kit with flashlight and so on. And I was thinking how accidental it was, who you “saved.” Makundi instead of this famished Kakwa; or her instead of another of the women in their seventh or eighth month I had noticed struggling along but passed? A stooped fellow clutching a few cassava roots by the roadside (and relieved I wasn’t stopping to steal them) indicated by gesturing that Bol might still be around, when I said the name. I thought of my legendary Hickey ancestor, however,
who as a child had starved with his family through the Great Potato Famine in Ireland a hundred and fifty years ago. When they sent him out to search the fields one last time, after nobody else had strength enough to go, he walked back, like this man, with three in his hands and knowledge of an undiscovered pocket, to save their lives. A sumptuous sunset had begun, as large as the sky. Would we get away by dawn? I didn’t dare leave Ruth’s till daylight or we might face mob rule.

  “God bless you!” She grinned wearily when I drove through the ruined gate.

  The courtyard was like ten gypsy encampments piled together, with hunger the theme song. Her hair had whitened, so she looked sixtyish instead of fiftyish; and even Makundi, who had been skinny before, was thinner still.

  “You find us in reduced circumstances,” she added self-mockingly, while grimacing at the arrival of yet more weakened women, swelling toward deliveries that were sure to be wretched and sad, and also the small boy curled fetally, with his snot bubbling into my lap.

  Two Dinka clan chieftains’ wives, Nyadoul and Nyajal, one in a red toga, the other in blue—“They are heroes,” Ruth said—took charge of my last fifty kilos of cornmeal, though it would need to multiply like Christ’s five loaves and two fishes in order to nourish the multitude who gathered around the steel fuel drum to smell the aroma as sticks were lit.