“This way they’re dying by inches,” she said; and, turning, asked me, since I had remained almost silent, “Should I apologize?” In fact, according to Al, she had, over the radio. Yet on the scene I was uncertain. Maybe you really ought to stay as long as you could, if only as a witness.
I cleared my throat. “I don’t know.” Because that sounded a bit stupid, I added, “Truthfully.”
Ruth was sleepwalking by now, compared to when I’d left, but still cherishing young Leo, who continued to hug her right hip in addled confusion, and therefore she was none too pleased by my introducing an obviously sickly, faintly weeping new waif right into the household, so to speak, who might be fatally contagious. I wasn’t, either—he’d been handed to me as a stranger by a stranger a couple of hours ago and had been dribbling on me from both ends ever since. But his mother’s anguished expression from the side of her face that still worked was potent, imperative, as Ruth, without asking, could see. Not touching him, she examined him sympathetically.
“No measles,” she said. “They have measles in Kajo Kaji. Can you picture what will happen if those two armies come tearing through here and all get the measles and everybody on their feet keeps running?”
The drone of the Antonov, never grounded as early in the evening as the MiGs, moved us indoors, to “the priory,” as she called her quarters jokingly, to collapse into chairs for a pot of tea. Not that the roof made it safer than the dinky ditch she’d had dug for a bomb shelter— and which stank now of feces—but you could ignore more. She was in a diminished mood. There was no protocol. She wolfed down a Meals Ready To Eat from my stash, chewing pieces Leo could swallow to finger into his mouth. I gave my boy soup. The generator had run out of fuel, so we used a candle. The radio’s battery was dwindling. The baby jackal had indeed gone into one of Makundi’s stews.
“It’s so random it’s bedlam,” she said. “You have to believe in heaven, and I don’t know if I do.”
We did reach Felix, nearby in Uganda, who ran the closest NGO station and could relay the news to Al the next morning that I’d arrived at Ruth’s. His radio was on because he was attempting to reach the German embassy in Kampala, in case they could pressure an army general to organize a convoy of food north along his road from Gulu. Another mine probably planted by a rump group of rebels called the Allied Democratic Forces had blown up under a routine delivery, killing the truck driver, and set off another drivers’ boycott. Knowing that an avalanche of refugees was tumbling his way, he sounded frantic to get resupplied. “I can feed a hundred at most for one day,” he said. Ruthie groaned. We were watching a line of our own souls, supervised by Nyadoul and Nyajal, each receive a handful of mush to last them indefinitely. These Ugandan rebels weren’t crazies, like the Lord’s Resistance Army, but a collection of leftover military folks who had served previous dictators, so their mines were meant to disable not aid groups but Museveni’s army. The LRA’s evil genius wished to punish the world for its sins.
I wanted Ruth to massage my sick shoulder, but she was too tired for me to ask. She showed me a knapsack she’d packed for tomorrow’s vamoose. Makundi, meanwhile, was guarding the jeep. She also pawed through the meds that remained in my trunk for what to distribute to patients she recognized before we left—irritated now that Al hadn’t remembered to put in powdered milk and eggs for Leo.
“But he’s never met Leo. And we had about ten minutes,” I pointed out, though afraid then of being blamed myself.
The complaint was shelved when the Antonov pooped a crapload of explosives onto a temporary settlement down the road a bit, where it might impact the exodus the most. The route must be choked with the injured, the panicky, throttling possibilities of either resupply for the front or an orderly guerrilla retreat. Flames flashed up like blood briefly, and I pictured the airplane’s crew, Soviets cashiered at the end of the Cold War without ever having had the chance to bomb American targets; this could be their apotheosis. We continued doling out germicides, rehydrating salts, malaria pills, so nothing would be left to fall into less deserving hands, a random, surreptitious process nonetheless, because everyone needed stuff.
The chairs, beds, blinds, bins would disappear as soon as we were gone, and after I emptied the rest of my jerrican into the gas tank, I rinsed it obsessively to carry our water, since the jugs had been stolen already. The other jeep’s tires, up on blocks, which I’d hoped to cannibalize for the Norwegians’ vehicle, had been cut up for rubber sandals.
Makundi wore a pair—and so did Bol, when he showed up, looking skeletal. I hugged him, gave him an energy bar. No, no firing squads; nothing for him to fear if, like us, he made a dash for it. The big bright rising moon tempted us—if it might not tempt the Antonov into trying another bombing run—instead of the alternative, succumbing to a nap. But, coughing badly, swallowing an aspirin, he advised us not to.
“At night people have less conscience, you know? No witness. In daylight they know you did good, so they wouldn’t hurt you.”
He didn’t want to discuss what had befallen his various school-boys, except to say that the unaccompanied minors program had been scrapped by the SPLA even before the offensive. No food for those not drafted, and so those twelve years old and under had scattered, chasing bush squirrels and grasshoppers. He grabbed at the air, as you’d do to catch the latter and crunch them in your mouth. I fell asleep on my cot while we caught up, but Ruth, being worried that his cough was tubercular, did not act welcoming, and Makundi, no fan of the Sudanese, had always been cool toward Bol. He liked to say that the Brits had given the Sudan its independence on a silver platter well before Kenya’s and without anything like the fight Kenya’s Mau Mau had had to wage. So here they were, fighting each other instead: Arabs versus Dinkas; Nuer and Zandes against the Dinkas. Bol would scowl defensively. “Do you think we’ve made no plans?” But in their arguments, Makundi evoked the chaos everywhere within a hundred miles by waving circles in the air.
This wasn’t in contention now. And Ruth was preoccupied with preserving the poor toddler, Leo, still marked with the monkey eye sockets and cheeks from the starvation he had endured before Father Leo had happened to scoop him up. Like Bol’s, her attention had narrowed, but she still had a child to focus upon. She had no soap left to scrub with after touching her patients, which bothered her visibly when Leo was standing by, wanting to be touched, too. No food to give them, either—the cornmeal I had brought vanished even before the end of the line reached the cooking barrel—but a gargantuan scale of privation within a stone’s throw of the church itself. People may have congregated in the churchyard in hopes that it would be spared in order not to anger the Christian powers, but flickering on the hillsides all around were campfires anchoring individual families against the atavism of the sky.
I slept for what resembled half an hour of nonstop vigorous dreaming, with this emergency transposed to other settings (or me trying to prevent the pews from being burnt as firewood), until Makundi woke me. The sky was pink tentatively whitening toward blue: “Like America,” he said ironically. Logy, I had three adult passengers ready, plus Leo permanently hitched on Ruth’s jutting thigh or knee or hip. We could have identified a thousand people in need of the services of an ambulance, but the point was to dull or mask one’s compassion and briskly clear out, as everybody watched. I was able to play that role except for the sticking point of my little dribbling, whimpering, feverish, dysenteric, dying boy. I think Ruth was ready to come to blows, if I had laid him in the car alongside Leo: “It’s not just malaria. They would isolate him in a hospital.” He was as hot as soup, doubled over with cramps, too scared to sleep. She was afraid of cholera, which was stretching it, but she was right that sticking him in the jeep to bounce like a jumping bean until he died would be simply cruel. With his mother’s haggard, aphasic face in my mind’s eye, I remade my bed, sheets and all, then laid his head on the pillow, with a chocolate in his mouth and water at the side. Leaving him incongruously ensconced like that in lux
ury on an expatriate’s cot for the short remainder of his life, he had made me feel better. Yet it is as regretful a memory as any I have.
Otherwise our departure was anticlimactic. Nyajal and Nyadoul thanked Ruth in a mixture of English and Dinka, via Bol, with the gravity of women about to flee themselves, in separate clans, and far from the first time, having already walked from the Nile to Ethiopia and back, losing crippled kinsfolk at every stage. We could see the smattering of Dinkas, lying or sitting, and raising their hands to us, who would get no farther than here.
Makundi, Ruth’s onetime houseman in Nairobi, had a coil of snaring wire under his shirt and Attlee’s sheath knife on his belt. This was not his war, and he was prepared to walk home across a fourth of Africa, if it came to that, using the woodcraft of his youth, but he was coming with us. Bol, having a minor civil administration position, however, was pained. He told the crowds that in Uganda the United Nations would find and feed them, and if they were stalled where they were to remember that the Arabs had lived alongside their ancestors for a thousand years and were not bogeymen. Most of their soldiers were not Arabs anyhow, but blacks from the region of Darfur who the Arabs hired to fight for them. “We all went to school together before and we will go to school together again,” he translated himself for me. I was dunked into a chilly memory from Keene, New Hampshire: the school board quizzing me about why I’d taken an hour of class in Beginning History to make a point of getting fourteen-yearolds to understand the difference between Norman Thomas and communism.
Our Slavic friends droned overhead to choose another target. Fires scattered on the horizon included thatch huts burning, whether set ablaze by other guerrillas attacking our guerrillas or people destroying their own homes as they fled. Then the geysering explosions of the Antonov’s pass caused the mob on the road in front of us, already arena-sized, to quail. Oldsters, and Dinka mothers of childbearing age bolstering one another, cicatrixed Mandaris, Nuer scarified on their foreheads, Acholis, Baris, and other minority tribes mixed in this mass that surged like a stadium emptying through a tunnel. Bol’s diplomacy helped part a path, and although people I vaguely recognized made thumbing motions for a ride, it was good-humored, as if granting that, all right, our service was up and we were entitled to board one of those British Airways flights that once a day followed the course of the Nile at three or four times the height of the Antonov, clear north, entirely out of Africa to Heathrow, leaving only its contrail behind. I was teary from the tension nevertheless, and because my lap felt empty, though it and the seat were still stained and smelly from that little boy’s bloody flux. And now when he woke from his daze, as hot as a teapot and desperately thirsty, the sheets gooey, his innards on fire, and looters tipping him onto the floor, wouldn’t he have been better off if his mother had never pushed him into my arms in the first place?
Ruth’s face was pursed from a migraine, and indrawn from the calamity. The Zandes, Bol said, were drifting to the west toward Zande land, and the Kakwas toward Yei. Ladoku, our Anglican minister, had set his sights on reaching Palabek, a Ugandan village, by a network of trails that one of his Acholi parishioners knew about, with such of his flock who could attempt the trek, after kneeling down publicly to beg forgiveness from the rest. The enormity of the relocation permitted us to bob along as noncombatants, with Bol assuring any soldier of our bona fides. People hollered for help occasionally, pointing to a wound or somebody who’d collapsed, yet we had turned stony. None of us was inclined to stop. Ruth even muttered, “Donor fatigue” to a supplicant who trotted beside her window, without asking what his problem was. We did acquire a tiny entourage of boys who hadn’t been dragooned for combat but had no favors to ask. They just recognized Bol or me from those classes under the tamarind tree and, not being too lame, started to follow, like a Secret Service cordon, as Ruthie joked, when they perched on each front fender or jogged by the tailpipe, holding on to the spare wheel bolted upright in back. I didn’t adjust my speed to accommodate them, but couldn’t go faster anyway.
Unaccompanied minors to begin with, they’d been left to comb the debris of ruined villages for scraps of protein or boil grass and leaves. The wedge of space behind the car as we nosed through the throngs provided a collecting point for more, only stymied by the aerobatics of a MiG that dived in an ear-damaging pendulum over us—I nearly squirted off the road again—suddenly throttling the flow. Red and black detonations miles ahead of us announced the blowup of the bridge over the Aswa, as we later learned. Not a river as formidable as the Nile, but neither drivable nor wadeable, and guys were going to have to spear the crocs and snakes in the belt of swampland before a horde of people swam. We’d stopped seeing weapons—a bazooka, a Stinger, a Kalashnikov—everything being at the front, and some of the sad sacks slumped pitifully at the shoulder of the road were never getting up.
The jam was such that Makundi made it plain that he would rather have struck off on foot for himself if it weren’t for Ruth. He had his pay. “Alone is best.” But Bol was flogging the case that the SPLA’s commanders had delegated him to get us through so the international community could hear the news. Although not true, this might have worked if it were possible to slip us past the people who hadn’t been able to hear his voice. The noise was bedlam; the crush, fearful. When we did move, the impetus was everybody’s need to continue south, bridge or not. Khartoum had broken the siege on all sides and was shuttling in more troops on another Antonov for the push, a man with a squawk box at a roadblock said, and these Dinkas, being in foreign tribal territory anyway, couldn’t skitter off the road to hide in the mountains like the locals and find food without their soldiers to protect them. The Acholis and others had scores to settle. And yet, beyond the Aswa, the LRA was lying in wait with a machine gun to pick the refugees clean, once they got into Uganda, he said. “They listen to the radio, too,” Bol translated.
Grannies and aunties signaled us in dismal urgency when a feebly blubbering child with wrist bones larger than her arms collapsed, or an older person not beyond rescuing. My fingers twitched on the steering wheel, wanting to help, at the same time as I groped for my canteen beside my seat to make sure it was out of reach of the witches’ brew of germs inhabiting the mouth or hands of any child we might relent and try to save. Ruth’s face was like when you’re scurrying through a rainstorm with no covering for your head, flinching, bent—mumbling, though, that Ethiopia had been worse.
We weren’t in the middle of an Ethiopian or Somali desert but in central Africa, the very scenery of prehistory, as pristine as it gets, if you left the road blocked by these uprooted thousands for a matter of days. “It’s shattering,” I suggested. “Not like glass,” she told me. “More like mercury—it’ll get back together.” She held Leo up occasionally, for people to know we had a child in the car. Then Bol, when he was spotted by an eight- or nine-year-old we recognized as having taught together, hauled him through the rear window to sit between himself and Makundi, which made two. Not dumbfounded by his good luck, the boy began to recite half the English alphabet for us. Makundi, less touched, lectured Bol on how the Dinkas should have budgeted some troops for border control. His composure was equal to the task of slapping people’s hands away when they reached inside to beg for food, as if they were pickpockets in Nairobi. Exasperated as he was by our late start—the blame was not mine, but he didn’t hide his belief that a CIA spook like Craig would have been of more use—he didn’t rate school-teacherly niceties, educated gentilities, like Bol’s all that highly, either. With his languages, Luo and Kikuyu, Arabic and Swahili, English and Dinka, plus, intact from childhood, his woods wisdom, he might be illiterate but couldf slide out of his door and strike off southeasterly for home pronto, if his loyalty to Ruth didn’t say no. Ruth reached back to feel the forehead of the new little boy, then nodded her approval because the fires of vitality but not a fever burned there. As stringy as a sparrow, he chattered to Bol about subsisting with cousins’ families on their meager leavings after his pa
rents died, till they sloughed him off and he “lived like an antbear,” Bol said, keeping himself alive by tweaking dead bark off windfalls in the woods, eating termites or whatnot.
Either we were obstructed in the crowd or burning too much gas in fits and starts, with our hopes flagging alongside the footsore souls surrounding us. They seemed to think a helicopter might soon arrive to hoist us to safety, an intervention they wouldn’t resent if the notice helped them. But no, unlike my last exit, with Ya-Ya and company, this was not to be easy. And, again, a plane’s horrific shadow and racket swept over us, the Doppler effect dropping its original scream into a blast furnace snarl. We were as terrified as everybody else, but so hemmed in that to have swerved would have killed half a dozen people. I was yelling, and in front of us one woman among a bunch broke her ankle, twisting to escape the shadow. Malnutrition makes your bones fragile. Her friends pulled her out of the way—and the MiG had apparently expended its ordnance—but in the fright and hectic scramble I wound up with a youngster clambering into my lap. I hardly glanced at him at first, I was so distracted, or remembered which woman, the injured lady or another, had been carrying him, or whose arms had almost immediately deposited him through my window. They didn’t want me to know—have the opportunity to object—and so pretended that it hadn’t happened, lest he be thrust out.
His heft was reassuring, at least. Not a starveling with reddish, kwashiorkor hair. And instead of crying and peering outside for his mother, to provide me a clue in the confusion as to who she was, he lifted his hands straightforwardly onto the wheel, imitating mine. Every woman looked about as worn out as if she’d been toting him on her back or in her arms for twenty miles, and nobody betrayed whose he was. He kept mimicking my motions of steering.
“Maybe the MiG brought him,” I said. A fait accompli! I wondered idly how I would be able to describe his mother to him someday. Ruth offered him a morsel from a ration packet, evidently a new taste, to settle him; and Makundi chimed in acceptingly in a backhanded sort of way: “Anyhow, he’s not a Dinka.” Mig, as I began to call him, did look Bari-ish.
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