Baghdad Without a Map

by Неизвестный

  I asked him about his career, and on this subject he was more forthcoming. The son of a Muglad shopkeeper, he'd begun as a humble trader and trucker, doing small jobs for the army and local merchants. Then the aid groups came, and they'd naturally turned to him. “Faki is the only honest man in Muglad,” he said, speaking, as usual, in the third person. Other truckers skimmed grain from the bags of sorghum, delivering their cargo half empty, or stuffed with dirt.

  “Faki's bags always arrive full,” he said. I knew from Kevin that this was so.

  I asked him about his ties to the militia, and whether this helped his business.

  “It is true, I have friends.” He smiled. The gold incisors flashed again. Then he swept his arm across the courtyard and said, for the benefit of everyone, “What is a man without friends?” The others nodded obligingly and responded, almost in chorus, “Nothing, Faki, nothing.”

  Faki also wasn't reticent about the growth in his estate. The food deliveries had transformed him from a small-time trucker to a provincial tycoon who now possessed seven trucks, sixteen Dinka house servants, five hundred head of cattle, and three homes—one for each of his wives. “I change houses each night, for six nights, then sleep alone on the seventh,” he said.

  I asked him if he felt at all strange about becoming so rich from feeding starving refugees.

  “Without Faki, many in the south would have nothing to eat.” Then he spoke forte voce again? turning to the others. “Without Faki, many in Muglad would have nothing to eat!” When the laughter died down, he waved us to a large table at the center of the courtyard, adding, “My friends, it is time.”

  Tall Dinka servants emerged bearing large platters with multicolored woven lids. Somewhere in the dark a generator rumbled, and a dim light glowed in the courtyard. The second shift of dinner guests had already gathered, sitting silently in the shadows at the edge of the courtyard.

  Faki stood at the head of the table, with six guests on either side, and took the top off each of the platters. One was filled with steaming chicken, another with goat, another with beef. There were also bowls of mashed, spiced peanuts and baskets of steaming bread for scooping up the food. Bart, who sat across from me, whispered through the steam: “My editors, they want I should write about a starving child, and here we eat so well!” After a few seconds the guilt passed, and as soon as Faki had thanked Allah for the food, we greedily dug in.

  Faki himself sipped water, waiting for the night's final shift before taking food. Continuing our interview, he said he planned to turn his business over to his sons and go into export-import, based in Khartoum. He also hoped to acquire a fourth wife, a young nurse in Muglad who was not only beautiful but fluent in English and French as well. “This will help Faki to go international,” he explained. The price tag for the takeover was steep. A fine wife in Muglad could cost up to thirty thousand Sudanese pounds or thirty head of cattle, whichever the bride's family preferred. The two sides were still negotiating.

  “In the future, someday, Faki would like to go to New York,” Faki said. “Look for another house, maybe some cattle.”

  Faki clapped his hands and the Dinka servants reappeared, clearing away the ravaged platters and setting down cakes and tea in their place. When this too had been consumed, Faki glanced meaningfully into the dark, where the next shift of diners waited. The guests at our table thanked him with handshakes and bows and slipped quietly into the night.

  Faki held my hand for a moment and gestured at my notebook. He had one more thought for Wall Street. “Even if I never see New York,” he said, “I can count my cattle and say, 'There is no man in Muglad like Faki.' ”

  Bart and I stumbled through the pitch-black night to Beit Khawajja, burping all the way. The aid workers were already asleep on cots in the open air, with a half-dozen Sudanese rolled up in sheets on the ground. Two cots remained empty, for us. I thought for a moment about the malaria-stricken Canadian I'd met on the flight from Khartoum, and tried to cover myself with my mosquito net. It was hot and uncomfortable, like lying inside a giant cobweb. So I threw it away and lay there in my underwear, on a narrow cot, feeling oddly content. My belly was full—indecently full—and I gazed up at a bright tapestry of stars, undisturbed by clouds or smog or urban glare.

  Bait's mind drifted along a similar plane. “It is strange, no?” he asked with a chuckle, sitting on his cot. He was shining his flashlight into a gourd of water. A dubious silt of sand and twigs lay at the bottom. “Here I am, no toilet, no light, no beer.” He drank down the water. “Tomorrow I probably die of malaria. And tonight I am such a happy man.” We said our good nights and I fell asleep, waking once in the night and gazing dreamily at the brilliant sky, wondering why it was that no one had hit off the lights.

  The following day, Kevin figured out how we could skirt the policeman's prohibition on visiting the refugees. He had business at the next town up the road, called Babanoosa, and doubted that the arm of Sudanese law stretched that far.

  The road was a rutted track through acacia and thorn, and the twenty-mile journey took us over an hour. We arrived at a sleepy railroad junction of mud-brick Arab homes, bordered by a sprawling refugee camp. Ten thousand or so Dinka were huddled in hovels of sorghum stalk and mud, with ten latrines for the entire population. The stench was overwhelming. Kevin left me at the entrance to the camp and we agreed to rendezvous four hours later.

  Two hundred new arrivals squatted beside a makeshift clinic, waiting for a single Sudanese doctor to inspect them. Most had reached the camp on foot after journeys of two weeks or more, arriving with nothing but the filthy rags on their backs and gourds of brackish water. Their bare feet were swollen and dusty and their bodies so emaciated that the women's chests were almost indistinguishable from the men's.

  One boy had a thin string tied around his bloated belly, a Dinka folk cure for stomach pains. From a pile of free clothes he had plucked an undersized sweatshirt that read “Somebody Loves Me.” Another boy had tea leaves stuffed in his ear, a Dinka remedy for infection. A teenager, stark naked, walked back and forth with a monkey tied to a string. It was his only belonging, and he offered it to passersby for thirty Sudanese pounds, or an equivalent quantity of food. There weren't any takers.

  “We keep track of the dead by what the gravediggers have been paid,” said an English-speaking Dinka nurse who worked at the clinic. In Muglad the previous wet season, the death rate had been thirty a day out of a population of three thousand.

  The nurse offered to translate while I interviewed some of the refugees. He took me to a low grass hut, returning a moment later with a cane-carrying teenager named Lual Gar-ang. Lual was seven feet tall and had to bend almost double as he came in through the hut's low doorway.

  Lual was unsure of his age—nineteen, he said, maybe twenty—but he knew exactly how many hungry Dinka had fled his village three weeks before, and how many remained when they arrived in Babanoosa. “We began with one hundred and eighty and now we are only ninety-six,” he said. “Arabs with guns took the rest as slaves.”

  Last spring an Arab tribe had arrived in the village armed with machine guns they'd been given by the government. They burned the Dinka grain stores and took most of their cattle. Lual sketched the scene in the dust with his cane, drawing quick messy lines to represent flames. The Dinka went hungry through the wet season and then had no seed with which to plant a new crop.

  By spring they were eating grass and tree leaves to stay alive. Faced with starvation, the elderly and sick, joined by the women and children, headed north on foot while healthy adult males stayed behind to tend the few remaining cattle. Lual went along because he had a chest infection. “I am no use to anybody,” he said, tapping his wasted rib cage.

  The group was traversing an isolated stretch of scrub when Arab tribesmen charged up on camels and horses, brandishing carbines. The Dinka, armed only with spears and clubs and weak from hunger, were unable to defend themselves. The Arabs shot one man, then tied up the healthies
t Dinka and disappeared with them back into the bush. “It was as easy for them as herding cows,” Lual said. Stooped and ill, he was spared, and staggered north with ninety-five survivors. His mother and-several others died along the way.

  I asked Lual how long he planned to stay in the camp.

  “Until I am well,” he said, his voice weak and hoarse, almost a death rattle. “I want to go home and kill Arabs.”

  Lual limped out and other Dinka wandered in, with stories as awful as his. One woman told of friends who had sold their children into slavery in exchange for a few days' food, or a ride north in the back of a truck; it was either that or watch the children starve. The famine was so severe that the price for a healthy girl had fallen from thirty dollars to only five dollars. The girls either became concubines or were sent to the fields to shepherd cattle and cut thorns.

  A middle-aged man named Andreea Atyek had come north to search for his three children, snatched two years before in an Arab raid. He had wanted to come earlier, he said, but felt he had to provide first for his remaining family members. “Two wives and eight children—this is more important than three stolen ones,” he said, revealing the grim calculus of raising a family in southern Sudan. Despite his efforts, three of his children had starved.

  As Andreea explained it, the loss of cattle was, for the Dinka, almost as tragic as the loss of children. The Dinka worshiped their cows, sang to the animals, even recited love poetry to them. A few calves were slaughtered each year for meat, but killing cattle was otherwise frowned on. Wealth was measured in cows, as were dowries. Cattle even served as blood money to compensate for crimes. A murder cost thirty-six head. In Dinka society, a man without cows was nothing.

  As he got up to leave, Andreea unfolded a piece of paper he kept in the breast pocket of his tattered shirt. It was covered with crude sketches of giraffes and hippopotami, drawn by a seven-year-old daughter who had died on the long trip north.

  “She would find it sad here,” he said, sobbing. “It is a barren land, nothing like home. There are only rabbits and birds.”

  After two hours of interviews, crushed by heat and depression, I staggered out of the hut and lay down on the ground to shut my eyes for a moment. What sounded like drums began beating in the distance. I opened my eyes to find five little boys staring intently at my face. “Kbawajja! Kbawajja! Khawajja!” they cried, tugging at my hair.

  Tracking the drumbeats, I wandered out of the clinic, through a crude marketplace where the Dinka sold Reagan sorghum they'd gathered in town. I'd seen them that morning, in Muglad, trailing the trucks full of grain, hoping for a little spillage. Kevin said the Dinka still ate as they did during times of plenty down south, feasting on their weekly ration until they were full, brewing the rest into homemade beer and waking up the next day with nothing.

  I stopped to watch one woman pummeling the grain with a stick as big as herself. She thought I'd come to admire her earrings, and moved closer so I could have a look. They were crafted from old English halfpennies, bearing portraits of Edward VII. She spoke no English or Arabic, so I could only guess at their origin: a gift from a missionary, perhaps, or bit of charity from some English traveler who had passed through decades ago.

  I walked toward the noise, which came from a crowd gathered beneath a desiccated baobab tree, the only shade outside the clinic. What I had taken for drums was actually the sound of several hundred hands clapping. The temperature was easily 110 degrees. Many of these people hadn't eaten in days. Yet at the center of the circle, six women were singing and dancing as the others cheered them on, shouting a refrain that came out as “ay-yi-yi.”

  I couldn't understand the words they sang, but I could understand their motions. Looking at the ground, the women stamped their feet and thrust out their withered breasts, raising bony arms behind their heads and pointing fingers at the sky. They were mimicking cattle. At home, they'd sung to their bulls and cows, named them, recited the names of their ancestors. Here, with nothing left of their former lives, they could only remember the cattle by dancing.

  The dance was evocative and erotic in a sad sort of way. The women hadn't much left to shake, and their arms waved in the air like withered tree limbs. Emaciated breasts flopped from their shredded frocks. But the women kept dancing, uninhibited and ecstatic. I was the only male present and the only kbawajja, but no one seemed to mind.

  I watched for a while and then left them there, clapping and singing beneath the baobab tree. I walked back into Babanoosa to catch my ride. Veiled Arab women slipped in and out of doorways on the narrow streets, and Arab men in tall white turbans moved toward the mosque as the afternoon call to prayer wafted out across the scrub.

  We made it back to Muglad in time for a sunset soccer game at a field adjoining the refugee camp. Normally, Kevin and one other aid worker played in the weekly contest, but they had work to do and asked Bart and me to go as substitutes. I was weary from the long day in Babanoosa and wearier still at the sight of the field: a two-hundred-yard expanse of thorn and scrub, with crooked sticks forming a goal at either end. The field was almost as wide as k was long and edged with sand and brambles. An underfed goat grazed at the hundred-yard line.

  The teams, twenty to a side, were as irregular as the field. One squad was mostly Dinka, the other included members of a clan called Nuer. Tribal markings were the only way to tell the two groups apart. Dinka men have their six bottom teeth yanked out at the age of eight, and four lines cut across their foreheads at adolescence. The Nuers' faces are marked with six lines and small raised dots. This distinction would no doubt be obvious to an anthropologist. But in fading sunlight, on a playing ground the size of an Iowa cornfield, the players were indistinguishable to me.

  When I suggested with pantomime that one team identify itself by disrobing from the waist up, in the American tradition of “shirts and skins,” half of the players politely obliged and half didn't, irrespective of which squad they were on. Then a self-appointed referee, who had evidently never played soccer before, tossed a lumpy brown ball in the air and announced that the match had begun.

  Tents emptied out and the refugees crowded along the sidelines, shouting and banging on sticks. Adults gathered behind one goal and children behind the other, though neither group seemed to be rooting for a particular team. The game, after all, was a complete novelty to most of them, as were Bart and I. No sooner had we lined up, on opposing sides, than a deafening roar began:

  “Khawajja! Kbawajja! Khawajja!”

  Posted at left wing, the only player I could identify was a Dinka with red sneakers who appeared to be on my side. This was hard to confirm, as everyone crowded around the ball rather than playing in position. The referee stood passively by as the players delivered groin kicks and tackled each other in the thorns.

  What the players lacked in finesse they made up for in stamina. After two or three sprints down the endless field, I was clutching my stomach and gasping for breath. My teammates, many of whom had recently limped into Muglad with swollen feet and bellies, raced up and down as effortlessly as gazelles across the savannah.

  Given the size and condition of the field, scoring should have been impossible. Perhaps to compensate for this, both teams had passed over their seven-footers and chosen as goalies two youths who were, by Dinka standards, virtual dwarfs, no taller than I. As the goals were thirty yards wide and the posts lacked crossbeams, even wild kicks sailed past the goalies' arms or over their heads. After twenty minutes of play the score was 10 to 7.

  The crowd showed no interest in the scoring, apparently unaware that this was the point of the game. Instead, they were riveted to the miscues, laughing loudly whenever players kicked and missed or let balls roll between their legs. After days spent waiting for rations of sorghum, the soccer game wasn't sport, it was comic relief. And it quickly became clear that Bart and I were the champion clowns, midget men with straight blond hair and pale skin, loping in slow motion behind the fleet, tall Dinka. Each time either of us t
ouched the ball, the cry went up from the sidelines: “Khawajja! Khawajja! Kbwawjja!”

  Deafened by the noise, I dribbled through the thorns until my wind gave out, then looked for the red-sneakered youth—yelling, pointlessly, “Yo! Dinka in the red!”—and kicked the ball as hard as I could.

  “KHAWAJJA! KHAWAJJA! KHAWAJJA!” After an hour, the sun sank into the scrub in a blaze of purple and orange, with the score tied at 21. The referee called the game. The other side didn't hear, or didn't care, and rushed down the field, kicking the ball through the posts after our goalie had fled. The referee threw up his hands. The Nuer had won, 22 to 21. And the refugees wandered off through the dark to pick up firewood and cook their sorghum porridge as another band of refugees wandered in.

  Two days later, five planes touched down at the Muglad airstrip and disgorged a U.S. congressional committee onto the tarmac. The group had chosen Muglad as the last stop on a one-day “fact-finding” tour of the famine-stricken south, accompanied by Sudanese officials, TV crews and several dozen reporters who'd been granted visas for the lightning visit. Reclaiming my camera from the police—miraculously intact—I rushed with several hundred locals to the airport. Tribesmen with spears stood majestically at the edge of the airstrip, waving banners that read: “We has the plegsure to welcome the govermor and delegation.” I waited for them to break into a chorus of “Kbawajja!” but they didn't, perhaps because the first congressman off the plane was Mickey Leland, a black Democrat from Texas. He showed his solidarity by walking along the line of welcomers, teaching them to high-five. His raised palm came up to the average tribesman's nipple.

  Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, followed Leland's performance by attempting to lead the tribesmen in a sing-along about the five boroughs of Manhattan.

  “New York, hello, how are you?”

  The tribesmen looked at him blankly.