Tears of the Desert

by Halima Bashir

  I confessed that I didn’t really feel at home in the village. But I felt as if I was doing good work there, which was the main thing. But sometimes, I wondered why I didn’t run a similar clinic in my home village. At least there I would have my family around me, in case of any trouble. Here, I felt as if I was on my own. Mounah and Osman tried to reassure me. I was far from alone, they said. I had saved their son’s life and I was like a sister to them. If anything happened, I was to come to them for help.

  Dinner with Mounah and Osman invariably got me thinking about home again. I decided to try to get a call through to Uncle Ahmed. What I dreaded most was the thought that my village could be attacked, and that I would never know. In Mazkhabad marketplace was a radio, with a big cable antenna strung up in a tree. People called it a “radiotelephone,” and in return for a small charge it was possible to place a call to a telephone number anywhere in the country.

  Or at least that was the theory. In practice it mostly didn’t seem to work. Once or twice I had tried to call Uncle Ahmed, but his words had come through all distorted, with lots of other voices talking over him, and fragments of other conversations bleeding through. As the radiophone was in the open market I had to be careful what I said, for I never knew who might be listening.

  This time, I managed to get through to Uncle Ahmed on a reasonably clear line. My family was fine, he told me. There had been sporadic fighting in our area, but no trouble in the village itself. But how much longer this could go on was anyone’s guess. Here in Mazkhabad I had a steady stream of injured fighters coming to the clinic, so surely there had to be fighting going on. My greatest fear was that either here, or at home, one day soon an attack would come.

  I left the marketplace and made my way back home, lost in my thoughts. All of a sudden there was the snarl of an engine behind me and I jumped to one side. The Mazkhabad police Land Rover thundered by. As it disappeared in a cloud of dust I saw a row of faces staring out at me. At least they were the regular police, and not the dreaded security men. But still I had this horrible feeling that they were watching me, and that sooner or later they would discover what I was up to at the clinic.

  A week later I was just finishing dealing with the last of my patients when I heard a car pull up outside. This was in itself a rare thing, as few people in the village owned vehicles. I looked up to see the police Land Rover. For a moment I hoped that it might be an entirely innocent visit. Sayed had already warned me that the police dropped by now and then, to check how our work was going. Or perhaps one of the policemen was sick or injured.

  Three Arab-looking men got down from the vehicle. I watched them squaring their shoulders, so as to make themselves look fierce, and with a swaggering posture they headed my way. This was no community visit, and none of them looked particularly unwell. I noticed Sayed dart out of the treatment room, so as to greet the policemen on the veranda. I didn’t know exactly why they had come, but I had a bad feeling already.

  “Hello, Commander. Welcome. Come in, come in,” Sayed fawned. “What a pleasant surprise. Welcome. Everything is fine. Everything is good. How can we help?”

  The police commander parked himself in the doorway, a cold and silent presence. He swept the room with his eyes, as if he owned the place.

  “Ahem, so this is the new doctor,” Sayed continued. “Dr. Halima Bashir, just recently qualified in Khartoum. You know her? She’s doing great work . . .”

  The commander held up his hand to silence Sayed. “Enough! Yes, we know her. We know all about her. We’ve heard many, many things.”

  I did my best to ignore them. My patient was a young woman in advanced stages of pregnancy. I was trying to figure out exactly how her baby was situated, and whether she was going to have an easy birth. If not, she might have to go to Hashma to deliver. I felt along her tummy, trying to locate the baby’s head. As I did so, I could feel the commander’s eyes on me, boring into my back.

  I heard boots scuffing across the floor. They came and stood near me—one on either side, the commander facing me across the bed. Sayed had made himself scarce, but I knew he was listening at the window. I could see his shadow. The commander hooked his thumbs into his belt, over which bulged the fat of his belly. He squared his shoulders, as he waited for me to acknowledge his presence.

  “So, you are the new doctor,” he sneered. “We hear you’ve come here to serve your people—the Zaghawa. Is it true?”

  I glanced up at him. There was no warmth: just a dark, hostile stare. “I’m a medical doctor. I treat all people. It doesn’t matter who they are.”

  “Is that right? How noble of you. Trouble is, that’s not what we’ve heard. Not at all. It’s said you are the Zaghawa doctor who’s come to treat the Zaghawa people.”

  “I’ve already told you—I treat everyone, regardless.”

  The commander leaned forward, bringing his face close to mine. “Listen, doctor, we know what you’re up to.” His breath was rancid, suffocating. “We know it all. . . . Now, there’s something we want from you. A list of names. A list of names of all the Zaghawa men who come here. You keep that list, and maybe we won’t have to trouble you anymore.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. I’m a doctor. I came here to treat people, not to keep watch on them. That’s not my business.”

  His eyes widened. “Not your business? Not your business? You think you decide what is your business? Ha! Doctor, I’m telling you—you will give us that list of names.”

  “No, I am a medical doctor,” I replied, quietly. “I am not here to compile lists for the police.”

  His hands twitched, his face twisting into a mask of rage. “No one ever says ‘no’ to us. No one, you hear me?Who do you think you are? Be careful, doctor, be very, very careful . . .”

  There was silence for a second. I folded my arms and tried to stare the commander down. His eyes narrowed to little slits, his voice dropping to a menacing whisper.

  “Better learn to obey my commands. I expect that list. I command you to prepare it. So do it. Or you’ll see what happens.”

  They left, the commander first, the two others behind him. I followed them with my eyes to the door and out to their car. As soon as it was gone Sayed came in. He had been subservient and fearful when they were here, but now he feigned a relaxed indifference.

  “Don’t worry, doctor,” he said. “They’re always like this—stupid policemen. Threatening people and throwing their weight around. Just ignore them.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. That’s what I intend to do.”

  Someone in the clinic had reported me, of that I was certain. I didn’t believe it was Sayed. He was weak and ineffectual, but he had a good heart and he wasn’t anyone’s spy. I had no idea which of the others it might be. I would just have to be more careful. But I was worried now, and my fears about the security men in Hashma had returned.

  That evening I went to see Osman and Mounah. I explained what had happened. No way was I keeping any lists for the police. But I was worried what would happen next. Osman’s cousin was a senior tribal chief in Hashma, so he had power and influence. I wanted him to know what had happened, just in case things got any worse for me.

  “They poke their noses in and order me around,” I told them. “I’m not doing it. I’m a doctor, not a spy.”

  “Just ignore them,” Osman counseled. “If they ask for the list, just say it’s not ready yet. But don’t openly defy them.”

  I glanced at Osman, scrutinizing his face. “What happens if they make trouble for me? Can you do anything to help?”

  “I can have words with certain people, yes. But it’s far better to stay out of trouble. You’re a woman—you don’t want to end up fighting those policemen.”

  I decided to take Osman’s advice and avoid any open confrontation. I had been at Mazkhabad for three months now, and I reckoned twenty Zaghawa fighters had been through the clinic. Often, I had cleaned and bandaged their wounds. More important, I had sent them back to the bush with consignm
ents of medical supplies. I wasn’t about to stop doing this: It was too important. But I would have to be more secretive about it.

  I decided that in the future wounded fighters should only come at night, and always to Abakher and Aisha’s house. I would set up a makeshift clinic and have medical supplies on hand. In that way I could keep what I was doing hidden from whomever it was reporting on me. I felt certain it wasn’t Sayed. He was a good friend of Abakher. Both of them knew about—and were complicit in—my activities. But someone was spying on me, and I had to find a way to thwart them. Using the house as my base might just work.

  Two weeks later I was sitting out in front of the clinic with Sayed having a midmorning cup of tea. The village seemed to be strangely, eerily quiet—almost as if it were holding its breath, awaiting something. I was just discussing with Sayed what supplies we needed for the clinic when I heard a distant commotion down at the marketplace. There were faint cries and the pounding of running feet, as if lots of people were on the move. For a second I wondered, fearfully, if it was an attack, but surely there would have been gunfire.

  Suddenly, I caught sight of a crowd of people surging out of the marketplace. They turned as one and started running in our direction. Among them were figures carrying heavy burdens in their arms. I couldn’t quite tell what at this distance, but it looked as if they were human forms. As the crowd drew closer, I realized what they were carrying: It was the girls from the village school. I could see heads lolling and beige nyangours—a long dress that is standard girls’ school uniform—flapping in the breeze.

  Sayed and I glanced at each other in dismay. What on earth was going on? The onrush of bodies approached in a heaving, panicked mass. Sayed and I went forward to meet them. I caught the look of pain and rage on the faces of the adults, and I could hear the pitiful cries of the girls. I caught sight of one of the women teachers, but she seemed to be clawing at her face and hair, as if driven out of her mind. As the crowd enveloped us, I realized that the schoolgirls’ nyangours were ripped and dirtied, and streaked in blood.

  My God, what had happened? What had happened? What in God’s name had happened?

  The cries were all around me now, confusing and deafening. I tried to make sense of the words.

  “. . . beasts . . .”

  “. . . attacked the school . . .”

  “. . . monsters . . .”

  “. . . the devil himself . . .”

  “. . . children . . .”

  “. . . raped . . .”

  “. . . ruined . . .”

  “The Janjaweed! The Janjaweed!”

  Desperate hands clawed at me, and I was dragged back toward the treatment room. As I took the first of the little girls and laid her bloodied form on the bed, I felt as if I were drowning.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Black Dogs and Slaves

  Come here my child,

  I have a heart for you.

  Come here my child,

  I have my tears for you . . .

  Never, not even in my darkest, blackest nightmare, had I imagined that I would ever witness such horror. What was happening to my country? Where had all the love gone, the goodness, the humanity? Who had let the devil in and given him free rein? How could people be so evil? They were adults and these were little children. . . . Did they have no children of their own? Had they never been children themselves? Did they have no heart, no innocence, no adult’s love for a child? Were they really even human?

  These were the thoughts that were firing through my mind as I helped lift that first little girl onto the bed, so that I could inspect what the Arabs, the Janjaweed, had done to her. As I gazed in horror at her limp form a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her throat—over and over and over again. It was a sound like I had never heard before—a hollow cry of brutalized innocence, of innocence forever lost. It is a sound that I shall never forget no matter how long I live.

  In spite of everything—the shock, the confusion, the trauma—my medical training took over now. I reached for the little girl’s face, one side of which was swollen and bloody. I probed around the wound. She’d been hit with a blunt instrument—probably a rifle butt—and needed stitches. But there were other, more urgent, priorities. I checked her eyes: They were dead and glazed with shock. Unseeing. But at least she was still conscious. I felt for her pulse: It was racing and fearful. Yet it was strong, and I knew then that she was going to live. She would live—as long as I could stop the bleeding.

  I lifted up her nyangour.It was slick with congealed blood. As gently as I could I tried to pry apart her shaking, bloodied knees. The soft child’s skin of her thighs was crisscrossed with cut marks, as if a pack of wild animals had been clawing at her. I felt her body stiffen, her leg muscles tightening and resisting, as that chilling, empty wailing in her throat rose to a terrified screaming. I felt wave after wave of panic sweeping through her now—no, no, no, no, not again, not again, not again.

  I tried to talk to her. “I’m sorry, little sister, but I have to look. It’s doctor Halima, from the medical clinic. I have to look, I have to. . . . But I won’t hurt you or do anything nasty, I promise.”

  She turned her head toward me, but her eyes remained a glazed mask, and the cries kept coming. She had withdrawn to some inner place, a fairy-tale landscape of childhood innocence where the horrors had no way of reaching her. But by my very actions I was threatening to drag her back to the terrible present. Yet I had to examine her, for she was bleeding heavily and I had to decide how best to treat her. I knew in my head what must have happened, although my heart refused to accept it. I had a good idea what I had to do—and I was dreading it.

  I glanced across at her parents. Her father’s face was a slick of tears, as he wept openly and uncontrollably—a young Zaghawa man paralyzed by heartache and anguish for his little eight-year-old girl. I reached for his arm and gestured with my eyes to his daughter.

  “Talk to her. You have to talk to her. Tell her you’re here. Tell her it’s okay. Tell her I need to see, she has to let me. I’m going to help her. We all are. Talk to her.”

  The man nodded, and I saw him visibly try to pull himself together. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his robes, then bent toward his daughter’s face.

  “It’s Daddy,” he whispered. “Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here. I’m holding your hand, little Aisha, and I’m going to protect you. Forever and ever I’ll be here with you. No one can hurt you now. But you have to let the doctor look. You have to let her see . . .”

  I felt the tears running down my own face. I couldn’t hide it. I wept openly. Everyone else was crying—why shouldn’t I? Who was I to be so strong? Yes, I was a medical doctor, but I was also a woman—and with every one of these little girls I felt as if they were my own daughters, each my own child.

  I eased little Aisha’s legs open, to reveal a red, bloodied rawness. She had been circumcised, just as I had been. When that first Arab had forced himself into her, he had ripped her apart. I felt a wave of nausea and revulsion rush over me, followed by a hot panicked dread. It was exactly as I had expected, exactly what I had been fearing. I would have to clean the wound and sew her up again, and I knew that I had no anesthetic with which to do so.

  I glanced around the room. It was a seething mass of crying, traumatized schoolgirls and shocked and grieving parents. How many girls were there here? A dozen? Two dozen? Three dozen? Maybe more? We didn’t even have enough beds for them all. More worrisome still, did we even have enough medical supplies to treat them all?

  “I need boiling water!” I cried, calling for Sayed. “Boiling water. And needle and thread—as much as you can find.”

  “Sumah and Makka—two girls to a bed!” I cried to the nurses. “Give them acetaminophen—half a tablet each. Bathe their wounds with boiled water and antiseptic lotion. I’ll follow to do the stitching . . .”

  “And Sayed—get Malik from the dispensary to assist you. Just as soon as you can l
eave him, come help me with the stitching.”

  Nothing in my medical training could have prepared me for what lay ahead. By the time I had cleaned and sewn up Aisha’s torn womanhood, her cries of agony were forever burned into my mind. And she was the first of many. I knew by then that we didn’t have enough supplies to treat them all, and that we would have to improvise.

  I also knew that everyone—parents, teachers, and clinic staff alike—was looking to me for leadership. But what could I do? How were we going to treat the girls without enough supplies? At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with eight-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around.

  As I stitched up a second girl’s ragged, bloody wound an image from my childhood flashed into my mind. It was of my mother and Grandma Sumah binding up my own womanhood, following the cutting time. They had bound my thighs tight with a rope—so tight in fact that I’d been unable to move. Maybe we could do the same with the injured girls here. I called Sayed and explained what I had in mind. We would need the parents to fetch the rope, as we had none at the clinic, but there was plenty in the market.

  I finished stitching up that second little girl, and stepped back, unsteadily. She grabbed my hand and held it tight. Her eyes were wide with fear and agony, her face wet with tears. Her mother was at her side, but her father was out in their fields and would have no idea yet what had happened to his daughter. The little girl tried to say something, her lips moving, but no sound seemed to come. I bent closer. She tried again, her words a fearful whisper.

  “The Janjaweed . . . The Janjaweed . . .”

  I nodded, and tried to force a smile. “I know, I know. Don’t worry . . .”

  “Why . . . Why . . . Why did they do this to us?”

  “I don’t know, little sister. I don’t know. They are bad people, evil people . . .”