The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” she said with a confidence she didn’t at all feel. “You go home, get some rest. I’ll call the U.S. embassy in Kampala.”

  “What about the police? Do we file a missing person’s report?”

  “Let me talk to the embassy first,” she said. “They’ll know what to do.”

  After they hung up, Sabine stood in the snow a moment longer, the phone still in her hand. The bullfinches were gone, and Bruno had lain down and was licking his front paw. Bits of lingering ice still bobbed in the river. The twin Gothic spires of Elisabethkirche impaled the sky. Impossible, Sabine thought, that the world hadn’t stopped completely, that the church bells had managed to ring that morning at all. The assertiveness with which she’d spoken to Steve came easily; it was a familiar instinct, managing crisis with pragmatism. But stirring in the depths was something darker, more menacing.

  The day she left Uganda for the last time, two years ago, she’d looked out the oval airplane window as they lifted off the tarmac and rose into the air over Entebbe: the undulating green hills below, the vast blue of Lake Victoria glinting all the way to the horizon. She’d known even then—hadn’t she known?—that after everything, she couldn’t just flee; it wasn’t as simple as packing your bags and unpacking them on another, colder continent. She thought of Lily—earnest, eager Lily—and her knees nearly buckled with the weight of it.

  She tugged lightly on Bruno’s leash and he stood, and together they turned back toward the animal shelter. The doubts, the guilt, that gaping absence in the shape of a twenty-two-year-old girl—these and other things could be kept in abeyance so long as she focused on first one task and then another, as simple as putting her feet forward, left, right, left. The path ran straight from the river to the shelter, and she no longer felt the cold.

  * * *

  She called the Kampala embassy from her office at the shelter. As the phone rang, she picked up the photograph of Hannah and Lily that sat on her desk. It had been taken a decade ago, and the mother-daughter pair could have been mistaken for sisters: same constellation of freckles across the nose, same soft eyebrows, same closed-mouth smile. The primary difference was hair color: Hannah’s was mousy-brown while Lily was dark haired, like Sabine. Hannah looked so young in the photo—she was so young. She had eloped at nineteen with an American student she’d met in Hamburg and returned with him to the States at the end of the semester without completing her degree. It was the single boldest act Sabine had ever known her sister to make. What other adventures might Hannah have had if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so soon after arriving in Colorado? She’d never said anything to hint at regret, at fantasies unfulfilled, but Sabine wondered. While other American girls celebrated their twenty-first birthdays by taking their first legal drink—and second, and third—Hannah spent her twenty-first birthday eight months pregnant with the baby girl she’d already decided to name Lily, after the white-and-yellow flowers that bloomed in early spring in the grassy foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  At last, a recorded message: Thank you for contacting the embassy of the United States of America in Kampala. We will be closed from Wednesday, December twenty-fourth, through Friday, December twenty-sixth, for the Christmas holiday. Normal business hours will resume Monday, December twenty-ninth. Please visit our Web site for more information. If this is an emergency, please contact our duty officer at … Sabine wrote down the numbers that followed, then replaced the phone on its cradle.

  She hadn’t factored in the holiday. She knew it was Christmas Eve, of course; it was a hard thing to forget. She drove past the Christmas market outside Elisabethkirche every evening on her way home from work, the kitschy circus-like wooden stalls juxtaposed with the church’s regal gray stone, the smell of fried dough and Glühwein and bratwurst seeping in through the car’s heating vents as she passed beneath a lit-up banner that read, O DU FRÖHLICHE WEIHNACHTSZEIT IN MARBURG!—a joyous Christmastime indeed, Sabine thought, when you spent your days cleaning kennels and administering medications to surly felines and reluctant mutts. The animals at the shelter never took a day off, and Sabine always agreed to take the holiday shifts, along with a brusque young Polish girl who was currently tending to the rabbits. Their colleagues were grateful to spend the time with family, and it was all the same to Sabine; she hadn’t celebrated Christmas in any meaningful way since Hannah died.

  As girls, the sisters had made the annual trek from Stuttgart, where they lived with their parents, to Marburg, where their maternal grandparents had a house in the narrow cobblestoned streets of the Oberstadt, below the castle. Oma cooked the goose for Christmas Eve, and Opa read them stories of talking ravens and glass mountains and siblings lost and found. The Grimm brothers had lived in Marburg in the early 1800s, and the town’s hilly forests and half-timbered houses still retained an atmosphere of magic and wonder.

  After Hannah expatriated to the U.S., and Sabine to Ethiopia for her first job, these Christmas pilgrimages were often the only occasions when the sisters would meet in person, Hannah with Lily in tow. Sabine watched chubby little Lily take her first unsteady steps in the same garden where Sabine had once broken her wrist during a clumsy cartwheel; she consoled Hannah during her divorce from Lily’s father, while four-year-old Lily blew bubbles at the neighbor’s cat, shrieking with delight when a gossamer bubble hit its mark and popped in a silent smatter of droplets that sent the cat bolting for cover. Sabine felt a painful nostalgia when she secretly observed Hannah tucking Lily in at night, reading stories of talking ravens and glass mountains and siblings lost and found.

  The sisters had continued to come to Marburg after their grandparents died, and then after the death of their own parents, but after Hannah was gone, Sabine let the tradition slip away. It was easier to just keep working, and Lily seemed content to spend Christmases in Colorado. Then, when Sabine returned to Germany two years ago—she told people she needed a break, she was burned out after eighteen years of disaster zones, which was a portion of truth large enough to satiate their interest—Christmas felt too loaded, too weighty, to invite Lily to join her, and Lily never asked. The last time she’d seen her niece in person was a year and a half ago, when Lily stopped in Marburg overnight on a whirlwind summer backpacking trip with a college friend through Europe. Sabine remembered offering to pick them up at the train station and being surprised by Lily’s cool confidence that they could find the animal shelter on their own. When they’d shown up right on schedule—Lily’s laughter disappearing beneath the chorus of barking dogs—Sabine had a fleeting vision of Hannah as she must have looked upon arrival in the U.S.: sure-footed and beautiful and unafraid.

  Another memory came: one Christmas, when Lily was seven and they were gathered at Oma’s house in the Oberstadt, Sabine and Hannah were standing together in the garden, facing the house, when they realized Lily had been quiet—too quiet. They turned and found her gone. After they’d spent twenty minutes scouring the neighborhood, calling Lily’s name over and over again, they returned home to call the police, and there was Lily, emerging from the deep hedges at the periphery of the garden holding a sliver of wood, long rotted: part of an old rabbit hutch. Holding it as if nothing were amiss. Now, listening to the line ring for the American duty officer in Uganda, Sabine recalled this moment with a mixture of hope and unease. Could it be that easy, again?

  A harried male voice answered. “Yes? Hello?”

  “Hello?” she said. “I’m trying to reach someone at the U.S. embassy. Is this the right number?”

  “Well, I’m the guy on call.” His accent was unmistakably American. “What can I do for you?” In the background she could hear cars honking. She grasped the noise as evidence of Kampala—she smelled the fumes, felt the fine grit of dust and the bump of an anonymous shoulder jostling her in the crowd.

  “My niece—she’s been in Uganda since June. She was supposed to fly home yesterday out of Entebbe, but she never checked in for her flight.”

  “A
merican citizen?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Uganda?”

  Why didn’t he sound concerned? She rapped a pencil rapidly against the desk. “Yes—I think so. She left northern Uganda a few weeks ago, probably December second. Her last e-mail was December first.”

  “But she’s in Uganda?”

  Sabine’s grip tightened around the pencil. “She could have crossed a border. She’s been out of touch since she left Kitgum.”

  “Where?”

  “Kitgum.”

  “Hold on a sec.” The line became crackly, and the seconds ticked by. She heard a muffled thump, and then he came back, and the background noise was gone. “Sorry about that, Mrs.…”

  “Hardt. Sabine.” She didn’t bother to correct the Mrs.

  “The thing is, I’m not in the office. Christmas Eve and all. I’ve been running around downtown. Just got back to the car. Okay … pen … paper…” She could hear something rustling. “Got it. Your niece, you said? What’s her name?”

  “Lily Bennett. B-e-n-n-e-t-t. She’s twenty-two years old. She was volunteering with Children In Need. It’s an NGO in Kitgum. The last time we heard from her was December first. She said she was leaving the next day to go backpacking.” Sabine was aware that she was repeating herself, but the facts she had were so spare. She had nothing else to offer.

  “Bennett,” he echoed. “And where was she staying? Which hotel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t say?”

  “She didn’t make any reservations. She was probably staying in hostels.”

  “Was she traveling with friends, family?”

  “She didn’t mention any friends. No family,” she said, then added, uselessly, “her mother died six years ago. My sister.”

  A respectful pause; then: “Did she keep a blog, Facebook, anything like that?”

  A few days ago, Steve had mentioned that he’d been checking Lily’s Facebook profile over the last few weeks, but there weren’t any updates. “Not that I know of.”

  He sighed. “Look, I’ll be frank with you. I’m just a clerk in the visa office who got the short straw as duty officer over Christmas. If you give me a number where I can reach you, I can make some calls here and let you know what I find out. But we haven’t had any reports of an American citizen being hospitalized or detained recently.”

  “Detained? No, she’s—that’s impossible.” But she knew it wasn’t; it happened all the time. “She’s just—out of touch.” She couldn’t bring herself to say missing.

  “I’m sorry. I understand. It’s just, from what you’ve given me, there’s not much we can do. The local police have to conduct the investigation.”

  The word investigation sent a ripple of unease down her spine.

  “So I should talk to them?” she said. “The Ugandan police? They’ll be able to help?” Thinking of her previous dealings with the Ugandan police did not fill her with confidence.

  “That’s the official line,” he said.

  “Is there an unofficial line?”

  “Local law enforcement can be hampered by bureaucracy.” He seemed unaware, Sabine thought, of the irony in this statement coming from an employee of the U.S. government. “And three weeks without contact is a long time,” he continued. “There’s gonna be a lot of legwork involved, a lot of phone calls, a lot of dead ends.”

  Dead ends mingled with investigation, hanging bleakly in the air.

  “What are you saying?” The dogs began to bark in their kennels. The light slanting in through her office window seemed diffuse. At once the image of the man and the swan returned to her from that morning: his gentle touch, the explosion of ice and energy and bird when the swan broke free, and then the wide, still, gray sky. She remembered a different brightness, an all-encompassing brightness—dust rising from a red-dirt road, a woman waving frantically … Then a shadowy place—a hatbox with something written there, an unfamiliar name, her grandfather’s spindly handwriting, a terrible secret—

  The American’s voice cut back in. “… it’s what a lot of families in your situation choose to do.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “It’s what a lot of people decide,” he said again. “If they can afford it, you know.”

  “Afford what?”

  “A plane ticket.”

  And then she understood.

  For a moment her voice didn’t seem to work. At last she said, “Thank you for your advice.”

  “Good luck,” he said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ROSE

  December 24, 2008

  Kitgum, Uganda

  The afternoon sun pressed like hands upon Rose Akulu’s shoulders and neck as she made her way on foot through Kitgum town toward her brother’s home. The air smelled of roasted groundnuts and burning garbage. A car drove past, stirring a haze of dust in its wake; two bony dogs trotted purposefully down a narrow alley between buildings. Otherwise the streets were mostly empty: here a slow-moving bicyclist, there a woman with a purple umbrella for shade.

  Rose had spent the morning working in the dim, peaceful coolness of her rented room, transcribing interviews she and Christoph had conducted earlier in the week. He’d made her promise not to work over the holiday, but she enjoyed the rhythm of play, type, pause, type, rewind, fast-forward, pause, play. Christoph had provided her with equipment from his university in Switzerland—laptop, earphones—and the soft clicking of the letters on the keyboard beneath the fingers of her left hand felt as soothing as the patter of rain on a thatch roof. She was slow, as she could only use one hand to type; she’d lost her right arm years ago, and the scarred stump that remained—three inches past the shoulder—was of little use except in attracting unwanted gazes in public. But in her slowness she could be careful, methodical. This was her strength, Christoph said—the reason he preferred her to anyone else. And for Rose, as long as the sentences were divided into words and phrases, disconnected from one another, she didn’t have to consider the meaning they carried as a whole. She could forget her body, be deaf to the grief that singed the edges of the voices in her ears, thinking only of capturing the English and Acholi words and pinning them down, accurately and in the correct order.

  The patchy green soccer field next to the Bomah Hotel was empty of schoolchildren, and the shops along the main road had their doors closed and shutters pulled down. The wooden stalls of the market were bare; a breeze worried a piece of blue fabric caught on a broken stick. A man passed carrying two live roosters upside down in each hand, their legs tied with twine, wings loose.

  Transcriptions hadn’t always been the best part of her work. In her first such job years ago, when a Dutch academic had plucked her from the girls at the rehabilitation center to help him with his research, she’d preferred the interviews themselves: going into the community, speaking with people as if she were any other Acholi girl. Rose could ignore their distrustful looks so long as they answered the questions she asked on the mono’s behalf. The technology, though, made her nervous, so certain was she that she’d break any electronic thing she touched. But her employer had been patient, and with time she began to look forward to those hours of drifting, alone, when she was accountable to no one and nothing but that little black cursor, winking. It filled her days. When she made a mistake, the delete key never judged. People, she’d learned, were less forgiving.

  Well—there was Ocen. Always Ocen. As Rose turned the corner and spotted a group of parked motorcycles, her heart made a small leap and she searched for the familiar red and blue tassels hanging off the back of his passenger seat. Ocen had sometimes worked this corner with a handful of other boda drivers, ferrying passengers around town for a small fee. It had been some weeks since she’d seen him. They’d had a fight, and she was angry, and then he left town and had not returned. She suspected he’d taken refuge at his uncle Franklin’s house in Arua, where he could just as easily ply his trade, though she’d c
alled Franklin and he said he’d not seen his nephew since spring. But of course if Ocen was fleeing her, he would hardly encourage his uncle to reveal his whereabouts. Perhaps it was only a test, time for them both to cool off; perhaps Ocen had already returned without telling her.

  By the time she’d come close enough to see that his bike wasn’t among them, she’d also seen the three drivers relaxing in the shade of a mango tree to the side of the road, and her disappointment was confirmed. One noticed her attention and sat up, calling out, “Boda?”

  Rose shook her head and walked on. She circled the roundabout and crossed the bridge leading out of town. Below, the creek was stagnant and muddy. Two hulking Marabou storks stalked the reeds and trash along its banks. Thunderheads gathered in the distance over Agor, and she picked up her pace. Though the sun shone now, the weather was quick to shift, and she didn’t want to get caught out in the rain. A few hundred meters later, she turned off the broad road for cars and onto a narrower dirt path for pedestrians that cut through the brush. Stalks of grass tickled her calves where her skirt did not quite reach. In a moment she entered the well-swept clearing of her brother’s home, sending three clucking hens into a flutter.

  Behind the round hut, her sister-in-law, Agnes, leaned over a large black pot, stirring millet. A baby was wrapped tightly on her back, his bottom supported by fabric that came around Agnes’s front and was tied in a knot beneath her breasts; only Wilborn’s scrunched face above the nose was visible. A green plastic cross hung around Agnes’s neck, swaying slightly away from her chest as she bent forward. She glanced up as Rose approached.

  “Apwoyo,” Rose said.

  “Apwoyo.” Agnes stood straight and arched her back. Wilborn blinked his wet-black eyes, yawned, and closed his eyes. “Itye maber?”