The Atlas of Forgotten Places

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The Atlas of Forgotten Places Page 3

by Jenny D. Williams


  “Atye maber,” Rose said. “Is my brother here?”

  A goat emerged from the surrounding brush and plopped down in the shade next to the gray mud walls of the hut.

  “He is away.”

  Rose felt a momentary, selfish relief. She pitied her brother his passion and his pride—traits that in a different era would have been sharpened with the same attention and intention as an Acholi spearhead. But these times were past. James had been lucky to avoid both abduction by the rebels and recruitment by the government army. Now, in this so-called post-conflict northern Uganda—with the rebels scattered across the borders in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—James was distinctly unsuited for the kind of menial labor opportunities a man of his little education could hope to get. Unemployment in Kitgum was high, and James had taken to the unfortunate endeavor that occupied so many frustrated men. He often started before noon, joining friends on hard wooden benches outside a neighbor’s hut; a thousand shillings bought five small sachets of waragi, and the clear empty plastic packets would grow in piles at their feet as their conversation raged and quieted and raged again, until he ran out of drink and stumbled back home.

  Agnes carried the bruises of his discontent. Rose had berated James many times and encouraged Agnes privately to pursue divorce, but her sister-in-law refused. And in the end, James was Rose’s brother, her blood. The only family she had left.

  “I’ve brought you something,” Rose said as she took a small stack of bills from her purse and handed it to Agnes. Fifty thousand shillings was enough to buy food and pay rent on their hut for a month. In addition, Rose paid the children’s school fees and gave money for books and supplies, and if anyone became sick, she would cover the cost of the medicine.

  Agnes slipped the package in between the pages of a folded newspaper that sat on a stool nearby. “You are generous.”

  “You are family.” Rose glanced around. “Where are the children?”

  “Isaac is sleeping. Grace has gone for water.”

  As if on cue, a girl of nine emerged from the path in the brush, swaying beneath a yellow jerry can that was balanced atop her head; she had both hands up to steady it, but Rose could see dribbles of dampness on the front of the girl’s red dress where the water had spilled. Grace set down the jerry can in the shade of the hut. The goat bleated but didn’t move.

  With her eyes low, Grace whispered, “Apwoyo, auntie.”

  “Apwoyo, Grace,” Rose said. “Did you come from the river?”

  Grace looked away.

  “It is not clean there,” Rose said.

  “She went to the borehole,” Agnes said. “Didn’t you, Grace?”

  The girl made the slightest indication of a nod.

  “You were at the borehole?” Rose asked. “At St. Joseph’s?”

  “Eh,” the girl affirmed, almost inaudibly.

  Rose knew that the river was only a short walk down the footpath, while the borehole at St. Joseph’s Hospital was a kilometer along the roadside, plagued by careless drivers. Neither was a good choice. “Make sure you boil it thoroughly,” Rose said.

  “We are not animals,” Agnes said sharply.

  “Of course,” Rose said.

  Soon she was kneeling, ankles demurely to one side like a proper Acholi woman, as she prepared the dough for samosas. Grace peeled potatoes while Agnes set aside the cooked millet and started another pot for stew. Rose watched them with aching envy: how easily they passed an object from one hand to the other, how natural it was for Grace to turn a potato in her left hand and grasp the peeling knife with her right. For the most part, Rose found that she could do almost everything with one arm that others could do with two; it just took longer and required greater care. But cooking was complicated—she couldn’t hold an onion in place and slice it at the same time. She knew a woman, one-handed like her, who’d had a special cutting board made with nails pounded all the way through the wood so she could spike vegetables and keep them from slipping away. Rose was lucky: she never cooked alone.

  The bells from the Catholic Mission next to St. Joseph’s rang in the distance, carried and then whipped away by the wind that had turned sour and chilled, a sure sign of rain to come. Rose had already carried the dried laundry inside the hut, moving carefully so as not to disturb the sleeping boy, Isaac, who lay warm and sprawling on a mattress under a mosquito net.

  On the ground outside she poured one package of Pembe baking flour into a large plastic bowl, then filled a steel mug with water, which she added to the flour a little at a time, alternately dribbling and setting down the mug to knead with her left hand, until the dough cohered.

  “How is your work?” Agnes asked after a while.

  “It goes well.”

  “This mono has not tried to bed you yet?”

  Rose felt a flash of defensiveness toward Christoph. Though he was fine-looking enough for a white man, she had no feelings for him, and he had been nothing but professional in the eight months they’d worked together.

  “It’s not like that,” she said.

  “Shame,” Agnes said. “With him you could really go somewhere.”

  Her sister-in-law spoke the truth; Rose had known it to happen with others. The idea of starting over somewhere else had its appeal. But even if Christoph had opened the door to that spacious, moneyed room of life abroad, how could she leave Ocen behind?

  Unless he left her first. She took out her anger on the dough, pinching off smaller pieces with particular zeal.

  “Is it the boda?” Agnes asked.

  How like Agnes to cut to the quick. Rose was silent.

  “You didn’t arrive with him today,” Agnes prodded.

  “He is not around.”

  “Another woman? One whose dowry he can meet?”

  Rose held her tongue. Of course Agnes would know the price James had set for her marriage and the unfair burden it placed on Ocen. It didn’t please Rose to be speaking of these things, even to a woman she should see as a sister. Agnes had been begrudgingly welcoming when Rose returned to Kitgum after many years away, and she was grateful for the financial support Rose brought, but the two were not close. Agnes had suffered greatly during the war, and though she’d never blamed Rose directly, Rose knew the accusation was there, a splinter beneath the skin. How else should Agnes face such loss? Three brothers and a sister, all dead. Aunts and uncles, gone. Agnes’s parents lived in Adjumani, a hundred and fifty kilometers away; she saw them rarely. None of the children she cared for were her own. Grace Aber and Isaac Onen were her brothers’ children; the baby, Wilborn Okello, had belonged to her sister, who died in childbirth. That sorrow was still fresh. Agnes’s only living sibling, another sister, was also in Kitgum but cared for four children, two of whom were orphans. Such was “peace” in northern Uganda: the few who remained, struggling to care for the loved ones of the many who were gone. The memories of violence remained palpable—in the absence of family members at a gathering, in the missing ears, missing noses. Missing arms. In the redness of men’s eyes by midafternoon. In the abandoned schools, crumbling, burnt, reclaimed by wilderness.

  “Did you see this operation in Congo?” Agnes nodded toward the newspaper. “Museveni is hunting the rebels in Garamba. They should find Kony and take him here, so that he can be killed in front of us.”

  Rose had long learned not to flinch at the sound of the rebel commander’s name. “Should he not go to trial?”

  “His death is the only justice.”

  Rose and Christoph had spoken often about this issue. Like many foreigners interested in the northern Ugandan conflict, Christoph was well versed in questions of justice and reconciliation between the government of Uganda, headed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, and the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, led by Joseph Kony. The last chance at peace had been negotiations that took place in Juba, southern Sudan, in 2006 but were problematic from the beginning. The International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for Kony and his top co
mmanders the previous year, and some people argued that these warrants were the reason—at least partially—why Kony was wary of appearing in person to sign a peace agreement. Why should he risk arrest? A movement had begun to promote the idea of traditional reconciliation, involving Acholi ceremonies of cleansing and forgiveness; the ceremony of mato oput, “drinking the bitter root,” was touted as the best chance to move forward. But in order to perform such a ceremony with the rebel leader, he must first be found.

  When the negotiations in Sudan failed, President Museveni turned to a military option. Ten days ago, on the fourteenth of December, his army—the Uganda People’s Defence Force—began an aerial bombardment of the LRA’s main camps in Garamba National Park, in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. So far Museveni had made a lot of noise about success but had entirely failed to produce Kony. Rose was unsurprised. The rebel leader had ways of knowing things, of slipping beyond the government’s grasp. And Museveni could not be trusted any more than the LRA. Probably there were other motives for putting soldiers on the ground in that place. It’s all so far away, she told Christoph. What good does it do to think of such things here? And, she thought but did not say, what good to confront things she would rather forget?

  She began to roll out the small balls of dough one by one on a rock. Grace had moved nearby, anticipating her needs, and each time Rose lay another thin circle on the growing stack, Grace dipped the tips of her fingers into a cup of oil and drizzled it on the dough in neat spirals to keep the layers separated. The girl was silent, her dark eyelashes so lovely.

  Rose felt a pang of longing for this borrowed intimacy. She’d had a son once; he would be almost Grace’s age now, if he were alive. His hands had been as tiny and fragile as blossoms. Rose pushed the memories away. From the tall stack of circles, she took a smaller stack the width of her thumb, then pressed the edges down to turn the many smaller sheets into one long, layered circle. This would become the flaky crust of the samosa. As Rose finished each crust, Grace set them on a growing stack on a hot, flat pan over a second cooking fire, whose smoke drifted Rose’s way, stinging her eyes.

  Evening was falling, along with the drone of insects and snatches of birdsong. The clouds had dissipated into scattered wisps. It seemed that the rain had passed them by after all.

  “Ah, my sister,” said a gravelly voice. “My sister has come.”

  James entered the clearing with a swagger.

  “Apwoyo, brother,” Rose said. Even without meeting his eyes, she knew they would be red. She kept him in her field of vision as he approached, though she did not look up from her work.

  “What have you brought for us today?” he said. “Tomorrow is Christmas. You must have a big gift, you are working for a big man.”

  Rose wiped her hand on her skirt, leaving a light dusting of flour, and rose from her seat. She pulled out a white envelope from her purse and handed it to him. James fanned through the bills inside.

  “This is all?”

  “I must eat, too.”

  He eyed her sullenly but said nothing. At the open door of the hut Isaac emerged. He stood in the dim shadows rubbing his eyes. His T-shirt had a hole near the hem, showing a dark slit of belly, and he was naked from the waist down. He looked briefly at the people assembled there and then his face pinched. Grace picked him up—he held his arms out to her, his lips quavering—and she carried him to the edge of the clearing, where she set him on his chubby legs and he proceeded to pee into the bushes. When he was done, he picked up a rock and threw it with surprising force toward the seated goat, which bleated and scampered off. Isaac picked up another stone and began to examine it, turning it over in his hands. He was taking it to his mouth when Grace took it away, admonishing, “So sharp! You will hurt yourself, little one.”

  James sulked into the hut with the envelope, and Rose took the chance to speak to Agnes, hushed so Grace wouldn’t hear. “When was the last time he hit you?”

  Agnes turned back to the stew.

  “Ocen says men who beat their women are cowards.”

  “He will not beat me,” Agnes said firmly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  James returned, his stash tucked away. “Where is the food? It’s time to eat.”

  “It is not ready,” Agnes said. “You must wait.”

  “I am hungry.”

  “You can wait,” Agnes said again. On her back, Wilborn began to whimper. Agnes took the wooden spoon over her shoulder and tapped lightly on the fabric next to the child’s body, saying, “Shh, shh.” Rose remembered her own mother doing the same when she was a baby tied to her mother’s strong, broad back, with the half shell of a hollow calabash over her head to shade her from the sun. If she began to cry her mother would tap on the shell with a stick—tak tak, tak tak tak—and it soothed her. Even now, when she typed on Christoph’s laptop, sometimes the clicking would sound the same, tak tak, tak tak tak, and she would be lulled.

  “I will wait,” James announced. He swayed toward the stool and reached out for the newspaper. A jolt of adrenaline raced through Rose’s body—she saw his movement as if in slow motion. “Stop!” Rose said.

  But she wasn’t fast enough. James picked up the newspaper, and the bundle of shillings fell out to the dusty earth in a flutter. He looked at the money dumbly for a moment, then turned to his wife in a rage.

  “What did you do? Did you go to Acholi Pride? Did you spread your legs for whoever would pay?”

  He lunged toward her, but Rose stood quickly and stepped between them, putting her good hand against his chest. “Stop!” she repeated. He was strong but sluggish, and she hoped the force of her tone would be enough.

  “It was a Christmas gift from the mono,” Rose lied. “For the children. I could only give it to them.”

  He breathed waragi into her face. “Get out of my way.”

  “Listen to me. I am your sister. Would I be false with you?”

  “You are not my sister,” he seethed. “You are a rebel whore.”

  He shoved her aside, then turned and kicked the pan where the dough had been slowly cooking; the stack went sprawling into the dirt, and the pan fell with a bright clang. Rose saw Grace move subtly in front of Isaac.

  “You!” Agnes’s shout cut through the scene, aimed at James, her voice a razor’s edge. She shook her spoon at the spilled dough. “Eh! We have spent all afternoon. What shall we do now? What shall we eat tomorrow?”

  Rose kneeled to pick up the upended pan. The pain of her brother’s words throbbed dully; she had heard other people say such things, but to hear them from his mouth was something else entirely. She wished she could disappear—right this instant, right from this spot. Maybe she would reappear someplace else, somewhere new and clean. Someplace where no one knew her name, her face, her past.

  “I will not share a pot with LRA,” James said.

  “You stupid man,” Agnes said. “Come here. The stew is ready.”

  And so they gathered on woven mats set on the ground—three children, three adults; like a foreign fairy tale, Rose thought suddenly, like the stories Christoph told from his own land, blessed by triumphant trios and perfect symmetry. The pot of stew and the pot of millet sat in the center of their small circle; they had no plates or forks or spoons.

  “A prayer, my child,” Agnes said to Grace.

  Rose tried to imagine this scene, transcribed: on paper, in black and white, the little letters lined up side by side. How could anyone make sense of such a thing? It defies understanding, Christoph sometimes said of the war. She knew the same could be said of everything that comes after.

  Grace began to speak. “Dear Lord, we thank you for this bounty. Please forgive us our sins. We thank you for the gift of your son, who died so we might be saved.”

  Rose felt her heart contract. The son who died so she might be saved.

  In Jesus’ name, Amen.

  CHAPTER 3

  SABINE

  Decembe
r 25

  Outside the plane window, all was dark; inside, too. When they departed Amsterdam, the flight attendants had lowered the cabin lights so people could sleep, a courtesy Sabine’s seatmate was now taking full advantage of. He was a heavyset Kenyan businessman—the finely tailored suit gave it away, along with the passport in his front shirt pocket—and his periodic snores punctuated the background noise of the aircraft.

  The seat-back display stated that they were somewhere over Egypt. Sabine looked out to see if she could spot a city or even a cluster of lights, but there was only blackness stretching in every direction. It reminded her of flying across parts of the United States, where the land was cloaked in vast wildernesses that no longer existed among the manicured forests of Germany. Somewhere out there was Lily, alive or—

  Alive, Sabine told herself firmly. She wrapped the thin airline blanket tighter around her shoulders.

  She was amazed at how easy it had been to arrange everything once the decision was made. The flight had left Frankfurt yesterday evening, with a short layover in Amsterdam; she would arrive at Entebbe, Uganda’s international airport, in another few hours. She’d called an old friend to meet her there. She’d fired off a mass e-mail to three dozen people from over the years, NGO colleagues and expats whose contact information she’d kept; they’d be scattered across the continent, probably across the globe—she imagined lights switching on in cities around the world like pins on a map—but if someone knew someone else who could help, she’d take everything she could get. In Marburg, a colleague had agreed to take over her shifts at the animal shelter until she returned. Her vaccinations were up to date. She’d put a travel notification on her bank card and pulled out a thousand euros from her savings account.

  These practical considerations had kept her moving and occupied. Now, detached from solid ground and helplessly unable to do anything more, Sabine felt the magnitude of the situation anew. She tried to think objectively about what could have happened. The problem might be one of access—Lily was stuck somewhere, without Internet or phone to communicate her change in plans—but considering the pervasiveness of mobile technology in even the most remote villages, this was unlikely. She could have gotten sick somewhere along the way and was being treated in a local clinic. Sabine had once spent three days in a hotel room in a malaria-induced fever dream; one of the hotel staff finally checked on her and took her straightaway to the hospital, where she’d been half-conscious another few days. Lily might have come down with something a day or two before her flight and still be recovering.

 

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