Anything worse … Sabine couldn’t—wouldn’t—think that far.
Back in Denver, Steve said he’d monitor Facebook and find someone to hack into Lily’s e-mail account in case she’d communicated with anyone else in the last three weeks. On the advice of a friend of his who worked for the police department, Steve filed a missing person’s report in Colorado and would spend the next few days drumming up media involvement. He’d been reading about other cases of people who went missing abroad (Had he slept at all? she wondered), and he told Sabine that the U.S. State Department or FBI got involved only if subjected to enough public pressure—though they would still need permission from local authorities. “That’s your job,” Steve had said. “Convince them we’re all on the same side. The only thing that matters is finding her.”
As logical as this approach seemed, Sabine found it wanting. She knew how bureaucratic behemoths operated: lethargically, and with much griping. As the clerk from the U.S. embassy had said, there was so little to go on. Even if they brought in a search helicopter, where would it circle? Sabine, acting independently, could be nimble and swift. She could cover more ground in less time. She knew East Africa, she knew Uganda—she knew Kitgum. That was where she would start, she’d already decided: in the place Lily had lived, her last known location.
Throughout the flight, memories of Hannah and Lily surfaced at random—images that seemed utterly trivial, things she didn’t even know her mind had filed away.
Hannah at eight, standing on a wooden stool at the kitchen sink elbow-deep in suds, helping their mother wash dishes while Sabine stood behind them to dry. Hannah wore a pink checkered apron with a white lace hem, and her wispy blond braid lay tamely down the perfect center of her back.
Hannah at thirteen, sharing an ice cream cone with Sabine: here, I know vanilla’s your favorite. The look of surprise and hurt in her eyes when Sabine licked too hard and pushed the entire scoop to the ground. The overpowering shame Sabine felt when Hannah whispered, How could you?
Lily, in a home video, nine years old. She’s wearing Hannah’s rain boots and a floppy gardening hat, crouched in front of a line of Barbie dolls, placing a chunk of Play-Doh in front of each one in turn. Hannah’s voice: Can you tell Aunt Sabine what you’re doing? Lily looks up defiantly, squinting. I’m giving food to hungry people, she says. And then I’m going to fly in an airplane and never come back.
The lights in the cabin flickered on, accompanied by a polite ding and an announcement for everyone to please put away their tray tables and bring their seat backs to an upright position. Sabine’s neighbor woke from his nap, shifted in his seat, and gazed past her out the window. Dawn had broken while they were over Sudan, and the crimson-streaked horizon gave way to a fierce blue. Sabine struggled to return to the present.
“I’ll be happy when we’re on the ground,” the man said. “Are you traveling for business or pleasure?”
How could she begin to answer?
“Family,” she said at last. Something in her tone must have indicated that she would say no more on the subject, and he did not press.
After they landed, as they shuffled down the cramped aisle, just before they exited the plane the man turned back to her.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
It took her a moment to realize. “So it is.”
* * *
Outside baggage claim, Sabine’s friend Rita Meier was waiting, her sleek brown bob impossibly perfect despite the early hour and humidity. Rita worked at the German embassy in Kampala; they’d met when Sabine had first arrived in Uganda in 2003 and Rita helped her sort through visa paperwork. Whenever Sabine had come to Kampala after that, for staff meetings or outward travel, she’d sought out Rita’s company. It wasn’t that they were so like-minded—their differences were more numerous than their commonalities—but there had always been something comfortable about their friendship. Never mind that Rita listened to awful, saccharine German pop songs, or that her bookshelves were filled with everything except books. They were both single women close to forty living abroad, and that was enough.
“Thanks for coming,” Sabine said as they embraced.
“My God—poor Lily,” Rita said. “Poor you.” She held Sabine at arm’s length and smiled tightly. “We’ll find her. She’ll be all right.”
They shouldered through the glut of drivers who called out, “Kampala? Hotel?” as the women passed.
“It’s been, what—three years?” Rita said as they walked to the parking lot. “Four?”
“Just two.”
“It’s good to see you again. I’m sorry it has to be under these circumstances.”
“I’m sorry for bothering you on Christmas,” Sabine said.
“Quatsch. We’re happy to have you. And to help in any way we can.”
“We?”
Rita smiled shyly. “I’m married now.”
“Rita! That’s wonderful.” Secretly, though, she felt a pang of hurt, as if it were a betrayal of their friendship. They’d spent so many evenings discussing the pitfalls of marriage, complaining about unfair expectations that all women abroad have to have a man to keep them safe and sane. Safer and saner without, they liked to say.
“His name is Jochem,” Rita said. “He’s from Berlin.”
“So you’re not Rita Meier anymore?”
“It’s Stücher now.”
Inside the car, as soon as Rita turned on the engine, the space was filled with the whirr of cold air and the melodic crooning of Reinhard Mey. Some things, at least, hadn’t changed.
Sabine sat up as they drove out of the lot and exited the airport, driving on the left-hand side of the road, a relic of British colonialism. The land was lush, the sight intoxicating, and Sabine could feel her limbs pulling outward, longing to press against the landscape itself. The roads were busy despite the holiday: minibuses shared the road with motorbikes, packed trucks, SUVs, and sedans, all drifting between lanes as if on a whim.
“Arschloch,” Rita cursed under her breath as a minibus swerved in front of her and screeched to a stop at the curb so another passenger could squeeze in.
They’d only just left Entebbe behind when the sprawl of Kampala crept out to meet them. Kampala had never been Sabine’s favorite city. Capitals in general were too busy for her, too self-important. She preferred the villages and the countryside. But after so long away from this place, every tiny thing felt significant: the pristine yellow MTN billboards over the grimy streets, the ubiquitous minibuses with their blue checkered stripes, the woman selling pineapples out of a wooden cart, the way slender men wore shirts that always looked two sizes too big. Sabine lost herself in the crush of imagery.
“That wasn’t there before, was it?” she said, pointing to a massive three-story shopping mall.
“They built it last year.”
The city was louder, more crowded, more everything than she remembered. Kampala had always felt chaotic but safe; now it seemed vast and overwhelming—labyrinthine alleys wending in and out of one another, disappearing behind unfinished concrete walls and splitting into a hundred narrow gutter-lanes. How easy it would be for one girl, alone, to take a wrong turn and never resurface.
Lily’s first e-mail after landing had been gushing with enthusiasm, everything in exclamation marks; had she felt fear, too? She never said. But even if she had, Sabine would have brushed her off as a stereotypical American, timid and gullible. Unease pinched her chest; she should have known the dangers. She should have prepared Lily better, inundated her with warnings, as Hannah surely would have done.
After a quick stop at the Garden City mall ATM—where Sabine withdrew some two million Ugandan shillings, roughly eight hundred euros—they proceeded to Rita’s house in the high-class neighborhood of Kololo, on a hill overlooking downtown. The streets here were calm and green, shadowed by leafy trees; the fences were tall and the tops embedded with broken glass or barbed wire. Rita honked at the driveway entrance, and a Ugandan man peeked through an
eye-level opening before swinging the metal gates wide. Inside, a large house stood handsomely in the compound, surrounded by foliage and a wide green yard sloping downhill toward the city.
Though Sabine was long accustomed to the strange decadence of expat life in Africa, the juxtaposition of splendor and poverty never failed to make her uncomfortable. She knew that these luxuries—a big house, a well-maintained yard, a guard and gardener, maids and nannies—attracted genuinely skilled candidates from abroad, who sacrificed other things to live here: closeness to family, access to top-notch health services. But no one forced them to come. And the ugly side of expat life—the feeling of being special, being granted automatic entrance to the upper echelons of society by the mere accident of one’s birth, which was conveniently masked by the fact that they were there to “do good”—hung in the air wherever expats gathered.
At the same time, the thought of navigating downtown Kampala in the heat exhausted her, and in Rita’s spacious, breezy living room she accepted the offer of a real cup of coffee—“not that instant Nescafé crap,” Rita assured her—with sincere gratitude.
After coffee, Rita gave her a spare cell phone and a calling card with ten thousand shillings’ worth of airtime. Jochem joined them from the kitchen, his hand outstretched to Sabine. She took it.
“It’s good to meet you,” she said.
“I’m so sorry about your niece.” He had a dish towel slung over his shoulder, and his shirt was splattered with flour and something gravy-like.
“I really appreciate your help,” she said.
“I wish I could do more at the German embassy,” Rita said. “We’ve sent out an alert to our newsletter subscribers and posted to the Web site. If anyone’s seen her, they’ll contact us.”
Jochem crossed his arms. “Someone must have seen her get on a bus, at least. The hostels she stayed in would have her name in their books. If she was backpacking, she’d leave a trail.”
Rita squeezed her shoulder. “Mzungu girls don’t just vanish—what’s the phrase in English?—into thin air.”
But Sabine knew that mzungu girls didn’t just disappear and emerge weeks later unharmed.
“Come on,” Rita said. “Let’s pay the police a visit.”
* * *
A Marabou stork picked its way through a pile of garbage along the curb outside the Kampala Central Police Station, and another was perched on a billboard overhead. The one stalking near the station stood about four feet tall and was bald on the head and neck; a bulbous pink throat sac hung at its breast like a deflated sausage. Atop the billboard, the second one spread its massive black wings, flapped twice, and resumed its surveillance. No other capital city that Sabine knew was as infested with these ugly, carrion-eating birds as Kampala. She’d heard that the Marabous had arrived in droves during the seventies to feast on the dead victims of Idi Amin’s dictatorship, but that was only rumor. Most likely they’d simply trickled in two by two, relishing in the uncollected trash and poorly regulated slaughterhouses dotting the densely populated city. Locals viewed them as a nuisance—the birds’ droppings were acidic enough to dissolve the paint on a parked car—and Sabine had heard of people cutting down the branches of trees where the storks nested so that the chicks would fall to the ground and die of exposure. But most Kampalans understood that the Marabous, as unsightly as they were, played an essential role in the urban ecosystem, and until the government was prepared to deal with the garbage of a growing city, the storks would do their dirty work for them.
Inside the station, an officer pointed them toward the missing persons’ room down the hall, where another officer in a khaki uniform and black beret sat behind a gray desk pecking at a yellowish computer keyboard. A dozen other Ugandans—civilians, by the look of their clothing, Sabine assumed—sat in plastic chairs along the wall or stood nearby, waiting. The officer glanced up as they entered and briskly waved them over.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “What is it?”
Sabine felt ashamed at how easy it was to skip the line—mzungu privilege, present and accounted for—but did not demur. She explained the situation as succinctly as possible. The officer listened expressionlessly but attentively, taking careful notes on a loose sheet of paper. At the top he wrote LILLY BENNET—USA in block letters. When she was done speaking, he tented his fingers.
“Is there a reward?”
Steve had brought up the possibility; his police officer friend advised against it because of the torrent of false leads it would generate, and they’d have to be careful with wording and legal management. But at this point they didn’t want to close any doors, and Steve said he’d look into fund-raising in the next few days. Their private accounts would be quickly depleted; Steve already had two mortgages, and Sabine had taken a significant pay cut when she traded aid work for the animal shelter. And none of this answered the far more difficult question of how to set a price on Lily’s life; any amount seemed too little, too crass.
“Soon, maybe,” Sabine said.
“Radio ads are also good,” the Ugandan officer went on.
Rita nodded. “I’ll set it up.”
The officer gestured to the other people waiting in the room. “You are lucky. This one, her husband is missing for three months. Three months!” He pointed to a woman with a baby in her lap; the woman looked away, her eyes brimming. “She comes every week to ask me what I am doing to find him. But what can I tell her?” he said, continuing as if she weren’t in the room—as if she couldn’t understand what he was saying. “I tell her, you need to help, you need to cooperate. You need to give us more information. When there is no physical evidence, what can we do?”
“It’s called investigation,” Sabine said. Now the word felt necessary and strong.
The man shrugged. “Look around,” he said. “Where shall we get the money? Where shall we get the manpower? In this room—this is everything.”
He set the page of notes on a growing stack at his right hand. It was a clear dismissal.
“It’s Lily, one l,” Sabine said as she walked out. “Bennett, two t’s.”
Outside, Rita said, “This is bullshit.” Her tone, however, did not convey disbelief, and Sabine found that she too was unsurprised. She looked up as the stork on the billboard flapped once and took flight, its massive wingspan casting a cool shadow across their path.
* * *
Christmas dinner was a quiet affair. After eating, Sabine checked her e-mail, which was filled with messages from her old contacts, former colleagues now based in Singapore and Honduras and Peru. They offered plenty of concern and condolences and hardly any tangible advice or leads, besides one Senegalese aid worker who said he knew a private detective in Mombasa; he gave her a name and phone number. Others had diplomatic contacts at various U.S. embassies across the continent. She replied to each asking them to follow up as best they could, though secretly she doubted any of these tenuous connections would amount to much.
After nightfall she sat with Rita and Jochem on the balcony, looking out over the lit-up buildings of downtown. Earlier that afternoon Sabine had stood in the same place while on the phone with the duty officer at the American embassy, who finally agreed to set up a meeting with the deputy chief of mission first thing the next morning. Then, the division between land and sky had been visible, if diluted by smog. Now on the hills in the hazy distance, tiny lights flickered like dense constellations of stars. When she squinted, Sabine lost track of where the hill stopped and the night sky began. A light rain pebbled the overhang above them, and a lamp drew assorted winged creatures into its aura.
“Kampala feels different than I remember,” Sabine said. “Was it always this way? Have I grown soft in Marburg?”
“It’s not you,” Jochem said. “We’ve had armed robbers break into houses on our street. A tourist was stabbed in Kabalagala last month. It feels more like Nairobi every day.”
“And the north?” Sabine asked.
“Probably safer than Kampala. The LRA’
s based mostly out of Congo and Sudan now. Hundreds of kilometers from the Ugandan border.”
“After Museveni’s little shock-and-awe show, who knows where they’ll go next,” Rita said.
Sabine was confused. “What’s this?”
“Operation Lightning Thunder,” Jochem said, leaning forward. “The UPDF has been bombing the hell out of LRA camps in Congo.”
“What happened to Juba? I thought the peace negotiations were going well.” On the rare occasions that Uganda made the news in Germany, she always switched the channel.
“The negotiating teams reached an agreement, but when it came time for Kony to come out of the jungle to sign, he didn’t show up. That was the end of November. The attack started a few weeks later.”
“Have they gotten Kony?”
“He keeps slipping the net.”
“I can’t imagine that’s playing out well in the newspapers,” Sabine said.
“It’s all propaganda anyway,” Rita said. “Museveni’s cracking down on free media. You know the police raided the offices of the Independent here in Kampala?”
“Three Ugandan reporters have been attacked this year,” Jochem added. “One was killed. They said it was a car accident, but…” He looked at Sabine askance and asked carefully, “Was Lily doing any writing? Any research?”
“She didn’t mention it. Why?”
He told a story about an Australian couple, good friends of theirs, who’d lived in Kampala nearly a decade; the husband was a journalist. The previous month they were stopped by the police at a checkpoint while driving home from dinner. The husband hadn’t been drinking, but the police arrested him anyway, then brought him to the station and put him in a cell with a hundred other prisoners, some of whom had been there for months. By the time his wife was allowed to see him, he’d been badly beaten. She was allowed to give him some food and blankets, but that was all. When he was finally released the next morning—without explanation—the man told his wife that the violence in the cell was unreal. Another man had been murdered while he’d watched. The only reason he’d stayed safe was that he’d been able to buy protection with the few items she’d brought. He felt pretty strongly that it was a message.
The Atlas of Forgotten Places Page 4