The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  It was dark by the time she reached Kitgum. Storefronts were closed—the holiday, she remembered—and pedestrians walked in blackness without the help of streetlights. Here and there, half-remembered shapes lurched out at her: the hulk of a building, the silhouette of a tree stump. She drove past quickly with her windows up, as if the menace of her memories might sneak in through the smallest of openings.

  When she pulled into the Bomah gates, she saw a few people sitting at the tables outside the hotel bar. Under the dim lights she counted three African men and two mzungus, one a heavyset woman with red hair and the other a broad-shouldered blond man with his back to her—no one she recognized. As she parked, the blond man turned slightly, and she caught a glimpse of his profile: he seemed instantly familiar, though she was sure she’d never met him. She wondered if he was one of the expats Lily had mentioned in her e-mails. She decided to drop off her things first, maybe take a quick shower, and then come back out to make some inquiries.

  In the lobby, two musty couches sat uninvitingly in a dark corner, with a fake plant between—just as she remembered. There were several hotels in Kitgum, most of which were dingy affairs with shared drop toilets and cramped quarters. The Bomah offered relative luxury: private bathrooms, mosquito nets without holes, warm water most mornings, and its own generator so that they could show English Premier League soccer games in the bar even when the power was out, which in Sabine’s days had been a regular occurrence. She’d never stayed here herself—she’d had a house across town—but she’d eaten often at the restaurant. She wondered if they still served their famous chicken fricassée, or as the expats called it after countless nights of the same, chicken freaking chicken.

  A gawky Ugandan boy showed her down a dark hallway to a basic but clean room, furnished with a bed and mosquito net, a wooden dresser with one door that didn’t quite close, a table and two chairs, and an attached bathroom that had a shower but no curtain.

  “Is there hot water?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow, maybe,” he said.

  A shower could wait.

  Steve called just after the boy left. His updates were as inconclusive as hers.

  “Did Lily mention anything about research to you?” Sabine asked. “Maybe an article she wanted to write?”

  “She kept a journal,” Steve said. “She bought a new one for this trip, I remember. But formal writing? I don’t think so. She’s always been more of an artist.”

  “That’s right. I remember now.” Sabine recalled a project Lily had done in high school, when Hannah was still alive—an assignment for her art class that involved maps. Lily had brought her sketchbook to Germany for Christmas, proud of her painstaking pencil-sketched versions of world maps from medieval Europe, with the thrilling words terra incognita across places yet unexplored. She’d showed Sabine copies of her favorite maps: the Babylonian Imago Mundi, depicting the known world in the sixth century B.C. as a seven-pointed star, and a view of sixteenth-century Florence, Italy, where, in the lower right-hand corner of the map, a man in a red coat sat on a small hill overlooking the city, pen and paper in his hand—the cartographer, drawn into his own illustration. Sabine remembered that Lily was especially fascinated by this human flourish. It made her feel connected to the mapmakers of old.

  “Why do you ask?” Steve said. “Is there a lead?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. It made no sense to worry Steve with tales of journalists thrown into jail. She watched a gecko scurry across the ceiling. “The woman at the embassy asked me something this morning. About whether Lily was depressed.”

  After a pause, Steve said, “My police contact said sometimes it’s the people you least expect who…” He took a breath. “He asked if Lily had ever had suicidal thoughts.”

  She shook her head, even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “No. Never.”

  “I told him that she saw a grief counselor for a while after Hannah died.”

  That was news to Sabine. A grief counselor? Had Lily been so in need, and Sabine never saw it?

  “But these last few years,” Steve went on, “she’s been in a good place, emotionally, I think. And in Uganda, you know, she saw some hard stuff. But she was always so positive. She wrote to me and said Kitgum was really helping her to put things into perspective.”

  Sabine thought of Hannah’s memorial service: Lily at sixteen in a black dress that hung a little too loose, her straight dark hair falling across her forehead as she clung to Sabine’s embrace, racked with sobs. That whole week Sabine had been frantic; grappling at once with the loss of her sister and the gain of a suddenly motherless niece. She’ll need you, Hannah had said when Sabine visited her in hospice for the last time. She’s more fragile than she knows. She’ll need you to be there for her, after I’m gone. But Sabine didn’t know the first thing about comforting teenage girls, let alone cultivating a relationship from a world away. And in the end, it had been Lily who pulled away from Sabine’s embrace, her eyes swollen but her face composed, and said, We’ll be okay. It’s going to be okay.

  Sabine flew back to Tanzania three days after the memorial, back to azure beaches and glossy fishermen, back to honking buses and sporadic electricity, acacia trees and the endless savanna, grant proposals and emergency funding and donor reports. A world still thrumming and hungry and alive. She welcomed the way the light seared her to the bone. She didn’t explain her absence to anyone, and the gentle laughter of her Tanzanian colleagues, their earnest focus on the tasks at hand, soothed her. It was easy, then, to respond to Lily’s e-mails with magnanimity, missives of encouragement. Working as a camp counselor sounds wonderful, I’m sure the children adore you, she wrote. Did you know Hannah was studying to be an elementary schoolteacher in Germany before she met your father? When Lily wrote saying that she’d finally chosen a college major, Sabine had just transferred to Uganda. A degree in psychology would be challenging, she wrote, but a worthwhile endeavor, certainly. Whenever they spoke on the phone, Lily seemed cheerful and optimistic, brightly American. What shadows had she hidden behind that façade?

  In her room at the Bomah, Sabine and Steve hung up, and she sat on the bed to gather her thoughts. She was tired; the drive had drained her, and now the possibility that Lily had wanted to disappear … She meant to go out to the courtyard, but the moment she closed her eyes and lay back, exhaustion overcame her, and the last thing she heard was the gecko’s chirrup before she was fast asleep, far from herself, in a town she’d once called home.

  CHAPTER 6

  ROSE

  December 26

  Rose woke with the sense of someone in her bed. With her eyes still closed, she drifted in and out of consciousness, and the warm figure at her side grew and changed. First it was her son, now grown the size of Grace; then it became Ocen, fondling a breast; then it was Christoph, who touched her shoulder and whispered, “Tak tak tak, tak tak. Tak tak.”

  When she roused at last and opened her eyes, she was alone. Through the thin walls she could hear the sound of someone hammering a tin sheet, and through the window a slant of sun striped her body with a band of warmth across her chest and shoulders. She rolled over to blink away the painful brightness.

  Christoph’s offer was on her mind. She’d stayed awake late into the night thinking of his words and what they could mean. She had considered the possibility, but had never truly believed that it would happen for her. It frightened her a little. Imagining the sparkling cities of Europe; the clean, tall buildings; the well-dressed strangers; the cold that she’d heard others speak of as if it were an animal, nipping at every place of your skin. In Europe, there would be no one who knew who she was, what she had been through, what she had lost. Was it possible to leave this self behind, if she left this town?

  At the edge of the bed, she dressed in her skirt and a blouse and slipped on her sandals. Her room, for which she paid thirty-five thousand shillings a month, consisted of four walls, one door, and one window. The floor was concrete and easily swept
; a short thatch broom stood in the far corner. She had a bed frame and a mattress and one set of sheets, which she paid the woman of the house to wash every Sunday, along with Rose’s clothes. Laundry was a task best suited to those with two hands, Rose had found. The only other items of furniture were a small dresser for clothes and a nightstand with a locked drawer, where she kept some cash, her identification papers, and Christoph’s equipment when she was doing transcriptions. She had no desk and so she worked on the bed.

  She locked the door behind her and, carrying a small towel over her left shoulder, shuffled across the dirt courtyard to the shared toilets. There were eight people in the house. Rose was the only renter, and the only one not related by blood. The rehabilitation center had organized the room for her when Agnes and James said they could not take her in. The family she stayed with asked no questions, but neither did they invite her to their table. At first, the mother would pull her children closer whenever Rose passed near; she once heard the husband and wife arguing in the next room—so thin, these walls—over whether to let her stay. She is a threat to the children, the woman said. These rebels, they come back from the bush with terrible thoughts. The husband calmed her: The mono would not hire her if she were bad. And the money, it will pay for medicine for the baby. Now, after three years of polite behavior and paying rent on time, the adults in the family paid her as little attention as they did the chickens that clucked freely around the yard.

  She splashed her hand in a plastic bucket of water and wet her face, then patted it dry with the towel. One of the chickens ventured toward her feet, and when she turned back to her room, it raced away on strong little legs, then slowed and resumed its pecking near a rusty metal wheelbarrow.

  In her room, Rose opened the locked drawer of the nightstand and touched her fingers to the small purse of emergency cash, and then the stiff blue passport that lay next to it. The crest of Uganda, etched in gold paint, showed a shield with two spears behind, an antelope-like kob on its hind legs on the left, and a crested crane on the right; beneath was a banner that read, FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY. The last mono Rose had worked for—a petty, mean-spirited British woman—had wanted Rose to come with her to South Africa for something or other, and so she’d helped Rose gather all of the necessary materials to apply for a passport. She even brought Rose to Gulu to show her support—and pay a bribe—at the Ministry of Internal Affairs’s regional office for northern Uganda. The trip to South Africa didn’t work out in the end, and the mono woman had in fact left Uganda without paying Rose her final balance, but the passport itself was such an object of beauty that Rose almost didn’t mind.

  She took it from its place in the drawer and held it in the palm of her hand. So light! She fingered the edges and then opened it to examine her serious, unsmiling face in the photo. There was her name, Rose Akulu, and her birthday, May 17, 1986, though the exact date was just a guess. She didn’t feel twenty-two; she felt a hundred years old, a wizened crone, shriveled up on the inside.

  Ocen made her feel young again. When he lay with her, when he traced his fingers along her left arm from shoulder to wrist—when he cupped her stump with infinite tenderness, unspeaking—she could imagine better things for herself, for her life. The first Christmas they spent together after she returned from the bush, she gave him a hammered metal cuff bracelet she’d found in the marketplace; the saleswoman told her it came from Kenya, and its interlinking iron, brass, and copper strands were made from old train tracks and wires and melted bullets. It was traditionally a wedding gift, she said—but Rose told Ocen none of that. She simply told him that it was beautiful, and that she’d thought of him when she saw it. He’d received it in reverent silence and slipped it on then and there. She’d never seen him take it off. That was the loyalty he’d shown, the gift he’d given her every day in return.

  The laptop and earphones beckoned, but Rose put her passport back and shut the drawer and locked it. The loneliness she’d felt these few weeks without Ocen made their argument seem trifling and small. Every night she spent alone, she sensed the specter of the commander who’d named her wife. His looming face, his body, his threat. She hadn’t looked for Ocen both out of pride and out of fear, in case what Agnes said was true, that he had found another woman, or had been keeping another all along. But now she feared the specter would manifest—he would become too real in her dreams, and stalk her when she woke. Only Ocen kept the ghosts at bay.

  The day was warm and still as she made her way to the corner in town where Ocen sometimes waited for passengers with his boda, the place where she’d seen the three napping men two days before. Ocen had paid a onetime fee of fifteen thousand shillings for the right to work this stage; he’d done the same at three other stages around town. Having a boda was a straightforward business but not very lucrative. A permit cost two hundred and fifty thousand shillings, and renting a motorcycle was sixty thousand shillings a week. Depending on how aggressively a driver pursued passengers, he could make anywhere from fifteen to thirty thousand shillings a day, minus fuel. A man had to work hard to pay for his necessities with what he earned, let alone accumulate enough to pay a dowry. Ocen had told Rose from the beginning that he needed to save first to buy his own motorcycle, so that his business could be more secure. But Rose had felt that he wasn’t trying hard enough, or saving fast enough; she’d offered to buy the bike on his behalf with the money she’d saved from her own work. Ocen lashed out at this offer with unexpected vitriol. She’d called him a coward, among other things. She regretted those words now.

  That was the end of November. It had been a strange month anyway, with Rose sensing a growing distance between them. She could understand if he needed to take some space. But surely he wouldn’t leave Kitgum forever without telling her?

  At the first boda stage, the two drivers were new in town and didn’t know Ocen at all. Rose continued to another stage outside the mosque. Four bikes stood along the side of the street, and their respective drivers sat in the shade beneath a tree. Rose recognized a few of their faces.

  “Boda?” one man asked, snapping to attention as she approached.

  “I am looking for Simon Ocen. He works this stage sometimes.”

  “Eh, Ocen. He is not around for some weeks,” the man said.

  “You have not seen him?”

  “No,” a second man said. “Not since…” He thought a moment. “Not since last month.”

  “He was here in December,” a third said.

  “He was gone.”

  “He was here,” the man insisted. “I had to take my sister to hospital, and Ocen took my regular passengers that day.”

  “What date was that?” Rose asked.

  “December first.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I am sure.”

  “And he did not call or write since then?”

  “We are not his friends. We pay to sit here the same as he does. If he pays and does not come, that is his choice.”

  The fourth man finally came forward. “And if he does not come anymore, he does not get his money returned. That payment is gone.”

  Rose felt a slight shift in atmosphere, a darkening of the tone. The other three men turned away. So this fourth man was the leader, then.

  “He will not ask for the money,” she said carefully, addressing him. “I am only here because I am concerned. Have you heard anything about him?”

  “He has some regular clients,” the leader said. “He takes some children from Matidi to school in the morning and takes them back in the afternoon.”

  “Brody takes those children now,” the second man volunteered. “I saw him last week.”

  “And there was a mono girl,” the leader said. “She lived at the Mission. He brought her to the rehabilitation center, and around town.”

  “He was lucky,” another said, grumbling. “She paid too much.”

  Rose had a flash of memory—yes, the mono girl. Lily. She’d seen Lily and Christoph together at the Bomah on
several occasions, had even spoken with the girl once. She remembered Ocen receiving Lily’s calls in the evening when she wanted to be taken home late; Rose had never minded him answering, because it meant he would earn a little extra, though she was annoyed when he left her bed to do it. “And who takes the mono girl now?”

  A woman shouted out to the bodas from across the street, and one of the men moved swiftly to his bike and started the engine. He pulled the bike out and waited while she sat, her legs to one side, her hands gripping the cushion. They murmured a quick negotiation and then took off.

  “The girl? Who takes her?” Rose asked again to the three who remained.

  “No one,” the leader said. “She is gone.”

  These foreigners, Rose thought—coming for a few months and then leaving again like it was nothing.

  “You should talk to his cousin,” the third man said. “Paddy.”

  “He knows where Ocen is?”

  “Ocen met with him the day before my sister went in the hospital.”

  Rose thought a moment. Paddy lived far from town. A few months ago Ocen told her that Paddy and his wife were planning to leave the government camp and return to their ancestral land in Palabek. Such a choice was becoming more common now that the LRA was less of a threat within the Ugandan borders.

  “Can you take me to Palabek?” she asked the driver.

  “Palabek?” The man shook his head. “The man is not in that place.”

  “Where is he, then?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  The man shielded his eyes from the sun as it peeked above the mosque. “Paddy is in prison. You can find him there.”

  * * *

  At the suggestion of the boda driver, who spoke in graphic terms of the unpleasant conditions in which prisoners were kept, Rose stopped by the A-One Supermarket to pick up a few things for Paddy before her visit. Power in town had gone off sometime in the morning, and the noise of generators had begun to fill the streets. As she climbed the steps to the store, she tried not to look at the madwoman laid out, asleep, on her woven mat on the concrete next to the shop entranceway. Her limbs were skinny, and her clothes ragged with holes. Everyone knew her tale. For a long time it was merely sad—homeless, mentally unfit. Two years ago the story became a tragic one when she was raped one night by a drunk UPDF soldier and became pregnant. When she had the baby, she couldn’t care for it—she was no more than a child herself—so a local government employee came to take the little girl away.