It smelled warm, metallic, and sweet. Rose’s vision went blotchy and strange.
Suddenly she was somewhere else.
It was the morning after her abduction. Many had been killed in the night, but it was dark, and she was young and cowering and covering her face when the rebels found her, bound her, made her march. By dawn they were deep in the bush, tired and thirsty. Their feet were blistered, their tongues the size of rodents in their mouths.
There was a girl who was too slow. Rose did not know her name. The girl was older than herself, and stubborn. She sat and refused to rise.
The rebels gave them machetes. A lesson, they said.
The sweat rolled down her jaw.
She remembered holding the weapon; had she brought it down? She had both arms, and she was small but strong.
The rebels at their backs, punishing those who did not punish the girl. The girl cried out, begged, but Rose did not stop. The smell of blood. Blade on flesh. It was the weapon, not the bearer, with the will; this was what you had to believe. Rose closed her eyes. They were many; the girl was only one.
Christoph coughed lightly. She blinked, returned. Her heart raced; her body trembled. A thousand needles shot through her missing arm, filling out where her bone and muscle should have been, setting the ghostly space ablaze with pain. She looked at the empty air, terrified and confused: her arm was on fire, how could it not be real?
“Are you okay? Do you need to leave?” Christoph whispered.
“It is only…” She winced as another jolt stabbed.
“Let me take you home,” Christoph said.
“No,” she insisted. “I am fine.” She gestured with her left hand to her right shoulder. “It shall pass.”
Before them, two people kneeled on the earth, facing each other: one, the killer; the other, the victim’s father. Their hands were clasped behind their backs.
Rose took a deep breath.
“Heads together,” said the elder who stood over them, guiding their foreheads to touch: “One. Two. Three.” A kiss of skin for each count. “Now, take three sips of the bitter root.”
As each person dipped down in turn—mouth to calabash shell, like antelopes bending to drink from a pool—Rose wondered: and what of the crimes that were never recorded? The transgressions that flowed beneath the skin like groundwater, undiscovered; a dormant disease in the blood?
And what did it taste like, the bitter root? What was the sense that lingered on the tongue? Did it taste of death? Did it taste of release?
The body—left behind. Unburied. Open to animals, the rain, the sky. Not the girl’s body, no: the body of another. Small. With hands like blossoms. Opening—grasping—
Gone.
* * *
The ceremony lasted all day. Late in the afternoon, the clans shared food and drink, a ritual to complete the return of unity between them. When it was finished, the perpetrator looked relieved, but Rose saw that the victim’s mother was pained, as if carrying a fresh wound on an old scar.
On the drive back to town, Christoph was quiet, his expression troubled. Usually after a day in the field—an event, such as today, or an interview—he liked to “debrief,” as he called it. He would ask her opinion of certain things he couldn’t ask in the presence of others, or he’d want her to clarify something he didn’t quite understand. This evening, though, he seemed detached. He’d hardly spoken with Thomas, the elder who’d invited him to the ceremony. Rose saw him check his missed call before they got in the car, but he hadn’t called whoever it was back. Rose would not pry. Finally he broke the silence himself:
“Did you ever meet Lily?” he asked.
“Mm,” Rose said noncommittally. “Lily. Let me remember.”
“American girl, dark hair?”
But the name had already clicked into memory: the mono girl, Ocen’s customer. Funny that she’d just been reminded yesterday. “She was working at the rehabilitation center.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “She’s missing. That woman I was talking to this morning at the Bomah? That’s her aunt. She came out to look for her.”
“Missing? From Kitgum?”
“No one knows. She was traveling all over the country, so if something happened, it could have been anywhere along the way.” He turned to her. “Have you heard of anything happening here? Any … trouble? It would have been a few weeks ago. The beginning of December.”
If there was trouble in town, Ocen would know; bodas always knew. They went everywhere, listened to everything. If there had been a half-whispered word of a crime against a mono girl—a robbery gone wrong, kidnapping, worse—Ocen would have snatched its echo from the air. But Rose, alone: what did she hear? Only the hush of curses: LRA. Killer. Rebel whore.
“I am sorry,” she said to Christoph. “I don’t know anything.”
“I feel gutted, like I should have known. She’s been missing for weeks.” He shook his head. “It’s so sad. Just horrible, isn’t it? It makes you think.”
About what? she wondered, but didn’t ask.
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’m glad we got to witness the ceremony today. I’ve read a lot about it—about the variations from clan to clan, what the rituals mean. But seeing in person … it’s powerful. You get the sense that this could be the path toward real peace. Imagine Joseph Kony kneeling on the ground before all those people, asking for forgiveness.”
Rose felt a bloom of nausea and anger rise. “So he should not go to The Hague?”
Christoph downshifted to make a right-hand turn toward town. “Why should the rest of the world impose our version of justice on the Acholi people? Why should we rob you of your traditions?”
“Is your justice too good for us?” she said, her tone cutting. “Are Kony’s crimes against the Acholi not also crimes against humanity?” Are they not also, she willed him to hear, crimes against me?
Christoph looked at her in surprise. He seemed about to respond when they turned the corner and a crowd of people appeared in the road directly in front of them.
Christoph slammed on the brakes, and Rose’s seat belt snapped hard against her chest. Then the sound of the engine rumbling idly and the muted shouting from the crowd ahead. Yellow dust darkened the air in front of the windshield.
“What’s happening?” Christoph said, craning his neck. “Rose, can you see what’s going on?”
The question was answered without her as the dust settled and the crowd shifted—opened—and they saw a man: kneeling. Shirtless, his pants torn and dirty. His arms were tied behind his back, and his upper body swayed slightly. There was something dark and wet on his face, running down his neck, across his chest.
“It’s a mob,” Christoph said, understanding.
For a moment the man just swayed there. The scene seemed stalled, suspended; an act on a stage. Then a man from the crowd stepped forward and swung the long wooden handle of a hoe in an arc over his head, swift—whhifft came the noise, distantly, and then crack!—across the kneeling man’s back.
Christoph began to frantically work his seat belt buckle.
Rose reached out to grab him—only air; why couldn’t she feel him?—and realized she was reaching with her right arm, the non-arm, the gone arm.
She found her voice instead. “Stop. Don’t.”
His hand was on the door handle. Rose could see a few people in the crowd looking their way.
“We have to do something. They’re going to kill him.” His voice trembled but his body was rigid, frozen, hand on handle, as if her invisible arm held him there.
“If you try to stop them, they’ll beat you,” she said, low and even. “They won’t care that you’re a mono.”
Another man broke from the crowd and punched the kneeling man in the mouth. Rose flinched; Christoph jolted as if he’d been hit himself.
“No,” Christoph said. That was all. Before she could say another word, he swung the door open and got out, shutting it behind him.
She took
a breath. The air was heavy and close. The scene before her seemed to happen in slow motion: the three men who splintered from the crowd when they saw Christoph get out of the car; Christoph striding forward, his whiteness no shield; the limb-locked collision. He tried to shoulder past—there was yelling—and the three men held him back, pushed him down to the ground; the struggle brutal and fast—
—and release, a parting: the crowd thinned and dispersed, like oil separating on a hot pan. From the direction of town, the police had arrived, a pickup truck that now spilled out two officers in khaki uniforms with red berets and black batons. They grabbed the kneeling man—an elbow each—and jerked him to standing, then pushed him forward, though the man’s feet stumbled and dragged. Roughly they shoved him toward the back of the pickup, where two more officers hauled him chest over tailgate, letting the man fall hard, face-first, onto the metal truck bed. Meanwhile Christoph had picked himself up and was brushing the dirt from his palms.
Rose opened her door and stepped down. To a person passing, she asked, “What is the man accused of?”
“He is a thief,” the man said before trotting onward, unwilling to linger.
When Christoph returned to the car, Rose could see he was shaking. He had a small rip in the shoulder seam of his T-shirt—nothing large, the size of a silver two-hundred-shilling coin, through which his pale skin was visible. He wiped his mouth with his hand.
“My God,” he said.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” He brought his hand to his forehead. “That man—”
“He was a thief. Someone told me just now.”
“But it’s barbaric! It’s … inhuman! If the police hadn’t come…”
She met his eyes, his wild, horrified eyes. Her gaze was level. She said: “You believe in traditional justice? This is traditional justice, too.”
* * *
He dropped her off half an hour later at the corner near her house. In the car they’d hardly spoken. Christoph was shaken, that much was clear; Rose felt unsympathetic to his distress. She said good night and got out. Through the rolled-down passenger window he spoke in a monotone, “See you Monday.” His eyes stayed straight ahead, and seconds later he was already driving away, back to the safety of the Bomah compound, the comfort of cold beers, mono conversation—probably to “debrief” the day’s excitement and the evening’s brutality, she thought as she watched the red rear lights of the car turn the corner and disappear.
As she turned toward the house, a shadow came out from behind a tree—a figure, tall, looming. Instinctively, her body sprang to flee, so fast that her mind hadn’t even formed the thought. Not fast enough. The figure grasped her good arm and held her tight.
“Shh, sister,” a familiar voice said. “I am not here to hurt you.”
James. Her pulse slowed but her mind quickened. He was smiling, a sort of half grin; was it embarrassment she saw there?
He let go of her arm. “I told you I would come see you, didn’t I?”
“What do you want?” she said, wary.
“You should not walk alone at night. Kitgum is not safe.”
“I am not walking. I am already home. And now I am not alone.”
“True, true,” he said, chuckling.
“Why are you here?”
She sensed him weighing his words.
“Agnes is pregnant,” he said at last. “She is carrying my child.” In his tone Rose heard wonder, and joy, and perhaps a hint of fear—good fear, she thought. The kind that makes a man see himself anew.
“A blessing,” Rose said. “I am happy for you.”
“I know I’ve done wrong. Too much.” He was shaking his head. “I have been a poor husband, a loiterer, a drunk. I have not cared for the children God sent to me. I have done you wrong, too, my sister.”
A warm flush came up her neck. Had anyone ever said this to her?
“I want to change,” he continued softly. “It is time. I am ready to work hard. I will do anything. I will humble myself before the miracle of my child.” Fiercely, he gripped her arm once more. “You can help me, can’t you? Your mono friend? Maybe he knows some work I can do. Or I can drive a boda, like Ocen. He can help me get started.”
Unease loosened the knot, and she spoke, though with sadness: “Ocen is gone. And Christoph…” She thought of the shock in his expression when she’d thrown his outrage back in his face. This is traditional justice, too. Surely he would never help her study now; to think he might help her brother was almost laughable.
Yet James’s presence before her, his earnest face—how young he was! Only twenty-four, with three orphans under his roof and a baby coming soon. This was the future she must invest in, she thought: this was her family.
“I will ask,” she said finally. “We will find something for you.”
He clasped her single hand in his two large ones. “Bless you, my sister. Bless you.”
CHAPTER 9
SABINE
December 27
She’d forgotten how night fell in Kitgum: the sensuality of a yellow-gray sunset seducing her into believing it might be like this always—the sweet trill of birdsong, somewhere a radio playing Ugandan reggae songs, a refreshing coolness sweeping away the heat—until the swift curtain of night dropped and she was left spinning, startled, blind.
In her room at the Bomah, Sabine washed the day’s sweat and grime from her face. She had only a candle for light; power had gone off in town that afternoon, and the hotel hadn’t turned on its generator. She hadn’t stayed much longer with Miriam that morning. The girl was reluctant to share too many details, and Sabine didn’t need specifics to understand what was happening: the rebels were trafficking in illegal ivory as a way to fund their cause. It seemed so obvious—yet even obvious knowledge could be dangerous to the knower.
After she’d left the Children In Need center, instead of going to the police she found an Internet café. The connection was slow but functional, and the screen was angled away from the other tables so that no one could see what she was reading. For hours she scoured news sites, UN reports, NGO newsletters; there was nothing that connected the LRA to ivory, but plenty about the illegal ivory trade in Africa as a whole.
As she read, a narrative began to emerge. Demand for elephant tusks and rhino horns skyrocketed in the 1970s, causing a massive decline in animal populations across the continent; a 1990 ban on the ivory trade temporarily slowed the slaughter of rhinos and elephants, but in the past decade, there’d been a resurgence of demand in Asia and, subsequently, of illegal activities in Africa to meet the market’s desires. Criminals became organized and brutally effective. More often than not, the people doing the killing were better armed than the rangers trying to stop them. It was more than scattered violence; it was a war. The illegal ivory trade was spreading deeper and wider, with vast interlinking networks of poachers, smugglers, distributors, and corrupt officials at every point along the way.
Sabine knew many of these things already, of course. But it was the scale of the slaughter that astounded her. And the photographs: the ragged carcasses, the stacks of curved tusks as tall as a man. Tens of thousands of elephants were being killed every year.
She learned other things, too, of elephant intelligence and empathy. They mourned their dead and nursed their wounded. They could distinguish between languages, between genders, between faces: they could recognize the humans who had helped them in the past, and those that posed a threat.
Her heart broke at the thought of those splendid creatures dropping to the ground, never to rise. She recalled a game drive she did years ago on a weekend R & R in Kenya: it was the off season in the Maasai Mara, so she had a safari Jeep and a driver all to herself. At midday they’d come across a small herd of elephants at a watering hole. For a drowsy half hour, with the Jeep parked under the shade of a Kigelia tree, Sabine watched, entranced, as the calves wove unsteadily between their mothers’ legs, and the adults’ tru
nks prodded and splashed and swung as if they were separate creatures altogether. Then the wind shifted, and the elephants caught the scent of some predator in the bush. The herd began to move as one, gaining momentum as they climbed the slope away from the pond—directly toward the Jeep. The driver scrambled to turn the ignition and put it into gear. But Sabine was enthralled: the earth literally rumbled beneath them as the herd came closer, ears wide and flapping, long muscular legs pumping, trunks aloft and trumpeting. The noise was stupefying. Such magnificence! The driver had gotten them out of the herd’s path just in time, and with the windows open, Sabine felt the exhilarating rush of air as they stampeded past. She’d believed it was a force beyond man’s reach—a tsunami, an earthquake—but of course that was foolish. Anything that drew breath, man could bring down.
Sometime around two o’clock, the computer screen winked abruptly and went black.
“Eh, sorry,” the woman at the counter said. “No generator.”
Probably for the best, Sabine thought. She was exhausted and defeated and hungry to boot. She emerged from the Internet café dazed, blinking into the harsh daylight. At the corner was a woman in a headscarf selling samosas, and Sabine bought four little potato-filled triangles, then a bottle of water from the kiosk across the street. The kiosk had two plastic chairs set out under the overhang, and Sabine sat and ate.
So Lily knew that the LRA had ivory. Miriam said she’d first told Lily in mid-November. Two weeks later, Lily left Kitgum and fell out of touch. Three weeks after that, she failed to show up for her flight home. It could be a coincidence, Sabine thought. Simple happenstance. She reiterated in her mind what she’d told Rita back in Kampala: Lily never mentioned being interested in research or writing or journalism of any kind. But it would have been easy for Sabine not to know. Those buoyant e-mails, the smiling photographs: how much had Lily been curating her experience in Uganda, selecting only the pieces she wanted Steve and Sabine to see?
She remembered an e-mail Lily had sent in November. There were lines she recalled now with vivid clarity; they came at the end of a paragraph where Lily talked about how much she’d learned at the rehabilitation center, how she finally understood the limits of charity. For a while I just felt helpless, she’d written, like no matter what I did here, there was no way to make a difference. But now I think I’ve found a way. It’s about finding something that’s bigger than yourself, and being brave enough to commit to it. At the time Sabine had been preoccupied with some minor crisis at the animal shelter; she’d read the message quickly and thought nothing of it—a surge of optimism stemming from a complex brew of emotions Lily was experiencing as her time in Uganda came to a close. But now Lily’s words cast a long, dark shadow.
The Atlas of Forgotten Places Page 10