The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “Rose?”

  The woman looked up, startled out of her reverie. Her eyes focused, and Sabine saw that Rose recognized her. Sabine thought she noticed a flicker of wariness in Rose’s gaze. “You are Lily’s aunt,” Rose said.

  “Yes. Sabine. And you’re Christoph’s assistant, is that right?”

  Rose gave a slight nod.

  “Christoph said you know Lily’s boda driver,” Sabine pressed. “I need to talk to him—he might be able to help find her.”

  Rose was quiet, and Sabine sensed her deliberating.

  “Rose, if you know anything—”

  “Ocen is not around,” she said. “He left Kitgum.”

  Sabine’s hopes sunk. “Can you call him?”

  “He does not answer.” Rose looked away. “We had a fight.”

  “Maybe if I tried?”

  Rose shared his number—reluctantly, Sabine thought, though Rose watched closely as Sabine dialed and held her phone to her ear. It clicked straight to the automated no-answer message.

  Sabine shook her head. “He must be out of range, or his phone is off. I’ll try again later.” Rose seemed disappointed, too, and Sabine felt sorry for her. After an awkward pause, she said, “I’m sure you and Ocen will work things out.”

  Rose tilted her head and met Sabine’s eyes. “If you find her, please tell me?”

  “Of course.”

  When Sabine knocked at the police building a moment later, she was still thinking of the strange look in Rose’s eyes as they’d parted ways—was it defiance? Entreaty? Or had Sabine simply imagined it, wanting to see a message where there was none?

  The officer who answered the door—but did not invite her inside—listened to her queries with a bored expression and offered distinctly unhelpful single-word answers in response. Did they know Lily was missing? (Yes.) Were they coordinating with the police in Kampala? (Yes.) Was there a local investigation under way? (Yes.) Were there any leads? (No.) The man scratched his chest absentmindedly throughout. After five minutes Sabine gave up, and he closed the door without saying good-bye.

  Now it was her turn to stand at the roadside uncertainly. Back to the Bomah? The Mission again? As she mulled it over, a large truck rattled out from behind the prison; its long bed had tall walls and metal bars arching over—usually for transporting livestock or goods for market. But now the back was filled with prisoners in yellow T-shirts and shorts, standing up, holding onto the bars or each other to keep from toppling over. Cheap labor, she thought—and a shame, too, when there were probably plenty of young Ugandan men who couldn’t find work themselves, who turned to drinking instead.

  “Sabine!” a woman’s voice called from the direction of the Bomah. Sabine saw Linda at the gates. “Where are you headed?”

  “Nowhere,” Sabine said honestly.

  Linda waved her over. “Walk with me. I’m going for lunch.”

  It didn’t take a moment for Sabine to catch up.

  “We missed you at breakfast,” Linda said.

  “I was on the phone all morning.” Sabine felt her feet begin to drag. “Trying to coordinate the search has been a nightmare. There are a hundred things to think of, and no one has really been able to tell us what we should and shouldn’t be doing. The State Department wants me to come back to Kampala to shake hands with the chief of police or something, so they can pat themselves on the back and feel good about their ‘contribution to the investigation.’ And the police, my God…” She threw up her hands in frustration.

  Linda smiled sadly. “It sounds like you’re doing everything you can.”

  “Am I?” Sabine stopped midstride. Why couldn’t she catch her breath? She buckled over; her hands were on her knees, and she was laughing. Why was she laughing? No—she was crying. But her cheeks were dry.

  “Sabine?” Linda’s voice echoed distantly. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. It’s okay.” Was it? She took a deep breath and stood up straight, her throat catching. They’d stopped in the middle of the road. Somewhere distantly she could hear praise music playing, and the sound of clapping hands. Sabine brought a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the bright sun. “It just—feels so useless sometimes.”

  “What feels useless?” Linda asked gently.

  “All of it.”

  The war. The world. The mother and baby at the side of the road, her grandfather’s secret, the hatbox with his handwriting … all the burdens of the past, living inside her.

  “It will be four weeks tomorrow,” she said. “Four weeks without a word.” She closed her eyes and breathed in the dust. “I’m not sure what to hope for anymore.”

  Linda was silent, and Sabine turned to face her, dropping her voice. “I think she was in trouble before she left Kitgum, Linda. She had access to—sensitive information. If someone found out…”

  Linda touched her shoulder. “Let’s keep walking a bit, shall we?” Her tone was light and jaunty, but Sabine followed a flick of her eyes toward a man who stood loitering in the shade of a tree across the street.

  Sabine nodded. “What’s for lunch?”

  Ten minutes later, the two women were comfortably seated at a table in an otherwise mostly empty courtyard, with two cold Cokes in front of them and food on the way.

  “They never follow me in here,” Linda said. “I know the owners. And our voices won’t carry. It’s safe to talk.”

  “Why are they watching you, anyway? Are you a journalist?”

  “I’m studying nodding syndrome—it’s mostly been recorded in southern Sudan, but cases have started popping up in northern Uganda.”

  “So you’re a doctor?”

  “A medical anthropologist.”

  “I never imagined anthropology to be so risky.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” Linda said. “But with nodding syndrome, no one knows what causes it or how it spreads. There’s the possibility of it becoming a political issue, especially in a place like northern Uganda, which is already so marginalized. Museveni probably doesn’t want the international community to accuse him of sitting on his hands.”

  “If there’s one thing I learned from three years here,” Sabine said, “it’s that everything in northern Uganda can become a political issue.”

  Linda clinked her glass Coke bottle. “Amen. Now, what do you think Lily was into?”

  Sabine told her about Miriam and the Australian reporter in Kampala who’d been thrown in prison to deter him from his research into mineral smuggling.

  “I’m worried that before she left, Lily was investigating the illegal ivory trade,” she concluded. “She’s not a journalist. She might not have known how dangerous it was.”

  “If so, she was extremely discreet,” Linda said. “I certainly never suspected. And I’m alert to these sorts of things, you know. Do you think the backpacking plan was a ruse?”

  “I don’t know. No one at the bus station saw her the morning she left. She might have been meeting someone—an informant, maybe. Or she could have decided to give up her research since she was leaving the country in a few weeks.”

  “But she was intercepted on her way to the bus.”

  Sabine nodded.

  Neither woman spoke.

  The food arrived, two hot plates of rice and beans and boo. The rich, earthy scent of the cooked greens should have been appealing, but Sabine had no appetite. Linda didn’t seem to be much interested in eating, either, as she tapped her fork absently against the side of her plate.

  “Christoph mentioned seeing Lily outside some kind of museum,” Sabine said.

  “The National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre.”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  “Their library isn’t huge, but they have a collection of UN reports she might have looked at. They also have computers where you can use the Internet for free. I suppose if I didn’t want to be linked to a particular search history, that’s where I’d go. It wouldn’t hurt for you to ask the staff tomorrow morning.”r />
  Sabine sighed. “I don’t know why I’m still here. In Kitgum, I mean.”

  “You only just arrived.”

  “But every day counts. Every hour. She could be out there somewhere. Scared, in pain.”

  “I don’t think it’s helpful to think about that.”

  “I just feel stupid sitting around in one place.”

  Linda gave a short laugh.

  “What?” Sabine said.

  “It’s funny,” Linda said, taking a forkful of boo. “Lily said the same damn thing.”

  * * *

  After lunch Sabine found an Internet café where she could print Steve’s flyer, and she spent the afternoon distributing copies in town. Sorry, sorry, people would say when they looked at Lily’s photo underneath the headline DISAPPEARED!! They’d cluck and shake their heads. We are praying for you, really. Some recognized Lily’s image, and in this way Sabine could trace her niece’s footsteps through town, from the fruit stall where Lily bought a pineapple once a week, to her preferred grocery store, to the kiosk where she bought pay-as-you-go airtime for her phone. People knew Lily in the oddest places: a woman in a fabric shop who’d taken Lily’s measurements for an Acholi-style skirt; a furniture maker who remembered Lily getting on the back of a boda outside his shop; a waiter in a bar who’d watched her play a round of pool with Christoph. Each detail accumulated in Sabine’s mind, filling in her picture of Lily’s experience, her interests, her life. Sabine hadn’t realized how limited her own time in Kitgum had been; she’d spent so many hours either at the office or at home, or at the Bomah for dinner or drinks—was it possible she’d never walked this side street, never looked down this row of market stalls, never thought to glance past what you could see from behind the windshield of her company car?

  By the time dusk grayed the sky, Sabine still had no new leads, and her back ached. At the Bomah, dinner was subdued. Christoph and Linda were shaking their heads over the latest news from northeastern Congo, where the LRA was responding to Operation Lightning Thunder as expected—that is, with swift, brutal attacks on local people. The Ugandan newspapers reported a massacre of a hundred and fifty Congolese on Christmas Day in a place called Faradje, which Sabine had never heard of until now, and which would probably never be reported outside East Africa. This was a conversation she remembered well: one she’d had a thousand times before. Her heart couldn’t take it. After eating, she begged off, claiming administrative necessities. As she rose from the table, Christoph stood too and gave her an awkward hug—a gesture of comfort? Her forehead fit perfectly against the underside of his jaw, and the warmth of his skin made her pulse skip. She broke it off with a mumbled excuse and retired to her room.

  She lay awake in bed trying to find any thread of hope that remained in the search for Lily. This ivory thing: it was a stretch, wasn’t it? Aside from Linda’s general paranoia—which, from what Sabine remembered of her time in Kitgum, was not entirely off base—there was no real evidence of foul play. And in the meantime, there was an entire country to search, and she couldn’t be in every place at once. Maybe it was time to try Steve’s way, head back to the capital, meet with the people in suits, follow the rules. Maybe that was what she should have done from the start.

  One last chance, she told herself. The National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre opened at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. If she walked out of that building empty-handed, she could be back at Rita’s house in Kololo by sundown.

  * * *

  Monday dawned darkly, the air chilled with the promise of rain. The gloom seemed appropriate. Sabine had woken to thunder several times in the night, and in the morning there lingered a disorientating sense of having been spoken to, a feeling that Kitgum was telling her in no uncertain terms: go on. Get out. There’s nothing left for you here.

  She packed her bag—she’d hardly unpacked in the first place—and tossed it in the back of her rental car, then went back inside and dropped her key at the small reception desk with the young man who’d checked her in the first night. The tables outside the restaurant were empty; all the better, she thought. Sabine was not skilled in the art of good-byes. At social events she invariably tried to duck away unnoticed rather than make the obligatory round of farewells. Here was no different: she had Linda’s and Christoph’s contact information, and they, hers. What useful words of parting could there be?

  For the first time since Sabine arrived, the main road seemed to display normal traffic and signs of commerce. Bicyclists, bodas, NGO vehicles, and a steady flow of pedestrians carrying all form of cargo from chickens to jerry cans to firewood. Sabine missed seeing the flocks of schoolchildren in their crisply colored uniforms, but of course school was out for the holiday. Two raindrops fell in quick succession against her windshield, and then nothing.

  She pulled past the drab local government buildings and parked outside the newly constructed, cleanly painted two-story documentation center. Three men stood in the door frame of the nearest government building, chatting. She sensed them watching as she walked to the center and tried the front door. They didn’t seem suspicious; their conversation was buoyant and hearty.

  The door was locked. She checked her watch: five minutes after nine. She knocked and waited. Still nothing.

  “He is there,” one of the men called. He pointed to a car approaching from down the road.

  “Thanks,” Sabine called back.

  When the driver came into view, Sabine lost her breath.

  “David?” she said incredulously the moment he stepped out of the car.

  The lanky Ugandan took a second to recognize her, then broke into an enormous smile. “Ehhh!” He clasped her hands in his. “Sabine, my friend. You have returned. It has been a long time.”

  Sabine felt overcome. She hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone from her old NGO once she moved to Marburg. Now that the NGO had pulled out of Kitgum, she’d assumed that the Ugandan staff would scatter as well. But it made sense for David to stay; his family was here, she remembered—a wife and two children.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said, grappling for solid ground.

  “You are very different,” he said.

  “How so?”

  He cocked his head, examining her. She expected him to comment on her haggard look, the worry and resignation that must certainly be showing under her eyes. He pursed his lips. “Your face is somehow fat.”

  She laughed. It wasn’t meant as an insult, she knew; her Ugandan colleagues had sometimes greeted her by saying, You are looking big today.

  “I eat better in Germany,” she conceded. “My life is more relaxed there.”

  “That is good,” he said, nodding. “You worked too hard before.”

  Guilt pinged through her chest, but before she could say anything, he put a hand on her elbow. “Come. Tell me why you have returned.”

  She glanced up at the thunderclouds. “Shall we go in?”

  It began to sprinkle while David was unlocking the door, and once inside, Sabine brushed off the drops that peppered her shoulders while David turned on the lights in the reception room. The walls were covered with photographs, posters, newspaper articles, and tools of war on display with captions beneath. As David put his briefcase behind the desk, she walked closer to the exhibition. A long collage of newspaper clippings caught her eye: REBELS KILL 23 IN KITGUM CAMP. HUNDREDS SLAUGHTERED IN BARLONYO. UNICEF ESTIMATES 25,000 CHILDREN ABDUCTED SINCE START OF CONFLICT. NORTHERN UGANDA REACHES 1.8 MILLION DISPLACED. IDP CAMPS: FROM MILITARY TACTIC TO POLITICAL NIGHTMARE. Farther on: ANGRY LRA REBELS WALK OUT OF JUBA PEACE TALKS. KONY REFUSES TO SIGN CEASEFIRE. MUSEVENI TO KONY: SIGN, OR ELSE.

  At the end of the collage, an Acholi proverb was painted on the wall: KA LYEC ARIYO TYE KA LWENY LUM AYEE DENO CAN. “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

  Then came a series of photographs of the top LRA commanders, with the unmistakable face of Joseph Kony at the top. In the picture he wore a green military uniform
with red and gold shoulder patches and a matching cap; his goatee was scruffy and his eyebrows furrowed. His expression seemed confused, she thought. Not malicious or bloodthirsty. Yet the LRA operated almost completely under the sway of his command, the brutal tactics ordered by the “spirits” that spoke through him. He was said to have sixty wives or more. How could one person do so much harm?

  “It’s still a work in progress,” David said behind her. “This is all temporary. We’re trying to put together a permanent exhibition.”

  “It’s remarkable,” she said.

  “Is there something you’re looking for in particular?”

  She turned back. “Yes. It’s about Lily. My niece.”

  Again, the explanations; the sorrow, the murmured consolations. Sabine probed further before the weight became too much.

  “Christoph said that Lily used to come here,” Sabine said. “Do you remember seeing her? Do you know what she was looking at?”

  “I remember very well.” He gestured for her to follow, and they went into the next room—the library Christoph mentioned, with books lining the shelves on the walls, three long desks in the middle, and six computers at the far end. David stopped in front of a shelf and pulled down an enormous, heavy volume.

  “National Geographic Atlas of the World,” he said. “It’s an old edition—1996, I think.” He set it on the nearest table and opened to the spread of East Africa—Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda, with the large blue splotch of Lake Victoria in the middle, and extensive coverage of eastern DRC to the left and southern Sudan at the top edge. “She liked to copy from this page,” David said. Sabine recalled Lily’s hand-drawn maps in her sketchbook in Stuttgart—the cartographer drawn into the landscape—and the map of Kitgum that hung on the wall at the rehabilitation center. A familiar creative habit, to ground herself in unfamiliar territory. Sabine felt her disappointment threaten to brim out from behind her eyes.