The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  David leaned back, crossing his arms. “She showed me her drawings of Kitgum, too, even the woman who sleeps outside A-One Supermarket. Eh! She has talent, this one.”

  Sabine sighed. “It doesn’t really help, though, does it? If she had circled the name of a town or something…”

  David said nothing, keeping his hand on the open page.

  “How do you keep hoping?” she said suddenly, desperately. “She’s been gone for nearly a month, David. There’s no trace of her, nothing. I’m not getting anywhere. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” Emotion choked her voice. Light-headed, she put a hand to her forehead. “What if it never gets easier? What if we never find out what happened?”

  David closed the atlas and returned it to the shelf. “Let me show you something.”

  He led her back out into the lobby and stopped in front of a long banner on the wall opposite the newspaper collage. It was a list of names and dates. Okello Martin 1989/2000. Okema Nancy 1981/1996. Okwera Emmanuel 1993/2005. The names went on and on. There must have been hundreds. Onen Francis 1991/2004. Opiyo Jeremiah 1984/1999. Sabine couldn’t read them all. Her eyes moved to the caption beneath.

  During two decades of war, tens of thousands of people were abducted by the LRA, most of them children. Many are still missing. If you know anyone who is missing, please add their name, birth year, and date of abduction here.

  “These are just the ones from Kitgum,” he said. “The ones we’ve been able to collect. There are thousands more.” He traced a finger along the list and paused at a name: Odong Fiona 1998/2002. “This is my niece.” He ran a line to another, Oyet Denis 1984/1997. “My cousin.” When he stopped at a third name, his finger trembled ever so slightly. Otim Gilbert 1981/2003. “My brother.”

  Sabine read the names in silence. She thought of her own banner of loss: her father’s parents, before she was born; her mother’s parents, before she graduated Gymnasium; her parents, in a sailing accident; her sister, to cancer. No grief was easy. But the missing—this was something else entirely. You couldn’t grieve, but neither could you hope. Both were too painful to bear. “How do you manage?”

  “Everyone has to find their own way. For me…” He paused. “I put my faith in God, that He has a plan. I am praying to Him every day.”

  “And if God and I are not on speaking terms?”

  “There must be something you believe in, above all else. Pray to that.”

  The sound of rain outside grew louder. Sabine hesitated. “Do you remember the woman you took to the hospital? The one with the baby.”

  “Eh, I remember.”

  Her throat clenched. “I’m glad you broke the rules. If it had been me alone, I wouldn’t have helped.”

  He looked away. “It was a small thing.”

  “It was brave.”

  David seemed uncomfortable, and she pressed forward—he needed to understand the good he had done, the good she had failed to do. “Everything we did at the NGO, that was just numbers, it was our job. But you didn’t let it blind you, like I did.”

  Still he was quiet.

  “It was a life,” she insisted. “Two lives. You saved them.”

  Now he was shaking his head. “Only God can save.”

  “But you were there. You put them in the car. You made that call.”

  “Sabine,” he said, “I did not save them. The baby died.”

  * * *

  Outside, behind the wheel of the parked car, Sabine sat and watched the storm roil. Her hair and shoulders were soaked just from the short run from the building. The change in weather was spectacular: the sheer force of it. Trees danced violently in the sudden wind. A boda driver skidded in the slick mud and recovered; two women with yellow jerry cans took shelter under the overhang of the government buildings nearby as a rush of running water surged off the sloping tin roof and broke the stalk of a green plant beneath.

  If she believed in anything “above all else,” she thought, it was this—the apathy of the universe to the individual desire, the personal plight. There was birth and there was destruction. The fairy tales she grew up with were filled with signs and circles, questions that never went unanswered, riddles that never went unsolved. But in life, the world kept turning and the mysteries only deepened, chasms never bridged.

  As she drove out of town, she turned on a whim down the road that led to her old house. It felt appropriate: a final farewell to Kitgum. The street was acutely familiar, even in the storm: an unfinished brick wall; a hand-painted advertisement for Omo laundry soap; a boda stage; and then, just around this corner, behind the next red gate, with tall walls and pink bougainvillea and a guard with a gun, her house—

  The car judded to a stop. She turned off the engine. She looked, kept looking, as if waiting for the punch line.

  The house was gone. The perimeter walls were only partially dismantled, but the building inside had completely vanished; only the concrete foundation remained, now wet and pooling in the rain. Three years of her life, a thousand mornings, a thousand nights. No evidence remained. She felt the house’s absence like an empty space in her chest.

  The rain on the windshield and roof grew more urgent, and in the cacophony of noise, she turned on the engine and shifted into first gear. It was time to go.

  CHAPTER 12

  ROSE

  December 29

  Rain threatened overhead as Rose made her morning trek across the yard to shower. She’d slept poorly, her dreams ragged and weighty: the face of an LRA commander, the thunder of bombs. Her encounter with Lily’s aunt yesterday outside the prison unsettled her, and throughout the afternoon and evening—when she took a boda to the IDP camp in Palabek to take some money to Paddy’s family then stayed for dinner—her thoughts were elsewhere. She kept playing back conversations with Ocen, picking through every remembered phrase for references to Patrick or Flynn or Lakwali or Congo or even gold. She thought of his growing distance that last month, his jumpiness; what was his secret?

  Lily was a part of it. She couldn’t say why she felt so certain. But where the connection was exactly, she couldn’t say. Did Lily know someone at the gold mine? Would she help Ocen get a job there? Or were the words in Ocen’s notebook just words, unimportant; was it the girl herself—her whiteness, her bank account—Ocen’s idea about money? If Christoph was Rose’s “opportunity,” why would Lily be any different for Ocen?

  Rose soaped her body with cold water, her arm terse and quick. Had Ocen left her for the mono girl? Had they run away together? She thought of the way his face would change when he saw it was Lily calling. Was it more than money?

  Was it—love?

  She rinsed and dried. Her skin prickled with goose bumps; the weather was shifting. And if it was love, what right did she have to be jealous? None, she told herself. She had no claim to Ocen, just as she’d had no claim to Opiyo all those years ago, when they were all young, on the cusp of young adulthood—Rose and the twins, a perfect trio of playmates. Opiyo was the smiling twin, charming and boisterous, while Ocen lingered shyly behind. So different, the two, and yet they were more than brothers: blessed by jogi, two halves of one whole. Opiyo would sneak away to engage in some mischief or another, and Ocen would reluctantly follow, unwilling to endure the humiliation of Opiyo’s creative taunts if he stayed behind, usually involving dog vomit and elephant piss. When Rose watched the two together, she passed over Ocen’s hesitancy in favor of Opiyo’s confident, feline motions.

  The first time Opiyo kissed her in the brush at the edge of the river, her insides tightened and moved like snakes, and she wanted more, always more. Miraculously, Opiyo wanted the same, and they became sweethearts, Rose and the smiling twin, sharing the heady promise of a marriage someday, and children—a shared life.

  Then, Rose and Opiyo were abducted together; Ocen, left behind, remained in Kitgum. During her years in the bush, Rose couldn’t think of the people at home, couldn’t bear to wonder how they had changed, what they dreamed, if they were al
ive to dream at all. She became a wife and a mother, though it was nothing like she’d imagined.

  And then she was neither. That was what it meant to return.

  After she left the rehabilitation center in Kitgum, Ocen appeared on the street like a ghost: his face, Opiyo’s face. His body no longer hesitant but graceful and strong. The war years made a man of the boy. The first time she saw him she gasped—it wasn’t possible, Opiyo, here—and Ocen stopped, and she saw him with new eyes. She was terrified and overjoyed, and he was gentle, so gentle when he traced his fingers along the bandages where her right arm had been, when they embraced. It is you, he said, over and over again. You. And then: Where is my brother? Where is Opiyo?

  Her cheek was pressed into the hollow between his chest and shoulder, and she meant to tell him everything—the truth from the beginning, the countless small ways Opiyo had saved her, and the one large, impossible to repay, but then she wouldn’t be able to stop, the river would gush forth, and Ocen would have to know not just what his brother had been but what he had become. The lie slipped out before she could stop it: he is at peace.

  Later she told herself it was a kindness, this gift of closure. Ocen would not have to wonder what choices his brother was making in order to stay alive.

  Ocen never asked again. Not about Opiyo, nor her missing arm, nor the signs of childbirth that still showed in the places where she’d been cut open and sewed together again. When he touched her scars, he was quiet, as if saying: I see you as you are, and it is enough.

  In her room, she dressed in comfortable clothes—jeans and a loose blouse; she had a special bra without a clasp that slid over her head and needed no fastening—and put out the transcription equipment on her bed. A bare lightbulb cast some brightness against the darkening sky outside. She hadn’t spoken to Christoph since Saturday evening after mato oput, but he’d given her the USB stick with the recordings from the ceremony before they got in the car—before the mob—and she would remain professional, whatever he decided next. She toyed with the earphones as the laptop was booting up, her heart aching. She didn’t care about the payment anymore; she was not like so many other hungry, grasping people. She hadn’t thought Ocen was that way, either. Perhaps his uncle had a greater impact on him than Rose imagined. This saddened her, because from what she knew of Franklin, he would sell his own child for the right sum.

  An idea struck her. She took her phone and began to type a message to Franklin’s number.

  I have a payment for Ocen, she wrote, 1.5 million shillings. It is from a special job he did before he left Kitgum. It must be given to him personally. If you know how I can reach him, there may also be a reward for you.

  She hit send and settled in to wait. It was still early; she knew that “big men” like him slept late so that they could rise when everyone else was already hard at work, while they yawned and stretched and spent half an hour scratching their bellies and feeling manifestly superior in their sloth.

  So she was surprised when her phone began to ring within a minute. When she looked at the caller ID, though, her excitement was curbed.

  “Apwoyo, James,” she answered. “Is all well?”

  On the other end of the line, she heard muffled scratching. A rooster crowed faintly. Someone breathed into the mouthpiece.

  “Brother?” she said. “Are you there?”

  A sound like howling—horrible, unnatural—filtered through, as if from a distance. The fine hairs on the back of her scalp tingled.

  Then a whisper: “Auntie?”

  “Grace,” Rose said, relief rushing through her. “What is it?” The eerie howl came again, and Rose understood it was not coming from Grace. It hardly sounded human. “Grace?”

  “You must come,” the girl said, her voice quick and fragile and hushed. “Please.”

  Rose’s heart was in her throat. “You are at home?”

  More muffled scratching; the howl, rising in pitch. Then Grace again, a plea: “Hurry.”

  A click: silence.

  Rose moved to action, shutting the laptop and fumbling to put it away. With the drawer open she caught a glimpse of her passport and little purse, and she grabbed them on an impulse. In a matter of seconds she had slipped on her only pair of tennis shoes and was running down the road in search of a boda. She found one leaning lazily outside the Bomah and gave him directions without negotiating a fare first. With the chilly wind rushing past, her thoughts were jumbled and racked with guilt: she should have known James hadn’t changed, she should have pushed Agnes harder to leave him; had he finally gone too far? Had he hurt one of the children? That howling—what was it?

  The boda dropped her off at the roadside, and she put three thousand shillings in his hand, more than enough to preclude an argument. As she hurried down the narrow footpath to her brother’s home, the grass whipping her calves, she heard the driver rev the engine and pull away. The brisk, rain-ready air bit at her bare skin. Please let the children be fine, she said to herself, the words beating in time with her footfalls: please, please, please let the children be fine.

  The dye-kal was empty when she came to it. She saw the hut, door swung slightly open; a thin rope of smoke rose over the top of the roof from the cooking fire on the other side. Three chickens pecked unobtrusively at the far edge of the brush. Aside from the cluck and burble of the hens, all was quiet.

  “Grace?” she said. “Agnes? Are you here?”

  She approached the hut and pushed the door farther in. The space was dark compared to the gray morning light outside, and for a few seconds she saw nothing but blackness. Then the blackness moved.

  “Auntie?”

  Rose’s eyes adjusted, and now she could make out Grace, with Wilborn in her lap and James’s phone clutched in her tiny hand. Rose leaned in and saw Isaac on the mattress, methodically tearing up a piece of paper. She looked closer: the paper shape still retained one folded wing, a long, slender beak.

  “What happened?” she said. “Are you all right? Where is Agnes?”

  From outside came the sound of crying.

  Grace pulled Wilborn closer. “Auntie,” she whispered, “please. I’m scared.”

  “Stay here,” Rose said as she backed out of the dim doorway. She came around the side of the hut slowly, her left hand touching the low edge of the thatch roof. With each step the scene revealed itself in pieces: an overturned pot; a stray spoon next to a small sharp stone; a yellow jerry can on its side; the fire—and two bare feet, the soles pointed toward Rose, too still.

  One more step and Rose saw it all: Agnes on the ground, limbs limp, her legs in a fetal position and her chest twisted skyward, head resting in James’s lap, and James, hands cradling his wife’s face, his body racked with sobs—and the blood, everywhere, wet and dark on James’s hands, his clothes, Agnes’s throat and dress. James didn’t even seem to notice Rose’s approach, his mouth pulled back in a grimace. His crying heaved into a keening—the howl she’d heard in the background of Grace’s call. A glance at Agnes’s slack face made it clear she was gone.

  It had been four years since Rose escaped the rebels, but it took only an instant for something inside her to shift—for her to become swift and hard, to look past the blood and shut her ears to the anguish. She strode to her brother—skirting the congealed blood in the dirt around his legs, where it had pooled from the gash in Agnes’s throat—and crouched next to him, set her hand on his shoulder. “Hush now,” she shushed. The howl faded to a whimper. “James, look at me. Look at me.”

  His face turned groggily toward her. She expected to see the signs of waragi, but his eyes were clear. His mouth opened but nothing came out.

  “James, you have to concentrate. Tell me what happened.” But it didn’t matter, did it, if it was a fit of rage, an argument gone wrong. Agnes was dead—killed—and her unborn child. That was the only part of the story that mattered.

  In the bush she’d learned many things about survival, but the most important act was instinctual: flee. Was
that why she’d brought her passport and purse? Had the knowledge been there all along? Flee.

  If a mob found them, it would be the end.

  James, the wife killer; Rose, rebel whore.

  “The boy,” James croaked.

  “Eh?”

  She heard a noise at the hut and whipped around to look. Grace stood there, half hidden.

  “Grace! Stay back. Turn your head!”

  Grace shrank into the shadow.

  “What boy?” Rose asked James. “What do you mean?”

  “Ehhhh, the boy…” He began to rock back and forth.

  From behind her, Rose heard Grace whisper: “It was Isaac. He threw the stone.”

  The stone.

  She thought of Isaac at church, with the chickens; on Christmas Eve with the goat. The strength in those tiny arms. She turned to the small rock she’d noticed next to the spoon: flat and jagged at the edge … Rose had once seen a woman get nicked in the neck with a piece of shrapnel; for a half second it looked like nothing, a crease or a wrinkle on the skin, but then it bloomed reddish-black and gurgled forth, and the woman fell to her knees, choking. It took less than a minute for her to die.

  “Eh,” called a voice from beyond the edge of the clearing. “Apwoyo, Agnes?”

  Rose stood swiftly. Grace pressed herself against the hut as Rose came around the side and saw a man approaching from the footpath that led to the road. It was the preacher from Agnes’s church. From his vantage point, the hut concealed the gruesome scene.

  She stepped forward to intercept him, and he smiled when he recognized her. “Ah, Rose,” he said. “I’ve come to give Agnes a blessing.” He took in the look on her face and his smile fell. “Are you all right?”

  “There’s been an accident,” she said. “Can you get someone from Saint Joseph’s?”

  He hesitated, bringing a hand to the back of his neck as he craned to look past her. “I…”

  “It’s an emergency. Go!”

  She watched him scramble back through the undergrowth. Agnes was past help, but now they had time. Ten minutes, maybe.