The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  Christoph’s face was pale. So he hadn’t known. Sabine had been watching Rose’s expression carefully, too, as it transformed subtly from caution to confusion and—was she reading that right?—relief. It occurred to Sabine that Rose might have seen Lily and Ocen’s leaving together as a sign of romantic involvement; she remembered the fight Rose mentioned. A lover’s spat. It made sense that Rose would feel comforted by an alternate explanation. On the other hand, Sabine thought, was romance so far a stretch? As uncomfortable as it made her to imagine, Lily could very well have had more than one fling in Kitgum.

  Finally Christoph spoke, bewilderment in his voice. “She never said a word to me.”

  Sabine was sorry for him: Lily’s secret would feel like betrayal, a sign of distrust. She wanted to say, She never told me, either. If anyone should have known, it was me. But she stayed silent, and the pity passed.

  “What about Ocen?” Christoph asked. “Why would they be together?”

  “Transportation. Or he could have been helping her with the investigation.” The latter seemed unlikely, though. Sabine flicked her eyes to the mirror. “Rose, did Ocen’s uncle tell you when exactly they came to Arua? Or how long they stayed?”

  “He did not say.”

  “But they were supposed to come back to his place?”

  “That is what he said.”

  “Anyway,” Christoph said, “it’s the best lead we’ve got.”

  He used the term so casually, so unconsciously—we, as in us, as in the three of them together—and Sabine wasn’t sure she liked it. She was grateful for the information Rose had brought, and she even felt appreciative of Christoph’s presence as a bridge between them, but when her and Rose’s interests took separate paths, she hoped Christoph would choose his assistant. Sabine expected their trio to break up in Arua once Ocen had been located and had given whatever information he could about Lily’s whereabouts, her contacts, or her plans. At that point Sabine would continue on her own, without the attraction and embarrassment that kept her stiffly at arm’s length from Christoph.

  They rode the rest of the way to Gulu without further conversation. Sabine was glad to concentrate on driving, and both Rose and Christoph seemed lost in private contemplations. The rain stopped soon after Gulu, and the sky turned a terrific blue. Sabine’s thoughts drifted, strangely, to Marburg. A week ago her life fit tidily within the parameters of ordinary: she’d woken to heavy snow, put a dollop of fresh cream in her coffee, driven to the animal shelter in predawn darkness for her early morning shift. It was easy to conjure the sensual details of that life in discrete fragments—the warm, doggy smell of the kennels; the shrill chorus of barking and the clamor of opening gates; the squeaky crush of snow beneath her winter boots; the crisp, skeletal branches of trees; the way the sun would catch on the frozen river and scatter into a thousand shards. But in imagining these things, Sabine felt she was observing someone else’s memories—precious, delicate, contained in a snow globe. As hard as she looked, she couldn’t find herself inside. Here—beneath the sweeping sky, with the low green landscape rolling past—Sabine felt full and alive and present. A part of the world, not separate from it.

  “Palenga,” Christoph said as they passed through the outskirts of a village. “Rose, don’t you have family from around here?”

  “My mother’s father.”

  “Did you visit often?”

  “Sometimes, when I was very young.” A smile crossed her face. “My cousins and I would sneak away to the house of a very rich man and look through his trash pit for things we could eat. Eh, he threw away such treats! Jam and biscuits and fancy tea … The first chocolate I ever tasted was from licking the wrapper of a candy bar.”

  “Does your grandfather still live there?”

  “He died when I was in primary school.”

  Christoph tapped a finger on the armrest. “My mother’s parents died when I was young, but my father’s parents are still alive. As a kid I spent summers on their farm near the French border.” He twisted in his seat to face Rose. “I used to sneak away with my cousins, too. We’d go picking apples in the neighbor’s orchard. My grandparents had the same kind of tree on their land, but the ones we stole always tasted sweeter.” Smiling, he cast a glance at Sabine. “Your turn.”

  “My turn?”

  “Arua’s still a long ways off.”

  “You want to play car games?”

  He put up his palms. “We have to pass the time somehow.”

  After a pause, she said reluctantly, “I never met my maternal grandparents. They died before I was born.”

  “What about your father’s side?”

  “My grandmother was a schoolteacher.”

  “And your grandfather?”

  Her opa’s face came immediately to mind: the stiff bristles of his closely trimmed white beard, the blue eyes that always seemed unquiet, both kindly and sad.

  “He was an engineer by profession,” she said. “But his passion was Rhinelanders.”

  “What’s that? People who live around the Rhine?”

  She laughed despite herself. “Rabbits. He bred them for years.”

  “Breeding rabbits is a skill?” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the hint of his smirk.

  “Have you ever seen a Rhinelander?” she said. “They’re beautiful—such distinctive markings. White with black-and-yellow checkers. I remember him in the yard, going from hutch to hutch with feed, speaking to the does.” She told a story about one Christmas morning, when her grandfather woke her at dawn to see a litter of newborn kits. She’d been proud because Opa didn’t wake Hannah, only her; it made her feel special and chosen. Sabine recalled the pale blooms of breath before her as she followed him across the snowy lawn. At the hutch he coaxed the dam away with a handful of oats then pushed aside tufts of warm, loose fur on the nest box to reveal six tiny, hairless babies, their minuscule pink ears laid flat against their skin. It was the doe’s first litter; she was eight months old when she kindled. Sabine’s grandfather pointed to the kits’ round little bellies and said the dam had already nursed, and she’d be a fine mother indeed. Then he tenderly replaced the fur over the babies’ bodies and led Sabine back to the house, where she crawled back under a layer of quilts and fell back asleep.

  “He sounds like a gentle man,” Christoph said.

  “Yes.”

  “That generation saw a lot of hard things.”

  Her throat caught. “They did.”

  He turned to Rose again. “You learned about World War Two, didn’t you? In school, I mean?”

  Sabine thought it odd that he would ask; Rose’s command of English and her position as Christoph’s assistant suggested that she’d had a good education. But Rose’s answer—“A bit”—left Sabine wondering.

  “Switzerland was neutral,” Christoph continued, “but my grandparents’ farm was right next door to German-occupied France. They worked with the village mayor on the French side to help Jews escape across the border.” His voice turned wistful. “I remember meeting the children and grandchildren of some of the people they rescued. They stayed in touch after all these years. It was humbling.”

  He cast a glance at Sabine. She willed him to look away. Not my turn, she thought. He seemed to get the message. In a brighter tone, he said, “Rose, did you know Sabine lived in Africa for eighteen years?” He glanced at Sabine. “Eighteen, wasn’t it?”

  Sabine nodded.

  “That is a long time,” Rose said. “Almost as long as me.” Sabine caught her eye in the mirror and saw her smile.

  “How old are you, Rose?” she asked.

  “Twenty-two.”

  The same age as Lily. Sabine’s heart twisted. “I was twenty-two when I came to Africa,” she said. “My first job was in Ethiopia. I was based in Addis for a year and a half. After that I went to Ghana, then Mozambique, then Zambia.”

  “So many places,” Rose said.

  “That was only the first five years. Crisis postings tend t
o be fairly short—anything from a couple months to a year or two. At first I tried to spread my focus, working in different sectors: food security, livelihood, water and sanitation, health education … Eventually I focused on refugees and displacement. That’s how I ended up in Kitgum.”

  Christoph was looking at her closely. “I find it interesting that someone who spent her life running away from the idea of home would try so hard to help other people return to theirs.”

  “Who said I was running away?”

  He shrugged.

  “I wanted experience. Staying in one place would have pigeonholed me.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m settled now,” she insisted. “I own my apartment in Marburg.” Her tone flared with offense, but beneath it she felt a kind of relief: the relief of being recognized, of having a stranger’s astute gaze pierce you right to the marrow. I see you, he was saying. I see through you.

  “Why did you leave Uganda?” Rose asked. “Did you get another job?”

  Sabine kept her eyes ahead. “No. I moved back to Germany.”

  “You said it was burnout, didn’t you?” Christoph said, and again she tingled under the spotlight of his study. He’d listened; he’d paid attention. He’d remembered.

  “I said that, yes.”

  The road became ribbed, and they rattled over the ruts in jerky silence. Each bump sent her heart jouncing in her rib cage. By the end Sabine’s entire body felt untethered, like something inside had been shaken loose. Before she knew what she was saying, the words came out, spilling off her tongue like paper banners tossed from an upper-story window, unrolling all the way to the ground: the story of the two women and the baby on the side of the road, the small, pinched face, David’s intervention, her own awful apathy.

  When she was through, she felt emptied of something; she was a wet towel, wrung out and wrinkled.

  “What happened after?” Rose asked.

  Sabine shifted uncomfortably. “I put in my notice.”

  “No,” Rose said. “I mean, what happened to them? The woman and the baby.”

  Sabine sobered at the memory of her conversation with David that morning. “The baby died.”

  “And the mother?” Christoph asked.

  “She survived.”

  “That is no life,” Rose said quietly.

  They reached Arua when the late-afternoon light was gentling toward evening. Rose guided Sabine to Ocen’s uncle’s compound with the briefest of words. Sabine’s heart beat faster when a low brick house and cluster of huts came into view.

  “Eh,” Rose said, the towel falling from her shoulders and revealing the space where her arm should have been. “We are here.”

  CHAPTER 14

  ROSE

  December 29

  Rose felt the world expand and contract around her as she stepped out of the car outside Franklin’s house and waited for someone to appear. Her legs were stiff from the long drive—they’d only taken a single short break—and there lingered in her veins a simmering edginess. In the car, with the towel absorbing the rain from her clothes and skin, she’d kept her hand gripped tightly around her phone, both hoping and dreading that it would ring with news of James. The phone’s continued silence seemed almost willful. When Christoph had wanted to call the police, Rose’s mind raced with the possible consequences—not just for Ocen, who might have committed crimes himself, but for her own security, so blatantly fleeing the scene of a crime. Rose had been about to interject when Sabine began to explain Lily’s secret investigation into ivory. Rose struggled to comprehend this new development: so Ocen had not been looking for trouble alone? If he was assisting Lily in her research, this could very well be the “ideas about money” he’d mentioned to Paddy. Surely he would be earning as Lily’s assistant, just as Rose earned as Christoph’s. Except Christoph’s research was tame; Lily’s was a wild animal, a predator stalking in the night. Could it be that Ocen’s reticence the previous month was for Rose’s safety? At this possibility she felt a surge of love, along with shame for having doubted him, her good, noble Ocen.

  Still, nothing was certain, and it concerned her that in the wide compound there was no sign of Ocen: no familiar T-shirt drying on the clothesline, no boda. No man.

  Sabine and Christoph had come up behind her.

  “Is anyone home?” Sabine called out, striding forward. “Hello?”

  A goat bleated from somewhere in the brush, and a moment later a woman emerged from the dark doorway of one of the huts, a bright handkerchief around her head. She stood and wiped her hands on her skirt, eyeing the group skeptically. Rose recognized her as Ocen’s uncle’s second wife; Ocen had brought Rose to Arua for the wedding last year.

  “Where’s Lily?” Sabine said. “And Ocen? Where are they?”

  Christoph took her gently by the arm. “Let Rose talk to them.”

  Rose appreciated his intervention. Things between them were normal again, as much as they could be. When he’d met her at the Bomah, he’d taken one look at her—shaking, soaking wet—and dashed to reception for a towel. As he wrapped it around her shoulders, he said, I’m sorry, Rose, for what happened before. I was foolish. You have every right to be angry with me. She thought of the violent scene she’d just fled, how unfair and skewed the world was, and here was a man striving to put things right, however clumsily. And now he was—she realized with a start—her only friend in Kitgum, aside from the children. She took his hand. Come with us to Arua, she said. I would like to have you there.

  “We are looking for our friends,” Rose said to Franklin’s wife. “Lily and Ocen. Your husband told me they passed through here some weeks ago.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows in a slight affirmation but said nothing.

  “Can you tell us where they are?” Rose asked.

  A portly man appeared from behind the brick house—Ocen’s uncle Franklin. He was short and thick as a tree stump.

  “Rose,” Franklin said in surprise.

  “Apwoyo, Franklin.”

  “I did not expect you to come.” He glanced at Sabine and Christoph, then lowered his voice and addressed Rose. “Is this about the payment?”

  “Where’s Lily?” Sabine interjected. “I know she was here.”

  Franklin’s cheek twitched as he took a step toward the door of the house. “Please, you are welcome to come inside.”

  “I don’t want to come inside, goddammit,” Sabine said. “I want to know where she is.”

  Franklin looked at Rose as if she might offer him a way out, but she kept her eyes hard.

  “I’ll call the police,” Sabine threatened.

  “Eh,” Franklin said with a half laugh. “No need, no need. Lily was here. She came with Ocen weeks ago.”

  “The date?” Sabine said.

  “December second. They left the next morning.”

  “You told me they were coming back here soon,” Rose said.

  “Ocen said he would return some days ago. But he is still away.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They must have said something,” Sabine cut in. “A word. A hint. Anything.”

  He opened his palms. “I wish I could help, truly.”

  “What do you want, money?” Sabine asked.

  Franklin turned to Rose and said in Acholi, “I don’t like these monos here. They should not be involved. Where is my protection in this situation?”

  “No one wants to get you in trouble,” Rose said. “We only want to find them.”

  Behind her, Sabine asked Christoph, “What are they saying?” Rose turned just enough to glimpse Christoph put a finger to his lips and shake his head subtly. Let them talk.

  Rose continued in Acholi. “Where did they go?”

  “You know where they went.”

  She met his eyes. “Lakwali.” The word felt dark in her mouth.

  He nodded. “They came here to cross the border.”

  “Ocen had
no papers,” she said doubtfully. She could sense Sabine and Christoph’s close attention, though they remained silent. Christoph was accustomed to letting her converse freely in Acholi and trusting that she would translate everything afterward, but Sabine was restless and fidgety. For the moment, Rose was glad she was cut out of the discussion. Her single-mindedness might shut Franklin down completely.

  “I have friends,” Franklin said.

  “Smugglers?”

  “Contacts. A network.”

  “The Opec Boys.”

  “Among others.”

  “To get him travel documents?”

  “The way we travel, documents are not necessary.”

  There were hundreds of smuggling routes along the border, he said—dirt roads and paths through the brush where the police couldn’t patrol. Rose imagined Lily riding Ocen’s boda at night, headlights off: the chilly air, the scratch of branches, the girl’s thudding heart, her chest pressed against Ocen’s strong back.

  “But they were not on a mission for you?” she said.

  “Do you think I would be so foolish? A nosy mono girl, working for me?” He scoffed. “I take greater care than that.”

  “But the risk—”

  He waved her off. “There was no risk. They carried nothing of value. Along those roads I have people everywhere—farmers, wives, even very young children. They keep their eyes open and sound the alert at the slightest suspicion.” He patted the cell phone in his front shirt pocket. “Modern technology is a beautiful thing.”

  “If they were caught?”

  He shrugged. “The mono girl wanted a bit of adventure. The boda got lost. ‘Thank you, officers, for helping us find our way back to safety.’”

  She clicked her tongue. “Why Lakwali? What did they want there?”

  “They wouldn’t say.”

  “Why do you keep their secrets?”

  “I am telling you I don’t know. That is the truth.”