The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “You’re touchy,” she said. “You behave as if you have things to hide.”

  He wiped away the sweat that had begun to form at his temples. “I have many things to hide, Rose. You know my business.”

  “But you’re not hiding anything about Ocen?”

  “I promised him I would. But that vow is broken now. I’ve told you everything.”

  “Do you know Patrick? Or Flynn? Did they mention these names?”

  Franklin’s expression showed genuine blankness. “No, I never heard these words before.”

  “And Ocen said they intended to return before Christmas?”

  “Eh, they are only a few days late.”

  Normally, Rose would share his unconcern; she had shared his unconcern, hadn’t she, these past weeks? Not apathy, but a recognition of the things beyond one’s control, a capacity for patience. Christoph called it “African time”: a certain malleability about calendars, a flexible sense of hours and days. When she entered primary school Rose had learned to align her movements to the clock; she’d unlearned these lessons during her years among the rebels, who aligned their movements to the position of enemy soldiers, the availability of food and water, and the possibility of safe passage. Back in Kitgum, working for mono researchers, she’d slid back into Western notions of timetables in order to please her employers. Still, when unexpected delays occurred or plans changed, she accepted it with a dispassionate calmness that drove Christoph crazy. Now it was different. Silence was a signal.

  “Lily missed her flight home,” Rose said to Franklin. “They are not merely delayed. They are missing.”

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

  “Help us find them,” she pressed. “Call your contacts.”

  Franklin laughed humorlessly. “You must think me very powerful, that my network could extend so far. Lakwali is beyond my reach, Rose. Two hundred kilometers inside Congo, and operated by foreigners. White people.” He brought his face very close to hers. “You should ask your mono friends what the girl wanted there, and why she would take my nephew into her troubles.”

  He turned to Sabine and Christoph and switched to English. “Please, I told Rose everything I know.”

  Rose met Christoph’s eyes and raised an eyebrow. He spoke into Sabine’s ear, and she tightened her lips but didn’t say anything as Christoph stepped forward to shake Franklin’s hand. “Thank you for your help,” he said.

  Franklin nodded. “Safe journey.”

  In the parked car, Rose summarized her conversation with Franklin while Sabine sat at the wheel in pursed-lip silence. Christoph listened closely, tapping a finger against his jeans. When Rose finished, a beat passed before Sabine spoke.

  “This place. Lakwali. It’s a gold mine?”

  Rose nodded.

  “In the Congo?”

  She nodded again.

  “Her research could have been broader than just ivory and the LRA,” Christoph said.

  “Or she had an informant there. Someone who could help her.” Sabine shook her head. “Congo. Fuck.” She gripped the steering wheel as though to steady her. She looked exhausted, Rose thought.

  Christoph reached across the console and touched Sabine’s shoulder. Sabine flinched at the touch, though Christoph didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s find someplace to eat,” he said. “We can reevaluate over dinner. It’s been a long day.”

  * * *

  The White Horse Hotel and Restaurant was newer and more chic than the Bomah, or any restaurant in Kitgum for that matter; in the dining room the handsome dark wood tables rested contentedly under blue tablecloths, and outside on the hotel grounds the pool was full and the foliage brushed up lushly against the spacious private huts. But Rose saw everywhere signs of menace: in the jagged orange reflection of sunset on the eerily still pool water, in the blazing-red dining room walls that seemed to her to be the color of fresh blood. She tried to focus on the plate of tilapia in front of her, but the crimson walls loomed too near, bringing back the sticky glistening wetness of Agnes’s blood that morning. A wave of nausea caused her to set her fork aside.

  She wasn’t the only one without appetite. Sabine hadn’t even picked up her silverware, and Christoph ate a few bites of chicken halfheartedly. They’d separated for half an hour or so to check into their rooms—it was too late to return to Kitgum tonight—and then had come together for dinner, where they went over Rose’s conversation with Franklin again in greater detail, holding each piece to the light. Sabine said that while she was in her room she’d called a friend in Kampala who did some quick research online about Lakwali. There wasn’t much information, but it appeared to be owned by an Australian mining company called Gladstone. According to a company press release, the Lakwali mine was poised to become one of the largest open-pit mines in Africa. Sabine’s friend said she would look into it more and get back to them later that night or the following morning.

  “But I have to wonder,” Sabine said. “How do we know Franklin is even telling the truth?”

  Christoph wiped his mouth with a napkin. “What reason would he have to lie?”

  “Rose, you said he’s involved in smuggling.”

  “Small-time,” Rose said. “Fuel, cigarettes. Nothing like ivory or gold.” She didn’t leave anything out, except the fact that she’d known of Lakwali before this evening. She already sensed that Sabine didn’t entirely trust her, and there was no reason to feed those doubts by admitting that she’d kept certain things to herself. Lakwali was out there now, known to all of them.

  “What if Lily was about to expose him?” Sabine continued. “What would he do to prevent it?” She seemed distant, as if thinking aloud rather than speaking to them. “Lily wouldn’t have suspected him, because she didn’t suspect Ocen. She might have looked to Franklin as an informant. But he wouldn’t want her to get too close. Maybe Lakwali is a distraction. Maybe she never left Arua.”

  “And what about Ocen?” Christoph shook his head. “You can’t imagine Franklin would do anything to his own nephew?”

  “Maybe he didn’t have to.”

  Rose flushed with anger. “Ocen would never be a part of such a thing. He is a good man. An honest man.”

  “Honest enough to keep you in the dark about their plans?”

  “He was protecting me. Lily had dangerous knowledge.”

  Sabine’s voice was swift as a spear. “Dangerous to Ocen’s uncle.”

  “The investigation was Lily’s idea,” Rose shot back. “Ocen was trying to help her. If something happened to him, the blame falls at her feet.”

  “Stop,” Christoph said sharply. The word rang out between them. “Both of you, stop it. Sabine, I’ve met Ocen. He’s a man of honor. And Rose, if they were traveling together, it was Ocen’s decision, too. No one’s to blame.” He met each of their eyes in turn. “You’re worried. People you love are missing. We need each other.”

  Rose felt buoyed by Christoph’s defense of Ocen. “Sorry,” she murmured, keeping her eyes low. Sabine’s apology sounded to Rose to be equally reluctant, but Christoph seemed satisfied.

  “Assuming Lakwali was their destination,” he said, “what’s our next point of action? The police should be notified. What about the UPDF?”

  “No military,” Rose said.

  “No police,” Sabine added.

  Christoph gaped. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Even if I thought we could trust them,” Sabine said, “the Ugandan authorities don’t have any jurisdiction in Congo.”

  “The UPDF is in Congo as we speak. Operation Lightning Thunder.”

  “That’s a limited military action against the LRA in Garamba National Park,” Sabine said. “Lakwali is hundreds of kilometers south. I very much doubt the Congolese military would look kindly on the UPDF broadening its mandate to include a gold mine.”

  Christoph looked doubtful. “For a missing American…”

  “Who entered the country illegally?” Sabine shook her head. “No, the
re must be a way to get in touch with someone at the mine. Find out what Lily wanted there—find out if she ever arrived.”

  “Your friend—Rita—did she say if there was any contact information online?”

  “Only Gladstone headquarters in Australia. She’ll try calling, but with the holiday…”

  “I’ll go,” Rose said.

  The table fell silent. The patter of the waiter’s footsteps echoed as he approached, and when he reached over the table to clear their plates, Sabine and Christoph leaned back slightly. Christoph waited for the man to leave and then said to Rose, “You absolutely will not.” He had that expression Rose knew well: a kind of controlled furiousness, typically reserved for confrontation with uncompromising officials. Now he was using it on her—as if she were a child, as if she didn’t understand what she was saying. But she understood better than anyone what such a journey meant.

  “I will go to Lakwali,” she repeated. “I will follow them there.”

  “It’s not under discussion,” Christoph said. “An excursion to Arua is one thing. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is something else entirely.” He pressed his index finger against the blue tablecloth, pushing it into a wrinkle. Rose kept her eyes on the fabric while Christoph went on, his voice hushed and urgent. “This is a country that’s basically been at war since independence. There’s no stability. No security. The UN is barely managing to keep its head above water. The roads will be patrolled by God knows what army—where roads exist at all.” He turned to Sabine. “Help me out here.”

  Sabine nodded slowly. “All of that is true.”

  “It’s brutal,” Christoph went on. “The incidence of rape—” His voice caught.

  Rose said, “And what do you think I have seen in my life? Only peace and sunshine?” Christoph blinked and her shoulder throbbed. She became acutely aware of her scar, the breath of space between her skin and the fabric that covered it.

  His face was pale. “Rose, I can’t stand to think of you going in there. A woman, traveling alone…”

  “She won’t be alone,” Sabine said. She met Rose’s eyes, and Rose saw a quiet fierceness there.

  Christoph let out a cry of exasperation. “You’re out of your minds.”

  “I feel it in my bones,” Sabine said. “Lily is alive.”

  “You have to involve the authorities. How will you get around? How will you talk to people?” He threw up his hands. “You don’t even speak French!”

  “You do,” Rose said.

  For a moment no one said a word. The space around the table crackled with tension. Rose sensed something gathering strength, a swell of will and fear and hope. The crimson walls pressed ever closer.

  Christoph heaved a great sigh. “We’ll have to leave your car here, Sabine. We can inquire at the border about transportation to Lakwali and the security situation on the roads.” He firmed up his voice. “If I deem the risks to be too great, I will not hesitate to alert the authorities.”

  Sabine looked first at Rose, who nodded.

  “Agreed,” Sabine said.

  Christoph seemed resigned as he rose from the table. “We’ll meet here tomorrow morning at seven. Let’s all get some rest.”

  * * *

  Rose had just stepped inside her room when her phone began to ring. She recognized her brother’s number and gasped at the force of the desire to believe that it was him, that in the next second James’s voice would come through laughingly on the other end of the line. She had to steady herself before she answered.

  “Auntie, it is me.” Grace’s voice was small and timid, and Rose’s heart clenched to hear it.

  “Grace. My sweet. You’re with Beatrice? And Isaac? Wilborn?”

  “We are all here.”

  Warmth flooded her veins, and her grip on the phone became loose. “Thank God.” She hesitated a moment and then asked tentatively, “And what news?”

  But Grace did not respond, and in the pause Rose knew everything. She could not bear for the girl to have to say it aloud.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t answer.” Rose found herself sitting on the bed, the sheets so crisply tucked around the sides. A mosquito net was tied in a neat knot overhead. The room felt clean and full of nothing. Where James was now—and Agnes, and their unborn baby—was it like this? Was it like this where her own son had gone, and so many others? Would it be so bad to be in such a place?

  “Are you safe, auntie?”

  Rose’s throat tightened. “I am safe.”

  “When will you come back?”

  She gazed out the window at the vestiges of sunset, the swift fall of night. “Soon,” she soothed. She tried to imagine what tomorrow would bring: a crossing, or not. A journey, or not. Answers, or none. Her voice trembled when she said, “Take care of your cousins, Grace.”

  “I will.”

  “Kiss them for me.”

  “I will, auntie.”

  The stillness of the room after they hung up felt vast and weightless.

  Rose lay back on the soft bed and willed herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  SABINE

  December 29

  Alone in her hut, Sabine sat on the bed, phone in hand. At Ocen’s uncle’s house and then at dinner, her mind had been churning with a hundred thoughts at once, grasping at the fragments that kept bumping against each other without cohering into a whole. Lily and Ocen; Ocen and Franklin; Franklin’s illegal activities; Lily’s investigation. Ivory. Gold. Truth. Lies.

  Congo.

  Despite her accusations at dinner, Sabine didn’t really believe that Franklin was responsible for Lily’s disappearance. She couldn’t say why, exactly; it was a sense, an instinct. But was it like the instinct that told her Lily was still alive?—an instinct she gladly exploited to persuade Christoph to their side, but one she didn’t entirely trust. Was she feeling only the desire toward instinct? A need to believe? The idea of Lakwali pulsed dangerously, magnetically from the unknown territory beyond the border. Sabine now knew why Lily had been studying the atlas at the peace center: it was no art project, no hobby. It was a guide. Online maps would be useless without a smart phone—forget about satellite coverage or GPS. Sabine wished she had that atlas, too, to prepare her for what was to come.

  “Tell me, Rita,” she said after her friend answered on the first ring. “Am I crazy? Is this whole idea insane?”

  Rita sighed. “God knows I wish you wouldn’t go.”

  “What did Peter say?” When she’d called Rita before dinner, she’d confessed her suspicions about Lily’s research, the reason she might have had for taking such a risk; Rita had promised to ask the Australian journalist, Peter, for advice.

  “He said if it were him, he’d keep the authorities out of the loop, too.”

  “But I could wait, couldn’t I? I could try to get in touch with someone at the mine.”

  “And what if they say they don’t know anything about her? Would you believe them? Would you call it a day?”

  Sabine ran her hands along the taut bedsheet. “No.”

  They were quiet a moment.

  “It’s so odd,” Sabine said. “I lived in northern Uganda for three years, and I’d never even heard of this place—Lakwali. I have no idea what to expect.”

  “How much do you know about the war in Congo?”

  “Only what’s reported on the BBC,” Sabine admitted. It shamed her to know so little—yet the intensity of her job in Kitgum had demanded a near-exclusive focus on what was happening then and there. If she’d been transferred to Congo, she would have immersed herself as deeply in Congolese history, geography, and economics as she’d once done for Uganda, for Mozambique, for Ethiopia. But until a crisis was directly relevant to her work, she didn’t have the capacity for any more tragedy. And even if she’d been offered a job in Congo, she probably wouldn’t have taken it. There were some places that frightened even her.

  “The conflict in Congo is probably the most complicated war in the world
,” Rita said. “Two wars, technically, in the last twenty years, but they overlap quite a bit. Nine African nations. Twenty armed groups. Five and a half million people dead, mostly from disease and starvation. Large-scale fighting has been occurring in various provinces since Rwanda invaded eastern Congo—it was Zaire, then—in 1996. Ever since, the country has been mired in one conflict after another.”

  There was no agreed-upon narrative for these conflicts, Rita explained, except that they were all thoroughly, relentlessly bloody. Northeastern Congo had some of the richest goldfields in the world—and without any governmental structure or authority, it was the usual story: executions, torture, rape, slaughter, stealing, smuggling. During the Ugandan occupation of northeastern Congo from 1998 to 2003, troops extracted some nine million dollars’ worth of gold from Congolese mines. When the Ugandans pulled out, they left behind local rebel groups who scrambled to take over where Uganda had left off.

  “There were international interests at play, too,” Rita said.

  “And that’s what Peter was researching?”

  “Exactly. The project he worked on looked primarily at a place nearby called Mongbwalu. They uncovered evidence that AngloGold Ashanti, a major player in global gold production, gave logistical and financial support to Congolese rebels in order to have ‘safe passage’ to conduct exploration activities around the mine. That rebel group killed thousands of civilians in the Mongbwalu area in a two-year period.”

  Sabine took a moment to absorb the information. “Could it be the same with Gladstone and Lakwali?”

  “Hard to say. Peter didn’t know anything about Lakwali specifically, and in the last few years he’s been focusing on activities around Goma. The Gladstone Web site is awfully vague, and if they had any contact with rebel groups it’s not like they’d be shouting it from the rooftops.” She paused. “Do you have any kind of plan for transportation, communication?”

  “Transportation will be tricky. We’ll try to find someone on the other side of the border who’s willing to drive us. Or we’ll take a bus. Christoph speaks French. Hopefully that’ll be enough.”

  “Do you trust him?”