The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “What about toward the back? Is there anything else?”

  “Mm…” Again the rustling of pages. As the pause lengthened, Sabine felt the coldness reach the back of her head, spreading around her neck and shoulders like hands preparing to choke.

  “Ah—here,” Daniela said. “There are maps. This one … It says Arua. And the border. Then roads … Lakwali?” she said, with some interest.

  “Keep going,” Sabine said urgently.

  She turned a page with a soft swippt. “Oh! Garamba. Big map. Here is Nagero, our headquarters … There is the river … There are names of LRA camps, locations.” Swippt. Swippt. Swippt. “That is everything. No more. Only empty.” She paused. “I no understand. She is with rebels? She is journalist, or…?”

  “Lily’s my niece. She’s been missing for nearly a month. I’m at Lakwali now—we followed her trail here. We came from Kitgum. From Uganda. I came all the way from Germany.”

  After a beat, Daniela spoke. “Do you want I send the book to Lakwali? We have a truck, he is driving next week for supplies.”

  Sabine closed her eyes. Next week. So long? “No. I’ll come to you. How do I get there?”

  A moment later, armed with instructions based on known local bus routes, Sabine hung up. Christoph pounced the second the phone clicked on its cradle.

  “What happened?” he said. “What kind of camp?” He stepped forward. “What did you mean, ‘I’ll come to you’?”

  Sabine’s arms hung uselessly at her sides; they felt almost as though they belonged to someone else. “Lily and Ocen made it to Garamba,” she said numbly. “But they didn’t go to park headquarters. Three days ago, the rangers found her journal left in an abandoned LRA camp out in the forest.” She lifted her gaze to Rose. “There were no bodies.”

  Rose said nothing. In her peripheral vision Sabine saw Christoph rub the back of his neck. He, too, was silent. What was there to say? Each of them understood that this evidence, discovered in the circumstances described, could be explained by a chillingly limited number of scenarios. The possibility that the LRA had come across Lily’s journal without encountering her or her traveling companion was minuscule. And if an encounter had taken place—this, Sabine understood with terrible clarity—Lily and Ocen were either dead or captive.

  Captive or dead.

  And if Lily were alive among the rebels, what had they done to her? What were they doing to her right this minute?

  Tears came involuntarily to her eyes. She did nothing to stop them. She’d remained steady over the phone, but now she could barely keep herself upright. By the time she realized the world was tilting, Christoph had already gripped her arm, murmuring, “Careful, careful. Take a deep breath. Good. Let’s get you sitting down.”

  She found herself in Patrick’s chair, blinking as if seeing the space for the first time. She felt dumb and blank. The objects presented themselves with painful ordinariness. On the plain wall behind Christoph was a round clock, a whiteboard with various lists of names and numbers, and a framed picture of Congolese President Joseph Kabila, dressed in a sharp blue suit and smiling smugly. A small table with an open Nescafé tin and an electric kettle stood askew from the wall. At once this crookedness pierced her senses: the feeling of something carelessly knocked aside, an accidental jostling. The casualness of it left her flailing and enraged. No, she thought simply. The story is not over yet.

  “Hey y’all,” Patrick said cheerfully as he entered the room. His smile dropped as he saw their grim faces. “Shit. What did they say at Garamba?”

  Sabine looked away. She only half listened as Christoph summarized the situation. Out the office window she watched three African men on the other side of the road; they wore yellow hard hats and stood leisurely in conversation. One said something that made the other two chuckle. Their easy smiles seemed as distant to Sabine as the moon.

  Patrick blew out a big breath. “I don’t even—does that mean…?”

  “We don’t know,” Christoph said.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  Sabine cast a glance in Patrick’s direction. “Daniela said there’s a bus that travels from Bunia north to Dungu. It passes through the village next to Lakwali and would take me within a few kilometers of Garamba headquarters at Nagero. What time will it be here tomorrow?”

  Patrick looked doubtful. “You want to go there yourself? With the war and everything?”

  “What time?” she repeated.

  He bit his lip. “Varies. Usually around eleven.”

  “How long will it take to walk to the pickup spot?”

  “Hey, if you’re serious about this,” Patrick said, “you better talk to our security guys first.”

  “That would be very useful,” Christoph said. “We’ll need some up-to-date information.”

  His we wrapped itself around Sabine’s heart and squeezed. She caught a glance from Rose, who gave a small nod, her eyes bright and sad.

  “All right,” Patrick said. “Let’s go see who’s around.”

  * * *

  They spent an hour in the main security office with two members of the Gladstone “asset protection and crisis management” team: a grizzled South African who wore sunglasses indoors and a soft-spoken Congolese man whose fingers were long and delicate, entrancing Sabine as they traced back and forth across an enormous wall-hung map of Orientale Province. She appreciated the visual distraction—somewhere to focus her eyes, an object of scrutiny. The province extended north all the way to the Sudanese border, northwest along the border of the Central African Republic, and east to the Ugandan border. In the uppermost part of the province, the district of Haut-Uele included Lakwali as well as the entirety of Garamba National Park—which covered nearly five thousand square kilometers, Sabine learned, a number whose vastness, in comparison with the single very slender girl who had disappeared inside, she couldn’t quite will herself to comprehend.

  The map was overlaid with a series of color-coded splotches to indicate which areas were controlled by which military group. The list of groups in a side bar was disheartening: of the dozen or so groups listed, the only two she recognized were the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, FARDC—the DRC’s official army—and the LRA. There were several blue dots indicating the presence of UN troops. Sabine was relieved to see that the area immediately surrounding Lakwali belonged solely to FARDC and the UN; the more troubling mosaics appeared much farther south, in Ituri District. There was also a disturbingly wide swath of overlapping interests in Garamba and along the Sudanese border, where the locations of the recent LRA attacks on civilians were marked with small red flags.

  “So many,” Rose murmured, reaching out; her finger hovered just above the red flag marking the town of Faradje.

  “It’s not a drive in your grandmammy’s buggy, that’s for sure,” the South African said. “But you’ll be traveling in daylight, and I’m pretty sure the bus company that runs this route keeps a police officer on board. I’d be more concerned if you were in a private car or on a motorcycle. Then you’d be a sitting duck for thieves and thugs.”

  Sabine thought of Lily and Ocen, how small and vulnerable a boda was. Such easy prey. Had they been targeted before even reaching the outer boundaries of the park?

  “And Garamba headquarters?” Christoph said.

  “Nagero station,” the Congolese man confirmed.

  “Nagero, right,” Christoph said. “Is the UPDF using it as a base?”

  “Not as far as I know,” the South African said. “But Nagero’s got a good lot of rangers on hand. For keeping away poachers and rebels and what have you. You’ll be all right there.”

  * * *

  After dinner Patrick offered to let them use a satellite phone to contact the outside world since the Internet was still out. Rose said she had no one to call. Christoph tried his parents in Geneva, but no one answered, and he chose not to leave a message. Sabine considered calling Rita, but in the end declined; the situation still fe
lt too fragile, too tenuous. She needed to hold the journal in her hands—to absorb the truth of the artifact’s existence—before she could fully believe it, and until she fully believed it, she would not lay that burden on anyone else. Christoph suggested calling Steve, but here, too, Sabine demurred. Would it not be kinder, she said, to tell Steve: I am in the place Lily came to, and now I stand with evidence of her life in my hands, and I will—I will—take whatever next step I must?

  After they left the office, Patrick guided them toward their rooms, through the outdoor maze of offices and sleeping quarters. The darkness was kept at bay by the severe light of bare bulbs outside the buildings, where buzzing insects circled and sparked. They dropped off Rose first, and then Patrick brought Sabine and Christoph to their building.

  “I wish I was coming with you guys tomorrow,” he said, hands in his pockets.

  “I’m sure your parents would be glad to know you’re not,” Christoph said.

  “Yeah, well.” He kicked his boot in the dust. “Guess I’ll see you in the morning. Canteen opens at seven.”

  Watching him go, Christoph said, “Ah, the invincibility of youth.” He scratched the stubble that had begun to grow in around his jaw. “Didn’t you say someone was looking into Lily’s e-mails? Wouldn’t they have found her correspondence with Patrick?”

  “Steve told me that she opened a new account in October using the last name Hardt,” Sabine said. “She must have used that one for her investigation.”

  He nodded. “She took every precaution.”

  “Except when she smuggled herself into Congo and headed straight into rebel territory.”

  “She thought she was doing something good.”

  “It was foolish,” she said bitterly.

  “Or brave.”

  “To risk her life for a story?”

  Christoph appraised her. “Stories are what save us.”

  “No,” Sabine said. “Stories only make us believe we’re worth saving.”

  They’d come to Mangbutu building and stopped in front of Sabine’s door.

  “You don’t have to come to Garamba,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, stepping closer. “You’re not going to do this alone.” He took another step. There was less than a meter of space between them.

  Sabine felt the air change; an alert stillness settled in the hall. “Alone has always worked for me.”

  “Ah, yes. Two decades in Africa. The nomadic life of an aid worker.” He leaned closer. “You’re a fascinating creature, Sabine Hardt.”

  “Because I chose a career over settling down, having a family?”

  “Because you won’t admit what it is you’re really looking for.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Absolution.”

  “For what?”

  “For being human.”

  She wanted him to come closer; she wanted him to leave. He did neither. He seemed to be evaluating her, reading her face for a question, or an answer—what was he looking for there? She had a sudden, overwhelming desire to be seen, to have all of herself exposed to this man—her failures, her flaws. It was embarrassing how base this instinct felt, how singular and forceful. If she let it loose, there was no telling whether she could control it. Her body tingled with a powerful sense of reciprocity—as if his body and hers were already in communication. But that couldn’t be. It was the uncertainty of the last few days, the emotional roller coaster: that was all. And anyway, what would happen after tomorrow? After Garamba? When they returned to their separate cities, their separate lives? She swallowed hard and took a step back.

  “Good night, Christoph.”

  He nodded; was that disappointment in his eyes? “Rest well.”

  Inside her room, with the door closed tightly behind her, Sabine turned off the air conditioning and opened the screened window to let in the thick, humid night and the sounds that came with it. Then the yowling of wild dogs and the chirruping of night insects became too much, and she snapped the window closed and started up the AC. But the stale smell of chemically cooled air made the space feel cramped and oppressive. She opened the window again.

  It was the right decision to keep him out. When this was all over, when they’d found Lily—maybe something could happen. Not now. Silly to think on it further. She put it from her mind and started the water for a shower.

  It was the right decision, too, to go to Garamba, she told herself as she scrubbed the day’s sweat and dust from her skin. She hadn’t come all this way to abstain from the final stage of the journey, whatever the danger.

  For a brief, blessed moment, Sabine was grateful that Hannah wasn’t alive to endure this grief. The gap between the worry Sabine felt now and the agony her sister would have felt was infinitely, unknowably vast. Sabine remembered with aching clarity the first time her sister had come back to Germany after Lily’s birth: how resonant Hannah’s voice had become, how changed her face, how centered and still. At the time Sabine looked on her sister’s domestic contentedness with pity; motherhood didn’t fit into her own humanitarian ambitions. When she asked Hannah how it felt to be a mother, Hannah replied, It feels as though a piece of my heart exists outside my own body, in another person. And I can never get it back.

  This answer only confirmed to Sabine what she had already suspected about herself—that she would never have children—because why would you want a piece of your heart in such a precarious location as someone else’s body? Why choose that uncertainty, that terror, that utter lack of control? As she grew older, this approach extended to lovers and friends, because how could she do her job if her heart was elsewhere? Love made you selfish; love made you choose some above others. And so, all these many years later, her heart was lonely, but whole. Unseen—but intact.

  She changed into a fresh T-shirt, closed the window, and got into bed.

  CHAPTER 18

  ROSE

  December 31

  Rose passed a fitful night. Awake she was haunted by Ocen’s ghostly presence in the room; asleep, by the image of him in the bush, his wrists bound, his skin slick and dappled by rain. She slept naked, having washed her only set of clothes in the hot shower the night before and hung them to dry on the air-conditioning vent, and the stiff bedsheets rubbed roughly against her skin. Sometime in the night she woke with a start at a great and terrible crack, the sound of an explosion. In the unfamiliar darkness it took her a moment to distinguish between the racing of her heart and the storm beating the ceiling, but then she understood the noise was thunder, not a bomb. Part of her wished she would fall back asleep and never wake.

  By morning the storm had not yet cleared, and as Rose dressed in her clean, dry clothes, she watched through her window as sheets of water turned the ground into a raging, muddy mess. She couldn’t help but imagine Ocen, exposed to the weather. Strangely, this thought brought her comfort: that the rain she would taste when she stepped outside was the same rain that had fallen over her lover in the night, whether the body that received it still breathed or not. She consciously steered her mind away from evaluating which of these options—breathing, or not breathing—was likelier, or kinder.

  For a long time she’d believed she would rather die than face the LRA again. Even now, with the road to Garamba ahead, her instinct rebelled. Her body felt heavy as a brick. Yet the thought of Ocen tore her heart in half. She must continue. She must endure.

  Out the window she saw Sabine and Christoph coming toward her building to pick her up for breakfast, their figures hunched and hurrying under two large umbrellas printed with the Gladstone logo. Rose felt a rush of thankfulness for her two traveling companions, despite the many differences that lay between them. Christoph’s protectiveness was perhaps naïve, but sweetly so, and Sabine’s ox-headed determination was galvanizing. Rose donned her travel purse and, for lack of toothpaste, swished her mouth with water, then went outside to meet them.

  After a quick breakfast—Christoph kept encouraging them to eat more, to build up s
trength for the journey ahead—they bundled into a Gladstone vehicle so that Patrick could give them a ride to the clinic in the village, where the bus would stop. The rain was relentless; Rose was glad that she’d had the luck that morning in Kitgum to wear sneakers and long pants instead of her usual attire of sandals and a skirt.

  After the solid, newly painted buildings inside the Gladstone camp, the village surrounding the mine appeared positively shabby: the little wooden lean-tos, the mud-walled huts, the boarded-up kiosks that stood between gushing rivulets of runoff. Through the window of the car, Rose caught the gaze of men and women watching from the dark doorways of huts, their wary eyes following the vehicle as it splashed by. She was glad to be leaving this place.

  There were already a dozen people gathered under the overhang along the side of the clinic to wait out of the rain’s reach. They paid the SUV little mind, aside from a brief flurry of tittering from three young Congolese women wearing brilliantly colored skirts, sitting on tautly bound sacks of what Rose guessed to be maize or yams by the size of the lumps. Patrick parked the car and turned off the engine.

  “Might as well wait in here,” Patrick said, settling into his seat. “It’s nice and dry. Oh—I almost forgot.” He shifted to pull out a handful of bills from his pocket. “I’m assuming you didn’t get a chance to exchange any currency at the border.”

  In the passenger seat, Christoph accepted the money. “Congolese francs. I didn’t even think of that.”

  “It’s only like thirty bucks,” Patrick said. “But it should get you up to Garamba.”

  Rose thought of the slender stack of shillings folded inside her purse. So far the money had been left untouched; Christoph had paid for everything in Arua, and Sabine had paid for her visa at the border. She felt uncomfortable accepting their charity, but what else could she do?

  “Hey, there it is,” Patrick said, swinging his door open and popping open an umbrella. “Looks like we got here right on time.”