The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  They must have gone four or five kilometers before they came at last to a small clearing where Rose stopped. The space was sheltered by a barrier of trees with broad overhanging branches and slick dark roots twisting out of the soil. The ground was dry and scattered with a few boulders. Just beyond, Sabine saw a glint of sunlight flash on a glassy brown surface—a river. Rose kneeled to examine the earth, then stood, apparently satisfied.

  “Here,” Rose said.

  “For the night?” Sabine said.

  Rose nodded. “The animal prints are old. We shall not be disturbed.”

  Sabine looked down and saw that the patterns of indentation were indeed in the shape of large footprints. Quite large, in fact, she noticed with growing discomfort. One set was approximately the size of a dinner plate.

  “We say raa in Acholi,” Rose said.

  “Hippopotamus,” Christoph said as he set down his pack with a huff. “We can take turns keeping watch in any case.” He squinted at the sun, which was dropping quickly behind the forest canopy. “Tomorrow we’ll see if we can make it to Faradje—find the UN base.”

  “No,” Rose said. “We go to Nagero.”

  “Back to the road?”

  “Through the bush.”

  “But how?” Sabine asked.

  “The river,” Rose said. “It will take us there. I saw it on the map.”

  “Good thinking,” Christoph said. He unzipped his backpack and handed Sabine a water bottle. “I stocked up at Lakwali,” he said. “Drink as much as you need. I have plenty.” As she drank gratefully, he handed another to Rose, then opened a third for himself.

  “What about our passports?” Sabine said. “The soldier—he took them…”

  “We’ll have to manage,” Christoph said. “Maybe the staff at Nagero can help us.”

  Sabine had never been without her passport, and she felt as naked as if she were without clothes.

  “Did either of you see anything during the attack?” Christoph asked.

  “LRA,” Rose said. “They were there. I felt it.”

  Christoph lowered his voice. “Are we safe here?”

  “Our tracks are easy to find, but they will not come looking,” she said. “After a battle they would rather vanish into the bush. They will stay hidden. The only danger is if their path crosses too near.”

  “It will be dark soon,” Sabine said. “Do we have anything we can use to light a fire?”

  Rose shook her head. “The smoke would draw them to us.”

  Sabine felt a welling of frustrated tears, which she quashed. No fire meant no warmth, no light. Already the shadows were closing in around them. She thought of her cell phone, left behind in the crash; even if she couldn’t call anyone, the green glow of its screen would be better than nothing.

  “I have a headlamp,” Christoph said, as if reading her thoughts. “And some peanuts,” he added. “Maybe even a chocolate bar.” He managed a smile. “Almost the right ingredients for s’mores.”

  “It will not be comfortable,” Rose said matter-of-factly. “But it will pass.”

  * * *

  Night fell.

  Christoph distributed all the clothing in his backpack so that Rose and Sabine could change out of their wet clothes and get dry and warm. The humidity of the day became pierced with chill, and Sabine was grateful to drown in Christoph’s soft, too-big sweater, which smelled both of fresh laundry and dust. There hadn’t been time to build any kind of shelter, so they did the best they could with what they had. Rose had cleared twigs and rocks from a flat space next to two large boulders, and Christoph sat not far from Sabine, each of them with their backs against a tree trunk; Sabine was nestled into a hollow made by emergent roots, with her knees against her chest and her forehead resting lightly on the wood. She wouldn’t sleep well, but at least she felt more secure in the tree’s solid embrace than if she were sprawled out in the open air.

  Sunset was muted over the river, the colors choked off by the darkening land. They decided to save the batteries in Christoph’s headlamp, and it wasn’t long before Sabine could hardly make out Christoph’s figure not three meters from where she sat. She wrapped the sweater tighter around her and focused on the chorus of insects and birds singing the dusk away. The sounds were deeply familiar to her—the same as those she’d heard a thousand nights in Kitgum—and yet here they felt closer than ever before, and strange, and frightening.

  “Rose,” said Christoph, “would this qualify as a wang’oo?”

  Sabine recognized the Acholi word referring to the nightly family gatherings around a communal fire, when elders would tell stories, riddles, and jokes, and people would discuss their lives. She recalled a former coworker in Kitgum who told her that one of the greatest casualties of the war was this essential piece of Acholi culture, which had become rare in the IDP camps.

  Sabine sensed Rose stirring in the darkness. “We are not family,” Rose said. “And we have no fire.”

  “But we have stories,” Christoph said. When both women were quiet, he said, “All right, I’ll start.”

  “You’ll just tell a story, right off the top of your head?” Sabine asked.

  “I wouldn’t be much of a folklorist otherwise.” He cleared his throat. “Ododo-na-ni-yo?”

  “What does that mean?” Sabine asked.

  “It means, ‘May I tell my story?’” Christoph said.

  From Rose’s corner came a reply: “Eyo.” Yes.

  Sabine paused. “Eyo,” she said at last.

  He began.

  Once there was a man who had seven sons but who wished desperately for a daughter. At last his wife gave birth to a girl, but the baby was small and sickly, and they decided to give her an emergency baptism in case she didn’t survive. So the father sent his sons to the well to fetch some water.

  “Hurry,” he told them. “The time is precious.”

  Eager to please, the seven boys ran quickly, but when they reached the well, each of them wanted to be the one to fulfill the task, and in their struggle, the jug fell in.

  The brothers didn’t know what to do, but neither did they dare return home without the water. Meanwhile, at the house, their father became impatient, assuming that they had been distracted by play and forgotten their duty.

  In anger he cried out, “I wish they would all turn into ravens!”

  No sooner had he spoken the words than he heard a great whirring sound, and out the window, saw seven black ravens fly up and away.

  By this point, Sabine had recognized the story: the one her opa had read to her and Hannah when they were children, which Hannah read in turn to Lily; the same story that Sabine and Christoph had discussed just the other night at the White Horse Hotel in Arua. Strangely, Arua seemed more distant now than her grandparents’ house in Marburg, the smell of hearth and wood, the familiar heaviness of the quilt her opa tucked around her before bed. As Christoph continued, his voice transformed, becoming low and rich, and soon Sabine no longer heard the chitter of insects or the call of forest birds, but only the soft, alert breathing of her sister next to her in bed, and the flick of pages being turned, and her grandfather’s bass tones, rising and falling in the wonderment of the fairy tale.

  The father could not take back the curse, and together he and his wife mourned their sons. But their daughter soon grew healthy and strong, and they rejoiced in her beauty, which deepened daily. The man and his wife took care not to mention the raven-boys, and so the girl grew up believing she was an only child.

  One day, while she was at the village market, she overheard some neighbors speaking about her as she passed. They said that she was indeed quite beautiful, but that she was to blame for the misfortune of her seven brothers. The girl was greatly troubled, and when she returned home, she asked her parents if what the neighbors had said was true. They finally confessed.

  Though her parents reassured her that she wasn’t at fault—her birth was the cause, but her role was innocent—the burden weighed on the girl’s con
science day after day. She came to believe that it was up to her to redeem her brothers.

  For months she agonized over what to do. One night she gathered her courage and set off secretly into the wide world, hoping to find her brothers and set them free, whatever it might cost. She brought nothing with her except a loaf of bread to satisfy her hunger, a jug of water to quench her thirst, a chair to rest on along the way, and a small ring to remind her of her parents and the home she’d left behind.

  The girl walked on and on, ever farther, all the way to the end of the world. There she came to the sun, but it was hot and frightening, and ate children. She ran away toward the moon, but it was cold and wicked, and when it saw her, it growled, “I smell human flesh.” So she hurried away again and came at last to the stars, each one sitting in its own little chair.

  The stars were friendly and good to her, and when the morning star arose, it gave her a chicken bone. “Your brothers are inside the glass mountain,” the morning star said. “And you can only open the glass mountain with this bone.”

  The girl thanked the star and took the bone, wrapped it in a cloth, and went on her way until she found the glass mountain. The door was locked, and she took out the cloth with the chicken bone so that she could unlock it.

  To her horror, the cloth was empty. She had lost the good star’s gift.

  What could she do? She wanted desperately to rescue her brothers, but she had no key.

  Then she had an idea. She took a sharp stone, cut off one of her fingers, and put it into the door.

  The door opened.

  When she went inside, a dwarf approached her and said, “What have you come here for, my child?”

  “I am looking for the seven ravens,” she answered, hiding her bleeding hand. “They are my brothers.”

  “The lord ravens are away, but if you wait here, they will return.”

  So she followed the dwarf into an enormous banquet hall, where he placed on the table seven plates and seven cups, and filled them with food and drink. Though her hand throbbed painfully, the girl took a bite from each plate and a sip from each cup, and into the last cup she dropped the ring that she’d brought.

  Suddenly she heard a great rush of wings, and she became frightened, and ran and hid behind a door. In flew seven ravens, who landed at the table, ready for their meal. One after another they said, “Who has been eating from my plate? Who has been drinking from my cup? It was a human mouth eating from my plate, and a human mouth drinking from my cup.”

  When the seventh one drank the last of his wine and turned over the cup, the ring rolled out. He recognized it as belonging to their mother and father. He cried out, “If only our sister were here, we would be set free!”

  When the girl heard this wish, she came forth and revealed herself, and the ravens were restored to their human forms. They kissed one another and embraced, and went home happily.

  With the final line, Sabine found herself thrown abruptly back to the present, the prickling chill, the Congolese night. The vision of her opa was extinguished.

  “Is that a folktale from your land?” Rose asked.

  “Do you like it?” Christoph said.

  “I like the Acholi stories better.”

  Sabine heard a rustling from Rose’s direction, and Christoph asked: “Everything all right, Rose?”

  “I need to make a short call.”

  Sabine remembered the euphemism well; she’d taken to using it herself when in the field with Ugandan coworkers, who would have been mortified to hear their boss ask for directions to the nearest toilet.

  “Take the headlamp,” Christoph said as he switched it on. Sabine’s eyes adjusted quickly to the dim glow of their little scene, with the flickering shadows of trees and the distinctly humanlike shape of Rose reaching out for the light.

  “Don’t go far,” Christoph said. “Shout if you need us.”

  “I will.”

  The tiny light bobbed away behind a tree and was consumed by blackness.

  “I haven’t heard that story since Lily was a child,” Sabine said quietly.

  Christoph let her words hang for a moment before he said, “Aboloi wi ngadi.”

  “What?”

  “It’s part of the Acholi storytelling tradition. ‘I throw it on so-and-so.’”

  “Throw what?”

  “The responsibility of telling the next story. I’m throwing it on you.”

  “I don’t know any folktales.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a folktale.” After a moment’s pause, he said, “Tell me why you became an aid worker. There must have been a reason.”

  Sabine pulled her knees tighter against her chest. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  She heard him moving; then he was sitting beside her. She could feel his pulsing warmth, close.

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” he said.

  She was silent.

  “Does it have something to do with your grandfather?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  If there were ever a moment of reckoning, it was now, she thought. She was so tired. And this man, this earnest, cheerful man who sat near, who’d memorized the stories she’d grown up with—this man who, it seemed, already knew everything about her—why should he not hear this from her lips?

  “I was fifteen when he died,” she began. “I’d worshipped him, you know. Him and his Rhinelanders. What you said before, that he sounded like a gentle man. He was. But he was something else, too.”

  “It was a time of war,” Christoph said. “Many people didn’t have a choice.”

  “I don’t mean his military service. He was an engineer. He helped plan roads and bridges. He never saw battle. Even if he had … I could understand that, forgive it.”

  “You’re being cryptic.”

  “I found a hatbox,” she said faintly, feeling distant from herself. “In his closet. The day of the funeral, when the rest of my family was out in the garden. They were arguing over the rabbits, trying to figure out whether they should sell them off or cook them for dinner. I couldn’t stand to listen. I fled inside, wandering the empty house—touching the things he’d touched, sitting in the chair where he’d always smoked his pipe in the evenings after dinner. Eventually I came to the bedroom. It’s … silly, maybe, but I wanted to put on his coat. The winter coat he wore when he tended the hutches in the snow.”

  “It’s not silly,” Christoph said, but she hardly heard him.

  “That was when I found it. The hatbox. It was so curious, you know—he’d never worn hats. I pulled it down and opened it. There were papers inside, letters and official documents. The first letter I picked up was just a few months old, from March 1981. I still remember the words exactly; I read them over and over again. ‘Sehr geehrte Herrn Hardt, thank you for your inquiry into the whereabouts of Herrn Ari Morgenstern of Marburg, Hessen, and his family. It is with regret that I inform you, our records do not show any persons of that name, nor possible relatives thereof.’ The next letter was from the previous year. ‘Sehr geehrte Herrn Hardt, we would gladly assist you with your query; however, unfortunately our files contain no matches…’ At the very bottom of the pile, there was a letter from 1951. Nearly thirty years old. It said something similar. I read every letter in the box; all of them were the same.”

  “Morgenstern,” Christoph said. “A Jewish name.”

  “My grandfather had included their last known address in his correspondence—it was the same street as my grandparents’ house in Marburg. They were neighbors. The letters also referenced the time frame, the date the Morgensterns disappeared. November tenth, 1938.”

  “Kristallnacht,” Christoph said.

  “I didn’t know that then. It was the eighties; Holocaust education in Germany was still in its nascency. I’d heard things, of course. The facts were out there. I’d even seen parts of that American miniseries, Holocaust, on TV at a friend’s house when her parents weren’
t home. But to speak of it directly—it wasn’t done. To ask what role your father played, or your grandfather … it was tantamount to blasphemy.” She paused. “But these documents … I thought they were evidence of something noble.”

  Christoph said nothing.

  “My grandmother found me like that, hours later, with the letters all around me. I didn’t even apologize—I just started asking questions. Who were the Morgensterns? How did they disappear? Why was it so important for my grandfather to find them? Had he helped them escape? She finally explained, just to shut me up, I think.

  “The Morgensterns were neighbors, yes. And they had indeed come to my grandparents’ door under the cover of darkness, the night of the tenth of November, 1938. The synagogue in Marburg was burning; Jewish homes and shops had been ransacked. The Morgensterns—Ari and his wife, Ewa, and their two small sons—were afraid.

  “I asked her if Opa had hidden them behind the rabbit hutches, or if there was a secret cellar beneath the kitchen. She said, ‘Your grandfather was a boy of twenty-two. Your father was a baby of three months. The risk was too great. There was nothing we could do.’”