The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “Daniela,” Sabine said. Christoph repeated the name loudly for the soldiers, and they exchanged a look; one lowered his rifle and pulled out a black communication device from his belt. Meanwhile six other men had come running from the building and were forming a semicircle around the group, barking out orders between themselves.

  “Please,” Sabine said. “We’re friends.”

  “Amis, amis,” Christoph said.

  Rose closed her eyes and waited for the shooting to start.

  It never came.

  “Sabine Hardt?” a male voice called.

  When Rose opened her eyes, a short Congolese man with big eyes was standing a dozen meters away, addressing them. He wore the same uniform as the others aside from a black beret in lieu of a hat. His stature was diminutive, but his person emanated power.

  “I’m Sabine.” Sabine stepped forward.

  With the slightest gesture, the commander—for that’s what he surely was—had his men at ease. He walked briskly toward Sabine and shook her hand.

  “I’m Jean-Pierre Mutondolwa, chief warden.”

  Introductions were made with Christoph and Rose.

  “We expected you yesterday,” he said. “But we heard about the attack on the bus outside Faradje. We feared you were involved.”

  “We were,” Christoph said. “We managed to get away. Rose led us to the river, where we camped overnight. We followed it here this morning.”

  The ranger trained his eyes on Rose. She felt uncomfortable under his scrutiny, as if standing under a very bright light in an otherwise dark room.

  “It was LRA, wasn’t it?” she said.

  He nodded. “We think they had a dozen fighters. They’ve broken up into smaller groups now—ten to fifteen for raiding parties, fifty or so when the group includes families and captives.”

  “Where’s the UPDF?” Sabine asked. “We saw a helicopter this morning. Was it theirs?”

  “Probably. They’re based in Dungu, a hundred kilometers west, but they’ve been crisscrossing the land northeast of here for a few days. My guess is that they’re responsible for flushing out the group that attacked the bus yesterday.”

  “What about the UN?” Christoph said. “Can’t they do anything?”

  “Limited mandate,” he said.

  A few beats passed before Sabine cleared her throat. “It’s been … a difficult journey.”

  “Of course,” he said, gesturing toward the building. “Come inside. There’s food and water.”

  “Thank you, yes. But what I mean to ask is—do you have my niece’s journal? We’ve come a long way to see it.”

  “Daniela will be here soon. She can tell you more.”

  Sabine and Christoph walked ahead, while Rose came alongside the chief.

  “Were you at the camp where the journal was found?” she asked.

  “I was.”

  “What else did you find there?”

  “The things you might expect,” he said. “Sandals, tarps, jerry cans, rubbish.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Are you hoping for something in particular?”

  “Lily was not traveling alone,” Rose said. “She had a man with her. A Ugandan man. My … husband.” The word was a lie, but it felt exactly right. “He wore a bracelet made of braided metal. If Lily’s journal was there—if she left it on purpose—I thought maybe…”

  He stopped walking and met her eyes. “I am sorry. We found nothing else.”

  They entered through a yellow arch and two wooden doors. Inside was a large room furnished with tables and chairs. No one sat.

  A few minutes later, a white woman strode in looking rushed but composed, very pretty despite the tangled mess of her brown hair. She wore tall hiking boots and knee-length khaki shorts that showed off her lean, muscled legs. It was strange to see a woman here—surely this was a man’s place, remote and rugged and rent open by violence.

  “Daniela,” the woman said, sticking her hand out. “Park manager. Welcome. You are … well?”

  “Nous allons bien,” Christoph said.

  Daniela’s face showed relief upon hearing the French, and she quickly responded in kind.

  Christoph translated. “She says she’s sorry that her English isn’t very good. She’s glad we’re safe, she was worried about us after the attack on the bus.”

  “Lily’s diary?” Sabine asked. “Does she have it?”

  Another rapid-fire exchange in French, with Christoph translating concurrently. “She has it. She’ll take us there now. After we didn’t arrive yesterday, she put the journal in a secure location, a locked storage shed over near the office, where they keep the…” He stopped, then asked Daniela another question.

  “Oui,” she said.

  “Keep what?” Rose asked. “What do they keep?”

  Christoph’s face was pale when he turned back. “The ivory.”

  CHAPTER 21

  SABINE

  January 1, 2009

  Ten minutes later, the group stood outside a brick shed, Daniela fiddling with a padlock while Sabine, Christoph, and Rose waited a few feet away. A handful of rangers had accompanied them and looked on. Sabine felt strangely calm. Or perhaps not so strangely: after all, behind this door lay a book that would, in all likelihood, reveal nothing she didn’t already know. Certain details might become clear: how far Lily had gotten in her investigation, the people she’d spoken with, what exactly she planned to do when she got to Garamba. But whatever questions the journal addressed, the most essential one—where is she now—would remain unanswered. Sabine would find no closure here.

  “Ah!” Daniela exclaimed as the key finally clicked and the lock opened. She tugged open the stiff wooden door and stepped inside. Sabine was the first to follow. The shed was approximately the size of the kitchen in her apartment in Marburg, separated into a front and a back space joined by a doorless frame; there were neither windows nor lightbulbs, and it took a few seconds for Sabine’s eyes to adjust. Daniela strode ahead into the back space while Sabine halted abruptly. Behind her she heard Christoph enter and take a sharp inhalation.

  “Merde,” he said.

  On the floor to their left was a stack of elephant tusks that nearly reached her chest in height. The tusks lay lengthwise on the ground, curves of different sizes—some as small as a child’s arm, others taller than a man—linked into one another in a massive, grotesque sculpture. Their colors ranged from eggshell-white to splotchy brown to burnt black. Many of the tips were broken and jagged, as if hacked off in a hurry or with crude instruments.

  “There must be hundreds,” she said.

  “More,” Christoph said.

  Sabine had known what the shed contained, of course; back in the main building, Daniela explained that this was where they stored everything the rangers confiscated from poachers when they were caught. But somehow the word ivory was too distant, too imprecise an object—it conjured delicate trinkets and polished white figurines—and Sabine had imagined that it would, in any case, be kept out of view. She was completely unprepared for the grisly sprawl before her. It must have been years’ worth of seized tusks. She remembered from her cursory online research in Kitgum that this would only represent a tiny portion of what the poachers got away with.

  She ran her hand along an enormous tusk that was lodged in the pile somewhere around waist height and ran nearly the length of the room. Its surface was covered in a vast network of dark hairline cracks. In black marker, someone had written directly on the tusk itself: 2.81 m, 53 cm, 46 kg. Length. Diameter. Weight. It weighed almost as much as she did. She tried to imagine the majesty of the creature it once belonged to—the creature that had died for its beauty. She couldn’t.

  In the back room, Daniela was bent over a file cabinet, sorting through a dozen tiny keys. Stepping through to join her, Sabine was startled at the sight of fifty or so rifles, dark and long and hanging on racks; more were piled below, spilling over. Several had yellow labels taped around the middle. No
ne looked new: the wooden stocks were chipped and worn. More seized booty, she guessed. How often had these rifles exchanged hands? She had never seen so many guns in one place, except perhaps when carried by a regiment of soldiers. Inert, the guns should have seemed harmless, she thought: just metal and wood. But so near the grim display in the room behind, the rifles pulsed with violence. They had no purpose but to kill. As Sabine stood there, it occurred to her that whatever truths Lily’s journal held, it was this shed that told the real story of her fate: ivory at one end and guns at the other.

  Vaguely, Sabine heard the tinny sound of metal drawers opening and closing. Then Daniela was standing next to her, presenting something. “Alors,” she said.

  In Daniela’s hand was a large sketchbook, about the size of a normal sheet of paper and nearly an inch thick; the pages were bound together by two stiff blue covers and a spiral coil. The cover was scuffed, marked by streaks of dirt and splatters of discoloration, probably from rain. Sabine felt no sense of recognition. Should she? She took a short step forward, hesitant. How far this object had come, Sabine thought: through mud and rain and brush and fear. Her hand trembled when she took it.

  She opened the cover; it was the only thing she could think of to do. The first page was entirely blank except for two words: Lily Bennett.

  A rush of memories flooded in. That handwriting, loosely cursive. This was her Lily. Hannah’s Lily. Lily of the bubbles blown at the neighbor’s cat; Lily of the gardener’s hat and Play-Doh; Lily of the hand-drawn maps and the cartographer’s flourish; Lily of the talking ravens; Lily of the white-and-yellow flowers that bloomed in early spring in the grassy foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  Her chest constricted, and she felt the walls closing in around her. She needed air.

  “Sabine?” Christoph said.

  She pushed past him, the journal clutched to her chest. Past the weapons and the tusks, the whitewashed walls and unswept floor. Outside, she stumbled and caught herself. There was Rose—anxious, concerned—and the rangers. The scattered trees, the wide blue sky.

  “What does it say?” Rose’s voice was near, but Sabine heard it as if across a great distance. “What does she write about Ocen?”

  “I…” Her speech faltered.

  Christoph was suddenly at her elbow. “Are you okay?”

  Daniela emerged from the shed behind them and swung the door closed, then threaded the padlock through the latch. Sabine brought Lily’s journal away from her chest and examined it again. This was a sacred thing, she understood: the laying down of words. Lily’s secret-most thoughts would be captured here; the things she never would have said aloud. What right did Sabine have to expose those sentiments? She felt suddenly protective. And yet—she glanced at Rose, whose expression was attentive and pleading, right there on the verge of anguish. Rose had nothing of Ocen’s. No physical anchor to give weight to this agony.

  “Do you need a minute alone?” Christoph asked.

  Alone. She recalled her words to him just a few days before: Alone has always worked for me. But had it, really? Her heartbeat slowed to the pace of a firefly, just one, twinkling. She met Christoph’s eyes: two fireflies, blinking in unison. She looked at Rose. Three.

  * * *

  They began at the end.

  Together, they laid the journal down on one of the wood tables in the main building, and Sabine, Rose, and Christoph squeezed in shoulder to shoulder. Daniela had left them; she still had a park to run, after all. Christoph held the covers open. Sabine trusted the steadiness of his hands more than she did her own.

  The back third of the book was blank. Christoph flipped toward the front, page by page, in silence. So much emptiness, Sabine thought. So much left unsaid.

  Finally they reached the last entry. It was just as Daniela had described over the phone: a large map of Garamba, spread over two pages. There was Nagero, situated toward the bottom next to the river they’d followed that morning; Faradje, farther to the east, and Dungu to the west; and four tiny stars, the estimated locations of the LRA camps throughout the park’s boundaries and to the west. Each had a name: Eskimo. Boo. Pilipili. Kiswahili.

  “How did she possibly find out where they were?” Christoph said.

  This had puzzled Sabine, too, ever since Daniela mentioned it. She looked closer at the squiggles connecting the LRA camps to nearby landmarks. The faint lines were accompanied by brief notes: walk 3 days, pass 6 creeks, 1 river, radio tower here, follow park road 2 days.

  “Miriam,” Sabine said.

  “Who?” Christoph asked.

  “The girl at the Children In Need center in Kitgum—the one who first told Lily that the LRA were smuggling ivory. She escaped from the rebels in September and arrived in Kitgum a month after that. She would have known exactly where the camps were.” She thought back to that conversation: I told Lily about life with the rebels, Miriam had said. The names of our people, the rivers, how we traveled, where we stayed …

  But why? Sabine wondered. Was Lily trying to determine smuggling routes? Or did she just want to make sure she would avoid areas close to the rebel camps?

  Christoph turned the page. This, too, was as Daniela had said: a map that included both Arua and Lakwali as well as the roads between. Lily would have gotten this information mainly from the atlas and Patrick. Lily’s detour through Lakwali made a lot more sense now, when the route was laid out on a map like this: even though she and Ocen might have taken a more direct road to Nagero if they went north from Arua instead of west, detouring to Lakwali split the journey into two shorter days instead of one long one, with the added bonus of secure shelter and hot showers.

  Another page. This one had no maps or images of any kind; it was filled with handwriting, a more condensed version of the slack cursive Sabine had seen on the front page. Her heart quickened—maybe there were names here, informants or contacts. The notes were scrambled and messy, but Sabine detangled them bit by bit: a packing list, two phone numbers for Franklin in Arua, approximate distances between towns, times for sunrise and sunset, a handful of phrases with Lingala translations (Can you help us? Can we buy food? How far to _____?). The URL for Patrick’s blog was there, too. Finally, boxed off near the bottom, she saw what looked like a rough itinerary that listed December second as Arua, December third as Lakwali, and, beneath:

  Dec 4—Garamba???!!!

  Sabine’s stomach churned.

  “Ready?” Christoph asked gently. She nodded.

  On the next page the writing was more fluid, the phrases cohering into full sentences and even paragraphs.

  In times of famine they eat wild plants, adyebo and anunu … The camps have 150–200 captives and 75–100 fighters … They stay in one place for months, sometimes years—women have jobs cutting grass for hut roofs, digging in the fields … They grow cassava, sim-sim, sweet potatoes, sorghum, maize, sunflower, groundnuts, rice …

  “These must be her interview notes,” Sabine said. “When she spoke with Miriam.”

  The room was quiet as they read further. Soldiers form small hunting parties … The younger abducted girls are kept as tingtings, babysitters, before they’re old enough to be married off, usually by 12 or 13 … Then a separate list with the underlined title, 0 sightings, and the names of LRA camps followed by months:

  Boo—Sept

  Eskimo—Aug/Sept

  Boo—July

  Kiswahili—April/May

  → June?? Oct/Nov???

  A code, perhaps? Sabine wondered. She looked at the title again. Zero sightings of what?

  “That’s odd,” Christoph murmured.

  “The sightings?”

  “No,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed? She doesn’t mention ivory once.”

  Christoph was right, she realized: nowhere was there a single instance of the word ivory, or elephant, or smuggling, or any direct reference to Lily’s investigative object.

  “Here,” she said, pointing to the list. “This must be when Miriam saw evidence of poaching
or smuggling.”

  Christoph pursed his lips skeptically. “I’m not sure. Why the letter O?”

  “The zero? Maybe it’s a placeholder—Lily was being cautious. Keep going,” Sabine urged. “There must be something else.”

  Dutifully, Christoph turned another page. More notes from the rehabilitation center, though these were even less relevant—it looked like a rough draft for a funding proposal; Sabine had seen enough grants in her time to recognize the signs. Then a series of sketches of the children at play, the boys kicking around a soccer ball and the girls in traditional dance costumes or hunched over a piece of paper with a pencil. Christoph flipped past a few more pages. Still nothing.

  “We’re not getting anywhere,” she said.

  Christoph looked at her in surprise. “You want to stop?”

  “What are we going to find? These notes are all too old to be of any use. Not even the locations of the rebel camps can help us now—Operation Lightning Thunder has seen to that.” She flipped another page and saw a sketch of three cows in a field, or perhaps the same cow three times. Underneath was a to-do list that included things like buy snacks and finish human interest story for CIN newsletter and Francis re: more art supplies. “What good will this do us? What good will it do them?”

  She began turning pages more rapidly now, frustrated and confused. More drawings, more flurries of notes—nothing about ivory, not a word. At the same time she chided herself: what did she expect? Flowcharts and diagrams, evidence of systematic research?

  “Wait,” Christoph said, stilling her hand with a touch. The feeling of his skin on hers was electric, and for a second she didn’t even notice the page where he’d made her stop. Then her focus shifted, and she saw the portraits—nearly a dozen, all of the same person: a Ugandan man, youngish. Handsome. They were simple pencil drawings, not quite as detailed as the portrait of Miriam at the rehabilitation center, but the face was vivid and lifelike nonetheless.

  Sabine heard Rose gasp. It was the first indication she’d made that she was still here, still attentive; she’d said nothing about the maps nor the interview notes nor anything else in Lily’s journal thus far. Sabine glanced at her, watching as Rose brought her hand to her open mouth, unable to take her eyes from the page.