The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “It’s Ocen,” Christoph said softly. “Isn’t it?”

  But Rose couldn’t even nod; she’d gone still as stone. Sabine looked again at the face in the sketches, the same somber expression in each. So this was Ocen. He’d clearly posed for Lily: his eyes stared unwavering out from the paper, his profile presented at precise angles. She felt an acute pang of anguish for Rose, to have to witness this proof of the intimacy that had so clearly existed between subject and artist. She touched Rose’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Rose reached out quick as a flash and gripped Sabine’s arm. “No,” she said. “No—look.” She let go to point to a sketch in the lower right, one Sabine hadn’t picked out before, but now that she looked closer, it did seem different somehow. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  “Are those supposed to be military fatigues?” Christoph said. “Huh.” He squinted, trying to read the words underneath. “‘Is this what he looks like now?’” He frowned. “I wonder what that means.”

  Rose’s voice was hardly more than a breath: “Opiyo.”

  The word jogged something in Sabine’s memory. “Say that again?”

  “Opiyo,” Rose repeated.

  “Ocen’s brother?” Christoph asked.

  Sabine shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Ocen had a twin—Opiyo—he was abducted the same day as Rose.”

  “The sightings,” Rose whispered. “O for Opiyo.”

  Christoph’s hand flew to his forehead, his expression stricken. “Aboke. Lily thought she could—the night before they left, she was talking about—” He choked up, unable to finish.

  Sabine desperately tried to put the pieces together. Ocen’s brother? Aboke? The Italian nun and the schoolteacher who tracked the rebels into the bush …

  With a quiet click, everything slid into place.

  The simplicity was staggering.

  The secrecy, Miriam’s memories, I told Lily about life with the rebels, the names of our people …

  O for Opiyo.

  Lily’s e-mail came back to her again: For a while I just felt helpless, like no matter what I did here, there was no way to make a difference. But now I think I’ve found a way. It’s about finding something that’s bigger than yourself, and being brave enough to commit to it.

  The audacity. The foolishness.

  It had never been about ivory. There was no secret investigation. Lily and Ocen weren’t trying to avoid the rebels.

  They were trying to find them.

  “It was a rescue operation,” Sabine said.

  Christoph nodded, stricken. Turning to Rose, he said, “But you thought he died.”

  “I believed it was true.”

  Sabine felt dizzy. She had to sit down. “Rose,” she said, her voice sounding faint even to her own ears. “You know how the rebels operate. Is there any chance…” She trailed off, then began again. “Is there any chance the LRA would let them go?”

  Rose’s silence echoed all around. It seeped into the walls and through the floor.

  * * *

  Dinner that night was beans and stew and rice, served hot on spotless white plates in the main building. Daniela had returned after organizing their sleeping arrangements: three huts, she said, spare but comfortable, among the rangers’ quarters. There were other huts closer to the river—the ones they normally used for guests—but given the security situation, Daniela would rather that everyone stay within a tighter radius.

  “She can help organize transportation back to Lakwali, or Arua—wherever we want to go,” Christoph said. “She just needs a few days to set it up. And in the meantime, they don’t have Internet, but we can use the phones to call out. We should be contacting everyone. UPDF, police, the American embassy, media outlets.” He met Sabine’s eyes. “Steve.”

  “Tomorrow,” Sabine said.

  “The sooner they know—”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He didn’t press.

  Sabine surprised herself with her appetite. She and Rose said little, leaving Christoph to carry the conversation with Daniela, the chief warden, and a few other staff members, who all kept their voices low out of respect; Sabine didn’t even ask Christoph to translate.

  Afterward, Daniela brought a change of clothing for both Sabine and Rose—Christoph still had his backpack—and showed them the wooden stalls the staff used for showers. Each had a bucket filled with river water that had been boiled then cooled enough to use. The water felt sublime against her dirty, sweaty skin; the shower at Lakwali seemed a hundred years ago instead of two days. Sunset streaked fiercely overhead, brutal in its splendor.

  Exiting the shower, Sabine caught a glimpse of Rose slipping her blouse on in the next stall. Her single arm was lean and skillful, doing the work of two. What would Rose return to, Sabine wondered, in Kitgum? What awaited her there? Christoph had said that he wanted to help her, but for a woman who’d lost her adolescence, then her child, and now her partner—what balm could soothe those wounds?

  When they were dressed, the chief warden met them with a flashlight and walked them across the parade ground, past the low administrative offices and the Congolese flag, past the mud-spattered trucks and the brick shed and the trees and a single-room building that read SALLE DE POLICE. The warden’s stride was slow and powerful, the fabric of his fatigues swishing softly, boots creaking, rifle and radio clicking against one another every few steps. Sabine carried Lily’s journal against her chest. The warden pointed out the three huts Daniela had prepared for them and gave them each a key, then aimed the light toward the drop toilets a few dozen meters from the periphery.

  “If you need to leave your hut for any reason during the night, take a flashlight and stay alert. Hippos come through here regularly, and we’ve had leopards as well.”

  “I’m the only one with a headlamp,” Christoph said. “We lost most of our gear in the attack on the bus.”

  “I’ve got an extra flashlight at my hut, if one of you wants to accompany me there. I can send someone to take another over.”

  “Let me come,” Rose said.

  Christoph nodded. “I’ll stay with Sabine.”

  They stood outside Sabine’s hut and watched the warden and Rose disappear into the night.

  “Will she be all right?” Sabine asked.

  “I trust the warden completely,” Christoph said.

  “I mean in Kitgum. When she goes back.”

  Insects and birds chittered from invisible places in the grass. After a long time he said, “I don’t know. She has family there—a brother and his wife—but I don’t think they’re close. Her reintegration has been difficult, even with her own clan.”

  Brisk footsteps and a bobbing light approached from the darkness: the ranger sent by the warden. When he got close enough for Sabine to see his face, she realized how young he was: barely more than a boy. As she accepted the flashlight and mumbled a word of thanks, she felt a sudden, crippling tenderness toward him, this young man who faced down poachers and rebels, day in and day out. She pictured the fortune of ivory in the brick shed—hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth, at least—and the single padlock on the wooden door. Yet he, and all the other rangers at Garamba, chose this: to trudge onward in obscurity, unrecognized by the outside world, unacknowledged even by the creatures they risked their lives to protect. As he walked away, she felt an abrupt urge to send a prayer out behind him: that he would weather whatever violence raged across his path, that he would grow old and die in his own bed, surrounded by people who loved him.

  Christoph followed her into the hut while she made a quick scan with the light. The space was cramped but clean. The bed was covered by a taut blue sheet, and a mosquito net hung from the thatched roof; a water basin stood next to the door along with a pair of rubber sandals. A gecko ran across the wall, but there were no snakes under the bed nor spiders on the ceiling.

  “What about you?” Christoph asked. “Will you be all right?”

  Sh
e held up the flashlight. “I promise to look both ways.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “I … can’t,” she said. “Not right now.”

  Neither of them spoke for several minutes, and finally Christoph turned to leave. Before she realized what she was doing she’d reached out and taken hold of his hand.

  “Stay with me,” she said. “Just a little longer.”

  They sat together on the concrete step outside the door. Sabine had left Lily’s diary on the nightstand inside. Christoph was silent, making space for her to begin. But she didn’t want to talk yet. She was thinking of her first memory of Africa: when she landed at the airport in Addis Ababa those many years ago, seeing the flat green land all around and hazy mountains in the distance—how raw the land had seemed, how promising and untamed. She’d known even then that it wasn’t just about making up for the sins of her forefathers; she’d made this choice for her. She was the selfish one. Other people’s tragedy would be a platform for her redemption. She was special. She was kind. She would map goodness on a suffering land. She’d acted the part of the noble savior with a terrible, secret satisfaction. The people she professed to be helping—when had she stopped to ask for their permission? What insidious, invisible harm had she done? Was it still possible, after everything, to claim that imperfect action was better than none?

  In novels she’d read—novels that had been passed around among aid workers starved for evening entertainment—there were consequences for a person’s actions: every scene served a purpose; every decision, no matter how minute, affected the greater arc. But if you lived this way you would be paralyzed, unable to decide whether to have coffee or tea. In life things happened and you didn’t always feel the effects. The consequences came later or not at all. Or they happened to someone far away.

  Was there such a thing as a final equation? A moral balance of variables?

  Beside her, Christoph waited.

  “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get home?” she asked at last.

  He thought about it a while. “Ice skating.”

  “Ice skating?”

  “There’s a rink, a patinoire, in the Parc des Bastions, right in the heart of Geneva. I used to take Céline there when I came home from university for the holidays, when she was six, seven, eight years old. She loved the cold. She refused to wear mittens, even when the temperature dropped below zero. It was amazing, though—when I held her hands, her skin was always warm to the touch.”

  Sabine had never been to Geneva, but she could picture it exactly: Christmas lights strung from trees, a kiosk selling hot chocolate, children in puffy winter coats, dashing blond Christoph arm-in-arm with a laughing, barehanded little girl. The image suffused her with sadness.

  “Back in Lakwali,” she said, “you told me stories save us.”

  “They do.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Maybe the choice to believe is as powerful as the belief itself.”

  “But then it’s just fantasy. It’s like your folklore, your fairy tales. It’s not real life.”

  “Fairy tales don’t tell us about what happened or didn’t happen,” he said. “They tell us about ourselves. The things we long for, the decisions we make. The ways we fail. The possibility that next time will be different.”

  “And when there’s no ‘next time’?”

  She sensed him hesitate. Then he leaned forward and cupped her chin gently in his hand. She understood his intention with a kind of panic. But when his mouth touched hers, something released in her chest: a tiny knot, unraveling. She wanted to struggle against it—there was too much at stake, too much grief locked up behind—but she couldn’t, the release had already started, and she kissed him back, hard. A moment later they had to pause for breath.

  “Inside,” she whispered.

  “Are you sure?”

  She took his hand, rose, pulled him with her. With the door shut behind them there were no more restraints. They undressed jerkily, elbows bumping in the tiny space. They laughed at their own awkwardness, then found themselves standing face-to-face, both naked, suddenly shy.

  He ran the back of his hand from the hollow beneath her jaw to her collarbone, light as a feather’s touch; he kept going, running a line down the center of her chest and then grazing outward to her right hip.

  As their bodies leaned into one another, a noise came from outside the hut—what sounded like heavy breathing. The muted crunch of grass.

  Sabine froze. “Someone’s there.”

  Christoph held a finger to her lips and looked up, listening. As the sound repeated—louder now, like snorting—a smile crossed his face.

  “Hippos,” he said.

  Then kissed her again.

  CHAPTER 22

  ROSE

  January 1

  “Here,” the chief warden said. “Take this. I changed the batteries yesterday.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mutondolwa.” Rose accepted the flashlight and flicked it on. The beam was focused and powerful, a tunnel of brightness cutting through the night.

  “Please, call me Jean-Pierre.”

  They stood in the packed dirt outside the warden’s hut, which looked just like all the others, despite his rank. Through the open door she got a glimpse of the spartan room inside; it was almost as poor as Ocen’s hut near the airstrip in Kitgum. Thinking of that hollow space pinged her with fresh grief, and she was relieved when Jean-Pierre closed the door and said, “Let me walk you to your quarters.”

  His pace was unhurried, and his composure seemed to permeate the space around him. Her mind had been in turmoil all evening, reeling with the revelations of Lily’s journal, and she clung to the steadiness of the warden’s quiet assurance with gratitude. They passed a young ranger, and Jean-Pierre spoke a few words with him, gesturing briefly at his own flashlight and nodding in the direction of the hut where Christoph and Sabine waited. The ranger strode off purposefully.

  “How long have you worked at Garamba?” she asked.

  “Three years. My wife, Sincere, and our children have been living in Faradje so the young ones can attend school. I prefer to stay with them, but my work often keeps me here.”

  “Faradje? The Christmas attacks…”

  “They’re fine. I’ve arranged for them to come to Nagero for a while. There are family quarters south of the station, toward the main road. They arrive tomorrow morning. It is better for them to remain here until the present unrest has passed.”

  “The LRA will not stop attacking civilians,” Rose said. “Now that they have been driven from their camps, they will need food and supplies. They will raid villages and then vanish into the bush. It’s what they know.”

  Jean-Pierre nodded. “All the UPDF has succeeded in doing is stirring the hornets’ nest. They have made our work very difficult.”

  He stopped in front of a hut tucked behind a copse of trees, unlocked the door, and stepped in confidently, running the beam of the flashlight under the bed, checking for snakes, Rose guessed. She almost wished there would be one, so that he would stay a bit. She wasn’t ready to be alone, not with her thoughts creeping up in her consciousness like a hungry river rising.

  Opiyo—alive, alive, alive.

  The words lapped against her ears. This was the truth that had come between her and Ocen before he left, not money troubles or another woman. Rose recalled Ocen’s all-night absence at the end of October, when she’d waited for him in his hut until dawn—that was the day he’d found out. And afterward, his moodiness through November—it wasn’t a phase. It was disgust, thinly disguised.

  Ocen had not died believing his brother would meet him on the other side of the eternal border. He died knowing he’d been lied to by the woman he loved.

  “Rose?” Jean-Pierre’s voice brought her back.

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you for your assistance.”

  He aimed the flashlight out the open door to the toilet stalls in the distance, di
mly illuminated with the diffuse beam. He politely refrained from voicing an explanation. “Our on-duty rangers will be patrolling the perimeter all night. Others will sleep in the huts here and here,” he said, pointing out nearby huts with the light, “if you need anything before morning.”

  “Are you from here? From this place?” she asked. She would have asked anything to get him to stay, just a moment longer.

  “I am from here,” he said, “but I spent fifteen years as a park warden in Kenya.”

  “Fifteen years? So long?”

  His low chuckle reverberated. “I am nearly an old man. But I was once as young as you. In fact, I studied in Kampala.”

  That surprised her. “In my country?”

  He laughed again, his white teeth glinting in the moonlight. “Yes, in your country. Kampala is an exciting city. Very stimulating.”

  “I was never there.”

  “I am sure you will see it someday.”

  After he left, she lay awake for a long time thinking of his words. Kampala felt like something out of a story; people might speak of it, but it wasn’t real. In fact, the entire world beyond her bed might be an illusion, she thought. If she only closed her eyes, it would stop existing at all.

  * * *

  By the time Rose made it out of her hut in the morning—she’d slept hard and late—the sun was already above the surrounding canopy and everyone else seemed to have been up for hours. Rangers were doing drills in the parade ground as she crossed to the main building, feeling discomposed. Inside, Christoph and Sabine were nowhere to be seen. A Congolese woman with a severe expression brought a plate of pineapple and cold toast without asking, then retreated into the kitchen area and, with a few sharp words Rose could only assume were at her own expense, elicited a peal of laughter from a second woman whose large bum Rose glimpsed through the open door. Alone at her table, Rose ate the toast in embarrassed silence, which subsided only upon the arrival of Jean-Pierre, whose smile she returned with tremendous relief.