The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “Christoph and Sabine are in the office,” he said. “There is no Internet, but they already started making calls.”

  “Thank you, I will go to them.” She stood. “And your wife and children? They have arrived well?”

  His smile broadened. “Very well.”

  The joy in his voice was palpable, and it both pleased and pained Rose to hear it. No one would ever speak of her like that again, except perhaps Grace.

  “Let me return the flashlight,” she said. “It is in my hut still.”

  “Keep it for now. You may need it another night.”

  She thanked him and left, skirting the rangers on the parade ground and approaching the low, green-roofed building that housed the administrative offices. Of the six doors she counted, only one was open. Peering inside, she saw Christoph standing with a phone to his ear, speaking in French; Sabine sat behind a messy desk concentrating on the clipboard in her hand, tapping a pencil against the paper. In front of her was Lily’s journal, laid open. Both Sabine and Christoph possessed an energy about them that felt incongruous with the depressed lethargy from the day before.

  Sabine looked up as Rose entered. “Rose! Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

  “I slept … too long.”

  “You must have needed it. Here…” Sabine handed the clipboard over. “This is the list I’ve come up with so far. Can you think of anything else?”

  Rose took the clipboard hesitantly. The first item—Contact UPDF re: possible sightings, request for temporary ceasefire—already had a checkmark next to it. She read further: Contact embassies re: lost passports (Kinshasa??) … Notify Steve/Rita/U.S. & international media … UN involvement? U.S. military? Hostage protocol? Negotiation team? Photos of Lily/Ocen? Reward?

  As she read, Rose became confused. “What is this?”

  Sabine gave her a puzzled smile. “We’re organizing the search team.”

  Christoph swiped the clipboard from Rose’s hand and wrote down a series of numbers. Then he said a few last words into the phone and hung up. “That was the Swiss embassy in Kinshasa,” he said. “They gave me the number for the German and Ugandan embassies as well. The process should be about the same for all of us. We’ll need to file police reports—we can do that here, I think, or in Faradje—and have people back home fax them copies of our birth certificate or driver’s license, some kind of identification. It will mean going to Kinshasa in person—I’m not sure about transportation, it’s a long way…”

  “You know,” Sabine said, “if FARDC didn’t recover our passports from the bus, they must still be in the wreckage somewhere. The rebels will be long gone. Let’s ask Daniela if one of the rangers can drive us this afternoon.”

  “It would certainly avoid a lot of hassle,” Christoph agreed. “And then we don’t have to be so quick to leave. We can keep our focus on what’s happening here.” He put a hand on Sabine’s shoulder, and she reached up to squeeze it. Rose watched this newfound intimacy with a curious sense of detachment.

  “Rose,” Christoph said, turning to her, “there’s a lot to catch you up on.”

  “We got through to the UPDF this morning,” Sabine said.

  Rose shifted warily. “The UPDF?”

  “Now that we know it was never about ivory, it doesn’t make any sense to withhold information from them,” Sabine said. “Our first priority is to prevent any additional military actions against the LRA until we find out exactly where Lily and Ocen are. The UPDF commander I spoke with couldn’t agree to this on the phone, but he’s taking it back to his superiors. He did at least confirm that there’s been no report of Lily’s body in any of the rebel camps targeted so far during Operation Lightning Thunder. He seemed quite certain.” She paused, apologetic. “They couldn’t be sure about Ocen…”

  “But,” Christoph cut in, “if they took Lily captive, there’s no reason to believe they would treat Ocen any differently. Remember Aboke? Both the Italian nun and the Ugandan schoolteacher were unharmed.”

  “That’s what you believe?” Rose said. “They’re still alive?”

  Christoph and Sabine exchanged a glance.

  “We’re cautiously optimistic,” Sabine said.

  “And you will remain here to look for them?” Rose asked.

  “Until we get our passports, we don’t have a choice—we can’t leave the country.”

  “But Rose,” Christoph said, “if you want to get back to Kitgum, the UPDF can arrange transport. They’re already bringing a group of women and children they’ve rescued from the rebels. Even without your identification documents, we could vouch for you—make sure you’re taken care of.”

  Rose’s thoughts went back to those weeks in the UPDF barracks four years before—the interrogations that began the day she was released from the hospital. The soldiers had kept her for weeks, asking a thousand questions about the rebels’ movements, their strategies, their communication systems. She’d told them what she could—but not everything. If they’d known it all, if she were discovered, they would have kept her a hundred days more. She would not go through that again.

  And Kitgum held nothing for her. Well, the children, of course—but would she be allowed to see them? Would she have to stalk Grace outside the schoolyard, observing her from a distance? Even if Rose were cleared of any wrongdoing in Agnes’s death, she would have no job after Christoph left. The warden’s words from last night came back to her: Kampala is an exciting city. Very stimulating … I am sure you will see it someday.

  Why not? She still had her purse with the little bundle of shillings, and her much greater savings at Stanbic Bank; she could slip into Kitgum just long enough to return Christoph’s equipment to his room at the Bomah and send a secret farewell message to Grace. She didn’t have to wait for the UPDF to take her there—it would be easy enough to leave Nagero without notice and travel by bus as far as the border. If Franklin’s thugs could cross without issue, surely she, a single woman who carried no cargo, could evade detection. In Kampala, she might begin again. No one would know her. No one would know the horrors that lay dormant in her blood.

  “You don’t have to decide now,” Christoph said. “It’s a lot to take in.” He turned back to the clipboard. “So. The German embassy can wait … We need to ask Daniela about a ride to the crash site.”

  “Let me find her,” Rose said.

  “That would be very helpful. She told us she would be in the air for an hour or so…” He checked his watch. “She should be back now. If she’s not in her office down the hall, try the headquarters or ask one of the rangers. They’ll know where she is.”

  Rose was still puzzling over the phrase “in the air”—was that a metaphor for something?—when Christoph turned back to Sabine.

  “Do you have the State Department woman’s number at the U.S. embassy? She’d know how we can get in touch with American military.”

  “Everything’s at the bus,” Sabine said.

  Christoph considered a moment. “I have Linda’s contact info stored in my phone. She can get a number for the U.S. embassy in Kampala. They must have contact information for Steve, too.”

  “It’s the middle of the night in Colorado…”

  Sabine’s voice faded as Rose exited the room, leaving them to their logistics and their eagerness. Meanwhile she was forming her own plan: to leave the next morning before dawn, without even saying good-bye.

  * * *

  She tracked down Daniela in a back room of the main building, where she was leaning over a map of the park and speaking into a walkie-talkie, her tousled brown hair escaping in wisps from her ponytail. With her were three Garamba rangers in green fatigues—including Jean-Pierre—and a police officer in blue. Daniela asked a question into the communicator, and a moment later a male voice crackled through. Everyone’s faces fell. Jean-Pierre noticed Rose and came to her at the doorway.

  “Is everything all right, Rose?”

  “Sabine and Christoph have a question for Daniela,” she said
quietly. “But maybe you can help? They would like to return to the site of the attack on the bus, this afternoon if possible. Our passports, documents … Everything was left behind.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t spare any vehicles today.”

  “I will inform them. I’m sure they will understand.”

  “Maybe I can arrange something for tomorrow.”

  Daniela spoke briefly into the walkie-talkie and pressed her finger simultaneously against the map.

  “What’s happening?” Rose whispered.

  “Daniela does an aerial survey of different areas of the park every morning in our small plane,” Jean-Pierre said. “This morning she spotted a large group of vultures about twenty kilometers northeast of here.” He paused to listen to the ongoing conversation between Daniela and whoever was on the other end of the walkie-talkie. “We sent a team to investigate,” he continued in a hushed voice. “They arrived just a few minutes ago and confirmed that it was a herd of elephants. Twenty-two, all dead. The tusks are missing.”

  “Was it the rebels?”

  “No. There are no footprints leading to and from the site—only around the bodies. It appears … it appears that the adults huddled around the calves, trying to protect them.” He stopped, and Rose saw the emotion in his eyes. “But they could not shield them from above.”

  “From above?”

  “Our team says many of the elephants were killed by bullets to the top of the head.”

  It took her a few seconds to understand the implication. “The UPDF helicopter we saw yesterday. It was flying north.”

  He nodded gravely. “Greed knows no borders. This is war of another kind.” He looked back at the team assembled around the map. “If we are not willing to die for these creatures, they will be gone.”

  * * *

  When she returned to the office to inform Sabine and Christoph that the vehicles were unavailable, they hardly even seemed disappointed; tomorrow, they said, would be fine.

  “Rose, good news,” Christoph said. “We found out there are U.S. military advisors working with the UPDF on Operation Lightning Thunder. It’s all very hush-hush.”

  “That’s good news?”

  “Now that we have hard evidence about Lily, the media is going to pick up the story for sure,” Sabine explained. “The U.S. military will be under a lot of pressure to get involved. They’re already on the ground—they’ll want to act as quickly as possible.”

  “I see,” Rose said.

  Christoph came around the desk to stand at her side. “Ocen is a part of this, too. We haven’t forgotten him. It’s just easier to spur people to action when it’s an American life at stake.”

  The injustice of this truth should have outraged her. Tens of thousands of abducted Acholi children, tens of thousands more slaughtered at the rebels’ hands; how many dead and dying in IDP camps? How many dead and dying in Faradje, in yesterday’s bus attack? Ah, but should a mono girl be among them! Then we may intervene; then we may act.

  She felt nothing. She’d heard this story before.

  “I wish you luck,” she said. “Please, I told the warden I would assist him in some matters.”

  They let her leave without argument. Instead of crossing the parade ground for the fourth time that morning, though, she turned south, toward the main road. It didn’t take long to reach the family quarters Jean-Pierre had mentioned. Rose saw children playing, women hanging brightly colored laundry on lines, chickens pecking, a small dirt soccer field. A rooster crowed. She approached a woman sweeping the hard-packed ground outside a hut and said, “Sincere?” The woman pointed toward a hut some twenty meters away, where two children were scratching in the dirt with sticks. As Rose approached, a woman came out from the hut with a basket hitched on her hip. Her face showed signs of age, but her body moved with grace and purpose.

  “Sincere?” Rose asked again.

  The woman paused. “Oui?”

  Rose fumbled through the only French she knew. “Je … Rose. Amie … Jean-Pierre.”

  “You may speak English, child,” Sincere said gently.

  With relief, Rose said, “My travel companions are occupied, and I have nothing to do. Your husband has been so generous—I thought I might be of assistance to you and your children, helping you settle in…”

  Sincere good-humoredly appraised her. Under her mothering gaze, Rose felt herself becoming a girl again, shy and in need of comfort. How sharp this longing was! She caught her breath.

  “Come, sit with me,” Sincere said. “I have great plans to shell this entire basket of groundnuts before noon.”

  And so Rose passed the day as a kind of daughter, listening to Sincere speak of life as a ranger’s wife, here and in Kenya. Their two oldest children were already grown, she said, now with babies of their own; the two young ones here—a twelve-year-old girl, Nicia, and her younger brother, Serge—reminded Rose of Grace and Isaac. With Sincere, Rose was at ease; the comfort was like that which she had experienced sometimes with Ocen, when he made her feel taken care of, as if she belonged. Over a background of the chickens’ buckkaws and the children’s laughter, Sincere acknowledged the fear of watching her husband leave for work, knowing the dangers he faced—the perpetual doubt that he would return. And yet she loved him for his dedication, his passion; she could never ask him to give it up.

  “Why does he care for these creatures so much?” Rose asked.

  Sincere smiled. “Once, in Kenya, he came upon a baby rhinoceros that had gotten stuck in a mud pit and was struggling. It was close to exhaustion, and its mother could do nothing. There was an elephant nearby—a cow. Jean-Pierre watched her wade into the mud and push the baby out, even while the mother rhinoceros was attacking her. She would risk her own life to save another.” She stroked the grinding stone in her hand absentmindedly. “He has loved them ever since.”

  “The elephants are his family, too,” Rose observed.

  Sincere sighed and crushed a shelled groundnut. “Except you can teach your wife to wield a gun. The elephants have only their tusks, and that is no defense at all.”

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon, Rose returned to the headquarters to hear what progress Sabine and Christoph had made. The office where they’d been working was empty, though the clipboard remained on the desk, and Lily’s diary lay open to the map of Garamba. Rose approached it carefully, as if the object held some kind of dark power. She let her hand hover above the paper a moment without touching it; then she flipped the page, and again, and again, and again, until she reached the place where Ocen’s profile appeared. Outside she could hear the sound of a truck engine growing loud and then fading.

  Looking at the face of the man she loved, she was filled with remorse. If she’d told him everything from the beginning—if she’d said, Opiyo is alive, but he is no longer the boy you remember—Ocen would have understood. She was sure of it. He would have known that rescue was madness. They would still be together in Kitgum; Lily’s revelations would have meant nothing. The girl would have set aside her naïve notions of heroism and returned home to America.

  She shut the journal and closed the office door behind her when she left.

  Sabine and Christoph were not in the main building, either. One of the rangers who spoke a little English told Rose that he had seen them heading toward the sleeping quarters. Rose started in that direction, but halfway across the parade ground she saw Sincere carrying a basket of onions and tomatoes toward the kitchen. Rose decided to join. She would meet Sabine and Christoph that evening at dinner.

  She and Sincere walked around the side of the building to a small outdoor cooking area next to a door leading to the kitchen inside. The two Congolese women who’d served breakfast welcomed Sincere jovially but eyed Rose with rather less bonhomie until Sincere said something that seemed to break the ice.

  “You must forgive them,” Sincere whispered to Rose. “They never served an African woman before. Only African men and whites.”

 
; Rose glanced around the pots and pans and various boxes of supplies sitting on wooden crates nearby, and pointed at a package of Pembe baking flour, then to herself. “Samosas,” she said to the two cooks. The women hooted and laughed and waved Rose cheerfully toward the jerry cans filled with water and oil.

  Twenty minutes later, she was so focused on the dough that she didn’t notice Sabine’s approach until the woman was sitting right beside her on the mat.

  “Rose,” Sabine said. “There you are. Christoph was worried when we didn’t see you at lunch.”

  Rose exchanged a glance with Sincere, who pointedly rose from her place peeling potatoes and took her bowl into the interior kitchen. “I was around.”

  “Well, we haven’t been able to speak directly with anyone at the U.S. embassy in Kampala yet,” Sabine said, “but my friend Rita is working on it. We left a message for Steve, too—he’s Lily’s stepfather—so he’ll whip the media into a frenzy.” Sabine smiled, though Rose saw it was pained. “I’m sorry that the search has to focus on Lily at this point. I’m confident, though, that when we find Lily, Ocen will be with her.”

  “Why do you say when?”

  “Sometimes … the choice to believe is more powerful than the belief itself.” Sabine paused. “And I choose to believe that if Lily and Ocen found the rebels, Opiyo wouldn’t hurt them. Ocen is still his brother.”

  Rose continued to knead the dough. For a moment she thought it would be better to say nothing; if Sabine wanted to hold on to this hope, however empty, then let her do so. But Rose had made this mistake with Ocen, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that lesson enough? And what did it matter now, if Sabine heard everything that Ocen should have known from the start?

  “Opiyo…” Rose said. “He was that, once.”

  “He was what?”

  “Kind.”

  A long pause. “You were taken together?”

  “We were … promised to each other. The rebels found us kissing.” She almost smiled to remember. “When we marched to Sudan, Opiyo took care of me. He brought me extra food and water. He made sure I was not cold. He gave me strips of cloth from his own shirt to protect my feet from sores, so that I would not fall behind.” Her voice grew faint. “When we were forced to beat someone who was too slow, or who tried to escape, he met my eyes. He helped me not to cry. They kill you if you cry.”