The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  * * *

  In the morning, Sabine noticed large, circular indentations in the earth around the ivory, but there were no looming shapes in the brush nor trumpets in the distance. She turned her focus to Christoph, who had descended into a kind of hallucinatory state: his fever had risen again, and he mumbled incoherently with his eyes fluttering behind closed lids. Sabine wondered what visions he saw there, whether he glided on ice skates, squeezing a smaller hand than hers. When Benson came by with a quarter pineapple—which Christoph wasn’t conscious enough to eat—Sabine gripped the doctor’s elbow.

  “He can’t walk like this,” she said.

  “He won’t have to. We received word this morning to stay where we are. The other unit is meeting us here.”

  “Thank God. How soon?”

  “Soon.”

  A thought came to her, and she checked to make sure Rose wasn’t within hearing distance. “Benson, do you know a soldier named Opiyo? He would be in his early twenties, I think.”

  His gaze was steady and gave nothing away. “Rose’s friend?”

  “They were abducted together. Many years ago.”

  “I know him.”

  Sabine lowered her voice. “Will he be there today?”

  “The last I heard he was somewhere far, perhaps Sudan.”

  She wasn’t sure if it was disappointment or relief that she felt, and Benson’s expression stayed carefully neutral.

  “He is Kony’s aide-de-camp, you know. His personal envoy.”

  She realized the implication in Benson’s statement: that if Lily and Ocen had managed to find Opiyo, they would have met the rebel leader himself. Her skin went clammy, and she swallowed a surge of nausea.

  “Come,” Benson said. “I’ll show you where to get water. You’ll need to keep your husband hydrated.”

  Stay present, she told herself firmly. Christoph needs you now. She asked Rose to look after Christoph for a moment then followed the doctor through the brush. It was the first time she’d really seen the layout of the unit. Strange, how small it was—she estimated no more than twenty soldiers, some building shelters with tarps, others organizing supplies. She saw two boys swinging pangas at tree trunks. The notches, she realized, formed a kind of ladder. Lookout stations. She recognized the two rebels who’d found them in the shack—her skin crawled at the hard stare the taller one gave her as she passed.

  Benson led her to a creek that had been dammed up with a plastic sheet set with rocks. He dipped a jerry can into the slow-swirling pool and let it fill.

  “He’ll die, won’t he?” she said quietly. “If the other unit doesn’t have medication.”

  Benson lifted his head and handed her the jerry can. It was heavier than she’d expected.

  “I’m afraid that is the most likely outcome, yes.”

  She nodded, mute, trying to blink back the tears that blurred her vision.

  He considered a moment, then gently took the water jug back from her. A few drops splattered her wrist. “Here, let me.”

  She heard some commotion behind them and turned to see more rebels stepping out from the tall grass, their faces as sober and unyielding as those that greeted them.

  “The other group is arriving,” Benson said. “I should find their medic.”

  Sabine had a jolt of fear for Christoph’s safety; what if the new commander saw no use in a gravely ill prisoner? Rose alone might not be able to protect him. Sabine wouldn’t be any greater defense, but she knew she had to be there, to put herself between Christoph and any threat, physically if necessary.

  “I have to be with him,” she said over her shoulder, leaving Benson and the water jug at the little pool. The new rebels were already integrating into the camp. As she hurried between tarps and cooking fires, Sabine was surprised to see women and children walking freely—some of the women even carried guns. Soldiers’ wives, she realized: families. She saw one woman with a rifle slung across her chest and a baby tied to her back.

  A moment later Sabine emerged from the thicket into the small clearing where the captives were gathered. Her heart pounded to see three new soldiers here, too, but they appeared to be ushering more prisoners into the circle, not attending to those who were already there. The number of new captives was astonishing. There had to be dozens, and more appeared every second from the surrounding foliage: skinny children with torn clothes and grave faces. Sabine saw Rose kneeling by Christoph’s side, and she hastened over.

  “He is bad,” Rose murmured.

  “The doctor will ask about medicine,” Sabine said under her breath. “But we can’t let them see how sick he is.” She cast furtive glances about the clearing, studying the newly appeared rebels for signs of menace. “If they think he’s too much of a burden, they might…”

  She stopped. Her voice: gone. The arrivals had parted—briefly and casually, in the normal course of being shuffled about—and she’d seen … What had she seen?

  A vision. Her younger self: dark haired and uncertain, in dirty jeans and a dark T-shirt. Precisely how she must have looked that morning in Lalibela when the men confronted her outside her tent, a memory that came back to her with astounding lucidity. The ghostly girl’s pale expression had been an exact reflection of her own twenty-two-year-old fear dimly seen behind a curtain of false bravery. How vivid and strange it was! She gave her head a little shake; was she feverish? She touched the back of her fingers to the underside of her jaw. Craning her neck, she looked again. The crowd opened.

  It was no vision.

  “Lily,” she whispered, the ground tilting, her hands grasping—fumbling; she heard her own voice, as if from far away, echoing, “Lily!”

  Her younger self looked up; their eyes met. Everything else fell away.

  The force with which their bodies came together—Sabine could not wrap her arms hard enough, or tightly enough; she pressed Lily’s head against her chest, pressed her mouth against Lily’s hair, smelled the sweat and oil and a faint trace of soap; her fingers clutched at Lily’s body, her shoulder and arm and the narrow waist—real, real, all real, flesh and muscle and bone. Both of them were crying. Sabine felt the shudders of Lily’s sobs, and the wetness that seeped through to Sabine’s collarbone. She couldn’t stop saying her name, “Lily, Lily…”

  “I have to sit down,” Lily said, half gasping. “I’m—oh, God.” She crumpled out of Sabine’s embrace and sat in a broken heap on the ground, choked for breath, ruddy cheeks and puffy eyes, grimacing in pain.

  “What is it? Talk to me. What did they do to you?” She was seized with horror—a pretty mzungu girl, a prize—but then she saw Lily clutching her foot. Her ankle was bound in a crude splint made of two semiflat pieces of wood cinched with torn cloth around the lower calf and under the heel. She wore no shoe, and her ankle was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Slowly the rest of the world came trickling back to Sabine: where they were. How they came to be here. How far away from safe. Sabine knelt. “Is it broken?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lily said. Her hair fell in greasy tangles across her face. “It must just be a bad sprain. But I’ve been walking on it for days, there’s no ice or anything.”

  “There’s a doctor here. Benson. He’ll figure something out.” Hushed, she added, “Is there anywhere else they hurt you?”

  Lily shook her head, and the relief Sabine felt made her lose her breath in gratitude.

  Lily noticed Christoph’s prone figure. “Christoph! Why is he here? Oh my God, is he—?”

  “Malaria.” She squeezed her niece’s thin shoulder. “But he’s alive. We’re all alive. And now we’re together.”

  Tears made clean passage down Lily’s earth-streaked cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said, hiccuping into a sob. “I was so selfish. I can’t believe I thought—I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry…”

  “Shh.” She held Lily’s face to her chest again, this time softly, as if cradling a baby. Sabine’s eyes—stinging and wet—lifted, and she blinked into the sky, so piercing swee
t above them. When she looked levelly again, across the clearing, she saw him.

  That face.

  Like he’d walked right off the page and into this day.

  CHAPTER 24

  ROSE

  January 7

  At first Rose didn’t understand what she was seeing. There was Lily, just as she remembered the American girl—though more ragged now, her body held at sharper angles—and the tearful reunion between aunt and niece. Rose watched their embrace as if through a veil. Their emotion was profound and palpable, and yet Rose felt nothing, no stirring inside her chest.

  She had made up her mind the first night: she was already dead. Nothing could move her.

  But then Sabine’s face had lifted, a shadow crossed it, and Rose followed her eyes to the figure that had just emerged from the grass. Broad shoulders and a familiar red T-shirt and dark jacket and—there, a glint of copper around the wrist. His lip was cut and his cheek bruised, and when he saw her, his eyes became wide and full. She stood up, swayed; tried to take a step forward but couldn’t—her knees buckled and she was crouched, her hand on the ground, her breath gone. She found his face again. Ocen.

  He rushed toward her, but in an instant two soldiers leapt in front of him, rifles aimed, one shouting in Acholi, “Stop where you are! Stay back!”

  Palms raised, he halted, surrendering, though Rose could see his confusion and desperation. He sank to his knees. They looked at each other across the space. The air felt as impenetrable as stone. She witnessed Lily and Sabine next to her, holding onto one another. The distance between Rose and Ocen was a thousand miles.

  “It is you,” he said softly.

  Just to see him alive—a kind of lightness had entered her heart. She thought: now I can die, because I have seen his face again.

  “Did you find him?” she asked. “Is he here?” There was no need to say his name; they both knew whom she meant.

  He shook his head once, shortly. “They have told me nothing.” Without drifting from her gaze, he spoke to one of the rebels who stood between them. “Let me go to her. Please.”

  But the guard’s tongue was sharp. “She belongs to Kony. She is one of his.”

  Ocen’s eyes never left hers, though she wished they had, so that she would not have to see the shock there. He said nothing, asked no questions—but the question didn’t need to be said aloud. Neither did her answer.

  She didn’t know how long they sat like that, unspeaking, the few meters between them stretched into an entire country, a landscape for which there was no map. Her neck ached from the weight of the jerry can, but there were other, greater aches that consumed her. Vaguely she sensed things happening around them. The rest of the captives settled in, cautious not to breach the invisible territory that at once connected the silent pair and kept them apart. An atlas of lies, of loss, of love, of all the things they could not say, all the futures that were not theirs to hope for. Benson appeared with a jerry can of water and a packet of tablets that he administered to Christoph, who remained unconscious. Sabine and Lily spoke to one another in urgent, hushed voices, talking over one another, filling in the gaps of their journeys. Nicia, Sincere’s daughter, was there as well, watching on silently. Rose saw and heard everything, and she saw and heard nothing at all, nothing but his face, his breath. Eventually the rebels decided they could let down their rifles, that Ocen understood the rules.

  At last she broke the quiet. “I lied to you.”

  “Not only about Opiyo.” His voice was strained, and he looked away. “But I understand.”

  She kept her hand as still as a stone, though it wanted to be a bird, aching to fly toward him. “I kept secrets.”

  His eyes glistened. A muscle in his neck strained. “I chose not to ask. There were things I didn’t want to know.”

  “I had a son,” she said.

  “You forget: I have seen the scars.”

  The gentleness in his tone felt like an offering, and she clung to it gratefully. Though they stayed rooted to their places at opposite ends of this dangerous, uncharted topography, the words that traveled between them began to find safe passage. She explained how Sabine and Christoph and she had come together to find them, the clues that had led them to Arua and Lakwali, the bus crash at Faradje, the attack at Nagero.

  “We were with the unit at Faradje,” Ocen said. “They kept us hidden in a storeroom. They’d killed the farmer and his family who lived there.”

  His face was so haunted. The things he would have seen.

  “But why?” she asked. “What made you think you would reach him?”

  Ocen glanced over to where Lily and Sabine had moved, a dozen meters across the clearing; together they ministered to Christoph. It didn’t matter anyway if they were within hearing distance; they couldn’t understand Acholi. “Lily’s conviction was … contagious. She made me believe.” He paused. “I wanted to believe.”

  Slowly, carefully, as if uncoiling a length of rope, Ocen described the events of the previous months, casting all the way back to July, when he first became Lily’s regular boda. She was eager and earnest, he said, and kind. After a while it became easy for him to talk about his experiences of the war, the death of his parents, and the abduction of his twin. She had lost her mother, too, and in a way shared some part of his grief. Rose listened to him speaking, his low and rhythmic voice, and burned with jealousy for the closeness he’d shared with the American girl. But she did not interrupt.

  He said that Lily first learned Opiyo was still alive at the end of October, when Miriam and the other former abductees came to the rehabilitation center. Lily recognized Opiyo’s name and told Ocen at once.

  “That was the night you never came,” Rose said.

  “I was angry. And confused.”

  Shame made her look down.

  He went on, explaining how Lily came up with the plan to rescue Opiyo; he would never have thought it possible, but she was convinced that her whiteness would be a shield. She went over and over the story of the Italian nun and Ugandan schoolteacher who rescued a hundred girls kidnapped at Aboke. Miriam gave precise descriptions of the secret LRA camps in and around Garamba, sharing details with Lily that she hadn’t told the UPDF during her interrogations. Lily cross-referenced everything with Google maps and the old atlas at the National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre. And at the end of the day, Lily told Ocen, if they got themselves within a close enough radius, the rebels would be just as likely to find them first.

  But there was something else.

  “Juba,” Ocen said.

  “The peace talks,” Rose murmured.

  “Yes. Lily was following the negotiations very closely. There was still some hope that a deal would be reached. The government had come up with an agreement that would offer amnesty to all rebels not included in the International Criminal Court indictments. If Kony signed, Opiyo would return home. He would be free.”

  “But Kony did not show,” Rose said, remembering. “When the team went to the assembly point at Ri-Kwangba. They waited for him for two days, but he never came.”

  “We heard the news on the last day of November. The government had repeatedly said that it was the LRA’s last chance for peace. There were rumors circulating that Museveni had already put together a plan B, and he would act quickly.”

  “Operation Lightning Thunder.”

  “We didn’t know how quickly. Lily was leaving Uganda in three weeks. There was no time.”

  They were meticulous in their preparations, he said. No one could know. Not Lily’s family, not the expats in Kitgum. Not Rose.

  “When I knew you had left together, I thought there was something else between you,” Rose said.

  Ocen looked down. “A part of me wanted you to think that.”

  His bracelet caught the light. It was late afternoon now; evening would fall soon.

  “Paddy told me that you had ideas about money,” Rose said. “I took this to mean that Lily was paying you for your assistance, th
e way I earned from Christoph.”

  “Lily gave me enough to purchase the boda, so that we could travel without worry. I planned to sell it again when I returned to Kitgum, so that I could help my cousin.”

  She forced herself to ask: “You had no plans for a dowry?”

  For a long time Ocen was quiet, and Rose wondered if this was meant as a kindness. Maybe it was better not to hear it aloud. His posture flagged. When he finally spoke, his voice was pained. “If I did not return, it wouldn’t matter. And if I did, it would only be with Opiyo.” He hesitated. “I thought you would choose him. You had always chosen him.”

  She saw them both before her: the smiling twin and the shy twin; blessed by jogi, two halves of one whole. Her love for one felt impossibly interlinked with her love for the other. Opiyo’s cunning; Ocen’s gentleness. Both had saved her. The boy who kissed her by the river and stole rations so that she would not starve; the man who took her back, who tethered her to earth when she watched the airplanes rise and disappear into the boundless blue. Ocen could not have given her what Opiyo had: as a boy he’d been too sensitive, so easily swayed. But Opiyo couldn’t accept her once she’d belonged to another. If it had been him waiting in Kitgum, he would have cast her aside. Ocen forgave.

  “I choose you,” she said.

  Even as she said it, she knew it was too late, and in Ocen’s eyes, she saw that he knew, too. There was no afterward, there was no more choice. Their future lay among the rebels; their fate would be chosen for them.

  “Your son,” Ocen said. “What was his name?”

  She thought of the name Kony had given the boy, a name that meant nothing, just a collection of letters, strange syllables. Her child had worn the name like a costume that didn’t fit. His secret name—the one she’d heard as clearly as if a bell had been rung the first instant he’d come into the world, when she held him to her breast while bombs began to fall—that was the name that meant everything.

  “Adenya,” she said.

  A smile crossed Ocen’s face, authentic and unfiltered and too brief. “Adenya,” he echoed.