The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  Rose felt the looming presence of a guard overhead.

  “Get up,” the guard said. “Follow me.”

  Ocen’s eyes became wide and worried. “Where are you taking her? Why can’t she stay? I gave my word not to approach!”

  “She must be kept separate.”

  Rose stood stiffly as Sabine and Lily came over, the girl hobbling on her injured foot.

  “What’s happening, Rose?” Sabine asked. “What’s he saying?”

  “Separate,” the guard said in English.

  “But why?” Sabine said. “She’s been with us for days.”

  The guard shrugged. “He made the order.”

  “Who?” Lily pressed.

  “The chairman.” The guard’s expression didn’t change. “He arrives tomorrow.”

  Familiar words skipped among the assembled: Lapwony is coming, the soldiers said, Baba will be here. The names the man had chosen for himself were generous: teacher, father.

  “The chairman…?” Lily glanced at Ocen.

  “Kony,” he said.

  Rose saw the horrified faces of Lily and Sabine; she sensed Ocen watching her as the young rebel led her away into the trees. But she did not speak. She felt peaceful and calm. She kept thinking of Ocen’s smile, the way he said her son’s name—the shape of the word, from his mouth: it sounded like prayer.

  * * *

  She heard the whispers pass by and around her all evening and into the night.

  Baba Kony is coming here. Where shall he sleep? The old Mbororo hut, the one we used last time, are the walls still intact? Maybe the Sudanese are with him, to collect the ivory … Will they take supplies from Khartoum? I used six magazines at Nagero, now I have only four left! Eh, six magazines! The battle was not so long … I used only three. How many wives are with him? What about this one here?

  There were stories that Kony had sixty wives or more, but Rose knew the number was much smaller than that—a dozen at most. He had chosen each one with care. When he selected Rose from the other girls, he’d touched her cheek with his thumb and said, “Don’t be afraid. God has many plans for you.”

  Eh, this one, a guard said. He will decide when he arrives.

  Is he with the large group? one asked. With one hundred more fighters, we will be strong.

  Eh, the large group comes later, another replied. Now Lapwony comes with his personal escort only.

  The High Protection Unit, the other said with awe.

  Then they spoke of Kony’s bodyguards, their bravery, the way they would spread out like a spiderweb around their leader, alert to any danger: the slightest threat at one side would cause the whole web to shift. Kony was always in the middle, unreachable. The UPDF would never reach him by ground, the soldiers bragged among themselves, and an aerial assault would never take them by surprise.

  Rose ignored all that was said. She sat where she’d been brought, beneath a makeshift shelter of broken branches and fallen palm fronds and two green plastic tarps; she ate from the pot placed before her, though she could not taste the food. Something had caught fire inside her: a minuscule spark, grown to a smolder. The longer she sat—the darker the night became, the colder the wind—the closer she cupped her thoughts around this tiny flame, fanning it with the breath of possibility. She knew what she had to do. It was the only way to be free. She saw this now: clear as rain.

  She just had to wait for the right moment, and she could be with her son again. In the last pure place.

  * * *

  Sometime in the night she heard rustling outside the shelter. The beam of a flashlight bobbed at her feet and then shone directly in her face. Blinded, she squinted and shielded her eyes. The beam lowered again to the ground, and she blinked away the blackness.

  For a few seconds all she could make out was a looming figure crouched before her. Slowly her eyes adjusted, and she took in the military fatigues, the black gumboots, the rifle. The man rose to standing and turned his back before she could see his face—but she’d already recognized the breadth of his shoulders, the bones of his wrists, the sound of his breathing.

  “Apwoyo, Opiyo.”

  He halted a few feet away, his back to her, saying nothing.

  “Will you speak?” she said.

  He’d kept the flashlight on and aimed low, so that the ambient brightness showed the stiff folds of the tarp that shielded them on three sides. From beyond the shelter she heard the muted sounds of a guerilla camp at night: hushed voices, the crack of twigs, sporadic insect song.

  “Please,” she said.

  Still he did not turn. His voice was cold. “He will see you tomorrow.”

  “Is that all you came to tell me?”

  “I had to check to make sure it was you. I did not believe Lieutenant Ochola.”

  “Now do you believe?”

  He snapped around. “What is Ocen doing here? Why did you bring him?”

  In the dimness his features were indistinguishable from his brother’s, and she was taken aback; in her mind he hadn’t aged, he was the same as the last time she’d seen him, four years before. This was the boy who’d kissed her among the maize fields. The boy who bound her feet with banana leaves. The man who led her into womanhood, though they were both children still.

  “Ocen did not come with me,” she said. “He came with the American girl. They were searching for you. They wanted to take you home.”

  He raised his lip, rested a hand on his weapon. “I am a captain in the Movement, Lapwony’s personal envoy. I do not need rescuing. I will return to Acholiland when the government has returned what was stolen from us. Our land, our wealth, our culture.”

  “That is rhetoric. The strength of the Movement diminishes every day. Operation Lightning Thunder has scattered you. Museveni will not rest.”

  “Neither will we.”

  “Their strikes have made you weak. How many fighters are left? Three hundred? Four? You are too few.”

  Opiyo cut his hand through the air. “The spirits protect us.”

  “Spirits,” she scoffed. “When Kony tracks the position of the enemy by satellite and claims to have learned it from a voice in his head—that is not God speaking. That is his madness.”

  His voice became low and deadly. “Careful, Rose.”

  Suddenly she felt very tired. It didn’t matter: she would soon be at peace. She leaned back against the tree trunk, brought her knees to her chest. “What will happen to me tomorrow?”

  Opiyo shined the light at her missing arm. “It depends on whether the chairman believes you can still be of use to the cause.”

  “My companions?”

  “The foreigners mean nothing to him.”

  She expected no different, and yet the sadness she felt took her breath away.

  “And Ocen?” she said at last. “What will be his fate?”

  Opiyo looked away, but not before she saw a shadow of emotion cross his face. He was not stone after all. “He is too soft for this life. He would not survive.”

  “Release him,” she said. “It is within your power.”

  “Then I would be too soft.”

  “Go together. Escape. Leave this life behind.” He eyed her skeptically. “There have been other defectors, Opiyo. They are given amnesty by the government. The clans are performing mato oput.”

  Opiyo squatted before her so that their eyes were level. “We cannot be cleansed, even by the bitter root.”

  “Forgiveness is there,” she said. But he knew her too well, he could see through the plea. She thought of the words whispered behind her back—killer, rebel, whore—and the hostile looks flung her way when Christoph couldn’t see. Still she insisted, “You can return.”

  He smiled a humorless smile and traced his finger along the ground where the beam of the flashlight shone. She made out the number eight, followed by a seven. “That is the number of people I have killed.”

  All those bodies—stillness. “You had no choice.”

  Opiyo brought his hands toge
ther. “Last week we met three women crossing a road. They begged us to let them go, but the spirits had already spoken.” His tone was even, matter-of-fact. “‘The lips that would denounce us must be cut off. The ears that would hear our secrets must be slashed. The eyes that would spy on us must be gouged…’”

  “Stop,” she said quietly. “Please.”

  “Such orders are nothing new,” he went on, “as you must recall. But the spirits weren’t finished. ‘Those who beg in a foreign tongue must eat the flesh of their betrayal.’”

  Her stomach churned, and she suppressed a shudder. “You are a good man underneath.”

  “I was a good man,” he said sharply. “Until you gave yourself to him. Until you bore his son.”

  “Your son,” she whispered.

  Opiyo’s lips opened as if to speak, but nothing came out; not even breath. For an instant she saw the hardness vanish, and his face was open and new. She could see him thinking back, trying to remember—was it possible? In the bush, the months blurred together, one upon the next; she could see him calculating, wondering how she could be sure …

  He stood abruptly. “You lie.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut so that the tears would not be released.

  His heavy footsteps started for the exit. “I’ll hear no more.”

  “Do you remember how we used to meet at the river in Kitgum at midnight?” she said softly. “We stole candles from the teacher so that we could find our way in the dark.”

  She heard his footfalls pause.

  “You’d take your slingshot and shoot bats by moonlight,” she went on. “You did it so that I would be impressed, so that I would let you kiss me.”

  She opened her eyes and saw his head move subtly to the right, as if the slow-moving river was there, reflecting a rippled canopy of stars. She saw the boy he’d been, the impish look in his eye when he stretched a pebble back in the band and let it loose—the twang of rubber, the thwipt of a direct hit.

  His grip tightened around his rifle.

  Without looking back he said, “I remember nothing of that life.”

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 25

  SABINE

  January 7

  After the guard took Rose from the clearing, Sabine stood, mute and dumb at the suddenness of what just occurred and how little power they had to stop it. The place where Rose had been sitting now felt jarringly empty. Sabine looked across at Ocen, who was slumped, his face in his hands, and then at Nicia, who was watching the place in the trees where Rose had disappeared, her young eyes bright with panic. Sabine felt Lily’s hand slip into her own and squeeze.

  “I’m afraid,” Lily whispered.

  Sabine squeezed back. “It’s going to be all right.”

  In the half hour since they were reunited, Sabine had stepped firmly into the role of guardian, however thin the solace was that she could offer. She’d listened in silence to Lily’s tearful accounting of the previous months—the revelation that Opiyo was still alive, the possibility of amnesty if Kony signed the peace agreement, the awful news when he failed to show at the assembly point at the end of November. The desperate last resort, the secrecy, the breathless journey across the border, the slightly disingenuous e-mails with Patrick. Everything Lily said confirmed what Sabine and Christoph and Rose had pieced together via her journal.

  “And the ivory?” Sabine asked.

  Lily’s confusion was answer enough. “What ivory?”

  There was more that the journal hadn’t revealed: the trek through Garamba, following Miriam’s directions and Lily’s maps; the first moment when Camp Boo came into view, the two lines of rebel soldiers that appeared from the foliage and surrounded them, rifles raised. At first, Lily said, everything went miraculously smoothly—after their initial skepticism, the rebels were courteous, treating them more as guests than captives; the soldiers seemed awed by Ocen’s mirror image of a man they all knew and feared, and Lily was given a loose freedom among the women and children. A meeting with Opiyo, Lily believed, was imminent.

  A week later, the first bombs fell. The rebels’ attitude toward Lily and Ocen turned mistrustful; they bound their hands and guarded them closely, even during the chaos of the UPDF’s aerial attacks. “They accused us of being spies,” Lily said, her eyes filling. “They thought we’d given away the location of the camp.” Just before the soldiers confiscated Lily’s backpack, she left the journal behind, hoping it would get found. “I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t even know what day it was. I thought it might still be before Christmas, and you wouldn’t even be worried yet…”

  As Lily spoke, Sabine’s heart twisted at the astounding scale of her niece’s audacity, the arrogance that had allowed her to claim Ocen’s cause as her own. Lily had seemed to view the war as a game—as something romantic and dangerous, a problem she could solve. It shamed Sabine to think that Lily was forming these ideas without Sabine noticing—yet what would she have said, if she’d known?

  When Lily’s story caught up with the present, Sabine detailed the chronology of their search in turn, the previous two weeks of panic and frustration and unexpected breakthroughs.

  “We can’t give up,” she told Lily. “The U.S. military, UPDF … they know we’re here. Christoph and I were able to make some calls at Nagero before the attack. They’re out there looking for us right now.”

  And in some strange way Sabine had begun to believe it: they were together, the seekers and the sought. Surely there was something powerful in this convergence. Benson’s appearance with antimalarial tablets seemed to confirm the changing of the tide toward a more hopeful outcome. After all, Sabine thought, Lily herself had been brought back from the dead; Christoph would recover; Opiyo was with Kony, somewhere far away …

  The illusion shattered the moment Rose vanished at the point of the rebel’s bayonet. Their group had come together only to be rent brutally apart.

  And the guard’s parting words. Kony was coming. They awaited his judgment.

  “What will they do to Rose?” Lily said. She hadn’t let go of Sabine’s hand.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Sabine repeated, though the conviction in her tone rang hollow.

  Lily’s eyes widened. “Opiyo—he’ll be there, too.”

  Sabine pulled her niece close and stroked her tangled hair. “All we can do is wait.”

  * * *

  In a few hours, Christoph’s breathing began to steady, and the worst of his fever seemed to pass. Ocen sat at Christoph’s side with Sabine and Lily, but he said nothing, his thoughts clearly elsewhere—with Rose, no doubt, and his brother, whom he would meet tomorrow for the first time in a decade. Sabine had been examining him surreptitiously throughout the afternoon, startled at how perfectly Lily had captured his likeness in such few strokes on the page. It was odd to be suddenly so near to him, this person for whom Lily had taken such an unfathomable risk. Sabine thought of all the ways she’d pictured him—as kidnapper, as lover, as assistant, as anonymous boda driver—and nothing, nothing came close to the unassuming young man before her. Why Ocen? He seemed almost random, an act of whimsical charity.

  Or—Sabine wondered—had Lily needed him more than he needed her?

  She looked at her niece’s troubled face, so young: so young and so lonely. At once she saw Hannah’s features stand out in bold relief: the constellation of freckles across the nose, the soft sculpted eyebrows, the shy prettiness Sabine had always pretended not to envy. A memory came back to her of Hannah at hospice, during those last draining days. Sabine had flown in from Tanzania when it became clear the end would come soon. She and Lily kept vigil at Hannah’s bedside, talking of silly things, or nothing at all. Sometime during that blur of hours—morning and night seemed one and the same—Lily left the room to pick up some food from the deli down the street, and Hannah reached out and gripped Sabine’s hand with surprising force. Sie weißt, Hannah breathed. She knows.

  Was weißt sie? Sabine said gently. Kno
ws what?

  Hannah coughed. The morning star, she said in English.

  Sabine thought of the fairy tale, the girl who flees the sun and the moon in search of her raven brothers. Hannah’s thoughts had become increasingly tangled, her mind muddled, and in Sabine’s exhausted state she only stroked her sister’s bony wrist and said, Yes, she knows. They all live happily ever after.

  Now, in a blaze of understanding, Sabine saw it in a different light.

  Morning star: in German, Morgenstern.

  She knows.

  Hannah had known about their grandfather’s dishonor, too. That was why she eloped, why she escaped to the States, why she stayed in Colorado, even after her marriage fell apart. She would have used their family history as a lesson for Lily—we must rise above the place we come from. With a jolt, Sabine saw herself from Lily’s perspective: evidence of the noble choice, sacrificing safety and comfort in the service of a grander ideal. When Sabine returned to Germany, Lily would not have seen it as defeat, but as quiet triumph. Kitgum was not the site of Sabine’s surrender, but the place where atonement could be made.

  How devastatingly wrong they all had been.

  Lily’s voice drifted in. “Aunt Sabine? Are you okay?”

  “I…” She took in the low dun grass stamped down in the clearing, the green brush at the edges, the tiny hovering gnats backlit by the sinking sun, the dozens and dozens of silent children under a dome of sky. She didn’t know what came next.

  Christoph coughed, and Sabine heard Ocen’s low voice: “He is waking.”

  She looked down and saw Christoph blinking. His eyes fell on Sabine’s face, then moved to Lily and Ocen. He turned questioningly back to Sabine, clearly discomposed. Sabine put her hand to his forehead. It was warm but not hot.

  “They’re real,” she said. “We’re all together now.”

  “Safe?”

  She stroked his hair away from his temple. “No.”

  He pushed himself up onto his elbows and glanced about the clearing. There were five rebels guarding them now instead of one, and they eyed the group of foreigners with obvious suspicion. As Christoph absorbed the changed scene, the solemn, scared faces of the abducted Congolese children looked at him, then away.