The Atlas of Forgotten Places

by Jenny D. Williams

  “You had malaria,” Sabine said. “You’ve been out since morning.”

  “Where’s Rose?”

  “They took her away. Kony is coming. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  His arms trembled, the muscles too weak, and he lay back down and closed his eyes. For a long moment no one spoke.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” she said. “You should rest.”

  “Paper.”

  “What?”

  “I need paper.”

  Sabine looked around uselessly. “I don’t…”

  “Here,” Lily said, pulling a piece of paper, folded into quarters, out of the back pocket of her jeans.

  Sabine looked at her in surprise. “Where did you get that?”

  “It’s a blank page from my sketchbook. I was going to try to send a message, but they took my pen.”

  Christoph struggled to prop himself up again, and Sabine helped him scoot a few feet to the right where he could lean against the trunk of a tree. She watched, baffled, as he unfolded Lily’s page and smoothed out the creases against his jeans. She glanced up as a guard narrowed his eyes and began to stalk toward them.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered to Christoph. He didn’t reply but folded the page diagonally until the sides aligned, then carefully ripped off the leftover rectangle. Then he folded the triangle in half again so that the two acute angles touched. She noticed the raw blisters on his palm—from carrying the heavy tusks—and felt her own hands throb in sympathy.

  The guard was coming closer; he was almost upon them. Sabine’s heart raced. Christoph stayed completely focused on his task: folding and pressing and unfolding, making new triangles and squares and diamonds. “Christoph…”

  The rebel loomed over them, his heavy rubber boots quashing a few last blades of grass as he stood, the barrel of his rifle aimed at Christoph’s busy hands with an unmistakable message. But Christoph was already finished: he spread his palms to reveal his creation.

  It was a bird. Sabine was unsettled by the sharpness of the angles, the precision of the lines—and yet the creature it was meant to represent was manifestly visible, the beak and tail and two folded wings.

  Christoph lifted his palm toward the rebel. “Crane.” He gave a small smile. “Owalo.”

  The guard hesitated for a few seconds, then took the paper bird delicately, pinching the very tip of one of the wings between his thumb and index finger. “Owalo,” he echoed.

  As the rebel examined the fragile object, Sabine noticed the slenderness of his waist, the bagginess of his uniform. He had a long scar running from his neck up in front of his ear across his cheek, which from a distance made him look fierce—but up close she saw how young he was. He couldn’t be older than fifteen. Around his right wrist he wore a fraying cloth band. Perspiration stippled his forehead.

  “Owalo,” he said again, this time nodding toward the patch on the shoulder of his uniform. When Sabine studied the image closer, she saw an intricately embroidered insignia with two green palm leaves under a crested crane. The boy tucked the paper bird into his pocket and walked away.

  “I remember that story,” Lily said quietly. “The girl from Hiroshima. We read it in school. A thousand paper cranes is supposed to grant you a wish.”

  Christoph’s eyes followed the young rebel as he settled back into position on the periphery. “Let’s hope one crane is enough.”

  * * *

  Christoph continued to recover throughout the evening. Sometime after dark had consumed the last remnants of daylight, Benson came by to check on him as well as all the new arrivals and brought clean materials to replace Lily’s splint. He had Sabine hold the flashlight while he laid two sections of a dried palm frond stem on the ground; they were stiff as wood and cut to just the right length for a brace. He put a strip of cloth along the concave insides, then set each vertically against either side of Lily’s ankle and bound them together with medical tape. Lily winced at his touch but did not cry.

  “Keep it elevated,” Benson said. “Tomorrow the pain will be less.”

  “How’s Rose?” Sabine asked.

  “You should put her from your minds.” He walked off before she could say more, leaving them once again in utter darkness, aside from the stars spread lavishly across the night sky. Sabine couldn’t pull her eyes from this astounding cosmological display: so much vaster and deeper and more dazzlingly real than anything she thought she’d ever seen. Or perhaps it was that as long as she was looking up, she would not have to cry.

  “She’ll be there tomorrow,” Christoph said. “She must.”

  “Maybe we can convince Kony to let her go,” Lily said.

  “Never.” Ocen’s voice came as a surprise to Sabine, who hadn’t realized he was still awake. The sadness in his tone was excruciating; it resonated with surrender. “He would rather see her die.”

  No one answered.

  Eventually, one by one, occupied by their troubled imaginations, they drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  The rebels came to fetch them in the morning. The Congolese children watched silently as four soldiers—including the boy with the wrist band and scar; the three others looked almost as young—surrounded Sabine, Christoph, Lily, and Ocen and prodded them forward. Christoph, still a little dizzy, leaned on Sabine’s shoulder, and Ocen walked a half step behind Lily.

  It was a blue-sky day, the temperature mild. Birdsong drifted from the forest depths. They were led out of the clearing but away from the main camp where Benson had brought Sabine the day before to fetch water. Sabine had a sudden image of getting led off into the bush just to be shot. Maybe Kony was never coming at all, there was no third unit, they’d have no chance to plead their case. The end would be unremarkable: a branch shorn from a tree, a plant crushed underfoot, a flock of birds taking flight. No one would ever find their bodies. It had happened a thousand times before; it would happen a thousand times again.

  Just as desperation overcame her, they came into a clearing. She looked around for any sign of rebels, but it was empty aside from banana leaves that had been spread on the ground; in the center was a basin filled with water, and next to it a small bar of soap.

  One of the guards barked out an order, and Ocen translated: “We must wash first.” He paused. “Before we meet him.”

  The four of them shuffled awkwardly around the plastic basin. Ocen was the first to kneel. He splashed some water on his face and rubbed the soap into a lather between his hands. His movements were graceful and slow, and Sabine felt distinctly like she was witnessing an act of devotion. When he was done, he rose and let his hands dry in the warm air. Lily knelt and followed the same procedure, though Sabine saw her hands were shaking. Then Christoph. Then it was her turn. She bent on one knee and cupped her hands in the water that was now not entirely clean. In the glassy surface she saw the silhouette of her face and shoulders against the brightness of the sky. The reflection was too dark to make out her own features. She closed her eyes and brought the water toward her, felt its cool touch. There was something strangely sacred about the action; her hands possessed a profound serenity that originated outside her body. When she was finished, she rose, not with a sense that she had been cleansed, but clarified.

  They were led away again along a narrow path through the brush, Sabine in the front behind two guards, followed by Lily, Christoph, and Ocen; the last two guards brought up the rear. After a few dozen yards, the rebels halted. Sabine craned her neck to see around them, but there was nothing ahead, only more trees. The foliage was dense and tangled. Why had they stopped? Her panic returned.

  The soldier in front of her turned; it was the boy with the scar. He glanced around as if nervous. The rebel next to him whispered something in Acholi, and the boy made a quick movement to readjust his rifle and pull something out of his front shirt pocket.

  It was a tiny strip of paper—smaller than the length and breadth of his finger—and Sabine recognized the stiffness and slightly off-white color
as that of Lily’s journal. She thought of the crane Christoph had given him last night. As she took the slip, she saw that something was written there: a name, Okwera Emmanuel, in clumsy lettering. She looked up in confusion and saw his eyes wet with tears.

  “If you return to Uganda,” he said in English, “please find my mother and father. Tell them I am alive.”

  The soldier behind him stepped forward and handed her a second strip of paper. Another name.

  “Please,” the second soldier said quietly. “My parents. Tell them I miss them.”

  Sabine’s eyes pinched with tears. From the left, out of the thicket, more soldiers appeared, furtive and cautious, each with a roughly edged rectangle bearing his name. Some slips had two names or more. A boy would emerge, hand over his paper, whisper a please or thank you or apwoyo, and vanish back into the bush. Much of the handwriting looked the same, as if a small number of rebels had taken dictation for the others.

  When the last soldier had come and left, Sabine was left with a palm full of paper, thin and crumpled as packing confetti. Did any of the names she held match the ones on the banner back in Kitgum? She closed her hand around the pieces and tucked them into the tight front pocket of her jeans. The boy with the scar—Emmanuel, she thought firmly, that’s his name: Emmanuel—inhaled sharply and gave a quick nod.

  “It is time,” he said.

  They walked forward.

  After a few minutes, they came to a new clearing. As Sabine followed the two guards out from the brush, she felt her stomach plummet at the sight of a group of heavily armed soldiers, unsmiling, standing in a row behind an empty brown plastic chair; they wore military fatigues and an assortment of berets and wide-brimmed caps, all in shades of camouflage and green. They held their weapons loosely in front of their chests. Surreally, Sabine saw Ocen among them, then quickly corrected herself: Opiyo. His eyes were fixed on the approaching group but showed no sign of emotion. Sabine’s foot caught on an exposed tree root and she stumbled; Christoph’s hand steadied her.

  Behind the soldiers was a mud-and-thatch hut in poor condition and several bamboo lean-tos that appeared to have been hastily erected. A handful of young children stood shyly around the lean-tos, and two women, each carrying a baby on her back, went about domestic chores: one fanning the flames of a small cooking fire and the other swishing laundry in a plastic basin filled with soapy water. Neither looked up at the captives’ arrival, but the woman at the fire did cast a glance at another figure, who was seated some distance from both the lean-tos and the soldiers, her knees folded to the side, her left arm resting lightly in her lap, a single rebel standing guard behind her. Sabine’s throat closed.

  “Rose,” Christoph said, his voice choked. Rose kept her face in profile; she would not meet their eyes.

  The guards led the four of them to two makeshift bamboo benches that were arranged side by side facing the brown chair. Sabine and Lily sat together on one bench; Christoph and Ocen, on the second. Opiyo’s face was still hard, his stance unwavering. The soldier next to him casually waved away a fly.

  From the doorway of the hut, a figure appeared. He paused a moment in the sunlight; unlike the other rebels, he was dressed in all white—white T-shirt, white pants: brilliant, blinding white—and wearing, bizarrely, flip-flops. He had no hat; his fuzzy black hair was shorn close to the scalp. His eyebrows were faint, his mustache trimmed, and his chin showed the shadow of new stubble. The rest of his jaw and neck were smooth-shaven. Sabine recognized him instantly.

  This was Joseph Kony.

  His expression as he looked upon his visitors seemed to Sabine to be the same as in the photograph she’d seen hanging in the National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre in Kitgum: somewhere between puzzled and concerned, a seemingly guileless display of wonder and worry. There was no savagery or madness in his face or bearing, no ruthlessness, not even a hint of rage. In fact, what Sabine first felt upon laying eyes on this man—messiah, monster, myth—was an overwhelming sense of ordinariness. Here was a middle-aged man of average build, with pleasant features that one might even call handsome. He walked slowly, without strutting, and took a seat in the brown plastic chair, crossed one leg over the other, and leaned forward, holding his knee with both hands. He was surprisingly close; Sabine could see a small cut on the hollow of his left ankle, just starting to heal. Finally he spoke.

  “Would you like tea?”

  His voice was soft, slightly hoarse, and impeccably polite. He didn’t wait for a response before calling over to the two women in Acholi, gesturing with slender fingers; a silver wristwatch glinted in the light. Without a word the woman doing laundry pushed herself to standing and went around the back of the lean-to, disappearing from sight.

  They waited in silence. Sabine’s heart pounded. Her hand found Lily’s. A moment later the woman returned with a blue thermos and four tin mugs; she set them on the ground before the benches and knelt to serve the tea. Reluctantly releasing Lily’s hand, Sabine took the mug offered to her and held it awkwardly above her lap. The heat stung her blistered palms.

  “Please,” Kony said earnestly. “Drink.”

  She dutifully brought the mug to her lips. The tea was the sweetest she’d ever tasted. Beside her, Lily did the same.

  Kony leaned back and broke into a smile. Sabine noticed a small gap in his upper teeth, from misalignment or a broken tooth. It gave him a weirdly jolly demeanor.

  “It is good that you have come,” he said. “You are very welcome here with us, the Lord’s Resistance Movement.” He gestured toward the structures behind him. “It is a shame, you see us in such a bad situation. The UPDF is making our lives very difficult. Even me, Joseph Kony, I am escaping only with my life.”

  No one responded. This was not a dialogue, Sabine knew; it was a speech. His tone became more serious.

  “Maybe you believe you know something about us. About the war we are fighting.” He pursed his lips. “I read the newspapers, I listen to the radio. I know what they are saying about me. They call me a terrorist. They say I am evil. Fundamentalist, madman, demon … They say I am killing only innocents, that we took twenty thousand children from their homes. Eh!” He spread his hands. “Where would we keep twenty thousand children in the bush? These children here,” he waved vaguely toward the lean-tos, “they are my own sons and daughters.”

  Several more young children appeared while others vanished into the trees, apparently bored. Sabine caught the eyes of a girl who looked to be about four; she had her fingers in her mouth, staring unabashedly at the mzungus. A slightly taller boy slapped at her hand until she turned and followed him into the brush.

  “They say that I cut off ears and noses and lips,” Kony went on. “But how can I cut off the ear of my brother? How can I harm my own people, the Acholi?”

  His fist cut swiftly through the air. “It is propaganda—this is all propaganda Museveni made. The UPDF is the one who is killing. The UPDF kills civilians and says it was LRA. But that one is not true. We were never there. We never did those things they say.”

  He was gesturing passionately now, punctuating his statements with a lifted hand, a pointed finger, as a preacher might during a sermon.

  “I am a freedom fighter. We are fighting for the freedom of our people. It is Museveni who put millions of Acholi into camps, where they suffered and died. It is Museveni who keeps the people penned up like cattle so he can steal their land.”

  Sabine recalled the truly horrendous conditions she witnessed in the camps around Kitgum—the tens of thousands of people crammed into a few square miles, the cholera outbreaks, the alcoholism and rape. People stripped of dignity and hope. And the land-grabbing was real—huge tracts of good farming and pasture land snatched up by outside interests while the owners remained trapped in the camps, unable to dispute those claims. She’d spoken with too many witnesses to LRA brutality to believe that part of Kony’s story, but as she listened, creeping into her mind was a new understanding. The camps—which, a
t the peak of the conflict, housed nearly two million people—were supposed to be temporary, but as the years went on, and the NGOs multiplied, it had become less and less urgent to find a solution. After the World Trade Center attack on September 11, Museveni’s government was rumored to be receiving fifty million dollars a year from the United States to fight the LRA “terrorists”; a large portion of that money likely never left Kampala, either by straight-out siphoning or through lucrative military equipment contracts. War was good business as long as the violence stayed in the hinterlands of the country, where Acholis were killing Acholis; they’d never voted for Museveni’s party anyway.

  Was Operation Lightning Thunder intended to end anything at all? The viciousness of Kony’s forces may have been the focus of media attention—but Sabine had heard plenty of stories of atrocities committed by the UPDF. And Museveni’s political maneuvers were killing the north slowly, genocide by economic suffocation, while the government benefited financially and Museveni’s moral shortcomings were given a blind eye by Western powers.

  And suddenly it was this distant, pale specter of the West that loomed sharper and more horrifying than anything else. Those unbloodied hands gesturing vaguely around long, polished tables, claiming the role of the savior one minute and ushering in new waves of calculated, convenient complicities the next.

  Abruptly Kony’s manner changed again: now he was chillingly calm.

  “Colonel Otim says that you are spies. He says you gave away our position to the enemy.”

  “No,” Lily blurted. “That’s not it at all. You don’t understand.”

  Sabine’s heart nearly stopped. “Lily, quiet,” she said under her breath.

  But Kony furrowed his eyebrows and said, “Please, continue.”

  Lily’s voice was trembling. “We were looking for Opiyo. Ocen’s brother.” Opiyo’s expression stayed unreadable. “We just wanted to find him, to bring him back home to Kitgum.”

  Kony listened intently. “How did you find our camp?”