“I met a girl who lived here with you. With the LRA, I mean. In Garamba. She helped me with the locations. I never shared it with anyone, I swear.”
“What was her name, this girl who claimed to know us?”
Lily seemed to realize she was treading into dangerous territory. “I can’t remember.”
Kony turned to Sabine with a piercing gaze. “You came at a different time. After this one was already here.”
“She was missing, we had no idea what happened…” Sabine trailed off; where could she even begin? What was he accusing her of? Firmly, she said, “We didn’t come out here and track you down. We were at Nagero—your soldiers kidnapped us.”
Kony nodded slowly. “This girl, why is she so important to you?”
Sabine found herself choked up. It took a moment for her to get the words out. “She’s my sister’s daughter. She’s family.”
“Yes,” Kony exclaimed, growing animated. Sabine was relieved to have given a correct answer. “Family,” he repeated. “That is what I mean. The Acholi people, they are my family. And I see them suffering. I am fighting for them not to suffer. Museveni says I don’t want to talk peace, but that one is not true. We are separated from our Acholi family for too long here in the bush. It is not good for families to be separated.”
He turned at last to Ocen. “That is also why I understand your reasons for coming to find your brother. You can see he is here. You have found him.” His tone became smooth, as if giving instructions to a small child. “But I will tell you this: he has no wish to return to Uganda. None of us will come back—only when our cause succeeds, when we remove Museveni from power. Then we will return together, victorious, in the glory of God.”
He clasped his hands and looked between the captives. “Now, you all have your answer. It seems our business is concluded.”
Sabine’s temples tingled. Concluded? What did that mean?
“You will see for yourself,” he went on, “that I am not an evil man. The Somalis, they would keep you hostage and demand fifteen million dollars. In Sierra Leone they would cut out your intestines and make you eat them. We are not like that. These criminals, they are not people like us.”
He leaned back slightly in his chair and raised a finger. Opiyo bent his head, and Kony whispered something into his ear. Opiyo nodded and strode away from the chair, tapping one of Kony’s bodyguards to follow. They crossed the clearing and Opiyo murmured to the boy soldier with the scar—Emmanuel, Sabine thought faintly. Emmanuel kept his eyes down as he joined the two in approaching the benches.
“Up,” Emmanuel said softly. The bodyguard was not so gentle, prodding Christoph with the barrel of his rifle.
Sabine looked back and forth between the soldiers and Kony. “What’s happening?”
Kony flicked his hand. “I release you.”
“Release us…?” Now the bodyguard pressed his rifle hard against her ribs, and she was rising from her seat, fumbling to set the tea mug onto the bench; her knee jostled the bamboo and the mug tipped with a clatter, spilling liquid onto the grass. Lily bumped into her, and Sabine felt her niece’s hands gripping tightly at her waist. She heard Lily inhale sharply—her ankle, of course. Sabine nudged her shoulder under Lily’s armpit to help her walk. Christoph appeared on Lily’s other side. “Easy now,” he said. Emmanuel and the bodyguard were herding them from behind, pressing forward out of the clearing in the direction from where they entered.
In the confusion it took her a moment to realize they were only three.
She looked back; Ocen was still seated on the bench, his back to them. Opiyo stood with his hand clamped down on his twin’s shoulder. To the far right, Rose hadn’t moved from her place on the ground. It is not good for families to be separated …
“Ocen,” she said breathlessly. “Rose.”
A rifle pushed hard into her lower back. “They stay.”
She caught Kony’s eyes. His unblinking, unshakable calm.
“This is not your war,” he said.
It was happening too quickly: the steely jabs against her back, her own feet stumbling traitorously forward; Lily limping; even Christoph was pressed onward, onward, away from Ocen’s seated figure and Rose’s lowered head, her unmet eyes. The foliage came up on either side and the path narrowed; Sabine’s mind spun. The long green leaves brushed against their bodies and closed behind them. No chance to refuse; no final embrace. No good-bye.
* * *
Five pairs of feet moved methodically through the verdant undergrowth: swish, crack, crush, creak. Words did not exist in this universe. Everything around her seemed appallingly alive, heady, humming: the lush green plants, the whistling birds, the yellow grasshoppers that landed on her shirt, clinging with their tiny hooks until they sprang off again.
She knew she should be relieved. They were going home. Lily was safe; their ordeal was nearly over. But every step brought them farther from Rose, farther from Ocen. Any number of times she was seized by the conviction to go back—and in the next instant, she knew how futile it would be. Their return would save no one and would clinch their own doom. Even Christoph must have understood, because even he made no move to turn around, though tears rolled silently down his cheeks.
They hadn’t gotten far when Lily tripped and crumpled to the ground, gasping.
Kony’s bodyguard stood over her, gesturing with his rifle and speaking harshly in Acholi. His meaning was clear enough.
Lily clutched her ankle. “I can’t.”
“She’s injured, can’t you see that?” Christoph said. He, too, had lost strength in this short time, Sabine saw; his face was pale and his eyes sunken.
The bodyguard responded with a sneer, but before he made any further moves, Emmanuel spoke a few quiet words and the bodyguard appeared to acquiesce, though unwillingly.
Emmanuel turned to Sabine. “Rest.”
Christoph sat heavily next to Lily; Sabine walked a few paces away with Emmanuel. “Where are you taking us?”
“Village.”
“What will happen to the people back there? Rose and Ocen?”
He paused for a long time, and when he spoke, his voice was so faint she wasn’t sure he said anything at all. “I don’t…” He didn’t go on.
They’d stopped on the top of a rise, with the forest at their backs and a long landscape of savanna sloping down before them. In the valley Sabine saw a herd of water buffalo grazing in the tall grass, with dozens of white cattle egrets perched on their thick hides. From the forest came an echo of an elephant’s trumpet. Sabine thought of the gruesome pile of tusks back at the rebels’ camp and wondered where they would travel next, who would purchase them, what trinkets they might be shaped into for display on a shelf an ocean distant. The lines linking this place to that, the invisible networks that traversed the surface of the earth: she saw them stretching before her, reaching outward, illuminated in a vast and complex web of connection, pumping like veins, pumping money and oil and gold, greed and hate and guilt and fear. She thought of the European explorers, the colonialists, the armies, the missionaries, the bureaucrats—and now the journalists, the aid workers, the diplomats, the saviors.
We never should have come, she thought.
She looked at Emmanuel. From this side of his profile, his scar was hidden, and Sabine thought she could glimpse the boy he’d been before: studious and shy, assisting in domestic chores without complaint. How his mother must miss him. The names in her pocket filled her with sadness—and purpose. She could still do this small good.
From the direction of the camp came the muted crack of a shot; the flock of egrets took wing in the valley below. Sabine caught Christoph’s horrified eyes.
Lily let out a choked sob. “Oh, God.”
An awful silence throbbed in her ears. Then Kony’s bodyguard shouted an order, and Emmanuel said, almost apologetically, “We go.”
No one moved.
“Go!” the bodyguard repeated.
More gunfire sounded fro
m the forest: a heavier exchange. Sabine looked to Emmanuel, whose face showed new signs of worry. The bodyguard swiveled his head and listened as the rat-a-tat-tat-tat continued, his body tense and swift. Sabine watched his alarm with growing concern. Whatever he imagined was taking place at the camp was clearly not what he’d expected. When he turned back, his expression was distorted with anger. His eyes were on Lily.
“Spy,” he hissed.
He raised his gun.
What happened next felt slow. The seconds were stuck together, gluey and long. Sabine had time to take everything in: the white crescents on the man’s pale fingernails wrapped around the wooden grip; a bead of sweat trickling down the back of his neck; two dragonflies hovering dreamily at her kneecap. Silence had dropped like a swaddling blanket over the earth. Her mind formed no conscious thought—but her body knew.
She hurled herself at him. Thunk came contact, followed rapidly by jolting stabs of metal and wood and elbow and bone. The gun went off a fraction late and she felt the kickback as they were falling through the air, a nanosecond before they hit the ground hard. The rifle thumped lightly away and the bodyguard made a small uhmf sound as the wind was knocked out of him.
She heard the sound of trumpeting. Odd, she thought; the herd had been so far away. Dazed and shaken, she tried to push herself up, but her wrists gave out. The rebel scrambled for his gun, picked it up. Took aim. At her.
Now the seconds sped up; there was no time. Still she tried, tearing at the grass, digging her feet into the soil …
He fired.
She felt no pain. A lightness spread throughout her body, an expansion of tingling luminescence. She broke into a trillion tiny parts.
Her vision cleared, and she saw Kony’s bodyguard, standing, breathing heavily, hunched over his gun. Emmanuel held position behind him, rifle stiffly raised, though his hand was nowhere near the trigger.
Lily, clambering. Her features were twisted in anguish, her mouth a gaping hole: no sound that Sabine could hear. She was reaching for something, for someone …
Oh. It was her she was reaching for. Sabine tried to take a breath; failed. How strange, how laughable to see her own chest open to the sky, blossoming.
With a gush her senses returned: the remote noise of gunfire at the camp, Lily’s ragged screaming, the smell of something burnt in the air. Her body felt as if it were on fire. She longed for an extinguishing. They were right up against the trees, almost under their shade, but not quite.
Christoph’s hand was in hers.
“Hey,” he whispered. “It’s me. I’m here.”
His hand was weirdly cold, and hers, warm. She thought of scarves, and skates, and circles on the ice, spirals getting gradually bigger, gaining momentum …
“You can’t die,” Lily sobbed. “It’s my fault. It should have been me. It should—”
… the spirals dizzied her. Could she have done more, or done differently? Of course she could have. There was always more to be done. It felt so horribly unfair that death came like this, before you were ready, before you were redeemed—but then, maybe, that was it after all. Redemption was not a state you could achieve, a place you could enter once and live inside forever. One had to make peace with the grappling. Just because it ended for her did not mean it ended.
She needed to tell this to Lily, to make her see that she could carry this failure forward with grace, that the questions had no answers but must be held nonetheless in one’s heart with care. But her voice didn’t want to work. When was the last time she took a breath?
“Please,” Christoph was saying—not to her, but to the soldier who was taking aim again. Sabine saw them both through a gauzy haze. “Please, please…”
From out of the forest came a revelation of thunder. The earth rumbled and a great wind rushed past. Christoph threw himself across her body and she felt Lily do the same, her niece’s arms crossing Christoph’s, their pulsing, living skin. She turned her head sideways, squinting through the clamor and the dark spots that had begun to appear. She could no longer see the soldiers.
The elephants were in the way.
Gray, massive, grand—and ferocious, their ears flapping wide, legs stamping, tails swinging. Their bodies were almost baffling in their enormity and their force. They must have been spooked by the gunfire, she thought, and then the thought became untethered, loosely drifting. All thoughts became so. Memories hovered like fireflies, flickering, radiant, pulsing in sync with one another. Her world dimmed.
Nothing needed forgiveness, here. Everything went on.
* * *
Their long white tusks flashed as they charged past, the herd parting around the fallen like water around a rock, meeting on the other side.
CHAPTER 26
ROSE
January 8
What Rose felt when Sabine, Lily, and Christoph were led into the trees was, overwhelmingly, relief—relief so brutal she could not bring herself to watch. Watching their figures disappear would mean saying good-bye, and if she did that, she would cry, and if she cried, whatever small chance she had left to save Ocen’s life would be gone. She prayed that Lily’s ankle would hold up, that Christoph’s malaria would not relapse, that Sabine would stay stubborn as ever, that they would find their way home.
Meanwhile, there was silence. Kony brought his hand to his mouth and nibbled on a fingernail. The soldiers in his High Protection Unit appeared both serious and at ease. Opiyo stood behind Ocen, his hand pressed upon his brother’s shoulder as if without it, Ocen might become weightless and float up heavenward. When they’d first brought Ocen into the clearing, Rose thought her heart might burst right out of her chest; yet she’d seen no fear in Ocen’s face, no reluctance in his stride. Even now he sat tall and composed, a man surrendered to whatever fate fell upon him. She felt her skin pulling away from her muscles and bones, toward him, her limbs tight and pulsing.
At last Kony broke the quiet.
“Rose, Rose,” he tutted. “I am surprised to see you here.”
It was odd: as long as he’d been speaking with the others in English, she could almost pretend he was a different man—a smaller, less powerful man. But in Acholi, he spoke as fluidly as the preacher from Agnes’s church in Kitgum, the language a puppet in his skillful hands. This was the man she’d known: the man who’d taken everything from her. Despite her role, she’d seen him rarely during her years in the bush; he traveled often with his High Protection Unit and was rumored to have a house in Khartoum. Most of the time she remained with her co-wives and the wives of other commanders, harvesting crops, tending to the children. He’d used her perhaps two dozen nights in as many months. But those nights she remembered with painful clarity: the roughness of his touch, his wordless grunts. Most of all she recalled his smell. He was fastidiously clean, but no matter how much soap he used, how often he anointed himself with shea butter oil, there lingered a distinct scent of burnt milk.
“They told me you died in Sudan,” he said. He flicked his eyes to her scarred shoulder. “I see you only survived in part.”
“It is by God’s grace that I survived at all.” The words were hollow to her, but she had to tread carefully. She’d spent the night preparing, and still she could not be certain.
He assessed the rest of her frankly, without smiling. “Did you miss your husband?”
She forced herself not to look at Ocen. “Of course.”
Softly: “Then why did you not come to me?”
“The UPDF watched us too closely. I could not leave.”
“And yet you are here.” His voice had taken a dangerous turn, but she stayed calm.
“The army was distracted by their operation. I took the chance that I would find you.”
He leaned back as if considering this answer, and she looked casually toward her former co-wives who continued their chores at the lean-tos, now without returning her glance. She’d recognized them at once: one had been among the rebels when Rose was first abducted; the other came when Rose was
pregnant. For the first, Margaret, Rose had no love. She was mean and jealous and had often accused Rose of petty infractions. If she felt Kony was favoring Rose, she would beat her on the head or toss her out of the hut to sleep in the rain. But the other girl—Fatumah—had been so young when she was abducted, only ten, and was a tingting for all the years that Rose was in the bush. Rose wondered if it was her own escape that precipitated Fatumah’s elevation from babysitter to bed-sharer.
“And what is your relation to this one?” Kony asked, indicating Ocen.
Rose kept her face neutral. “None.”
“You agree, then, that he is a traitor to the Movement.”
She feigned indifference, but her pulse quickened. “Eh, he is harmless, this one.”
“Harmless? He tried to lure away my personal envoy. His presence disrupted my troops’ movements and their ability to follow orders. He would have sabotaged my entire strategy if given the chance. Are those acts not deserving of punishment?”
“In this way,” she said, “you speak the truth. But can a man not repent for his crimes? Imagine the blessings you shall receive with both twins together, fighting at your side. Imagine how the spirits will rejoice.”
“Don’t presume to speak for the spirits.”
Chastened, she quieted her voice. “Then let him return to Kitgum. Let him tell the Acholi that he met Lapwony Kony, that he met the teacher, and that you are fighting on behalf of his people. Let him tell them that you are prepared for peace.”
“The Acholi know what I am fighting for.”
“You have been away from northern Uganda for two years. Some have forgotten. It is easy to believe Museveni’s lies, when that is all people see.”
Kony’s eyes met hers. For a long time—too long—he said nothing.
“I am not a fool,” he said at last. “You did not come to Congo looking for me.” With a raised hand to silence her unspoken objection, he turned to address Ocen for the first time. “The penalty for sleeping with a commander’s wife is death.”
Rose looked back and forth between their faces, her heart sinking as she saw that Ocen’s expression equaled Kony’s in coldness.
The Atlas of Forgotten Places Page 33