Acts of Faith

A BIG MAROOR, Suleiman called their journey. Maroor meant “trek” in Sudanese Arabic, but “trek” suggested an organized migration from point A to point B and did not describe the circuitous wanderings upon which Michael Goraende led them for the next twelve days, westward into ranges called the Heibans, the Moros, the Limons, then north, east, south, north, and west again across unpeopled plains, up and over rock-strewn trails steep as staircases. They paused for a day’s rest at Michael’s headquarters, secreted within an isolated valley, and then made a short hike to New Tourom and St. Andrew’s mission.

Throughout the trek they traveled at night as much as possible to escape the crushing midday sun and the government Antonovs, ceaselessly prowling the unblemished skies. In the mornings, while Douglas and Suleiman surveyed for landing strip sites, Fitzhugh interviewed shopkeepers in the village marketplaces, asking how much they had sold in the past and how much they were selling now, and made careful notes of the dwindling stocks of soap and salt and cooking oil. He inspected household granaries where winnowed grain was stored in clay jugs. He went into the fields where men threshed grain by beating it with long, heavy wooden paddles, and he made more notes as they spoke about lack of rainfall and this year’s poor harvest and the raids that had driven them from valleys, forcing them to sow their crops on the stony mountainsides. They pleaded for seed and oil presses and implements. They complained of headache, bellyache and, Fitzhugh suspected, purely imaginary ailments and asked for medicine. He borrowed scales from village merchants and weighed small children and took their heights with his tape measure to determine if they were suffering from malnutrition. All in all, assessing the Nubans’ needs wasn’t difficult: they needed almost everything.

He slept through the blazing afternoons, and when the sun set, Michael would rouse him and Douglas and they would set off to the next town. They drank tepid water flavored with the iodine of their purification tablets. They ate doura and more doura and Fitzhugh notched up his belt until he ran out of notches. Maroor, trek? It was more an ordeal, never more so than on the night of the thirteenth day, when they pressed on to Kologi, the chief village of Suleiman’s tribe. They’d left a town called Kauda just before sundown, following an old road through an undulating plain. Michael set a murderous pace, hoping to reach a mountain named Jebel Gedir and its surrounding hills by daybreak.

A full moon rose, bright enough to turn the night into a colorless imitation of day. The scattered acacia cast distinct shadows on the whitened grass. Venus was pinned above the horizon, spreading thin petals of light so that it earned its Arabic name, El Zohar, the flower. Sometime after midnight Fitzhugh’s old injury woke up; it felt as if someone were injecting a scalding liquid into his knee. His legs went numb, and he pitched forward with each step, as if he were stumbling downhill. An hour or so later, when the Jebel’s rim appeared outlined against the lesser blackness of the sky, he was for all practical purposes walking in his sleep. The ash-daubed bodies of the Nuban porters gave off a pale glow in the moonlight, like phosphorescence. Suleiman’s white jelibiya seemed to be floating in midair beside them, and Fitzhugh hallucinated that he was looking at a ghost shepherding a flock of dimmer specters. He managed one conscious, rational thought: Why am I doing this to myself?

They reached the mountain shortly after dawn. Douglas, also reeling from exhaustion, checked his GPS and said they’d covered thirty miles in twelve hours. He and Fitzhugh didn’t bother to fetch their sleeping bags from the donkeys but collapsed on the spot and blacked out, until awakened by the heat and flies of late morning.

He ached in every muscle and bone. His marrow ached. Why was he doing this to himself? What strange magnetism had pulled him back to this country?

Sitting against a smooth rock slab, he looked up at the cave mouth gaping in the splintered face of the mountain. It was, said Suleiman, the cave where the Divinely Guided One had prayed and fasted day and night, steeling his soul for the great task before him.

“Truly, this is where the Mahidiya began. On this mountain, in that cave, the Mahdi saw that he must unite all Sudan behind him to get rid of the British and the Egyptians. And that is what he did!”

Yes, the Mahdi, thought Fitzhugh. A brilliant general and also an early Muslim fundamentalist. Today he would be a terrorist. What was it about this place that it created visionaries of all kinds, warrior-prophets and warrior-saints, messiahs true and false, Sufi mystics, dervishes dancing in the desert? Was Tara right in saying that Sudan’s distances conjure up mirages of the mind, its boundless horizons inspiring men to imagine that anything is possible? Do its skies, so threatening in their vastness and vacancy, foster feelings of insignificance that force men to turn to God for solace and validation of their existence? And does the silence that greets them when they turn—the unbearable silence of Sudan’s immense spaces—cause them to hear voices in their own heads and trick them into thinking that what they hear is the voice of God, commanding them to sacred missions? And what is it about this place that even as it molds true believers out of its native clay, it also draws true believers from elsewhere? General Gordon, the Christian mystic, tugged to Sudan by his own messianic vision: to abolish the slave trade, and how he tried, with his band of zealots. But the law of unintended consequences operates here like nowhere else.

“The father of my grandfather fought with the Mahdi when they defeated the General Gordon at Khartoum,” Suleiman was saying. “He saw the head of the Gordon placed on a stick. Shuu! What I tell you is true. His sword was honored with English and Egyptian blood. I have it still, in my house in Kologi, and when we get there, inshallah, I will show it to you.”

A curious fellow, Suleiman. He didn’t carry a rifle. He was a kind of pacifist, for all his talk about swords honored with enemy blood. His tribe, the Kowahla, were Nubans who had been converted to Islam, but he stressed that they were Sufi Muslims. Earlier in the journey he’d told a story about a day, two years ago, when he was in a Khartoum souk buying a pair of work boots. (He’d driven a bulldozer for the Ministry of Civil Aviation; hence his knowledge of airstrips.) While he was haggling with the merchant, a detachment of police and soldiers arrived in army lorries. They leaped out and began rounding up young men for conscription into the militia. An officer came up to him, demanding his identification. He showed his card, confident that his status as a government employee would exempt him, and if that didn’t, his age—thirty-five—would. He was stunned when the officer told him that a tall, strong fellow like him had to fight in the jihad in the south, and ordered him into a vehicle loaded with twenty others, all of whom wore the look of men sentenced to hang. It was common knowledge that the militia suffered dreadful casualties. Suleiman turned and fled through the marketplace crowds, soldiers and policemen in pursuit. His long legs saved him. After hiding out with friends for several days, he hitched rides from southward-bound lorry drivers and then made his way on foot back into the sanctuary of his native mountains.

“Isn’t it hard for you, a Muslim, to be fighting against other Muslims?” asked Douglas, sitting opposite Suleiman.

Fitzhugh had been wondering the same thing but couldn’t think how to pose the question diplomatically. Douglas had got around all that simply by coming right out with it, like a child, his innocent candor avoiding any suggestion that Suleiman suffered from divided loyalties.

“I am not a fighter.”

“You know what I mean. You’re part of the struggle.”

“See my skin.” He pinched his forearm. “I am not an Arab. I am Nuban, Kowahla. Not a true Muslim, the government thinks. Because we believe in the Islam of the heart, not the Islam of the Kalashnikov. We Sufis believe the Holy Koran when it says there shall be no violence in matters of religion.”

Douglas nodded, and then, his attention diverted by a circling bird, fished a pair of binoculars from the case on his belt.

“An eagle,” Michael said, squinting up at the gyring bird.

“Nope. An augur buzzard.”

“Come, my friends,” Michael said, standing. “Kologi isn’t far.” He glanced at Fitzhugh, getting to his feet like a man of eighty. “You have to put up with this for just two more days. Tomorrow we will return to the airfield.”

Fitzhugh drew a laugh when he said, “Al-hamduillah—praise be to Allah.”

Kologi was an isolated place of tall round huts and boxy market shacks marooned on a range of low hills rising from clay plains and flat acacia forests that vanished into a shimmering horizon. Upon their arrival, Douglas and Suleiman, displaying a stamina Fitzhugh found amazing, went off on another excursion in search of landing fields. He toured the souk with the tribal chief, called a nazir, a stout, gray-haired man with a gray beard like a chin strap. Later on he and the nazir rode out on donkeys, accompanied by Michael and a couple of his soldiers striding on foot. They crossed a red, rolling plateau trenched by flash-floods, the donkeys’ hooves raising talcumlike puffs in the loose, dry soil. It was a windy day, and the wind blew dust into their faces and dust-devils whirled across their path. The land angled gradually downward into a shallow bowl, where a tobacco plot’s orderly holes, resembling the cups in an egg carton, pitted the ground near a draw-well and stalks of chopped sorghum rattled in the wind. If any trees had ever grown here, they’d long since been felled for houses and firewood. The one exception was a tulla grove, in whose shade the nazir assembled some twenty or thirty farmers and introduced “His Excellency, Mister Fuzzyew, who will bring assistance to you.” The men should make their needs known, he commanded, and they did, half of them speaking at once.

The clamor stopped suddenly. Freezing in their various postures, the farmers fell into a silence that seemed tangible. The nazir and Michael and the soldiers squatted, their heads cocked. Fitzhugh’s senses were dull, his reactions slow; he looked around in bewilderment until Michael wrapped a wrestler’s arm around his knees and, with one tug, jerked him off his feet. He fell like a sack on all fours. Only then was he conscious of a distant droning in the sky, growing louder.

“Remember what I told you,” Michael whispered, as though the plane might hear him. “The bombs will make a noise. A hum. If you hear that, fall flat on your face and cover your head.”

The hum. Yes, he remembered. It was made by the tail rotor in the bomb. He held his breath, afraid the sound of it would muffle the hum just enough to make a fatal difference. To his eyes, the red-barked branches above appeared to have gaps yards wide, and that made him feel as visible as a man wearing Day-Glo orange.

The throb of the turboprop engines was distinct now. Still on his hands and knees, not daring to move, he looked at the farmers, also motionless except for their lips, mouthing silent prayers. Ever so slowly, heads turned to the right. Fitzhugh’s turned with them, and he saw a silver dart in the spotless sky. It was winging northward, six or seven thousand feet up, far lower than Antonovs dared fly in the south, Michael murmured. The pilots knew that the rebels in the Nuba had no antiaircraft guns or missiles. He shaded his eyes with a hand and observed that the rear cargo doors were closed. At least they appeared to be. He hoped so.

“They push the bombs out the back, you know. There is no aiming. There is no address for the bombs. They are addressed, To Whom It May Concern.”

The drone faded, then grew louder. A second plane? No, the same one, circling around. Michael told everyone to lie still. Fitzhugh pressed himself into the earth, so that he felt every pebble. From the sound of it, the Antonov was going to come in right over them. Fitzhugh listened with his whole body, with his skin, each pore becoming a microscopic ear, opened for the whirr of a tail rotor, spinning downward, though he knew that if he heard the sound now, with the plane directly above, it would be not a warning but merely an announcement that his death was seconds away. What did it feel like to be blown apart?

He wasn’t aware that the Antonov had flown on until Michael shook him. He stood up. If he’d ever felt this relieved before, he couldn’t remember it. How splendid the clear sky looked, how beautiful the vivid tulla trees. He had an almost overpowering urge to laugh, to clap each man on the back and shake his hand, as though they’d accomplished some difficult task together. He didn’t know the name of even one, yet a rush of affection flooded through him, and of something more than affection, of solidarity. An old man, white-robed, shuffled up to him and spoke with angry shakes of the cane. He said his cotton field had been bombed and burned several months before and that he wished to inform His Excellency of a particular need he had. He stated what it was. After the rest made their petitions Fitzhugh and the nazir remounted the donkeys and rode back to the village.

He returned to Suleiman’s compound, where an underfed goat greeted him in the little courtyard formed by a ring of five tukuls. Everything seemed oddly normal and domestic. Two of Suleiman’s wives were preparing a pot of doura in the cooking hut. The third wife, a beauty of eighteen or nineteen, her plaited hair trailing to her waist, stood in the doorway of the women’s quarters, nursing a baby. She offered Fitzhugh a dazzling smile.

In the hut that was Suleiman’s exclusive domain, Douglas sat stripped to the waist on a worn leopard skin while Suleiman attempted to tweeze out a tick embedded in his side. Their quest had been unsuccessful, Douglas said. They’d found plenty of good level ground, but a few pokes with Suleiman’s stick revealed that it was all soft black-cotton soil under a fragile crust incapable of bearing an airplane’s weight.

“Speaking of planes . . .”

“Saw it,” Douglas said.

“A wonder it didn’t bomb the town.”

“Oh, they do not try to destroy us,” Suleiman remarked airily. “Only to make our lives a misery so we come over to their side.”

How unnaturally pale the American’s skin looked, contrasted with the black of Suleiman’s hand, carefully manipulating the tweezers. Fitzhugh took a seat on a crudely carved chair, against the wall on which the curved sword of Suleiman’s great-grandfather hung in a cracked leather scabbard.

“They told me the thing they need the most is for the war to end,” he said. “It’s what one old man said to me. We can bring in all the tools and seed and clothes we want, but it will mean nothing if the war goes on.”

“What did you say?” Douglas asked.

“Nothing. What can you say to that?”

“I have got him, all of him, and the head, too,” Suleiman exclaimed, his left eye twitching as he held up the tweezers to display the blood-gorged trophy.

Fitzhugh opened his notebook on his lap and began to rough out the report he would present to Barrett. Figures for the number of malnourished children, for this year’s crop yield. He drew up columns for the items and commodities that were in short supply and jotted a reminder to tell Barrett that a shipment of Unimix would be needed to supplement the children’s diets. The feeling that had dogged him since before leaving Loki, of being a twig in a current, was dissolving. He felt strong, purposeful. This was his work, the only work he knew how to do, and he stopped wondering why he was doing it. Did his father wonder what was the point of managing a hotel for tourists? The point was obvious—it won bread for his table. At least Fitzhugh’s work possessed a moral dimension that his father’s lacked. It wasn’t only for himself; it won bread for the other man’s table as well as for his own. But was it worth the sort of danger that had brushed him today? The sort of hardship he’d endured two nights ago?

 

AFTER ANOTHER MEAL of doura, the nazir came around to tell Their Excellencies that a dance was to be held that night in their honor. The Kowahla hadn’t had much cause to celebrate in the past year. Douglas and Fitzhugh’s visit had given them one.

They were delighted to find out that Suleiman’s hut had a shower: a perforated calabash hanging from a peg in an alcove, with a pull-cord attached. One of Suleiman’s younger sons, a boy of eight or so, filled the calabash from a rusty jerry can. Douglas stepped in, the boy staring at him, wonder-struck by the sight of a naked white man.

“All yours, Your Excellency,” Douglas said when he was finished.

Fitzhugh bowed. “Thank you, Your Excellency.”

The kid refilled the calabash. It held less than a gallon and succeeded only in turning five days’ accumulated grime into a silty film, but he gloried in the cool water splashing on his overheated skull, trickling down his chest and arms. He shaved in a pocket mirror, combed his thinning hair, changed into his spare T-shirt and shorts, and with his similarly spiffed-up partner, went into the courtyard to wait. Suleiman and the rest of his family were gone, and Fitzhugh noticed that the sword was missing from the scabbard on the wall. A distance away, a crowd was gathering in the twilight on a broad pitch, where wood had been stacked for a bonfire and drummers were tuning up, loosing staccato bursts.

In a fresh jelibiya, the nazir appeared, preceded by a man holding a paraffin lantern, followed by a retinue of tribal elders, and flanked by two sword-bearers, one of whom was Suleiman, the polished blade once honored by British and Egyptian blood held vertically in front of his face. The nazir motioned to his guests to join the procession. Everyone looked so solemn that if he didn’t know better, Fitzhugh would have thought they were going to an execution. They marched to the pitch. Two chairs had been set out for them, a table with clay jars on it to one side, the musicians to the other—half a dozen drummers sitting cross-legged on the ground, one man standing behind a crude xylophone made of hollow wooden tubes. The moon had risen, a pale fruit with a sliver sliced off one side. Four or five hundred people ringed the pitch, the bonfire rose high in the middle of the circle, and the oiled limbs of twenty young dancers, ten men and ten women, gleamed in its light.

Setting his lamp on the table, the lantern-carrier passed a jar each to Fitzhugh, Douglas, and the nazir, who sat on a mat beside Suleiman and the other sword-bearer. The nazir drank. Douglas raised his jar, then hesitated, looking sidelong at Fitzhugh, who took a healthy swig to assure him that the thick, white liquid was safe to drink. The American sampled it, licked his lips, and frowned.

“What is this?”

“Fermented sorghum. Marissa, it’s called.”

The female dancers had lined up at one end of the pitch, the men at the other, and the musicians broke into a fast, thrilling rhythm, the quick heartbeat of Africa itself, a sound that reached back to the first ages of the human race. Straight-backed, their breasts thrust forward, the women moved toward the men with a foot-stomping strut. Wound into hundreds of plaits, their long hair swished back and forth, their bead and coin necklaces rattled and jingled, their feathered skirts swung with their hips to make a rustling sound. They danced past the fire, then stopped and stood, swaying to the beat, and with graceful gestures of their hands and arms, they beckoned to the men, who advanced on them, pounding their feet on the ground in time to the drums. The two lines met, separated, and moved away from each other, and then the pattern was repeated. As the women stood swaying near the fire a second time, the whole crowd began to sway with them and took up a chant, male voices singing a chorus, female answering with a high, lilting refrain that ended in a short, shrill ululation, like the warbling of a thousand birds, before the men responded with another chorus. The dancers met once more and parted to begin the cycle anew. It went on for ten or fifteen minutes without stopping. Fitzhugh took another drink. His flesh tingled as voice, drum, and choreography fused into a harmonious whole that summoned him out of his separate self, called to him to unite himself with it, and his pulse quickening to match the pulse of the drums, he swayed with the people all around him. They had become one thing, a single being proclaiming in the union of sound and movement concordant joy in a divided, joyless land. The human spirit will endure, cried this being composed of many beings drawn into a circle; war and suffering will pass away.

The music abruptly stopped. The male dancers fled the stage. The xylophone played a rill of light, swift notes, and the drums began again, sending flurries of wild, syncopated throbs across the circle, stirring the women into a new dance. They snaked around the fire twice, and a third time, and then wound toward Fitzhugh and Douglas, strutting as before. The spectators broke into another communal chant, and in that flickering, enclosed world, its effect was almost hypnotic. The women drew closer and closer till they were barely a yard away from where Fitzhugh and Douglas sat with the nazir. Suddenly one girl leaped in front of the old man and, with a violent toss of her head, flung her braided hair over his head. He jumped up, wrapped one arm around her waist, and pressed his cheek to her forehead. His legs briefly recovered their youth as he danced with her in that posture; then he raised his free hand, snapped his fingers, and sat down again. Fitzhugh realized that this was a demonstration of what to do, for in a second one of the dancers came to him and covered his face with her hair while another did the same to Douglas. The American got into the spirit of the thing; he was on his feet and dancing. Fitzhugh remained in his chair. The woman paused in her movements and looked at him as if he’d insulted her. His heart rapped against his ribs, whether from ecstasy or fear or a little of both he couldn’t tell. His partner was Suleiman’s junior wife, and he didn’t know if dancing such a sensuous dance with her would provoke a fit of jealous rage. Suleiman had that sword at his feet.

The nazir appeared to sense his quandary. He grinned and told him, “Shuu! Your friend, do as he is!”

Douglas couldn’t quite get the beat or the steps, but he was trying, whirling and stomping like an American Indian, to the crowd’s delight. Fitzhugh knew he could do better. He’d been a good dancer in the tourist discos of Mombasa. Of course, he wasn’t in Mombasa and this wasn’t a disco, but when Suleiman’s wife again threw the canopy of waist-length braids over him, he was out of his chair, all self-consciousness gone. The drumming took control of his limbs as he embraced her slim, taut waist with his left arm and lay his cheek to her forehead, the musk of her sweat and of the oil that made her legs and arms gleam intoxicating him as all the marissa in the village could not have done. He danced till he was breathless, then raised his right hand above her head, clicked his fingers, and let her go. She gifted him with that smile of hers, and he heard the throng laughing and cheering its approval. He was relieved to see Suleiman laughing and cheering right along with them.

Douglas and Fitzhugh tried their hand on the drums, then danced some more, caught up in the jubilant atmosphere. The celebration was an act of rebellion, no less than firing a shot; it rebuked the dour, violent ascetics who ruled this country. After the fire had burned down to embers, Michael emerged from the crowd to remind Their Excellencies to get some sleep; he intended to start for the airfield well before dawn. Suleiman picked up his sword and escorted them home.

In a state of happy weariness, Fitzhugh flopped onto his sleeping bag and smoked a last cigarette. “I think the old man was wrong,” he said to Douglas.

“What old man?”

“The one who told me that if the war doesn’t end, it won’t make any difference how much stuff we bring in here. He’s wrong.”

“There’s my man.”