Acts of Faith

MY NAME IS Aluet Akuoc Wiere. I am twenty-five years old. I was captured four years ago. The Arabs attacked our village in the early morning—

“Manute, her village,” Ken interrupted. He was sitting with his laptop in the chair previously occupied by Bashir. It and the other chair, in which the people being interviewed sat, had been moved under the tree. The sun was well up now, so white it looked like a gigantic light fixture.

“The village of Aramwer,” Manute said, and spelled it, Ken typing with sparse brown eyebrows knit, lips pursed. He was a hunt-and-pecker, and his fingers were turning a tedious process into a torturous one.

On every mission Ken collected stories from the former slaves, for inclusion in the reports he sent to the WorldWide Christian Union’s board of advisers and the Human Rights Commission. He needed specifics—the names of the villages the people came from and of the places they were brought to, the names of their captors and the masters to whom they were sold, the dates when they were captured and details about the raids and how their masters treated them. An Oral History of a Crime Against Humanity, that was what Ken called it. Quinette’s job was to hold a microphone between Manute and whoever was being interviewed, so it could pick up both voices, and to keep an eye on the battery light and flip the cassettes in Ken’s tape recorder, a big old-fashioned thing gloved in vinyl.

They came on horseback, many, many of them . . . The woman called Aluet Akuoc resumed her tale. With her oblong face and narrow mouth, the upper lip curled to perpetually bare two front teeth, Aluet was not as pretty as some of the other women. She wore a shapeless striped shift, pulled down over one shoulder so her baby, a boy of perhaps two, could suckle her breast. . . .

Some wore white jelibiyas. Some in light brown uniforms. Some rode two on a horse. One to guide the horse, one to shoot. They shot the men and the old people.

Ken raised a hand, asking Manute to give him time to catch up.

“I think I could do that a lot faster,” Quinette ventured.

Ken looked at her.

“I took a typing and dictation course in high school,” she said, and thought she sounded as if she were applying for a job.

“No end to your talents, is there?”

Another of his hard-to-read remarks. Something he just tossed off, or did he think she was being presumptuous? Whatever, he got up and took over on the tape recorder. She sat in his place, settling the keyboard on her lap, tilting the screen forward a little, to keep the light that speared through the branches from bleaching the contrast. Unlike the tape recorder, the computer was brand-new, state of the art, and a long cable snaked from the DC outlet and across the scalloped circle of tree shade to a small, collapsible solar panel.

My father was running away. He didn’t go far. The Arabs were on horseback. They shot my father. They shot my husband. His name was Kuel. He tried to defend us, but he had only his shield and fighting stick. The Arabs’ bullets went through his shield. I saw him shot down in front of me. Everyone started running, but the Arabs shot anyone who ran, so I stopped running. They caught me and tied me to a long rope with twenty other women. I was separated from my little daughter. I have not seen her since.

Aluet’s was the fifth—or was it the sixth?—story Quinette had heard, and although Ken chose his subjects at random, each story seemed worse than the one before, a chapter in a narrative building toward some unbearable climax of atrocity.

They made a zariba in the forest and put us in it. It was a bad night for all the women. Three men raped me. I was then three months pregnant. That night I had a miscarriage. We had to walk seven days, seven nights to the Jur river. A woman and a child died on this journey of thirst. We rested at the Jur and then walked three days more to the river Kir. There I was given to a man called Abdullai. I worked for him and his wife, Nyangok. My job was to grind sorghum. I did this from morning till night for no pay. At first they treated me harshly. Abdullai put a branding iron to my face so I could be identified if I ran away. Nyangok beat me with a bamboo stick if I did not grind the sorghum fast enough to suit her. Sometimes she beat me for no reason and called me jengei.

“That means ‘nigger’ in Sudanese Arabic,” Ken interjected dispassionately. “Put that in parentheses, Quinette. Put ‘nigger’ in parentheses.”

The soft tap of the keys. (Nigger.)

But I was lucky. Nyangok’s mother was Dinka and lived with Nyangok and Abdullai. She told Nyangok to stop beating me and calling me jengei. “Would you call me, your own mother, jengei also?” was what she said to Nyangok, and the beatings stopped. Things were not so bad after that, except when Abdullai’s brother, Iskander, came to the house. He would come to the house when no one was there and force me to have relations with him. That’s how I got pregnant and gave birth to Hussein.

Quinette looked up from the screen and saw Aluet stroke Hussein’s head.

Then the Arab called Bashir came to Abdullai’s house. They had a long talk and reached an agreement. I was sold to Bashir for some money and Bashir brought me here. I hope I will find my daughter. She will be nine years old now.

Ken thanked her, and Aluet rose and walked over to the homestead to stand with the others. They were lined up behind Manute’s Land Rover, parked beside the tukul with its rear doors open and a row of jerry cans inside. Soldiers were pouring water out of the cans into tin cups and giving each person a drink. While they stood waiting, Jean listened to their heartbeats with a stethoscope and Mike took their pulses and temperatures and made notes on a clipboard. The people then filed off to where more soldiers were cooking porridge over an open fire. The soldiers ladled the porridge out of a big cast-iron pot into wooden bowls, and the liberated slaves found whatever shade they could and sat down to eat with wooden spoons that looked like ice cream scoops. Phyllis’s cameramen were shooting the scene. They had filmed the first three people Ken interviewed but seemed to get bored with the repetitious accounts of rape and murder and forced labor and went off to get some videotape of the slaves’ picnic.

A boy sat down with his arms resting on the bamboo arms of the chair. Black on light brown. Quinette recognized him.

My name is Atem Amet. I am sixteen. I was captured in the same raid as my cousin, Aluet Akuoc Wiere. I was given to a man named Osman Mekki. He had many slaves, working in his fields and cattle camps. One day, a year after I was captured, I lost one of his best bulls. Osman was very angry. He said that if I didn’t bring the bull back, he would cut off my hand. I didn’t know where the bull was and couldn’t bring it back. Because of my failure, Osman tied me down and cut off my hand with a panga.

So that was how it happened. Not for trying to escape but for losing a bull. Quinette was stunned that the boy described his amputation as if it were not out of the ordinary. All these people talked about their torments that way, and their tales expanded her conception of what human beings were capable of, in the way of both enduring cruelty and inflicting it. The joy she’d felt only a while ago fled her heart, pushed out by pity, and the pity fertilized an egg of rage.

A woman thirty-three years old. Then my master, Hamad, said I had to become Muslim. A woman came to his house. She told me that I had to have my genitals cut to be a proper Muslim woman. I resisted. Other women were called to hold me down. The woman gave me an injection and then cut me with a scissors. It didn’t hurt at first, but after a while, it became very painful.

Quinette shuddered, and the little egg grew, its cells swiftly dividing to form fetal arms and legs, a froglike head, slitty little eyes, rudimentary ears.

A twelve-year-old boy.

Everyone from our camp who wasn’t killed was tied to a long rope. I saw the Arabs kill four older boys who tried to flee. They tied them together and chopped their heads off with pangas. The Arabs said we would be killed in the same way if we tried to escape.

A woman of fifty-five.

The Arabs raped me over and over. It was too much for me. I am an old woman, and it was so long since I thought of sexual relations with a man. It was too much. I fainted.

The thing inside Quinette had a heartbeat now.

Ayuang Bol, Malang Agok, Ahol Akol Teng, Nyanut Ngor Mayar thirty years old twelve years old twenty-three fifteen eighteen twenty

the Arabs stole all our cattle and goats carried looted oil on my head for eight days they came on horseback and on foot khaki uniforms white jelibiyas shouting Allahu akhbar

that means God is great in Arabic, Quinette, put it in parentheses

a twelve-year-old girl raped beside me that night her screams more than I could bear Muhammad beat me with a stick and broke my nose we were brought to a camp and made to study the Koran and those who were slow in learning were denied food and water five girls tied to horses I slept outside with the cattle my bed was cattle dung every night for three years.

It turned over and kicked. It grew and grew, leaving no room for any other emotion.

A twenty-six-year-old woman, Atem Deng.

And because I would not allow my genitals to be cut, Ahmed’s wife called me jengei and filthy infidel. I was very angry and struck her. She beat me with a horsewhip and told Ahmed when he came home that I had struck her. Ahmed said he would punish me in a special way. That night, he took me to a zariba

(That’s a pen made of thornbushes, put it in parentheses, Quinette)

and stripped me naked and held me down with my face in the dirt. He told me he would show me what happened to women without the genitals of a good Muslim woman. And he did that thing to me and it was very painful.

Atem Deng fell silent. Ken asked if she had anything more to say. She did, and each word was as sharp and distinct as the crack of a bullet, the sense so clear that Manute’s translation was almost unnecessary.

I wish I was a man so I could carry a rifle. I would find Ahmed and kill him. I would kill his wife and all his children. I would massacre them all.

There was a kind of beauty, an appealing purity in the woman’s longing for retribution. It was even refreshing, after listening to the others recite the outrages they’d suffered with such forbearance. Quinette typed,

I would massacre them all,

and the crisp black letters seemed to leap from the glowing screen and enter her, feeling like a midwife’s hands, drawing out her own incubated rage. The infant’s red eyes were open, and through them she saw herself standing alongside Atem Deng, cutting down the man called Ahmed and his wife, and the man called Abdullai, and Ibrahim and Iskander and all the nameless raiders who had thundered into the lives of these violated people, who could never be truly free because they would be forever chained to the memories of what had been done to them. The fantasy had the terrifying clarity of a hallucination, and she blinked and shook her head as if to physically eject it from her mind.

“Getting tired?” Ken asked.

“Are there any more?”

“Two, maybe three. I try to get twenty to twenty-five each time out.”

She stood and set the laptop down on the chair. “You’d better finish up, then.”

“Two or three, then we’re done.”

“You finish up.”

She started to walk off, toward the homestead. Maybe she could help out there, serve the porridge, write down temperatures and pulse rates for Mike.

“Quinette.”

“You finish up. I really don’t like feeling the way I do now.”

“Like what?”

“Like I could do what she wants to.”

Ken studied her for a moment. “That’s natural. You’d have to be made of stone not to feel angry. First time I did this, I thought, ‘They must be making this stuff up.’ But they’re not. Too much of a pattern.”

“Jean told me it takes some getting used to but that you don’t want to get too used to it.”

“She’s right. It’s a trick, though.”

“I’ll try to get the hang of it.”

Mike and Jean didn’t need her help; nor did the soldiers at the outdoor soup kitchen. Matthew was among them, and he offered her a bowl of the porridge.

“They need it more than I do,” Quinette said. “Your sister?”

“There she is. Amin Madit.”

He gestured at a handsome bare-breasted girl of eighteen or nineteen, wearing necklaces of blue beads and shells and brass bangles on her wrists. A pile of cold ashes from the cooking fire lay at her feet, and she sat polishing her teeth with a finger dipped in the ashes while an older woman shaved her head with a razor, sculpting a skullcap of hair at the crown.

“I brought those pretty things for her to wear, and now her hair is being cut and she will look like a fine Dinka girl when I bring her home.”

Amin Madit would never tell her family about whatever defilement she’d undergone in captivity. Quinette was certain of that, so she was relieved that the girl had not been among those interviewed; it would have been too awful to know her secrets and have to keep them from her brother.

“She’s very beautiful. I’m happy you found her.”

Matthew pushed the bowl toward her.

“Please eat. It’s made from doura,” he said, as if doura were a rare delight, like caviar.

The porridge had the color and texture of raw dough, but she took it anyway and went off by herself, sitting in the one shred of shade that had not been appropriated. One spoonful was all she could take, not because she disliked the taste—a little like grits without the butter—but because it seemed wrong to eat in the company of people who probably hadn’t had a decent meal in months. Quinette felt wrong just being here, a woman whose flesh was ignorant of rape and the lash and the circumciser’s blade. How stupid she’d been to think she had touched these people with her impromptu sermon, that her words had given breath to their stifled happiness. The chasm between her and them was wider than the one between America and Africa, between black and white; they had suffered greatly, she had not. It troubled her to feel so separated from them, the women most of all. She stared at the thornbush beside her, barbed with spikes as long as her thumb. It beckoned her to throw herself into its bristling arms, to make herself bleed and hurt and bind herself to the Dinka women in a sisterhood of pain.

Fear of the very pain she desired restrained her; fear and the knowledge that it would be sinful. And what about her anger, that little monster she’d spawned minutes ago? Ken said it was natural, but was it? And if it was, so what? All sin was natural. Quinette’s thoughts now turned to the state of her own soul, a subject that always commanded her attention. Pastor Tom had counseled her that not all anger was sinful. There was righteous wrath, like the Lord’s when He cast the moneychangers out of the temple, and the ire inspired by the Devil, like the kind that had come over her when she’d thrown a rock at the auctioneer. So what was this that had caused her to see herself, so clearly, as an avenging angel? Righteous wrath or the devil’s ire? The Lord said that if you commit adultery in your heart, then you’ve committed adultery period. She couldn’t recall if He’d said anything about committing murder in your heart.

She watched Ken unplug the laptop and fold up the solar panel. Lugging both, he came over and sat next to her.

“Feeling any better?”

“I guess.”

“It hits me sometimes. Like this is an evil that just screams to be crushed.” He scuffed the dirt and was silent for a time. Then in his abrupt way he said he was considering creating a new job, because managing his program from his headquarters in Geneva was getting to be difficult. He could use a representative on the scene.

“It would be a job with more than one hat,” he went on. “Based in Loki. Someone with computer skills, because I want to build a complete database of liberated captives. Then there would be coordinating with people like Manute to set up dates and places for redemptions, and making sure aircraft are chartered to fly our team in, and as if that wouldn’t be enough, I’d want someone to establish relations with the foreign media in Nairobi, you know, to get as much exposure as possible.” He scuffed the ground again. “I’m thinking you could be who I’m looking for.”

Quinette said nothing.

“Jim and I are impressed by the way you’ve handled yourself out here. That speech you gave, it was something. You’re pretty good on that laptop, you didn’t complain once about the heat, the dirt, the flies, and you were fairly poised in front of the camera. So what are your thoughts?”

“I—I have no idea what to think. Or say.”

“Responsibilities back home?”

“If you mean a husband, children, no. Not much of a job either. But I—God, I don’t know. I mean, I couldn’t just pick up right now and—”

He laughed his dry laugh. “It wouldn’t be for right now. I have to work out a lot of details first, take a couple of months at least. Are you interested?”

“At the moment, I’m a little . . . stunned?” She paused. That wasn’t the right answer, so she seized his hand and shook it.

“Good,” he said. “Expect to hear from me after you get back to the States.”