Acts of Faith

Balm in Gilead

IN THE MORNING they discovered that Zulu Three’s runway was one long slick of mud. With the cautious shuffle of someone walking a frozen river, Suleiman went up and down the length of it, stopping occasionally to probe with a long stick. He tapped bricks of muck from off his sandals and returned to the doum palm grove where Fitzhugh waited with Douglas. They’d arrived at the airstrip well ahead of time, to make sure it was usable after last night’s thunderstorm. Barrett and Diana had come with them.

“Slippery, but this deep only,” Suleiman reported, forking two fingers above the tip of the stick. “Very hard underneath. The naga’a clay. Rains run off it like it is cement.”

Douglas clutched his arm and said, “Good man!” as though Suleiman were responsible for the runway’s sound condition. “By the time our passengers get here, that surface gunk should be dry enough. Loki by lunchtime.”

“And a proper bath and no more bloody ticks,” Diana said, holding out a bare forearm blotched by two dime-size welts. Last night, before they’d made love, Fitzhugh had removed the ticks by the light of a paraffin lamp—a novel form of foreplay, she’d called it. He examined the bites now and in the morning glare noticed that four days and nights in the bush had left her skin looking shriveled and scaly. While this observation did not affect his feelings for her, the mere fact that he’d made it troubled him.

An eager grin cracking through his blond stubble, Douglas looked at Barrett, sitting cross-legged against the trunk of a palm tree.

“So what do you think? How did we do?”

“It all went much better than I expected. The wrestling was a big hit. I give the show four stars.”

“I meant, do you think we won over any hearts and minds? It was hard to tell.”

“Well, I’m not sure the matches and the dancing were a good idea,” Diana said. “Everyone looked so fit and jolly that the aid workers must have questioned if things here are as bad as we say.”

“Ah, but we may have a few converts—that Hardin woman, for one,” said Barrett. “As for the rest”—he spread his hands—“we’ll have to wait and see.”

Douglas stood, brushed off the seat of his pants, and said he was going to radio Michael that the airfield was in good shape and to bring the passengers. As he went toward the airplane, which Suleiman and a work gang were divesting of its camouflage net and branches, Fitzhugh moved off into the bushes to take a leak. Barrett intercepted him on his way back.

“A quiet word?” He jammed his hands in his back pockets and shyly looked down, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Now then, Fitz, I want you to understand straight away that I’m the last one to moralize—”

“You’re the most moralizing man I’ve ever met.”

“Sure, when it comes to politics, but I’m not talkin’ public morals in this instance.” Barrett raised his eyes. “It’s private behavior I’d never moralize about.”

A bulbul sang plaintively. Fitzhugh knew it was a bulbul because Douglas had taught him to recognize its call. He shook out an Embassy, its tip yellow from his dried sweat.

“I figured she would have to confide in somebody sooner or later. I’m glad it was you.”

“She didn’t. I’ve suspected somethin’ between you two for a while. It’s been obvious, to me at least. The way you two look at each other. She’s one of my dearest friends. A very capable woman, but she’s got her vulnerabilities.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Fitzhugh said defensively. “About all I can do is swear to you that it isn’t that. I really do love her.”

“You’ll understand why I find that strange?”

“Sure. So do I. So does she. Is this the place for this conversation?”

“No place is,” Barrett said with another downward glance. “All right, I’ll believe you that your feelings are genuine, but feelings change. Ah, she’s goin’ to be an old woman in ten years. I can’t see what good can come out of a relationship like this.”

“John, what good could come out of one between a five-and-a-half-foot white excommunicated priest and a six-foot African woman?”

“Sure and you’ve got me there,” he said with a laugh. “I’m afraid of her gettin’ hurt.”

Fitzhugh was beginning to feel like a young suitor with a father’s shotgun pointed at him. “She won’t be.”

“I hope so. I’d appreciate it if you wait till we’re out of here to tell her about this little talk.”

He readily agreed to the condition, although it made things a bit awkward when he again sat down next to Diana. Still, he was relieved to have the secret out. The clandestine trysts and the pretending that they were no more than friends in public were wearing him out. Maybe he should have announcements printed up for general distribution. Mr. Fitzhugh Martin and Lady Diana Briggs are pleased to announce that they are lovers. Mr. Martin wishes to declare that he’s not after Lady Briggs’s money. Better leave that last declaration out—it sounded like protesting too much.

The relief workers and the press contingent arrived about three hours later, accompanied by meks and villagers bidding them farewell. Watching the procession wind down the ridge, SPLA soldiers out in front and on the flanks, the church canon holding up a gold-plated crucifix before a couple of hundred hymn-singing men and women, Fitzhugh recalled Barrett’s characterization of the war as a resumption of the Crusades.

“Let’s get her ready to go,” Douglas said.

They went to the airplane as strains of the hymn, sung to a drumbeat, lilted down from above. Fitzhugh strapped himself into the worn copilot’s seat and slid the side window open to let some air into the stifling cockpit.

“Shall I read it off to you?” He picked up the clipboard that held the plastic-covered checklist. “It would make me feel useful and authentic.”

“My man, I can do it in my sleep,” Douglas boasted, his hands darting across the confusing array of switches, knobs, and instruments.

Only two days before flying into the Nuba, the G1C’s copilot, an American farm boy of heroic size and with a heroic appetite for anything alcoholic, had got himself heroically drunk and fallen into a trash pit on his way to bed, breaking a leg. There had been no time to find another first officer. Douglas would have to fly the plane single-handed. He’d issued Fitzhugh a white shirt and epaulettes, instructing him to play the role of copilot but to please, for Christ’s sake, not touch one damned thing.

Sweating, waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in before he shut the window, he watched the deacon emerge from the palm grove and lead the choir along the side of the runway to the solemn beat of the drum. The porters filed behind, and then came the passengers, shepherded by their armed escorts. The drum changed pitch: two flat, hollow thuds that sounded like warehouse doors banging shut. Douglas shouted, “Holy shit!” and pointed out the window on his side of the airplane. There was another, louder thud as a fountain of gray-black smoke shot up at the far end of the airfield.

The singing stopped, the drum fell silent, people scattered in several directions. Fitzhugh’s senses were transmitting bits of information faster than his brain could sort them out.

Soldiers running.

People throwing themselves to the ground.

Five or six almost simultaneous explosions, rocks and dirt splattering with terrible velocity. The solitary figure of the deacon, marching down the middle of the runway, the crucifix held high.

Douglas yelled, “What the f*ck is he doing?”

The man walked on, toward the dissipating smoke of the last mortar bursts, raising the bright cross higher, like an exorcist doing battle with demonic forces. Two soldiers tackled the lunatic and were dragging him away when thick vaporous arms enveloped all three and flung them through the air. Fitzhugh, pinned to his seat by shock as much as by the safety harness, stared at the broken bodies, one lying across another, a third sprawled several yards away. Diana! Where was Diana? Snapping out of his stunned state, he unbuckled the harness, rose from the seat, and fell back. It was only then that he realized that the plane was rolling.

“What’re you doing? Diana’s out there!”

Douglas seemed not to hear his cry, a deaf machine in control of another machine, canted forward in his seat, his eyes nailed to the runway ahead, one hand frozen to the yoke, the other ramming the throttles forward. The plane swerved in the still-slick surface mud, and Fitzhugh saw the ground falling away.

“You can’t do this! Can’t leave her—can’t leave everybody—”

Douglas said nothing. He cranked a wheel in the pedestal, pulled a lever, and looked at the instruments or out the windshield with fierce concentration. He turned westward, leveled off at a thousand feet above the mission, then banked sharply and passed over the airfield, half obscured by torn veils of smoke and reddish dust. The Gulfstream flew on over the plain to the east and banked again. Douglas broke his silence.

“You didn’t hear the gear retract, did you? I’m saving the airplane. Soon as the shelling lifts, I’ll land and pick everybody up. Your job will be to get their asses on board in one hell of a hurry. Nobody’s going to be left behind.”

Fitzhugh wanted to rush to Diana’s side and at the same time dreaded returning to the ground. The explosions, those compact maelstroms with their awful noise, a noise of things going out, of things rent and crushed, had unnerved him. Douglas circled the airfield again.

“Holy shit! There they are! There!” He pointed at a cone-shaped hill barely more than a mile away. “There! Dead ahead!”

Douglas changed the radio frequency and contacted Michael by his call sign, Archangel. There was no answer. He called again, and Michael’s voice came through the static of his field radio.

“Archangel, I’ve got the mortars spotted! At the base of a hill southeast of the strip! Do you see it? Looks like a pyramid! Do you see it?”

“No! Give me an azimuth, give me the range!”

“Roger. Fitz, I’m gonna need you. Keep your eyes on this”—he motioned at the compass on the overhead panel—“and give me the bearing when I ask for it.”

Turning again, they skimmed the ridgetop and sliced across the runway, the Gulfstream’s nose aimed straight at the hill.

“Okay, now.”

Fitzhugh squinted at the instrument, a strange dry taste in his mouth, as if he’d been sucking on the tip of a lead pencil, a quivering in his legs. He couldn’t think.

“Give me the f*cking bearing, goddamn it!”

The hill loomed larger in the windshield, a tall mound of jumbled rocks and grass the color of a lion’s mane.

“One-fifty . . . one-fifty-five. Yes, one-fifty-five.”

Douglas’s glance flicked to the compass the moment before he hauled back on the yoke to clear the hill’s peak. Something metallic glinted through sun-scorched trees fringing a wadi a few hundred feet below.

“Archangel, Archangel. Bearing one-five-five, range three thousand meters. Did you read that?”

Static.

“Archangel, do you read me? Bearing one-five-five, range three-zero-zero.”

Michael answered and repeated the information.

“Fire a marking round, tell me when you’ve shot, and I’ll try to adjust from up here,” Douglas said, then made another turn, an airborne hairpin that brought a tug of G-forces.

“What’s happening? What’s going on?”

“We’re in it, my man, that’s what. We are in the goddamned war!”

Two minutes later, as they orbited the plain, they heard Michael report, “Shot out!”

They circled for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty . . .

Michael called, “Did you spot the round?”

“Negative. Give us one more.”

A pause, then: “Shot out!”

Fitzhugh’s heart leaped when he saw a geyser of dense white smoke somewhere between the hill and the airstrip.

“Archangel, you’re way short!” Douglas said. “You’re short five hundred! Add five hundred!”

Another geyser rose, well up on the slope.

“Too much! Drop two hundred!”

They flew on, banked, and with the Gulfstream tilted at a thirty-degree angle, the right side facing away from the target, Fitzhugh was blind to the next shot. Douglas’s shout, blasting through his headset, hurt his eardrums.

“You’re on ’em, Archangel! Fire for effect! They know you’re on ’em, they’re hauling ass! Fire for effect!”

As the plane completed its turn, Fitzhugh saw men running from out of the wadi. He saw them with a peculiar thrilling clarity—brown-clad figures scrambling and stumbling up the slope, some with what looked like sewer pipes on their shoulders. Shells from Michael’s mortar battery burst in the wadi. The G1C sailed upward and looped around for another pass.

“Add one hundred! No, make that two hundred! Repeat fire for effect!”

Shells burst amid the fleeing figures. It was weird, not hearing the blasts, like watching a silent war movie. The leaden taste was gone from Fitzhugh’s mouth. He felt a wild enthusiasm for the game, fancied himself and Douglas as film-land heroes, partners in daring. That the pathetically small creatures in panicky flight below had been the source of his terror seemed absurd. With godlike detachment, he saw a body tossed into the air. The hilltop passed below. The landscape beyond was empty and serene.

“Archangel, Archangel! You nailed ’em!”

“Very good,” Michael replied. “I’ve sent some men in pursuit. Thank you, Doug-lass.”

“My man, slap me five!” Douglas cracked his palm against Fitzhugh’s, then landed the plane.

Fitzhugh sprinted across the runway. Nimble and swift, as if he were dribbling through an opposing team’s defenders, he weaved through knots of dazed people, past soldiers carrying the wounded and the dead, and found her slumped in a culvert, her hands and the front of her blouse spattered in red. Her eyes were open, and she was breathing.

“Oh Christ, where are you hurt?” He fell to his knees beside her, pawing her to find the wound.

She sat up. “Fitz? God, am I glad to see you.”

“Where are you hurt?”

“Nowhere. Not mine, his.” She pointed at the body of a man, lying on his back in a puddle of blood, more blood than it seemed any one body could hold. “His femoral artery,” Diana gasped. “Tried to—no good—came out like—” She flung her arms around him. “God, God, God, I am so glad to see you.”

He embraced her. She felt very small. Her bloodsoaked shirt stuck to his.

“You’re sure you’re not hurt, darling?”

She nodded. “Never saw anything like it . . . came out of him like water from a hose.”

“John?”

“I think he’s all right. It’s over? Tell me it’s over.”

“It is. We got them.”

“What? Who did you get?”

“Later. Come on, we have to get you on the plane.”

He helped her to her feet, this woman whom he loved now more than ever. She stared down at her blouse and then at the dead man and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Come on. There’s nothing to be done.”

An arm around her waist, he walked her to the doum palm grove, in whose shade lay injured soldiers and villagers. More were coming in, some staggering under their own power, some carried in like sacks. Gerhard Manfred was performing triage, ordering this one to be placed here, that one there. He had pressed Quinette and Lily into service, tearing clothes into strips for bandages. Nearby Barrett, kneeling beside a soldier with a shrapnel-grated face, murmured prayers. The CNN reporter stood off to the side with her cameraman, filming the scene. Well, if she didn’t have a story before, she had one now.

“Splendid, not so, Fitz?” Manfred said, waving a hand covered in gore. One man, supporting another who was hopping on one leg, came up to him. “There!” he commanded, pointing, then turned back to Fitzhugh and Diana. “Yes, things have come to a splendid conclusion.”

Diana asked if there was anything she could do.

“There is. Help these girls make dressings with whatever cloth you can find.”

“Start with mine,” Fitzhugh said, stripping off his shirt, epaulettes and all.

“Splendid! Ha! Everyone is behaving splendidly.”

Whatever the overwrought German meant by that remark, everyone was behaving, if not splendidly, then with greater calm than Fitzhugh expected after such an assault. A villager retrieved the canon’s crucifix and planted it in the ground to make some sort of statement. People brought the casualties to the improvised aid station and went out to look for others with something like professional efficiency, as if they’d done it often in the past. Undoubtedly they had. Wails of mourning went up every so often, but the wounded bore their pain quietly—a moan was the loudest sound anyone made. Some were still in shock, but the Sudanese capacity to endure suffering probably accounted for their silent forbearance. In their world a mortar shelling was no more unusual than a drought, a flood, an outbreak of relapsing fever. Looking at their quiet, obsidian faces, he couldn’t say he admired their stoicism, for there was an element of apathy or fatalism in it. He thought of a submissive dog that dumbly accepts its master’s beatings, and the more accepting it is, the more beatings it gets. Did he pity these people then? Really, he had no idea what he felt about anything. His horror at the sight of terrible wounds was mixed up with his joy that Diana hadn’t been hurt, a residue of his initial shock and fear with a druglike elevation, a kind of giddiness. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, but it would take more than nicotine to guide him through this thicket of powerful conflicting emotions.

He stubbed the cigarette and went off to round up his passengers and to see if any had been injured. It took a while. The aid workers were scattered about, helping to collect the wounded and the dead, while the journalists were taking photographs. Finally he got them all together. Only one had been hit, a guy from Norwegian People’s Aid with a superficial wound to his arm. The two Christian soldiers from the Friends of the Frontline had had a close call—a large mortar fragment had driven into a log they’d been hiding behind. They couldn’t stop talking about it, how the shard, almost as big as a railroad spike, had struck with a thud right between them and sent wood splinters flying over their heads. A bilious resentment flooded into Fitzhugh. It was as if the perverse, malign spirit that ruled over this cursed land had decreed that only those with black skin would suffer death and serious injury.

After assembling the group in the palm grove, he boarded the plane and told Douglas everyone was ready to go. Manfred was in the cockpit with Douglas.

“Your passengers will be having in their travel plans a little change,” the doctor said.

The Gulfstream was going to evacuate the casualties to his hospital, a mere twenty minutes away by air. Tara Whitcomb was coming in to pick up the reporters and aid workers.

“Tara?”

“I tried to get one of our planes, but they’re all committed and too far away,” Douglas explained. “Tara was near Malakal when she monitored my call. Only hitch is that she’s in her Caravan. Fourteen is the most she can take and we’ve got sixteen. Your job, my man. Find two people who really like the scenery here.”

 

“KEEP THE PRESSURE ON, don’t relax,” Lily said.

Quinette clamped the man’s shoulder with her hand, her thumb pinching an artery to stanch the bleeding in his upper arm. The wound was a deep, almost surgical incision that went nearly all the way around his bicep, as if someone had tried to amputate his arm with razor-sharp hedge clippers. The man was conscious, but he didn’t utter a sound, his eyes blinking erratically. There seemed to be a question in them, encrypted in the rapid blinks.

Michael was helping out, stretching a jelibiya taut between his outspread hands so Lily could cut it into even strips with her pocketknife—a menial task for a commander, but the casualty was one of his best officers, a captain. Looping four strips over her arm, Lily handed a fifth to Quinette.

“Tie a tourniquet where your hand is,” she said. “Not so tight you’ll cut off his circulation. And be quick about it. He’s lost enough blood as it is.”

Then she folded two strips into thick compresses, knelt down, and held them to the wound, one on each side. When that temperamental Manfred had called for someone to give him a hand, Lily had stepped right up. It turned out that she’d been a trained paramedic in northern Ireland before she’d joined Concern, and had plenty of practice treating traumatic injuries on Belfast’s bomb-blasted streets. Quinette had no experience along those lines, beyond a high school first-aid course, but she’d felt bound to help her friend in any way she could. Now, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, she released her grip. With the relaxation in pressure, blood squirted from the wound, turning the compresses a vivid red. Fighting panic, Quinette bound the tourniquet snugly around the captain’s shoulder and knotted it.

“That should do,” said Lily, a compact bundle of competence as she wrapped the fourth strip around and around the compresses.

With the fifth, she fashioned a sling. The injured man groaned when she crooked his arm across the front of his chest and looped the sling over it and then around his neck. Wiping her hands on her trousers, she stood and looked down at her handiwork and said, “That will have to do.”

Michael spoke softly to the captain in Nuban. The man’s lips parted, but he didn’t say anything. All he did was blink and wince, there in the shade of the palms, where fifteen other casualties awaited evacuation and where the dead, seventeen altogether, lay in a long row, some dismembered, some eviscerated, some full of small red holes that looked like measles or smallpox from a distance. The living hovered over them, waving off the flies, and sent up cries of grief and songs of mourning into the hot afternoon sky. The high-pitched lamentations pulled at Quinette’s already overstrung nerves. Never in her life had she seen anyone die—her father had expired in the hospital at two in the morning—much less seen anyone die in the ways these people had. Their mangled bodies held a certain lurid fascination, like a grotesque highway accident, but she refused to look at them. The sight made her think things she shouldn’t be thinking.

She must have been ten or eleven that winter Sunday morning when her father came down to the kitchen in his flannel bathrobe, his hair mussed and a stubble on his face. He went to the coffeepot—that old Farberware percolator Ardele loved for the aroma it gave off—and without a word poured a cup and stood looking out the window that faced the barn where the tractor and other machinery were kept in cold weather. The rest of the family, dressed for church, ate breakfast. They all four knew immediately that he’d had one of his war nightmares and had woken up reincarnated into the uncommunicative character her mother called “Remote Man” because he would seem so very far away when those spells came over him. It was an inner distancing, a kind of implosion, the man everyone knew compressed, under the pressure of his memories, down to a pinpoint until he almost vanished inside himself. Sometimes Quinette was scared that he would stay there and never talk to her again. It was almost impossible to get through to him when he fell into that black hole, and it was just as difficult for him to speak to anyone else, as though the things he saw in there and the things he felt were inexpressibly awful. But Ardele tried now and then to make contact. She’d tried that morning. “Ted, there’s still time for you to get ready for church. I do wish you’d come with us at least once in a while.” He said nothing. He stared out the window and drank his coffee. “All right, just thought I’d ask.” He turned around suddenly. “Why do you keep asking? You know I don’t believe in that crap anymore. Maybe I never did.” Most times it didn’t pay to contact Remote Man, because most times he was as angry as the real Ted Hardin was gentle. “Ted, please, the girls.” “Like, do you really believe you’re going to heaven with all this churchgoing? Do you really honestly think we’re going somewhere when this is all over?” “I won’t ask again, promise.” “Know that wall they’ve just put up in Washington? Fourteen of my buddies are on it. Three of them, you could’ve sent what was left of all three home in an eight-by-eleven manila envelope. Think they’re somewhere right now, playing their harps?” “Please, Ted, don’t talk like this in front of the girls.” “A shovelful of dirt in your face if you’ve still got one and it’s all over. End of story.” “Not in front of the girls, I’m asking you, Ted.”

Quinette was shocked. How could the sweet man on whose ample lap she sat at hay-mowing time or during spring plowing amid the good smells of turned black earth not believe in God and the eternal rewards awaiting those who did? It meant she would not see him in heaven, and what kind of heaven would that be without him in it?

Now that she’d seen what he had in Vietnam, she understood why he’d uttered those bitter words. It was the fact of mutilation that caused her to think the inappropriate thought There is no life after death. The mortar shells had laid bodies open, seeming to expose a terrible truth—a human being is only skin, muscle, bone, blood, organs, and slimy viscera, no fit dwelling for an immortal soul. The randomness of those deaths troubled her just as deeply. Why had those particular seventeen people been killed? Pastor Tom would say that God had summoned them for His own good reasons, but as she’d lain in a ditch beside Lily, Quinette had perceived no selective process in the arbitrary explosions, in the chaotic flurries of hissing shrapnel, flying every which way above her head. It seemed that pure chance determined who died, who got hurt, who escaped unscathed. The deeper mystery, the one that vexed her most, was why God had permitted this to happen in the first place. How could he allow people to be killed and horribly maimed just as they were singing hymns in His praise? The moment before Lily had pulled her into the ditch (for she’d been standing up, in a paralysis of bewildered terror), she’d seen the canon marching down the runway with the crucifix raised high. It was a brave act of faith, and for it he’d gotten killed. Why would the author of all things good license such an evil? Unless it wasn’t an evil but only appeared to be one to her limited human mind. Oh, these thoughts were so perplexing. Dangerous as well. They sowed doubt in the ordered garden of her belief, and Pastor Tom had often preached, “In matters of the spirit, there can be no room for doubt, for it is but a short journey from doubt to despair.”

“Done all we can,” Lily said, intruding on her reverie, and a welcome intrusion it was. “Nothing for it but to wait. Looks like we’ll be spending one more night in this godforsaken place,” Lily added with a look at her watch. “Know the old soldier’s advice, ‘Never volunteer’? I’m wondering if we should’ve listened to it. It’s my own bed I’d like for tonight.”

Tara Whitcomb had departed an hour ago with their colleagues. A little before that Doug and Fitz had flown out for Manfred’s hospital, with the most serious cases and a detachment of soldiers to help carry them off and into the Land Rovers. The plane should have been back by now. If its return was delayed much longer, it would be too late to evacuate the remaining casualties and make Loki before nightfall.

Quinette scanned the vacant sky and said, “They’ll be showing up any minute.”

“Here’s hoping nothing’s gone wrong,” Lily said. “Did I say this place was godforsaken? God never considered it long enough to forsake it.”

With his radio operator standing behind him, Michael knelt at the wounded captain’s side and, cradling the man’s head in one hand, tried to get him to drink from a calabash. It wasn’t a suitable vessel; pouring out of the hole in the top, the water only dribbled down the captain’s chin. Quinette squatted next to him, took out her water bottle, and inserted the nozzle between his lips. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he sucked greedily.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Captain Bala. He was one of the two who tried to stop that crazy canon from killing himself.” Michael shook his head. “I don’t know what that man thought he was doing. The people needed him.”

“Do you wonder why he and the other man got killed and Captain Bala lived?” Quinette asked earnestly. “Do you ever wonder about things like that?”

“No.”

“I guess what happened today is sort of routine to you.”

“War is never routine. It’s full of surprises, none of them good.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose the answer is that it was God’s will.”

“And you believe that?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think the canon is with God right now?”

“These are strange questions to be asking at this time.”

“I know.”

“We Nubans believe there is a world beyond this one, so of course he is now with God. Look at that.” His fingers fanning like a magician’s demonstrating a card trick, he gestured at a group of women making a pile of tree branches. “Those are from a special acacia. The ash of its burned leaves is sacred. It’s used to anoint the bodies of the dead. If that and some other things aren’t done, their spirits won’t answer when you call on them. They might cause you trouble.”

Her immediate thought was that this funeral custom wasn’t fitting for people who claimed to be Christians, but recalling the words Malachy had spoken to her, that Sunday months ago in the Turkana village—“You’ve got to meet them halfway”—she refrained from voicing it. Indeed, these people, with their half-heathen, half-Christian beliefs, might even be a living reproof to her doubts. Their faith in the eternal life of the spirit had not been shaken; why, then, should hers? It must have been the Enemy who’d planted those questions in her mind. Once again her attention was diverted to herself and to the state of her own soul. She concluded that God was testing her. As the Enemy had tempted Christ in the desert, so was he now tempting her to cast off her faith and make the short journey into despair, in which she would be easy prey for his snares and wiles. She mustn’t give in, she mustn’t fail! If, as she’d thought last night, God was calling her to a new field of action, He would need to know some things about her first, like how strong was her faith.

“Satan, get thee behind me.” She felt stronger now, rerooted in the firm soil of certitude. “Like a tree standing by the waters, I shall not be moved.” She watched a woman borrow matches from a soldier and then set fire to the branches. In seconds the pile was ablaze, black smoke ascending pillar-straight into the windless air. Her gaze rose with it, and then she heard the drone of Douglas’s plane.

The doctor had sent blankets back with him. The blankets were turned into makeshift stretchers, which made loading the second lot of casualties easier than the first. When it was finished, Michael and his radio operator climbed aboard and sat down at the forward end of the cabin, Captain Bala lying at his feet. As the engines revved to an urgent roar and the plane made a rough roll down the runway, Quinette was touched to see him clasp the officer’s hand. He continued to hold it through the climb, the leveling off.

“You must be very close to him,” she said.

“I would not be leaving my command post otherwise. But Major Kasli can handle things for a little while.”

He bent down to speak to Captain Bala, who responded in a rasping whisper, and Michael folded the blanket he was lying on over his chest.

“He said he’s cold. It must be the altitude, the loss of blood. Kasli is my second in command because of his rank, but this one I trust like a brother. We were in the army together.”

It took a beat for the tense to register with Quinette.

“I don’t understand, were.”

“Sudan army. We deserted from the same garrison to join the SPLA. We’ve fought side by side from that day to this.” He turned full face to her, and his smile, a bright crescent above his rounded chin, brought a flush to her cheeks. “So now you know you’re sitting next to a fugitive and a deserter as well as a rebel, a man the government would hang without trial.”

“I’m used to traveling in dangerous company,” she said, affecting a jaunty tone.

“Three times I’ve been wounded,” Michael said. “Bala not one time until today. Fighters stayed near him on operations. It was said a powerful kujur had given him a charm against bullets. I wonder if he began to believe that himself. I think that’s why he did what he did, running after the crazy man.”

The captain moaned, his good arm flopped over his waist, his hand slapping his side. Leaning forward, Quinette again fed him her water bottle. He gulped and spit up. She squeezed the bottle hard to squirt the liquid down his throat. He spit up again. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” The words to the old spiritual drifted into her mind—it had been sung at her father’s memorial service in the church he would never enter when he was alive—and she hummed it now. “There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Sometimes I get discouraged, and think my work’s in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”

A short time later she found herself at one more desolate bush airstrip, holding Captain Bala’s wounded arm tight to his chest while Michael gripped a knotted end of the blanket, his radio operator the other. With great care, they passed him head first through the plane’s door and lugged him toward a waiting Land Rover. The vehicle had been converted into an ambulance, the rear seats removed and a steel rack bolted halfway between the roof and the floor so six people could be carried at once, three on top, three on the bottom. A German nurse named Ulrika determined which six of the fifteen casualties were to be taken first. Wearing a blood-smeared smock, she made a quick examination of each one. “This one ja, this one also, this one nein,” she said. The fateful litany went on. Ja . . . ja . . . ja . . . nein. The captain received a “ja,” and Michael and the radiooperator laid him inside, wedging him alongside two others on the top rack.

The sun was low on the serrate horizon. Doug said he couldn’t make Loki before dark, even with luck and a tailwind, and elected to delay the return flight till morning.

“You and Lily might want some privacy, so you can sleep inside,” he said while soldiers began erecting a tent of camouflage netting over the plane. “Fitz and I can bag out under a wing.”

“Oh, I like the idea of sleeping out under the stars,” Lily declared. She gave her dingy brown hair a coquettish flip.

“Might rain again tonight.”

“I’ll take the chance,” she said. It appeared that the idea of spending one more night in the Nuba had suddenly become more agreeable to her.

Lily had just started to build her little nest under the wing when Ulrika bustled up, her bosom thrust forward, her rear end thrust backward for ballast. “You are the girl with nurse’s training?”

“Nurse’s?” Lily rolled out her air mattress. “I was a paramedic.”

“Ach! Nurse. Paramedic. You think we care about such distinctions here? You must come.”

“Come? Where?”

“With us to hospital, where do you think? Gerhard instructed me to bring you. We have so many, we need all the help we can find.”

“You’ll pardon me, sure, but I don’t get paid for that, and I’ve got to be back in Loki by tomorrow to do what I do get paid for.”

Ulrika drew back, as if she’d been insulted. “For what you get paid or not paid makes no difference! We have already lost three people and will lose more with your help or without it but more without than with.” She collected herself and tried a less strident approach. “I appeal to you. I am not making a big opera, but this is life and death.”

“Well, hell and bloody hell,” Lily said, kicking the air mattress. “Never f*cking volunteer.” She glanced at Douglas and Fitz.

“Up to you,” Doug said, “as long as you’re back here between eight and nine. We want to take off before it gets too hot.”

Quinette looked toward the Land Rover and saw Michael standing on the running board, looking back toward them. “I’ll go with you, Lily, since they need help,” she said.

They had to sit on the roof, enclosed by the roof-rack, which they clung to as the Land Rover rocked side to side or leaned at precarious angles when one set of wheels rolled along a ridge in the center of the road. On the running boards, clutching the braces of the sideview mirrors, Michael and his radio operator had the look of charioteers. The road was so badly ditched and potholed that the driver couldn’t go much faster than ten miles an hour. In some places it became a series of evenly spaced heaves and dips, and Quinette watched the hood rise and fall like a boat’s bow in a storm.

Up on her unstable perch, she felt daring and adventurous and reveled in the roughness of the ride, the dust blowing into her face. They possessed the glamour of hardship. She flew out of herself and pictured the scene as if it were a movie: the sky behind a shimmering rose, dusk gathering in the sky ahead, and the two vehicles filled with casualties of war plunging on through a strange landscape where rocky needles stabbed out of acacia forests and wind-carved boulders stood like fantastic sculptures. The image poured its drama into her, nourishing the conviction that she was where she belonged, living with the intensity that had always been meant for her.

At the hospital Lily was issued a surgical smock, mask, and latex gloves and shanghaied into the operating room, which was nothing more than a tukul set a little apart from one of the bungalows that served as wards. Quinette was relegated to helping a male nurse prepare the patients for surgery, cutting their clothes away from their wounds, sponging them with hot water and bacteriological soap. There weren’t many beds open, so the injured had been placed on blankets on the ground, under an awning of plastic sheets propped up by crooked wooden poles. She and the nurse worked by a hissing high-pressure lantern that was a magnet for insects. He spoke only Arabic and a few words of German picked up from his boss, forcing him and Quinette to communicate mostly in an improvised sign language. She hadn’t eaten since this morning and was dizzy with hunger, its pangs occasionally overcome by a swift, sharp cramp of dysentery. Her knees grew stiff from all the stooping and squatting, but she relished these afflictions; the thing she was doing wouldn’t be worthwhile if it didn’t hurt a little. And hunger and tummy cramps were next to nothing compared with the patients’ sufferings. The fabric of their bodies gouged, slashed, and punctured, they appeared not to have been maimed so much as vandalized by some malicious delinquent.

Captain Bala was unconscious. He didn’t flinch when the nurse, after replacing the makeshift tourniquet with a rubber tube tied below Bala’s shoulder, ripped off the dressings. He motioned to Quinette, and she sponged the gash. The arm was swollen, and she feared septicemia had set in; and yet when she laid the back of her hand against the captain’s forehead, his skin was cool to the touch, almost cold. If he had an infection, he would be running a fever, she knew that much. The nurse had meanwhile wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Bala’s good arm. He pumped the bulb, read the gauge, pumped again, and with a grave expression softly whispered, “Ya Allah—my God.” Then, as he took Bala’s pulse, his hand resting on the captain’s midsection, he appeared to feel something strange, for he let go of the wrist and pulled up Bala’s shirt, revealing a lemon-sized lump, with a red-rimmed pinhole in its center, just below the ribs on his right side. The nurse pressed it, and Bala awoke with a sudden jerk, a startling cry. A flurry of gestures told Quinette to fetch one of the stretchers leaning against the bungalow’s wall.

The captain was Michael’s size, well over two hundred pounds, and her back nearly popped as they lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the operating room. She was out of breath when they set him down outside. They waited. Bala lapsed back into unconsciousness. From somewhere behind the tukul, a generator throbbed. In a few minutes the door swung open and two orderlies passed through the rectangle of bright light, carrying a woman rolling her head from side to side, the stump of her right leg swaddled in bandages. Manfred and Ulrika followed behind, pulling off their masks. They cupped their hips in their hands and arched their backs and took deep breaths of the still night air before they each lit a cigarette. The lighter’s flare illuminated Manfred’s bloodshot eyes, the half-moon sags beneath them. His whole face looked like it was under the pull of a powerful gravity. The poor man had been bandaging and cutting and stitching and pulling metal out of people for the past eight hours. He and Ulrika smoked while the nurse apprised them of Captain Bala’s condition. That’s what Quinette assumed he was doing; she couldn’t understand a word. The doctor motioned to bring the wounded man inside.

The operating room, with its baked mud walls and ceiling of corrugated tin, looked nothing like the ones on TV medical shows. Except for a breathing apparatus with a face mask hanging from it, there was no high-tech gadgetry flashing signals of life’s functions. Overhead lights shone on a stainless-steel table covered by a stained foam mattress. Hot water steamed in pots on a propane stove. Lily was cleaning surgical instruments in one, dipping them with tongs.

The two strapping orderlies returned and laid Captain Bala on the table. Quinette stepped back toward the door but didn’t leave with the male nurse. She had a special interest in this patient and figured that entitled her to stay and watch; however, her view of the operation was blocked by a wall of backs as Manfred and his assistants went to work. “I had better not put him under, his blood pressure is far too low,” he murmured to Lily. “Let’s see if we can make do with a local.” Lily raised a bottle to the light and filled a syringe. Then the doctor called for a scalpel and forceps, and for several minutes there was complete silence, until he exclaimed, “Ah!” As he turned aside, pinching what looked like a fragment of a coat hanger between the forceps, Quinette saw the front of his smock spattered with a blackish fluid and Ulrika holding a compress to Bala’s side. Manfred frowned when he spotted her, leaning against the door.

“You have a reason for being here?”

“I . . . no—I was just wondering . . . is he going to be all right?”

“You’re not needed here, Miss Hardin.”

She went out, feeling superfluous and embarrassed. She should return to her assigned duties but thought against all reason that if she remained close by, Captain Bala would be okay. Looking up at the stars, more stars than she’d ever seen back home, she prayed to God to deliver Michael’s comrade from whatever danger he was in. Even as she did, she sensed that this petition wouldn’t be granted; so she wasn’t too surprised or saddened when, about a quarter of an hour later, the orderlies marched out with the stretcher between them and the captain on it, the blanket drawn over his face.

“I am sorry for kicking you out,” Manfred said, emerging with Ulrika, Lily, and two other assistants. “I didn’t know you and Miss Hanrahan worked so hard to save that man. The fifth one we lost today.”

“We did a first-rate job, treating the wrong wound,” Lily remarked caustically.

Manfred lit up again, bringing the two fingers holding the cigarette flat against his lips, pulling it out with a quick, nervous movement. “You could have done nothing with the right one.”

“What happened?” Quinette asked.

“A thin piece of shrapnel this long”—he spread a thumb and forefinger about three inches—“pierced his liver, straight through to the inferior vena cava. This is the big artery from the heart to the liver. Not much bleeding on the outside—the piece was like a little cork—but a great deal of internal hemorrhaging. It is miraculous he lasted as long as he did.”

“I’d better find Michael and tell him.”

But at that inconvenient moment, a wave of nausea rolled through her. Hand to her mouth, she moved away and vomited.

Ulrika placed a matronly arm across her shoulders. “Ach, you are not used to this.”

“Not that,” Quinette sputtered. “I’ve got dysentery, and—”

“You have something for it?”

“Cipro.”

“Then take one and get some rest. My little house, you can sleep there. I don’t think I will be lying down for some hours yet.”

Quinette shook her head. “As long as Lily is—”

“Do not with me play the heroine,” Ulrika chided. “You have done your share. My little house. I will get someone to show you where it is.”

Shining her penlight into the small room, she saw a box of matches on the nightstand and lit the paraffin lamp. Ulrika had asked her not to turn on the electric lights, to save juice in the solar batteries. The bed with its steel headboard looked like hospital surplus, its stern functional lines softened somewhat by the mosquito net that enclosed it. Figuring the invitation did not include use of the bed, Quinette propped her rucksack in a corner, unrolled her air mattress and sleeping bag, and placed them atop one of the floor mats. It was stuffy inside, and she opened the shutters, sat on a chair, and took off her boots and socks, wrinkling her nose at the smell. All of her clothes had a funky reek. Reckoning she did, too, she stripped and hung her clothes on a peg to air them out, then positioned the chair in the middle of the room, between the two windows, and washed her naked body in the night breezes.

She looked around at the floral print curtains on the windows, posters of German pop groups on the stone walls, a portable radio with built-in CD player on the desk, next to a laptop and a stack of computer-game software. She wasn’t ready for sleep, though she’d been awake since dawn. What she felt instead of tiredness was an inner collapse. Everything she and Lily had done for Captain Bala, all for nothing. “Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.” The Holy Spirit, however, seemed not to be in a revivalist mood as far as she was concerned, so she got her travel Bible from her rucksack and sat on the bed, holding the book under the lamp, and paged through it aimlessly, hoping to come upon some uplifting passage. Finding none, she lay down for a moment . . .

A knock at the door and the sound of someone calling her name woke her up. At first she thought she was dreaming, the voice and the rapping sounded so far away; but then she was sitting up and looking at her watch. Ten-thirty. She’d been asleep for maybe fifteen minutes, though it felt like hours. By the time her head cleared, Michael had given up and was walking away—she could hear his boots crunching on the gravel pathway. She called to him through the window.

“Miss Hardin? The nurse told me you were here. I woke you up?”

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. She knew, instinctively knew, the reason for this visit and was thrilled he’d come to her.

“Wait a second. I’m not dressed,” she said, and quickly put on her trousers and shirt and fluffed her hair. She was about to tell him to come in when she noticed that she’d left her bra and panties on the peg. That wouldn’t look right, she thought, and stuffed them into her rucksack. Then she opened the door.

He had to duck as he entered; it was a low doorway—she herself had cleared it by only a couple of inches. He took off his beret and folded it under an epaulet and asked if he could sit down. She nodded, and he fell into the chair, looking stricken and exhausted. She placed the desk chair in front of him and sat down.

“I am so sorry,” she said, covering his hand in her two. “I prayed for him, I did, but—”

“I didn’t come here for the kind words.” There was an equal measure of aggression and weariness in his tone. “Bala was a soldier and he died like one, and that’s the end of it.”

“You came because you needed to talk to somebody. And don’t tell me I’ve got that wrong, because I know and I know because I lost someone close to me when I was fourteen. My dad. And afterward, after it finally sank into my teenage head that he was gone and never coming back, all I wanted to do was talk to people. To just about anyone who’d listen.”

“But you are wrong,” he said.

She released his hand and sat back, noticing how the lamplight lent a bronze cast to the cicatrix on his forehead.

In an undertone, his lips barely moving, he said, “You have no idea how sick I am of all this. I didn’t come here to talk, but to listen to you talk. I want you to take me out of here for a little while. Talk to me about the Iowa state.”

“Iowa?” she asked with a nervous laugh.

“Yes. I’ve heard Garang speak about his days at university there. He liked it very much. I wish to hear about it from you.”

“There’s not much I can say. I mean, it’s kind of boring.”

“Boring is good. The more boring the better. Because, as you’ve seen this day, Sudan can be so very interesting.”

He cocked his chin as he stared at her, as if defying her to bore him, an unusual challenge that she did her best to meet, telling him that Iowa was very white, racially speaking, and very flat from the Mississippi in the east to the Missouri in the west, flat as a table except near the rivers, where it got hilly but not much, and owing to this flatness and the thick, rich, black soil, it was mostly farmland, corn and soybean fields and cow pastures, and nothing much ever happened there except during presidential election years, when candidates from all over descended on the state, vying for its citizens’ votes because it was a big deal to win the state of Iowa, even though it didn’t have a lot of people, like California or New York—fat people, she added, and described how heavy and ponderous everyone had looked to her when she’d returned home from her first visit to Sudan, why, your average Iowan could shed twenty pounds and give it to your average African and the Iowan would still be overweight and the African skinny, and was that boring enough for him?

“Delightfully boring,” he answered. “But you’re not fat.”

It was hard to tell if he meant this as a compliment or as a mere statement of the obvious.

“I probably would be if I’d stayed. My older sister? The last time I saw her, she was getting like this.” She made a circle with her arms. “She’s not as tall as me—as I. I’m the tallest of three sisters. Take after my dad. He was six feet four.”

“The father you lost,” he murmured, and she could tell by the way he said it that he wondered how she’d come to lose him.

“He was a soldier, like you. In the Vietnam War. He got sick because he was exposed to a chemical they used over there. Agent Orange. You heard about it?”

“When I was at Fort Benning, yes. My father was also a soldier. In the British army. He fought with the British in the Second World War. Against the Italians in Ethiopia.”

“You seem kind of young to have had a father in the Second World War,” she remarked.

“He had three wives. I was a son of the youngest, a girl sixteen years old that he married when he was forty.”

Three, she thought, and that brought a question, one she was reluctant to ask.

“But you haven’t told me about your life in Iowa state,” he said.

She laughed. “Now that would really bore you.”

“I wish to hear about ordinary things.”

She spun random, mundane anecdotes about Cedar Falls and the farm and the dull years in high school. Her life B.A.—Before Africa. A fear leaped within her that she was overdoing it, making it sound more commonplace than it had actually been. However much he wished to hear about ordinary things, she didn’t wish Michael to see her as an ordinary woman, a desire that led her to carry on for several minutes about her sinful years and her eventual return to grace, a tale she thought sufficiently dramatic to balance out all the everyday stuff.

“And so you have come here to Sudan for what reason?”

“I told you. I work for the WorldWide Christian Union—”

“Yes, of course. But what are your own reasons? The reasons in your heart. Was your life in America too dull that you had to come here?”

The honest answer, she knew, was yes, but she didn’t care for the sound of it: too personal, too selfish, and besides, it was not entirely true. “I think I was called here. I think I’m doing something God wants me to do. What about you?”

He smiled. “I’m here because I was born here, Miss Hardin.”

“It’s all right to call me Quinette. I meant, you said you’re sick of all this. Why are you doing what you do?”

“There is a Nuban ballad, one for the modern times,” he answered. “It says this:


The world becomes bad

There is one man who doesn’t want to go to war

If you want me to fight, you must take me by a rope

Around my neck and pull me there. I won’t go.

“Sometimes I wish I could be like the man in that song. To have the courage to say, ‘I won’t go.’ But I don’t have the choice. Some men fight because they love it. I fight because I hate it.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I fight in the hopes that if I fight hard enough, long enough, and with enough intelligence, I can make an end to fighting.”

“I like that. It’s beautiful,” she said, and pulled her chair a little closer to his.

“It’s necessary, not beautiful. I deserted the Sudan army for many reasons, but one was this—my commander told me I could never be promoted if I did not become Muslim and take a Muslim name. When I refused, I could not get paid because the commander said there was no one named Michael Goraende on the muster roll. But, he said, there was a man named Ahmed Goraende. All I had to do was report to the paymaster and say I was Ahmed Goraende. Still I refused. I had a wife and three children in New Tourom, and they suffered because of my stubbornness.”

“Is . . .” Quinette hesitated. “Is your wife still there?”

“She was a teacher at the St. Andrew’s school. She and two of my children, a son and daughter, were killed in the bombing. The third one, the oldest, a daughter, lived.”

After taking a minute to absorb this revelation, Quinette told him how deeply sorry she was—and was appalled that it wasn’t entirely the truth.

“I’ve seen a great deal of death,” he said, “so much of it that even the sadness of losing a wife and two children did not last as long as it should have.”

“Do you have another wife? Your father had three.”

“No. No other.” He was silent for a time. “Miss Hardin, will you be returning to the Nuba?”

“I don’t know. It depends.”

“On what?”

“If my boss decides there’s work for us to do up here.”

“There is. As I told you, a great many of our people have been taken captive.”

“It’s not that simple, it’s a complicated process,” she said. “We don’t have any contacts up here. We would—”

“We could help you make these contacts. I would very much like it if—if you were to come back here.”

She couldn’t quite read that remark; his expression was likewise illegible in the wan lamplight. “May I ask why?”

“For selfish reasons. I enjoy talking to you.”

“You’d like me to bore you some more.”

With a tentative movement, he touched her knee and grinned. “Oh yes, bore me to death. No, no, of course not. It has been a long time since I’ve spoken to a woman as I do to you. My wife and I used to talk a lot. Like you, she was an educated woman.”

Quinette stifled a yelp. “Educated? Educated doesn’t describe me.”

“Compared with the women here, you are. Many of them cannot read or write.”

“By that standard, I’ve got a Ph.D.,” she said.

“I should be going,” he said abruptly.

“Do you have to? I enjoy talking to you.”

“Another time. Tomorrow.”

She leaned forward as he began to rise, intending to give him a chaste kiss good-bye; but she felt as if she’d fallen into some kind of magnetic field, for she kept leaning, her face drawn toward his, seemingly against her will. In the next moment she was on top of him, straddling his lap, clasping the back of his neck while he held her around the waist and they kissed; kissed without a pretense of tenderness, she biting the inside of his lips, his tongue darting for her throat.

They drew back from each other and into an awkward silence. To her, the surprising thing was that the kiss didn’t surprise her. It had a quality of inevitability, of something foreordained from the moment she’d first seen him, yesterday morning.

He reached out and pulled her to him, and they kissed again. His mouth broke free and roamed over her face, until they heard someone walking outside. Ulrika! In a panic, Quinette leaped up, went to the window, and saw an orderly trudging toward the casualties’ shelter, where the pressure lanterns flared.

“It’s all right, it isn’t her,” she whispered.

Michael got out of the chair. “It will be next time. I must go.”

“You could stay,” she pleaded. “We could talk a while longer.”

He silenced her with a subdued laugh. “I’m afraid that talking isn’t what we would do.”

That declaration made her feel wanted, even irresistible, but it was a poor consolation. She stood in the doorway and watched him stride across the hospital grounds, into the enveloping shadows. He didn’t look back. She shut the door, afraid that if she left it open another second, she would succumb to a reckless impulse to run after him. She got into her sleeping bag. A faint growl of thunder sounded in the distance, rousing a hope that it would rain hard all night and wash out the airstrip and strand her here indefinitely. That wasn’t likely, she couldn’t rely on circumstance, she would have to find a way to return; and looking at the roof beams, she began to scheme how to do it.