Acts of Faith

“MY MAN! COFFEE’S ON!”

Sitting on his sleeping bag under the Gulfstream’s wing, Fitzhugh ignored Douglas’s cheerful summons, although he needed some caffeinating after a night of fractured sleep and fearful dreams inspired by the previous day’s events. The contents of the nightmares had mercifully fled his mind as soon as he woke up, a quarter of an hour before sunrise. Terror lingered in him for a while longer but dissipated as the sun bulged out of the crenulated mountains, magnified to twice its high-noon size, its sharply slanting light heightening the shades of ochre and terra-cotta in the earth and rocks. Feeling like an astronaut who’d landed on some austerely beautiful planet, he gazed at the scene in blank-minded admiration until thoughts of Diana intruded and, so to speak, brought him back to earth.

The horror of seeing her covered in blood, the elation of discovering that it wasn’t hers had shredded his notion to live their affair in the moment, shocked into an awareness of the depth of his love and into recognizing the truth that a serious romance cannot abide stasis; it must go in one direction or the other. Grow or die. Having no wish to allow the relationship to die, he would have to nurture its growth, which meant working toward marriage or some arrangement unsanctioned by law or clergy. The trouble was, the picture of them sharing a roof and bed was as fuzzy as ever; indeed, he couldn’t see it at all, much as he wanted it. His desire for children was the biggest obstacle. That was curious; he hadn’t given fatherhood much consideration before he’d become involved with Diana; it had been an abstraction. Now it had become a concrete issue, because to fulfill his love would be to foreclose on the possibility. He’d spoken about none of this to her. She was the one who seemed content with things as they were, happy to carry on in the present.

“Yo! Fitz! Get it while it’s hot!”

He looked through the web of camouflage netting and across the runway toward Douglas, squatting beside a smoking campfire with Suleiman and the soldiers guarding the plane. There were times, and this was one, when his friend’s sunny voice, his exuberance, got on Fitzhugh’s nerves. Americans—now there was a people who managed to live in the future and in the here and now at the same time. To them, the future was the here and now.

He recalled a conversation he’d had with Malachy about Douglas’s “cool idea” to save the Nuba. They concluded—somewhat reluctantly—that only an American could have come up with such a scheme, only an American could have had the confidence and enthusiasm to see it through. And so the discussion turned from Douglas to Americans in general. Malachy, who had relatives in the United States and visited there often, opined that they were an optimistic people with an almost childish faith in themselves and in the future because they lacked a tragic sense, not because America had never experienced tragedy but because Americans refused to admit that tragedy existed. Slavery and the Civil War and the Great Depression and the Vietnam War hadn’t shaken their conviction that tomorrow would be better, and if it failed to deliver, the next day would. And why was that so? Fitzhugh inquired. Americans believed in a radiant tomorrow, Malachy replied, because they possessed an uncanny ability—it was a kind of self-induced amnesia combined with a deliberate blindness—to forget the bad things that had happened yesterday and to ignore the bad things that were happening today. He remembered being in the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam and the hostage crisis in Iran, the pall cast by those disasters darkened by a recession, inflation, the menacing shadow of the Soviet Union on the march in Afghanistan. What had America’s president said to all this? What did that smiling movie actor tell his people? “It’s morning in America!” And what did his people reply? “Why, yes it is!” Of course it wasn’t morning in America, but Americans couldn’t see that, dazzled by the illusory sunrise summoned up by the smiling actor. And look at where they are now! said Malachy. Richer than ever, victors in the cold war, the envy of all the world! Do you see, my old friend? It became morning in America because Americans willed it to be so.

“If Muhammad won’t come to the coffee, then the coffee’s got to come to Muhammad.”

Holding a steaming tin mug in each hand, Douglas parted a flap in the netting and joined him under the wing. “Just the way you like it. Three sugars.”

With the tip of his tongue, Fitzhugh tested the mug’s rim for heat before he took a sip.”Two is how I like it.”

“Lousy, isn’t it? I got it from the compound’s mess. You know what Wes always says about the coffee in Kenya.”

“ ‘How come in a country where such fine coffee gets grown, the stuff tastes like it was filtered through a secretary’s pantyhose after a ten-hour day?’ ” Fitzhugh said, attempting Dare’s country-boy twang. “His figures of speech are very colorful. He said that once to Rachel in the office. She didn’t appreciate it.”

Douglas combed his days-old beard with his fingertips. It became him, maturing his undergraduate looks. “But he’s right. You can’t get a decent cup in Nairobi or anywhere. That gave me a really cool idea. I’m going to mention it to Hassan, see if he thinks it could fly. We open a coffee shop in Nairobi, kind of like a Starbucks back in the States. Serve cappuccino and espresso besides regular coffee. Cheap. If it goes over, we open another, build a local chain.”

This early in the morning it was difficult to keep up with Douglas’s inspirations.

“Diversify,” he added. “We’ve got to do something with Knight Air’s profits besides park them in a bank, so we put the money to work in another enterprise. Really good coffee at reasonable prices. Everyone benefits.”

“Only you could find something socially redeeming about a chain of coffee shops.”

“What is it, my man? You seem a little on edge. Look, I know you’re thinking about what happened yesterday—”

“Actually, I was thinking about something else.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Douglas carried on, not listening. “The NGOs will be scared of committing to the Nuba. Too dangerous. And that’s what Khartoum wants them to think. Somebody tipped off the bad guys about what we were doing, so they figured to send a message, and a few dead relief workers would have been the way to send it, loud and clear.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know it.” Then Douglas rested an encouraging hand on Fitzhugh’s shoulder. “But I gave it some more thought this morning, and it came to me that things could work out just the opposite. Those people could be back in Loki right now, saying, ‘We aren’t going to be intimidated, things are really rough up in the Nuba, it needs all the aid we can send.’ And if they’re not saying that, that’s how we should spin it when we get back. It’s possible, I’m saying, that that mortar attack was the best thing that could have happened.”

Pausing to absorb this remarkable statement, Fitzhugh lit a cigarette, his first of the day. “What you did yesterday impressed me, but you know, you make it hard for me or anyone to admire you completely. Because you have an unfortunate genius for saying things like you just now said.”

He received in response the patented gaze, the disarming smile. “Hey, you don’t really think I’m happy about these people getting killed and wounded, do you? All I’m saying is that some good might come out of it.”

“Let’s drop the subject. I was thinking about something else anyway. About Diana and me.”

Douglas frowned. “Diana and you?”

“Barrett knows, so you might as well, too. We’re involved.”

“You’re involved sex-wise?” Douglas asked, each word rising up the scale, the final one coming out in a high tenor of disbelief.

“I prefer love-wise. We’re in love, and I was wondering where it’ll lead to, if it can lead to anything.”

In a parody of astonishment, Douglas slapped his forehead. “First Wes and Mary, now you and Diana. What the hell am I running? An airline or an odd-couple dating service?”

“Think of it as diversification,” Fitzhugh remarked and, in an idle shift of his glance, noticed that Suleiman and the soldiers were standing in frozen postures, faces turned toward the sky. In a moment, Suleiman fell to his knees and scooped dirt onto the campfire to douse the smoke. He and Douglas heard it then—the low, uninflected growl of a high-flying Antonov.

The sound reduced everything else that was on their minds to triviality. They ran out from under the net and joined the soldiers in an apprehensive vigil, heads turning as they tracked the plane, a silvery cross in a powder-blue sky striated by cirrus clouds. It flew northward; then, with the leisured arrogance of an unchallenged bird of prey, it made a slow turn. The sound faded, but the plane was still visible as it overflew the hospital, several miles away, before turning again.

Douglas said, “I’m going to get Gerhard on the radio, tell him to start Michael and those girls back here right now.”

Fitzhugh heard the growling noise once again. The plane had dropped in altitude. He fetched binoculars from his rucksack and saw the big, over-wing engine cells, the tailfins spread above the rear cargo door. The cargo door that doubled as a bomb bay. It was open. The soldiers had taken cover in the woods edging the airstrip, except for two, who’d leaped into a pit dug last night for their 12.7-millimeter machine gun, a weapon that had purely symbolic value against an aircraft flying at ten thousand feet.

It commenced another circle, descending farther as it headed eastward.

“Talked to the logistics dude, that Italian, Franco,” Douglas called down from the cockpit window. “It flew right over them the first time around. Our people should be here—”

The muffled rumble of a bomb cut him off. In the distance a column of smoke roiled straight up and crowned out into a shape resembling a tree, one whose growth from sapling to full height was compressed into seconds, as in a time-lapse film. Fitzhugh felt a tremor beneath his feet as another tree rose, a third, a fourth, black and evil. Far above, flying slowly with its nose pitched up, the Antonov excreted the seeds.

“Jesus Christ, they’re hitting the hospital!” Douglas hollered down. “I can’t reach anybody!”

“Of course you can’t if they’re being bombed. Get out of there, Doug! We might be next!”

They sprinted into the woods and lay flat beside the soldiers, cradling their useless rifles. The pair in the gun pit crouched behind the twelve-seven, the barrel pointed skyward.

There was a brief silence, then another series of blasts, maybe half a dozen all together, the explosions and their echoes merging into a single thunderous roll. The earth vibrating under him, Fitzhugh could not imagine what it was like to be in the eye of that awful storm. Bombing a hospital, in the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most loving-kind. The difference between hearing about such barbarism and witnessing it was the difference between a vexatious rumor and a monstrous, undeniable fact. The one provoked distress, perhaps questions as to how humankind could pervert religion to such demonic ends; the other provoked purest outrage.

The last echoes of the last bomb died away, the plane flew on, and the morning’s quiet was restored. The men emerged from the woods to see soot-colored shoals spread over the hills to the east and flames flashing intermittently in a dark funnel, whirling like a stationary tornado. They stared in silence. Fitzhugh thought of Ulrika and Gerhard, poor man, his illusion of the hospital’s exemption blown to dust, and maybe he’d been, too; of Quinette, Lily, Michael, and all those wounded yesterday, delivered from one horror into another.

“Tell me what good you think will come of this,” he said, pushing his face to within inches of Douglas’s.

“Stay chilly, my man,” the American said, then walked away and climbed back into the Gulfstream.

Remaining outside, Fitzhugh could hear him through the open cockpit window, trying to reach the hospital on the radio, the same words over and over.

 

IN A CLEFT between two large boulders, she lay with her face crushed into the dirt and her hands clamped to her ears and Michael’s body pressing down on her.

“It’s finished with,” she heard him say through a high-pitched ringing, and felt his weight lifted from her as he stood up.

Finished with? The air raid had been so far beyond anything in her experience, beyond anything she could have imagined, that it would never be finished with, not to her. The ringing continued, shrill and unmodulated. The bombs had set it off, exploding with a noise that had penetrated her skin until it seemed to be coming from inside her.

“Quinette, you must get up.”

She rose to her hands and knees. He helped her the rest of the way. A slight trembling passing through her legs, she leaned against one of the high rocks and stared, hardly blinking, at Michael and his radio operator, both men looking at her with expressions that asked, Are you all right? They meant, Is anything broken, are you bleeding, can you walk, can you see? That was what mattered to soldiers accustomed to war’s terrors. Any other form of trauma was irrelevant. She understood this, so she said, “I’m okay.”

Michael brushed the dirt from her face. “We must see if there’s anything we can do.”

She tried to spit the dirt from her mouth, but she didn’t have any spit. “Can you give me a minute?”

“All right.”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

He spoke to the radio man, who produced rolling papers and tobacco from a shirt pocket and rolled one. He struck a wooden match under his thumbnail and lit it, taking a drag before passing it to her. It was strong tobacco, and the first dizzying puff was like the first she’d ever taken, when she was thirteen—a Salem, she remembered. How odd that she could recall the brand, while her recollection of the past however-many-minutes-it-had-been (twenty? thirty? ten? five?) was like the recollection of a dream.

They’d gathered for breakfast at a table on a platform of baked mud behind Manfred’s house, near a lemon grove—she remembered that much—and Michael saying “Antonov!” when the plane flew over the first time, and the doctor, bleary with exhaustion, for he’d been operating till two in the morning, telling him not to be alarmed, planes routinely flew over the compound. On its second pass the Antonov was much lower, and someone shouted, “Cover the solar panels!” and the guy called Franco came out of the radio room, calling to her, Lily, and Michael to get in a Land Rover and make for the airstrip. No. That wasn’t the right sequence. Franco had spoken to them first, and then the plane came in. Lily had gone for her rucksack while Quinette, Michael, and the radio operator started toward the vehicle. That was when the first bombs struck a village across a narrow valley, maybe half a mile away. Michael seized her by one hand, the radio man by the other, and ran with her downhill, so fast her feet nearly left the ground. How they’d gotten here, into this crevasse in the rocks, she didn’t know. Her only memory was of bomb bursts becoming one enormous eruption and of the ground shaking and metal falling from the sky, clattering against the rocks.

The next few puffs went down easier than the first. The tobacco stitched her nerves back together, tuned the ringing down. She heard the loud crackle of flames, smelled burning wood and rubber and diesel fuel and a stench she’d not smelled before but somehow knew was burning flesh.

“Lily! Did you see Lily?”

“I don’t know,” Michael answered. “Come, we’ve got to see what we can do.”

She followed the two men up the hill, thinking that she ought to embrace them for saving her life, but for now it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. Reaching the top, they beheld a scene as arresting as a spectacular vista; it was as if horror and ugliness, when taken to this extreme, achieved a kind of beauty. Fuel drums for the hospital generators had burst, creating pools of fiery liquid; flames engulfed one of the Land Rovers, the other was flipped onto its roof, its tires four torches. Smoke twirled in plumes that wove together, forming a fog that turned the sun into a pale wafer. Through the smoke, people staggered blindly or crawled on all fours, some making inarticulate sounds, most stunned into silence. Ulrika’s cottage had been obliterated; so had the adjoining cottage and radio room. The new tin roof of Manfred’s house, a little distance away, had been peeled back and the breakfast table blasted into several pieces. Passing through the lemon orchard—the trees askew and stripped of leaves, shards of broken breakfast crockery littered everywhere—they came to the medical wards, or what had been the medical wards. Huge craters gaped in the courtyard once formed by the two long bungalows and the adjoining breezeway. All that remained were mounds of mangled tin, broken roof beams, charred mattresses, twisted metal bed frames, shining fragments of solar panel, and bodies and parts of bodies almost indistinguishable from the rubble. They found Ulrika, down on her knees, tearing at the wreckage bare-handed. Covered in soot, she ordered them to help her, there were people in there, Franco was in there, Franco had been covering up the panels when the bombs fell . . . Michael yanked her upright and told her that it was pointless, no one buried in that mess could be alive. After a few moments she said yes, they must save who could be saved, they must find the Herr Doktor. They went off, passing sights Quinette knew would provide the raw material for very bad dreams—and found Manfred at the pediatrics ward. It, the nearby dispensary, and the X-ray hut were the only structures to have escaped the high-explosive wrath, though shrapnel had flagellated the walls. A short distance away, in the encampment where the families of patients stayed, women ululated, and those trilling shrieks, mingling with the cries of children inside the ward, were almost more than Quinette could bear. “See what they do to us,” Michael murmured, his jaw tightening, “see what they do.”

Manfred, squatting down, was examining a woman who sat in the pediatrics doorway, holding an infant with blood running out of its ears. Its eardrums must have been broken by the explosions, but the doctor had his stethoscope on the child’s knees. He listened attentively, then moved the instrument to its chest, its tummy, its forehead. He tapped its elbows and back before pressing the stethoscope to the mother’s bosom and, after listening to her heartbeat for several seconds, told her that she was fine and so was her baby. He spoke in English. Quinette doubted the woman would have understood him in any language, for her ears were bleeding as well.

“I will give you something for that bleeding later,” he went on, “but now I have a more serious case to attend to.”

“Herr Doktor?” Ulrika said.

He turned, revealing a big purple lump on his temple, and looked up, presenting a peculiar smile. “Ah! Ulrika, Quinette. I am glad you have come. Don’t worry about this mother and daughter. They are doing splendidly. But you can help me with Lily, a more serious case, but I believe I can save her.”

“Gerhard, you have been hurt!”

He touched the lump and looked quizzically at his fingers, as if he hadn’t been aware of his injury. “This? Nothing. I believe I knocked my head when I dove into the bomb crater. Ha! I saw it, and I knew no two bombs will strike the same place twice. Like lightning, nicht wahr? And so I ran for it. Run, run, I said to Lily. We ran together, but I was the faster.” He scowled. “Lily, yes, the more serious case, but with your help, she can be saved. Come with me.”

With a stiff mechanical gait, he went around the corner of the building and picked up, by the knees, a pair of short white legs severed raggedly at the thighs and, carrying one in each hand, walked off toward the X-ray hut. Quinette’s head swam, an acidic bubble lodged in her throat.

Manfred shouldered the door open and dropped the limbs beside Lily’s truncated corpse, lying face-up, staring with wide eyes of sightless green, her mouth open in a frozen scream, and two splintered ivory staves protruding from the stumps of her thighs.

Quinette choked as the bubble popped. The dead outside were strangers, but this was irreverent, competent Lily, brimming with life such a short time ago. Quinette knelt and brushed her palm over the still, startled eyes, closing them.

“You’re so cold,” she sobbed. “Aw, Lily, Lily . . .”

And do you still believe this icy, dismembered thing was the home of an immortal soul? the Enemy chuckled. There is no soul, no heaven or hell for it to go to, no God. She was being tested again, much harder than yester-day. She mustn’t fail! If you exist, then God does, too! she shot back triumphantly.

“Stop that crying,” Manfred said. “I need your help, Miss Hardin.”

Dropping to his knees, he took Lily’s left leg, joined its bone to the exposed bone in the stump, then pulled up the flaps of skin, making a seam that resembled a jagged cut. He did the same with the right leg, which took less time because it had been severed more cleanly. Everyone watched with morbid fascination, indulging him in his madness until he called for sutures and his surgical needle.

Letting loose in German—“Gerhard! Herr Doktor! Mein Gott! Bitte!”—Ulrika grabbed him by an arm. He shook free. From behind, she hooked him under the arms and tried to drag him away, but he resisted. She couldn’t budge him.

“Michael, you must help me with this man.”

A profound serenity coming over her, Quinette motioned to Michael to hold off. She knew what to do. It was like that time, which seemed a hundred years ago, when she spoke to the liberated slaves and somehow knew what to say. That kind of certainty.

“Leave him be,” she said to the nurse.

Ulrika let him go and backed away and began to cry.

“Thank you, Miss Hardin. Now we can get to work! Suture! Needle!”

She passed him these imaginary items. Raising his hands, he mimed threading the needle, then, bent over, began to sew Lily back together. Stitch by stitch, he made every movement as if it were real filament and a real needle in his hands. He knotted off a suture and called for another of a different gauge. Quinette gave it to him, humming softly to him as he worked.

“What is that tune, Miss Hardin?”

“An American spiritual. Shall I sing it for you?”

Frowning in concentration, he pulled an invisible thread through the skin and tied it off. “Yes, if you please.”

“ ‘There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,’ ” she crooned, thinking, Yes, let’s make Lily whole again, even if it’s make-believe. ” ‘There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.’ ” God will overlook the deception when on that great gettin’ up morning He shall raise Lily and all the righteous dead to walk, souls and bodies reunited, in perfect beauty.

“How are the patient’s vital signs?”

She pretended to look at a monitor and replied that the vital signs were normal.

“Excellent. I am almost finished with this leg.”

And singing again, “ ‘Sometimes I get discouraged and think my work’s in vain,’ ” Quinette rose and gripped Manfred under one arm. “ ‘But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.’ ” She pulled easily and, feeling no resistance from him, pulled with more force. He straightened his back and looked down at his patient.

“So you’re finished with that one, Dr. Manfred?”

“Yes, I believe I am.”

“You’ll need a break before starting the next one. You don’t want to make a mistake.”

“Yes, of course. A little rest. In surgery like this, one must be very precise.”

At a nod from Quinette, Ulrika took the doctor under his opposite arm. Together they lifted him to his feet and led him outside.