Acts of Faith

IN THE COOL of early morning she trekked to New Tourom with her personal bodyguard, a scrawny youth nicknamed Negev after the Israeli machine gun he carried, and a procession of students, children of Michael’s soldiers. Pearl and her friends were among them, wearing white uniform dresses, gifts from the Friends of the Frontline.

In town workmen were roofing the new school, weaving makuti through the beams and rafters. There she was met by a teacher, Moses, a gaunt, middle-aged man in a white shirt who would be her translator. The meks, some of whom had come from villages as far as fifty miles away, were assembled inside St. Andrew’s church. The retriever, Bashir, was with them, looking none too comfortable within Christian walls.

“Salaam aleikum,” Quinette greeted, thus exhausting her Arabic.

“Aleikum as-salaam,” Bashir replied, and sat on one of the halved logs that served as pews.

Breaking out her notebook and tape recorder, she took a seat alongside him. Some of the meks presented handwritten lists of abducted people; the others, illiterate, had committed the names to memory. Deciphering the scrawl, extracting detailed information like ages and dates of capture, was exceedingly tedious. The translations drew the business out even longer. The meks knew no English, each spoke a Nuban dialect different from Moses’s. The only common language was Arabic, which few spoke well, requiring Moses to ask them, over and over, to repeat what they’d said. By midday Quinette had completed interviews with only two of the eight men and had not had a chance to speak to Bashir.

They broke for lunch, to resume in the afternoon. Moses invited her to eat with him and his wife. She might have turned him down had she known that he was also going to invite Ulrika.

They picked her up at her clinic, a square hut in front of which stood a queue of old folks and mothers with babies. Inside, a man sat handing out prescriptions through a window and writing in a cloth ledger that looked like an artifact from the nineteenth century. Ulrika was taking a child’s temperature. When she came out, looking much thinner than when Quinette had last seen her, her face drawn, her long hair limp in the heat, she said that the child was suffering from severe diarrhea and that she had sufficient medicine to treat him for only two more days.

“After that I will be like a kujur and feed him the inside of a baobab gourd. That is supposed to cure the diarrhea, but if it doesn’t, maybe he will die. I don’t know.”

She had heard that her supplies had been confiscated, and was that true? Her cheeks flushing, Quinette nodded.

“There was no way to stop them?”

“There were twenty, thirty of them with rifles.”

Never a choice between right and wrong, only between what was necessary and what was not. She pleaded with God to not let the child die, trusting Him to understand that swapping the medicine for weapons could save the lives of many children.

They sat down outside Moses’s tukul, in the shade of a mango tree. His wife had cooked a chicken that must have trained for the poultry Olympics, the meat was so stringy and tough. Quinette asked Ulrika about Dr. Manfred. The nurse had heard no word from him and very little about him, only that he’d returned to Germany and was recovering from his breakdown. “A temporary madness,” she said in her brusque way, “but I don’t think he is coming back for a long time, maybe never. He suffers from too much of Africa.”

After lunch Quinette returned to the church and conferred with Bashir. Speaking in Arabic, he affirmed that he and his associates would be able to act as middlemen in the Nuba, as they did in Dinkaland. But travel in the mountains was more difficult and more dangerous, and therefore he would have to charge a higher “risk premium”—seventy-five dollars a head.

Outside a dog barked, the sound jarring in the scorched stillness of the afternoon. “I’ll have to speak to Eismont about that,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll agree to it.”

“Sixty, then,” Bashir countered.

She regarded him, with his Rolex and rings and spotless jelibiya. “I can’t tell you how much you disgust me,” she said, smiling.

Moses looked at her, alarmed. “Miss, do you wish me to translate?”

She said no and returned to interviewing the meks.

 

HANDY WARMED UP for his debut as a combat cameraman by filming the training exercise, a live-fire rehearsal for the attack on the garrison. It was conducted some distance from town, on an open plain where there weren’t any people and the soldiers, thanks to the ammunition Dare had delivered, could practice with real bullets. They were a motley lot. Michael’s bodyguard and assault troops wore uniforms; the rest were got up like they’d looted an army surplus store and maybe the used clothing bin at a Salvation Army depot. There were men in bathing trunks and shorts and T-shirts so full of holes they showed as much skin as they covered; men wearing camouflage trousers and brightly colored shirts that negated the camouflage. A couple of soldiers had donned skirts and petticoats so that they looked like armed cross-dressers. They wore sneakers, sandals, and shower shoes and covered their heads with World War II British officer hats and heirloom pith helmets passed on by grandfathers who’d served in colonial constabularies.

Dare had a low opinion of African fighting abilities, except for the Ethiopians and the Somalis—who’d shown their prowess at Mogadishu—but he looked past the sorry appearance of Michael’s troops and observed that they moved well in the field, listened to their officers’ commands, and handled their weapons as if they knew which end to point. The Archangel had taught them the lessons he’d learned at Fort Benning. With bundles of grass and tree branches tied to their belts, they advanced in choreographed rushes, one platoon sprinting forward while another laid down covering fire—short, disciplined bursts, not the unrestrained volleys of amateurs who liked to make noise.

Handy had come down with a slight fever and diarrhea, but he’d rallied after an overdose of Lomotil and now brimmed with enthusiasm, his camera trained on a mortar crew drilling with smoke rounds. He focused on the one who dropped the shells into the tube—he wore a shiny crucifix around his neck, a regular Crusader. “This will look terrific!”

“A few months ago these dudes were carrying spears,” Doug said. “Now look at them.”

Dare said, “From the bronze age to the twentieth century quick as a wink. Nothin’ like progress.”

 

SHE’D SPOKEN TO all the meks but two. They would have to wait until tomorrow. She was worn out, and so was Moses, practically hoarse from his translating work, and he still had teaching to do.

“An English class for some older students,” he said. “Possibly you could assist me.”

“Me?” Quinette said, her hand going to her chest. “I’ve never taught.”

“This is only the English alphabet. Very easy.”

“All right. You helped me, I’ll help you.”

The class was held outdoors, with a chalkboard propped against the trunk of a tree. There were ten students in their late teens or twenties, and among them was the woman of fierce beauty who’d spoken about her captivity on Nuba Day. Quinette couldn’t recall her name, but her tale of escaping her master she hadn’t forgotten. Moses spoke in Nuban, motioning at Quinette to introduce her. The young woman said something.

“Yamila says you have met before,” Moses translated.

“Yes. Hello, Yamila.”

“Ah-lo,” Yamila replied without a smile.

Moses passed out the copybooks and pencils. No computers or visual aids here, no desks—the students sat on rocks or on empty cooking-oil tins—no nothing, not even a roof over their heads.

Moses wrote an A on the chalkboard. “What is the letter?”

The class, in unison: “Capital letter A!”

“Write, please.”

Heads bowed over copybooks.

He wrote an a.

“Small letter a!”

It took half an hour to get to z. Moses checked the class’s work. This was where Quinette was to give him a hand. It was difficult to read the students’ scratchings. Yamila’s were the most illegible of all; the letters looked like aimless scribbling. Quinette squatted, took a stick, and wrote an A in the ground.

“Ay,” she said. “Capital letter ay.” Motioning to Yamila to make the sound, stretching it out like she was pulling a rubber band. “Ayyy.”

Silent, the young woman looked fixedly at her.

“Ayyy,” Quinette repeated, and meeting with the same stare, she called Moses over. “I don’t think she understands what’s going on here.”

“Oh, but she does,” Moses said. “She wishes to learn to read and write, but she can be stubborn. Please try with her again.”

Gesturing at the ground, Quinette encouraged her pupil to write the letter: “Ayyy.” There was something intimidating about Yamila’s expression, so untamed that the wonder was that anyone had been able to subdue and enslave her in the first place.

Yamila bent down and formed the letter and said “Ay,” and turned to Quinette as if defying her to find fault with her writing or her pronunciation.

“Good. Now, bee.”

She made an awkward but recognizable B.

“Now, cee.”

“Cee.”

They went on—dee, ee, ef, gee, aitch—with never a moment’s softening in Yamila’s countenance. Well, after what she’d been through, what else could she be but hard and full of rage? You couldn’t expect her to grow mellow and tender just because a stranger was helping her learn the English alphabet.

Numbers were next, and then a spelling lesson, and by late afternoon the adult education class was over. The pupils stood, Moses leading them in prayer. “Father in heaven, watch over us. Do not kill us, do not allow us or our children to go hungry, do not make us sick. Father in heaven, bring peace to the Nuba, deliver us from war, deliver us from evil, Amen.” This God wasn’t the God Quinette prayed to. This was the God of Sudan, who had to be asked not to kill people, or starve them, or make them sick.

She walked back to the garrison with Negev. After they’d gone through the passage in the hills, she saw several figures dancing on a wide ledge atop a promontory.

“What are they doing?”

Negev replied vaguely that it was “for the sibr,” and when she suggested they have a look, he shook his head. “Men are not allowed. Women only.”

Now her curiosity was piqued. “Well, I’m a woman. Could I go by myself?”

“You are white lady, missy, and I don’t know if it is permitted. If someone tells you to go away, please to do it.”

She turned up a path, her approach masked by the ring of boulders that made a natural wall around the ledge. With the excitement of doing the forbidden, she hid behind one of the boulders and cautiously raised her head. High oblong rock formations leaned into one another at the back side of the ledge, like the poles to a teepee, and in the cave-like space between them, a pair of older women sat observing several girls, circling one another, holding long, supple branches or whips. They were naked, except for their beads and bracelets, and their bodies had been lacquered in oil. Three of the girls were Pearl and her cousins, Kiki and Nolli. Their white school dresses were laid out on a boulder. Pearl pirouetted, and as she did, her partner struck her hard across the back with a stick. She winced but made no sound; then her partner offered her back, and Pearl lashed her with a whip plaited of leather. Kiki, Nolli, and the remaining girls were similarly engaged, and they all bore the blows without a cry, only their faces registering pain. Soon blood began to flow, its color shocking against the lustrous black of their skin.

Flinching sympathetically with each crack of wood or leather but unable to turn away, Quinette wondered what she was witnessing. As the older women watched with critical eyes, the girls flailed one another several times more, their heads thrown back and eyes squeezed shut, the scarlet rivulets streaming over their buttocks and down their reed-thin legs. They seemed to be in a state beyond pain, a transcendent rapture, like the passion of saints. One of the women clapped her hands, and the witches’ sabbath was over. Almost immediately the girls came out of their collective ecstasy and gathered around their mentors. The women wiped the blood with palm leaves, then dipped their hands into a mound of white ash and powdered the wounds. Quinette ducked down before she was discovered and rejoined Negev.

“They were beating each other,” she said, short of breath, her heart fluttering. “Beating each other with whips and sticks. Why?”

He stood up, holding his machine gun by its carrying handle. “For the sibr,” he replied—a flat declaration that closed off further inquiry.

She followed him home, confused less by what she had seen than by what it made her feel.

That evening, in response to her questions, Michael explained that the ritual was a rite both of initiation and of purification. The girls were beating the evil out of one another, in honor of the Fire Sibr, and at the same time subjecting themselves to a trial of their womanhood. No less than boys, who were tested in other ways, Nuban girls had to prove they possessed the bravery and strength to withstand the ordeals they would meet as adults. Those who failed suffered disgrace and scorn, which were worse than the sting of a whip. That was why Pearl and the others had not cried out under the blows.

“Was it wrong of me to watch? What would they have done if they’d seen me?”

“I don’t know. Our customs don’t say one way or the other what would happen if a strange woman observes the ceremony.”

In the darkness he was all but invisible. It was good she couldn’t see his face; otherwise she wouldn’t have had the nerve to confess what she was about to confess.

“Watching them,” she began hesitantly, “I felt . . . something.”

“Shock? Disgust?” Michael prompted.

“Nothing like that. What I felt was . . . a longing. I envied them.”

“But why?”

“I envied them for their pain, and the way they got beyond it.”

He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “You already are a woman, Quinette. Your strength and bravery have been tested. I was there when they were, and you did not fail.” After another, longer silence, he clasped her chin and turned her head to face him. “That is when I knew I loved you.”

She sat inert, her heart pummeling her chest.

“There is no need for you to say anything.”

“I can’t. I—I don’t know . . . Tomorrow? You will be careful, won’t you?”