Acts of Faith

THEY GOT LOST for a while, night fell, and afraid that taking the vehicles cross-country in darkness would result in a broken axle or some other mishap, Michael halted the march a few miles short of the airfield. His troops dropped where they stood and went to sleep. Dare and Douglas found a tarpaulin between the seats and the rear of the cab and stretched it out beside their truck as a ground sheet. Two of the wounded men died during the night, and their bodies were transferred to the other truck in the morning, so now nine corpses were interred under the captured rifles and mortars, and the odor leaking through the mound of metal reminded Dare of road-killed skunk mixed with marsh gas. Sooner we get them into the ground, the better, he thought, feeling every rock and pebble he lay on.

They reached the airfield in less than two hours the next morning. It was as far as the vehicles could go. Their cargo, human and inanimate, was unloaded, and Michael sent runners to announce the victory and assemble porters to haul the weapons and carry the wounded to the clinic, the dead to their graves.

Still worn out, the troops sprawled under the doum palms before beginning the last leg to their base. One man took off his shoes and poured blood out of them. Doug had flopped down under a tree, hands folded contentedly on his stomach, the video camera at his side.

Dare delicately pulled his last sweat-browned cigarette from the pack. “It ain’t my intention to haul my potbellied, middle-aged ass all that way to headquarters. I’m stayin’ here. I’m gonna radio Fitz from the plane and tell him to beg, borrow, or steal some fuel on account of it is my intention to take a hot shower and shave no later than tomorrow night, and change out of these clothes and eat somethin’ other than the ration of shit these folks call food and have pleasant dreams between clean sheets. It’s gonna be your job to haul your young, in-shape ass back there and see how Handy’s comin’ along. This is what your blood brother wants you to do. There’s still some water in the jerry can. Fill your canteen, leave some for me.”

“That’s the longest speech I ever heard you make,” said Doug.

“The thought of gettin’ the f*ck out of here makes me crazy with happiness.”

“Handy might not be well enough to walk.”

“Then get some of these Nuban studs to carry his holy roller ass, and if that won’t do, tell him he’ll have to wait to come out on the next relief flight. He’s been here two weeks, another one won’t kill him.”

 

AFTER A RESTLESS night and needing to occupy herself, she asked Pearl if she could help her and her cousins with their endless chores. The girl was shocked: Quinette was a guest, and a guest didn’t do menial household work. Quinette insisted. Pearl said very well, she could lend a hand preparing the midday meal, bean stew and groundnut paste.

She took down an armful of dried beans from a platform beside the kitchen and placed them in a mortar made from a hollowed-out tree trunk. After showing Quinette how to pound them—gently, because the idea was to separate the beans from the pods, not mash them—the girl gave her the pestle, as long as a canoe paddle and three times as heavy. When the batch was done, Pearl, her strength belied by her slender arms, lifted the mortar and poured the beans and empty pods into a basket, which Kiki raised overhead and tipped slowly, the beans falling into a metal pot on the ground while the pods, light as paper, were carried away by the wind.

The beans were transferred into a clay cooking pot and set on the hearth to roast until they were ready for grinding. Pearl scooped several handfuls onto a stone slab, then knelt and, pressing her toes into the ground to gain leverage, mashed the beans into a flour with a hand-held stone. This was done in the shade cast by the overhanging fronds of two tall palms growing just outside the courtyard wall. Even so the sun’s heat struck like a hammer. Kiki and Nolli, crushing groundnuts into a paste, had stripped down to loincloths. Before grinding the next batch of beans, Pearl took off her skirt and T-shirt, revealing an identical undergarment—a barega, she called it—and went back to work.

“Not easy,” she said, sitting up straight. “Do you wish to?”

Quinette nodded and, on a whim, kicked off her sandals and removed her shirt, shorts, and bra, leaving on only her panties. The girls gawked. If they had seen white women before, they had never seen one naked, or nearly so. The tan lines at her throat and around her arms fascinated them. They touched her, puzzled as to why some of her was light brown, the rest pale. She pointed at the sun and attempted to explain how it darkened her exposed skin, but she wasn’t sure if they made the connection.

She knelt at the grinding slab, took the stone in her right hand, cupped her left over it, and rocked forward, pressing down hard. Pearl was right about it not being easy. It was the sort of physical labor she hadn’t done since she’d helped her father pitch bales into the hayloft. Sweat washed the oil in her hair into her eyes, half-blinding her, and her back and arms ached, but she found in the work the sort of pleasure people do in strenuous but mindless tasks.

She was still at it when he returned, exhausted, coated in dust. He was taken aback by the sight of her. Embarrassed, she put on her clothes and checked an impulse to hold him.

“What were you doing?” he said finally in a dull, reproachful voice. “That’s not work for a guest.”

He scolded Pearl for allowing it. Sullenly the girl put the crushed beans into the pot, mixed them with water, and placed them on the coals.

“I asked if I could help out,” Quinette said in her defense. “Insisted on it.”

“She should have insisted back at you,” Michael replied sternly and, without another word, went into one of the tukuls. She could hear water splashing from the calabash. He came out, bathed and changed into a clean uniform, and sat in the courtyard, motioning to Kiki to bring him something to eat. The girl scooped the mixture of beans and groundnut paste into bowls made from split gourds and served one to him, one to Quinette. She knew better than to ask him about the battle, for he was now like her father when he fell into one of his remote moods, journeying into some inner space where none could reach him. He finished eating and stared off into the middle distance.

“It went well,” he said, his tone still dull. “I lost very few men.”

“I am relieved to hear that.”

“Douglas shot down a helicopter. I heard him say, ‘Payback.’ What does that mean?”

“He evened the score. For what happened a month ago.”

Michael snorted. “As if war is a feud? There were a lot of them left alive. We couldn’t take them with us, and I don’t think we would have if we could have. We shot them. We shot them all.”

She pitied him, having to do and see terrible things, but felt none for the ones who had been shot. None whatsoever. “What would they have done if it had gone the other way?”

“What do you think they would have done? War is cruelty, you cannot refine it. A great commander in your civil war said that. Sometimes I think, the crueler I can make it, the sooner it will be over, but . . .”

He went inside and was soon asleep.

Quinette worked on her report for a while, then she too took a nap. She slept soundly, dreamlessly. It was nearly dusk when she awoke and, stepping out into the courtyard, saw Michael transformed. Instead of a beret, he was wearing a topee with a crest pinned to its front and, over his shirt, a leopard-skin smock. This outward change was matched by an inward one, evidenced by the smile he gave her—the smile that was like an embrace. He’d returned from his mental journey, returned to himself.

“My father’s, when he was in the British army,” he said, tapping the cork helmet’s brim. “There is going to be a dance tonight, to celebrate the victory. This is for you.”

He picked up a bundle wrapped in brown paper and handed it to her. She tore off the wrapper and unfurled a long dress, with a broad black stripe running down its middle and two more circling the billowy sleeves. The pattern recalled the geometric shapes of the wall paintings inside the tukul: concentric rings, diamonds, squares within squares, all in harmonious colors of orange, yellow, and terra-cotta. A sunrise of a dress.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful. Should I try it on?”

“And to please keep it on. I would like you to come to this dance in that dress.”

She went into her hut, stripped bare, and changed, loving the touch of soft, clean cotton against her skin. Pearl came in with a set of hoop earrings and a bead necklace. She put them on and freshened her lipstick, but she felt awkward, like a poseur, as she stepped out.

“White Nuba Woman!” she said, laughing.




WITH MICHAEL AND DOUGLAS at its head, and Quinette and Pearl just behind them, a torchlit procession marched to the dancing ground in New Tourom. It resembled a Mardi Gras parade, with the soldiers wearing a bizarre mix of costumes—sunglasses and fezzes, camouflage trousers beneath bare chests that were palettes for painted designs, arms plumed with feathered armbands—and old women, careless of their withered, fallen breasts, ripping off their blouses to wave them in the air and proclaim the Nubans’ ancient right to bare their flesh without shame. To take one’s clothes off and dance the dances of one’s ancestors, said Michael, was a gesture of defiance against the strictures of Sharia, Islamic law.

Quinette gave no thought to the politics of nudity when they arrived at the dancing ground. She was too captivated by the scene, washed by the supernatural light of a gibbous moon. Drummers and musicians with their douberre—the trumpets made from antelope horns—were assembled, girls with flesh oiled and painted in red and ochre formed half a circle, men the other half. The girls stood, the men sat on logs, heads bowed, sheaves of bundled grass in their laps. Pearl ushered Quinette to the female side of the circle. The douberre players blew deep, hollow notes, a choral of older women began to sing, and at a wild burst of drums, a group of girls moved forward, swinging their hips, swatting the air with the grass sheaves.

“This is called Nyertun,” Pearl said. “A girl’s love dance.”

Some of the men wore bells tied to their ankles and, tapping their heels, added a rhythmic jing-jing-jing to the drumbeats, the swishing of the grass bundles. More girls joined in. The drumming grew faster. The space came alive with orgiastic movement, limbs gleaming like polished metal in clouds of moonlit dust. As the girls danced closer to the men, the air seemed charged with a mounting excitement, heightened by the tinkling of the bells. One of the girls approached a man, brushing against him, then quickly swung one leg over his shoulder and rested it there, her body swaying. Except for his tapping foot, he remained immobile, his gaze held modestly to the ground. Her movements and his stillness created an electric tension between licentiousness and chastity, passion and restraint. Now the others followed her lead, each girl choosing a man, flinging a leg over his shoulder as he sat. The couples remained in that pose for a few seconds, until the girls spun away. At a change in the drums’ rhythm, the men rose and danced after their partners. Couples twirled around each other in one spot, striking each other with the sheaves, and then danced out of the circle and went off together into the darkness. Quinette realized that the Nyertun was a mating ritual, and the women got to do the choosing.

Marissa was being liberally consumed. She took a calabash that was offered to her. The fermented sorghum did not taste like beer—she didn’t know what it tasted like—but it wasn’t unpleasant, and she drank freely. Looking on, she saw Michael tug Douglas into the middle of the ring and seat him among the remaining men. At the sight of a foreigner joining in, women ululated, men blew whistles. One of the female dancers, older than the rest, danced toward him. Tall, stately, her back arched, abandoned to the rhythms yet in control of every sinuous movement, she brushed against him, Douglas immobile as she tossed her leg over his shoulder and swayed. Then, as she moved away, he pursued her, mimicking the men’s dance none too gracefully, but the crowd cried its approval.

“You would like to dance?” Pearl asked.

Quinette’s hand went to her own throat as she mimed the question, “Me?”

“It is easy. I will show you.”

Pearl demonstrated how to hold her arms, at a slight angle to her body, with her palms facing forward, and what to do with her feet—a kind of kicking movement. Feeling self-conscious, Quinette took another drink of marissa before giving it a try. The steps weren’t intricate—she’d always been a good dancer; the hard part was throwing that stately arch into her back. When Pearl thought that she’d got the idea, she handed her one of the grass sheaves and nudged her toward the circle. She resisted, a victim of stage fright and of Pastor Tom’s censuring voice sounding in her head. She took another drink and practiced some more with Pearl. After a minute or two she thought that perhaps she didn’t care what Pastor Tom would say.

She stepped out, and her entrance brought the same outburst that had greeted Douglas. At first she had a sensation that she was outside herself, and she judged that she looked like an imposter in her Nuban dress; but the ululations and whistles encouraged her. She heard in those sounds Africa giving voice to its acceptance of her, and she experienced a lightness, a soaring relief, as if she’d been suddenly cured of a debilitating sickness.

The drumming got inside her, pulsing with her blood. She rejoiced in the movements of her body; it was liquid, her legs and hips seemed to flow. She knew now how to answer the declaration Michael had made to her. Aware of a hush that had fallen over the spectators, waiting to see what she would do, she ventured closer to him, swaying with abandon, swishing the grass bundle. He saw her and, in obedience to the rules of the Nyertun, brought his head down demurely, his legs trembling with latent excitement. She brushed teasingly against him. She felt wild and wanton; then with the sheaf in one hand, she paused to hike the dress up over her knees with the other and raised a leg to his shoulder. Just as she did, she bowed slightly to say, “Now I’ve said it.”

He rose and danced with her. Immersed in a bath of sound and movement, she experienced a communion like the one she’d known on her first journey to Sudan, when she seemed to merge into her surroundings. She lost all sense of herself as a being separate from those around her, while they, ululating, blowing their whistles, lost awareness of her separateness from them. Loneliness was the disease from which she’d been released. It had afflicted her ever since her father’s death and her exile from the farm, her father’s land. How wonderfully strange that plunging into a deeper exile in Africa had healed her.

 

HE PULLED THE dress over her head and said, “From this night you will be White Nuba Woman in all ways.”

He picked her up and carried her to the bed. The mosquito net fell over them, creating an illusion of perfect privacy. Behind its veil, they embraced and kissed and drank in each other’s musky scents. She caressed him, and with his finger he drew circles around both her breasts, then a line between them, and made random patterns on her stomach. Now he plucked at her skin, following the designs he’d traced, circles and loops, straight lines and lines like a child’s depiction of ocean waves.

She didn’t ask what he was doing, fearful that one word from her would break the spell.

He laid a palm below her navel and whispered, “If you were a Nuba girl, you would be tattooed three times, the first time here, when you are ten years. You go high up into the rocks with only women present, and the tattooist smooths your belly with oil, like this”—he rubbed her there—“and then draws in the oil the designs you choose, like this.” He penciled another motif with his fingertip, his touch lambent and warm, like a paraffin flame. “And the final thing she does is to lift up the flesh with a thorn and make a cut with a small knife.” He pinched her repeatedly, just hard enough for her to feel it. “When the cuts heal, they make the tattoos. The next time is when you have passed from girl to woman. Again, you go to the secret place high in the rocks, again the tattooist rubs the part of your body where the marks will be with oil, here and here.” He massaged her ribs and her stomach just beneath her bosom. “And again—” pinching—“the thorn, the knife . . .

“You are beautiful, Quinette, and I am making you more beautiful.” He clasped her ribs and turned her resistless body face-down and knelt over her. “The third time is after you have borne your first child. It’s always done to the back. It’s the most painful tattooing, it takes two days to complete. Also the most expensive. Your husband has paid the tattooist with goats and chickens and money, he has supplied the oil that is rubbed into you from here to here on the first day.” He stroked the nape of her neck, her shoulder blades, her spine down to her hips, his finger sketched curves and slashes, his pinches were harder than before, bringing a light sting. “Many cuts are made, hundreds, that’s why this is the most painful, but now a powder is applied, made of herbs and sorghum flour and the ash of burned acacia to ease the pain and stop the bleeding and make the marks stand out from the skin when the cuts heal, because those that stand out are the most beautiful.” As he kneaded her back again, she felt as if her bones had turned to gelatin. “On the second day, you are beautified here and here. Here and here the oil is rubbed in.” He dug into her buttocks, the backs of her thighs. There she felt his fingertip making spiral imprints before he pinched her, still harder, squeezing her flesh between his nails. He asked if it hurt and she nodded and he told her she mustn’t make a sound, a Nuba woman was brave and never made a sound when the tattooist’s thorn and knife pricked her. “Imagine you are lying on the warm, smooth rocks, high in the mountains, I am the tattooist, I am now soothing the cuts with the powder of ash and herbs and flour.” In an almost drugged state, she accepted the pressure of his hands, moving over her bottom, down along her legs and up again. “Now you are fully a Nuba woman, very beautiful, admired by all in your village.” His voice seemed to cover her as he parted her thighs. He reached under her to touch her, and she felt how damp she was there when he embraced her at the waist and pulled her toward him. She rose to her knees in a feline crouch, sighed through clenched teeth as he penetrated her to his whole length so that his bristling hairs scratched her. They worked each other into a swift orgasm, and when it came, in a quivering rush, her ass slapping his belly, she felt that their joined selves were floating free of gravity, and in that blissful suspension she knew with the wordless knowledge of the heart that God would forgive her, for with their joyful outcries she and Michael answered the moans of all the wounded and all the mourners’ laments, with the wet smack of flesh upon flesh they annulled the strikes that insensate steel had made against flesh. Mourning, steel, blood—all that was no; all this was yes, and what God would begrudge such an affirmation?