Acts of Faith

Redeemer

AFTER SHE RETURNED to Kenya, Quinette thought that a graph of her moods would resemble the electrocardiogram of someone suffering from acute arrhythmia. Her own heart twitched erratically—spasms of joy when she recalled the dance and their lovemaking, but also convulsions of shame brought on by the thou-shalt-nots of her evangelical faith. Michael’s absence caused fits of loneliness, the uncertainty of when she would see him again quivers of anxiety. She would experience dips of melancholy, spikes of excitement, and flutters of terror, all within five minutes. Her emotional fibrillations were impossible to hide—at one point her roommate, Anne Derby, asked if there was a history of bipolar disorders in her family—but she had to hide their cause. Loki was like the small town she’d left behind, prone to brushfires of gossip. Most everyone was liberal about liaisons between whites and Africans (more liberal when it came to white men and black women than the other way around), but a love affair with an SPLA commander was definitely out of bounds. If her involvement with Michael became public, more than her reputation would be tarnished; Ken could very well fire her. So she had to keep her thoughts and feelings to herself, and the lack of a confidant aggravated her symptoms.

She wrote Michael an uninhibited letter—five pages in her peculiar handwriting, slanting so far forward it threatened to topple into illegibility—marched to Knight Air, and handed it to Fitz. Was that a knowing smile he gave her? If it was, he was discreet enough not to ask questions, promising the letter would be delivered in two days, when the next flight was scheduled for New Tourom.

She then suffered the torment of waiting for a reply, and her moods for the next two weeks rose and plunged with greater violence. At last Fitz told her a letter was waiting for her in Knight Air’s office. She retrieved it immediately and read it as she walked to her tent.


My Darling Quinette,


      With happiness and surprise I received your letter. Forgive me for taking so long to answer. I have been very busy, and of course I had to wait for a plane to deliver this to you.


      You begin your letter, “Dear Michael,” I begin mine as you see. Is it bad manners to call you “My Darling” on the basis of one night together? (How I wish to have another like it!) I don’t care. You are my darling.


      I do not feel for you what you feel for me. I feel twice as much! I have thought about you day and night since you left. Before I met you, I had no belief in “love at first sight.” Now I do.


      I must see you again soon, but I am a soldier and cannot leave my post. I know you also have your responsibilities, but if there is a way for you to return here, I beg you, take it! Please write to me straight away. If I cannot hold you, I must be content to embrace your words. All my love,

Michael

In a delirium, she read it again, hungering for more. Her instinct was to fly to him that day, but those responsibilities he mentioned stopped her. By luck—or was it by God’s design?—her responsibilities came to her aid. Ken had studied her report and called her on the sat phone to make arrangements for a redemption mission in the Nuba. This took time, but finally Michael contacted her by radio: Bashir would be arriving in New Tourom with more than one hundred captives. She informed Ken that everything was ready. He and the team arrived in Loki within the week.

In some ways, being near each other was a worse trial than being apart. Michael was aware of her dilemma, and when she landed with Ken and the others, he greeted her with a serious mien and a handshake. Throughout the afternoon the feigning of disinterest strained their nerves. Quinette and her colleagues were put up in a compound of empty tukuls near St. Andrew’s mission. She shared hers with Jean, the Canadian nurse. To know that Michael was at his headquarters, less than a kilometer away, and to be unable to go to him was an agony. The next day, as they waited for Bashir’s arrival with the captives, she resolved to take a risk. That night, after Jean was asleep, she crept out and walked to Michael’s compound, daring not to carry a flashlight though it was a moonless night. Two armed men stood watch by the entrance. His bodyguards! She’d forgotten about them. There was nothing for it now but to brass it through. She approached them and asked to see the commander. While one stayed with her, the other went inside and soon reappeared with Michael, clad only in his shorts.

“Are you mad?” he said. “This is dangerous.”

“I couldn’t bear it any longer. I had to see you.”

“Dangerous in more ways than one,” he scolded. “There are leopards in the Nuba, and they hunt at night.” He murmured to the guards, who went off.

“What did you tell them?” Quinette asked.

“Never mind. I sent them away. They can be trusted.” He drew her into the courtyard, and as he embraced her, she felt ready to jump out of her skin. “You are a madwoman, but I am happy you are.”

Not another word was spoken for the next hour. Their lovemaking had the desperation and intensity of an adulterous affair, the addictive quality of a drug, the satiation of their hunger only creating a deeper hunger.

“Quinette,” he said afterward, “perhaps you should go before your friends see that you are missing.”

“No!” she whispered with ferocity. “These couple of days are like a gift, and I’m not going to refuse it.”

“A gift? From who is this gift?”

Combining her piety with her desires, she clasped his face with both hands and said, “From God. He’s given us this time because He understands we’re in difficult circumstances. He wants us to be together, and He forgives us.”

“Ah, so you have spoken to Him?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“This isn’t wise,” he said.

“It isn’t supposed to be.”

“True. Love is the enemy of wisdom.”

She basked in his voice, inhaled his scent mingling with her own, that fragrance of unwashed bodies after sex on a hot night, like vinegar and shellfish and crushed bugs.

“I’m not sure what—” He began, stopped, and began again. “It isn’t only the people you work with who would condemn this. Some of the people I work with, they would, too.”

“Who?” she asked, recalling the dance, the cries and songs of favor that had greeted her entrance into the circle.

“Major Kasli for one. He thinks all the white people who come here come as spies.”

“Spies?” She rose to her elbows and looked down at him, profoundly disturbed that Kasli would see her in such a lurid light. “Spies for what? For who?”

“The CIA. He has a lot of strange ideas, but let’s not talk about this.”

She wasn’t ready to let it go. She had an enemy, and she was determined to learn what she could about him. “He would think I was sent here to sleep with you so I could spy on you?”

“Yes.”

“But America isn’t exactly on good terms with Khartoum, so why would it send a woman to spy on you?”

“You have to understand, logic, reality has nothing to do with Kasli’s views. He is . . . If he is not paranoid, he is almost.”

She laid her head on his chest. “I wonder what we’ll do.”

“I’ve been wondering as well.”

“And?”

“I have no answer, but trust that I will have.”

The following day, as the redemptions were progressing, her old bodyguard, Negev, approached her with a note. Pleading that she had to relieve herself, she went off and opened it: “When you are finished, please see me. There is something I wish to show you. M.”

Distracted, she made many mistakes in recording the slaves’ accounts on the laptop. When at last her work was finished, she left with Negev, who escorted her to a place she recognized: the path that led to the promontory where she’d, well, spied on the Rite of Sibr.

“Commander wishes to see you there,” Negev said, pointing, and then sat to wait.

She climbed the path. Michael took her by both hands and looked her up and down. “I wish you could have come here with your hair as it was the last time, and in the dress I gave you.”

“You were going to show me something?”

He gestured at the leaning slabs of rock that formed a dim cavern behind him. They stepped inside to stand on a floor worn to the smoothness of marble, the rocks tapering toward a point far overhead. It was like entering a cathedral spire, the numinous atmosphere heightened by a silence almost tangible, by the thin sunlight planing through a crack between the slabs to fall on a rounded block of stone in the middle of the cavern. The sibr stone, he murmured, was so sacred that anyone who touched it would die instantly. She could make out faded paintings high on the walls.

Michael squatted and asked her to climb onto his shoulders. Effortlessly, he raised her up. Ten feet above the floor she looked at a drawing of what appeared to be a leopard, surrounded by hunters wielding spears. Michael walked her slowly around the cavern, past friezes of animals, trees, and people painted in faint shades of amber, green, and red. Powerful-looking men chased lions and buffalo, their pursuits observed by women with bulging hips and oversize breasts. Some ancient story in pictures, frozen in time, unfolded before her—a narrative she couldn’t understand and that was all the more captivating for its mystery.

“Those were made by the ancestors,” Michael said. “The legend is that they were a race of giants, but I think whoever made those paintings did so sitting as you are now.” He set her down. “I want you to know about us, where we come from.”

She sat next to him against the cavern’s side and listened to a saga that began three thousand years ago, when a people known as Nubians had a mighty kingdom called Kush that was in time conquered by the Egyptians. The pharaohs ruled it for centuries, until a great king named Kashta arose to conquer the conquerors and establish a dynasty that reigned for a thousand years from its capital, a city called Meroe. It was, he said, the most powerful kingdom in black Africa, trading with the Roman Empire, exporting copper and gold and sandalwood. The Nubians of Meroe were conquered again, this time by Ethiopians from the Kingdom of Axium, who converted them to Christianity. So they remained for another millennium, some worshipping Christ, some following their ancestral faith, until the armies of the Prophet Muhammad swept out of Arabia and Muslim Egypt to win the peoples of Sudan for Islam. Then as now, the Arabs captured blacks for slaves, but some Nubians escaped the slave caravans bound for the Red Sea coast and fled into the safety of these remote hills, to which they’d given their name, its i lost over time.

“And those were the ones who made the paintings?” she whispered. It was a place that compelled whispers.

“Possibly. Or they could have been made long before. This has been a sacred place for centuries.” He stood and drew her to her feet. “We were once a great people. We conquered and were conquered in turn, but we always endured, and this war today is only a chapter in a very long story.”

They went outside, blinking against the sunlight. “We’re leaving on another operation,” he announced suddenly. “You can say we’ll be adding another sentence to the chapter.”

“And you told me all this so I’ll be strong and brave and not worry?”

“I told you about our history because I want you to be part of it.”

“You’re being awfully mysterious,” she said.

“Mysterious? No. I am being awkward because this is awkward, what I have to say.” He paused, squeezing the handle of his walking stick. “In so much of that history, we have fought with Arabs but we have also mingled our blood with them. You can see their blood in our faces, ours in theirs, but I have never heard of us mingling with white people.” His expression had become almost mournful. “I want to believe your pretty thought that God forgives us, but I can’t. I know now what we have to do.”

She drew in a breath and held it for a moment. “Michael, if you think we should . . . if you think we have to end it, I’ll be . . . You can guess what I’ll be, but I suppose it’s better to end it now, before—”

His somber look brightened a little, and he gave a faint smile. “Why do you think I said I want you to be part of our history if I wish to end it?”

“What does that mean, ‘part of our history’?” she asked with quick irritation. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means a great deal. It means I want us to be married.”

Wartime. Emotions accelerated, everything accelerated. It was all going too fast for her. She was mute.

Beads of sweat trickled over the marks on Michael’s forehead. “Can you give me an answer?”

Her heart was the organ she always listened to, but it wasn’t telling her anything now.

“You don’t have to answer immediately. It would be a very great step for both of us, but I think a greater one for you. You need to think about it.”

Step? she thought. It would be a leap, of a magnitude she could not yet imagine. “Think, yes, think,” was all she managed to say.

 

IF QUINETTE’S THOUGHTS and feelings had been erratic before, they were now thrown into anarchy. On the return flight to Loki, she didn’t speak to anyone, she was almost catatonic, the reverse of a cyclone—still on the outside, turbulent inside. As the team got out of the plane, Ken took her by the arm and asked what the matter was. She said, “Nothing.”

“C’mon, I know you well enough by now.”

She looked at his spare, stern face and noticed the mole on his jaw, just beneath his left ear. She must have seen it before, yet its ugliness had escaped her attention. Dark brown, sprouting tiny hairs, it resembled a tick. Somehow it awakened her to the realization that he hadn’t, in the past three days, revealed what action he’d taken about the fraud she’d uncovered. She assumed he hadn’t taken any, and wasn’t going to, and that was contemptible. “What do you suppose ‘nothing’ means?” she said, pulled his hand away, and stalked off.

That night, while Anne slept peacefully in the next bed, she gave free rein to her romantic imagination, picturing herself as the wife, lover, confidante, and counselor of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goraende. She supposed it would be very strange at first, with only Michael and Pearl to talk to, but she could learn the language and weave her life into the fabric of the Nubans’ lives. She would teach at the school and aid him in fulfilling his visions of the New Sudan that would rise when the war was won—as she didn’t doubt it would be. They would make fierce love at night, and if she were blessed, she would bear him a son to take the place of the one he’d lost.

She woke up full of doubts, stirred by a sentimental memory that came unbidden with the dawn. It was of the first time her father took her for a ride on the new John Deere. She saw him in jeans and a canvas barn coat, sitting on the tractor, its grasshopper-green chassis and bright yellow wheels set against the gloomy sky of an Iowa autumn, and that vivid, dreamlike image brought on the most acute spasm of homesickness she’d experienced since coming to Africa. It stayed with her as she dressed, as she ate breakfast, as she pedaled to her office, hearing the calls of “Jambo habari, missy” from the townspeople and as she sat at her desktop, transcribing names and tales of captivity. She was an ordinary small-town American girl and could never be anything else. Her place was there, not here—that was the message encrypted in the memory. It was madness to think she could she live in those half-known mountains as the wife of a rebel commander. She’d gotten a taste of what a hard, dirty, dangerous life it would be. Ticks and meager food and no toilet paper, the ever-present threat of an air raid. She would miss a shower at the end of the day—a real shower, not the drops that trickled from the calabash. A life like that demanded a heroic personality. Heroic personalities didn’t care about hardships, never gave a second thought to amenities like showers, toilet paper, or a soft bed. When her contract expired, the sensible course would be to go home and to look upon her two years here the way Dad did his year in Vietnam: as a dramatic episode in the otherwise prosaic narrative of her life, which she would pick up where she’d left off, like a dull book that had been set aside for one more exciting.

But that would be dreadful. Her homesickness, that powerful, nostalgic tug, was a kind of gravity, pulling her back to the familiar and away from Michael. Midwestern caution was making itself felt once again; more than caution, it was cowardice.

In this confused state, the absence of a confidant became intolerable. She could think of only one person it would be safe to speak to. One morning, instead of going to work, she biked to the Catholic church, an unprepossessing structure on Loki’s outskirts, closer to a chapel in size, with a school and an office in back. Looking through the window, she saw Malachy, crouched over a computer keyboard, tapping his gray head with a pencil.

“Quinette!” he said, answering her knock. “What brings you here? Well, come in, won’t you.”

The interior of Malachy’s office was a cheerful mess, books piled helter-skelter around a desk covered with papers that looked as if they’d been dumped from a wastebasket. He motioned for her to take a seat and asked what she was up to. The same, she replied, and what about him?

“I’m doing a revised edition of this.” He pulled from one of the piles a thick paperback: The Turkana Branding System: Iconography of Desert Nomads. Under the title was Malachy’s name.

“I didn’t know you’d written a book,” she said, feeling uneasy. Catholics were not true Christians, because they didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus—that’s what Pastor Tom used to say—yet here she was, about to confide in a priest of that religion.

“Oh, more than one,” he said, and turned the volume to its back cover, on which a photograph of a younger Malachy appeared—more brown in his hair, a thinner face, but the same windowpane eyeglasses. He was identified as “Rev. Professor Malachy T. Delaney, S.P.S. Ph.D.,” and the biographical sketch said that he’d obtained a doctoral degree in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, had been dean of the social sciences department at the Catholic University of East Africa, and had authored several books about the Turkana people.

“I didn’t realize we had a distinguished scholar in our midst,” Quinette said.

“You don’t. I’m just a hack. This book is about the branding system as a cultural institution. Do you recall that Sunday I took you to a Turkana village and the headman—the fellow with the ostrich feather in his skullcap—said that he and I were of the same brand? That to say you are of the same brand means that you’re brothers?”

Quinette nodded and saw that he’d provided her with a smooth transition into the subject on her mind. “I remember something else you told me. That for a missionary like you to be effective, he has to identify with the people he ministers to. You have to become one of them, you said.”

“I did. I believe I also said that you must never forget who you really are and what you come from.”

“I want to talk to you about that. A missionary like you has given up his home, his family, everything he’s familiar with. In a way, you’re married to Africa.”

“Not to the whole bloody continent—to this little part of it, yes, I suppose you could say I am, though the better way to put it is that I’m married to my vocation. What are you driving at?”

“I was wondering what it’s been like. How you’ve coped with it.”

“It hasn’t been easy, but if you’re asking if I’ve worked out some formula for coping with a life like this, I’m afraid I haven’t. There is no formula. The missionary’s calling is a bit special, don’t you know. It’s not for everyone.” He crossed his ankles and swiveled back and forth in his chair. “What is it, Quinette?”

She shifted her glance to the chaotic bookshelves, to the photographs on the walls, hanging askew. “A Catholic priest can never reveal what he’s heard in the confessional, right?”

“In all kindness, if you’re here to make a confession, I can’t hear it. You’re a Protestant.”

“I’m asking if—”

“You wish me to keep my mouth shut about whatever it is you have to say.”

“My job, my reputation around here could depend on it.”

“How so?”

“You know how people who work for aid agencies, or for human rights groups like the one I work for—you know how we’re not supposed to take sides.”

“Your employer isn’t neutral. Your boss has been very public in his denunciations of Khartoum’s policies.”

“Right, but he couldn’t let the WorldWide Christian Union be, uh, associated? Associated with the SPLA.”

“I suppose not. The SPLA doesn’t have an enviable record in the human rights department. Now then, what is it?”

She asked if he knew Michael Goraende, and he replied that he did not, he had only heard of him through their mutual friend, John Barrett. She laughed nervously—having kept mum about her affair for weeks, she couldn’t bring herself to reveal it, even now. The priest gave her some help.

“You and this Michael are romantically involved, and it’s become serious, is that it?”

“Last week he asked me to marry him.”

Malachy lowered his chin and gazed at her over the frame of his glasses. “And you said . . . ?”

“That I’d have to think about it, and that’s what I’ve been doing. Tied myself in knots.”

“But you’re leaning toward a yes, aren’t you? Hence the questions about what my life has been like.”

“Yes. Hence,” she said.

“Do you love him?”

“Of course! We’ve had a meeting of the minds, of the soul even.”

“And I imagine of more than the mind and the soul.” Malachy waved his hand—the thick, knotty hand, she observed, of a working man rather than a scholar. “No need to respond to that. Well now, if you did say yes, you’d be giving up the advantage that all you young people who come over here have got—the ability to quit when you choose and go home. With a three-letter word, you’d be tearing up your return ticket. You’d keep your American passport, but in all other respects you’d be an African.”

He’d said nothing she hadn’t thought of before, but to hear the consequences phrased so starkly renewed her misgivings.

“And then there’s my family. My dad’s dead, but my mother, my sisters—I’d feel like I was cutting myself off from them—from everything, everyone.”

“You could well be doing that.” He scrutinized her for several uncomfortable seconds. “In the thirty-five years I’ve been in Africa, I have run into people like you,” he said. “They find something in Africa they cannot find at home. People for whom the idea of being cut off isn’t really so dreadful. “

Quinette squirmed at the accuracy of this perception. Having listened to people admit to their sins for so long, Malachy must have learned how to catch omissions or lack of complete candor.

“So now,” he went on, “We’ve covered what happens with the three-letter word. What happens if you say the two-letter word?”

“I would spend the rest of my life wondering, What if? Heartache, regret, a lifetime of it.”

Malachy clasped her wrists. “You might get your share of heartache and regrets with a yes as well. You’re sure you love him?”

“Do I have to say it more than once?”

With a gentle but irresistible pressure, the priest drew her closer to him.”You’ve got to ask yourself one big question, my dear young woman. Is it him I want, or is he a means to some other end?”

Quinette said nothing, troubled that Malachy would think her capable of looking upon Michael as a means to an end, as if she were in love with a man for his money.

“You need to ask yourself if by marrying Michael you would be, let us say, finalizing a divorce from the life you once had, from your own past.”

“My God, no!” she protested. “I’ve been in love before, I’ve been married once before, I know the real thing when I see it.”

“Then fair enough. So one more question that you need to put to yourself. Is it him alone I would be married to, or him and something else?”

“Something else?”

“Are you sure it’s not a cause you’re in love with? Are you sure you would be marrying a man and not a cause? Or maybe half of one, half the other?”

What kind of hair-splitting was this? Quinette thought, and said with some irritation, “I’ve never thought about it.”

“I know, which is why I’m asking you to. It could make a big difference.”

She rode to her office in a pique, past women squatting in the dust behind their baskets of charcoal. She nearly fell when she wrenched the handlebars to avoid a goat that bolted across her path. She had gone to Malachy hoping to obtain some clarity, and all he’d done was to cloud her mind further with his lists of questions, some of which struck her as irrelevant. By committing herself to Michael, she would be committing herself to his cause and to his people. What was wrong with that? Why should she consider it? To love him was to love what and who he was fighting for—they could not be separated.

She cruised into her office compound, where the old gardener was raking the dirt, and went inside to confront the stacks of files, the diskettes with their records of human suffering. Annoyed as she was with Malachy, she admired him. If he could devote his life to his vocation, she could devote herself to Michael. It was a good thing she’d awakened the other morning with all those doubts; they had forced her to think about the penalties of becoming Michael’s wife as well as the rewards; now she could imagine it in its totality, with no illusions or impossible expectations—or so she believed. What she couldn’t imagine was a life without him.

God, through Michael’s proposal, had sent her a message: My tolerance of your illicit love is not without limits. Either she ended it or she sanctified it by saying yes. Michael had chosen her; now it was up to her to choose him, as the girls at the Nyertun had chosen their mates. Yes. The word flooded her with joy, and convinced that her heart was speaking to her finally and unambiguously, she wrote him a brief note and had it delivered by a Knight Air pilot: “Darling, I’ve thought about it, my answer is yes. I will fly to you as soon as I can, My love always, Q.”