Acts of Faith

Love in Wartime

MALACHY HAD INFORMED several of the most important headmen that Fitzhugh and Diana would be traveling in Turkanaland for the day, and he trusted the bush telegraph to spread the word to the others: They were friends of Apoloreng and were to be treated hospitably—another way of saying, Do not rob, harm, or molest these people. In case someone didn’t get the message, the Father of the Red Ox saw to it that a pair of askaris accompanied the mzungu lady, her companion, and their interpreter on their safari.

They were on safari not to photograph wild game but to get a picture of the latest drought to afflict the Turkanas’ much-afflicted homeland. Diana, the woman of good works, had a new project: funding a campaign to dig bore holes and thus provide the inhabitants of northwestern Kenya with a more reliable source of water than the heavens. Fitzhugh had gone along on the trip only for the chance to be near her.

Their affair had become common knowledge in Loki and among her Nairobi social circles, and the chatter was as cheap and predictable as he’d feared. Diana was painted as a randy woman of a certain age, Fitzhugh as an African gigolo taking advantage of a lonely, middle-aged white woman who also happened to be rich. It was pointless to protest; a protest would require him to answer the question “Then what are you doing with her?” and he could not, even to himself. He’d quit looking for answers. He was happy when he was with her, unhappy when he wasn’t—the whole thing was no more complicated than that.

Visiting the nomads’ camps, it delighted him to watch her, in the cotton trousers that clung to her high, ample hips, approach the circles of waiting elders with her sergeant major’s stride, and to see her lovely head bobbing under a wide straw hat as the interpreter translated the elders’ replies to her questions. She could have been making the rounds of dinners and cocktail parties in Karen; instead, she was bringing succor to a wasteland where cattle died on their feet and women had to walk half a day to find water. In a country ruled by thieves, hers was a heart that gave. If he needed a reason for his love, he could find no better.

She was not quite herself today, but pensive, reticent, and distant, a state Fitzhugh ascribed to her preoccupation with her project and to the dreadful conditions they saw, journeying from camp to camp. Her mood didn’t improve as they returned to Loki. She wore a sorrowful look, as if she were grieving over some loss. Passing through a pan of nearly treeless desolation, where termite mounds rose tall as chimneys and camels floated through the mirage on the horizon, they came to a broad riverbed. As the interpreter started to take the Land Rover across, Diana asked him to stop. She looked around, then pointed and murmured, “Please go that way.”

“I thought we were done for the day, memsahib,” the interpreter said. “Besides, there are no Turkana camps in that direction.”

“I know. Please go, it won’t be far.”

They rocked alongside the riverbed, dodging boulders, skirting clumps of acacia. At an oxbow bend, she called another halt.

“We’re going to take a walk,” she said to the interpreter. “You and the askaris wait here.”

“But memsahib—”

“We’ll be quite all right.”

Fitzhugh followed her around the oxbow, wondering what she was up to. He called her attention to the lowering sun—no one, not even Apoloreng, could guarantee their safety after dark. She said not to worry, they were going just a short way. “There, in fact.” She motioned at a mound of rubble and a broken concrete slab that lay against the riverbank. She walked beyond it in her resolute way, then sat down, her knees raised, her arms clasped around them.

“I used to come here whenever I had the chance, but it’s been years since the last time. I’m surprised I could still find it.”

It did not look like a “here” to Fitzhugh. Except for the slab of concrete, possibly the foot of an old bridge, he saw nothing to distinguish it from any other part of the desert. Patting the ground, Diana invited him to sit beside her.

“What is this about?” he asked.

“Kiss me first,” she said. “Kiss me like a man who loves me.”

She’d been so withdrawn all day that this demand startled him. He did his best to comply. “Now you will tell me what we’re doing here, yes?”

“I have been thinking about us quite a lot. There are some things I must tell you.”

The severity in her voice made him apprehensive. “I am listening.”

“It came to me that I ought to tell you here. This spot is special to me. My baby was conceived here.”

Incredulous, Fitzhugh looked at the thorn trees, the sandy river bottom, the fissured banks. “The daughter you told me about? The one who was stillborn? She was conceived in this wilderness? What were you doing here? You could not have been more than—”

“Eighteen. It was two years before Kenya got its independence. My father was a colonel, royal engineers, putting in roads and bridges out here. He and my mother had a house in Lodwar. We were in school in England, my sister and I, and on the summer holidays we would come back out to Kenya to be with them. That particular summer my father had a civilian working for him, an Irish boy of twenty-two, Brian McSorley. He’d been raised in Kenya, and he was in charge of the African labor crews. Brian and I—I can’t say we fell in love, we conceived a passion for each other.”

“Yes, and out of that, the daughter,” Fitzhugh said. “Pardon my asking, but she was the reason you and this Brian were married?”

“Would you please not interrupt, darling?” she said gently. “We were quite mad to get at each other, but there wasn’t much opportunity under the circumstances. The chance came one Sunday, when by hook and by crook, we managed to get away together. Brian was driving out to inspect progress on a bridge—that one there.” She gestured at its remnants. “I went with him. We had a picnic, about where we are sitting now. There used to be a very great tree here, and we were picnicking under it when a furious rainstorm came down. There was a flash flood, and in no time at all this riverbed had twenty feet of water rushing through it. The storm passed, but we had to wait for the river to go down before we could get back across in our car—the bridge wasn’t finished. We were rather delighted with this dilemma, but you know, this was nineteen sixty-one and I was eighteen and a virgin, and as eager as I was for him, I couldn’t quite bring myself to make love to him.

“It got late, and Brian was anxious. The Turkana were as belligerent then as they are today. It was then that we heard a strange sound, quite ominous—a ragged banging and clattering mixed up with a rhythmic thudding noise, a bit like the sound of an approaching train. Brian stood to look in the direction of the noise—there was a full moon, it was almost bright as day. Immediately, he said, ‘Oh, my God!’ and went over the bank, pulling me with him. The water had gone down a few feet, but there was still a strong current, and we had to cling to the roots of the tree or be carried away. The noise grew louder. ‘Turkana war party,’ Brian whispered. We drew our heads over the bank, and it was a sight I can still see clearly today. There, hardly ten yards from where we were hiding, scores, perhaps hundreds, of men went jogging past. They were wearing nothing but loincloths, and each one carried a shield and two spears. Two spears, you see, meant a war instead of a hunting party. They were in single file, and it must have taken twenty minutes for them to go by. I wasn’t frightened. You seldom are when you’re eighteen. The spears clattering against one another, banging against the shields, the blades glinting moonlight, and all those half-naked warriors moving past us—it was breathtaking.

“When they’d passed, Brian said we must get home and started for the car, but the entire experience had overcome my schoolgirl shyness. The danger, the excitement of it made me reckless. I said I was soaking wet and had to wring out my clothes, and I pulled off my dress right in front of him. I was shameless enough to tug at the buttons of his shirt, telling him he had to dry his clothes as well. It was my very first time, right here on the wet ground, and like all first times, it was nothing like what I’d expected. A bit painful, and terribly quick. We moved to the car . . . ah, I’ve said enough. I don’t know why I went into so much detail.”

Fitzhugh was quiet, mesmerized by images of the Turkana warriors, the gleaming spear points, the young lovers embracing under the bright African moon. Thinking of how ravishing Diana must have been at eighteen, he was jealous of Brian McSorley.

“I was back in England, my first year at university, when I found out I was pregnant. My first time, and pregnant straight away! As you can imagine, I was frantic. I wrote to Brian and told him. He answered and said he would marry me, but I—I never wrote him back. The British class system, you know. The colonel’s daughter, the Irish colonial, her dad’s foreman. I could not imagine my parents’ reaction, or rather, I could.”

She fell silent.

“So you and this Brian never—”

She shook her head.

“And did you go away somewhere to have the baby?”

“Away? Yes, away,” she said distantly. “I should come to the point. I lied to you, that night after dinner at the Rusty Nail. The baby was not stillborn.”

“You gave her up for adoption? But why would you tell such a lie? I’m not upset for myself. What would she think if she knew you had denied her very existence? Where is she now, do you know?”

“Darling, I’ve no idea if it was a girl or a boy. The baby wasn’t stillborn. It was never born.”

Fitzhugh glanced aside. In the west, over Sudan, the sun was turning orange. “And there is some reason you invented this story of a stillbirth?”

“Shame,” she replied. “I did it for the most selfish reasons. I got rid of an embarrassment, an inconvenience by killing it. I’ve felt awful about that all my life. About that and never responding to Brian. He never knew. We never saw each other again.”

“But you were hardly more than a child yourself,” Fitzhugh said. “You didn’t think I would condemn you, did you? For an abortion you had thirty-five years ago?”

“I condemn myself, and I’m not quite finished. The operation was botched. I could not have children ever again. When I did get married—it was some seven years later—I was afraid to tell my husband. He was very high church, and he wanted a family. After five years passed with my not getting pregnant, David went in for some tests. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, so he asked if I would be tested, and that was when I told him. He was appalled. Which appalled him more, the abortion or my duplicity, I don’t know. We tried to make a go of it, but two years later we were divorced.”

Fitzhugh was upset now. “I believe that was another lie. You told me that you and he never divorced.”

“Well, we did. That’s where the house in Karen comes from. David was extremely well off and kind-hearted and he offered a very generous settlement—more than I deserved, I suppose. It was my decision, and I think it was a wise one, to come back to Kenya and start over.”

“Your decision to tell me you weren’t divorced, what sort of decision was that?”

She didn’t answer.

“Was it a way to keep things within certain boundaries? Or were you just amusing yourself?”

He couldn’t tell if the movement of Diana’s head meant no, or if it expressed her dismay at his inability to perceive her motives. He stood, brushed the seat of his trousers, and motioned at the sun, now darkening from orange to red. “Then what about your decision to come clean today?” he demanded as they started back. “Maybe you could tell me about that.”

“I believe I wanted you to dislike me, perhaps even hate me, for being so false.”

“What for?”

She murmured something indefinite.

“Your attempt failed. I’m upset, yes, but it would take more than what you’ve told me to get me to dislike you, and much more to hate you.”

She stopped walking and, with the Land Rover and the anxious askaris in sight, made a sound, half sigh, half sob. “I said at the beginning, I’ve been thinking about us, and . . .” She paused to regain her composure. “When this started off, I thought I was having a fling. I never thought it would come to this, to the way I feel about you. But I am all wrong for you. You’re young, you’re going to want children, if you don’t already. You are going to want a young wife, a family. I know you will. It’s been on your mind, hasn’t it?”

“Of course it has.”

“But you never mentioned it to me. It’s an unresolved question in your mind.”

“I suppose so. But why are you bringing it up now?

“Because I am the age I am. Because even if I were younger, I could never give you what you’ll want. Because I’ve never loved a man as I love you. I love you enough that I want only what’s best for you.”

He said quietly, “You’re a generous woman, but I don’t believe you’re that generous.”

Diana tossed her head backward in mock laughter. “Oh, all right, caught in another falsehood. I do want what’s best for you, but I’m not making a sacrifice. It’s all self-interest. I know you love me now, but in a year, or two years, I’m afraid you’ll begin to have doubts and regrets, and who could blame you? I would rather inflict this on myself now than have it inflicted on me later, when it will hurt ever so much more. You want it unvarnished, there you have it.”

When he grasped what she was saying—it took him a moment—he experienced a stab of panic. She’d caught him unprepared; except for her subdued mood today, she’d shown none of the usual signs of a woman who wants to call it off, given no warnings that this was coming. Or had she and he had somehow failed to recognize them?

“You’re inflicting it on me, too, not just yourself,” he said, his voice rising. “Not twenty minutes ago you asked me to kiss you like a man who loved you. Why would you—”

“I don’t know why. Must there be a rational explanation for everything?”

They rode back in an excruciating silence. Fitzhugh would have gotten out and walked if it wasn’t for the late hour and the near certainty that he’d be waylaid by bandits. He was in shock, and at the same time boiling with resentment, not only for her dropping this on him so abruptly but for her fatalism, her conviction that his feelings were destined to change and he destined to hurt her, as if he had no will of his own, no capacity to make choices.

She was staying with Tara Whitcomb. The interpreter swung through the gate to the Pathways compound and parked. Fitzhugh climbed out with Diana and took her aside.

“Maybe there aren’t explanations for everything,” he said with a kind of quiet violence, “but damn it, I am owed one for what you’re doing.”

“I have given it.”

“What are you? Some kind of prophet that you know what I’m going to do and what I’m going to feel a year from now, or two or three?”

“No, but I do have a pretty good idea.”

“Really? Or has all the talk finally gotten to you? Maybe it isn’t that you’re all wrong for me but that I’m all wrong for you.” He seized her wrist and held her arm alongside his. “See the contrast.”

She jerked free. “Do not be absurd. You don’t know me at all if you think that makes a difference to me.”

“I won’t let you do this. I won’t stand for it.” She laughed caustically at this masculine assertion, and he too had no sooner uttered it than he realized how silly it sounded. “I should have some say in it, and you’re not giving me any.”

The softening in his tone brought a softening in her—a relaxation in her posture, a slight loss of firmness in her gaze as she lowered her eyes. “Oh, but you do have a say. But you are going to have to do some hard thinking before you can say it. And when you do, you will have to say it without any doubts or equivocation, and believe me, I’ll know if there are any.”

“I will have to decide how much I can give up.”

“It would be quite a lot, I know that, and if you decide you can’t, I shall want to know that as well.”

“And if I decide I can, what then?”

Her response was a demure smile, but it was enough, and for an instant the thought that she would be his in marriage thrilled him. The feeling was strong enough that he almost declared on the spot that he’d resolved the question. The knowledge that he had not stopped him. Instead of making a declaration, he asked if, then, she was not ending it but merely calling for an intermission.

“Very well, an intermission,” she said. “And—there is no way to put this nicely—I do not want to see you till it’s over.”

As she looked up at him, she removed her hat. He observed that the twilight made the veins in her hand appear more prominent, while it deepened the furrows at the corners of her eyes and leached color from her hair. She hadn’t intended to make any impression, yet it was as if she’d consciously given him a preview of the future, challenging him to sound his love and discover if it had the depth to make the surrender she was asking of him.

He was relieved that Diana had decided to relent and give them another chance; but after he went to bed, relief turned into mild terror. Their future as a couple was entirely up to him. Doubts about his constancy assailed him. Maybe she was right—better that she suffer some pain now than more later—and yet he felt that she was asking too much of him. She’d known the risks when she got involved with him; she ought to be willing to take them and not expect ironclad guarantees. But then he recalled how she’d looked, standing there in the fading light, and thought that he was being unfair. There were risks she could not afford.

In the morning, without knowing why, Fitzhugh was determined to act as if nothing had changed. He followed his routine, rising at five to be on hand for the early flights, making up the next day’s schedules after breakfast, checking cargo manifests. He greeted Rachel and the ground and air crews in his usual cheerful manner. He took care of paperwork—lease payments, invoices, and so forth. At lunch he met Tim Fancher and Rob Handy to arrange a flight for them and several tons of supplies and equipment. The two missionaries were going to establish ministries in the Nuba mountains. They were brimming with enthusiasm for this project and couldn’t tell that he barely heard a word they said.

He spent the afternoon at two distasteful tasks. The first was delivering ten percent “commissions” to aid agency logisticians; the second was preparing a report for Hassan Adid, who was expected to arrive later in the day. Knight Air’s sugar daddy wanted to see how well the company had done in the past quarter. It had done very well, with gross sales of $1.6 million. Douglas’s Nuba Day experiment had been a success by and large. The mortar attack and the air raid had scared off a couple of independent agencies, but the rest had reacted as Douglas had hoped and predicted. Knight Air’s planes were flying nearly every day. A significant share of its income, however, had been earned from the gun-running done by Dare’s shell company, Yellowbird. In the interests of cloaking its activities, its records were kept on a separate set of books entrusted to Fitzhugh’s care. Half its earnings were automatically transferred each week from its bank in Uganda to Knight Air’s bank in Nairobi. This had presented a problem in bookkeeping: How to account for the extra income? It was solved by a simple expedient: For every actual mission flown by Yellowbird, a fictitious Knight Air mission was created. The phantom flights were then entered on Knight Air’s books, complete with phantom dates and destinations. The deception did not end there. Since the real customer, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, also had to be concealed, another client had to be found to explain who had paid for the flights. Wesley and Douglas thought that Barrett’s International People’s Aid could play this role, but they needed his consent, which required expanding the inner circle to include him. The ex-priest who thought the war was an extension of the Crusades not only gave his consent, he gave it with enthusiasm.

Thus the report to be presented to Adid was somewhat fraudulent, and in compiling it Fitzhugh felt like a white-collar criminal. True, the bottom line was an honest, accurate figure, but if Adid had known that nearly ten percent of it had come from arms smuggling, it was safe to predict that he would have withdrawn his interests from Knight Air and never invested another dollar. He would have considered the risk-reward ratio way out of line and placed no confidence in the cover that Douglas and Wesley had devised. Indeed, Fitzhugh himself had little confidence in it. Were the UN security office to get wind of what was going on, discovering the financial link between Knight Air and Yellowbird would not require a particularly vigorous investigation, and all attempts to make plausible denials would then sound most implausible. The least that would happen would be the loss of Knight Air’s UN-authorized contracts, which accounted for a third of its income. Fitzhugh’s belief in the worthiness of the clandestine operation remained steadfast (when he experienced doubts, all he had to do to dispel them was recall the flaming ruins of Manfred’s hospital), but the secrecy it demanded had polluted the atmosphere. He, Douglas, Wesley, Mary, and now Barrett had become co-conspirators, speaking in whispers, fudging the numbers, ever on the lookout for a breach in security. They were all flying on the dark side.

Rachel helped him put the report together. She was very good with accounts and could have been the company’s finance director instead of its secretary. Because she didn’t know she was participating in a fraud, Fitzhugh’s disgust with the job increased. He felt he was taking advantage of her innocence. As the afternoon wore on, different feelings took hold. He noticed how attractive she was, a woman of twenty-seven with hips and breasts that invited comparison to the African fertility statues sold in the crafts markets. Strange that he hadn’t noticed her attributes in all this time. Distracted from the task at hand, he asked himself, “Why didn’t I fall for her instead of for a white woman sixteen years older? What’s wrong with me?” His mind leaped all at once into a fantasy—he would woo and win this healthy Kikuyu and sire a brood of children, infusing a fresh river of pure African blood into the diluted veins of his family’s mongrel line. A notion seized him that if he could get Rachel into bed for just one night, he would be cured of his obsession with Diana and released from his dilemma. He imagined Rachel’s robust body under his, his sperm swimming into her fecund womb. Without a conscious thought as to what he was doing, he drew his chair closer to hers and leaned toward her as she worked the calculator. He suggested they have a drink after work. “No, thank you,” she replied, and pushed her chair away from him—a rejection that brought him to his senses. He stood, pretending to get something from the file cabinet, and rapped his temple with his knuckles, as if to physically knock the lustful thoughts from his head. Other thoughts intruded. If he did forsake his hopes for a family and marry Diana, how would they live? He would be out here, she would be in Nairobi, unless he quit and moved in with her. What then would he do for an occupation? He would be as good as a kept man. She wouldn’t be Mrs. Martin, he would be Mr. Briggs.

When Adid showed up with Douglas at around five, Fitzhugh welcomed the business discussions, which he generally loathed, as a diversion from his emotional turmoil. The wabenzi looked out of place in his custom-tailored sport jacket and Italian loafers as he made a quick inspection of the company’s aircraft. While he did, Douglas murmured to Fitzhugh, “Might be big news, my man. We’ll find out at dinner.”

They went to the office, where Adid studied the report and remarked that more business had been done with International People’s Aid this quarter than last. That was good, but what accounted for it? Douglas didn’t miss a beat—the increased sales were due to his promotional gambit, the Nuba Day event, which had inspired IPA to deliver more aid. The ease with which Douglas lied almost made Fitzhugh wince. The sincerity in his voice and the candor in his gray eyes were perfect forgeries, offering a glimpse of something hidden in his nature, a glimpse fleeting and disturbing, like the wink of a veil that reveals a scar on an otherwise attractive face.

At the Hotel California mess, Adid, who was accustomed to being waited on, endured the indignity of standing in a cafeteria line with grubby aid workers, aircraft mechanics in greasy coveralls, sweaty loadmasters. He, Douglas, and Fitzhugh sat at a corner table, out of earshot of the other diners. While they ate, Adid withdrew from his briefcase a sheaf of papers containing pie charts and bar charts and launched into a monologue about market share, gross profits, net profits, net profits after dividend distribution, retained profits. The company’s performance had been good overall but not as good as he’d expected. One of the pie charts was presented, showing that most gross sales came from the independent NGOs, the remainder from the NGOs affiliated with the UN.

“You have not marketed yourselves aggressively enough when it comes to the latter, and you need to,” he said. “There are, what? A dozen independent agencies and more than forty under the UN’s umbrella, but Knight Air has contracts with only a handful of those. Pathways has the rest locked up, some thirty altogether. Your competition is killing you there. “

Douglas gave a rueful nod. “Yeah, we’re Avis, they’re Hertz.”

“With more aggressive marketing,” Adid began, then had a sneezing fit. Muttering “This damned dust,” he pulled a bottle of nasal spray from his pocket and tilted his head back to clear his nostrils. “I was going to say, with better marketing, you will not have to settle for second place.”

Fitzhugh protested that he’d done all he could, extolling the virtues of Knight Air’s larger and faster planes, offering generous “commissions” on sales.

“Ah, my friend the Ambler, I know you have, but you are the operations manager. Marketing should not be your department. So I am proposing that it’s time for the company to hire a marketing director.”

“Great idea,” Douglas said. “Got anyone in mind?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I had a discussion with him last week. A man named Timmerman. He is now director of flight operations for the UN, but he wishes to quit and is interested in going to work for you. Or may I say, for us.”

Douglas flinched and shook his head, “Wrong guy. Completely the wrong guy.”

“Yes, you had some problems with him sometime in the past. He told me about that.”

“And did he tell you that I was the next thing to a hijacker?” Douglas’s tone indicated that he was still wounded by the remark. “That’s what he told everyone else around here.”

“There is an Arab proverb—eli fat mat. The past is dead. It is dead for this Timmerman; let it be dead for you.”

“Just how did you and that Dutchman get together?”

“I keep these and these open.” Adid pointed at his eyes and ears. “He could be of great benefit to us. But you are the managing director. I can only offer my counsel. It is your decision.”

“What the hell does Timmerman know about marketing?” Douglas asked, scowling.

“He doesn’t need to know anything. He has been here with the UN for a long time. He is personally acquainted with the heads of each one of those forty agencies—”

“And he can use his influence to steer them our way,” Fitzhugh said, venturing to interrupt.

With an inclining of his small aristocratic head, the Somali acknowledged that Fitzhugh had it right. “You could easily double your UN contracts. With intelligent management, you could take most of them and, who knows, all of them away from Miss Whitcomb.”

Douglas’s scowl faded. An alert expression came to his face, so that, with his raptor’s nose, he resembled a perched hawk when it spots prey in the grass below. And this must have been the reaction that Adid, that canny judge of men, meant to provoke by referring to Tara by name rather than to her company’s name or to some abstract term like “your competitor.” He knew that Douglas viewed Knight Air’s competition with Pathways as more than a business rivalry; it was a duel between Tara and himself.

“Of course, you would need more equipment,” Adid went on. “I’ve researched the market. There are three planes for sale, two Andovers for three hundred thirty thousand each and a Polish Let for one hundred thousand. At the moment, retained profits are not sufficient to purchase these aircraft, so I would put up the capital.”

There was the big news, and if any resistance to hiring Timmerman remained in Douglas, that overcame it. He looked at Fitzhugh and flicked his eyebrows. “The big mo, my man. We’ll crush her.”

“Crush her?” Fitzhugh said, alarmed. Aside from his liking for Tara, he realized that crushing her, were it possible, could affect his personal life. She and Diana were friends. “Why should it be necessary to crush her?”

“The Sudan market is saturated,” Adid answered. “I see no room in it for two cargo airlines.”

“I’ve never thought of Sudan as a market.”

“You should change your thinking. What did you call the football pitches where you made your famous name? Grass?”

And the dark eyes, those pinpoint black holes that took everything in and gave nothing away, released a little something for a change—an intention. It was only a flash, but Fitzhugh saw it, and he mentioned it to Douglas after they saw Adid to his quarters.

“I think our Somali friend wants more than to be our venture capitalist,” he warned. “First he corners what he calls the market, and then he means to take us over.”

“I’m not an idiot,” the American responded. “To me, he’s like the booster rocket on a space shot. He launches us, then he gets jettisoned.”

“I am quite certain he knows you’re thinking that very thought,” Fitzhugh said.

 

SHE DECIDED TO announce her decision to marry Michael. This, she believed, would stiffen her resolve, make it harder for her to retreat. She went about it methodically, tendering a written resignation to Ken, tacking on an apology for giving him short notice and a promise to return to Loki after the wedding to train her replacement.

Next she notified her family. She started by writing her mother but found she could not express her feelings to Ardele and so wrote to Nicole instead. She rambled on for pages, drawing an idealized portrait of Michael in the hopes it would persuade her family that she wasn’t crazy to have fallen in love with him. She resented having to explain herself. Those dull people who had never done anything out of the ordinary and whose lives were set up to protect them from powerful emotions were incapable of understanding the ecstasy of a great love, the power of an overwhelming passion. Love. Love. Love, she wrote in conclusion. Everyone wants it, but hardly anyone finds it. I’ve found it over here, and no matter what you think of me, I think I’m very lucky that I did.

She posted both letters through the UN’s mail service—to make sure they got to their destinations—and then biked to Malachy’s church to tell him of her decision and ask if he would perform the marriage ceremony. No date was set as yet, but could he do it? He could not—she and Michael weren’t Catholics. What happened to the bold priest who wasn’t afraid to break the Church’s rules? There were some rules he could not break, he replied, but he was sure his old friend Barrett would be pleased to do the service. Her final step was to break the news to Anne Derby. Her roommate was sorting laundry when she entered the tent.

“I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve resigned and I’m leaving.”

“Leaving?” Anne said plaintively. She turned around. “Back to America?”

“I’m getting married.”

“No! You’re not! Who is it?”

“Michael Goraende.”

Anne blinked in puzzlement.

“He’s a colonel in the SPLA. He commands the SPLA up in the Nuba.”

Anne continued to blink as she assimilated this information.

“I’m going up there as soon as I can get a flight, and then we’ll set the date. I’m going to need a maid of honor, and I’d like it to be you.”

Anne returned to folding her laundry, except now she wasn’t folding it but distractedly bunching her clothes into balls.

“I know it’s a shock,” Quinette said. “But could you?”

“I don’t know . . . I—I would need to . . .” She spun around to face Quinette again. “No. I’m sorry, but no. How long have you been involved with this colonel?”

“Long enough. Why can’t you do it?”

“You know the reputation the SPLA has around here. If they haven’t committed as many war crimes as the Muslims, they have sure given it a bloody good go. Your doing this, why it’s the next thing to putting on a uniform and joining up.”

“So that’s what’s wrong? I haven’t seen them commit any war crimes.”

“I don’t mean wrong, morally. Or because he’s African. It isn’t done, Quinette.” She tossed a T-shirt on her bed. “It simply isn’t done.”

“But I am going to do it.”

Anne gave her a searching look. “Yes, I can see that. I’m fond of you, but you’ll be throwing your life away, and I want no part in that.”

“Fine, then. You won’t have,” Quinette said, already feeling like an outcast and, what was surprising, welcoming it.

“I’ll just say congratulations and wish you all the best of luck. You shall certainly need it.”

“Thank you. If you don’t mind, keep this to yourself till I’m gone.”

“That I can do.”

For the next few days Quinette was busy organizing her office files and putting things in order for whomever Ken sent to take her place. This eased her conscience about leaving him in the lurch. When she learned that the Friends of the Frontline were going to the Nuba soon, she went to Tim Fancher and, without disclosing her reasons (fearful she’d get a reaction similar to Anne’s), asked to hitch a ride. No problem, he said. They were flying in the big Antonov and could take a passenger. She returned to her tent and packed her trunk.

“You are really going to go through with it?” Anne said, watching her. “I’d hoped you’d have second thoughts. I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Quinette replied, though she scarcely did herself. It was critical for her not to think about her actions but to carry them out. She recalled a war movie she’d watched with her father. It was about paratroopers in World War II, making a night jump into France. One soldier stepped up to the doorway and balked at the last minute. A sergeant behind him gave him a kick, and he plummeted into the darkness. She had to be her own sergeant, overcoming all reluctance, booting herself into the unknown.

The following morning, before sunrise, Fancher and Rob Handy came for her in their pickup. When he saw her bulging rucksack and trunk, Fancher asked, “Looks like you’re planning to stay awhile.”

“Yes,” she said coyly. “Quite a while.”

“We’re going to be neighbors then,” he said, driving to the airfield. “Rob and me figure we’ll be up there three, maybe four months.”

The Friends of the Frontline were embarking on a campaign to set up ministries throughout the Nuba mountains. Fancher and Handy would base themselves in New Tourom and, in the manner of the circuit-riding preachers of old, range out from there, evangelizing, training civilian pastors and SPLA chaplains, giving support and encouragement to beleaguered Christian congregations, seeking converts among the Nuba’s Muslims. Quinette was happy to hear that familiar faces would be around for a while; it would help her through the transition into her new life.

At the airfield, ground crews were loading the Antonov while Alexei and the aircrew readied the plane for takeoff. The Friends were bringing in an awesome amount of supplies and equipment: a ton of schoolbooks, hymnals, and Bibles in Arabic and several Nuban languages, another ton of food and medicine, along with generators and fuel, solar panels, bicycles, movie screens, TV sets, tape recorders, mosquito nets, and boxes labeled EVANGELISM KITS or JESUS FILMS.

“We think of what we’re doing as a spiritual offensive,” Fancher said, gazing at the band of light that belted the sky to the horizon. “And of all this”—he jerked a thumb at the cargo—“as our weapons and matériel.”

“Satan is strong in Sudan,” added Handy, flexing a muscular arm. “We have got to be stronger.”

Quinette remarked that their “spiritual offensive” would be a dangerous undertaking.

“The hand of God never takes you to where the grace of God cannot keep you,” Handy said.

Quinette’s trunk was the last item to be taken on board. The loadmaster secured the cargo nets and motioned to her and the two men to get in. They strapped themselves into fold-down seats on one side of the fuselage.

“So what’s taking you up there for an extended stay?” Fancher asked.

Judging on instinct that he and Handy would react more positively than Anne had, she told him. It took them a minute or two to recover from their surprise; the plane had begun to taxi before Fancher spoke again, and his words confirmed that her judgment had been correct: raising his voice over the noise, he asked if she and Michael had chosen a minister. She answered that she hoped Barrett would fulfill that role.

“I’m ordained in the ECS, too,” he said. “So if you can’t get him, I’d be happy to do the honors.”

She could not have asked for a more auspicious beginning. Then the engines built to a deafening pitch, the plane rolled and lifted off, and she felt in its rise an escape from the gravity that had held her to all she knew, all she was.

 

THE AIRSTRIP WAS thronged with people—hundreds were needed to transport the cargo—and ringed by watchful soldiers manning antiaircraft machine guns. Quinette was greeted by Negev, by Pearl and her cousins Kiki and Nolli, and by a crowd of women and girls crying out “Kinnet basso!” which meant, Negev informed her, “Quinette has come!” By this time the bush telegraph had transmitted the news that Michael and the white woman were to be married, and the calls of “Kinnet basso!” told her that the marriage would meet with general approval. If she was an outcast in Loki, she was welcome here, loved by the Nubans for casting herself into their lives. She loved them back, unbidden tears coming to her eyes.

“Had no idea you’ve got so many fans,” Fancher said, struggling to get through the swarms of people. He and Handy didn’t seem to know what to make of her reception. A few young women were fighting for the honor of carrying her trunk.

When she got to the garrison, she learned that Michael had been called away to a conference of high-level officers planning a dry-season offensive and wasn’t expected to return for another three days. Bitterly disappointed and a little angry, not with him but with the obligations that had taken him from her at such a critical time, she went to the radio room and sent him word that she’d arrived and was waiting for him. His reply came ten minutes later—“Please be patient. I will be back soon.” The happiness of hearing his voice was shattered by Major Kasli, commanding in Michael’s absence. With a reproachful look on his narrow face, he reprimanded her for using the radio to send a personal message, chewed out the radio operator for allowing it, and for good measure reprimanded the junior officer who’d explained why Michael was gone. That was confidential information. Quinette wanted to pull his goatee till he howled. “That’s right,” she snapped. “Us spies might tip off the CIA.”

She retreated into the friendly confines of Michael’s walled compound, where she took off her Western clothes and wrapped herself in a kanga. In the courtyard Pearl and the other two girls were grinding sesame nuts. With three empty days of waiting stretching before her, Quinette offered to help. Pearl shook her head. “Remember last time, how cross my father was with me.”

“He isn’t here, he won’t know, and I have got to have something to do,” Quinette pleaded.

She knelt by the grinding slab, locked her ankles, and rocked forward and back, mashing the nuts into a light brown paste. In minutes she was dripping sweat, but she reveled in the mindless effort, the flex of her back and arm muscles. She and the girls took turns, then pounded sorghum in the pail-sized wooden pestle. A camaraderie grew between her and them, and there was pleasure in that, too: the feeling that by sharing in their labors she was breaking down barriers, knitting the thread of her life into the tapestry of theirs.

“Your hair, I don’t like it again,” Pearl remarked when the work was finished and the doura was cooking over the fire.

“The braids came undone weeks ago,” Quinette said.

“May I fix it? You should look beautiful for my father.”

She sat on a stool outside, in that welcome hour when the heat softened its blows, and submitted to the long process of having her hair woven into plaits.

“I would like to ask you a question, Pearl. But you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Yes?”

“How do you feel about your father and me getting married? I’m going to be like your mother.”

“My mama penngo. She is died.”

Pearl’s command of English, Quinette realized, didn’t mean they could communicate all the time. “What I meant is, will you be happy when I become your father’s wife?”

“Toddo buna Kinnet,” she answered. “Means Pearl likes you.”

“Kinnet buna Toddo,” Quinette said.

It’s going to turn out all right, she said to herself that night, lying on the air mattress thrown over the crude bed, the paraffin lamp lending a sheen to the rubbed walls, on which moths drawn to the light cast shadows twice as big as themselves.

The next morning, in the interests of keeping herself occupied, she went to New Tourom to see if Moses needed help with his classes. She arrived as the pupils lined up in a military formation outside the newly completed school building. After Moses called the roll, she volunteered her services, which he said would be most welcome. At a clap of his hands, the children, with an obedience Quinette found touching, trooped inside to sit on benches, copybooks in their laps.

After three hours of checking spelling and basic arithmetic, she joined Moses, his wife, and Ulrika for lunch, at which the nurse revealed that Quinette had become the subject of much local gossip. Good gossip, Ulrika added quickly.

“Some people are saying that you must be a woman with great powers. That you have—ach, I cannot think of the English word. There are many girls here happy to be his, but to them he pays no attention. Only to the foreign woman. Bewitched. That is the English.”

As much as she wanted to think of herself as bewitching, Quinette had to laugh.

She returned to the school for the adult education session. She was dismayed at how little progress the older students had made since her last time here. They were still struggling with the alphabet and numbers. Yamila was having a particularly difficult time, her copybook blackened with incomprehensible marks.

Leaning over her, Quinette turned to a blank page and drew a straight line. “One. The number one. Say ‘one.’ ”

Yamila only looked at her, wildly, defiantly. Was she “on the slow side,” as Quinette’s mother would have put it? It didn’t seem so. A complicated light shone in Yamila’s narrow anthracite eyes.

“Write it, the number one.” She handed her the pencil.

Yamila made a mark, said, “Wan,” and without further prompting, wrote the next numeral, forming it like a Z. “Wan, tuh.”

“No, not ‘tuh.’ Two. Toooo.”

“Toooo.”

Was there mockery in the singsong way she’d repeated Quinette’s exaggerated pronunciation?

“Good. Now try three.”

“Tree.”

“No. That—” pointing out the window—“is a tree. This—” Writing “3” with her fingertip—“is a three. That’s a tree, this is the number three. Tha-ree.”

“Tha-ree,” Yamila echoed. “Wan, toooo, tha-ree.” Then, with quick, violent movements, she inscribed the rest of the numbers and named each one, spitting the words, “Fuh, fi, seestah, sayvan, aytah, nye, tin,” before she sprang to her feet, tossed the pencil aside, and walked out.

There was no cause for such an outburst, and Quinette’s temper flared. She went after her, calling, “Yamila, get back here, get back here right now!”

The young woman halted and spun around with a look of pure hatred that startled Quinette. Then Yamila walked away, haughty as a queen.

“What is the matter?” asked Moses.

“I don’t know,” Quinette said, her cheeks burning. “She’s got something against me.”

“Yes,” the teacher murmured.

“What is it? Do you know?”

“I will try working with her tomorrow,” Moses said.

She could tolerate Kasli’s animosity—there wasn’t much choice but to tolerate it—but Yamila’s, because it was so at odds with the favor the other women had shown her, disturbed Quinette, undermined the confidence with which she’d gone to bed last night.

In a preoccupied mood, she walked toward the ruined mission, where Fancher and Handy were already making their presence felt. They had a gang of workers cutting the knee-high weeds with pangas and scythes, and another clearing the rubble from the bombed buildings, while a third crew lugged the boxes of Bibles and hymnals, the generators, solar panels, and other equipment into a large wall tent pitched in a lemon orchard. A flag flew over the tent—a dark blue cross on a white field, with a scroll that read FRIENDS OF THE FRONTLINE.

Handy, seated on a campstool, was reading a booklet, Muslim Evangelism: Do’s and Don’ts, Fancher speaking to one of the workmen. Both men projected an air of command, and Quinette struck up a conversation, prompted by some vague idea that their self-assurance would rub off and restore her own.

“You know Nuban?” she asked Fancher.

“A little, and only this dialect. Your hair looks different.”

“That’s because it is.”

“So you’re teaching school?”

“Only helping out.”

“These people need help, don’t they?” he said with an undertone of disapproval. “Mostly they need help to help themselves. Look at that.” He waved at the work crews. “They could have cut weeds and cleaned up the mess without waiting for Rob and me to light a fire under their feet. Well, at least it’s under way now.”

“Jesus Christ is building his church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” Handy interjected. He appeared to be fond of speaking in slogans and aphorisms.

Quinette glanced at his booklet. “And you’re going to preach to Muslims?”

“Try to,” he replied. “It’s tricky. You don’t grab them by the collar and tell them to believe in Christ. You expose them to Christ’s message and hope they get it. We want to bring as many of them home as we can.”

The talk was not having the desired effect. The image of Yamila’s face, with its expression of raw hostility, would not leave her mind. The turning of her back was a rejection that Quinette saw as a threat to her acceptance into this world. Just then Negev came across the mission grounds, his long arms swinging, his Israeli machine gun strapped across his back. “Missy, will you be going back soon?”

“I know the way. You can go if you want to.”

“I am to protect you. My orders, missy.”

With Negev matching her step for step, as if attached to her by an invisible cord, she went down the road and through the notch in the hills into the valley. The garrison and the tukuls of the camp followers and the soldiers’ families lay ahead, partly veiled by smoke from burning sorghum stubble. Pausing, she looked up at the ledge and the mouth of the cavern on whose walls the ancestors had painted their inscrutable tale in pictures. At that moment she thought of Malachy’s words, “You have got to meet these people halfway, you have got to become one of them.” She knew what she must do and resolved all at once to do it.

“I’d like to stay here for a little while,” she said.

Negev shrugged uncertainly. “As you wish, missy.”

“Without you. I’m perfectly safe. Please go and speak to Pearl,” she added in a peremptory tone. “Tell her to come here. I want to talk to her.”

When Pearl arrived, Quinette made her request. The girl said nothing, puzzlement and a little alarm showing on her face, along with a question. She’d anticipated this reaction—what she was asking was without precedent, and Pearl wanted an explanation.

“I know that a Nuban’s wife must be strong and brave and have no evil in her,” Quinette said with slow formality. “Your father told me.” She pointed toward the ceremonial ledge above. “There. He took me there and showed me the ancestors’ paintings, the day he asked me to marry him.”

The girl’s expression did not change. She said, “Please wait here, Kinnet,” and went off, almost at a run. Quinette had anticipated this as well: Pearl would have to seek the counsel of her elders.

Sitting against a sun-warmed rock, the overheated air tingling in her nostrils like steam, she admired the landscape, the mown sorghum and wind-rippled grass taking on the color of burned butter in the slanting light. Minutes passed, she didn’t know how many. The light now fell at a near horizontal, slicing over the heights on the valley’s western side. Then she saw Pearl below, coming up the path followed by two women, one in a faded shift, the other in a blue kanga. The same pair who’d presided at the ritual Quinette had witnessed, the judges of female courage and virtue. The woman in blue was carrying a coiled whip.

“They will do it,” Pearl said.

Quinette took off her shirt and let it fall to the ground. From a clay jar Pearl poured sesame oil into her hands and rubbed it into Quinette’s back and shoulders, then sat down at the mouth of the cave, next to the woman in the faded shift. The woman in blue spoke. Quinette turned to Pearl for a translation.

“She asks that you do what she does,” the girl said.

Her chin jutting proudly, torso pushed forward, hips out, the woman began to dance to a silent drumbeat. With the knotted lash bent over her head, the tip in one hand, handle in the other, she stepped out wide to one side, lowering the whip to hold it across her back, then crossed her right foot over the left and repeated the movement until she’d described a full circle. She could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy—it seemed all women in Sudan passed from young to old with only a brief transit through middle age—but she danced with the grace of a girl. Quinette followed her lead, her movements, stiff and uncertain at first, becoming more supple and confident. The woman clucked approval, then demonstrated a refinement, turning as she sidestepped so that each large circle became a series of smaller circles, a ring of connected rings. Quinette did likewise, going around once, and again, and the whip’s sting went through her like an electric shock, bringing reflexive tears to her eyes. She willed them dry, clenched her jaw, and flinched as the oxhide cracked again.

She spun once more, forcing herself to look into the face of her tormentor and examiner. And around again, the whip’s slap as definite as a gunshot, its burn like a bullet’s. A third crack. Her eyes did not grow wet, she did not flinch, a gasp never left her throat.

The woman in blue danced before her, clutching the bowed lash in both hands. Quinette spun, offering her back in sweet surrender, and felt the knots tear flesh, the blood trickling down the culvert of her spine. She looked at the ruby droplets glimmering in the dust, each one a bead in the seam welding her to Pearl, to the woman seated next to Pearl, to the woman in blue, and to every soul in this alien world that was to be her own. A bond no one could break.

The knots ripped her again. She shut her eyes, in a state of ecstatic anguish, and soaring beyond pain, she did not feel the next bite of the leather teeth.

And then it was over, and she knew she’d passed her trial when the women began to ululate. They cupped their hands at the corners of their mouths and faced the valley, announcing Quinette’s initiation. They faced the cavern, their tongues flicking between half-open lips, the wavering shrieks echoing back, as if spirits of the ancestors were answering.