Acts of Faith

Star at the River’s End

THEIR HONEYMOON WAS a walking tour of the Nuba. Having met with his senior officers, Michael now had to confer with his subordinate commanders before the coming offensive. He wanted Quinette to join him so she could meet the inhabitants of his military domain and they meet her. It was going to be a celibate honeymoon; his full bodyguard accompanied them, and to their thirty-odd, Fancher, Handy, and a parade of porters carrying gear and supplies on foot or on bicycles added twenty more. As usual, Negev shadowed Quinette everywhere, a diligent guardian who had to be told not to traipse after her when she went to relieve herself.

Trekking mostly at night to avoid enemy aircraft and ambushes as well as the sun—temperatures now hit one hundred and twenty-five degrees—negotiating trails that twisted among tumbledown slopes where tall pinnacles jabbed at the stars and tree roots clutched precipitous ridges like the fingers of desperate climbers, they journeyed into some of the remotest parts of the mountains. Not so remote, however, that news of Michael’s wedding to a white woman had failed to reach them. Women and children swarmed out of the villages to gawk at Quinette, touch her, and ask her questions in dialects that Negev could barely understand.

In every village, while Michael met with the meks and SPLA officers, Fancher and Handy waged their spiritual offensive, evangelizing with a mixture of revival-tent fervor and military efficiency. They distributed hymnals and Bibles in the local language. They powered up the generator and showed videos about the life of Christ. (It was startling to see a TV screen glowing in villages that had no electricity.) If there was a church, they preached in it, encouraging the congregation to remain steadfast in the face of their adversities, reminding them that in the suffering is the glory. If there were soldiers present, they told the stories of Gideon and Joshua and the other mighty warriors of God. They conducted catechism classes with flip charts and audiotapes of gospel messages.

On the sixth day of the journey, they enlisted her. Taking her aside, they explained that Nubans thought it improper for men to minister to women, which was why their audiences were exclusively male. They had observed the numbers of females who were drawn to her and noticed the empathy she had for them. With some coaching, she could take on the task of teaching them about the women of the Bible, about Mary and the virgin birth, the tribulations the mother of God had endured. Would Quinette be willing to do that? She considered the request. God had called her away from her former life for a purpose. Was this it? Eager as she was to say yes, she had to point out that she had no experience or training in missionary work. Fancher expressed approval for her modesty. It normally a took a year to train a fieldworker, he said, but an exception could be made in her case. She’d already overcome cultural biases, the hardest lesson a fieldworker had to learn. If she proved able, she could undergo more formal instruction once they returned to New Tourom. He gave her a cassette recorder, tapes of Mary’s story in five different Nuban tongues, and flip charts that showed it in pictures, then tutored her on how to use the materials and conduct a meeting.

They traveled into the lands of the Masakin tribe, where the crowded mountains of the eastern Nuba gave way to broad valleys offering no sanctuary from air raids and the dreaded murahaleen. Horsemen and airmen had brought tamsit to the Masakin. The Arabic word, Michael told her, meant “raking.” The Masakin had been raked out of their valleys and forced to flee into a range of hills that stretched across the southern horizon: Jebel Tolabi, Jebel Doelibaya, Jebel Tabouli. Tamsit, in other words, was ethnic cleansing; it was scorched earth.

Making for the jebels, the column proceeded through an incinerated landscape, the bones of livestock whitening fields that looked in the moonlight as if they’d been covered by a blizzard of ash. A team of minesweepers went out ahead, swinging their detectors back and forth. The silence was eerie, interrupted only by the crunch of burned sorghum stalks underfoot. Besides landmines, there was the danger of stumbling into an enemy ambush—a government garrison wasn’t far off—and everyone’s eyes and ears were tuned to a high pitch, trying to pick out human forms in the darkness, listening for voices.

Walking behind her husband, Quinette experienced a heightened alertness, a druglike quickening of her senses produced by an amalgam of fear and excitement. The possibility that she might be killed at any moment made her feel intensely alive, and more than ever Michael’s sister-in-arms.

The thumping of a heavy machine gun sent everyone to the ground. Red and green tracer bullets, stitching the skies above the hills, declared that the column wasn’t the target—some trick of acoustics had made the machine-gun sound much closer than it was. Flat on her stomach, Quinette watched the tracers streak, then slow down, appearing to float like dying sparks before they winked out. There was a series of muffled thuds from an indeterminate distance behind her. Artillery shells whooshed overhead. Half a minute later a flickering appeared among the hills, followed by a ragged rumbling, then more machine-gun fire, then a bright flash as something exploded and caught fire.

Michael, lying beside her, counted by thousands to time the interval between the flash and the sound. “Seven kilometers,” he said. “Six point eight exactly.” He clapped his hands twice, and the men stood and continued toward the mountains that made a jagged jet-black silhouette, as if a hole had been opened in the sky to reveal a starless void lying beyond the heavens. Michael composed a coherent narrative out of what had been, to Quinette, a lot of confusing noise and flashes. SPLA guerrillas had ambushed a convoy trying to sneak through to the garrison under cover of the predawn darkness. The government troops had called artillery fire on the ambush, but the garrison’s guns, shooting at such long range, had been off the mark and the shells had landed harmlessly. The explosion had been a truck or armored personnel carrier struck by rocket-propelled grenades, or perhaps by an artillary round, falling short of its intended target.

His version of events was dead on. Reaching the base of a jebel at first light, they came upon the bullet-sieved hulks of three Sudan army trucks. In one the driver had been welded to the charred remains of the cab, his body shrunk to half its normal size: a faceless blackened form. Corpses lay all around, and the stench was awful. A year ago Quinette would have been sickened, she might have even been moved to pity; but now her only thought was “They had it coming.”

The column climbed into the jebels. Even there the Masakin had not found much refuge. The people who emerged from the villages were emaciated, barely surviving on the spare crops scratched out of rocky hillsides, some of which had been transformed into moonscapes by Antonovs and helicopter gunships.

There was a reason the government was paying the Masakin so much attention. Michael showed it to her from a ridge overlooking a cauterized plain of sun-cracked clay and a road: the main supply route between two government-held towns, Talodi in the east, Kadugli in the west, where, he said, it turned northward to join the pipeline and another road that ran to the oil fields. He pointed to the south.

“That way, less than one hundred kilometers, is the oil company’s airfield. These hills will be our base when we attack it. From here, with the lorries, we can transport the heavy mortars. We will leave at dark and be in position by midnight. We will hit them and the pipeline hard and fast.” He balled his right hand into a fist and smacked the palm of his left. “Hard and fast.”

They went on, arriving at a town where the local SPLA battalion was headquartered. Its commander invited Quinette to stay with his wives, all three of them, while he and Michael worked out their battle plans. Negev lugged her rucksack into the tukul and rolled out her sleeping bag. She fell on it and didn’t wake up till early afternoon, when the youngest wife brought her a meal of mandazi cakes and stringy goat meat, the same fare she’d eaten throughout this trek. She could shove her arm into the waistband of her hiking shorts and figured she’d lost a pound for each of the ten days since she’d left New Tourom.

Fancher appeared at the door to tell her that it was time for her debut as a minister. She followed him to the church, a long bungalow just outside of town, with the usual makuti roof and a tall wooden crucifix planted in front. The men were already gathered inside, where she could hear Handy reading from the Psalms—” ‘He shall cover you with his feathers, and under his wings shall you trust. His truth shall be your shield and buckler . . .’ ”

“That’s our reading for today, the ninety-first,” Fancher said to her, offering a smile of reassurance. He handed her a Bible, marked at the Psalm. “I’d like you to start with it.” He motioned at a tree a short distance off. Under it stood one of the translators in Fancher’s retinue, with the flip chart on an easel and the tape recorder on a table, plugged into speakers and a solar panel. The news that the women and children were to be ministered to by a woman had drawn quite an assembly—more than a hundred, Quinette judged. “I’ll watch how you do and give you a critique afterward,” Fancher said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

She had thought her experience with speaking to liberated slaves would give her confidence, but her knees shook slightly as she stood before all the expectant faces. This wasn’t making a speech, this was ministry. The sweat trickling into her eyes didn’t help, and she flubbed the first verse and had to start over. She read on and, verse by verse, felt more sure of herself. The indwelling spirit poured through her, and instead of standing rigidly, she began to pace to and fro, gesturing, her voice growing stronger. “ ‘You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flies by day. . . . Nor for the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor for the destruction that wastes at noonday . . .’ ” It wasn’t too long a Psalm, just sixteen verses, but with each line needing to be translated, its reading took a full fifteen minutes. She concluded—” ‘With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation’ “—and glanced over her congregation at Fancher, standing with his arms crossed over his chest. He pursed his lips and gave her a single nod.

That gesture encouraged her to ad-lib.

“ ‘I will show him my salvation,’ ” she repeated. “And God showed us our salvation in Jesus Christ, his son. Now we’ll learn about Mary, who gave birth to Jesus—”

“Gunships! Gunships coming!”

The cry came in three different languages, English, Arabic, Nuban. “Gunships coming!” Men were running from the church. In seconds Quinette’s audience fled in all directions. Fancher seized her arm and yelled, “Over there!” They ran to a bomb shelter—nothing more than a wide, deep hole in the ground. It was already packed to the rim. They ran to another and wedged themselves in, crouching atop a pile of people, with no more than six inches between them and the top of the hole. Between the shelter and the church, a few women lay flat on the ground. Quinette looked up. Two gunships materialized, looking like huge predatory insects. “Woe to the land of the whirring wings . . .” Both swooped directly over the bomb shelter, their rapid-fire cannons making a loud, hideous, ripping noise. “A thousand shall fall at your side . . . but it shall not come near you . . .” Quinette pressed her face into the back of a person under her and heard a series of sharp cracks. Rockets, Fancher said. The gunships flew off. Fancher crawled out of the hole, got to his feet, and dived back in. “They’re coming in for another run!” he cried, the last couple of words drowned out as both helicopters skimmed the treetops, close enough that Quinette glimpsed the pilot’s helmeted head in the cockpit window; then she curled into a fetal position and covered her head as brain-numbing explosions brought down a rain of dirt and debris. The ground shook, shrapnel scythed a tree branch overhead, and it crashed somewhere nearby. No one in the shelter was hit. “I will say to the Lord, He is my refuge and fortress . . .”

In the silence that followed, she heard shouts. Peering over the shelter’s lip, she saw Michael leading teams of antiaircraft machine-gunners and riflemen. Waving his arms, pointing, he showed them where to set up firing positions. She felt a rush of love, of pride—to be the wife of such a man! The gunships roared in again and this time flew into a sheet of bullets. The noise was stupendous. Quinette did not duck, thinking that she should match her husband’s bravery. The lead gunship wobbled, then dropped, settling on its wheels as if it had made a normal landing. Michael’s troops riddled it with bullets.

Their ears ringing, Quinette and Fancher got out of the hole and brushed dirt from their hair. SPLA troops ran toward the downed helicopter a hundred yards away. Villagers, scrambling from their hiding places, followed them. Quinette walked in a shell-shocked daze. The women who hadn’t made it to a shelter had been shredded by cannon fire. She couldn’t tell how many there had been. Nearby, the tree beneath which she’d begun her meeting was splintered and blackened, the tape recorder and speakers and other paraphernalia scattered amid rocket fragments. The troops were dragging the bodies of the crew from the gunship. One was still alive. Villagers pounced on him, tearing at him with bare hands, hacking him with pangas in an orgy of revenge. Only with your eyes shall you look and see the reward of the wicked, Quinette thought. “No! No!” Handy screamed, sprinting toward the frenzied crowd.

“Help us stop those people!” Fancher said to her. “We can’t let them do this!”

She pointed at the heaps of bloodied rags that twenty minutes ago had been listening to her read the ninety-first Psalm. “I can’t,” she said, choking. “Let them have at it.”

“You are safe, you’re not hurt!”

It was Michael, covered in dirt. He put his arms around her and held her close.

Fancher appealed to him to help restore the villagers to their sanity. What was going on over there, within sight of a church, was an abomination.

“This is war, Mr. Fancher,” Michael replied coldly. “And war is cruelty. It cannot be refined.”

They left at dusk, after the dead were buried—amazingly, only eight people had been killed, and the church had not been badly damaged, though there were rocket craters within fifty yards of it. “Jesus Christ is building his church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The two ministers lectured her before they set off. Ministry was more than words, it was action, and she should have set the Christian example by helping them restrain the villagers. No matter what, that sort of conduct could not be justified. She agreed, she promised to improve, but while Fancher and Handy spoke in her ear, another spoke in her head: You can’t ask people to grant mercy to an enemy who shows them none. It seemed to her that Sudan was cut off from normal standards of behavior; it was under different, harsher rules.

The column walked till dawn, resting the next day in the village of another tribe, the Tira, to whom Quinette preached her second lesson. They left that night, passing through a region that had been spared from the war’s ravages because it was sparsely inhabited: a vestige of wild Africa where low ridges polka-dotted with acacia trees undulated toward a far-off range, rising like a volcanic island from an ocean of grass. Such ugliness and horror two days ago, such peace and beauty here. The range, Michael told her, was the southern face of the Limon hills. New Tourom lay beyond it. Home. Eager as they were to get there, they halted at midnight beside a riverbed and camped in the open, too worn out to march further. The men spread out into a defensive perimeter, and everyone but the sentries went to sleep to the lullabies of hyenas.

An urgency in her bladder and bowels woke Quinette at some predawn hour. After finishing that business in the riverbed, she crept back, but sleep eluded her and she lay on her bag, gazing at the constellations.

“That one is the Phoenix,” Michael whispered, raising his arm. “Do you see it? The one that looks like a house? The very bright star beneath it is Achernar. The Arabs named it. It means ‘star at the river’s end.’ ”

“How long have you been awake?”

“An hour. I cannot get back to sleep.”

“Me neither.”

“For the same reason?” he asked, turned onto his side, and laid his hand on her shoulder.

They sneaked away barefoot through the grass, past a none-too-vigilant sentry, came to a koppie, and sat under an outcrop, on a bed of sand.

“What river is that star at the end of?”

“The Nile,” he answered. “Do you see that long line of stars bending and twisting above it? That’s it. The Nile of the heavens.”

“I love the way that sounds,” she said. “Star at the river’s end, the Nile of the heavens.”

“Yes, the Arabs can be very poetic. As poetic as they can be brutal.”

He kissed her, so gently it was more a breath than a kiss. His fingers toyed with her braided hair, then fell to her shirt and opened the top two buttons. He cupped her breast and drew a ring around her nipple.

“I cannot keep my hands off of you. It’s a habit.”

“One you must never, ever break,” she said, laughing softly.

He stripped off his uniform while she wriggled out of her shorts and tossed them and her shirt carelessly aside. Their unwashed bodies gave off an ammonia-like odor. He stroked her back, as if he were strumming his harp. She’d had to rein in the raw carnality awakened by the dangers they’d faced together; now his touch and their isolation from the others unleashed it.

They lay without talking for a while, the sand cool against their skin. She turned sideways and held his face between her hands. “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if this was the time? If he were conceived out here tonight, under that star?”

He didn’t answer, sitting upright at an ominous sound, like a herd of charging buffalo. Michael snatched his sidearm from the pile of clothes and stood outside the outcrop, Quinette beside him. Except for the pistol, they might have been their own remote ancestors, naked and fearful in the African night. One ridge over, they made out a dust cloud and hundreds of huge, dark shapes flowing over it, but the darkness and trees and tall grass made it impossible to see what manner of creatures they were. A distance away the men were awake, shouting over the racket made by the stampeding animals. Then, fifty yards directly in front of her, the grass parted and a prehistoric beast appeared, six or seven feet tall, running on two long legs with clawed feet, its stalk of a neck sprouting from a body the size and shape of a bathtub. Michael gripped his pistol with both hands, then thought better of it, grabbed her by the wrist, and pulled her back under the outcrop. The surging mass broke around the koppie, the dust filling the small space where the two people huddled. Ostrich. The thunderous noise grew fainter. In a moment all was silence again. Quinette heard Negev calling for her. Dressing quickly, breathless, she called back that she was all right. She and Michael looked at each other and laughed with relief. Thank God they had had the outcrop to hide under, Michael said. The giant birds, fleeing in such blind fright, would have trampled them, and an ostrich’s talons could tear a human being open like a paper sack.

“Fleeing from what?” Quinette asked. “We heard hyenas earlier. Was it hyenas?”

Michael looked toward the ridges, where a swath of flattened grass marked the path of the ostriches’ flight. “It could have been. Or lions. Or a leopard. Or something else. Or they were like a mob in a riot, running for no reason. I don’t know.”

The wind soughed through the acacia and rippled the long grass that concealed whatever had menaced the ostrich. Hyena, lion, leopard, or nothing at all, some figment of ostrich imagination. She asked no more questions. This was the land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, where a lot of things lacked explanation.

 

AFTER THEIR RETURN she discovered that she was, for all her exotic circumstances, in an essentially prosaic role—the officer’s wife. She endured one of its trials, and that was her husband’s absence. Michael was there physically, but in all other ways he was gone, immersed in staff conferences, poring over maps and operational plans, overseeing military exercises to hone his troops to a fighting edge. New recruits, arriving from nearby villages and from as far as a hundred miles away, had to be trained. Radio messages from Garang’s headquarters had to be decoded and answered. Quinette was grateful for the moment they’d shared under the star at the river’s end. Her heart and body lived off the memory of it, as one would live off stored fat in a time of hunger, for in matters of sexual passion, if not of love, she was suffering a famine. At day’s end Michael was too tired and preoccupied to pay much attention to her. She joked that he’d broken his habit of not being able to keep his hands off her, but he didn’t think it particularly funny. Nor did he laugh when, one night, she remarked that here they were, married such a short time, and he’d already taken a mistress.

“What are you talking about?” he snapped.

“The war. The war’s your mistress.”

“What nonsense. I do not love this war, and you know that.”

“Darling,” she said, “you’re losing your sense of humor.”

He massaged his forehead with the heels of both hands. “You are right. And it is that damned second in command of mine causing me to lose it.”

“More nonsense about me being a CIA spy?”

“No,” he said wearily. “He argues with me all the time about this offensive. He thinks it will be a big mistake. I assign him a task, and either he drags his feet or he does not do it at all, to show me how much he objects. If I had someone to replace him, I would sack him.”

He revealed then that the operation was going to be more ambitious than she had thought. The raid on the oil-field airbase was to be the main act in a whole concert of destruction. While the Nubans struck it from the north, Dinka troops would assault from the south. This would be coordinated with a general offensive throughout the Nuba. Outposts and garrisons would be attacked to keep the Arabs pinned down as commando teams, armed with plastic explosives, sabotaged the pipeline.

“What’s Kasli’s objection?” Quinette asked. “That you can’t pull off something this big? That it will fail?”

“He’s afraid it will succeed.”

“What? Whose side is he on?”

“There are times I wonder,” Michael said, hanging his pistol belt on a peg. “But I understand his concerns. There is a kind of balance in the fighting in this zone. The government bombs a village, we attack a garrison. The murahaleen seize some captives, we ambush a convoy. A successful campaign on this scale will upset the balance. It will be a provocation, and Kasli fears Khartoum will retaliate in a very bad way. The people will suffer more and blame the SPLA for bringing it down on their heads.”

“And you say you understand that?”

“Yes,” he replied, frowning. “But that does not mean I agree with it.”

“I hope not.” She took his hands in hers, convinced he hadn’t told her all this to make conversation. Kasli had put some doubts into his mind, and he was calling on her to put them out. “Just think of what we saw in that Masakin village,” she said. “Kasli is comfortable with the status quo, and he wants it to continue. You can’t let that happen. The people don’t want you to, and I don’t want you to, and God himself doesn’t either.”

He looked a little amused. “Ah yes, your conversations with the Creator. And what does He have to say about it?”

Actually, she didn’t know what God had to say about it. What she did know as she imagined the spectacle unfolding—tall, black soldiers sweeping out of the hills, mortar shells bursting, cyclonic flames whirling from the shattered pipeline—was that the battle had to happen and that she must encourage her husband to make it happen. The vision stirred her into a warlike mood, and she thought of what God had to say. She went to her trunk and took out her Bible. After some searching, she found the passage from Isaiah and read it aloud. “ ‘In that time a present will be brought to the Lord of Hosts from a people tall and smooth of skin, and from a people terrible from their beginning, a nation powerful and treading down, whose land the rivers divide.’ A people tall and smooth of skin,” she repeated, her fingers running lightly down Michael’s bare forearm. “The Nubans and the Dinka. Whose land the rivers divide—the Nile. It’s almost like a prophecy.”

“And what is the present?” he asked, with a slightly sardonic smile.

He wasn’t taking her seriously. She would correct that. She laid the Bible in his lap and said calmly, “The airfield and the pipeline blown to hell and as many dead Arabs as your men can kill.”

He looked startled. “Would your missionary friends approve of you speaking like that?”

A voice spoke in her memory, the voice of the liberated slave woman, Atem Deng. “I wish I was a man so I could carry a rifle . . . I would massacre them all.” “I suppose not,” she said. “They wouldn’t approve of this either. I wish I could go with you.”

He said nothing.

“I know, it’s no place for a woman.”

“Certainly not for a woman who is my wife and hopes to be the mother of our son,” he said. “But perhaps there is something you could do short of that. I will think about it.”

The next day he brought her to the far end of the valley to watch the recruits training. An encampment of weathered tents and crude lean-tos was pitched at the edge of a dusty field where, under an unmerciful sun and to the commands of unmerciful sergeants (Quinette saw one crack a boy over the head with a stick for facing right when he should have turned left), they were marching with wooden rifles, like kids playing soldier. A lot of them were kids, no more than thirteen or fourteen. In Sudan, childhood was another casualty of war.

He gazed off to a corner of the field, where some recruits were advancing in single file, their make-believe rifles at the high port—they reminded her of a high school marching band coming onto the field at halftime. “Ah, they are doing it wrong,” Michael said under his breath. “Please wait here.”

He strode off and called a halt to the drill. She watched him grasp the lead recruit by the shoulders and move him to one side, then the man behind him to the other side, then the next and the next, until he got the file into a staggered formation.

“They think this is a parade,” he said when he came back. “They have to understand that if they went into combat one behind the other, one automatic rifle would knock the lot of them down like ninepins.”

“One round will get you all, I remember my father saying that,” Quinette said with a wistful smile. “When he took my sisters and me hiking in the woods. We were scared of the woods, and we’d walk very close behind him, sometimes bumping into him, and he would turn around and tell us to back away because one round would get us all. We never knew what he meant.”

He sat next to her and tapped her knees with his walking stick. “A soldier’s daughter, a soldier’s wife. So now I will tell you what you can do. When the regular soldiers are away, those boys”—he pointed at the recruits, now marching at the double, chanting in time to their stomping feet—“are going to help defend this base and New Tourom, but they cannot defend with toy rifles. I sent a radio message to Loki yesterday requesting rifles and ammunition. It means nothing, it is nonsense without a certain word.”

She gave him a puzzled look.

“I can no longer trust the radio to send my shopping lists in the SPLA code,” he explained. “Every commander knows it, and—you recall the time that one fellow tried to hijack one of my shipments?—another tried it recently, and he succeeded. Wesley was forced to deliver the cargo elsewhere. I’ve complained to the high command about this nonsense of one commander stealing from another, and they have promised to put a stop to it, but I don’t trust them either. So I have worked out a new system, a private code between me and Douglas and Wesley. To decode, a keyword is needed.” He produced an envelope from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “It’s in there. It says, so you know, ‘Please do not forget the handbook.’ A relief flight arrives tomorrow morning. You are to be on that flight when it returns to Loki and bring this to Douglas or Wesley personally.”

She slipped the envelope into the bodice of her dress. “Thank you, Michael.”

“Thank you?”

“For trusting me with something this important.”

Now enlisted in the military as well as the spiritual offensive, she arrived in Loki in a utilitarian outfit—khaki shirt and trousers—to look businesslike. The immigration officer in the hot little shed at the tarmac’s edge didn’t care about her appearance. With the surliness of the petty official granted a moment of power, he told her that her visa had expired and that she would not be allowed into the country. Quinette, who had forgotten about her visa (in the Nuba, passports and visas seemed irrelevant), reminded him that she was already in the country and that he could issue her a temporary airport visa. A modest gift, from the money Michael had given her for expenses, caused him to acknowledge that this was true. He shoved a form across his desk, which she filled out, checking “Business” in the box labeled “Purpose of Visit.” She paid the fee, but the officer, desiring to prolong his moment of power or perhaps extract another gift, held on to her passport. Flipping through it, he noted that she had departed Kenya some time ago, but he saw nothing to indicate where she’d gone. This was peculiar. What was the nature of her business? She replied that she’d been in Sudan, and he repeated that he did not see anything in her passport to show that she’d been there. He asked—that is, demanded in the form of a question—to see what was in her fanny pack.

She hesitated, her heart beating faster, “There are some personal things in there. Female things.”

With a backward curl of his fingers, the official told her to give it to him. Drawing herself up to her full six-one, she unbuckled the pack and tossed it onto the desk—just to show this officious character that he couldn’t push her around. He pulled out a fistful of tampons, her makeup, and the envelope, which he opened with a knife.

“ ‘Please do not forget the handbook,’ ” he said, then looked up at her with an interrogator’s gaze. “Is this a personal female item?”

“It’s a reminder,” she answered, her heart rate accelerating further. Now she felt like the spy Kasli accused her of being.

“To do what?”

“To not forget the handbook.”

“What handbook?”

“First aid,” she said. “A handbook on first aid. Now if you don’t mind . . .”

The officer leaned back and, shaving a mustache of sweat with his finger, looked at the ceiling and sighed to show that his forbearance was not infinite. “Miss Hardin, it is known that you are married to a commander in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. It is therefore important to know what your business is here. Now, if you don’t mind, you will tell me what it is.”

Quinette could only stand there, struck dumb.

“Aviation. She works for us.”

She and the officer turned as one. Mary English swaggered through the door and up to the desk and clasped the man’s hands firmly in both of hers. “We’ve been expecting her, and we’d appreciate it if you expedited the paperwork.”

His fingers folded quickly over Mary’s offering and as quickly slipped it into the desk drawer. It took him only a little more time to issue Quinette her visa and return her things.

Outside, Mary said, “The Archangel radioed us last night that you’d be coming in. We figured you’d get hassled. The word’s out on you. Sorry I was late. Hop on.” She slapped the backseat of a Kawasaki.

Quinette climbed on, laying her straw carry-bag in her lap. “The word’s out on me?”

“You are shit on a log and persona non grata to a lot of people in Loki,” Mary answered, kicking the starter, and they roared off, the motorcycle throwing a rooster-tail of dust. They sped by a UN gate and the compounds of the independent NGOs, each with its flag flying bravely, and finally through the gate into Hotel California, Quinette’s old home. Everything looked so familiar, and she somehow thought that this should not be so, that all of it should have changed because she had.

Walking across the compound, she neared the wall-tent she’d shared with Lily and Anne and felt a pang of nostalgia. The front flaps parted, and Anne came out, on her way to work.

“Anne! How are you?”

Her old friend looked her up and down and none too favorably. “Fine and how are you?” she said in a tone almost hostile in its indifference.

“Well, I—there have been a lot changes—”

“Good to see you again. I’m off.”

She walked away. An outright insult would have been less hurtful than that frigid reception.

“That’s what you meant, shit on a log, persona non grata?” Quinette asked.

“Shit on a log to the do-gooders,” Mary answered. “It’s uncool to marry a rebel commander. You’re persona non grata to the UN people. They’re the ones who alerted immigration to be on the lookout for you, maybe just to harass you, maybe because they suspect what we’re up to. They also sent around a notice that you’re barred from flying on UN planes, or any independent airline flying a UN mission.”

Hearing this made her as uneasy as seeing her picture on a wanted poster in the post office, but uneasiness swiftly morphed into a kind of outlaw’s pride. She regarded the aid workers, shuffling papers, drinking coffee in the mess, with scorn: play-it-safers with return tickets, who would never suffer the ordeals or experience the triumphs of a passionate devotion to a cause, to a person, to anything.

“Well, I had no intentions of flying on UN planes,” she said.

“Yeah. They’re just making a point. You’re not a neutral party anymore. You didn’t marry a man, you made a political statement. You’ve taken sides, in just about the most public way possible.”

“Seems to me you and Wes and Doug have done the same thing.”

“We aren’t public about it. We keep it as quiet as we can.”

They came to the tent Wes and Mary shared and sat on bamboo and rattan chairs under the grass-roofed shelter. Mary produced two Cokes from a cooler. Quinette took one sip and, indulging in the forgotten delight of an ice-cold drink, finished half the can in a single gulp.

“So what about you?” she asked. “Do you think marrying him was uncool? That I’m some kind of girl-guerrilla with a knife in her teeth?”

“Nope. You might be crazy, but I understand that because I’ve done something crazy. Wes has asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

Quinette regarded Mary, with her model-like beauty.

“I know what you’re thinking. And there’s more—I’ll be his fifth wife. No accounting for a woman’s taste, is there? That’s enough girl talk. You’ve got something for us.”

“I’m supposed to show it to Wes or Doug.”

“Wes is in Nairobi and Doug’s on a flight.”

“Michael said to show it to either of them. Personally.”

“Hey, I’m his first officer. I’m authorized,” Mary said, and turned her hand palm up. After she glanced at the note, she said, “Okay, let’s go and see what’s on order.”

When Quinette entered Knight Air’s office, Fitz bounded out of his chair and hugged her—a welcome that made up for the ones she’d gotten at the airport and from Anne.

“Okay, that’s out of the way,” Mary said. “It’s handbook.”

Fitz squatted before a small safe in a corner of the room, spun the combination lock, and pulled out a sheet of paper and laid it on his desk. Eight sets of letters were printed on it in block letters: RWOEIOHE RCRNSIEH OHEOEPEC PTLVDDTS YFIROSP IOWTNZRA IUSSTPC TTFAWEA.

“All those consonants, it looks like a listing from a Polish phone directory,” Quinette said.

Fitz chuckled. “The things I have had to learn how to do,” he said, in a way suggesting that the acquisition of these new skills pleased him.

On a blank sheet, he printed HANDBOOK, spacing the letters wide apart and writing a number under each one:

HANDBOOK

41632785

That done, he arranged the sets of letters vertically, placing each column under the number corresponding to its place in the sequence, then turned the sheet around so Mary could read the message.

Squinting at it, Quinette recognized some words, but the text still didn’t make much sense.

HANDBOOK

41632785

PRIORITY

TWOHCUTF

LOWERSFI

VETONSAR

DINESTWO

DOZPIPES

THREECAP

SEACH

“It says,” Mary explained, “that the Archangel is asking for a priority shipment of two hundred cut flowers—that’s assault rifles—five tons of sardines—that’s rifle ammunition—two dozen pipes—that’s rocket-propelled-grenade launchers—and three caps—that’s the grenades—three for each launcher.”

And now, with another look, Quinette saw the message emerge, like a lake bottom coming into clear view through a diving mask. She felt that she had gained admittance to a secret world.

Fitz turned to her. “So, mission accomplished. Join us for dinner tonight at Tara’s compound. The food there is much better.”

Proud that she had overcome her need for even basic amenities, Quinette looked upon the Hotel California’s comforts the way a reformed alcoholic would a drink. A soft bed, running water, decent food—one taste of these blessings, and she would have to start all over, habituating herself to a life without them. So when Mary, an hour before dinner, hinted that she could do with a bath by loaning her a fresh towel, a washcloth, and a bar of soap, she marched to the shower determined not to enjoy it. The cascade of hot water broke her resolve almost immediately. She stood under it for a long time, her head thrown back and eyes shut, and with guilty pleasure she watched the suds swirl down the drain, carrying away the grime and dried sweat that veneered her body.

Feeling renewed, she returned to the tent. She’d brought two changes of clothes in her carry-bag in case she couldn’t get a flight out right away—another pair of bush shorts with a matching shirt and, in case of a special occasion, the black and gold dress.

“What do you think?” she asked, holding up the two outfits.

Mary, who was brushing her hair in a mirror nailed to a tent pole, turned and answered that the dress was gorgeous, but considering Quinette’s notoriety, it might be best not to call attention to herself.

“I don’t see why I should skulk around like I’m ashamed.”

“Look”—Mary hammered the air with the hairbrush, like a scolding mother—“you’re already the subject of a lot of bad talk, so why give them a reason for more by showing up dressed like the White Queen?”

Never one to shy from attention, even the negative kind, Quinette snaked into the dress, did her lips, and put on her hoop earrings and a nest of black-bead necklaces. Eager to cause a stir, she was a little deflated when she entered the bar with Fitz and Mary and found it empty. So was the adjacent dining room, except for a South African aircrew in dark blue jumpsuits.

Round tables on concrete pedestals sprouted alongside the small kidney-shaped swimming pool, glowing an unearthly blue in its underwater lights. They sat down and ordered drinks, Quinette asking the barman for a gin and tonic without the gin—she hadn’t touched hard liquor in so long, she was afraid one shot would get her drunk. The pop-pop-pop of rifle fire came from somewhere in the distance: Turkana and Tuposa cattle raiders, shooting it up again. Quinette reminisced about the trek with Michael, the gunship attack, the ostrich charge. It was a pleasure to converse without strain. There were so few people she could speak to in the Nuba, her efforts to learn the local language—it was called Moro—having barely proceeded past the hello and good-bye stage, and even then she couldn’t say hello or good-bye to the other tribespeople who’d sought refuge in New Tourom because they spoke Otorro, Heiban, or Krongo.

The dining room had filled up: Quinette’s wish for an audience had been granted, and among the diners were Ken Eismont and his whole crew—Jim Prewitt, Santino, Jean, and Mike. She had never received a reply to her resignation and wasn’t sure how Ken would react to her presence. Her impulse was to return to the bar and hide out until he left; but that would be cowardly. Besides, what did she have to feel guilty about? Perhaps she could have handled her departure from the WorldWide Christian Union more gracefully, but her conscience was clear; and it armored her against the icy look that pierced Ken’s rimless glasses when she approached his table.

“Thought I would say hello,” she said.

He gave her a limp handshake.

“Did you find a replacement?” she asked.

“No, but thanks for leaving the office in good shape,” he said indifferently.

She decided to disarm him. “I gave you an apology in writing, I’ll give it face to face. I should have given you more notice.”

“You think that’s it? Not giving enough notice?”

She did not say anything.

“You used me and the organization as a pretext to see your lover. And then you quit. How do you justify treating us like that? I expected more of you.” He was speaking quietly but injecting venom into every word. “You left us with a pile of work you never finished, but that isn’t all. Did you ever for one second think of what the consequences would be to us? Are you aware that Khartoum knows about your marriage and that they’ve used it against us?”

“This is the first I’ve heard about it,” she said, perversely exhilarated that she had drawn the attention of the Sudanese government.

“Khartoum has been trying to discredit us and our program for years, and you handed them red meat for their propaganda sausage factory. They’ve made statements that we’re an ally of the SPLA because one of our employees is the wife of an SPLA officer.”

“Why do you I think I resigned first? To spare you that.”

“It didn’t work. They’re saying that our teams are now fair game for their militias. We’ve put out press releases that you are no longer our employee. Not that the denials have had any effect. You’ve put all of us”—he swung an arm at the table—“in danger. As if we needed more of that.”

“Isn’t this a little too public? Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say it in private.”

“I’ve said all I have to say, except this. We would have had to fire you if you hadn’t quit. Marrying a guerrilla officer, for Christ’s sake! I’d think you were nuts, but what you are is a selfish woman, Quinette. Selfish and careless.”

“Right,” she said angrily. “By the way, how did you make out, looking into that hanky-panky I dug up? Did you sort through that? Figure out how to cover it up? Where do you get off, judging me?”

“I don’t know you,” he said, turning from her. “You don’t exist.”

She got a plate, stepped up to the serving table, and looked at the dinner choices, written on little white cards placed in front of the chafing dishes. It was hard to read them, but she was damned if she was going to wipe her eyes and give Ken the satisfaction of seeing how deeply he’d wounded her. He didn’t even give her a chance to defend or explain herself.

She pointed randomly, the server in his starched white smock heaped chicken on her plate, and composing herself, she rejoined Fitz and Mary.

“That didn’t look like a pleasant encounter,” Mary said.

“Nothing important.”

The three of them had the table, which could seat twenty people, all to themselves. The empty chairs reinforced Quinette’s feeling that she was under a kind of quarantine. Her distress, however, hadn’t affected her appetite. She finished eating before her companions and vacuumed the scraps with her fingers until the plate looked as if it had been washed.

Ken and his crew were leaving. They walked past her without looking at her, as if indeed she had ceased to exist. Santino, however, lingered behind. “A letter arrived for you just two days ago,” he said, “I was going to give it to Knight Air for you, but now . . .” He withdrew it from his case. It bore a Minneapolis address. She recognized her younger sister’s handwriting. “Ken was too hard on you,” he added. “I enjoyed working with you. You are not like these others.” He motioned at the aircrews and relief workers crowding the tables. “You are one of us.”

That remark having sewn up the rents Ken had torn into her self-esteem, she feared that Kristen’s letter would reopen them. Returning to Mary’s tent, she switched on the lightbulb dangling from the ridgepole, sat down, and reluctantly opened the envelope. Inside were three pages, filled on both sides with Kristen’s backhanded script. The family brain had been designated to be the family scribe, responding to the letter Quinette had sent to Nicole more than two months ago. The first three pages crackled with scorn—“You said in your—can I call it wedding announcement?—that your news was going to come as ‘something of a shock.’ That was perceptive. Also a class A understatement. Mom wasn’t shocked, she was devastated!”—and with reproach—“You’ve never shown our mother much consideration, but with this, all you’re showing her is contempt”—and with rebukes— “Since Dad died, you’ve acted like you’ve got something against her, and me and Nicole too, and you’ve done everything possible to cause as much worry and pain as possible. Your marriage is your crowning achievement in that department.” The last three pages were an outpouring of distilled vitriol: “In case you think we’re a bunch of cornbelt racists, I’ll just say that our issue isn’t your husband’s skin color. It’s what he is. In your letter, you made him out to be some kind of African George Washington. Sorry. Since you went over there, we’ve kept up on events in that part of the world, and we know about the unspeakable things those African guerrilla leaders are doing over there. It’s beyond us how you could decide to spend the rest of your days with a man who has blood on his hands, how you could turn your backs on us and just throw your life away, like it’s an old dress.

“You said that no one can choose whom she falls in love with. That’s true. It’s also bullshit, and here’s the bullshit part—we don’t think you’re in love with this Michael Goraende. You’re in love with some image or idea of yourself. You’re the star in your movie, and your husband is the leading man.

“Guess what Ardele is telling her friends? That you’ve married an army officer and are living overseas on an extended assignment. That pisses me off sometimes, but what else can she say? She can no more comprehend what you’ve done than if you’d announced that you’re going to Mars. Meantime, she’s afraid that something awful will happen to you, that she’ll never see you again even if you aren’t killed or don’t come down with some awful disease. I can’t say the same is true of Nicole and me. It wouldn’t bother us a whole lot if we never see you again, because of what you’ve done to Mom.”

Quinette set the letter down, wondering how much of it had been a faithful representation of the family’s collective opinion and how much had been colored by Kristen’s own feelings. For sure, nasty little asides like “You’re the star in your own movie” were hers alone, and Quinette didn’t quite believe that Nicole never wanted to see her again, or that Ardele thought she was in love with an image of herself. That too was pure Kristen. She and her younger sister never had gotten along.

Mary pranced in, sassily swigging a Tusker from the can. “Bad news? You’re like this.” She squeezed the corners of her mouth and tugged it into a pout.

“Expected news. It’s just about unanimous. Now my family agrees with everyone around here, but maybe for different reasons.”

“Let me guess. Their little girl married a nigger.”

“I’ll bet that’s what they really think, but they won’t admit it.”

Mary sat beside her. “You’ve done something pretty extreme. You can’t expect applause.”

Quinette was silent for a moment. Ostracized here, rejected by her family, she grasped for her conviction that God had summoned her to the Nuba and Michael’s side for His own purposes, that He was leading her to something, step by step, and she clung to that belief tightly, lest it slip away. Without it, she could not carry on in the face of so much criticism.

“I don’t expect applause,” she said, “and you know, the disapproval isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing would be to be ignored. People ignore you only when you’re not doing anything worthwhile.”

 

THE DAY AFTER her return to the Nuba, high among the rocks that exhaled the night’s coolness into the morning air, Quinette knelt naked before a kujur’s wife. The woman sat on a wooden stool, with her instruments at her feet: a flat, square blade resembling a miniature ax-head, a couple of long thorns, several twigs, a jar of groundnut oil, and another of sorghum flour mixed with powdered herbs and roots. She spoke.

“She is asking if you are ready,” said Pearl, who sat watching.

Quinette replied that she was. With one of the twigs, the kujur’s wife traced the chosen design on her oiled abdomen: a vertical band of marks, ten across, stretching from the bottom of her breasts to her navel, straddled by two curved bands that resembled bowed legs. Leaning forward, supporting her elbows on her parted knees, a thorn in one hand, the blade in another, she lifted skin with the thorn and made a swift cut. Quinette sucked in a breath and flinched. The woman admonished her: she must remain very still. At the next cut, Quinette gritted her teeth and looked toward the sun. Mary said she’d done something way out there, but changing her name wasn’t extreme enough; nor was the trial she’d undergone in this very same place. Something else was needed, a visible sign to mark forever the inner change.

The woman’s hands moved as swiftly as a skilled weaver’s. Quinette forced herself to concentrate on them so she would not think about the pain. In minutes the first two vertical rows were done. The kujur’s wife wiped off the blood with a twig and smeared on more oil, then a handful of the flour mixture. A prick with the thorn, a quick slash of the knife. The woman cleaned the blood again, and again smeared the cuts with the powder, until Quinette’s stomach looked as white as moonlight.

It went on for half an hour, the hands never pausing. Prick-slash-prick-slash. The marks began to stand out, each the size of an insect bite and stinging like one. After thirty minutes more the curved bands were formed. Another layer of powder was rubbed on and wiped off. It was done. Quinette looked down at a frieze of three-dimensional dots that could never be eradicated. There would be a second tattooing soon, and after she gave birth, a third. She wasn’t pregnant yet, but she’d chosen the pattern: a zig-zag line, representing the Nile of the heavens, would streak down her back to her hips, where a circle with four spokes would symbolize Achernar, the star at the river’s end.