Acts of Faith

The Baker’s Daughter

SHE WORE A constant coat of dust and sweat. She could not wash her clothes or hair or bathe properly, for as the dry season reached its scorching zenith, even the calabash shower became a rare indulgence. Her body threw off an acidic odor leavened by the smell of woodsmoke, which was how everyone smelled in New Tourom except for Ulrika, Fancher, and Handy, who had water, soap, and shampoo delivered on aid flights. Quinette could have borrowed these commodities from them but chose to live as the Nubans did, cleaning her teeth with twigs cut for that purpose and relieving herself in a pit toilet enclosed by a grass fence, where flies congregated and a smooth stone or a stick substituted for toilet paper. The only item of modern hygiene she could not do without was tampons. Ulrika kept her supplied. Her closet was her rucksack and straw carry-bag, stowed under the bed. The usual spiders dropped onto the mosquito net at night. She whisked them off in the morning and swatted them with her sandals. The monotony of her diet—doura porridge and groundnut paste—was occasionally relieved by a goat stew or scrawny chicken roasted over a wood fire. She was bitten by ticks and suffered bouts of diarrhea.

She had never been happier.

She had love and passion and important work to do, and they more than recompensed for the lack of material comforts.

All was fulfillment.

Her life had reached the culmination of a transformative journey begun when she’d first set foot in Africa. Its course had not been charted by her; nor had its destination been manifest, though she knew now in mind and marrow alike that she had arrived.

In the morning she helped Moses teach English. She’d become his full-time assistant and savored her rapport with the pupils, delighted in their progress in spelling and punctuation.

Afternoons, she was the student, taking instruction in missionary work from Fancher and Handy. There were lessons in everything from first aid—a fieldworker was expected to be competent in treating minor injuries and illnesses—to the arts of discipleship. They put her through intensive Bible study, but much of her training was practical, on the job. She preached to the women in New Tourom about the heroines of the Bible. On a few occasions she joined the two men on hazardous trips to neighboring towns, where they showed their videos and played their taped gospel messages while she ministered to the females, to be critiqued afterward by her tutors. Of the two, she liked Fancher more. He had a steadying, calming influence on the mercurial Handy, who could be full of enthusiasm one day, and the next, meeting with some frustration, be moved to despair. But they were equally courageous and dedicated, and she didn’t doubt they were prepared to suffer death for their God, their church, and their mission.

Or rather their missions, for in addition to their main tasks, restoring St. Andrew’s and supporting the Nuba’s Christian congregations, they were there to proselytize and were not shy about admitting it. “We’re the real thing, not skim-milk evangelicals,” Fancher said. Converting pagans was easier than converting Muslims, which required tact and delicacy, a kind of passive approach. You exposed them to the message of salvation and more or less waited to see what happened next. This Fancher and Handy did by inviting people of all faiths to their meetings, by showing the films and playing the recordings in public, by training local pastors to speak Christ’s word to their Muslim neighbors.

Yet there were times when the message had to be delivered more forcefully.

Once, in a village a day’s walk from New Tourom, someone asked Handy what the difference was between Jesus and Muhammad. The stocky missionary’s face lit up, the cords in his neck stood out.

“Jesus was the son of God, Muhammad the son of man and woman, that is the difference. Jesus proved he was the son of God. Jesus healed the sick. Muhammad did not. Jesus made the lame walk. Muhammad made walking men lame. Jesus made a blind man see. Muhammad made seeing men blind. Jesus made a dead man live. Muhammad made living men dead. Jesus multiplied a basket of loaves and fishes to feed five thousand. Muhammad divided the spoils after raiding a caravan. Jesus could walk on water. Muhammad could only ride a camel. Jesus set the captives free. Muhammad made free men captives. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Muhammad teaches to kill and enslave your enemies, as many of his followers are doing today. You can visit Muhammad’s grave in Medina, but if you go to visit Jesus’s grave in Jerusalem, you will find only an empty tomb, because Jesus rose from the dead to join his father in heaven.”

His words seemed to hang in the air, to crackle and spark. Quinette could almost feel them, as if she’d been touched by an exposed wire. Later she asked Handy to write them out, so she could memorize them, in case the same question was put to her. She did not, indeed could not, wait for it to be asked. The next time she preached, she decided to forgo her usual subjects—Sarah and Rachel, Haggai and Elizabeth and Mary Magdalen—and delivered a sermon about the distinction between Jesus and Muhammad. A young Muslim woman approached her afterward, declaring that she wished to become a Christian. Quinette brought her to Fancher, who quizzed her to make sure her desire was genuine. He baptized her the next morning, with water from a plastic jerry can. Quinette witnessed the ceremony. She had reaped her first soul, and from this reaped a feast of purest rapture, to which her mentors added a rich dessert of praise.

All was fulfillment. She had submerged herself in a sacred and a secular cause, but she did not suffer from divided attention because both were one cause to her.

When she wasn’t teaching or preaching, she advised and encouraged her husband, serving as his unofficial adjutant to counter the influence of Major Kasli, who continued to issue dire warnings about the consequences of the forthcoming offensive. Observing that Michael’s orders and reports were written either by hand or with antiquated typewriters, she arranged for laptops, printers, and solar panels to be shipped in on Knight Air planes and spent hours showing the clerks how to use the new machines. She drafted press releases about the Nubans’ plight and gave them to relief pilots for delivery to Lokichokio and eventual transmission to the foreign press corps in Nairobi. One of her communiqués, describing Ulrika’s difficulties providing medical care from her inadequate clinic, brought a Reuters correspondent and photographer to New Tourom. A month later a plane landed at the airstrip, crammed with medical supplies and construction materials. One passenger disembarked, a broad-shouldered, thick-chested man with flaxen hair. It was like seeing an apparition. Recovered from his breakdown, Gerhard Manfred had an emotional reunion with Ulrika, Quinette, and Michael (and a moment of surprise when he learned of the marriage). He had read the Reuters story in Die Welt and persuaded German Emergency Doctors to send him back and to fund the building and equipping of a new hospital. It had been his dream ever since his return to Germany. Quinette’s imagination caught fire. With a five-hundred-word press release, she had brought a doctor and a hospital to New Tourom. She had the power to make things happen.

As the time for launching the offensive approached, a crisis occurred. A much-needed arms shipment failed to arrive as scheduled. Michael, in radio communication with Douglas in Lokichokio, learned that Dare had not been paid by the SPLA and refused to fly until he was. His petty selfishness disgusted Quinette and infuriated Michael. He had timed the offensive for the end of the dry season, calculating that the government would not be able to organize a retaliation before the big rains made the roads impassable and the skies too cloudy for effective bombing; but if he was delayed too long, the downpours would hinder his own forces, possibly prevent them from attacking altogether. Somehow or other the problem got resolved, Dare’s battered Hawker landed with the ordnance, and preparations resumed.

The recruits who were going to defend the town dug foxholes, trenches, and bomb shelters. Ammunition and final orders were issued to the veterans, who were everywhere, cleaning and recleaning their rifles, laughing the graveyard laughter of men who knew what they were facing because they had faced it before. Michael made frequent visits to the radio room to converse in code with his subordinate commanders and with Garang’s headquarters far to the south. A tense expectancy charged the air. Quinette herself felt electrified, as if the friction between her hope and dread, her anticipation and anxiety, were generating a current within her.

On the day before the army’s departure, as she was walking to the garrison from New Tourom, she spotted an Antonov at high altitude. It was the cool, dusty hour when the boys drove cattle into the byres for the night and the slanting light caused the contours of the hills to stand out in sharp relief. As always, the appearance of an enemy aircraft brought activity to a halt. The cows plodded on, bells jangling, but the herd boys froze to listen for the whirr and whistle of falling bombs. Watching the silver dot and the contrails in its wake, Quinette experienced a surge of heightened sensation. The colors of the sunset seemed more vivid, the still figures of the herd boys had the beauty of sculpture, the tops of the baobab trees looked lit from within. The plane, probably on a reconnaissance, flew on. Quinette quickened her steps, her spine and scalp tingling, her nerves thrumming like the strings of a Nuban harp, and desire overtook her. Michael must have felt that same erotic magnetism, for he was waiting for her inside their tukul, naked in the bed. They made love like wildcats, Quinette intoxicated by the sheer physicality of it, the strong smells, the quick slaps of damp flesh on damp flesh, and in her orgasm, her religious fervor fused with her sexual passion so the one could not be distinguished from the other. This too was her mission—to make a baby.

She had never known such anxiousness as she did during Michael’s absence. He expected the campaign to last a month. A month! She was in the radio room at least once a day, asking for news, but the reports coming back from the front were murky. Victory, defeat, stalemate—there was no way to tell. She didn’t know what she would do, what would become of her if he were killed.

She was thankful she had so much to keep her occupied, though she was often distracted and unable to concentrate. Physical labor was the only thing that took her mind off her worries. As most of the hard daily chores were performed by her three helpmates, Pearl, Kiki, and Nolli, Quinette started a vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes, beans, okra, and nuts in a little plot outside the courtyard. Negev, her constant shadow, offered to help prepare the ground, but she preferred to wield hoe and mattock herself. She found solace in making the rows straight, in building a thornbush boma around the garden to keep animals out, in the smell of the turned earth, the feel of it in her hands.

Since New Tourom was bombed three years ago, the enemy’s hand had barely touched the town. Some would say that hand had been stayed by Michael’s superb defenses, but Quinette believed New Tourom was under a guardianship more powerful than machine guns and shoulder-fired missiles. Whatever accounted for the town’s exemption, life proceeded as if peace had come. It was threshing time, and women carried baskets heaped with shucked doura to the threshing grounds, where elders and boys, powdered with ash to invoke the spirits’ protection, beat the ears with their heavy paddles. Baskets once again on their heads, the women carried the winnowed grain to the storage silos. Off-duty recruits were pressed into service as construction crews. They began to erect the frame for Manfred’s new hospital, to repair the church roof and, hauling water from a deep pit dug in a dry riverbed, to make mud for the walls of the tailor and carpentry shops. Fancher, who had been in an engineer battalion in Vietnam, acted as foreman, supervising the workmen with a mixture of sign language, English, rudimentary Arabic, and what Nuban he knew. Watching the progress day by day, Quinette recalled her husband’s vision of New Tourom as the tree that would spread the seeds of a new society through all the Nuba, all Sudan. Now, it was coming to pass; the tree had taken root, and she had a hand in it.

An aid plane landed with a dozen sewing machines among its cargo. They were of a kind Quinette’s great-grandmother would have used—black Singers operated by a treadle. Fancher said a Friends of the Frontline board member had discovered the antiques in a movie company prop shop. They ended their journey from Hollywood to the heart of Sudan in the still-to-be-completed tailor shop. A woman familiar with the ancient machines was found, and while workmen clambered overhead, thatching the roof, she taught her sisters how to use them. Quinette had an inspiration: The women could make Nuban dresses for sale to tourists in Kenya. Knight Air planes could deliver them on their return runs. With the cash realized from the sales, grain and other foodstuffs could be bought in hard times. When she presented the scheme to them, the women responded with enthusiasm. She was giving them a chance to earn money; among the things it would buy for them was some measure of independence. In return, they gave her more of their love.

Except for Yamila. Quinette’s charms had no effect on that young woman, sheathed in an armor of passive hostility that Quinette could not penetrate. She’d stopped attending English lessons because Quinette taught them, would not come to women’s Bible study because Quinette presided, and when Quinette entered the tailor shop one day with bolts of cloth, Yamila walked out with her usual haughty bearing. The savage princess.

“I don’t understand it,” Quinette complained to Ulrika that afternoon. “What did I ever do to her?”

The nurse gave her a skeptical squint. “You are not a stupid-head, so do not tell me that you do not know.”

“I really don’t.”

“You married Michael, that is what you did to her.”

Quinette paused, taken aback not by the fact of Yamila’s jealousy but by her own blindness to it. How could she have failed to see it?

“And it is more serious because of what you are,” Ulrika added. “Ja. In the mind of a Yamila, there is no understanding why he would take you over her. To her, this is insult, but she blames you.”

Jealousy begot jealousy. From then on Quinette regarded Yamila with fear and suspicion. She wasn’t afraid that her rival—she had to think of her as such—would steal Michael from her but that he would take her as a second wife, if her attraction were ever made known to him. Polygamy was common in the Nuba, but Quinette was willing to go only so far in her efforts to merge herself into the Nubans’ world. She was going to keep him all to herself.

He’d been gone eighteen days when a delegation of five Muslim elders visited her, Fancher, and Handy at the latter’s camp near the church. She and the missionaries were discussing an encounter Handy had had with three women earlier in the afternoon. He made videos for the ministry and had been shooting scenes of town life when he’d heard female voices nearby singing the hymn “Give Thanks to the Risen Lord.” Native women giving impromptu praise to their savior. Thinking this would make for a moment of inspirational footage, he found the trio in the courtyard of a house. They were drunk on marissa, naked to the waist, and had not much on below. Dancing as they sang, “Alleluia, Alleluia, give thanks to the risen lord,” they broke into inebriated giggles when they saw him, then faced his camera and with lewd sways of their hips, gave out another chorus of alleluias. He scolded them, but the admonishment only provoked more laughter. The incident plunged him into one of his fits of despair. These Nubans were incorrigible—they drank to excess, he’d seen children guzzling marissa.

Quinette had the impression that the Nubans weren’t people to him, they were souls. When they displayed their human weaknesses, he was disgusted.

“Ulrika told me they drink it because they have a vitamin deficiency,” she said to console Handy. “The millet in the beer makes up for it.”

“It also makes them plastered,” he said, unimpressed by the medical justification for what he considered a moral failure. “The Muslims around here need their vitamins, but you don’t see them getting smashed. What kind of example are the Christians setting?”

As if cued, the delegation appeared—five men in jelibiyas led by the seven-foot Suleiman. Normally jovial, he looked grave. After an exchange of greetings and ritualistic pleasantries, he and the others sat on the ground. He stated the purpose of the call: “We must ask you to stop teaching your religion to our people.”

“By ‘your people,’ you mean Muslims?” Fancher asked quietly.

Scowling, Suleiman replied, Of course that’s who he meant. Fancher earnestly asserted that they weren’t teaching Christianity to Muslims. The ministry’s gatherings were open to everyone, and if some Muslims happened to attend, they couldn’t stop them.

“You do this in the open,” Suleiman shot back. “You play stories from your Book on tape recorders so anyone can hear. You show cinema about your religion so anyone can see. These are things that should be done in one of your churches, where no Muslim would go.”

One of the others, a man of about sixty wearing a wool cap despite the temperature, raised a finger, long and tapering to a point, like a black thorn. “You are poisoning the hearts of our brothers, our children, our wives,” he said in quite good English. “That isn’t proper. It must stop.”

Handy nearly popped out of his camp chair. “Poison?”

“Yes, poison!” the old man replied. “You do worse than teach your religion. You insult ours.”

“You tell us that we’re poisoning people’s hearts and then accuse us of insulting you?”

Fancher cautioned his excitable colleague to keep calm.

Not finished yet, the elder pointed at Quinette. Because of her, his youngest wife had been turned from the true faith, declaring herself to be a Christian because of words Quinette had spoken to her, blasphemous words that Jesus was not a prophet as was written but the son of God, that Jesus did many miracles while Muhammad, blessed be he, did none, that Muhammad put out the eyes of seeing men, that Muhammad was a murderer and a robber. His wife was young and ignorant and easily influenced. He’d been forced to beat her severely, and he hated to do that because he was fond of her.

Now Quinette had to restrain herself from leaving her chair. Why were Muslims so violent? she wondered. Her convert could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, and the picture of her submitting to this old man’s caresses was as repulsive as the picture of her submitting to his blows. “Then why did you do it, if you’re so fond of her?” she asked in as even a tone as she could manage.

“To bring her to her senses, and because she repeated the blasphemies you spoke to her. No man who calls himself Muslim can tolerate a wife speaking like that. It is an outrage.”

“The outrage is that you beat that poor girl.”

“Do not make things worse with lies. We have had reports from other places about the things you people are saying.”

Suleiman leaped back in, advising Quinette that as the commander’s wife she had a responsibility to promote harmony, not division. Muslim, Christian, or otherwise, the Nubans had a common enemy.

“My brothers and I, we are Sufi. We are not like those in the government. Theirs is the Islam of the sword, ours”—he pressed his chest—“the Islam of the heart.”

“Oh, I see,” Quinette said, a burning sensation in her cheeks—the same heat she’d felt years ago and half a world away, when she’d hurled a rock at an auctioneer. “Is it the Islam of the heart to beat a young girl for repeating something she heard?”

“So you admit teaching blasphemy!” the elder said, sounding like a prosecutor in a courtroom melodrama.

“This has gone on long enough.” Fancher mopped his thinning black hair and looked at Suleiman. “If we’ve offended you, we apologize. I promise you, we won’t offend you any further.”

“You will stop the teaching?”

“What? Altogether? Absolutely not. What we will do is hold our meetings in private. That way your people”—he said this with a note of sarcasm—“won’t see or hear anything you don’t think they should see or hear.”

“There are Nuban priests of your church who are also teaching Muslims,” Suleiman said, advancing a new objection. “That must also stop. Let Muslims be Muslims, Christians be Christians.”

“I can’t control what those men do or say. I’ll ask them to be careful. But I have to warn you, if Muslims ask them questions, they will have to answer. And if we’re asked, we have to answer, too.”

The old man yanked off his wool cap and waved it at the missionary. “That is the same as teaching!”

“We’ll watch our words. We won’t say anything insulting. I can’t promise more than that.”

It was plain that the delegation wasn’t satisfied. It was equally plain that they weren’t going to win any further concessions. Their displeasure remained after their departure, a thickness in the air, almost palpable. Handy was not too pleased either, protesting that Fancher had caved in.

“Got to give a little to gain a little,” the older man responded, in the moderate voice of a father to a hotheaded son. “We’re not going to accomplish everything we’ve got to do with half the population pissed off at us.”

“I don’t think those guys represent half the population,” Handy remonstrated. “And that old dude is bent out of shape just because his wife did something without asking the boss’s permission.”

“We keep doing what we have been, but we do it more discreetly, all right?” Fancher said. “Quinette, I suppose you have an opinion?”

She didn’t give one immediately, looking off at the tailor shop, its mud walls tinged pink by the sunset. The image she could not erase from her mind was of the girl cringing as her aged husband slapped her or punched her or hit her with a stick. Her suffering was a consequence Quinette had not foreseen. She did not hold herself responsible but felt, rather, the same desire for retribution elicited by the slaves’ tales of their captivity. Handy was right—the old man was outraged because the chattel he called wife had made a choice of her own free will. She’d chosen a religion; had it been something else, he would have beaten her for that instead. Unless people like him changed, Michael’s vision was never going to be realized; and if effecting change caused friction, even to the point of pissing off half the population, then by all means, she thought, let us piss them off.

“I’ll be honest, Tim,” she said finally. “I agree with Rob. I think your whole-milk evangelism just got skimmed.”

 

SHE PAID HER daily calls on the radio room and learned nothing; she listened to the BBC’s Africa service on Ulrika’s shortwave and learned little more. There were reports from South Africa and West Africa, from the Congo and Angola, but no word about Sudan—until, twenty-four days after Michael’s departure, the reader announced that “in Sudan, the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, in a sweeping offensive in the Nuba mountains and southern Kordafan province, have seized several government-held towns, sabotaged the country’s thousand-mile-long oil pipeline, and bombarded an airfield and oil facility belonging to the Amulet Energy Corporation. . . . A company aircraft is believed to have been shot down in the fighting, with eight people reported killed. . . . Sudan’s information minister confirmed that the attacks took place but stated that all were repulsed with heavy losses to rebel forces.”

“So they have won,” Ulrika commented. “Whenever the government says the SPLA is defeated, it means they have won.”

Quinette didn’t know what to think. She still had no answer to the questions uppermost in her mind.

She went to bed in a state of emotional suspension and woke in the same condition, wondering if she had the inner strength to be a soldier’s wife. Her grandmothers had waited years for their husbands to come home from Europe, Ardele had endured a year without her Ted, as well as the news that he’d been wounded. Quinette sought to draw from that reservoir of perseverance but felt disconnected from it in her foreign surroundings, thrown back on her own resources, which seemed inadequate.

With little to keep her occupied—it was a Saturday, no school to teach, no Bible study to attend—she spent an hour watering and weeding her vegetable garden. Then she heard the bray of a douberre, the antelope-horn trumpet. Moments later, out of breath from running, Negev appeared. “Missy, the commander and the soldiers are come.” Going into the house, she stripped off her shirt and shorts, changed into a dress, and wiped her sweating face with a soiled bandanna.

Outside, hundreds of people were surging down the road, chanting, singing, blowing whistles and horns. Quinette, hiking her dress, dashed out ahead of the wild procession and, at the gap in the hills, saw the road before her filled with soldiers, trudging toward the garrison. The column stretched back to New Tourom and beyond. Michael was in front. She would have recognized him a mile away—the bright red beret, the slow, deliberate walk, head bowed, as if he were lost in reflection. “Thank you, Lord!” she said out loud. “Thank you thank you thank you.” The throng of civilians caught up to her and swept her on.

The impromptu festival that greeted the army’s return was pure mayhem, an explosion of joy and relief. Women ripped off their clothes and painted their bodies with mud, while men decorated themselves with bits of fur and straw hats and feathers. People danced around the soldiers in human chains resembling conga lines.

Quinette had to contain her own happiness. Thin and drawn, Michael was in the mood that always overcame him after a battle—reticent, secluded within himself. She had learned not to try to bring him out of this somber humor and walked quietly with him through the excited crowds into the courtyard of their house. There he gave her and Pearl each an embrace, asked his daughter to bring some wash water, and sponged off the dust that powdered him head to foot. He collapsed on the bed and slept till the next morning.

Symbolic funerals were held that day for the men who did not make it back, symbolic because it had been impossible for the soldiers to carry their dead comrades over such long distances. Somehow the solemn ceremonies and wails of grief helped to draw Michael out of his isolation. Later, as they sat in the courtyard, he looked at Quinette as if he had just woken up and began to talk about the battles. “Oh, we were like those words you read to me from Isaiah, I forget them.”

“ ‘In that time a present will be brought to the Lord of Hosts, from a people tall and smooth of skin,’ ” she reminded him.

“Yes, like that, and we brought the present, dead Arabs, hundreds of them. We hit them hard, beat them on every front,” he said, but in such a mournful way, you would have thought he had suffered defeat. In time, he got around to revealing what had put him in a clouded frame of mind: men directly under his command had shot down the oil company plane with the foreign workers on board.

She said she’d heard about it on the shortwave. Of course, it was sad, but—

“But this is war and war is cruelty,” he said. “Khartoum is making big propaganda and Garang’s headquarters has issued a statement—the SPLA regrets what happened, the plane was mistaken for an enemy plane, and so forth and so on and et cetera.” He slouched in his chair, big hands hanging between his knees. “I must tell you something. Something that must remain between us.”

She caught his drift and murmured, “But it was no mistake?”

“I knew it was a civilian plane with foreigners on board.”

“How could you possibly have known that?”

“It was a little before sunset, before we began the attack. Enough light to see by. The plane was on the runway. I saw its identification through my field glasses. It was very clear—’Amulet Energy.’ I watched the crew go on board and then the passengers, and I could see they were civilians. I could see they were not Sudanese. Not a dark face among them. I remembered an incident from a long time ago, when the oil fields were being developed by an American company. There was a battle. Workers were caught in the crossfire, three were killed. The company decided Sudan was too dangerous and pulled out. No oil flowed for years, not until Amulet Energy bought the leases and built the pipeline.” He drew out of his slouch and leaned toward her, cupping her chin. “When the airplane began to move, I knew what had to be done, and that was to inflict terror. We were not going to dam the river of oil by making some holes in the pipeline, by smashing up an airfield—those can be repaired—but perhaps we could do it with terror. Terror, my darling Quinette. “ He continued to hold her chin, forcing her to look squarely at him. It was as if he were telling her, I won’t allow you to turn away. Behold what I am, behold the man you are married to. “It had worked once, by an accident; perhaps it would work again, by a deliberate act. I ordered the mortars to fire, but the plane was in the air by the time the first salvo hit the runway. I called to the antiaircraft, ‘Fire! Fire!’ The plane was almost directly over our heads, climbing fast. A missile got it. It fell like a stone. Like a burning stone.”

He let her go, but she sat facing him as if his fingers were still there, gripping her jaw.

“In all my years as a fighter, I have never knowingly taken an innocent life. I have prided myself on that. Now, I am no better than a terrorist, and if what I did doesn’t have the effect I intended, it will have been pointless murder. It is murder all the same.” Slouching again, he stretched his legs over the ground, cleft and crazed from lack of rain. “Garang and the high command do not know what I’ve told you. It would make no difference to them if they did—Garang and his Dinkas have spilled a thousand liters of innocent blood—but I thought the denial that it was a purposeful act would sound more convincing if they did not know. My soldiers did not know either. They had no field glasses to show them it was a civilian aircraft. They did only what I have trained them to do—obey orders. You and I are the only ones who own the truth. I have made my wife a party to what I did, and perhaps that is wrong, too, but you see, it is a secret I cannot live with alone. I am not strong enough. I had to confess it to someone, and who else but you? And now I ask you to forgive me.”

“For what you did or for involving me?” she asked.

“For both.”

“Only God can forgive what you did, and He will if you ask Him.”

“I have, more than once. But now I’m asking you.”

She rose and stepped over the fissured ground between them to lay her palm on his arm. He sealed her hand with his.

 

THIN CIRRUS CLOUDS began to sheet the skies in the afternoons, while the air grew dense with prophecies of rain. The dry season was drawing to a close, and the kujurs conducted ceremonies to bury its trials and to petition the ancestors for a bountiful rainfall. The season’s military triumphs were marked by a celebration more orderly and choreographed than the spontaneous demonstration that had met the army’s return a week ago. Instead of being presented with medals, the bravest warriors were honored in the same way as victorious contestants in the wrestling festivals, with the girls’ love dance, the Nyertun.

Quinette was expected to take part. In the afternoon she lay naked outside her hut while Pearl, Kiki, and Nolli covered her with a homemade wax, then peeled it off, removing her body hair—it was considered unsightly among all of Sudan’s blacks. She was relieved that Fancher and Handy had declined an invitation to attend. If they hadn’t, she would have been forced to be an observer rather than a participant; it took no imagination to picture what their reaction, Handy’s in particular, would be to seeing her dance with virtually nothing on and her midriff marked by cicatrix. But she considered herself Nuban in all but the color of her skin and saw no conflict between her duties as a minister of Christ and her obligation to follow the customs of the people who had adopted her as she had adopted them. Malachy would have understood. It was the way of Africa.

And so she came to the Nyertun in the traditional costume—a skimpy barega below her waist and a bead bodice to cover her top—and danced under the moon. She had become quite proficient and gloried in her art. At the climactic moment, when the woman claimed her man by kicking a leg over his shoulder, she heard some onlookers gasp. She had been so transported, so lost in the sound and movement, that she hadn’t noticed Yamila, who now stood beside her, glaring defiantly, a leg resting on Michael’s opposite shoulder.

As Quinette discovered in a moment, custom ruled that when two women chose the same man, the decision rested with him. When Michael nodded to Quinette, Yamila hissed and would have scratched her if several girls hadn’t restrained her. Yamila broke free and ran off. Quinette couldn’t say who was more mortified, she or her rival.

So Yamila had at last declared her feelings. The dance went on without her into the early morning. When it was over and Quinette and Michael retired to their hut, she did not make love to him, she f*cked him. F*cked him on the bed and then on the floor mat with a wanton ferocity, as she imagined that wild girl would have done had his nod gone to her. She used her body like a weapon to pummel whatever polygamous, adulterous thoughts Yamila might have put into his head. F*cked him until even that vigorous man had nothing left to give, and as they lay on the mat in mutual exhaustion, she asked, “If she had gotten to you first, would you have gone with her?”

He laughed. “No. I want only you, and I am very happy you were first.”

“She’s a beautiful woman, I have to say that for her.”

“If that is your way of begging a compliment, I’ll give you one. You’re beautiful, too. Haven’t I told you so many times?” His hand moved to her belly, tracing the cicatrix. “As beautiful as any Yamila, as any Nuban woman.”

“I am going to be the mother of your son. I am going to give you back what you lost.”

“Yes, you have said so,” he said, with the melancholy of someone wishing for the unattainable. He moved his hand from her stomach, and she sensed with its withdrawal a withdrawal of himself, a sudden distancing.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, feeling a panic. “Is it her? I am not going to share you, Michael.”

“Stop, please! It isn’t her, it isn’t that. There are times I ask myself if we in this country should allow ourselves children until the war is over. It’s like giving birth when you have AIDS. The child is doomed as it’s born.”

“You can’t let yourself think that way,” she counseled.”It’s giving up hope. You have to think of what life will be like when it is over.”

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“You have to imagine it before you can have it. You have to imagine children in it.”

“Imagine it, imagine it,” he said in an undertone, lying on his back, hands clasped behind his neck. “And what would I be in a new Sudan? A minister of parliament? Then I would dress in a suit instead of camouflage and we would live in a fine house with servants instead of this tukul in the bush. Would you like that, my darling Quinette?”

She answered that the tukul was fine and so was the camouflage and that she could not picture herself with servants.

“Or I could be an officer in the new army of the new Sudan. You would see me in a fine dress uniform, like the kind I wore when I first joined the army. I was a ceremonial guard at the Presidential Palace in Khartoum, in a dark blue tunic and white gloves and a white topee. The government used to take Dinka and Nubans for that duty because we looked impressive in those uniforms.”

“I’ll bet you did,” she said.

“I must admit, I did.” In the darkness, she made out his grin. She had stopped him from slipping into morbid thoughts, brought him back to her. “And I’ll wear one like it in the new army of the new Sudan, but not with a corporal’s stripes, no, with the pips of a general. Brigadier General Michael Goraende. Or would you prefer a husband with a higher rank? Major general?”

“I like brigadier. I like the sound of it. Brigadier and Mrs. Michael Goraende.”

“We will be invited to diplomatic receptions and military balls. There I will be in my splendid blue uniform with the pips of a brigadier, and there you will be at my side in a gown, a Nuban gown, but finer than the one I bought for you. And who will know that we once lived in a tukul in the bush? Who will know that this beautiful American woman in her fine gown”—his finger played around her breasts—“once danced naked in the Nuba mountains before a thousand eyes.”

“No one,” she whispered. “It’ll be our secret. We’ll laugh about it when we’re alone, and how I said yes to you like a Nuban girl.”

“This is a fine future we are imagining for ourselves when the war is over.”

“With children, with a son,” she said, and rolled over and straddled him.

“My God, you are mad tonight. You are shameless.”

Mine, she thought, working him into arousal. Now and forever, mine.

The confidence with which she spoke those words to herself didn’t last. It was a brief remission in a fever of jealousy that flared each time she saw Yamila, and in so small a place as New Tourom, it was impossible not to see her almost every day. As the disease progressed, she began to suspect Michael of secretly desiring the girl, and the suspicions fostered images of Yamila swollen with his child, presenting him with a son, beating Quinette to the punch.

A week after the dance her period arrived on schedule. She cursed her body, then prayed, then, a cramp binding her abdomen, cursed again. A new fear arose that she would not be forced to share Michael but that he would divorce her because she was unable to conceive. One fear spawned another. She became convinced that the respect and adoration she commanded from the Nubans, though it had been won by her alone, was now sustained by her position as his wife. To lose him would be to lose them. She would be an outcast, a woman without a country, cut off from the home of her birth by her own choice, from her adopted home by circumstance. Therefore, according to the addled logic bred by her fever, her whole future depended on her giving birth.

She grew emotionally demanding, seeking reassurances that she had exclusive claim to him. “Stop this!” he said one night, after another interrogation about the state of his feelings. “She is an ignorant, illiterate peasant girl, she knows nothing about the world outside these mountains. I wouldn’t want her even if I didn’t have you. What is the matter with you?”

“There is nothing the matter with me,” she answered with some bitterness. “You’re all I’ve got, that’s what the matter is. I’ve given up everything to be with you, my country, my job, my family, my friends, everything.”

Sitting at the big ammunition crate that served as their table, its ugliness masked by a woven mat, he rubbed his temples and said patiently, “Did I force you? You gave it up of your own free will. I think you were even eager to give it up. Why are you blaming me?”

She was and she wasn’t. Her own desires for him and a different, bigger life with him were to blame; but because it was he, by the mere fact of his existence, that had moved her to act on her desires, she blamed him as well. Having surrendered all, she was sensitive to any threat to what she did possess. There was something about Yamila that Quinette sensed intuitively—she was an implacable natural force, as unconscious as a lioness seeking a mate. Her ignorance was her strength. She couldn’t see that she wasn’t suitable for Michael and, with no family or clan to care for her, too desperate herself to take Michael’s choice as his final word. She wanted him, that was all, and it was everything.

The rains arrived in mid-April, and so did Quinette’s next menstruation, an unwelcome but persistent visitor. She confessed to Fancher and Handy her longing to get pregnant and asked for their prayers, figuring that if the Creator was deaf to hers, He might listen to theirs. Later she decided to give the Creator a hand. She went to Ulrika with a request for fertility pills. It was not an item the nurse kept on hand, but she promised to do what she could to obtain them.

 

AFTER AN AUSPICIOUS start, with downpours pounding the hills nearly every afternoon, the rains failed at a critical time, after the sowing of the early-blooming doura that fed the Nubans until the main harvest in November. A dry week passed, then two, and the dread of drought and famine spread like a contagion. The kujur reprised the rituals he’d performed earlier, but the spirits did not respond favorably. (Nor, it must be said, did Allah, beseeched in New Tourom’s small mosque; nor did the God prayed to in St. Andrew’s church.) The skies grayed but yielded only a few drops.

One morning, going to the tailor shop to check on the dressmaking project, Quinette noticed that three of the women did not join in the chorus of “Good day, Kinnet,” that always greeted her entrance. Sullen and silent, they pumped the treadles and averted their eyes when she inspected their work. She felt like the resented boss of a sweatshop. On another occasion, meeting the kujur’s wife on the road, she said hello and got the cold shoulder. This from the woman who had presided over her initiation and tattooing. She was not imagining things. She learned from Pearl that a kind of whisper campaign had begun against her. It made sense in its way. The Nubans might be involved in a twentieth-century war, but their minds remained in the ages of bronze and iron. Confronting a drought that was proving resistant to the prescribed ceremonies and magic, those minds sought an explanation, and someone gave it to them: the ancestors were offended because a pale-skinned stranger had married the commander, and they had signaled their anger by drying up the well of the heavens. Quinette’s flat stomach, after months of marriage, was further proof of their disapproval.

So her fears of losing the Nubans’ affection and acceptance were not entirely irrational. The gossip was accepted by only a handful, but the kujur was among them—Quinette’s marriage got him off the hook, accounting not only for the failure of the rains but for his magic’s failure to cure it. He was an eminent and prestigious figure. With his advocacy, the notion that she was to blame could gain wider appeal. She made discreet inquiries, discovered that the rain-maker was not the source of the talk, and concluded that it could only have been started by the two people who had the most against her.

She confronted Yamila first, accosting her as she and several other women were filling calabashes at the town well. There she stood, all feline sinew, leverage in her braided muscles, but Quinette was sufficiently incensed not to feel intimidated.

“Here is something I know,” she said. “You’ve been talking against me, and it is going to stop. You are going to keep your mouth shut. Here is something else I know—you don’t understand my words, but you can see that I’m angry and you damned sure know why, don’t you? Sure you do.”

Taken by surprise, Yamila shrank back, uncertainty clouding her usual belligerent expression.

“You were put up to this, I know that, too. You’re not clever enough to have thought it up all by yourself. So I’ll give you some advice—it’s not going to do you any good.”

Quinette hadn’t the slightest idea how to enforce this ordinance; the important thing was that Yamila realize she was no one to trifle with.

Satisfied that she’d gotten her message across, she marched off to Kasli’s hut and lashed into him. How sly of him to take advantage of Yamila’s feelings and to use her to exploit the Nubans’ superstitions for his own purposes. Well, she was on to him, and he wasn’t going to get away with it.

Predictably, Kasli first professed not to have any idea what she was talking about. Then he accused her of being out of her head, and finally he all but admitted his guilt by expressing what she knew was his deepest wish: She should go back to Loki, or better still to America, where she belonged. She was a liability to Michael. She had made him the subject of much unfavorable comment throughout the SPLA; at the highest levels his judgment in marrying a foreigner was being criticized, and his fitness for further command was being questioned.

“And I’ll bet those unfavorable comments started with you,” Quinette shot back. “If anyone is going to leave here, it’s going to be you.”

After Kasli reported that remark to him, Michael took her by the shoulders—the first time he’d laid hands on her other than affectionately—and shook her. He was in command here, and Kasli was his adjutant, not hers to recklessly threaten.

“Is it his place to threaten me?” she asked. “To tell me that I ought to leave?”

“Of course not, and I gave him a good dressing-down about that. He came to his senses, and you must, must do the same.”

Her husband’s anger scared her into making an effort. She maintained her watch on Yamila and kept an ear out for further whispers, but she did try to cure the fever.

Kasli tried another ploy. Suleiman and the Muslim elders, still dissatisfied with the outcome of their discussions with Fancher and Handy, had brought their grievances to the adjutant and asked to meet with the commander. Michael was reluctant to get mixed up in religious affairs. Kasli persuaded him to see the delegation, arguing that the matter had bearing on the military situation: The SPLA needed the full support of the Nuba’s Muslims; therefore, he would be wise to address their concerns.

Wishing to hear both sides, Michael invited the missionaries to the meeting, and because she was their colleague, he insisted on Quinette’s presence as well. He didn’t need to insist. If he hadn’t, she would have.

It took place in the courtyard in the evening. Chairs were arranged in a circle, a kerosene lamp set on the ground in the middle. Suleiman presented the Muslims’ complaint. Yes, the foreigners had moderated their proselytizing, but in other places Nuban pastors whom they had trained and supplied with films and tape recordings had not. From this town had come a report of eight Muslims converted, from that town, five, from another, ten. In Suleiman’s home village, Kologi, four people had been led astray, and one of his sons had been among them.

Fancher objected to “led astray.” “On the contrary, we believe they’ve been led home.”

“Believe what you like,” Suleiman retorted. “We believe differently. Do you find us Muslims pushing the Koran into Christian hands? Do you find us playing recordings of the suras that everyone can hear? Do we have cinema about the life of Muhammad?”

Handy sighed. “Has it ever occurred to you that our pastors aren’t shoving anything at anyone? All they’re doing is showing people the truth, and once people see and hear the truth, they embrace it.”

“The truth?” said the elder with the young wife, indignantly. “The Koran is God’s final word on earth. How dare you say it isn’t the truth.”

Michael looked bemused by the theological dispute. Gesturing for silence, he turned to Suleiman. “What is it you would like done?”

“Stop these recordings and cinema. These things should not be done in public. It is an offense to us. We have families now arguing religion with each other. It wasn’t like this before these men came here.”

“He’s right,” Kasli interjected in a sibilant voice. “We lived side by side, with no interfering.” He looked at the old man. “You should tell Commander Goraende of what happened with your wife when his wife spoke to her.”

Quinette was shocked by the adjutant’s nerve. Whatever purpose the others had in mind, for him this gathering was nothing more than another chance to undermine her.

“Major, you are out of line,” Michael rebuked softly. “You will leave Quinette out of this.”

Kasli begged his pardon and pointed out that it was he who had asked her to attend.

And so the old man told his tale, and Quinette gave her side, mortified that she had to justify herself to her own husband.

Michael then quizzed Fancher—was there anything he could do? The request that the videos and recordings be played inside churches was not unreasonable. No, it wasn’t, the missionary answered. The problem was, most of the villages did not have churches or meeting halls, services were conducted in the open air of necessity.

“Then I see only one solution,” Kasli said, each word rasping like a dry leaf in a wind. “The commander should issue a directive ordering these things to be confiscated.”

Suleiman and the elders nodded in agreement. Fancher protested: his ministry had spent a great deal of time, money, and effort developing the tapes and videos. Without them, he and Handy might as well pack up and leave.

“Perhaps you should,” Kasli said.

Michael sat quietly after everyone left, his gaze fixed on the lantern and its halo of bugs. “I am in charge of military affairs,” he said, more to himself than to Quinette. “I do not see what I am supposed to do about this. What can I do?”

“Nothing, and Kasli knows it,” she said. “Confiscate the stuff? Even if you ordered that, how could you carry it out? Send your men to every town and village? He put you on the spot, darling, involving you in this. No matter what you do, it will cause trouble, and I think that’s what he wants. I don’t understand why you put up with him.”

“Because I need to have a Muslim as my second in command.” He paused. “He told me in private that he thinks your two friends were sent here to cause discord. That that is their true mission.”

Quinette groaned. “They’re CIA, like me? Oh God, Michael, he’s crazy.”

“Only when it comes to foreigners.”

“And if he ever did get rid of Tim and Rob and me, and me,” she said, “he’d go after Ulrika and Dr. Manfred next. Then sick people could go to the witch doctor and get cured with chants and rattles.”

“All the same, I am, how did you say it? On the spot?”

She watched his face, somber and thoughtful in the flicker of the lamp. “You’re not really considering doing what Kasli said?”

“I need to resolve this question.”

“Please don’t do what he said.”

“It’s important to you?”

Quinette picked up her chair and set it down across from him, her knees touching his. In her mind, Kasli was still present and she was locked with him in a struggle for leverage over her husband’s will, not merely on the moment’s issue but on all others to come. She deployed Fancher’s metaphor—the Nuba was an island in a sea of Islam. Michael needed Fancher and Handy to inspire and give hope to the Nuba’s Christians. He needed them, she argued, to finish rebuilding St. Andrew’s. It wasn’t just a matter of bricks and mortar. Had he forgotten the words he’d spoken when they met for the first time? Had he forgotten his vision of a Nuba where people spoke the same language and tribal differences were forgotten? If any of that were to come to pass, things had to change. There would be no place in a new Sudan for a sixty-year-old man with the power and authority to beat his teenage bride for deciding how she wanted to worship. Change—that’s what Suleiman and those others feared. Michael mustn’t allow their fears to stand in the way . . .

He listened to her ardent oration with his head tilted against the back of his chair, a pose that suggested patient indulgence. “Are you proposing something?” he asked. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m proposing that you do nothing.”

“Nothing? That is not what I expect to hear from an American.”

“Sometimes doing nothing is doing something, and this is one of those times,” she advised. “Let Fancher and Handy, let us, continue to do our work. If that bothers your adjutant or Suleiman or anyone else, you can tell them that life is going to be different. That you haven’t been fighting this war just so everything can stay the same.”

“But you know, that is what so many Nubans are fighting for, and not only Muslims. To be left alone and to live exactly as their ancestors lived.”

“That isn’t what you want, Michael. The war’s already changed things. You don’t need me to tell you that they can never be the same again. “

“I will think about this doing nothing,” he said.

“Please, darling. I did something for you, and you know what it is. Do this for me.”

“I am going to think about it.”

She could interpret the modulations of his voice, the meanings encrypted in its rises and falls. He wasn’t going to think about it. He’d made up his mind. She had won.

It wasn’t a victory that charged its price in advance; it delayed payment.