Acts of Faith

Maroor

“DO YOU SUPPOSE war to be here what wars are elsewhere?” Stopping in midstride, Gerhard Manfred flung one thick arm at a Nuban hospital aide sterilizing surgical instruments over a campfire. “Do you suppose that it is an event, with a discrete beginning that will proceed to a discrete middle und so weiter on to a discrete end? No! It is a condition of life, like drought. There is war in Sudan because there is war.”

“Like Vietnam?” Douglas murmured. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

Manfred’s gaze passed from the American’s face to his boots, then back up again.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.” His English bore only a whiff of Teutonic accent; otherwise he sounded like a Cambridge don. He was a man of fifty or so, judging from the white invading his blond hair, and powerfully built in a way that wasn’t threatening; his square, compact body looked more adapted to withstanding punishment than to dishing it out. “What has Vietnam to do with this?” He jerked his cleft chin at the aide, whose surgical smock rode up his long legs as he bent over, stoking the fire to make thin flames lap the soot-streaked sides of the sterilizer. “Did you Americans experience this in Vietnam? The coils shorted out one month ago, and of course I have not a technician to fix it, nor has a replacement been sent, so now this is how I sterilize my instruments. And why? Because there is war. Why is there war? Because there is. Ha! Make note of that, my friend—” He addressed Fitzhugh, who had his pocket notebook out. “Write that down, please.”

Fitzhugh stood silently for a moment, feeling light-headed. Yesterday, with Michael Goraende, Suleiman, the porters, and a rebel escort of twenty men, he and Douglas had walked for hours from Zulu One over a rough, rocky track and under a punishing sun until the drone of an enemy Antonov forced them to hide in a dense acacia grove. There, with the pack animals tethered to the trees, they waited until dark before setting off again, the path illuminated by a gibbous moon. They made a cold camp under a giant baobab at midnight and, without so much as a cup of tea, resumed their march at four this morning, tramped on through a ruby dawn, and came to a hilltop village, from which they could see the hospital on a lower hill a kilometer away: two long, mud-walled bungalows joined by a breezeway, umbrellas of solar panels gleaming incongruously on its thatch roofs. Crossing the narrow valley between the two hills, they arrived at Manfred’s compound just as the heat was making itself felt and the doctor was beginning his day of treating people for fever, goiter, snakebite, broken bones.

Straight away the man seemed intent on making himself as unpleasant as possible. He inspected the medical supplies without a word of gratitude to anyone for delivering them, shook hands with Douglas and Fitzhugh as if they were inconsequential tourists, and then, instructing them to remain, told Michael to vacate the premises with his men. The hospital was neutral ground, and Manfred intended to keep it that way. Suleiman and the porters, being unarmed, could stay, but not the guerrillas; if it became known that he’d welcomed rebel soldiers to his compound—and the bush telegraph would be sure to carry the news to the government garrisons scattered throughout the mountains—the army would have a perfect excuse to bomb or shell the place. Fitzhugh wasn’t entirely confident that an army that felt no restraints about bombing schools and missions needed an excuse to blow up a hospital. Twenty men with automatic rifles would be no defense against a high-flying plane; all the same, their presence was reassuring, and he hoped the guerrilla commander would tell the doctor to kindly leave matters of security to him. Michael was an imposing man, six and a half feet tall, but he was as deferential toward Manfred as a schoolboy toward a teacher and made only a mild protest, explaining that Douglas and Fitzhugh were under his protection. Manfred insisted; they would be safe with him. Michael gave in and led his men back to the village.

“You want me to write down what?” Fitzhugh asked.

“That we need a new sterilizer, what do you think? Also diesel fuel for our auxiliary generator, for use when the solar power is lost. Also . . . everything else. Yes! Everything is needed now in the Nuba, which makes your task of assessing our needs an easy one. This place should be called the Needa. Ha! Need a what? Need a whatever you can think of. Come along, I will show you.”

It seemed Manfred needed a tranquilizer. Well, Barrett had warned that he was a bit daft, so maybe his rudeness wasn’t intentional, but a symptom of that peculiar form of daftness summed up in the word bushed. The simmering anger, the lack of simple civility—Fitzhugh had seen it all before, in aid workers isolated too long, working sixteen hours a day because more than a few hours’ rest seemed an unjustifiable indulgence in the face of colossal suffering. That, and Barrett’s caution to be diplomatic, inclined him to humor the doctor’s idiosyncrasies.

He led them around the back of the hospital to a neat stone bungalow, picturesquely situated in ficus shade, overlooked by a soaring butte. A former British rest house, Manfred said, which he’d restored as a residence for himself. There was a lemon grove behind it, and a vegetable garden tilled by a young Nuban with a makeshift hoe. The doctor called to him in some local dialect, and the young man trotted toward them, a harlequin figure in patched denim shorts and a red and white T-shirt stamped with a faded legend PROPERTY OF OHIO STATE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT. Manfred seized the hoe by its thick handle and, as if to test Fitzhugh’s forbearance, thrust the blade at him with such violence that he had to step back to avoid being hit in the face.

“Do you know what this is?”

“I believe it’s a hoe.”

“No! This! What is this?”

Manfred brushed the dirt off the blade, revealing a couple of yellow cyrillic letters painted on the olive drab metal. Fitzhugh squinted at the writing and shrugged.

“It’s shrapnel from a Russian bomb,” Douglas said.

“Precisely! More precisely, a Russian cluster bomb, one of the four that fell on the mission six months ago.”

“That would be St. Andrew’s?” asked Fitzhugh.

“Twenty-seven people killed, sixteen of them children. Thirty-one injured. I know the precise number because I was summoned there to stitch the wounded back together. I did not entirely succeed.” He handed the implement back to the gardener, who returned to his labors. “So after the funerals, after the proprieties were observed—the Nubans set great store by the proprieties of death, they believe in the immortality of the soul, yes, they fear that if they neglect their obligations to the dead, the dead will neglect their obligations to the living and perhaps bring calamities, although one wonders what calamities could be worse than cluster bombs.”

Frowning, Manfred went suddenly silent. He appeared to have lost his original train of thought.

“You were saying, after the funerals?” Douglas reminded him.

“The funerals, yes. After the funerals, local farmers returned to the mission and collected the bomb fragments and from them made hoes. So that shows you how little we have here. The war has taken almost everything away, but sometimes it gives a little back. Swords into plowshares, bombs into hoes. Write that down in your little book. We need hoes so we don’t have to wait for another bombing to get new ones. Ah! This is all so silly.”

“Silly?” Douglas made a show of wriggling a finger in his ear, as if he hadn’t heard right. “What’s silly?”

“What is not?”

Turning sharply on his heel, Manfred stomped off. His two visitors didn’t realize they were supposed to follow until he looked over his shoulder and gave them a jerky wave. He brought them to a tukul identical to those in the village. Manfred flipped a light switch, and they beheld a spotless X-ray machine that rested on the dirt floor.

“A Siemens, my young friends. It was flown to Khartoum from Germany more than a year ago, then on to Abu Gubeiha and delivered from there by lorry. A fine instrument, not so?” He stroked the padded table and the smooth steel arm of the camera as if they were living things. “My X-ray technician is an Arab fellow, quite competent, trained in the U.K. Only one thing is missing. Can you guess what it is?”

Another riddle. Fitzhugh yearned for a smoke and a long nap.

“Film!” the doctor shouted into their silence and then laughed. “I have no film! I have not had any for six months! I have made several requests by radio for film to be sent, I have been assured it has been sent, but it never gets here. I have no idea what happens to it, though I have my suspicions. The Sudan military confiscates it for their own use. What do I do when someone comes to me with a broken bone? I poke, I prod, I guess. When someone comes to me with a persistent pain here or here or here”—he touched his liver, his stomach, his back—“and I suspect cancer? I cut them open and have a look. Exploratory surgery, performed with instruments sterilized over an open fire. I return to medicine as it was practiced a hundred and fifty years ago. Ha! Longer ago! I could be a surgeon in the Roman army. Silly, silly, nicht wahr?”

“Criminal is what it is,” Douglas said.

“Criminal? Are you a prosecutor? And whom will you prosecute?” Manfred faced the machine while words tumbled from his mouth like rocks in an avalanche, and his pale blue irises shot back and forth as if they were looking for a way to fly out of his head. “Absurd. Yes, that is the better word than silly. This entire century has made friends with the absurd, and none are better friends with it than the Sudanese. A war whose beginning no one can remember, whose end no one can see, whose purpose no one knows. Yes, they are best of friends with the absurd.”

Thinking, Count on a German to go abstract on you, Fitzhugh wrote “X-ray film, sterilizer, hoes, diesel” in his notebook.

Probably the man hadn’t had anyone’s ear for weeks. There were two other Europeans at the hospital, a German nurse and an Italian logistician, but Fitzhugh would bet that they’d listened to their boss’s rants once too often and had made his silence on certain issues a condition of their continued service.

Manfred turned off the light with a swat—there was a savagery in almost all his movements—and ushered his visitors outside.

“And this mission you two are on is absurd also. I hope you realize that.”

The remark struck them like a backhanded slap.

“If that’s what we thought, we wouldn’t be on it, would we?” Douglas said.

“I shall enlighten you, then. Even if you find places to land big planes and even if those planes are not shot down, how do you propose to get what you deliver to the people who need it? There are hardly any roads to speak of, and the only vehicle I know of is my Land Rover, which I need if I am called away and which can’t carry very much in any case. So tens of porters will be needed. What a tempting target a column of porters will make to some Sudanese pilot. He will not be able to resist. The first time such a procession is strafed, you will find it difficult to recruit others for the job.”

“Let us worry about that problem.” Douglas’s expression had gone blank, and Fitzhugh now knew him well enough to recognize that studied blandness as a sign of anger.

“I fully intend to,” Manfred stated. “I have too many problems of my own.”

Half of them probably self-inflicted, Fitzhugh thought, following him into the U-shaped courtyard formed by the breezeway and the two long buildings. Infants in their laps, several women were sitting against a wall, some wearing the sorts of dresses collected by church groups in the West, while two were nearly naked, rows of bright beads girding their waists. Their bellies were ornamented with ritual tattoos, the raised scars on dark brown flesh resembling rivets in leather. The women sat with the listless postures and lifeless expressions Fitzhugh had seen everywhere in southern Sudan, the faraway stares and slumped shoulders and bent heads forming their own kind of ritual tattoos, marking all, regardless of native tribe, as members of the single tribe the aid agencies called “affected populations.” Manfred, squatting down, read the notations written on the strip of surgical tape plastered to each mother’s forehead. He spoke to each gently, patted the infants’ heads, even sang a few bars of what must have been a Nuban lullaby. It somehow pleased Fitzhugh to see that his personality had another, more attractive dimension.

“The little ones are going to be vaccinated, and they’re afraid, the mothers,” he explained, rising. “It is the unknown. They have been told their babies should be vaccinated, but of course they have no idea what is involved, so I explain it to them in a way they can understand.”

He spoke to them again, and the women stood and filed inside, the half-nude females displaying on their backs and buttocks, brown as burnt cork, round as bubbles, the same intricate patterns as were stitched into their stomachs.

“They’re from a part of the Nuba where the old customs haven’t died out,” the doctor said, noticing Fitzhugh’s stare. “They believe that certain tattoos prevent disease, and that is not pure superstition. It is done like so. First, a small cut with a knife, then the flesh is lifted with a thorn. Germs enter the cuts, and the system develops antibodies, creating immunities. Not that the Nubans know anything about antibodies and immunities, they only know what works. So that is how I explained vaccinating to these women. Their babies will be pricked by a special thorn filled with healing spirits that will make their babies strong against sickness. Those two walked here from their village, by the way. Four days.”

An infant’s cry came from inside.

“There, the first one. They think of us, the Nubans, as powerful kujurs—their word for witch doctors. I told the women that the healing spirits in the thorn were brought by you two from the sky.”

“You didn’t really,” Douglas said.

“Of course I did. As a favor to you. It will help you make a favorable impression on these people.”

“That’s incredibly condescending.” Douglas had found a way to retaliate for the doctor’s earlier remark. “These people aren’t children.”

“Certainly not. But what do you know about them? You’ve been in the Nuba all of what? Twenty-four hours?”

“Long enough to know that they aren’t children who need to be told that we brought spirits out of the sky. I’d think they know what an airplane is.”

“Most certainly! They have been bombed by airplanes, but you, my young friend, don’t know anything to make such a cheeky comment as you just now made to me.”

Douglas started to reply; Fitzhugh nudged him to keep quiet.

“Condescending indeed,” Manfred carried on, arms crossed over his chest. With another movement of his divided chin, he pointed at the breezeway’s screen, through which they saw one of the tattooed women, in all her six-foot beauty, standing in front of the nurse’s table while a Sudanese aide daubed her infant’s arm with cotton. “Look there. You have had a taste of what it’s like to walk in these mountains. Now imagine please walking in your bare feet, carrying a child for four days. I try to imagine some fat cow in my country—eine grosse Kuh, it sounds more like what it is in the German, nicht wahr? I try to imagine the grosse Kuh walking barefoot from Bonn to Berlin to have her child vaccinated, and I cannot imagine it. Condescending? I have for these women nothing but admiration, but I overlook your comment. I think you are perhaps too tired from your journey to remember your manners.”

Fitzhugh winced, fully expecting Douglas to say that Manfred was no one to lecture about manners. Instead, he switched on his charm, as quickly and effortlessly as someone turning an ignition key. The broad, guileless smile, the touch, the sincere gray eyes framing the doctor like a portrait lens, so that he, like everyone else upon whom Douglas bestowed that unique look, felt that he was the only one in the picture.

“You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say, and I’m damned sorry I said it.” This in his slow, calm drawl, the smile turning ever so slightly abashed as he let go of Manfred’s forearm and extended his hand. “I’ll feel like hell all day if you don’t accept my apology.”

“Not necessary. I said I overlook what you said.”

“If you don’t mind. I won’t feel right otherwise.”

“Very well.”

Douglas cupped his left hand over their clasped rights, as if sealing a solemn agreement.

“And you’re right about another thing.” His gaze held the other man as firmly as his grip. “I don’t know anything, except two things—how to fly planes, and that you’re gonna get your X-ray film and your fuel and your new sterilizer. The farmers will get their hoes. And anything else you need or they need. I’m gonna see to it. Don’t mean I’ll try. I mean I will see to it, count on it.”

An effective little touch, Fitzhugh thought, that folksy, cowboy gonna instead of going to.

“So this is American confidence?”

“Doesn’t have a nationality. This mission will work.”

“Ah, that.” His hand now free, Manfred slapped the air. “That was a stupid thing to say also. So you will please accept my apology.”

“No problem. Okay, Suleiman and I—” gesturing at Suleiman and the porters, resting in the shade of silver-barked trees—“are going to start scouting today for a place we can turn into an airstrip, closer to here than Zulu One, so it won’t take a day to get the stuff here.”

“Not too close. An airfield would be a tempting target also.” Manfred looked off into the middle distance. “It will be a risk for me, to be supplied without Khartoum’s sanction.”

Douglas clutched the doctor’s shoulders, and he didn’t object to the familiarity; he was under the Braithwaite spell.

“You already took that risk.”

“This one time, yes, but flights coming in here, once, twice a week, every week—”

“If you want the stuff, I don’t see that you’ve got much choice,” Douglas said, tucking into the statement a tone of regret, as though he wished Manfred had more options. “Got a favor to ask. Okay if I send one of the porters over to the village to ask Michael for a couple of his men to come back here? That wouldn’t be breaking your rule too much, would it? Suleiman and I are going to need some security.”

“I suppose that would be—”

“Hey, thanks. We’ll be out of here in no time. While we’re gone, it would be good if you sat down with Fitz, drew up a detailed shopping list. What you need, how much, what’s priority.”

Manfred nodded and said Fitzhugh could join him on his morning rounds; they could make the list then.

“Okay, I’ll get rolling.” Douglas strode off to speak to Suleiman, who woke one of the sleeping porters. In a moment the man was on his feet, loping toward the village.

Looking at the American, the doctor pronounced him “an interesting fellow,” a statement Fitzhugh interpreted as a tribute to the masterful way the younger man had subdued him and taken control without trying to do either.