Acts of Faith

UNDER SPUTTERING FLUORESCENTS and bare bulbs of middling wattage, the ward looked like a dimly lit cavern. A fine dust blew through the wire window grates and powdered the beds, the night tables, and the steel poles from which IV bags hung like transparent cocoons, plastic tubes trailing from their undersides into the veins of the famished, the fevered, the wounded. With his eyes shut, Fitzhugh would have known he was in a bush hospital by the smell—the indefinable odor of sickness crowded in with the musk of unwashed bodies lying on unwashed linen in unwashed clothes. Manfred said, apologetically, that circumstances had forced him to compromise his standards of hygiene. He wished he could keep the infernal dust out with proper windows, but one might as well try to import ice cream as panes of glass into the Nuba; they could never survive the journey over the rough roads. He would prefer a tin roof to the one he had. Snakes and spiders nested in the thatch, and what trouble it was, keeping them out. Yes, corrugated tin—he could use that. Franco, his logistics man, could tell Fitzhugh how many square meters were needed. And the bed linen! Of course it should be laundered and changed daily; of course that was impossible. In the Nuban dry season, there was nothing so rare as water, and Khartoum’s recent military activities had made it rarer still. Arab raiders had destroyed a lot of wells. Poisoning a well was forbidden by the Koran, but the holy book was silent about plastic explosive, so that was what the murahaleen used. A charming distinction. There was only one well for the hospital, and it didn’t produce near what was needed. The rest was delivered by lorry in fifty-liter drums during the dry season when the track to Abu Gubeiha was passable; but this year, the deliveries had become sporadic.

Manfred paused to study the chart of a middle-aged patient, fabulously tall, his feet thrust between the bedstead’s metal posts. “This is the game. This hospital has for Khartoum a propaganda value. Somebody like Amnesty International reports that the government denies aid to the Nuba, the government points to us and says, ‘Wrong, and there is the proof, a fine one-hundred-twenty-bed hospital run by the most efficient Germans.’ But we are also a little problem. The government wants the Nubans to go to its so-called peace camps for medical attention. Once they are in, very hard to get out.”

“And you’re a problem because you give them someplace else to go,” Fitzhugh said.

“Precisely. We are here a little sanctuary. So Khartoum needs us on the one hand, but we on the other hand make it more difficult for them to subdue the Nubans. Therefore it makes things a little more difficult for us. Our water supplies?” Manfred turned an imaginary tap. “Enough to survive, nothing more, and I dare not protest. Water. Before everything else, water. Do you suppose it’s good for the soul to devote so much of one’s energy to obtaining something so basic as that? Do you suppose it teaches the value of simple things?”

Fitzhugh didn’t want to get into metaphysics and asked how much water was needed. Check with Franco, the doctor replied. Franco could tell him, down to the barrel. Franco was very precise—a northern Italian, you know.

Manfred leaned over the bed and conversed with his patient, who turned his head aside, exposing a round pink scar on his neck. The doctor examined it and said:

“Goiter. I removed it yesterday. A lack of iodized salt in the diet. The Nubans used to trade with Arab merchants for salt, but that is so much more difficult now. There is your priority number two. Salt.”

He moved on to the next bed, occupied by a strapping youth with the chest and arms of a Greek statue, wearing a gold earring in the style of Nuban males; it hung from the top of his left ear rather than from the lobe. A long horizontal scar, crisscrossed by recent stitches, ran around his side, just under his ribs, and he lay in a stupor induced by an IV drip of Demerol. A woman who could have been anywhere between forty and sixty sat at his bedside, on a dirty floor mat. She raised weary, bloodshot eyes toward Manfred, he muttered a few words to her, and she responded in a voice as tired as her eyes.

“A beautiful specimen of Nuban manhood, not so?” Manfred said after checking the young man’s chart. “A kadouma in his village, a wrestler. He and his mother came here last week. He had a bad pain in his side. They thought he’d been injured in a match. I suspected amoebic liver abscess, but when I cut him open to drain the abscess, I discovered a tumor. With the X-ray, I could have found it beforehand and spared him the surgery. The tumor is inoperable. Now we wait for him to die. He’s nineteen years old.”

They went from the surgical ward to the medical ward, the two divided by a plywood partition, then into pediatrics in the next building. Fitzhugh, making occasional notes, felt he was being guided through an exhibition of half the injuries, infirmities, and pathologies to which human flesh is prone. Dysentery and gastroenteritis declared themselves by the stench; dry coughs announced tuberculosis; febrile brows and shivering bodies testified to malaria; skeletal limbs whispered starvation; blood and pus oozing through gauze dressings rumored bullet and shrapnel wounds; amputated limbs screamed gangrene. He was able to look on the adult cases with detachment; he had seen their like before, his heart had grown the necessary carapace, thinner than the impenetrable callus that made some people incapable of feeling a thing yet thick enough to allow him to gaze on the worst sights without crippling his sanity; but in the children’s ward he realized that his prolonged leave from relief work, bringing sweet reminders of what normal life was like, had opened cracks in his emotional armor. An infant with a belly bloated by severe malnutrition being fed intravenously because the terror of a bombing had dried up his mother’s breasts; a young woman clutching a month-old daughter born, said Manfred, ten minutes after her twin had emerged dead from the mortar fragment that had pierced the woman’s stomach: those were sights Fitzhugh couldn’t bear.

He fled outside, with a pressure in his chest like the onset of a coronary. What a war this was that offered no sanctuary anywhere. A soldier in any one of its armies and militias was probably safer than a child in the womb. Jesus, aborted on the threshold of life by a hot steel sliver propelled by the random physics of a shell burst. He wished he knew where that particular projectile had been assembled, and the identities of the workers who’d packed the explosive and installed the fuse and detonator; he would like to show them what the products of their labor did. Not that imparting such information would make any difference. Those workers wouldn’t walk off the job in moral disgust. They had mouths to feed. It seemed that in the struggle between mercy and cruelty, cruelty would always have the upper hand. What weapons were there in the arsenals of mercy to equal the simple effectiveness of explosive, fuse, detonator, much less the complex electronics that guided a missile or fired a gunship’s rockets? Did mercy’s armies possess a bomb capable of restoring a village incinerated by napalm? Could they ever be anything but outnumbered and outgunned by the armies with howitzers and tanks?

“Too much for you?”

Manfred came down the path, the bright coin of his stethoscope’s gauge bouncing against his stomach.

Fitzhugh lit a cigarette, held out the pack to the doctor.

He took one and bowed to the proffered lighter. “I try to look at it as the mother does. She told us that her ancestors’ spirits had decreed that the one should be sacrificed so she and the other could live. Some truth in that, you know. Had its body not absorbed the fragment, the mother’s kidney would have been pierced and all three would have died.”

“And it helps you to look at it that way?”

“Provided I don’t think about certain things.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as what the Nuba was like the first time I came here, twenty-two years ago. I have worked also in Rwanda and the Balkans, and when I returned here, I never expected to see the things I saw in those places. But I think you have perhaps heard enough from me? You would wish a word with Franco?”

“I could use a nap first.”

“Yes! Of course! There is a spare bedroom in my house. You are welcome to it. I’ll have someone wake you . . . When?”

“A couple of hours.” He glanced at his watch. “Two o’clock, since you like precision.”

Franco was a lean man with a saturnine face perfectly suited to his surly disposition; he was, however, as exacting as advertised, and within an hour of waking from his nap, Fitzhugh had filled several pages of his notebook with a wish list of needed items and their quantities. All through the conversation, a jangling melody of squawks, bleeps, and what sounded like birdcalls came from the cottage next door to Franco’s. Ulrika, the nurse, a broad-boned woman on the frontier of middle age, was addicted to computer games and played them whenever she had a spare moment. Franco said it drove him half nuts. “Basta! Basta!” he’d shouted through the window, adding suggestions that Ulrika take up reading or meditation, anything that didn’t cause so much noise.

“Go to hell, you sorrowful pus!” she called back in a thickly accented English.

“Sourpuss, that’s the correct phrase, cretina!”

There was in this exchange a note of lovers who’d had a falling out. The racket went on.

Around five he, Franco, and the nurse convened for drinks on Manfred’s mustaba, a raised platform of sun-baked mud behind his house, overlooking the lemon grove and vegetable garden: a pleasing view, Fitzhugh thought, sitting in a canvas chair with a cold beer from the refrigerator where the plasma was stored. He sensed that the cocktail hour was a daily affair at the hospital, one of those rituals whites followed faithfully in the bush as a prophylaxis against going crazy. Ulrika was delighted with his presence: someone new to talk to, a visitor from the outer world. He found her interest flattering. She peppered him with questions about himself and Douglas, asked how things were these days in Loki and Nairobi, and about Barrett and Diana, and would he please tell them when he got back to please send her some decent shampoo. “This dust! This goddamned dust!” she said, tugging at her long, pinned-up hair. She shot a questioning glance at Manfred, who nodded.

“Herr Doktor does not wish luxury things to take up space in the airplanes that could be used for the medical things,” she explained. “But the shampoo is okay. So you will please ask John to send?”

He took out his notebook and jotted a reminder, pleased to perform this little service for her.

“Speaking of John, there is one thing about his plans I don’t understand,” Manfred said. A table had been set for dinner on the mustaba, and he sat at its head, the pater of this small, isolate familia. “This notion he has to rebuild the mission. What is the sense of that? As you have now seen, we have more urgent needs than churches.”

They were joined for dinner by the rest of the staff—the X-ray technician, the lab technician, and Ulrika’s assistant, a light-skinned woman from an Arab part of the Nuba—and finally by Michael. Good diplomacy demanded that he be included; Manfred did not want to offend the rebels any more than he did the government; the proprieties of neutrality had to be observed, however, and the messenger who’d gone to the village with the invitation informed Michael to come without his uniform, pistol, or bodyguard.

He complied, arriving accompanied by only one of his troops, who was armed with nothing more deadly than a musical instrument—some kind of homemade lyre. Michael’s shaved head was bare of its usual red beret, and he’d exchanged his camouflage for a borrowed jelibiya, as white as an egret’s wing and pinched at the waist by a cord, accentuating the spread of his chest and shoulders. At thirty-five, he was still as hard-muscled as the wrestler he’d been in his youth. Ulrika and her aide locked on to him the instant he appeared, magnetized by his stature, the almost perfect oval of his face, with its deep-set eyes, its vaguely smiling lips and small ears, a gold earring in one. This whole photogenic ensemble rested on a neck that appeared to have been hewn from an athlete’s thigh, its dark musculature set off by a strand of white beads.

“I think it’s customary in the West to bring a gift when you’re asked to dinner,” he said, tilting his head at the musician. “All Nubans love to make music, but this guy is the best.”

The last phrase betrayed the time Michael had spent in the United States, taking military training at Fort Benning. He sat down at the end of the table opposite Manfred while the musician perched on the edge of the mustaba and tuned his instrument, a curious-looking thing consisting of three sticks tied into a triangle, the two longer pieces attached to a calabash with a leather membrane stretched over it to hold the strings.

“We usually play opera at dinner,” Manfred stated, pointing at a cassette player on the floor. “It was to be Verdi today, but live music is best. Thank you, colonel.”

Addressing the guerrilla commander by his rank, Fitzhugh assumed, was the doctor’s way of making up for his earlier brusqueness.

“But where is the American, Douglas?” Michael pronounced it Doug-lass. “I expected them back by now.”

“I told him not too close to the hospital, for reasons I think you can appreciate. Perhaps they took me too much at my word?”

“If they did, that guy Douglas is with, Suleiman, will see to it that it’s far enough,” Michael said. “No one can walk like him. Fifty kilometers a day he can do without a problem.”

Dinner—canned turkey, beans and tomatoes from the garden, with bitter Sudanese beer to drink in tall brown bottles—was nothing like the elegant feasts Fitzhugh had seen laid out in some aid compounds in the south. Manfred prided himself on the austerity of the fare and mocked his counterparts in Médicins sans Frontières. He and his staff ate doura for breakfast, doura and maybe some beans or groundnuts for lunch, like the Nubans, but those froggies, ha, they could not do without their croissants, their fine Bordeaux, their cheeses. Not serious people.

Mouth inches from the plate, his fork darting like a hungry hawk’s beak, Michael ate with single-minded haste, as you would expect from a guerrilla fighter who spent most of his time on the move. Ulrika looked at him, politely aghast, her first impression of the striking lieutenant colonel undergoing some revision. Finished before everyone else was halfway through, he leaned back and closed his eyes and softy joined the musician in a chantlike song that floated with the lyre’s notes above the multilingual hum of hospital shop talk. Listening to the melody, Fitzhugh noticed again a quality he’d observed in Michael yesterday, a quality defined as much by the absence as by the presence of something. He lacked the harshness and arrogance seen in many SPLA officers: those swaggering Dinka and Nuer warlords, reared to lives of violence, taught from childhood that they are the lords of all men, trained to the courage that puts fear of death to flight and also breeds the ferocity to inflict death, if not with eagerness then without reluctance. Michael had to be as brave—he’d been wounded three times—and it had been obvious on the march from the airstrip that he had a gift for command; yet his martial virtues seemed grafted onto an essentially peaceable nature. There was a softness in his expression and voice and manner entirely out of phase with the personal history he’d disclosed to Douglas and Fitzhugh when they were hiding from the bomber, waiting for dark.

He’d begun his military career as an enlisted man in the Sudanese army, won a commission as a lieutenant, been sent to America for further training, and shortly after his return, deserted to join the rebels when his commanding officer told him he would have to convert to Islam and adopt a Muslim name if he expected to rise in rank. He’d been fighting ever since. If all that combat had brutalized him, as it had brutalized just about everyone else in Sudan (“Even your mother, give her a bullet! Even your father, give him a bullet!” Fitzhugh had once heard SPLA recruits chanting. “Your rifle is your mother! Your rifle is your father! Your rifle is your wife!”), he hid it well. He gave the clear impression that the mellow, muted ballad he was singing now was much more in keeping with who he was.

“I believe you can ease your mind, colonel,” Manfred said abruptly, and squinting under a visor made with his hand, he pointed toward the savannah that lay between a mountain range to the west and the hill occupied by the hospital compound.

Michael and Fitzhugh stood and looked, the low sun almost directly in their eyes, and made out five figures, moving single file across the plain. In the liquid light of Africa’s magic hour, they seemed to be walking on the bottom of a translucent copper sea.

“I think someone’s been hurt,” Fitzhugh said; as the figures drew closer, he’d seen that two, lagging well behind the others, were carrying what appeared to be a litter.

“But who? I sent three men to guard the American and Suleiman, and I count five men out there.”

“Yes, five,” Manfred confirmed. “But we’d better see if something’s wrong.”

Instructing Ulrika to prepare a bed in case one was needed, he set off with Fitzhugh and Michael, following a footpath around the garden and down the hill. The sun dipped below the western range and a wind sprang up and the grass on the hillside danced in the wind, as if rejoicing in its release from the heat that had baked it dry as paper. When they were about halfway down, they met Suleiman and two of the guards, both shirtless. Michael fell into an incomprehensible conversation with them, Suleiman gesturing at the third guard and Douglas, laboring up the hill with the litter.

Fitzhugh called out and started toward them with Manfred. Douglas and the soldier set the litter down. It had been made with a pair of crooked poles, between which the guards’ shirts had been stretched, tied down by the sleeves. On it lay what at first looked like a heap of rags but on closer inspection revealed itself to be the emaciated body of an old man.

“Hey, Fitz”—he gave a tired wave—“glad to see you. We could use a hand the rest of the way.”

“And damned glad to see you. But what is this?”

He looked at the body, lying motionless on its back, more bone than flesh, and the black flesh shriveled and the hair on its head sparse, grizzled, and white.

“Found him about three miles back, in a riverbed,” said Douglas, his face raw from sunburn, his shirt drenched clear through.

“But why carry him all that way? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That’s what we thought when we found him.”

Manfred kneeled beside the litter on one knee and looked for a pulse. As he did this, the man’s eyes half opened, his lips parted, and he made a dry sound, half gasp, half whisper. Fitzhugh felt a small chill; it really was like seeing a corpse come to life.

“Three miles that way, in a riverbed, you say?” the doctor asked. “You saw a village near there?”

Douglas shook his head.

“Well, there is one. Not very big. Perhaps you didn’t notice it. He must have come from there.” The grass all around had grown pale in the twilight and the distant mountains turned gray, and in the gloom and steady breeze, the man’s hair moved as a cobweb moves when a door swings open in a room. “I suspect he’d been in that riverbed for a day or two.”

“Wouldn’t know. I spotted him under a tree. First glance, I didn’t think it was a human being, and then, maybe a few seconds later, it hit me, and I said to Suleiman, ‘That was a body back there,’ and he said that, yeah, he knew and that he was dead. I wasn’t so sure, so I went to check. He opened his eyes and made a sound, like the one he just made now. Tried to get him to drink from my water bottle, but he spit it up. I told them we had to get him to the hospital before it got dark.”

“But of course your companions told you to leave him where he was.”

Douglas glanced at his fellow litter-bearer, who seemed to be listening with great concentration, as if he could understand what was being said through sheer effort. A few pale stars had come out, signaling the end of the brief equatorial dusk.

“How did you know that?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

There was no way Douglas was going to abandon a starving old man in the bush. He took a guard’s panga and cut some poles, then tied his own shirt between them. It wasn’t long enough to accommodate the man’s body, so he turned to the soldiers and asked them to contribute their shirts. The demonstration of his resolve appeared to shame them, and they stripped. The litter was assembled, the man laid on it, but he didn’t seem to realize that he was being rescued; he marshaled some hidden reserve of strength, rolled himself off, and tried to crawl away. He hadn’t gone a yard when he collapsed. Unconscious, he was placed back on the litter.

“Quite remarkable of you, convincing those men to bring him such a long way when they knew it was pointless.”

“How do you mean, pointless?”

“You did a fine thing, your good deed for the day. But tell me, you found your airstrip?”

“Yeah. And it’s not too close. What was pointless? ”

“Really, it was remarkable. A testament to your powers of moral persuasion. I commend you.”

“I’m not looking for any commendations. Anyone would have done the same thing.”

“I commend your modesty as well. I, for example, would not have done the same thing.” Manfred rested his palm lightly on Douglas’s shoulder. “Your companions were right. There is nothing to be done for him. He isn’t dying of starvation or thirst or a sickness. He is dying of living too long.”

The American scowled in confusion.

“When Nubans get to be very old, they often choose to go off somewhere to die.”

“And they’re just left?”

“Their relatives usually know where they’ve gone. They keep a watch, and when the person dies, then come the proprieties. I imagine this fellow’s people will be looking for him in the morning, and they’ll wonder what became of him. They’ll be worried that he was dragged off by a leopard or some other wild beast. They will be very anxious to find his body so the proprieties can be observed and his spirit not become meddlesome.”

Douglas rubbed his forehead with a thumb, seeming to massage his brain into puzzling out how his actions could produce effects he’d never intended.

“So what the hell do we do now? Bring him back to where we found him?”

“Impractical, now that it’s dark. Also, you’ve brought him here, he is still alive, and I have my own proprieties to observe. I am required to do what I can, which I think will be to make him as comfortable as possible for the night. If he dies, he dies. If not, then not. Either way, we’ll send word to the village where he is.”

“And that’s all?”

“Douglas! Listen to me, please. Can’t you see why he tried to crawl away from you? Come on. You must be famished. I will see to it that he is brought up to a bed.”

“I’ll give a hand,” Fitzhugh said.

As he bent down to pick up the litter, the man looked up at him, and he fancied that he saw a plea—no, a demand—in those yellowed eyes in their cavernous sockets. A part of him, the part that was heir to his African ancestors’ wisdom, felt obliged to obey that silent imperative; but the rest of Fitzhugh Martin did not belong to his ancestors’ world; it dwelled in Douglas’s and Manfred’s and Ulrika’s world, which had imperatives and obligations of its own.