Thirty Girls
Thirty Girls
Susan Minot
Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities on behalf of their leader, the despicable Joseph Kony. Her life becomes a constant struggle to survive, to escape, to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has travelled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her centre after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.With mesmerising emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.
Thirty Girls
Susan Minot
Copyright (#ulink_2202da55-5600-54d8-8f6d-51adf59bbd77)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies
A portion of this work originally appeared in different form
in Granta (winter 2012)
Copyright © 2014 by Susan Minot
Design by Kate Gaughran. Cover photographs © Claudia Dewald/Getty Images
Susan Minot asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007550722
Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007568901
Version: 2015-01-30
To beloved daughters Ava Cecily Hannah
and the brave daughters of Uganda
Contents
Cover (#u9c6f913b-e389-54f4-bf0b-a7b7a2f9cfb4)
Title Page (#u2ecb438b-427d-5176-8519-a093f6eca1f0)
Copyright (#ubd3f654d-38ae-5ccb-9544-72adb2f9e0f0)
Dedication (#u76edc0b2-6b76-5953-95bf-1aa23b1417a2)
I: THEY TOOK ALL OF US (#u14a98450-0564-5a93-865f-01a9d8da28fc)
1. Thirty Girls (#u2aa1c2d9-ed05-5c9a-b5b0-b21b84c9dad0)
II: LAUNCH (#u4a5bdf30-1763-5ca7-9858-2da4ff5a23e3)
2. Landing (#u071201bd-f96f-50cf-ad03-e25e2a58b36c)
3. Esther (#uaaa8086b-6444-52e0-88e6-90ea948890d8)
4. Taking Off (#u30ab501b-bd04-53a1-80b6-948091fdb029)
III: FIRST DAYS (#litres_trial_promo)
5. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Recreational Visits (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Independence Day (#litres_trial_promo)
IV: TO THE NORTH (#litres_trial_promo)
8. On Location (#litres_trial_promo)
9. In the Bush (#litres_trial_promo)
V: IT IS POSSIBLE (#litres_trial_promo)
10. At St. Mary’s (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Was God in Sudan? (#litres_trial_promo)
VI: REFUGE (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Hospitality in Lacor (#litres_trial_promo)
13. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
14. What Comes Back to Me (#litres_trial_promo)
VII: GULU (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Love with Harry (#litres_trial_promo)
16. Stone Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII: AIR POCKET (#litres_trial_promo)
17. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Dusty Ground (#litres_trial_promo)
IX: SPIRAL (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Where I Went (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Don’t Go (#litres_trial_promo)
X: FLIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Perhaps It Is Better Not to Know Some Things (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Where I Didn’t Go (#litres_trial_promo)
23. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes and Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Susan Minot (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#ulink_f8114201-63de-5c5e-8d99-2b0dadb8710d)
1 / Thirty Girls (#ulink_ad7eb859-a495-5688-8f74-2279752b9e6e)
THE NIGHT THEY TOOK the girls Sister Giulia went to bed with only the usual amount of worry and foreboding and rubbing of her knuckles. She said her extra prayer that all would stay peaceful, twisted down the rusted dial of her kerosene lamp and tucked in the loose bit of mosquito net under the mattress.
The bed was small and she took up very little of it, being a slight person barely five feet long. Indeed, seeing her asleep one might have mistaken her for one of her twelve-year-old students and not the forty-two-year-old headmistress of a boarding school that she was. Despite her position, Sister Giulia’s room was one of the smaller rooms upstairs in the main building at St. Mary’s where the sisters were housed. Sisters Alba and Fiamma shared the largest room down the hall and Sister Rosario—who simply took up more space with her file cabinets and seed catalogues—had commandeered the room with the shallow balcony overlooking the interior walled garden. But Sister Giulia didn’t mind. She was schooled in humility and it came naturally to her.
The banging appeared first in her dream.
When she opened her eyes she knew immediately it was real and as present in the dark room as her own heart beating. It entered the open window, a rhythmic banging like dull axes hitting at stone. They are at the dorms, she thought.
Then she heard a softer knocking, at her door. She was already sitting up, her bare feet feeling for the straw flip-flops on the floor. Yes? she whispered.
Sister, said a voice, and in the darkness she saw the crack at the door widen and in it the silhouetted head of the night watchman.
George, I am coming, she said, and felt for the cotton sweater on the chair beside her table. Sister, the voice said. They are here.
She stepped into the hall and met with the other nuns whispering in a shadowy cluster. At the end of the hallway one window reflected dim light from the two floodlights around the corner at the main entrance. The women moved toward it like moths. Sister Alba already had her wimple on—she was never uncovered—and Sister Giulia wondered in the lightning way of idle thoughts if Sister Alba slept in her habit and then thought of how preposterous it was to be having that thought at this moment.
Che possiamo fare? said Sister Rosario. What to do? Sister Rosario usually had an opinion of exactly what to do, but now, in a crisis, she was deferring to her superior.
We cannot fight them, Sister Giulia said, speaking in English for George.
No, no, the nuns mumbled, agreeing, even Sister Rosario.
They must be at the dormitory, someone said.
Yes, Sister Giulia said. I think this, too. Let us pray the door holds.
They listened to the banging. Now and then a voice shouted, a man’s voice.
Sister Chiara whispered, coming from the back, The door must hold.
It was bolted from the inside with a heavy crossbar. When the sisters put the girls to bed, they waited to hear the giant plank slide into place before saying good night.
Andiamo, Sister Giulia said. We must not stay here, they would find us. Let us hide in the garden and wait. What else can we do?
Everyone shuffled mouselike down the back stairs. On the ground floor they crossed the tiled hallway past the canning rooms and closed door of the storage room and into the laundry past the tables and wooden shelves. Sister Alba was breathing heavily. Sister Rosario jangled the keys, unlocking the laundry, and they stepped outside to the cement walkway bordering the sunken garden. A clothesline hung nearby with a line of pale dresses followed by a line of pale T-shirts. Dark paths divided the garden in crosses, and in between were humped tomato plants and the darker clumps of coffee leaves and white lilies bursting like trumpets. A three-quarter moon in the western sky cast a gray light over all the foliage so it looked covered in talc.
The nuns huddled against the far wall under banana trees. The wide leaves cast moonlit shadows.
The banging, it does not stop, whispered Sister Chiara. Her hand was clamped over her mouth.
They are trying very hard, Sister Alba said.
We should have moved them, Sister Rosario said. I knew it.
The headmistress replied in a calm tone. Sister, we cannot think of this now.
They’d put up the outside fence two years ago, and last year they’d been given the soldiers. Government troops came, walking around campus with guns strapped across their chests, among the bougainvillea and girls in their blue uniforms. At night some were stationed at the end of the driveway passing through the empty field, some stood at the gate near the chapel. Then, a month ago, the army had a census-taking and the soldiers were moved twenty kilometers north. Sister Giulia had pestered the captain to send the soldiers back. There was never more than a day’s warning when the rumors of an attack would reach them, so the nuns took the girls to nearby homes for the night. They will be back, the captain said. Finally, last week, the soldiers returned. The girls slept, the sisters slept. Then came the holiday on Sunday. The captain said, They will be back at the end of the day. But they didn’t return. They stayed off in the villages, getting drunk on sorghum beer.
The Jeep had been out of fuel, so Sister Giulia took the bicycle to Atoile. From Atoile someone went all the way to Loro in Kamden to see if the soldiers were there. No sign of the army. She sent a message to Salim Salee, the captain of the north, who was in Gulu. Must we close the school? she asked. No, do not close the school, he answered by radio. When she arrived back at St. Mary’s it was eight o’clock and pitch black and still nothing was settled. Sister Alba had the uneaten dinner there waiting for the soldiers. Sister Rosario had overseen the holiday celebrations and gathered the girls at the dorm for an early lights-out.
The banging had now become muted. The garden where the nuns stayed hiding was still, but the banging and shouting reached them, traveling over the quadrangle lawn then the roof of their building and down into the enclosed garden. Across the leafy paths at the entrance doors they could see George’s shadow where he’d positioned himself, holding a club.
I don’t hear any of the girls, said Sister Fiamma.
No, I have not heard them, said Sister Giulia. They could make out each other’s faces, and Sister Giulia’s eyebrows were pointed toward one another, as they often were, in a triangle of concern.
What’s burning? Sister Guarda pointed over the roof to a braid of red sparks curling upward.
It’s coming from the chapel, I think.
They wouldn’t burn the chapel.
Sister, they murder children, these people.
They heard the tinkling of glass and the banging stopped. Instead of being a relief the sound of only shouting—of orders being given—and the occasional sputtering of fire was more ominous.
I still do not hear the girls, said Sister Chiara. She said it in a hopeful way.
They waited for something to change. It seemed they waited a long time.
The shouts had dropped to a low calling back and forth, and finally the nuns heard the voices moving closer. The voices were crossing the quadrangle toward the front gates. They were nearby. The nuns’ faces were turned toward George where he stood motionless against the whitewashed wall. Sister Giulia held the crucifix on her necklace, muttering prayers.
The noise of the rebels passed. The sound grew dim. Sister Giulia stood.
Wait, Sister Alba said. We must be sure they are gone.
I can wait no longer. Sister Giulia took small steps on the shaded pathway and reached George.
Are they gone?
It is appearing so, George said. You remain here while I see it.
No, George. She followed him onto the porch’s platform. They are my girls.
He looked at her to show he did not agree, but he would not argue with the sister. Behind her he saw the pale figures of the other nuns moving across the garden like a fog. You walk behind me, he said.
George unbolted the doors of the breezeway and opened them to the gravel driveway lit by the floodlights. They looked upon a devastation.
The ground was littered with trash—burned sticks and bits of rubber and broken glass. Scattered across the grass of the quadrangle in the shadows were blankets and clothes. George and Sister Giulia stepped down, emerging like figures from a spaceship onto a new planet. In front of the chapel, the Jeep was burning with a halo of smoke. Dark smoke was also bellowing up in long tubes out of the smashed windows of the chapel. But she and George turned toward the dormitory. They could see a black gap in the side where the barred window had been. The whole frame had been ripped out and used as a ladder. That’s how they’d gotten inside.
Bits of glass glittered on the grass. There were soda cans, plastic rope, torn plastic bags. The second dormitory farther down was still dark and still. Thank the Lord, that appeared untouched. Those were the younger ones.
The girls …, Sister Giulia said. She had her hands out in front of her as if testing the silence. She saw no movement anywhere.
We must look, George said.
They stood at the gaping hole where the yanked window frame was leaning. The concrete around the frame was hacked away in chunks. One light shone from the back of the dormitory, the other bulbs had been smashed.
From the bushes they heard a soft voice: Sister.
Sister Giulia turned and bent down. Two girls were crouched in the darkness, hugging their nightshirts.
You are here, Sister Giulia said, dizzy with gratitude. She embraced the girls, feeling their thin arms, their small backs. The smaller one—it was Penelope—stayed clutching her.
You are safe, Sister Giulia said.
No, Penelope said, pressing her head against her stomach. We are not.
The other girl, Olivia Oki, rocked back and forth, holding her arm in pain.
Sister Giulia gathered them both up and steered them out of the bushes into some light. Penelope kept a tight hold on her waist. Her face was streaked with grime and her eyes glassed over.
Sister, they took all of us, Penelope said.
They took all of you?
She nodded, crying.
Sister Giulia looked at George, and his face understood. All the girls were gone. The other sisters caught up to them.
Sister Chiara embraced Penelope, lifting her. There, there, she said. Sister Fiamma was inspecting Olivia Oki’s arm and now Olivia was crying too.
They tied us together and led us away, Penelope said. She was sobbing close to Sister Chiara’s face. They came to know afterward that Penelope had been raped as she tried to run across the grass and was caught near the swing. She was ten years old.
Sister Giulia’s lips were pursed into a tighter line than usual.
George, she said, make sure the fire is out. Sister Rosario, you find out how many girls are gone. I am going to change. There is no time to lose.
No more moving tentatively, no more discovering the damage and assessing what remained. She strode past Sister Alba, who was carrying a bucket of water toward the chapel.
Sister Giulia re-entered the nuns’ quarters and took the stairs to her room. No lights were on, but it was no longer pitch black. She removed her nightdress and put on her T-shirt, then the light-gray dress with a collar. She tied on her sneakers, thin-soled ones that had been sent from Italy.
She hurried back down the stairs and across the entryway, ignoring the sounds of calamity around her and the smell of fire and oil and smoke. She went directly to her office and removed the lace doily from the safe under the table, turned the dial right, then left, and opened the thick weighty door. She groped around for the shoebox and pulled out a rolled wad of bills. She took one of the narrow paper bags they used for coffee beans and put the cash in it then put the bag in the small backpack she removed from the hook on the door. About to leave, she noticed she’d forgotten her wimple and looked around the room, like a bird looking for an insect, alert and thoughtful. She went to her desk drawer, remembering the blue scarf there. She covered her hair with the scarf, tying it at her neck, hooking it over her ears. That would have to do.
When she came out again she met with Thomas Bosco, the math teacher. Bosco, as everyone called him, was a bachelor who lived at the school and spent Christmas with the sisters and was part of the family. He stayed in a small hut off the chapel on his own. He may not have been so young, but he was dependable and they would call upon him to help jump-start the Jeep, replace a lightbulb or deliver a goat.
Bosco, she said. It has happened.
Yes, he said. I have seen it.
Sister Rosario came bustling forward with an affronted air. They have looted the chapel, she said. As usual she was making it clear she took bad news harder than anyone else.
Bosco looked at Sister Giulia’s knapsack. You are ready?
Yes. She nodded as if this had all been discussed. Let us go get our girls.
Bosco nodded. If it must be, let us go die for our girls.
And off they set.
By the time they had left the gate, crossed the open field on the dirt driveway and were walking a path leading into the bush, the sky had started to brighten. The silhouette of the trees emerged black against the luminous screen. The birds had not yet started up, but they would any minute. Bosco led the way, reminding the sister to beware of mines. The ground was still dark and now and then they came across the glint of a crushed soda can or a candy wrapper suspended in the grass. A pale shape lay off to the side, stopping Sister Giulia’s heart for a moment. Bosco bent down and picked up a small white sweater.
We are going the right way, she said. She folded the sweater and put it in her backpack, and they continued on. They did not speak of what had happened or what would happen, thinking only of finding the girls.
They came to an area of a few straw-roofed huts and asked a woman bent in the doorway, Have they passed this way? She pointed down the path. No one had telephones yet information traveled swiftly in the bush. Still, it was dangerous for anyone to report on the rebels’ location. When rebels discovered you as an informant, they would cut off your lips. A path led them to a marshy area with dry reeds sticking up like masts sunk in the still water. They waded in and immediately the water rose to their chests. Sister Giulia thought of the smaller girls and how they could have made it. Not all the children could swim.
Birds began to sing, their chirps sounding particularly sweet and clear on this terrible morning. They walked on the trampled path after wringing out their wet clothes. Sister Giulia had been in this country now for five years and still the countryside felt new and beautiful to her. Mostly it was a tangle of low brush, tight and gray in the dry season, flushing out green and leafy during the rains. An acacia tree made a scrollwork ceiling above them and on the ground small yellow flowers swam like fish among the shadows.
They met a farmer who let them know without saying anything that they were going in the right direction, and farther along they caught up with a woman carrying bound branches on her head, who stopped and indicated with serious eyes that, yes, this was the right way. People did not dare speak and it was understood.
The sun rose, yellow and bright behind them. Sister Giulia saw the figure of a person crouching in the grass at the far side of a clearing. Suddenly the figure was running toward them. It was a girl. As she came closer, they saw it was Irene. She was wearing her skirt as a shirt to cover her upper body. Sister Giulia embraced her and asked her if she was all right. Yes, Irene said, crying quietly. She was all right now.
We are going to bring back the girls, Sister Giulia told her. Irene nodded with disbelief. Sister Giulia gave her the white sweater and walked back with her a ways till they met again the woman carrying the branches and asked if Irene could go with her back to the village. The woman took her. It struck Sister Giulia how quickly one could adjust to a new way of things. You found a child, you sent her off with a stranger to safety. But then it was simply a new version of God watching over her.
Soon the sky was white. They walked for an hour, then another. By now their clothes were dry though her sneakers stayed wet. The sun was over their heads.
Far off they heard a shot and stopped, hopeful and frightened at the same time. They waited and heard nothing more. The sound had come from up ahead and they started off again with increased energy.
Sister Giulia apologized to Bosco for not having brought water. This is not important, he said.
At one point she spotted a white rectangle on the path in front of her and picked it up. It was one of the girls’ identity cards. Akello Esther, it said. She was in the 4th Class and had recently won the essay contest for a paper about her father and the effect of his accident on their family. She showed Bosco. He nodded. They had been this way.
When they heard shots again there were more of them and closer. Shouting voices floated through the bush from far off. They’d crossed a flat area and were now going up and down shallow hills. At the top of a higher hill they had a vista across a valley to a slope on the other side.
I see them, Bosco said. She stood near him and looked and could see only brown-and-green lumps with dark shadows slashed off them. She looked farther up the slope, bare of trees, and saw small bushes moving. Then she saw the girls, a line of them very close together, some with white shirts and all with dark heads. Alongside the line were gray and green figures, larger, guarding them on either side. It was too far to see the features on the faces.
For a moment she couldn’t believe her eyes. They had found them. She asked herself, What am I to do now? At the same time she set off, but now in front of Bosco. She had no plan. She prayed that God would guide her.
They took small steps down the steep path almost immediately losing sight of the opposite slope. They moved quickly, forgetting they were tired. It was past noon and they moved in and out of a dim shade. At the bottom of the hill they could look up and see the rebels with the girls. It appeared they had stopped. It was one thing to spot them far away and another to see them closer with faces and hats and guns. Then a rebel looked down and saw her approaching and called out. She thought it was in Acholi, but she couldn’t tell. She raised both hands up in the air and behind her Bosco did the same.
Other rebels were now looking over. She knew at least she would not be mistaken for an informant or an army soldier. Then she saw the girls catch sight of her. A large man walked down from higher up and stopped to watch her coming. He had yellow braid on his green shirt, a hat with a brim, and no gun. He shouted to his soldiers to allow her to approach and Sister Giulia made her way up the hill to where he waited with large arms folded. She saw the girls out of the corner of her eye, gathered now beneath a tree, and instinct told her not to look in their direction.
You are welcome, the man said. I am Captain Mariano Lagira. He did not address himself to Bosco or look at him. Sister Giulia lowered her gaze to hide her surprise at such a greeting.
She introduced herself and Thomas Bosco. I am the headmistress of St. Mary’s of Aboke, she said.
He nodded. She looked at him now and saw badly pockmarked skin and small eyes in a round face.
I have come for my girls, she said.
Captain Lagira smiled. Where were you last night?
I was not there, she said. Yes, it was a small lie. I had to take a sick nun to Lira. She slipped her backpack off and took out the brown bag. Here, I have money.
Mariano Lagira took the paper bag and looked inside. We don’t want money. He handed the bag to a rebel, who nevertheless carried it away. Follow me, he said. I will give you your girls. A rebel stepped forward and a fisted gun indicated that Bosco was to remain with him.
She felt a great lifting in her heart. Bosco hung back under the guard of a boy who looked no older than twelve. He wore a necklace of bullets and had hard eyes. She followed Lagira and passed close to some girls and began to greet them, but they remained looking down. She noticed that one rebel dressed in camouflage had a woman’s full bosom.
Captain Lagira pointed to a log with a plastic bag on it. Sit here.
She sat.
What have you there?
My rosary, she said. I am praying.
Lagira fished into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a string of brown beads. Look, he said. I pray too. They both knelt down and the rebels around them watched as the nun and the captain prayed together.
It was long past noon now and the air was still. When they finished praying, Sister Giulia dared to ask him, Will you give me my girls?
Captain Lagira looked at her. Perhaps he was thinking.
Please, she said. Let them go.
This is a decision for Kony, he said.
Kony was their leader. They called themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army, though it was never clear to her exactly what they were resisting. Museveni’s government, she supposed, though that was based in the south, and rebel activities remained limited to looting villages and kidnapping children in the north.
The captain stood. I must send a message then, he said. He had the rebels spread out batteries in the sun to be charged and they waited. She managed for a second here and there to sneak glances at the girls and saw most of their faces tipped down but a few watching her. Would you like some tea? the captain said. She could hardly answer and at that moment they heard the sound of helicopters far off.
Suddenly everyone was moving and shouting. Hide! Cover yourselves, they yelled. Sister Giulia saw people grabbing branches and the girls looked as if they were being thrashed as they were covered. She was pulled over to duck under bushes. Some of the girls had moved closer to her now. Leaves pressed on her. Then the loud helicopters were overhead, blowing dust off the ground and whipping the small leaves and loose dirt. Gunshots came firing down. One of the girls threw herself on Sister Giulia to protect her. It was Judith, the head girl.
The Ugandan army patrolled the area. Sister Giulia thought, They’re coming for the girls! But nearly immediately the helicopter swooped off and its blades hummed into the distance. They could not have known, it was just a routine strike. No one moved right away, waiting to be sure they were gone. After a pause heads lifted from the ground, their cheeks lightened by the dust. Sister Giulia saw Esther Akello with her arms over her friend Agnes Ochiti. The girl who had covered her, Judith, was wiping blood from her neck. A rebel handed Judith a bandage. She hesitated taking it. They were hitting them and then they were giving them bandages. There was no sense anywhere.
Orders were given now to move, quickly. The girls were tied to one another with a rope and walked in single file behind Sister Giulia. At least I am with my girls, she thought. She wondered if they would kill her. She wondered it distantly, not really believing it, but thinking it would happen whether she believed it or not. And if so, it was God’s will. They walked for a couple of hours. She worried that the girls were hungry and exhausted. She saw no sign they’d been given food.
At one point she was positioned to walk along beside Mariano. She had not dared ask him many of the questions she had. But since they had prayed together she felt she could ask him one. She said, Mariano Lagira, why do you take the children?
He looked down at her, with a bland face which said this was an irritating but acceptable question. To increase our family, he said, as if this were obvious. Kony wants a big family. Then he walked ahead, away from her.
After several hours they came to a wooded place with huts and round burnt areas with pots hanging from rods. It looked as if farther along there were other children, and other rebels. She saw where the girls were led and allowed to sit down.
Captain Lagira brought Sister Giulia to a hut and sat there on a stool. There was one guard with a gun who kept himself a few feet away from Lagira. This rebel wore a shirt with the sleeves cut off and a gold chain and never looked straight at Lagira, but always faced his direction. He stood behind now. During the walk they had talked about prayer and about God and she learned that Lagira’s God has some things not in common with her God, but Sister Giulia did not point this out. She thought it best to try to continue this strange friendship. Would Sister Giulia join him for tea and biscuits? Captain Lagira wanted to know.
She would not refuse. A young woman in a wrapped skirt came out from the hut, carrying a small stump for Sister Giulia to sit on. It was possible this was one of his wives, though he did not greet her. At the edge of the doorway she saw a hand and half of a face looking out. Tea, he said.
The woman went back into the hut and after some time returned with a tray and mugs and a box of English biscuits. They drank their tea. Sister Giulia was hungry but she did not eat a biscuit.
I ask you again, she said. Will you give me my girls. She didn’t phrase it as a question.
He smiled. Do not worry, I am Mariano Lagira. He put down his mug. Now you go wash. Another girl appeared, this one a little younger, about twenty, with bare feet and small pearl earrings. She silently led Sister Giulia behind the hut to a basin of water and a plastic shower bag hanging from a tree. She must have been another wife. Sister Giulia washed her hands and face. She washed her feet and cleaned the blisters she’d gotten from her wet sneakers.
She returned to Mariano. This rebel commander was now Mariano to her, as if a friend. He still sat on his stool, holding a stick and scratching in the dirt by his feet. She glanced toward the girls and saw that some of them had moved to a separate place to the side.
Mariano didn’t look up when he spoke.
There are one hundred and thirty-nine girls, he said and traced the number in the dirt.
That many, she thought, saying nothing. More than half the school.
I give you—he wrote the number by his boot as he said, one oh nine. And I—he scratched another number—keep thirty.
Sister Giulia looked toward the girls with alarm. There was a large group on the left and a smaller group on the right. While she was washing they had been divided. She knelt down in front of Mariano.
No, she said. They are my girls. Let them go and keep me instead.
Only Kony decides these things.
Then let me speak with Kony.
No one ever saw Kony. He was hidden over the border in Sudan. Maybe the government troops couldn’t reach him there. Maybe, as some thought, President Museveni did not try so hard to find him. The north was not such a priority for Museveni, and neither was the LRA. There were government troops, yes, but the LRA was not so important.
Let the girls go and take me to Kony.
You can ask him, he said and shrugged.
Did he mean it?
You can write him a note. Captain Lagira called, and a woman with a white shirt and ragged pink belt was sent to another hut, to return eventually with a pencil and piece of paper. Sister Giulia leaned the paper on her knee and wrote:
Dear Mr. Kony,
Please be so kind as to allow Captain Mariano Lagira to release the girls of Aboke.
Yours in God,
Sister Giulia de Angelis
As she wrote each letter she felt her heart sink down. Kony would never see this note.
You go write the names of the girls there, he said.
She looked at the smaller group of girls sitting in feathery shadows.
Please, Mariano, she said softly.
You do like this or you will have none of the girls, said Captain Mariano Lagira.
She left the captain and went over to the girls sitting on the hard ground in feathery shadows. She held the pencil and paper limply in her hand. The girls looked at her, each with meaning in her eyes.
She bent down to speak, Girls, be good … but she couldn’t finish her sentence.
The girls started to cry. They understood everything. An order was shouted and suddenly some rebels standing nearby were grabbing branches and hitting at the girls. One jumped on the back of Louise. She saw them slap Janet. Then the girls became quiet.
Sister Giulia didn’t know what to do. Then it seemed as if they were all talking to her at once, in low voices, whispering. No, not all. Some were just looking at her.
Please, they were saying, Sister. Take me. Jessica said, I have been hurt. Another: My two sisters died in a car accident and my mother is sick. Charlotte said, Sister, I have asthma.
Sister, I am in my period.
Sister Giulia looked back at the captain standing with his arms crossed. He was shaking his head. She said she was supposed to write their names but she was unable. Louise, the captain of the football team, took the pencil from her, and the paper, and started to write.
Akello Esther
Ochiti Agnes …
Judith … Helen … Janet, Lily, Jessica, Charlotte … Louise … Jackline …
Did I mistreat you, Sister?
No, sir.
Did I mistreat the girls?
No, sir.
So, next time I come to the school, do not run away. The captain laughed. Would the sister like more tea and biscuits? No, thank you. They bade each other goodbye. It was as if they might have been old friends.
You may go greet them before you leave, Mariano Lagira said.
Sister Giulia once again went over to the thirty girls, her thirty girls who would not be coming with her. She gave her rosary to Judith and said, Look after them. She handed Jessica her own sweater out of the backpack.
When we go you must not look at us, she said.
No, Sister, we won’t.
Then a terrible thing happened.
Catherine whispered, Sister. It’s Agnes. She has gone, just over there.
Sister Giulia saw Agnes standing back with the larger group of girls gathered to leave.
You must get her, Sister Giulia said. She couldn’t believe she was having to do this. If they see one is missing …
So Agnes was brought back. She was holding a pair of sneakers. She was told she might be endangering the others.
Okay, Agnes said. I will not try to run away again.
Sister Giulia had to make herself turn to leave.
Helen called after, Sister, you are coming back for us?
Sister Giulia left with the large group of girls. They walked away into the new freedom of the same low trees and scruffy grasses, which now had a new appearance, and left the thirty others behind. Bosco led the way and Sister Giulia walked in the middle. Some girls walked beside her and held her hand for a while. They bowed their heads when she passed near them. Arriving at a road they turned onto it. The rebels stayed off the roads. It grew dark and they kept walking. They came to a village that was familiar to some of them and stopped at two houses to spend the night. There were more than fifty girls to each house, so many lay outside, sleeping close in one another’s arms. Sister Giulia felt she was awake all night, but then somehow her eyes were opening and it was dawn.
At 5 a.m. they fetched water and continued footing it home. As the birds started up they saw they were closer to the school and found that word had been sent ahead and in little areas passed people who clapped as they went by. Sister Giulia felt some happiness in the welcome, but inside there was distress. They came finally to their own road and at last to the school drive.
Across the field Sister Giulia caught sight of the crowd of people near the gate. The parents were all there waiting. She saw the chapel blackened behind the purple bougainvillea, but the tower above still standing.
Many girls ran out to embrace their mothers who were hurrying to them. As she got close, Sister Giulia saw the parents’ faces watching, the parents still looking for their daughters. They searched the crowd. There was Jessica’s mother with her hand holding her throat. She saw Louise’s mother, Grace, ducking side to side, studying the faces of the girls. The closer they got to the gate, the more the girls were engulfed by their families and the more separated became the adults whose children were not there. These families held each other and kept their attention away from the parents whose girls had been left behind. They would not meet their gaze. In this way those parents learned their children had not made it back. When they came near Sister Giulia in all the commotion, she turned away from them. She was answering other questions. Some mothers were kneeling in front of her, some kissed her hand. She was thinking though only of the other parents and she would talk to them eventually but just now it seemed impossible to face them. Then she wondered if she’d be able to face anyone again, ever.
II (#ulink_2ac21308-4f1a-56e8-a1be-7a20a8e0a663)
Launch (#ulink_2ac21308-4f1a-56e8-a1be-7a20a8e0a663)
You have no idea where you are.
You sit among the girls. They’re in the shade, talking. It might be birdsong for all you understand or care. You think, I will never be close to anyone again.
2 / Landing (#ulink_e4bbc2c2-acc4-5496-9d1f-6e793c289ff1)
SHE STEPPED OUT of the plane and over the accordion hinge of the walkway to continue up the tunneled ramp. One always felt altered after a flight. There was the pleasant fatigue of no sleep and one’s nerves closer to the surface as if a layer of self had peeled off and gotten lost in transit. The change was only on the surface, but the surface was where one encountered the world. Her surface was ready for the new things that would happen in this new place, ready for anything different from what she’d known.
There was a soggy tobacco smell at the gate and loose rugs with long rolls no one had bothered to smooth out. She stood in a line of crumpled people holding their carry-ons and inching forward to wooden tables where clerks slowly stamped passports after a sliding look from the picture to the face.
She was finally away. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt the expansion, the air humid, the door opening, dawn light reflected off a hammered linoleum floor as she descended an old-fashioned staircase to the black carousel empty of baggage. There was a long row of bureaux de change with one short counter after another empty and behind them a large plate-glass window with palm trees being eaten by a white sky. Lackadaisical drivers were leaning on the hoods of their cars, half glancing around for a fare. Dark-haired men strolled in short sleeve shirts, women in thin dresses moved slowly. Everything mercifully said, This is not home.
The first time she saw him he flew.
They were in Lana’s driveway, unloading alabaster lamps she’d had copied on Biashara Street when a white Toyota truck pulled up and a young man with shoulder length hair opened the door. He leapt over the roof of the truck and landed in a bowl of dust.
Lana gave him a big greeting, embracing him as an old friend, as she embraced everyone. She stepped back to study him, hands on his shoulders. He had on a dirty white hat with a zebra band around the crown. Nice, she said, flicking the brim. Jane, come meet Harry.
Jane set down her crate. Harry, Jane, said Lana. Jane, Harry.
Cheers, Harry said in a flat tone. His chin drew in and he regarded Jane with a strange stoniness, as if she were an intruder who ought to explain herself. The impulse to explain herself was an urge Jane Wood struggled to ignore, so getting a look like that unnerved her. At least that was how she explained the unnerved feeling.
My friend from America, Lana said. She looked back and forth between them. Her bright gaze took in things quickly and let them go, just as fast.
Harry leaned forward and kissed Jane’s cheek, surprising her. Karibu, he said.
The phone rang inside the cottage and Lana dove to get it, swerving past the crates crowding the foyer.
We’re going for sundowners, she called over her shoulder. You must come.
With Lana, there was always a must.
A short time later Jane found herself crammed in the back seat of a dented station wagon driven by a paint-spattered neighbor of Lana’s named Yuri. They were headed to the top of the Ngong Hills.
The suburb of Karen flickered by. Its dirt driveways and high concrete walls topped with curling barbed wire hid the airy houses Jane had seen with their long shaded verandas and scratchy lawns. Abruptly the station wagon came to a sort of empty highway, drove on it for a while, then tilted off up a steep rutted road, laboring at a tipped angle. At the top they righted themselves over a lip and arrived at a wide sloping field of tall grass which dropped sharply to a vast smoky savannah banked in the distance with low gray hills.
Striped cloths were spread on the ground and Jane noticed the sunset behind too was striped with grimy clouds. Lana unpacked a hamper and poured vodka and orange juice from a thermos and they drank from dented silver flutes while watching the sky and leaning on each other. A warm wind blew up from the valley.
Jane knew none of them save Lana and even she was a recent acquaintance, met a year before in London on a film set Lana was decorating. If Jane was ever in Kenya, she must come visit. When the possibility actually arose, Jane found Lana and discovered how many guests and strangers took Lana up on her invitation. She was a tall striking girl with a cushioned mouth and flashing eyes. She was also a splendid recliner, as she was demonstrating now, surveying the scene before her like an Oriental odalisque, radiating enjoyment. Her pillow at the moment was a large American man named Don who appeared to be relishing his position of support despite an awkward pose requiring that he brace an arm against a nearby rock. His unwrinkled khaki pants and new white running shoes extended off the blanket into the dry grass. Lana was telling him about a project she had set up where students looked after orphaned wild animals. She must take him there tomorrow, she said, patting his red and white striped shirt, as if knowing money were packed in his chest. Yuri had brought along a dimpled girl in army boots. Jane thought she heard her say she was pre-med, which was surprising. Yuri and Harry were talking about flying. They paraglided here, at a spot farther down the escarpment where the updraft was better. The French fellow wearing a bandana was a photographer named Pierre. Pierre was also staying at Lana’s, on the couch in the living room. His low-lidded eyes regarded everything with amusement. He was snapping pictures of the army-boot girl who seemed not self-conscious in the least.
The sky dimmed and the air chilled and they packed up. They took the bumpy road back to Nairobi as it darkened. Harry sat slumped in the back seat beside Jane. She learned his last name was O’Day. He asked her what she was doing here.
What indeed, she thought. Writing a story. Getting away. She could say all that.
Seeing the world, she said.
She’s taking us to Uganda, Lana shouted back over Édith Piaf’s voice warbling out of the dashboard. Her long bare legs were draped over Don’s lap and extended out the window. After drinks everyone was feeling jolly.
Jane told Harry she was there to write a story on the children kidnapped by the LRA in northern Uganda. Lana had matter-of-factly said she’d go with her and that morning Pierre asked if he might come, too. He was in between assignments—there was no famine or war to cover at the moment—and he wanted to try shooting some video, not what he usually did. He mostly shot stills.
It’s not really my subject, she said. At all.
What’s your subject?
Desire.
It sounded totally pretentious, but what the hell.
And death.
Death should fit, he said mildly.
Death always fits. She smiled.
They both faced forward. In the front seat Lana was whispering in Don’s ear. Jane saw her tongue come out and lick it.
Things are hectic in Uganda, Harry said.
Have you been?
Not yet.
We haven’t exactly figured out how we’re getting there.
I am working on it, Lana said. I might have a possible driver.
Good, Jane said and a for a moment felt a pang of homesickness, which was odd since she did not want to be home in the least. She wanted to be as far away from back there as possible. Clutching at straws, she said.
You’ll figure it out, Harry said. You look like the kind of person who does.
She turned her squished neck to him to see if he meant it. Jane was sufficiently bewildered by what kind of person she was, so it was always arresting when someone, particularly a stranger, summed her up. His face, very close, had a sort of Aztec look to it, with flat cheeks and straight forehead and pointed chin. Jane couldn’t tell how old he was. There was no worry on his face. He was young. His expression was, if not earnest, still not cynical.
What do you do with yourself? she said.
Little of this, little of that.
She laughed. What at the moment?
I’m thinking about going to Sudan to look after some cows.
Really?
He shrugged. Maybe. Did anyone ever tell you you have a very old voice?
Voice?
The sound of it, he said. It’s nice.
Watch out! Lana screamed. The car jerked and swerved. Gasps of alarm rose from the passengers.
Not to worry, Yuri said in a calm voice, straightening the wheel which he steered with one hand. I saw the little bugger. He was trying to get hit.
Lana Eberhardt rented a cottage off the Langata Road. It was green with a rumpled roof where furry hyraxes nested and screeched through the night. In the three days that Jane had been in Nairobi, she had learned the cottage served as a crucial landing place in the constellation of the drifting populace.
Plans were made for dinner. Pierre got into a Jeep for the liquor run. He was tall and slow-moving, as if his attractiveness to women did not require he ever rush. This manner, combined with a French accent, made everything he said sound both frivolous and direct. Don drove off taking Lana in a shiny white rental car to some people called the Aspreys to see if they’d caught fish over the weekend. Their phone was out. Some time later they returned with a large cooler stocked with fish. The Aspreys themselves followed eventually, a short swarthy man and a woman in a shiny green wrapped affair with a plain face who carried herself with such flair and confidence she looked positively radiant. They had with them a beautiful freckled woman named Babette who someone said worked in an orphanage in the Kibera slum. She was dressed blandly in shorts and T-shirt and was all the more beautiful because of it. Other guests trickled in: a man named Joss Hall biting on a cigar and his wife Marina in a long Mexican skirt. There was a silent unshaven journalist whose name Jane didn’t catch. Harry O’Day had gone and not returned. Someone said he was sorting out job prospects. Pierre arrived with the liquor and a curly-headed blond woman with a fur vest and bare arms. He spent the evening leaning close to her with merry eyes. At eleven everyone finally sat down to dinner and more people appeared and wedged chairs in. A couple could be heard out in the garden shouting at each other, and Joss Hall came striding out of the shadows, with his head low, as if avoiding blows. Jane found herself glancing toward the doorway to see if that person Harry might reappear, but he did not walk in.
First they were leaving Tuesday, then Wednesday was better, then Friday. Pierre was waiting for some film that hadn’t arrived at the dukka in Karen on Friday. Lana had found them a driver, a German named Raymond, but he couldn’t leave till Sunday. No one was in a hurry; everyone had a loose time frame. They could wait.
Jane was napping on the Balinese bed in the back garden and woke to Harry’s face. He was wearing the white hat with the zebra band around it.
You want to come flying?
What?
Go on a mission. It’s only eight, nine hours’ drive.
Jane felt away from normal life, sleeping in a borrowed dress, living in a guest room. It was easy to say yes. You just went places here. You went with a stranger. Were you interested in him? Was he interested in you? You didn’t ask, even if you wondered. Jane always had so many questions rocking about in her head, it was nice to be in a place where people weren’t asking those questions. People here just did things. You just went.
She hardly knew where she was. Some nights she ended up sleeping at other people’s houses, missing a ride after the dinner party. The night before, she’d lost her key and Harry had taken her to his friend Andy’s adobe cottage, where they slept on the floor in front of a fireplace. Another paragliding guy with a beard was on the couch. Jane had not slept much, feeling Harry’s proximity.
What do I need to bring?
Nothing, he said.
But she went to the guest room and put some clothes in a bag. She peeled bills from a wad of cash and hid the rest with her passport behind some books. Her journal fell open and pictures fanned out on the floor. Harry picked them up and handed them back to her, sitting patiently while she wrote Lana a note saying she’d be back tomorrow or the next day. She took a white Ethiopian wrap Lana had lent her and got into Harry’s truck with him.
They drove through the Nairobi traffic with the Ngongs’ slate-gray peaks zigzagging above and headed west, up hills feathered with crevasses and past scribbled bushes and thin trees, and lit out on a spine-slamming potholed road.
They passed through the crossroad din of Narok, rattling with muffler-less cars. Yellow storefronts sat in a line beside blue storefronts. There were many groceries: Deep Grocery, Angel Food, Ice Me. People walked among goats or sat on piled tires; dust rose up. Then the colorful blur passed and suddenly the open windows framed a parched beige landscape smelling of smoke and dry grass. After long stretches of uninterrupted brush and flat dirt they’d find a scattering of huts with people on the side of the road, usually children, turning with slow, aimed faces to watch the vehicle pass.
Harry didn’t talk much, but after eight hours in a car she did learn some things.
The main thing for Harry was flying. Work was what you did to pick up a few shillings between missions. He’d had a few jobs, relief work in the north, construction work at a safari camp in Malawi. At home he could usually count on being hired by a German chap who put up electric fences for private houses in Langata. He spent a while too with a bloke trying to save wild dogs in the Tsavo desert. That had been a cool job, he said, nodding.
But mainly he flew. When he first started paragliding he would drive everywhere in the truck till he realized a motorcycle was better for the out-of-the-way places. And out-of-the-way places were the point. The whole continent of Africa was open to him, he’d only scratched the surface. A recent trip to Namibia over the baked desert clay was awesome. Sometimes he went with a mate, usually Andy, but he’d also go alone. His parachute folded up into a rucksack which he strapped to his bike.
She asked him questions; he answered them.
He’d go for days or weeks. Alone, he ate raw couscous, too lazy to cook. By the end of a trip he’d be living on vitamin pills and returned with burnt skin, weighing pounds lighter. His motorcycle got stuck in muddy swamps. Once, deep sand in the desert sputtered out the motor. There was the time he broke his collarbone landing on rocks which made the two-day drive home not so fun. Another time he dislocated his shoulder, but Andy was there and snapped it back.
Many places that he flew he could look in every direction and see no sign of people. Now and then a little cluster of huts was there blending into the brown earth or a thin wire of smoke rose out of the trees. But wildlife was everywhere. Elephants looked like tiny gray chips. Herds of gazelles were a swarm of flies on pale ground when you saw them from above. He looked down on the back of eagles with their stiff wings unflapping as he followed them down the thermal from behind.
Then Harry had a question. Who’s the man in the blue shirt? he said.
Jane looked at the unchanging landscape, thinking he meant someone on the road. Where?
In your book that fell out.
Oh. That’s my ex-husband.
You were married?
I was.
What happened?
Got divorced? she said brightly. Then, Got divorced. She felt him waiting for more. It was hard for Jane to stay silent if she felt someone wanted more. Two years ago, she said.
Harry rubbed his teeth with his tongue. You still love him? She looked at him, surprised. You keep his picture.
He’s dead.
He looked at her to see if this was true. Really?
Yup.
Whoa, he said under his breath. What happened?
OD.
That’s hectic.
Happens when you’re an addict, she said.
Yes, he said.
No, she agreed. It was bad.
They drove in silence.
How long were you married for?
Three years, but we were together for eight. He was in a clean period when we got we married. She laughed. As if that mattered.
Harry watched the road, tilting his head to show he was listening.
We weren’t together when he died, she said. But it was still … She didn’t finish.
What was his name? Harry said.
Jake.
Harry appeared thoughtful.
That was, Jane thought, all she was going to say about Jake. At least at the moment. Maybe she’d say more later. Some other time, when she knew him better. She might say more, if she thought he cared. But why would he want to know, really, was her first thought. And did she really want to tell him all that? Jake slipping back only a week after the little wedding, the wrenching final break, how she didn’t go to the funeral because the new girlfriend didn’t want her there. She’d had a hard enough time explaining it to herself without having to describe it to someone else. How do you describe hearing your husband say, I think I made a terrible mistake? And what more can you add about yourself if after hearing this you find that no vow of loyalty could have bound you more fiercely to him than this expression of rejection?
What about you? she said to Harry. You have a girlfriend?
His shoulders rose in a slow shrug. Sometimes, he said. Sort of. His face was placid.
Does she have a name?
He turned and smiled at Jane. Nope.
Open aluminum gates marked the entrance to the Massai Mara and a soft red road led them down a steep hill to the game reserve. They drove onto a flat green plain striped with thin shadows. In the distance a wall-like cliff rose on the western side.
They drove along the eastern edge among leafy trees. There she is, Harry said. To the south an escarpment curled like a giant wave about to break, dwindling off to the west and ending in a hazy bluff.
Harry pointed to some thornbushes which on closer examination turned out to be zebra sitting with ears up in a striped shade. Jane stared fascinated, feeling she was in a storybook, though she was to learn that zebra were not particularly impressive to Africans. Elephant, on the other hand, were by all standards worth driving off track for, as Harry did when he spotted a small herd low in a riverbank. The truck wove its tires through lumpy grasses and stopped, motor off and ticking, giving them a clear view of enormous wrinkled creatures, legs darkened by mud, swaying and bumping against one another. One lifted a trunk like a whip in slow motion and sprayed water. When a large female started flapping her ears, staring directly at the truck and making a throaty trumpet sound, Harry knew to start the engine and back up.
They passed the entrance to a safari camp and its wooden sign hanging on rope with the yellow recessed words Kichwa Tembo. Elephant Head. There were a number of commercial camps in the Mara, but Harry was taking her to a private house, owned by an anthropologist who’d married her Maasai translator and so had claims on the land. At the southern corner of the plain the red road tilted up, turning pale and chunky with white rocks. They lurched up a short vertical hill then hugged the side in diagonal slashes of switchbacks. Harry gripped the steering wheel as if he were wrestling something wild. They passed Maasai encampments he told her were called bomas, circular walls of tangled branches containing small huts and cattle which had to be protected from wildlife. On a day’s notice the boma would be dismantled and reassembled somewhere else where there was fresh grass.
Are we close? she said. But she wasn’t impatient. She felt happy and free. The land was majestic and riding beside him she had the feeling she was where she ought to be. It was not a feeling Jane had often.
Just up here, Harry said, and Jane didn’t care if they ever got there or ever stopped.
The white road ran along a naturally terraced area of the escarpment. Down to the right was a tunnel of greenery inside which flowed the Mara River. There was no road at all when Harry turned right down a slope of flattened grass strewn with hulking boulders at the end of which sat a stone house with a tin roof.
They got out. The air was loud with the sound of water rushing by in the river. They went to a door surrounded by a wrought-iron cage with a large padlock on it. No one appeared to be home. Jane sat for a moment in a chair left outside at a green painted table. The river surged by below, the color of café au lait, battering low branches that bounced against the white waves. Above the river a woolly ridge dark as a rain forest rose up against a yellowish sky. It was late afternoon. On the table a wineglass held a coin of red liquid and a dish had the last bits of a tart crust. Harry was digging around in the back of the truck, hauling out the backpack.
They walked straight up, first in the shade then passing the line into the sun. Jane followed Harry’s large backpack. They came to a narrow footpath. Halfway up they passed a thin woman, chest wrapped in a plaid red and blue shuka, walking down. Her head was shaved and her long earlobes hung with loops and beads. She was barefoot, probably around eighty, walking without hesitation. Jambo, they said and she nodded, passing by.
It didn’t take long to reach the top, and it felt as if they’d gone higher when they did. Soft wind blew and looking over the valley Jane had the sensation she’d never been able to see so far. Perhaps it was true.
Harry dumped out the sack and harness. He took off his shirt and put it back in the sack. As he unrolled the parachute it swelled out like foam. He shook it, then stepped into the harness attached to the thin ropes. His helmet was round and white, making his head look too big for his body. He stood a short distance from the edge with feet planted apart. Past the tall grass at the edge, the plain stretched miles below, brownish green but bleached of color. Behind Harry on the ground the chute flowed out like a wedding train. He pulled at it to free it from twigs and thorns, shaking at a dozen thin lines which all branched out into shorter lines attached to the chute. The likelihood of a tangle seemed immense. A harness of black straps fit over his shoulders and chest and wrapped around his thighs, arranged so that airborne he’d be seated. He stood for a while, staring out, listening. He looked at the clouds, gazing overhead, waiting for a gust. A white mist blew over them, dimming the sun and dampening Jane’s face, a low cloud whitening everything. The wind puffed the sheet behind him. His arm kept reaching back to fluff the light fabric, while he stayed face-forward. Wind filled the sail, lifting it, seeming to push him forward. He took a few quick steps. Jane was aware of the absence of the motor roar that usually accompanies a liftoff as Harry stepped off the edge onto air.
The fabric snapped behind him like a boat sail filling with a gust and he shot backward up over her head. He hovered there for a moment then swung back out over the escarpment drop. Jane heard a satisfied sort of whoop. She watched him, holding her hair away from her eyes, as his feet dangled past her and she learned that the person remaining on the ground could also receive a lifting sensation at takeoff. That is, she did. The flying was totally silent. In the air, Harry had said, you didn’t hear the sound of wind because you were moving at its speed. You were the wind.
The thermals wound in the invisible shape of corkscrews. She watched his figure soar out over the giant bowl of the world, soon catching the spiral in a wide slow circle as if up a spiral staircase. His sail was long and narrow, puckered like a giant earthworm. Very quickly his figure was quite far away.
To the west clouds were stacked with sculptural definition beside the lowering sun. The clouds, the clouds, she thought. Piled and beautiful, they were both indifferent and inviting. They had that paradox of nature you saw also in the sea, a thing appearing eternal even as it changed every second. Harry was now a miniature action figure under a sideways parenthesis. For a while longer she watched him sail, feeling weightless herself, floating by proxy. She didn’t need to fly to feel she was floating. She had a knack for channeling other people’s experiences. You left yourself behind and there was relief.
Harry was a white dot.
The vastness of the savannah below reminded her how tiny a speck she was too and yet at the same time offered her the illusion that she could reach across and touch the bluff miles away. Warm wind blew in small gusts against her and the dot seemed to pull her toward it into the sky. In dreams when she was flying she could never make out exactly how it was working. She swooped through doorways, looped over trees, but felt that at any moment the miracle might stop and down she’d plummet. She’d think in the dream, I better concentrate on staying up, but that wasn’t necessary. You just stayed up. You didn’t know what was keeping you up. It wasn’t in your control. It just happened. Like life. She thought how in her dreams she too flew in loops the way Harry was now, riding the thermals, following the shape of DNA.
A white sun perched on the western ridge. When it dropped behind, the light would go. Harry had told her to walk down before dark. Night-time was the kingdom of the animals. You didn’t want to be out there then with them. She entered into the shadow sloped across the hill, taking steps sideways, sliding a little, going down and yet still having the buoyant feeling of drifting over a vast plain. What had taken them thirty minutes to climb took her ten minutes to descend.
On the way down she kept the corrugated roof of the house in sight with the white truck beside it, the lightest thing in the gathering dusk. Darker vehicles were also parked there now. She reached the bottom and walked quickly on a dark road. When she saw a bright little fire going in front of the house it showed how dark it was. Closer she saw piled branches crackling inside a circle of stones. In front of the fire was the round table where two men and a woman were sitting with bottles and a crossed pair of army boots. She was greeted by the people with no surprise at seeing a strange woman emerge out of the dark. A fellow with a thin ponytail stood up and offered her his chair of twisted saplings. Karibu, he said. It was Andy. She sat.
Tusker? Jane was handed a bottle and introduced. The fire was warm on her legs.
The girl named Julia worked at a nearby tourist camp. The one with the boots on the table was Cyril from England.
They asked her where she was from and she asked them and soon they were talking about the baby leopard that had fallen through a torn patch in the roof last week. It landed on Annabel’s mother in her bed. Inside the stone house Jane could see more people crossing back and forth making dinner.
It was looking for food, said the girl, her white teeth glowing in the dusk. She wore a safari shirt and a short skirt. But it did freak her mum out a bit.
A bit, Jane said.
What did she do with it? said the fellow with the boots.
Shooed it out the window, said the girl, blowing cigarette smoke toward the fire. Poor thing didn’t want to be there either.
Maybe I better go get Harry, Andy said.
He’s not back? Jane said. Beyond the fire was blackness and the rushing of the river.
Well, Joss went to meet the plane, he said vaguely. I’ll go see. He gently moved off to be engulfed by blackness after which they heard the sputtering of a motor.
Inside Jane met their hostess. Annabel wore a ripped green evening gown and had red hair arranged in a loose triangle on her head. A long table was being set among rocks and feathers and bones. Jane was given the job of picking wax from Moroccan candlesticks and pouring salt into oyster shells, fossils from the river.
Hours later the table was crowded with plates of grilled meat and glistening bottles and candle flames. There were stories of men falling out of the sky, of cars breaking down crossing streams, of mothers running off with young lovers. A steady rain drummed on the roof above them. Jane sat beside a man in a polo shirt who was pointing out the absurdity of monogamy. Look at the animals, he said. Need I say more?
Annabel stood, pouring wine into everyone’s glasses, her smile showing wine-stained teeth.
You have someone back home? he asked her.
Kind of, she lied. She thought of the painter she’d liked lately though nothing had gone on between them.
Don’t let a man put you in a cage, he said. Ever.
Julia mentioned that it was her birthday as if she’d just remembered it, and everyone shouted and gave her toasts. Some time later Annabel handed her a present wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with a brown Hermès ribbon.
Much later Jane found herself outside in a pitch dark pouring with rain beside strangers pushing a car stuck in the muddy hillside. She gripped the door handle, her bare feet sunk in mud. The car would rev in a great burst, roll forward an inch then rock back down, inert. Try it again! they yelled. Another rev, another group shove, and it wasn’t budging an inch. People shouted, insulting each other, laughing. The rain was loud, slapping on the slick grass, but still Jane could hear the low constant roar of the river. The jaunty thump of music played from a tape inside where lanterns shone from yellow windows, casting dim smudges. Otherwise everything was black.
Jane could hardly see her hands. The shirt of the person beside her showed because it was light-colored. They kept heaving and shoving against the car. Suddenly it jerked forward, pulling out from everyone. Jane stumbled, managing somehow not to fall. A headless figure with a white shirt slid by as if on skis and grabbed her upper arm. Harry pulled her along so she skated at his side for a moment on the slick ground before they both toppled over into spattering mud. His arms were cupped around her, and they rolled in this clasp down the slope, somersaulting. The face was close and dark with darker spots where the eyes were and when its mouth came near she kissed it, kissing water and rain and bits of grit on his lips, thinking, I’m kissing Harry. She felt his chest warm through his soaked shirt. In her mind were images of the dinner and the faces around the candlelit table, of driving that day on the red snaking road, then of Harry lifting up into the orange air over her. They’d had a lot of wine and her thinking was far off and hazy but one thought did come—this is the way you found a person, crashing into him in the dark, without decision, without knowing where you were going—and even in that abandon she still managed to locate little worn areas of worry pulsing, but with no words to them. Worry didn’t stand a chance against this sliding and this person she was holding. The slope of the hill evened out and they stopped rolling and kept kissing and she had a laugh in the back of her throat with the thought, I’m kissing Harry. She kept thinking it as worry faded. She saw his hands on the steering wheel, his profile and his placid masklike face.
Wet hair plastered her forehead and his cheeks and their bodies pressed against the length of each other on the wet ground. She felt triply alive, as if delivered from an austere place where it was now apparent she’d been for a long time. How had she stayed there so long? Now she had his warm arms and her back was chilled. The rain kept streaming over them and behind in the deeper darkness the sound of the river was rushing and thundering. Harry was a close new thing which she knew very little about and yet at this moment found it seemed to offer her everything.
3 / Esther (#ulink_54fbf6fa-aa93-5faa-8f1a-873198af2c40)
I SIT AMONG the girls in the shade of a tree not so far above my head. It is peaceful with their voices in the air, talking quietly. It might be birdsong for all I understand or care.
I think, I will never be close to anyone again.
We are just now supposed to be drawing pictures of things we would like to forget. You can see why this is strange. We must think, in order to draw them, about those terrible things we would rather remove from our minds. We are told that drawing such things will help us remove them.
Instead I am drawing the tree past the work shed toward the field. It has a curved trunk and resembles a woman twisting to look over her shoulder.
Today I woke with a pressure on my eyes, pulling my forehead. I thought, Perhaps I am getting a cold. Maybe I am.
My mind is uneasy. Since being away, I am used to my thoughts being disrupted. They have cracks in them. I remember in a soft way, as in the distance, how it was to be whole. Nothing. It was like nothing. You just had wholeness, you did not feel it. I would not have known it was there if I had not become as I am now. It has offered me a perspective. It is interesting how one can understand a way that one was only after one is another way.
Beside me the girls’ heads are bent close to the paper. They use ballpoint pens and pencils which are better if you want to erase. Red pencils are often used for the blood and the bullets. At night the bullets were red.
Holly is beside me. She leans on a cardboard cracker box. She has drawn a house with a thatched roof and doorway, her house. Soon she will add men with pangas, a chair on fire, and her lute broken on the ground. She was practicing music when she was taken. Holly’s from the country near Ongoko, not from the town like me. I am from Lira town, which is not far, just a day’s walk.
Past the picnic bench near the shop the boys are together there drawing. I see that one, Simon, with them. His back is to me with his bad leg straight out. When he was shot the bullet was near the bone so his knee is not so good. He swings his foot around when he walks instead of stepping straight. The scar looks like a crack in a window with jagged lines coming out from a shiny pink center against his dark skin. The scars on us are not straight.
Simon is good at drawing so his drawings are tacked up in bicycle repair. One of a car on fire with flames smaller than the smoke, one of a boy with his arm cut off and drips of blood making a puddle. He’s skillful at details, doing three shades of camouflage with one lead pencil. His AK-47s shoot clouds and the soldiers have bouffant hairdos and sideburns as in cartoons. Everyone draws them that way, even though they do not so much look like that. They look like anyone.
A high chain fence follows two sides of the property here and there’s a wooden fence with pieces fallen out of it along the driveway. The playing field has no fence, but one side goes beside a marsh. We are not fenced in. Here is not a prison and still we are not permitted to leave.
I am not so good at drawing. I would rather look at a thing made in nature. I do not finish drawing that tree.
Our camp is called Kiryandongo Rehabilitation Center and we are, during the dry season, a dusty circle cleared in the middle of tangled bush a little ways off the Gulu Road. There are some huts and the office of two sheds connected where Charles our head counselor has an office. The kitchen has a small roof and all sides open to the fire pit and brick oven and there you see Francis cooking. Chickens peck around. We had chickens and when I was small I liked to hold them as pets. They were nervous, but if you keep patient they will calm down and stay in your lap even if their eyes are startled.
We have a parking area for cars. One belongs to Charles and the truck fetches food and supplies. The van is to transport children, but it is broken at this time and has not been used since I have been here.
In the work shed is a shop for making instruments and building chairs and repairing bicycles. Behind in the trees is a large white tent that came from Norway where the boys sleep. The ventilation is not so good and, having sixty boys inside, the air is unmoving and hot. The girls sleep in dormitories with bunk beds so close you can reach over and touch the girl next to you.
Holly is in the upper bunk beside me. She has decorated her area. From the ceiling strings dangle empty boxes of Close-Up toothpaste or fortified protein, an eye-drop bottle, a box of Band-Aids. I have no decoration. Underneath Holly is May, who is very pregnant, due in a month. Her parents do not accept the child coming and have not visited May.
At Kiryandongo we are all united by a thing that also divides us from others. We look at each other and know what we have been through. We also look away for the same reason.
Since my return I meet new challenges of the mind. I have decided to forget everything that happened to me there and so look forward to the remainder of my life. I am not so old, nearly sixteen. My life could still be long.
Before, my life was nothing to speak of. You would not have heard of it. Now, they tell us it is important to tell our story. They have us draw to tell it, but I am not so good at drawing.
We studied the Greeks in school and they had people called rhapsodes who memorized long stories and recited them the way you would a song. The long poems were epics. At banquets or by pools people would sit eating grapes and drinking from goblets and listen to the rhapsodes sing. It was not a song with music, but the rhapsodes still sang. They sang of heroes and of journeys.
When they ask us to speak, I cannot find the words. What I have inside is for me to look at alone. Who else can know it? Not anyone. I cannot say it out loud. How can one tell a story so full of shame?
I listen to the others talk and understand how they struggle. We knew the same things. I stay apart to make peace with it inside myself, if I am able. With the rebels I learned that inside is where it most matters in any case.
I am one of the abducted children. Did I tell you my name? I am Esther Akello.
I have been back about two weeks. The days are strange, I am not used to the peace. I am not used to waking without someone hitting my feet. The first week I slept a great deal and woke with swollen eyes, which in the mirror had dark hoops under them. There is a heaviness in me where gladness does not reach. I know there should be gladness that I have returned. I am free, but gladness does not come to me.
The boys finish their drawings then get up and kick around a ball on the dusty field. Boys forever like to play with balls. This is better than hitting each other. Simon is running with his bad leg. Charles claps his hands, getting them to go faster.
Here at Kiryandongo they always want you to join in. They say, Come on, Esther, I know you can run. Come on. Get up off your seat.
I prefer to sit. When the ants come I brush them away. If they keep coming back to me I pinch them between my fingers. Maybe I will get up when I am ready. Maybe I will not. I hate everyone.
As I said, my town is Lira. At night Lira is quiet and in the day it is not so loud either. We have a pink brick bank and a yellow brick post office and many churches, some with steeples, though most with simply a roof. Goats walk about. The main street is paved from the turnaround at one end and tilts upward past groceries and other shops selling batteries and Walkmans and clothes and stationery to the other end of town where the road becomes dirt and paths squiggle into the countryside. During the dry season the dirt is red and dusty, in the wet season it grows darker and stains our feet like rust.
I was born during the rainy season in April 1982, arriving by way of my parents, John and Edith Akello. I was preceded by a brother, Neil, then followed by sisters Sarah and Judy, and another brother, Matthew. I am told I came out very quickly and my mother who is a nurse said it was the fastest delivery she had seen or heard of. I was anxious to get into the world and to the business of being alive. My eyes opened just then, trying to look at everything even though a baby sees nothing but blurry figures. I was looking to discover things right away. I like to think I came out quickly also to spare my mother pain. From what I have seen giving birth is a terrible thing and I do not know why women must suffer this agony to produce a child. But that is only one of the many things I do not understand. There are many many more things I do not understand than ones I do. Sometimes it seems discovery is the learning of all I do not know. For this reason I am not happy for all the time I have missed school. I want to go back as soon as this is possible.
When we return we first visit the nurse at the clinic. She examines our scars and the sores on our feet. Our soles have become very hard. She checks our bones to see where they might have been broken and looks at our bleeding teeth and chalky tongues. We take medicine for worms and our heads are shaved of lice. The nurse will maybe take a blood test, but she will only do this if you make the request. Most girls do not know to request it because no one has told them. No one wants to frighten them about the HIV virus. They may know a little but choose not to know more. The nurses are advised not to disturb the girls further by informing them to have the blood test.
I ask for a blood test, because my mother is a nurse so I know it is important.
Was. Was a nurse.
The counselors do not like to mention other things. They respect that girls are too embarrassed to talk about the rudeness to which we were subjected. Some things are too private. They do not use the word rape. They believe they are relieving us. We may talk about killing someone with a machete, but rape is too private to speak of.
I have decided not to remember, but pictures appear to me no matter. A girl kicked in the face falls to the ground and immediately gets up, because we are marching. If you do not get up they will kill you. I try instead to think of other things: a river in the morning. I think of my best friend, Agnes, beside me, knocking me with her knee, and of the way her face changed when I said something she had thought of, too. I think of the first time I saw my boyfriend Philip on the street in Lira town and the effect it had on my body. I think about sleeping in my tree. But still come the things I do not choose to think of. The boy whom we were made to watch, for an example of what will happen if you try to escape. The rebels surrounded that boy and started jabbing at him with bayonet blades and pangas. Blood spurted where he was hit and black gobs landed on the dust. They kept cutting that boy, who was crying out. I watched with hard eyes. Chunks of skin came off and fell on the ground. I keep remembering his skin in the dirt.
You must not want to hear such things. Who would?
After my escape I was brought to the government building. The first person I was surprised to see was my aunt, not my mother. Aunt Karen smelling of pomade held me in her arms and cried. She was crying hard.
Your mother cannot come, she said, wiping at the tears. Then I received the shock I was not expecting.
She got very sick, Esther. She had the cancer.
What could I say to that? So I said, When?
Aunt Karen sobbed. It was very bad.
And now? I somehow knew the answer.
She could not get better. Aunt Karen squeezed her eyes and shook her head. Esther, your mother has died.
I thought I had gone beyond what I could imagine with the rebels, but it turned out there was more for me to go. Can it be true? I said.
It is funny, the things we say. Of course it was true. I am afraid it is so.
But for me, death was not so surprising, even when it was your mother.
When?
Aunt Karen kept crying, crying. Three weeks it has been.
I have come too late, I said.
I am not permitted to go home. When you are abducted you are required to stay in the rehabilitation center for some weeks after you return. So it was at Kiryandongo that my family came to see me. Lira is an hour away by car and they would find a ride. They sent word when they were coming so I waited for that day.
When they arrived at the bare yard of the entrance area, I had the feeling of being in a movie when aliens take over a person’s body so their eye sockets are yellow, a sign that the people inside are gone. My family looked that way to me. I thought, My mother dying has changed everyone and they are no longer the same inside.
When they were closer they looked as they were before. Neil my big brother lay his loose hand on my shoulder and greeted me by name, but he looked to his fingers not to my face. I greeted my father.
Yes, it is you, he said. I think there were tears in his eyes. I think we all had my mother in mind and were not thinking perhaps of what had happened to me. I am, after all, still here.
We went to sit in the shade of the dorm. They brought me flatbread they knew I liked. My sister Sarah sat on one side. I saw that Judy had changed the most and appeared older—she was now eight—and Matthew was not as plump as before and his front teeth were gone. Aunt Karen sat on my other side and patted my arm. She was dressed up, wearing her wedge sandals. She was not crying this time, just talking. She asked how was it here and was I getting enough to eat. She said our grandmother Nonni could not come, but I would see her when I was able to visit home. Nothing was interesting to me. I saw she was acting like the mother of this family. My mother did not think her sister was a very good mother. Aunt Karen was more interested in painting her nails and straightening her hair. This day she even looked excited to be in her sister’s place.
My father stayed still and quiet after they parked his wheelchair. He sat, faced to the side not looking in my direction. When he did glance at me his eyes closed as if it hurt. Was he thinking of what I had been through? Was he thinking of his wife who was now dead? I do not know.
In the family we liked to hear the story of their meeting. On a Christmas holiday my mother came home to Lira and went with Aunt Karen to the army dance. My mother saw my father there. She knew who he was. His brother Robert went around with Aunt Karen, but my mother had become a Kampala girl, working in the hospital there, and wasn’t interested in a soldier from Kitgum.
Then, in 1981, with Milton Obote as president, the Acholi and Langi were permitted in the army. Since Idi Amin, the Acholi were not. Idi Amin was against the Acholi. His men had even killed my father’s parents, who both died at the massacre in Bucoro.
With Museveni, our president now, if you are Acholi you are not so welcome in the army either. Many presidents do not look after the Acholi and Langi, because we are in the north, and some people believe it is our history to be persecuted.
I asked my mother what my father said to her that night, even knowing the story. She would shrug. My father asked my mother to dance and she said no, and he said, good, he did not want to dance either. My mother wondered if he was nice or mean. He told her he remembered seeing her when she was young but she did not remember that time and he asked her where she lived and what her work at the hospital was like. Most men she knew talked about themselves only. He said he liked the way she was holding her hands. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at the hands, he said. My mother has long hands. What can you tell about me? she said. It is private, he said. She thought he was being rude. Maybe he would tell her when he knew her better. Maybe you will never know me better, she says. I think I will, he says. Because I’m going to marry you.
My mother laughed and said they had better dance if they were going to get married. So they did, and after they got married he told her what he saw in her hands. They belonged to the mother of his children.
My mother moved back to Lira. They married in June, and my brother Neil arrived six months later. I arrived next. When his army term was up, my father did not re-enlist and instead opened an auto repair shop with his friend Jameson. He’d learned mechanics in the army and liked motors and was good at solving problems. My father likes not talking while he fixes something.
For a while we lived next to Aunt Karen. Sometimes Uncle Robert lived there too, but mostly not. They had a son, Robert Jr., but did not marry. They liked to fight. The brothers were very different. Robert liked being in the army and liked to roam.
My mother and father found a house away from them. Sarah was born, then Judy, then Matthew. We would go to the clinic where my mother was head nurse. Long lines out the door were people from the countryside who would come and wait all day. At home our cousin Lenora looked after us. She started when she was ten.
You see my father in a wheelchair and think maybe he lost his legs in a mine or even from the rebels, but none would be true. When I was five years old, a car fell on him. He was underneath it, making repairs. For a while he was at home, then he got a wheelchair and went back to work. I remember my father standing just once, a time I was on his shoulders. I was high up and scared to hit the doorway as we passed through and he was laughing at me and my worry.
My father does not feel sorry for himself. So if at night when he is home in his chair in the side place in the living room his eyes turn red from drinking this is not so surprising.
When visitors come to Kiryandongo you see how they look or do not look at you. My father does not; my sister Sarah does not stop watching me. If it is your sister you can imagine what she is thinking. I saw her trying to measure if I was wrecked or not. When we were small, people might not tell us one from the other, we have the same shape and face. Looking at her, I have the odd feeling of looking at myself as I was before I was taken.
I ask them about our mother, the ghost hovering there with us. Where did she die? Who was with her? Where was she buried? They told me these things. Did she say anything about me? They said she was worried for me, but believed always I would come home. I thought of my mother’s face, with her wide forehead and chipped front tooth. It was hard to picture her sick. As a nurse, she would have understood everything happening to her. Then I thought how at least I missed seeing this thing. I did not have to watch my mother die.
I was relieved when my family left. I wanted them gone. Then I missed them, too. Two feelings come at once and you feel neither of them.
No one here is at ease. We are all troubled.
The boys especially are fighting many times, but the girls are mean also. I saw Holly stomp a chicken yesterday. And Janet, before she would not have hit her baby. When she saw me looking at her as the baby cried she said, What is this compared to what the rebels did?
Nurse Nancy says we are coming out of it. The counselors have us think that after a while you will stop coming out of it and be as you were, yourself again. I think I will be coming out of it forever.
There is a person inside me who has been very bad and does not deserve a chance at life. She has done things no good person would do. I might argue against that and say, No, I am Esther. I am a good person, as good as I can be. But another voice is stronger and that voice says it would be better if I were dead.
They tell us, You are back and things will get better. Again and again they say, You are the fortunate ones. We say it ourselves. It might be so, but—
Holly was made to beat a boy when the rebels learned she liked him. Another girl here found her son’s leg up in a tree. No wonder you want sometimes to die. Sometimes your spirit is so heavy you say to it, I cannot carry you around.
Nurse Nancy sits with us talking. She is a wiry woman in glasses who lets her long hair fly around, more concerned with looking after us. She asks us about Kony. What did we think of Kony? Maybe we are mad at him. Some nod. Some girls say he is a bad man. I do not answer. I do not say, I’m not mad at Kony. I do not see Kony. To me Kony is nothing.
Kony took my life away from me, Carol says. She is a St. Mary’s girl who has been here a long time. Her parents still have not been found. Below her eyebrows looks filled with sandbags, pressing down her eyes.
Yes, but you have survived, Nurse Nancy says.
I have not, she says. I have not survived.
We have the future waiting for us, Janet says. See, up ahead? There we are. Who knows what is in store.
The future is blackness, Carol says.
Janet says, Do not worry. God will provide.
Christine, one of our counselors, tells us that journalists may come today. Christine was an abducted girl herself, ten years ago. She is about twenty-five and has a square head and round shoulders and wears pearls in her ears. Christine thought she might become a doctor and went to Kampala to go to school, but it did not work out so well, and she came back here and instead became a counselor. The journalists are interested in hearing of our experience, she says. No one has to speak who doesn’t want to. Sometimes it can help you. Recently there was a woman from Germany with a tape recorder.
Holly says she would not dare speak in front of such knowledgeable people, and Holly was even at the front of her grade.
Who wants to talk about what happened out there? I say. What good will it do?
I will speak, Janet says. Emily says she also will speak. Emily does not stop talking anyway, though she does not always say the truth.
They want to spread our story, Christine says in her mild voice. It will help all the children.
We think about this. The journalists do not come.
After you return, even if the world looks as you left it, you are changed and the world seems changed also. It is new. After my father’s accident, my mother said my father did not change. He stayed the same in his new world.
We must find forgiveness, Christine says. We must forgive ourselves.
I am looking for forgiveness, but it is hard to find. What does it feel like?
The fear that I may die any moment is still here. Now and then the fear drains a little from me, but in its place is not a better feeling. There is a hard blankness.
4 / Taking Off (#ulink_f47f425d-f9ad-5b53-9730-29e1cdf1bd9d)
THEY STUMBLED IN the doorway, soaked through. Quiet music played. Jane saw some figures in the dimness past burnt-down candles at the end of the table crowded with bottles and glasses. She felt her way down the hall and found her bag in the dark corner of a room where a couple was laughing in the dark. Returning she bumped into another sleeping body. In the bathroom she peeled off her wet dress and put on underwear and a strapped top. Back in the living room she left the wet dress draped over driftwood bookshelves. Harry emerged behind her carrying bedspreads and kicking cushions to a place on the floor of the living room. Other people were leaning against the wall, some sleeping, some murmuring in a far corner. Harry sat back against a cushion. Come here, he said, his arm straight out, and in the dimness she saw him looking past her, as if a direct look would be too intimate. She sidled against him and put the dry skin of Harry’s chest against her cheek and wet hair. He lay still. She was not tired and far from falling asleep. She lay spellbound. People were whispering; another lantern went out, darkening the stone wall.
Some time later she woke, and everything was black and silent and still. The face near her was dark gray, as if in a dream. She touched it and went to kiss the mouth and hands came up on either side of her head, keeping her there. She kissed him, hardly breathing, making no sound. Then he stopped.
Get up, he whispered. He stood and pulled her off the floor, somehow keeping the Indian bedspread wrapped around her shoulders. He steered her through the dark on the soft straw rugs, knocking her into a stool, toward the darker hall, keeping her shoulders in front of him. They came to the door of the bathroom and pushed in. The walls, she’d noticed before, were a rough barn wood stained brown but she could see none of it now.
Too many people around, he said. Keeping her wrapped he lowered her to the floor. Now let me see Jane, he said in the pitch black.
Her breath felt chopped into pieces. Oh, came out—oh. It kept being chopped.
Shhhh, he said, making no other sound. Did he even breathe? His hands in the dark were moving her around, traveling over her. Noises stayed in the back of her throat. That’s …, she began. Where were the words?
What? he said.
That’s. It’s. Oh.
But, she wasn’t expressing it in the least. Then her breath took over and she went to where words didn’t go or matter anyway.
Shhhh, he said.
His hands made her feel small and pliable, and all her nerves were lit. He shifted around and his weight came down on her.
Oh God, she said rather loud. He covered her mouth.
He was there close, but too dark to see. She thought of the rough wood on the walls. She felt his face sort of become her face. She heard the river nearby foaming down the hill and saw the line of the mangled trees she’d seen earlier in silhouette against a pale yellow sky. Then she felt she was in a green forest. Then she was on a porch. It was not a porch she knew, it was a porch in America. There were children playing down the block under leafy branches and it was summer somewhere in the South with beds and white chenille bedspreads and old light fixtures on the walls and railings twisting up the stairs inside. A man and a woman were having sex in the hallway. Then it was Jane having sex with a man in the hallway. Wisteria vines filled the screen door and the door banged shut. Another man was getting out of a truck; he was partly Harry. He came over the threshold wearing boots and pulled open her shirt. No, he came into a side room and threw her on a table and pushed her legs apart ignoring her face. He’d seen her earlier in town, he said. His face gazing at her breasts had only one thing in mind driving him. He shifts her to the side and lifts her against the door, holding her underneath, having to crouch and bend his knees. I’ve been thinking of this all day, Harry said with his legs pressing her knees out and her back against the rough wood, pinning her, legs dangling, toes just touching the floor. One foot has a sandal on, a strap tight on her ankle. He held her from beneath, lifting her against him, pressing his hips so she’s on the verge of collapsing but is thrown back, her wrists braced against the frame. He grabs her ass and her feet slip off the floor into the air, with one hand flailing to get a grip on the sink anchoring her, inside the sound of their breathing, and she feels in a sort of tornado as if she’s going up a hill powered by wind with gusts rolling dust around and still going up farther and not quite at the top, reaching a crest. Everything starts to shake and unravel with the earth splitting at her feet and the road cracking sideways and air erupting like glass shattering. Her legs flung wide sent off needles of light or song and she had the feeling of falling at the same time rising, of going out and out as she’s gathering in, feeling her arms and legs dissolve into a bright bank of dust and finally stillness.
I’m old, you know.
Which means?
I don’t know, just I am.
I happen to like old.
Right.
The older the better, he said.
Okay, so—what—you’re perfect?
More perfect than you know.
They were twisted into a bound shape on the bathroom floor. They untangled themselves and shuffled, attached, back to the living room.
In the morning they woke next to other lumped bodies under blankets and thin covers, pushed like waves against the stone walls. Jane opened her eyes to see a shirtless man unbend himself from their Indian bedspread and stand in rumpled underwear. He walked slowly toward the sound of the river picking his way over the bodies and disappearing in the light at the door, the back of his head in a rooster’s plume of hair. She thought it was the pilot. On the other side of Harry were two heads touching and four arms draped toward each other.
Her head rested on Harry, on the shoulder of this new person. Her mouth was dry and her eyes heavy, but her body felt loose and light. Some people you met and right away knew they were important. Or it might take a while for you to understand how that first moment when you felt taken aback was a jolt not away but to this new person. And if it turned out the other person had a similar thing happen, then it was one of those connectings that happen not often.
She lay on his shoulder and thought that Harry was now important. What important meant she could not have said, but the word was there. She pictured the letters carved in wood. She thought of his voice in the dark, saying, Take this off. It sounded a little cruel. She drifted on the thought of it, playing it over in her mind.
Later that day they were in the car driving back to Nairobi.
Harry told her about the girl he liked, Rosalie. He saw her at a party, wearing a jumpsuit with zippers. She was small, with skin so pale you could see her veins. Everyone was dancing. Harry had broken his foot and was dancing with a crutch which he threw across the floor and she jumped over. After, they went driving and stayed up all night, sitting on the top of her Jeep and watching the sun rise over Lake Elementaita. She had a boyfriend, so nothing happened. That is, no touching happened, but something had happened. Her hands, he said, looked like an old person’s hands. Rosalie told him that she had to give some thought to her boyfriend now, now that she’d met Harry. Afterward he wrote her a letter and she wrote back. She still loved her boyfriend, she said, and didn’t know what to do. They kept writing letters to each other. She was still deciding.
What do you write to her? Jane asked.
That I’m waiting for her.
Jane lay across the seat with her head in his lap. Harry pushed back her hair. It had been a long time since she’d touched a person. It made a person feel transformed. Before falling asleep in the bumping truck she thought of how she had come to this other country wanting to disappear, but now felt more vivid than ever. It seemed possible that she might actually be finding herself in some new form.
They reached Nairobi after nightfall. On the Langata Road less than a mile from Harry’s, their tire blew and they thumped to a stop. Harry changed it as Jane sat on a dead tree watching in the eerie quiet. A lone streetlight shone amber far down the road like a figure from another era. Harry popped the tire off and cranked the jack, and she watched how youthful his quick movements were and how smooth was the skin of his neck between his parted hair and how nicely shaped were his strong arms, and the perfect contentment she’d felt all day deflated a little with the arrival of her first wish—for more. If only she were that young. She had a keen longing then to be a younger girl whose freshness would make him delirious, the way his was making her.
They were back from their mission, she told herself. Mission was what Harry called it. They’d had a nice moment, she explained to herself. So that was probably that. She would be happy with that, then. Happiness came in pieces anyway. One had to be happy with the pieces as they came. She was trained in gathering pieces. When you had the bad luck to love a person who cared for drugs more than you, then you adjusted to the netherworld of Nothing’s perfect and Whoever said you got what you wanted and It will get better. Those pieces were sharp and cut you, but you still collected them. You justified the cuts.
They went back to Harry’s house. He referred to it as his parents’ house, even though he’d grown up there. A few spotlights shone outside a garage and at one end of a large roof. She followed him across a dark lawn of stiff tropical grass to the guesthouse. Inside was a wide stone fireplace and heavy wooden furniture and to the side a small bedroom with a mattress of clean sheets in the middle of a cement floor. Harry was under the covers when she returned from the bathroom and she switched off the living room light. She slid in next to him and had the lovely surprise, which always remained surprising, of the first contact with the skin of another warm body which felt, well, like a miracle.
He turned her sleepily. She wasn’t wishing for anything then, only this. All right, more of this, then. She felt as if she were on a train, jerking to a start. The slow chugging of the engine was her body coming alive again. As the speed increased, possibilities of the trip expanded. Maybe the journey would not be short. There was hope in the body against her. Maybe it would be a long trip. The Orient Express or the Trans-Siberian Railway. She was riding the shaky rails. She was going faster. Now she was being hurled up against the ceiling.
When she landed in slow motion some time later, her gaze drifted to a blurry window where dawn had turned the sky glass-blue through a pane of lead squares like the windows you see in old churches.
In the late morning, returning to the cottage, Jane found Lana having breakfast in bed with her silver tray. Lana patted the pillow beside her and poured Jane a cup of coffee from a silver pot. Raymond has buggered off, Lana said. He’s tossed us for a safari job. Don’t blame him, really. But—she used a pointedly hopeful tone—Don wants to come.
Don?
Lana shrugged, as if uncertain whether she was ready to promote the idea. He thinks it might be interesting. He has a car …
Jane looked at her.
Lana bit her toast and studied Jane’s face, gauging her reaction. He can always help with the cash flow? she said, chewing.
Later after dinner Lana and Don peeled themselves up off the Balinese bed and slipped away to Lana’s room. It was an early night. Jane and Harry stayed collapsed on the pillows, upholstered in hemp and stamped with a black and beige triangular pattern. In the deeper cushions Pierre was asleep.
I’ll take you, Harry said out of nowhere.
Where?
To Uganda. I’ll drive.
You will?
Sure. I’ve got a truck.
That would be great, she said. Really?
He looked at her. His face was an inch from hers and his lowered eyes were cool. I just said I would.
What about the cows? she said.
Screw the cows.
Really?
Keep saying really and I’ll change my mind.
A warmth spread in her chest.
She couldn’t pay him, she told him, but could cover the gas and his room and board. She had a minor expense account from the magazine, she said, actually, hardly believing it herself, since she had no real credentials as a journalist.
It’s better if you don’t hire me, Harry said. If I’m hired I usually get sacked.
The guest room where Jane was staying had been painted by Lana, salmon and green. Its lantern threw half-moons of light on the stucco wall. Harry got in with her under the pink mosquito net.
He had been with her now three nights and each night in a different bed in a different place. She was in that early lull of physical happiness when going over it was a pleasure, with no real qualms yet. She felt a sinking deeper. And now he was coming with them on her trip. It’ll be what it is, she said to herself, as proof she was without illusion, but having no more idea what It’ll be what it is meant other than a hope against the sinking.
Again departure was postponed so Lana threw another dinner party.
She went into action, arranging what needed to be done, talking to the cook, unruffled and focused. Her energy spread outward and Jane helped her push three tables together and move brass elephants. Lana shook out a long white tablecloth stamped with silver and blue paisley which landed like a sail.
From Jaipur, she said. Lana’s things each had a story—linen napkins were from Porta Portese in Rome, gold-dotted plates passed down from her grandmother in Paris, the striped red and green Venetian glasses from the lover trying to woo her back. That worked, she said, for a while.
The cottage had four small rooms packed like a treasure chest. In her thirty-six years Lana had covered a lot of ground. There were the small business ventures: lanterns from Morocco, the alabaster Indian lamps, the belts with Maasai beading. She’d worked as a set designer and fund raiser, started schools for the Rendille in the bush. Her tastes were both extravagant and rustic. A chandelier hung from a water buffalo horn on the terrace. She was generous whether flush or broke. For all the pleasure she found in things, she did not have the hoarding instinct of the materialist. You liked her bracelet? Here. She would unclasp it from her wrist and snap it onto yours.
She held up a conch shell filled with salt. Sweet, she said. She had dressed for dinner in a short satin slip, boots laced to her knees and dark lipstick. Now, she said, most important, the lighting. They lit lanterns and candles which had been placed in abundance around the cottage on stands and floors and tables crowded with silver cups.
How old is Harry? Jane said.
What do you think?
Twenty-six? Jane said tremulously. Five?
More like twenty-three, darling.
You’re kidding.
Or twenty-two. What, you care? Age doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t?
For dinner there was a platter of grill-marked chicken sprinkled with singed herbs, roast pork beside peeled potatoes, stewed eggplant in tomato sauce, green beans shiny with butter and garlic, curried lentils, ribs, shredded cabbage, sliced avocado. Lana’s housekeeper and another woman carried dishes in and out of the kitchen, taking orders from Lana in Swahili, without seeming to hear them.
By the time the cook’s specialty, coconut flan, was brought out, no one at the table seemed to notice, deep in conversation or having left altogether. Many were out on the concrete terrace, dancing to the turned-up music. By the end of the night however there was no pudding left in the dish. The servants slipped in and out, clearing the plates, leaving glasses and candles and flowers, and a spotlessly washed-up kitchen. The music pounded.
Jane, feeling dazed from drink, from Harry, looked around the room at the people she didn’t know, at ones she barely did, in this place where people returned from war zones, from managing famines, from living in tents among the elephants, or being gored by buffalo, a place where everyone seemed matter-of-factly to lead a life of extremity and daring. Harry was with his parents tonight. They’d just returned from a trip vaccinating livestock before they were to leave again. In his absence, her thoughts of him were more vivid. He was young. He was quite young. She kept thinking of him being young. She remembered how easy it had been at that age to take up with a person. It happened all the time—new people came, you were with them. When they were gone, more new people would come. When she looked at it from that point of view she saw they were no big deal. She thought she’d try to adopt that viewpoint. Adopting other people’s viewpoints, you could convince yourself you were being empathetic—never mind you were ignoring your self.
More people arrived and the dancing grew wilder. One man took off his shirt and was rolling around on the lawn, a dog barking at him hysterically. In between songs you heard the high squawk of an animal, the hyrax who lived and shat on the roof.
Monday morning, readying for departure at last, Jane sat on a bed piled with linen pillows and watched Lana pack. Lana was tall but seemed larger than a normal tall person. She surveyed her room, eyes narrowed, hands on leather shorts. She was accustomed to packing and moving her caravan, but not having to restrain herself in volume. The room was as full as a bazaar, and indeed she had either bought or sold most of the things in it: piles of vintage fabric, leather-trimmed suitcases, necklaces draped on rusted hooks. She picked up an ancient wicker picnic basket with cylindrical holders for wine bottles.
This we take, she said. She opened the lid to show Jane the relics of the 1920s inside—tin plates with embossed leaves, miniature glass salt bottles fitting in felt holders, a silver-rimmed martini shaker.
What else? she said to herself. The tucks on either side of her mouth deepened in concentration. She strode across the room. Unlike some tall people who try to shrink themselves smaller, Lana strode with the confidence of a giant, jangling when she moved. She hoisted a trunk from behind a stand overloaded with brimmed hats and oilskin jackets and fished out a stack of brand new T-shirts. These we bring for the children, she said, and stuffed them in a canvas bag decorated with beadwork, another one of her ventures.
Jane told Harry that Don was coming with them, too. He shrugged. It struck Jane how lightly people here held on to agendas. She was used to a world of people wielding control in order to have things run smoothly which, she noticed, often caused more tension than peace.
Maybe he’ll learn something, Harry said. From Lana.
Jane thought of what Harry had learned from Lana. To fill out the thought, she said, She’s an expansive—Jane was going to say soul but thought it sounded pretentious—spirit.
You mean she sleeps with everyone? Harry did not say it unkindly.
No, I—
Well, she does. He paused then added, Me among them, you know.
Yes, Lana did say … Jane waited for him to elaborate. It seemed that many people here had, if they’d been here long enough, slept with many other people.
Lana’s got a lot to give, he said.
It was a surprise to Jane when someone was not cynical in the least.
Lana was now examining a pair of breakable crimson Moroccan glasses with gold designs. She shook her head and returned them to their hammered brass tray. She found a stack of tin Mexican cups pressed in the shape of bells. Yes, she said, these we can use. It was hard to say which gave her more pleasure—having the things herself, or the thought of offering them to someone else.
When they left Nairobi at last, they got caught in the afternoon traffic. Though if they’d left in the morning it would have been the morning traffic, or in the evening, the evening. There was always traffic around Nairobi, except for late at night when all the cars disappeared and there was no one at all.
Harry drove with Jane beside him. Her body now felt linked to his, and with it came the certainty that his person inside was good and unique and inspiring, regardless of the fact that only a smallest amount of Harry was known to her.
Pierre and Don were in the back on either side of Lana who was tucked into Don’s shoulder. Finally they left the traffic behind and the truck hummed over unsmooth road. The passengers fell asleep, bumping awake over potholes. When Jane woke, her window overlooked a valley dropping off the roadside with houses scattered among greenery and Lake Naivasha a purple disc below. The pink lace at the edge of the gray flats was a flock of flamingos. They stopped at a pull-over overlooking the valley when Lana spotted a display of Maasai blankets strung up on sapling branches, and could determine from a distance they were the old wool ones, not the new polyester blend. A woman sat in the shade with narrow shoulder blades and rectangular beaded earrings and was surprised by Lana’s speaking Maasai to bargain. Harry hunched down to a blanket spread with collar necklaces and belts dangling arrows and beaded leather bracelets. The old bracelets used gut, the new, plastic thread. He bought one, with red and green diagonal bands. Lana pointed out to Don where they were headed, to the right of the lake, her sister Beryl’s house. They were stopping for a night or two. Beryl’s husband Leonard was an artist and Lana was keen to show Don his work.
Back in the car Harry handed Jane the bracelet. You need a souvenir, he said. He gave it to her casually, and she felt her face flush. Thanks, she said, as if she were used to having men give her things. In truth it was rare and, snapping on the bracelet, it seemed important he not know it.
In a valley of light green trees they turned off the paved road onto beige dirt. At an open aluminum gate they drove on a smoother road with farmed fields of crops on either side. At a huddle of trees they passed a white barn trimmed in black with wrought-iron windows and a yard of carts with handle pulls tilted to the ground. A long avenue of towering eucalyptus made a roof as high as a cathedral with a white stucco house at the end. The villa had a red tile roof in the Italian style, with a wide terraced balustrade on one side full of potted palms and blooming hibiscus trees.
They piled out of the truck, and Jane felt the thrill of arriving at a beautiful place. At one end, wide double doors were flung open to a gigantic hall with a black and white checkered floor and a great archway in the shape of a spade. French doors were open all along the veranda. An interior balcony rimmed the second floor, with doors behind the wooden railing, some open to windows beyond, some shut. Children came running across from the far end in wet feet and bathing suits, followed by a young woman in a bathing suit top with a kanga wrapped around her waist languidly advancing, shaking out long wet hair. A swallow swooped past Jane’s head. Lana picked up two children in her strong arms.
I thought you were getting here for lunch, the woman said, gliding across the hall. She kissed Lana’s cheeks.
We tried, Lana said vaguely. To everyone else: This is my sister, she said brightly. Lana stood a head taller though her sister was the elder. Beryl, with her flat stomach and blasé manner, looked more like a teenager than a mother of four.
Well, you’re in time for tea at least. Like Lana, Beryl had the Kenyan brand of British accent, but where Lana’s was full of enthusiasm, Beryl’s was flat. She seemed to be sighing at the boredom of life, particularly incongruous to Jane in this paradise swooping with children and flowers and birds.
Pierre, I knew you were coming, she purred, kissing both his cheeks.
Hey, beautiful, Pierre said.
But Harry, too? Lana doesn’t tell me anything. How’d she rope you into it?
Flying, Harry said, kissing her hello.
That all? Beryl raised an eyebrow toward Jane, but she wasn’t done with the boys yet. And you … are Dan.
Don.
She put out her hand, looking at him straight-on. Welcome, Don. Then she turned to Jane. And you must be the American writer, she said, as if another person might find that impressive.
I am, Jane said. It’s so nice of you to let us all stay.
Oh God, it’s nothing. Thrilled to have visitors. Lana, take them out and I’ll get the tea organized.
She pushed through a heavy door and Jane got a glimpse of a large kitchen with a number of dark-skinned people in light blue uniforms standing at sinks or bent over a table dusted with flour.
They crossed the gigantic hall, Jane’s nerves still vibrating from the jostling ride. The whitewashed veranda overlooked a garden of spiky bushes and hedges dotted with flowers. Mown paths meandered among more tangled jungle beyond. A sliver of light green pool could be seen at the end of an alley of cedar trees and a gigantic palm tree rose far past the other trees like an exploding firework. Marsh stretched beyond with inky grass markings and black twisted trees. The purple lozenge of the lake lay farther.
On the porch a low table with benches had been set for the children. There were bowls of berries and cookies on plates and pink cups filled with hot chocolate. A higher table of dark wood with brass corners and pale wood inlays was set with a silver tea set and plates of digestive biscuits, lemon slices, brown sugar lumps and a pitcher of cream. Blossoms of jasmine and red hibiscus were scattered among the plates.
Now this is more like it, Don said.
Everyone took a chair but Harry, who sat at the edge of the porch, feet hanging down, leaning against a pillar near the children.
Beryl appeared empty-handed, trailed by a woman in a light blue uniform with a white apron, carrying a tray of more tea and more cups.
Asante, Fatima, Beryl said, and sat. She poured the tea. Her arms were thin and tan. A young boy appeared behind Fatima, rattling a red lacquer tray. A wonderful smell rose.
You have croissants, Pierre said with a happy look.
No, no, Wilson, put it here. And take these to the children. No, these. The boy set down the tray, sneaking glimpses at the guests. So, Don, where are you from?
Los Angeles.
Wait. She looked at Lana. Is this the movie producer?
No, Beryl.
Oh, he sounded interesting. What was his name? She frowned at the children’s table. Tessie, stop it. Now.
But Roan’s pushing me off.
Then go on the other side. Roan, you know better. She faced back to Lana. What was his name?
Beryl, Lana said.
What?
It was Michael.
Right, he did that movie about the wizards. The children loved it. But you’re not in the movies, she said to Don, smiling.
No, can’t say I am. I’m in finance.
Right, Beryl said. So you’re all off to Rwanda?
Uganda, Jane said.
Never been there, actually, she said, surprised. Does everyone have tea?
None of us have been either, Pierre said.
So what’s in Uganda? She tucked her legs and curled around her cup, sipping it. Something was knocked over at the children’s table. Mama! someone cried.
Willa, for God’s sakes, ask Tess to pour it. Fatima! Beryl screamed.
That wasn’t me. Porter did it, said a little girl with tangled hair.
Fatima appeared and mopped up the spillage. She spoke to the children under her breath, not in English.
Well, help Porter out, then, Beryl said. Tessie, come on, you’re the one they’re looking up to. Honestly. Beryl decided to stop noticing and turned in the wicker chair, facing away from the children, draping her legs over the armrest. But Uganda has got gorillas, too, I know.
That’s in the south, Lana said. We’re going to the north. Jane’s doing a story about the abducted children.
Oh, right, the rebels. Beryl’s attention was already straying. Tess, enough! She spoke over her shoulder. Go on, if you can’t behave. The children went running off, except for a boy who stayed to talk to Harry. They appeared to be examining a butterfly.
They call themselves rebels, Jane said, but it’s really a roaming band of bandits terrorizing a rural community too poor to defend themselves. They’re not getting much help from the government.
Well, that sounds fun, Beryl said.
Lana was looking at the coins on her necklace, hitting them. Fun isn’t exactly the idea, Beryl.
No, God forbid fun. No, I’m kidding. Obviously. It sounds good. I mean, good for you to do it. Really. To be honest, I wish I could come.
Where’s Leonard? Pierre said.
On safari. Where else? The younger girl came and draped her arm around her mother’s neck, observing the guests. Beryl patted the little hand.
Oh, I thought he’d be here, Lana said. When’s he back?
Think he tells me?
Lana stood and pointed into a side garden. Some of his pieces are here. Don, come look.
Yes, go look, Beryl said, staying in her chair.
Everyone else rose from the chairs.
Dark hedges enclosed large figures that looked at first to be made of sticks. Then Jane saw the material was bones. Hundreds of bones were cobbled together in hulking forms, one in the shape of a birdcage with a large skull inside, another a tornado with bones seeming to swirl. There was a large foot.
He made practically everything we’re sitting on here, too, Lana said.
Don, arms crossed, observed the sculptures with a particular expressive reverence some people display when viewing art. He was frowning and nodding.
My favorite is that one. Pierre pointed down the veranda to a rope hammock strung between two elephant tusks.
Don brightened. That for sale?
God, no, said Beryl.
It’s a little controversial, Lana said.
She means illegal.
He found them, for God’s sakes, Beryl said. Not even Leonard would kill an elly. Lana, shall we show everyone their rooms?
Let’s.
Roy and Damian are flying in tonight, Beryl said offhandedly.
Really? Lana regarded her sister with glittering, knowing eyes. Beryl was absorbed in folding stray napkins and returning them carefully to the tray.
That should be interesting, Lana said. They staying long?
Beryl shrugged. Who knows. I better go see if the children have killed each other. She stood, languidly. Harry, you’re in the blue room. Beryl whispered loudly to Lana. Is he staying with—what’s her—?
Jane.
Right. You have the blue room. With Jane. And Pierre is in the tower. She strolled off.
Cheers for the tea, Harry called after her, practically the only thing he’d uttered since they’d arrived.
You are so welcome, darling. We’ll catch up later. I want to know every little thing.
Lana had a residence of her own on the property, a platform tent out of sight of the house. There was a large bed covered with yellow and orange Ethiopian kente cloth, and a claw-footed bathtub the servants filled with warm water in the evening.
Jane and Harry’s room had a four-poster bed painted silver.
After tea she and Harry took a swim in the light green pool beneath the gigantic palm. The early evening was still and quiet. When an owl flew above them it made an eerie whoosh. Jane and Harry exchanged a glance, heads above the surface. She dove underwater and held the glance with her as if it had entered a vein.
Back in the house the cavernous black and white hall was booming with Beethoven. The transporting melody seemed to roil in the arching ceiling like thunderclouds.
Jane shut the door to their room on the ground floor near the entrance. The music was muted. She lay on the bed and fell asleep in her wet towel. Traveling, one slept at odd times and suddenly. She opened her eyes to Harry’s face with his eyes closed beside her in the soft shadowless light. His face was smooth and inscrutable. In sleep it looked ageless. She looked at the curve of his eyelashes and the dark eyebrows. The thing that frightened her in his open eyes was not there in his shut eyes. When a person was asleep you could ponder his face.
His lip curved over his teeth. The mouth was the same as when awake, composed and calm, a little obstinate. She had the strange sensation that he was a younger version of herself. What was that familiar thing in him? Was it because she had been that age once? She had the odd notion that she’d been inside his head, at another time in her life. But Harry was much further along in self-possession than she’d ever been.
There were no freckles on his face, though his shoulder was sprinkled with them. She kissed his shoulder and, without opening his eyes, he came alive and reached for her and turned her around, pulling her back against him to hold her tight, then lay still again. How many years did she have on him? She hadn’t yet counted, but now she did. Sixteen, no, seventeen. Well, that was a record. She guessed the older one got the more records like that one could break.
He slept against her and she looked around the room. There was an armoire whose ivory handles had carvings of bows and arrows, and by the door an iron hat stand with antler hooks. A brass lamp had a colored glass lampshade. She thought how these things would have had to be transported in some bumping truck, wrapped in thick burlap or canvas, to get here. The silver ribs of the bed curved over them, with a white canopy draped on it. The bed looked Mexican with its thick layer of paint shimmering.
She felt far from everything. She often felt far from things in familiar surroundings, so it was a reassuring alignment when she had the feeling when actually far from home.
Here her thoughts didn’t dominate the landscape. The landscape and the new people in it, asking to be explored, took over. Far from home, she had less need to answer the questions, Why was she here? What was she thinking? What was the point? Those questions hovered, but did not insist on an answer. Habit was left behind, and with it, the old perspective. Her perspective stayed alert when she was far away. Back there was not so important anymore. She dozed off again.
She woke to the deep sputtering of an airplane motor. It grew louder as it descended and seemed to land directly outside her window. Harry was gone from the bed; she got up. She went to the window and opened the shutter to see a small plane in the blue and brown light rolling forward in the field. It came to a stop past where the cars were parked, just another vehicle of transport. The door opened, and a thin metal stair folded down. Two men ducked out and descended. One was pale and fair, the other dark. The pale man went to the rear and opened a door and pulled out some backpacks and a few boxes. The other in rolled-up pants was setting wood blocks under the airplane wheels. An askari with bare black arms and draped in a blanket stood by holding a spear. They exchanged words, and the two men left the plane under his watch. Striding toward the house, they were laughing. Jane wondered which one was for Beryl.
Who was that? came Harry’s voice from the bathroom, echoing in the high ceiling.
Two men in a plane, she said. She wrapped herself in a kikoi and went into the bathroom. A lightbulb clustered by glass grapes hung from the ceiling. The sink mirror was stuck with eagle feathers in a fan shape. Harry was sitting in water smoking a cigar. The tub was cast iron with feet, claws clutching balls.
You look happy, she said.
Come in.
She slipped into the water facing him. It was a long bathtub. A part of her checked to see if she felt shy with him. Only a small part did. Then that part was gone. Jane picked up a blue bar of soap and lathered her hands. She was glad to be there with him, but didn’t say it. Instead she said, Good cigar?
He blew smoke, nodding.
They heard commotion in the hallway, the two men arriving and being greeted.
On the wall was a framed ink drawing of a naked woman, pregnant, lying on her side. Is that Beryl? she said. They both gazed at the frenzy of curving lines.
Yes, it looks like a Leonard.
She doesn’t sound particularly pleased with Leonard, Jane said.
Beryl has a lot of putting up to do.
And four kids on top of it, Jane said.
There was a silence in the tall room. Harry’s face was relaxed. Jane felt silence was something which must be filled.
I can barely imagine having one child, she said.
Which was not exactly true. Silence often got filled with things not exactly true. Jane did in fact imagine having a child somewhat often, and rather more often lately. Images of it appeared in various mirages. She was holding a baby in bed just after birth; a child was walking unsteadily across a lawn, arriving to her outstretched arms. Though in the vision Jane somehow looked more like her older sister, Marian, a real mother, and the child was teetering on familiar grass in front of Marian’s house in New Jersey.
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Susan Minot
Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities on behalf of their leader, the despicable Joseph Kony. Her life becomes a constant struggle to survive, to escape, to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has travelled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her centre after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.With mesmerising emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.
Thirty Girls
Susan Minot
Copyright (#ulink_2202da55-5600-54d8-8f6d-51adf59bbd77)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies
A portion of this work originally appeared in different form
in Granta (winter 2012)
Copyright © 2014 by Susan Minot
Design by Kate Gaughran. Cover photographs © Claudia Dewald/Getty Images
Susan Minot asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007550722
Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007568901
Version: 2015-01-30
To beloved daughters Ava Cecily Hannah
and the brave daughters of Uganda
Contents
Cover (#u9c6f913b-e389-54f4-bf0b-a7b7a2f9cfb4)
Title Page (#u2ecb438b-427d-5176-8519-a093f6eca1f0)
Copyright (#ubd3f654d-38ae-5ccb-9544-72adb2f9e0f0)
Dedication (#u76edc0b2-6b76-5953-95bf-1aa23b1417a2)
I: THEY TOOK ALL OF US (#u14a98450-0564-5a93-865f-01a9d8da28fc)
1. Thirty Girls (#u2aa1c2d9-ed05-5c9a-b5b0-b21b84c9dad0)
II: LAUNCH (#u4a5bdf30-1763-5ca7-9858-2da4ff5a23e3)
2. Landing (#u071201bd-f96f-50cf-ad03-e25e2a58b36c)
3. Esther (#uaaa8086b-6444-52e0-88e6-90ea948890d8)
4. Taking Off (#u30ab501b-bd04-53a1-80b6-948091fdb029)
III: FIRST DAYS (#litres_trial_promo)
5. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Recreational Visits (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Independence Day (#litres_trial_promo)
IV: TO THE NORTH (#litres_trial_promo)
8. On Location (#litres_trial_promo)
9. In the Bush (#litres_trial_promo)
V: IT IS POSSIBLE (#litres_trial_promo)
10. At St. Mary’s (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Was God in Sudan? (#litres_trial_promo)
VI: REFUGE (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Hospitality in Lacor (#litres_trial_promo)
13. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
14. What Comes Back to Me (#litres_trial_promo)
VII: GULU (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Love with Harry (#litres_trial_promo)
16. Stone Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII: AIR POCKET (#litres_trial_promo)
17. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Dusty Ground (#litres_trial_promo)
IX: SPIRAL (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Where I Went (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Don’t Go (#litres_trial_promo)
X: FLIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Perhaps It Is Better Not to Know Some Things (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Where I Didn’t Go (#litres_trial_promo)
23. The You File (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes and Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Susan Minot (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#ulink_f8114201-63de-5c5e-8d99-2b0dadb8710d)
1 / Thirty Girls (#ulink_ad7eb859-a495-5688-8f74-2279752b9e6e)
THE NIGHT THEY TOOK the girls Sister Giulia went to bed with only the usual amount of worry and foreboding and rubbing of her knuckles. She said her extra prayer that all would stay peaceful, twisted down the rusted dial of her kerosene lamp and tucked in the loose bit of mosquito net under the mattress.
The bed was small and she took up very little of it, being a slight person barely five feet long. Indeed, seeing her asleep one might have mistaken her for one of her twelve-year-old students and not the forty-two-year-old headmistress of a boarding school that she was. Despite her position, Sister Giulia’s room was one of the smaller rooms upstairs in the main building at St. Mary’s where the sisters were housed. Sisters Alba and Fiamma shared the largest room down the hall and Sister Rosario—who simply took up more space with her file cabinets and seed catalogues—had commandeered the room with the shallow balcony overlooking the interior walled garden. But Sister Giulia didn’t mind. She was schooled in humility and it came naturally to her.
The banging appeared first in her dream.
When she opened her eyes she knew immediately it was real and as present in the dark room as her own heart beating. It entered the open window, a rhythmic banging like dull axes hitting at stone. They are at the dorms, she thought.
Then she heard a softer knocking, at her door. She was already sitting up, her bare feet feeling for the straw flip-flops on the floor. Yes? she whispered.
Sister, said a voice, and in the darkness she saw the crack at the door widen and in it the silhouetted head of the night watchman.
George, I am coming, she said, and felt for the cotton sweater on the chair beside her table. Sister, the voice said. They are here.
She stepped into the hall and met with the other nuns whispering in a shadowy cluster. At the end of the hallway one window reflected dim light from the two floodlights around the corner at the main entrance. The women moved toward it like moths. Sister Alba already had her wimple on—she was never uncovered—and Sister Giulia wondered in the lightning way of idle thoughts if Sister Alba slept in her habit and then thought of how preposterous it was to be having that thought at this moment.
Che possiamo fare? said Sister Rosario. What to do? Sister Rosario usually had an opinion of exactly what to do, but now, in a crisis, she was deferring to her superior.
We cannot fight them, Sister Giulia said, speaking in English for George.
No, no, the nuns mumbled, agreeing, even Sister Rosario.
They must be at the dormitory, someone said.
Yes, Sister Giulia said. I think this, too. Let us pray the door holds.
They listened to the banging. Now and then a voice shouted, a man’s voice.
Sister Chiara whispered, coming from the back, The door must hold.
It was bolted from the inside with a heavy crossbar. When the sisters put the girls to bed, they waited to hear the giant plank slide into place before saying good night.
Andiamo, Sister Giulia said. We must not stay here, they would find us. Let us hide in the garden and wait. What else can we do?
Everyone shuffled mouselike down the back stairs. On the ground floor they crossed the tiled hallway past the canning rooms and closed door of the storage room and into the laundry past the tables and wooden shelves. Sister Alba was breathing heavily. Sister Rosario jangled the keys, unlocking the laundry, and they stepped outside to the cement walkway bordering the sunken garden. A clothesline hung nearby with a line of pale dresses followed by a line of pale T-shirts. Dark paths divided the garden in crosses, and in between were humped tomato plants and the darker clumps of coffee leaves and white lilies bursting like trumpets. A three-quarter moon in the western sky cast a gray light over all the foliage so it looked covered in talc.
The nuns huddled against the far wall under banana trees. The wide leaves cast moonlit shadows.
The banging, it does not stop, whispered Sister Chiara. Her hand was clamped over her mouth.
They are trying very hard, Sister Alba said.
We should have moved them, Sister Rosario said. I knew it.
The headmistress replied in a calm tone. Sister, we cannot think of this now.
They’d put up the outside fence two years ago, and last year they’d been given the soldiers. Government troops came, walking around campus with guns strapped across their chests, among the bougainvillea and girls in their blue uniforms. At night some were stationed at the end of the driveway passing through the empty field, some stood at the gate near the chapel. Then, a month ago, the army had a census-taking and the soldiers were moved twenty kilometers north. Sister Giulia had pestered the captain to send the soldiers back. There was never more than a day’s warning when the rumors of an attack would reach them, so the nuns took the girls to nearby homes for the night. They will be back, the captain said. Finally, last week, the soldiers returned. The girls slept, the sisters slept. Then came the holiday on Sunday. The captain said, They will be back at the end of the day. But they didn’t return. They stayed off in the villages, getting drunk on sorghum beer.
The Jeep had been out of fuel, so Sister Giulia took the bicycle to Atoile. From Atoile someone went all the way to Loro in Kamden to see if the soldiers were there. No sign of the army. She sent a message to Salim Salee, the captain of the north, who was in Gulu. Must we close the school? she asked. No, do not close the school, he answered by radio. When she arrived back at St. Mary’s it was eight o’clock and pitch black and still nothing was settled. Sister Alba had the uneaten dinner there waiting for the soldiers. Sister Rosario had overseen the holiday celebrations and gathered the girls at the dorm for an early lights-out.
The banging had now become muted. The garden where the nuns stayed hiding was still, but the banging and shouting reached them, traveling over the quadrangle lawn then the roof of their building and down into the enclosed garden. Across the leafy paths at the entrance doors they could see George’s shadow where he’d positioned himself, holding a club.
I don’t hear any of the girls, said Sister Fiamma.
No, I have not heard them, said Sister Giulia. They could make out each other’s faces, and Sister Giulia’s eyebrows were pointed toward one another, as they often were, in a triangle of concern.
What’s burning? Sister Guarda pointed over the roof to a braid of red sparks curling upward.
It’s coming from the chapel, I think.
They wouldn’t burn the chapel.
Sister, they murder children, these people.
They heard the tinkling of glass and the banging stopped. Instead of being a relief the sound of only shouting—of orders being given—and the occasional sputtering of fire was more ominous.
I still do not hear the girls, said Sister Chiara. She said it in a hopeful way.
They waited for something to change. It seemed they waited a long time.
The shouts had dropped to a low calling back and forth, and finally the nuns heard the voices moving closer. The voices were crossing the quadrangle toward the front gates. They were nearby. The nuns’ faces were turned toward George where he stood motionless against the whitewashed wall. Sister Giulia held the crucifix on her necklace, muttering prayers.
The noise of the rebels passed. The sound grew dim. Sister Giulia stood.
Wait, Sister Alba said. We must be sure they are gone.
I can wait no longer. Sister Giulia took small steps on the shaded pathway and reached George.
Are they gone?
It is appearing so, George said. You remain here while I see it.
No, George. She followed him onto the porch’s platform. They are my girls.
He looked at her to show he did not agree, but he would not argue with the sister. Behind her he saw the pale figures of the other nuns moving across the garden like a fog. You walk behind me, he said.
George unbolted the doors of the breezeway and opened them to the gravel driveway lit by the floodlights. They looked upon a devastation.
The ground was littered with trash—burned sticks and bits of rubber and broken glass. Scattered across the grass of the quadrangle in the shadows were blankets and clothes. George and Sister Giulia stepped down, emerging like figures from a spaceship onto a new planet. In front of the chapel, the Jeep was burning with a halo of smoke. Dark smoke was also bellowing up in long tubes out of the smashed windows of the chapel. But she and George turned toward the dormitory. They could see a black gap in the side where the barred window had been. The whole frame had been ripped out and used as a ladder. That’s how they’d gotten inside.
Bits of glass glittered on the grass. There were soda cans, plastic rope, torn plastic bags. The second dormitory farther down was still dark and still. Thank the Lord, that appeared untouched. Those were the younger ones.
The girls …, Sister Giulia said. She had her hands out in front of her as if testing the silence. She saw no movement anywhere.
We must look, George said.
They stood at the gaping hole where the yanked window frame was leaning. The concrete around the frame was hacked away in chunks. One light shone from the back of the dormitory, the other bulbs had been smashed.
From the bushes they heard a soft voice: Sister.
Sister Giulia turned and bent down. Two girls were crouched in the darkness, hugging their nightshirts.
You are here, Sister Giulia said, dizzy with gratitude. She embraced the girls, feeling their thin arms, their small backs. The smaller one—it was Penelope—stayed clutching her.
You are safe, Sister Giulia said.
No, Penelope said, pressing her head against her stomach. We are not.
The other girl, Olivia Oki, rocked back and forth, holding her arm in pain.
Sister Giulia gathered them both up and steered them out of the bushes into some light. Penelope kept a tight hold on her waist. Her face was streaked with grime and her eyes glassed over.
Sister, they took all of us, Penelope said.
They took all of you?
She nodded, crying.
Sister Giulia looked at George, and his face understood. All the girls were gone. The other sisters caught up to them.
Sister Chiara embraced Penelope, lifting her. There, there, she said. Sister Fiamma was inspecting Olivia Oki’s arm and now Olivia was crying too.
They tied us together and led us away, Penelope said. She was sobbing close to Sister Chiara’s face. They came to know afterward that Penelope had been raped as she tried to run across the grass and was caught near the swing. She was ten years old.
Sister Giulia’s lips were pursed into a tighter line than usual.
George, she said, make sure the fire is out. Sister Rosario, you find out how many girls are gone. I am going to change. There is no time to lose.
No more moving tentatively, no more discovering the damage and assessing what remained. She strode past Sister Alba, who was carrying a bucket of water toward the chapel.
Sister Giulia re-entered the nuns’ quarters and took the stairs to her room. No lights were on, but it was no longer pitch black. She removed her nightdress and put on her T-shirt, then the light-gray dress with a collar. She tied on her sneakers, thin-soled ones that had been sent from Italy.
She hurried back down the stairs and across the entryway, ignoring the sounds of calamity around her and the smell of fire and oil and smoke. She went directly to her office and removed the lace doily from the safe under the table, turned the dial right, then left, and opened the thick weighty door. She groped around for the shoebox and pulled out a rolled wad of bills. She took one of the narrow paper bags they used for coffee beans and put the cash in it then put the bag in the small backpack she removed from the hook on the door. About to leave, she noticed she’d forgotten her wimple and looked around the room, like a bird looking for an insect, alert and thoughtful. She went to her desk drawer, remembering the blue scarf there. She covered her hair with the scarf, tying it at her neck, hooking it over her ears. That would have to do.
When she came out again she met with Thomas Bosco, the math teacher. Bosco, as everyone called him, was a bachelor who lived at the school and spent Christmas with the sisters and was part of the family. He stayed in a small hut off the chapel on his own. He may not have been so young, but he was dependable and they would call upon him to help jump-start the Jeep, replace a lightbulb or deliver a goat.
Bosco, she said. It has happened.
Yes, he said. I have seen it.
Sister Rosario came bustling forward with an affronted air. They have looted the chapel, she said. As usual she was making it clear she took bad news harder than anyone else.
Bosco looked at Sister Giulia’s knapsack. You are ready?
Yes. She nodded as if this had all been discussed. Let us go get our girls.
Bosco nodded. If it must be, let us go die for our girls.
And off they set.
By the time they had left the gate, crossed the open field on the dirt driveway and were walking a path leading into the bush, the sky had started to brighten. The silhouette of the trees emerged black against the luminous screen. The birds had not yet started up, but they would any minute. Bosco led the way, reminding the sister to beware of mines. The ground was still dark and now and then they came across the glint of a crushed soda can or a candy wrapper suspended in the grass. A pale shape lay off to the side, stopping Sister Giulia’s heart for a moment. Bosco bent down and picked up a small white sweater.
We are going the right way, she said. She folded the sweater and put it in her backpack, and they continued on. They did not speak of what had happened or what would happen, thinking only of finding the girls.
They came to an area of a few straw-roofed huts and asked a woman bent in the doorway, Have they passed this way? She pointed down the path. No one had telephones yet information traveled swiftly in the bush. Still, it was dangerous for anyone to report on the rebels’ location. When rebels discovered you as an informant, they would cut off your lips. A path led them to a marshy area with dry reeds sticking up like masts sunk in the still water. They waded in and immediately the water rose to their chests. Sister Giulia thought of the smaller girls and how they could have made it. Not all the children could swim.
Birds began to sing, their chirps sounding particularly sweet and clear on this terrible morning. They walked on the trampled path after wringing out their wet clothes. Sister Giulia had been in this country now for five years and still the countryside felt new and beautiful to her. Mostly it was a tangle of low brush, tight and gray in the dry season, flushing out green and leafy during the rains. An acacia tree made a scrollwork ceiling above them and on the ground small yellow flowers swam like fish among the shadows.
They met a farmer who let them know without saying anything that they were going in the right direction, and farther along they caught up with a woman carrying bound branches on her head, who stopped and indicated with serious eyes that, yes, this was the right way. People did not dare speak and it was understood.
The sun rose, yellow and bright behind them. Sister Giulia saw the figure of a person crouching in the grass at the far side of a clearing. Suddenly the figure was running toward them. It was a girl. As she came closer, they saw it was Irene. She was wearing her skirt as a shirt to cover her upper body. Sister Giulia embraced her and asked her if she was all right. Yes, Irene said, crying quietly. She was all right now.
We are going to bring back the girls, Sister Giulia told her. Irene nodded with disbelief. Sister Giulia gave her the white sweater and walked back with her a ways till they met again the woman carrying the branches and asked if Irene could go with her back to the village. The woman took her. It struck Sister Giulia how quickly one could adjust to a new way of things. You found a child, you sent her off with a stranger to safety. But then it was simply a new version of God watching over her.
Soon the sky was white. They walked for an hour, then another. By now their clothes were dry though her sneakers stayed wet. The sun was over their heads.
Far off they heard a shot and stopped, hopeful and frightened at the same time. They waited and heard nothing more. The sound had come from up ahead and they started off again with increased energy.
Sister Giulia apologized to Bosco for not having brought water. This is not important, he said.
At one point she spotted a white rectangle on the path in front of her and picked it up. It was one of the girls’ identity cards. Akello Esther, it said. She was in the 4th Class and had recently won the essay contest for a paper about her father and the effect of his accident on their family. She showed Bosco. He nodded. They had been this way.
When they heard shots again there were more of them and closer. Shouting voices floated through the bush from far off. They’d crossed a flat area and were now going up and down shallow hills. At the top of a higher hill they had a vista across a valley to a slope on the other side.
I see them, Bosco said. She stood near him and looked and could see only brown-and-green lumps with dark shadows slashed off them. She looked farther up the slope, bare of trees, and saw small bushes moving. Then she saw the girls, a line of them very close together, some with white shirts and all with dark heads. Alongside the line were gray and green figures, larger, guarding them on either side. It was too far to see the features on the faces.
For a moment she couldn’t believe her eyes. They had found them. She asked herself, What am I to do now? At the same time she set off, but now in front of Bosco. She had no plan. She prayed that God would guide her.
They took small steps down the steep path almost immediately losing sight of the opposite slope. They moved quickly, forgetting they were tired. It was past noon and they moved in and out of a dim shade. At the bottom of the hill they could look up and see the rebels with the girls. It appeared they had stopped. It was one thing to spot them far away and another to see them closer with faces and hats and guns. Then a rebel looked down and saw her approaching and called out. She thought it was in Acholi, but she couldn’t tell. She raised both hands up in the air and behind her Bosco did the same.
Other rebels were now looking over. She knew at least she would not be mistaken for an informant or an army soldier. Then she saw the girls catch sight of her. A large man walked down from higher up and stopped to watch her coming. He had yellow braid on his green shirt, a hat with a brim, and no gun. He shouted to his soldiers to allow her to approach and Sister Giulia made her way up the hill to where he waited with large arms folded. She saw the girls out of the corner of her eye, gathered now beneath a tree, and instinct told her not to look in their direction.
You are welcome, the man said. I am Captain Mariano Lagira. He did not address himself to Bosco or look at him. Sister Giulia lowered her gaze to hide her surprise at such a greeting.
She introduced herself and Thomas Bosco. I am the headmistress of St. Mary’s of Aboke, she said.
He nodded. She looked at him now and saw badly pockmarked skin and small eyes in a round face.
I have come for my girls, she said.
Captain Lagira smiled. Where were you last night?
I was not there, she said. Yes, it was a small lie. I had to take a sick nun to Lira. She slipped her backpack off and took out the brown bag. Here, I have money.
Mariano Lagira took the paper bag and looked inside. We don’t want money. He handed the bag to a rebel, who nevertheless carried it away. Follow me, he said. I will give you your girls. A rebel stepped forward and a fisted gun indicated that Bosco was to remain with him.
She felt a great lifting in her heart. Bosco hung back under the guard of a boy who looked no older than twelve. He wore a necklace of bullets and had hard eyes. She followed Lagira and passed close to some girls and began to greet them, but they remained looking down. She noticed that one rebel dressed in camouflage had a woman’s full bosom.
Captain Lagira pointed to a log with a plastic bag on it. Sit here.
She sat.
What have you there?
My rosary, she said. I am praying.
Lagira fished into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a string of brown beads. Look, he said. I pray too. They both knelt down and the rebels around them watched as the nun and the captain prayed together.
It was long past noon now and the air was still. When they finished praying, Sister Giulia dared to ask him, Will you give me my girls?
Captain Lagira looked at her. Perhaps he was thinking.
Please, she said. Let them go.
This is a decision for Kony, he said.
Kony was their leader. They called themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army, though it was never clear to her exactly what they were resisting. Museveni’s government, she supposed, though that was based in the south, and rebel activities remained limited to looting villages and kidnapping children in the north.
The captain stood. I must send a message then, he said. He had the rebels spread out batteries in the sun to be charged and they waited. She managed for a second here and there to sneak glances at the girls and saw most of their faces tipped down but a few watching her. Would you like some tea? the captain said. She could hardly answer and at that moment they heard the sound of helicopters far off.
Suddenly everyone was moving and shouting. Hide! Cover yourselves, they yelled. Sister Giulia saw people grabbing branches and the girls looked as if they were being thrashed as they were covered. She was pulled over to duck under bushes. Some of the girls had moved closer to her now. Leaves pressed on her. Then the loud helicopters were overhead, blowing dust off the ground and whipping the small leaves and loose dirt. Gunshots came firing down. One of the girls threw herself on Sister Giulia to protect her. It was Judith, the head girl.
The Ugandan army patrolled the area. Sister Giulia thought, They’re coming for the girls! But nearly immediately the helicopter swooped off and its blades hummed into the distance. They could not have known, it was just a routine strike. No one moved right away, waiting to be sure they were gone. After a pause heads lifted from the ground, their cheeks lightened by the dust. Sister Giulia saw Esther Akello with her arms over her friend Agnes Ochiti. The girl who had covered her, Judith, was wiping blood from her neck. A rebel handed Judith a bandage. She hesitated taking it. They were hitting them and then they were giving them bandages. There was no sense anywhere.
Orders were given now to move, quickly. The girls were tied to one another with a rope and walked in single file behind Sister Giulia. At least I am with my girls, she thought. She wondered if they would kill her. She wondered it distantly, not really believing it, but thinking it would happen whether she believed it or not. And if so, it was God’s will. They walked for a couple of hours. She worried that the girls were hungry and exhausted. She saw no sign they’d been given food.
At one point she was positioned to walk along beside Mariano. She had not dared ask him many of the questions she had. But since they had prayed together she felt she could ask him one. She said, Mariano Lagira, why do you take the children?
He looked down at her, with a bland face which said this was an irritating but acceptable question. To increase our family, he said, as if this were obvious. Kony wants a big family. Then he walked ahead, away from her.
After several hours they came to a wooded place with huts and round burnt areas with pots hanging from rods. It looked as if farther along there were other children, and other rebels. She saw where the girls were led and allowed to sit down.
Captain Lagira brought Sister Giulia to a hut and sat there on a stool. There was one guard with a gun who kept himself a few feet away from Lagira. This rebel wore a shirt with the sleeves cut off and a gold chain and never looked straight at Lagira, but always faced his direction. He stood behind now. During the walk they had talked about prayer and about God and she learned that Lagira’s God has some things not in common with her God, but Sister Giulia did not point this out. She thought it best to try to continue this strange friendship. Would Sister Giulia join him for tea and biscuits? Captain Lagira wanted to know.
She would not refuse. A young woman in a wrapped skirt came out from the hut, carrying a small stump for Sister Giulia to sit on. It was possible this was one of his wives, though he did not greet her. At the edge of the doorway she saw a hand and half of a face looking out. Tea, he said.
The woman went back into the hut and after some time returned with a tray and mugs and a box of English biscuits. They drank their tea. Sister Giulia was hungry but she did not eat a biscuit.
I ask you again, she said. Will you give me my girls. She didn’t phrase it as a question.
He smiled. Do not worry, I am Mariano Lagira. He put down his mug. Now you go wash. Another girl appeared, this one a little younger, about twenty, with bare feet and small pearl earrings. She silently led Sister Giulia behind the hut to a basin of water and a plastic shower bag hanging from a tree. She must have been another wife. Sister Giulia washed her hands and face. She washed her feet and cleaned the blisters she’d gotten from her wet sneakers.
She returned to Mariano. This rebel commander was now Mariano to her, as if a friend. He still sat on his stool, holding a stick and scratching in the dirt by his feet. She glanced toward the girls and saw that some of them had moved to a separate place to the side.
Mariano didn’t look up when he spoke.
There are one hundred and thirty-nine girls, he said and traced the number in the dirt.
That many, she thought, saying nothing. More than half the school.
I give you—he wrote the number by his boot as he said, one oh nine. And I—he scratched another number—keep thirty.
Sister Giulia looked toward the girls with alarm. There was a large group on the left and a smaller group on the right. While she was washing they had been divided. She knelt down in front of Mariano.
No, she said. They are my girls. Let them go and keep me instead.
Only Kony decides these things.
Then let me speak with Kony.
No one ever saw Kony. He was hidden over the border in Sudan. Maybe the government troops couldn’t reach him there. Maybe, as some thought, President Museveni did not try so hard to find him. The north was not such a priority for Museveni, and neither was the LRA. There were government troops, yes, but the LRA was not so important.
Let the girls go and take me to Kony.
You can ask him, he said and shrugged.
Did he mean it?
You can write him a note. Captain Lagira called, and a woman with a white shirt and ragged pink belt was sent to another hut, to return eventually with a pencil and piece of paper. Sister Giulia leaned the paper on her knee and wrote:
Dear Mr. Kony,
Please be so kind as to allow Captain Mariano Lagira to release the girls of Aboke.
Yours in God,
Sister Giulia de Angelis
As she wrote each letter she felt her heart sink down. Kony would never see this note.
You go write the names of the girls there, he said.
She looked at the smaller group of girls sitting in feathery shadows.
Please, Mariano, she said softly.
You do like this or you will have none of the girls, said Captain Mariano Lagira.
She left the captain and went over to the girls sitting on the hard ground in feathery shadows. She held the pencil and paper limply in her hand. The girls looked at her, each with meaning in her eyes.
She bent down to speak, Girls, be good … but she couldn’t finish her sentence.
The girls started to cry. They understood everything. An order was shouted and suddenly some rebels standing nearby were grabbing branches and hitting at the girls. One jumped on the back of Louise. She saw them slap Janet. Then the girls became quiet.
Sister Giulia didn’t know what to do. Then it seemed as if they were all talking to her at once, in low voices, whispering. No, not all. Some were just looking at her.
Please, they were saying, Sister. Take me. Jessica said, I have been hurt. Another: My two sisters died in a car accident and my mother is sick. Charlotte said, Sister, I have asthma.
Sister, I am in my period.
Sister Giulia looked back at the captain standing with his arms crossed. He was shaking his head. She said she was supposed to write their names but she was unable. Louise, the captain of the football team, took the pencil from her, and the paper, and started to write.
Akello Esther
Ochiti Agnes …
Judith … Helen … Janet, Lily, Jessica, Charlotte … Louise … Jackline …
Did I mistreat you, Sister?
No, sir.
Did I mistreat the girls?
No, sir.
So, next time I come to the school, do not run away. The captain laughed. Would the sister like more tea and biscuits? No, thank you. They bade each other goodbye. It was as if they might have been old friends.
You may go greet them before you leave, Mariano Lagira said.
Sister Giulia once again went over to the thirty girls, her thirty girls who would not be coming with her. She gave her rosary to Judith and said, Look after them. She handed Jessica her own sweater out of the backpack.
When we go you must not look at us, she said.
No, Sister, we won’t.
Then a terrible thing happened.
Catherine whispered, Sister. It’s Agnes. She has gone, just over there.
Sister Giulia saw Agnes standing back with the larger group of girls gathered to leave.
You must get her, Sister Giulia said. She couldn’t believe she was having to do this. If they see one is missing …
So Agnes was brought back. She was holding a pair of sneakers. She was told she might be endangering the others.
Okay, Agnes said. I will not try to run away again.
Sister Giulia had to make herself turn to leave.
Helen called after, Sister, you are coming back for us?
Sister Giulia left with the large group of girls. They walked away into the new freedom of the same low trees and scruffy grasses, which now had a new appearance, and left the thirty others behind. Bosco led the way and Sister Giulia walked in the middle. Some girls walked beside her and held her hand for a while. They bowed their heads when she passed near them. Arriving at a road they turned onto it. The rebels stayed off the roads. It grew dark and they kept walking. They came to a village that was familiar to some of them and stopped at two houses to spend the night. There were more than fifty girls to each house, so many lay outside, sleeping close in one another’s arms. Sister Giulia felt she was awake all night, but then somehow her eyes were opening and it was dawn.
At 5 a.m. they fetched water and continued footing it home. As the birds started up they saw they were closer to the school and found that word had been sent ahead and in little areas passed people who clapped as they went by. Sister Giulia felt some happiness in the welcome, but inside there was distress. They came finally to their own road and at last to the school drive.
Across the field Sister Giulia caught sight of the crowd of people near the gate. The parents were all there waiting. She saw the chapel blackened behind the purple bougainvillea, but the tower above still standing.
Many girls ran out to embrace their mothers who were hurrying to them. As she got close, Sister Giulia saw the parents’ faces watching, the parents still looking for their daughters. They searched the crowd. There was Jessica’s mother with her hand holding her throat. She saw Louise’s mother, Grace, ducking side to side, studying the faces of the girls. The closer they got to the gate, the more the girls were engulfed by their families and the more separated became the adults whose children were not there. These families held each other and kept their attention away from the parents whose girls had been left behind. They would not meet their gaze. In this way those parents learned their children had not made it back. When they came near Sister Giulia in all the commotion, she turned away from them. She was answering other questions. Some mothers were kneeling in front of her, some kissed her hand. She was thinking though only of the other parents and she would talk to them eventually but just now it seemed impossible to face them. Then she wondered if she’d be able to face anyone again, ever.
II (#ulink_2ac21308-4f1a-56e8-a1be-7a20a8e0a663)
Launch (#ulink_2ac21308-4f1a-56e8-a1be-7a20a8e0a663)
You have no idea where you are.
You sit among the girls. They’re in the shade, talking. It might be birdsong for all you understand or care. You think, I will never be close to anyone again.
2 / Landing (#ulink_e4bbc2c2-acc4-5496-9d1f-6e793c289ff1)
SHE STEPPED OUT of the plane and over the accordion hinge of the walkway to continue up the tunneled ramp. One always felt altered after a flight. There was the pleasant fatigue of no sleep and one’s nerves closer to the surface as if a layer of self had peeled off and gotten lost in transit. The change was only on the surface, but the surface was where one encountered the world. Her surface was ready for the new things that would happen in this new place, ready for anything different from what she’d known.
There was a soggy tobacco smell at the gate and loose rugs with long rolls no one had bothered to smooth out. She stood in a line of crumpled people holding their carry-ons and inching forward to wooden tables where clerks slowly stamped passports after a sliding look from the picture to the face.
She was finally away. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt the expansion, the air humid, the door opening, dawn light reflected off a hammered linoleum floor as she descended an old-fashioned staircase to the black carousel empty of baggage. There was a long row of bureaux de change with one short counter after another empty and behind them a large plate-glass window with palm trees being eaten by a white sky. Lackadaisical drivers were leaning on the hoods of their cars, half glancing around for a fare. Dark-haired men strolled in short sleeve shirts, women in thin dresses moved slowly. Everything mercifully said, This is not home.
The first time she saw him he flew.
They were in Lana’s driveway, unloading alabaster lamps she’d had copied on Biashara Street when a white Toyota truck pulled up and a young man with shoulder length hair opened the door. He leapt over the roof of the truck and landed in a bowl of dust.
Lana gave him a big greeting, embracing him as an old friend, as she embraced everyone. She stepped back to study him, hands on his shoulders. He had on a dirty white hat with a zebra band around the crown. Nice, she said, flicking the brim. Jane, come meet Harry.
Jane set down her crate. Harry, Jane, said Lana. Jane, Harry.
Cheers, Harry said in a flat tone. His chin drew in and he regarded Jane with a strange stoniness, as if she were an intruder who ought to explain herself. The impulse to explain herself was an urge Jane Wood struggled to ignore, so getting a look like that unnerved her. At least that was how she explained the unnerved feeling.
My friend from America, Lana said. She looked back and forth between them. Her bright gaze took in things quickly and let them go, just as fast.
Harry leaned forward and kissed Jane’s cheek, surprising her. Karibu, he said.
The phone rang inside the cottage and Lana dove to get it, swerving past the crates crowding the foyer.
We’re going for sundowners, she called over her shoulder. You must come.
With Lana, there was always a must.
A short time later Jane found herself crammed in the back seat of a dented station wagon driven by a paint-spattered neighbor of Lana’s named Yuri. They were headed to the top of the Ngong Hills.
The suburb of Karen flickered by. Its dirt driveways and high concrete walls topped with curling barbed wire hid the airy houses Jane had seen with their long shaded verandas and scratchy lawns. Abruptly the station wagon came to a sort of empty highway, drove on it for a while, then tilted off up a steep rutted road, laboring at a tipped angle. At the top they righted themselves over a lip and arrived at a wide sloping field of tall grass which dropped sharply to a vast smoky savannah banked in the distance with low gray hills.
Striped cloths were spread on the ground and Jane noticed the sunset behind too was striped with grimy clouds. Lana unpacked a hamper and poured vodka and orange juice from a thermos and they drank from dented silver flutes while watching the sky and leaning on each other. A warm wind blew up from the valley.
Jane knew none of them save Lana and even she was a recent acquaintance, met a year before in London on a film set Lana was decorating. If Jane was ever in Kenya, she must come visit. When the possibility actually arose, Jane found Lana and discovered how many guests and strangers took Lana up on her invitation. She was a tall striking girl with a cushioned mouth and flashing eyes. She was also a splendid recliner, as she was demonstrating now, surveying the scene before her like an Oriental odalisque, radiating enjoyment. Her pillow at the moment was a large American man named Don who appeared to be relishing his position of support despite an awkward pose requiring that he brace an arm against a nearby rock. His unwrinkled khaki pants and new white running shoes extended off the blanket into the dry grass. Lana was telling him about a project she had set up where students looked after orphaned wild animals. She must take him there tomorrow, she said, patting his red and white striped shirt, as if knowing money were packed in his chest. Yuri had brought along a dimpled girl in army boots. Jane thought she heard her say she was pre-med, which was surprising. Yuri and Harry were talking about flying. They paraglided here, at a spot farther down the escarpment where the updraft was better. The French fellow wearing a bandana was a photographer named Pierre. Pierre was also staying at Lana’s, on the couch in the living room. His low-lidded eyes regarded everything with amusement. He was snapping pictures of the army-boot girl who seemed not self-conscious in the least.
The sky dimmed and the air chilled and they packed up. They took the bumpy road back to Nairobi as it darkened. Harry sat slumped in the back seat beside Jane. She learned his last name was O’Day. He asked her what she was doing here.
What indeed, she thought. Writing a story. Getting away. She could say all that.
Seeing the world, she said.
She’s taking us to Uganda, Lana shouted back over Édith Piaf’s voice warbling out of the dashboard. Her long bare legs were draped over Don’s lap and extended out the window. After drinks everyone was feeling jolly.
Jane told Harry she was there to write a story on the children kidnapped by the LRA in northern Uganda. Lana had matter-of-factly said she’d go with her and that morning Pierre asked if he might come, too. He was in between assignments—there was no famine or war to cover at the moment—and he wanted to try shooting some video, not what he usually did. He mostly shot stills.
It’s not really my subject, she said. At all.
What’s your subject?
Desire.
It sounded totally pretentious, but what the hell.
And death.
Death should fit, he said mildly.
Death always fits. She smiled.
They both faced forward. In the front seat Lana was whispering in Don’s ear. Jane saw her tongue come out and lick it.
Things are hectic in Uganda, Harry said.
Have you been?
Not yet.
We haven’t exactly figured out how we’re getting there.
I am working on it, Lana said. I might have a possible driver.
Good, Jane said and a for a moment felt a pang of homesickness, which was odd since she did not want to be home in the least. She wanted to be as far away from back there as possible. Clutching at straws, she said.
You’ll figure it out, Harry said. You look like the kind of person who does.
She turned her squished neck to him to see if he meant it. Jane was sufficiently bewildered by what kind of person she was, so it was always arresting when someone, particularly a stranger, summed her up. His face, very close, had a sort of Aztec look to it, with flat cheeks and straight forehead and pointed chin. Jane couldn’t tell how old he was. There was no worry on his face. He was young. His expression was, if not earnest, still not cynical.
What do you do with yourself? she said.
Little of this, little of that.
She laughed. What at the moment?
I’m thinking about going to Sudan to look after some cows.
Really?
He shrugged. Maybe. Did anyone ever tell you you have a very old voice?
Voice?
The sound of it, he said. It’s nice.
Watch out! Lana screamed. The car jerked and swerved. Gasps of alarm rose from the passengers.
Not to worry, Yuri said in a calm voice, straightening the wheel which he steered with one hand. I saw the little bugger. He was trying to get hit.
Lana Eberhardt rented a cottage off the Langata Road. It was green with a rumpled roof where furry hyraxes nested and screeched through the night. In the three days that Jane had been in Nairobi, she had learned the cottage served as a crucial landing place in the constellation of the drifting populace.
Plans were made for dinner. Pierre got into a Jeep for the liquor run. He was tall and slow-moving, as if his attractiveness to women did not require he ever rush. This manner, combined with a French accent, made everything he said sound both frivolous and direct. Don drove off taking Lana in a shiny white rental car to some people called the Aspreys to see if they’d caught fish over the weekend. Their phone was out. Some time later they returned with a large cooler stocked with fish. The Aspreys themselves followed eventually, a short swarthy man and a woman in a shiny green wrapped affair with a plain face who carried herself with such flair and confidence she looked positively radiant. They had with them a beautiful freckled woman named Babette who someone said worked in an orphanage in the Kibera slum. She was dressed blandly in shorts and T-shirt and was all the more beautiful because of it. Other guests trickled in: a man named Joss Hall biting on a cigar and his wife Marina in a long Mexican skirt. There was a silent unshaven journalist whose name Jane didn’t catch. Harry O’Day had gone and not returned. Someone said he was sorting out job prospects. Pierre arrived with the liquor and a curly-headed blond woman with a fur vest and bare arms. He spent the evening leaning close to her with merry eyes. At eleven everyone finally sat down to dinner and more people appeared and wedged chairs in. A couple could be heard out in the garden shouting at each other, and Joss Hall came striding out of the shadows, with his head low, as if avoiding blows. Jane found herself glancing toward the doorway to see if that person Harry might reappear, but he did not walk in.
First they were leaving Tuesday, then Wednesday was better, then Friday. Pierre was waiting for some film that hadn’t arrived at the dukka in Karen on Friday. Lana had found them a driver, a German named Raymond, but he couldn’t leave till Sunday. No one was in a hurry; everyone had a loose time frame. They could wait.
Jane was napping on the Balinese bed in the back garden and woke to Harry’s face. He was wearing the white hat with the zebra band around it.
You want to come flying?
What?
Go on a mission. It’s only eight, nine hours’ drive.
Jane felt away from normal life, sleeping in a borrowed dress, living in a guest room. It was easy to say yes. You just went places here. You went with a stranger. Were you interested in him? Was he interested in you? You didn’t ask, even if you wondered. Jane always had so many questions rocking about in her head, it was nice to be in a place where people weren’t asking those questions. People here just did things. You just went.
She hardly knew where she was. Some nights she ended up sleeping at other people’s houses, missing a ride after the dinner party. The night before, she’d lost her key and Harry had taken her to his friend Andy’s adobe cottage, where they slept on the floor in front of a fireplace. Another paragliding guy with a beard was on the couch. Jane had not slept much, feeling Harry’s proximity.
What do I need to bring?
Nothing, he said.
But she went to the guest room and put some clothes in a bag. She peeled bills from a wad of cash and hid the rest with her passport behind some books. Her journal fell open and pictures fanned out on the floor. Harry picked them up and handed them back to her, sitting patiently while she wrote Lana a note saying she’d be back tomorrow or the next day. She took a white Ethiopian wrap Lana had lent her and got into Harry’s truck with him.
They drove through the Nairobi traffic with the Ngongs’ slate-gray peaks zigzagging above and headed west, up hills feathered with crevasses and past scribbled bushes and thin trees, and lit out on a spine-slamming potholed road.
They passed through the crossroad din of Narok, rattling with muffler-less cars. Yellow storefronts sat in a line beside blue storefronts. There were many groceries: Deep Grocery, Angel Food, Ice Me. People walked among goats or sat on piled tires; dust rose up. Then the colorful blur passed and suddenly the open windows framed a parched beige landscape smelling of smoke and dry grass. After long stretches of uninterrupted brush and flat dirt they’d find a scattering of huts with people on the side of the road, usually children, turning with slow, aimed faces to watch the vehicle pass.
Harry didn’t talk much, but after eight hours in a car she did learn some things.
The main thing for Harry was flying. Work was what you did to pick up a few shillings between missions. He’d had a few jobs, relief work in the north, construction work at a safari camp in Malawi. At home he could usually count on being hired by a German chap who put up electric fences for private houses in Langata. He spent a while too with a bloke trying to save wild dogs in the Tsavo desert. That had been a cool job, he said, nodding.
But mainly he flew. When he first started paragliding he would drive everywhere in the truck till he realized a motorcycle was better for the out-of-the-way places. And out-of-the-way places were the point. The whole continent of Africa was open to him, he’d only scratched the surface. A recent trip to Namibia over the baked desert clay was awesome. Sometimes he went with a mate, usually Andy, but he’d also go alone. His parachute folded up into a rucksack which he strapped to his bike.
She asked him questions; he answered them.
He’d go for days or weeks. Alone, he ate raw couscous, too lazy to cook. By the end of a trip he’d be living on vitamin pills and returned with burnt skin, weighing pounds lighter. His motorcycle got stuck in muddy swamps. Once, deep sand in the desert sputtered out the motor. There was the time he broke his collarbone landing on rocks which made the two-day drive home not so fun. Another time he dislocated his shoulder, but Andy was there and snapped it back.
Many places that he flew he could look in every direction and see no sign of people. Now and then a little cluster of huts was there blending into the brown earth or a thin wire of smoke rose out of the trees. But wildlife was everywhere. Elephants looked like tiny gray chips. Herds of gazelles were a swarm of flies on pale ground when you saw them from above. He looked down on the back of eagles with their stiff wings unflapping as he followed them down the thermal from behind.
Then Harry had a question. Who’s the man in the blue shirt? he said.
Jane looked at the unchanging landscape, thinking he meant someone on the road. Where?
In your book that fell out.
Oh. That’s my ex-husband.
You were married?
I was.
What happened?
Got divorced? she said brightly. Then, Got divorced. She felt him waiting for more. It was hard for Jane to stay silent if she felt someone wanted more. Two years ago, she said.
Harry rubbed his teeth with his tongue. You still love him? She looked at him, surprised. You keep his picture.
He’s dead.
He looked at her to see if this was true. Really?
Yup.
Whoa, he said under his breath. What happened?
OD.
That’s hectic.
Happens when you’re an addict, she said.
Yes, he said.
No, she agreed. It was bad.
They drove in silence.
How long were you married for?
Three years, but we were together for eight. He was in a clean period when we got we married. She laughed. As if that mattered.
Harry watched the road, tilting his head to show he was listening.
We weren’t together when he died, she said. But it was still … She didn’t finish.
What was his name? Harry said.
Jake.
Harry appeared thoughtful.
That was, Jane thought, all she was going to say about Jake. At least at the moment. Maybe she’d say more later. Some other time, when she knew him better. She might say more, if she thought he cared. But why would he want to know, really, was her first thought. And did she really want to tell him all that? Jake slipping back only a week after the little wedding, the wrenching final break, how she didn’t go to the funeral because the new girlfriend didn’t want her there. She’d had a hard enough time explaining it to herself without having to describe it to someone else. How do you describe hearing your husband say, I think I made a terrible mistake? And what more can you add about yourself if after hearing this you find that no vow of loyalty could have bound you more fiercely to him than this expression of rejection?
What about you? she said to Harry. You have a girlfriend?
His shoulders rose in a slow shrug. Sometimes, he said. Sort of. His face was placid.
Does she have a name?
He turned and smiled at Jane. Nope.
Open aluminum gates marked the entrance to the Massai Mara and a soft red road led them down a steep hill to the game reserve. They drove onto a flat green plain striped with thin shadows. In the distance a wall-like cliff rose on the western side.
They drove along the eastern edge among leafy trees. There she is, Harry said. To the south an escarpment curled like a giant wave about to break, dwindling off to the west and ending in a hazy bluff.
Harry pointed to some thornbushes which on closer examination turned out to be zebra sitting with ears up in a striped shade. Jane stared fascinated, feeling she was in a storybook, though she was to learn that zebra were not particularly impressive to Africans. Elephant, on the other hand, were by all standards worth driving off track for, as Harry did when he spotted a small herd low in a riverbank. The truck wove its tires through lumpy grasses and stopped, motor off and ticking, giving them a clear view of enormous wrinkled creatures, legs darkened by mud, swaying and bumping against one another. One lifted a trunk like a whip in slow motion and sprayed water. When a large female started flapping her ears, staring directly at the truck and making a throaty trumpet sound, Harry knew to start the engine and back up.
They passed the entrance to a safari camp and its wooden sign hanging on rope with the yellow recessed words Kichwa Tembo. Elephant Head. There were a number of commercial camps in the Mara, but Harry was taking her to a private house, owned by an anthropologist who’d married her Maasai translator and so had claims on the land. At the southern corner of the plain the red road tilted up, turning pale and chunky with white rocks. They lurched up a short vertical hill then hugged the side in diagonal slashes of switchbacks. Harry gripped the steering wheel as if he were wrestling something wild. They passed Maasai encampments he told her were called bomas, circular walls of tangled branches containing small huts and cattle which had to be protected from wildlife. On a day’s notice the boma would be dismantled and reassembled somewhere else where there was fresh grass.
Are we close? she said. But she wasn’t impatient. She felt happy and free. The land was majestic and riding beside him she had the feeling she was where she ought to be. It was not a feeling Jane had often.
Just up here, Harry said, and Jane didn’t care if they ever got there or ever stopped.
The white road ran along a naturally terraced area of the escarpment. Down to the right was a tunnel of greenery inside which flowed the Mara River. There was no road at all when Harry turned right down a slope of flattened grass strewn with hulking boulders at the end of which sat a stone house with a tin roof.
They got out. The air was loud with the sound of water rushing by in the river. They went to a door surrounded by a wrought-iron cage with a large padlock on it. No one appeared to be home. Jane sat for a moment in a chair left outside at a green painted table. The river surged by below, the color of café au lait, battering low branches that bounced against the white waves. Above the river a woolly ridge dark as a rain forest rose up against a yellowish sky. It was late afternoon. On the table a wineglass held a coin of red liquid and a dish had the last bits of a tart crust. Harry was digging around in the back of the truck, hauling out the backpack.
They walked straight up, first in the shade then passing the line into the sun. Jane followed Harry’s large backpack. They came to a narrow footpath. Halfway up they passed a thin woman, chest wrapped in a plaid red and blue shuka, walking down. Her head was shaved and her long earlobes hung with loops and beads. She was barefoot, probably around eighty, walking without hesitation. Jambo, they said and she nodded, passing by.
It didn’t take long to reach the top, and it felt as if they’d gone higher when they did. Soft wind blew and looking over the valley Jane had the sensation she’d never been able to see so far. Perhaps it was true.
Harry dumped out the sack and harness. He took off his shirt and put it back in the sack. As he unrolled the parachute it swelled out like foam. He shook it, then stepped into the harness attached to the thin ropes. His helmet was round and white, making his head look too big for his body. He stood a short distance from the edge with feet planted apart. Past the tall grass at the edge, the plain stretched miles below, brownish green but bleached of color. Behind Harry on the ground the chute flowed out like a wedding train. He pulled at it to free it from twigs and thorns, shaking at a dozen thin lines which all branched out into shorter lines attached to the chute. The likelihood of a tangle seemed immense. A harness of black straps fit over his shoulders and chest and wrapped around his thighs, arranged so that airborne he’d be seated. He stood for a while, staring out, listening. He looked at the clouds, gazing overhead, waiting for a gust. A white mist blew over them, dimming the sun and dampening Jane’s face, a low cloud whitening everything. The wind puffed the sheet behind him. His arm kept reaching back to fluff the light fabric, while he stayed face-forward. Wind filled the sail, lifting it, seeming to push him forward. He took a few quick steps. Jane was aware of the absence of the motor roar that usually accompanies a liftoff as Harry stepped off the edge onto air.
The fabric snapped behind him like a boat sail filling with a gust and he shot backward up over her head. He hovered there for a moment then swung back out over the escarpment drop. Jane heard a satisfied sort of whoop. She watched him, holding her hair away from her eyes, as his feet dangled past her and she learned that the person remaining on the ground could also receive a lifting sensation at takeoff. That is, she did. The flying was totally silent. In the air, Harry had said, you didn’t hear the sound of wind because you were moving at its speed. You were the wind.
The thermals wound in the invisible shape of corkscrews. She watched his figure soar out over the giant bowl of the world, soon catching the spiral in a wide slow circle as if up a spiral staircase. His sail was long and narrow, puckered like a giant earthworm. Very quickly his figure was quite far away.
To the west clouds were stacked with sculptural definition beside the lowering sun. The clouds, the clouds, she thought. Piled and beautiful, they were both indifferent and inviting. They had that paradox of nature you saw also in the sea, a thing appearing eternal even as it changed every second. Harry was now a miniature action figure under a sideways parenthesis. For a while longer she watched him sail, feeling weightless herself, floating by proxy. She didn’t need to fly to feel she was floating. She had a knack for channeling other people’s experiences. You left yourself behind and there was relief.
Harry was a white dot.
The vastness of the savannah below reminded her how tiny a speck she was too and yet at the same time offered her the illusion that she could reach across and touch the bluff miles away. Warm wind blew in small gusts against her and the dot seemed to pull her toward it into the sky. In dreams when she was flying she could never make out exactly how it was working. She swooped through doorways, looped over trees, but felt that at any moment the miracle might stop and down she’d plummet. She’d think in the dream, I better concentrate on staying up, but that wasn’t necessary. You just stayed up. You didn’t know what was keeping you up. It wasn’t in your control. It just happened. Like life. She thought how in her dreams she too flew in loops the way Harry was now, riding the thermals, following the shape of DNA.
A white sun perched on the western ridge. When it dropped behind, the light would go. Harry had told her to walk down before dark. Night-time was the kingdom of the animals. You didn’t want to be out there then with them. She entered into the shadow sloped across the hill, taking steps sideways, sliding a little, going down and yet still having the buoyant feeling of drifting over a vast plain. What had taken them thirty minutes to climb took her ten minutes to descend.
On the way down she kept the corrugated roof of the house in sight with the white truck beside it, the lightest thing in the gathering dusk. Darker vehicles were also parked there now. She reached the bottom and walked quickly on a dark road. When she saw a bright little fire going in front of the house it showed how dark it was. Closer she saw piled branches crackling inside a circle of stones. In front of the fire was the round table where two men and a woman were sitting with bottles and a crossed pair of army boots. She was greeted by the people with no surprise at seeing a strange woman emerge out of the dark. A fellow with a thin ponytail stood up and offered her his chair of twisted saplings. Karibu, he said. It was Andy. She sat.
Tusker? Jane was handed a bottle and introduced. The fire was warm on her legs.
The girl named Julia worked at a nearby tourist camp. The one with the boots on the table was Cyril from England.
They asked her where she was from and she asked them and soon they were talking about the baby leopard that had fallen through a torn patch in the roof last week. It landed on Annabel’s mother in her bed. Inside the stone house Jane could see more people crossing back and forth making dinner.
It was looking for food, said the girl, her white teeth glowing in the dusk. She wore a safari shirt and a short skirt. But it did freak her mum out a bit.
A bit, Jane said.
What did she do with it? said the fellow with the boots.
Shooed it out the window, said the girl, blowing cigarette smoke toward the fire. Poor thing didn’t want to be there either.
Maybe I better go get Harry, Andy said.
He’s not back? Jane said. Beyond the fire was blackness and the rushing of the river.
Well, Joss went to meet the plane, he said vaguely. I’ll go see. He gently moved off to be engulfed by blackness after which they heard the sputtering of a motor.
Inside Jane met their hostess. Annabel wore a ripped green evening gown and had red hair arranged in a loose triangle on her head. A long table was being set among rocks and feathers and bones. Jane was given the job of picking wax from Moroccan candlesticks and pouring salt into oyster shells, fossils from the river.
Hours later the table was crowded with plates of grilled meat and glistening bottles and candle flames. There were stories of men falling out of the sky, of cars breaking down crossing streams, of mothers running off with young lovers. A steady rain drummed on the roof above them. Jane sat beside a man in a polo shirt who was pointing out the absurdity of monogamy. Look at the animals, he said. Need I say more?
Annabel stood, pouring wine into everyone’s glasses, her smile showing wine-stained teeth.
You have someone back home? he asked her.
Kind of, she lied. She thought of the painter she’d liked lately though nothing had gone on between them.
Don’t let a man put you in a cage, he said. Ever.
Julia mentioned that it was her birthday as if she’d just remembered it, and everyone shouted and gave her toasts. Some time later Annabel handed her a present wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with a brown Hermès ribbon.
Much later Jane found herself outside in a pitch dark pouring with rain beside strangers pushing a car stuck in the muddy hillside. She gripped the door handle, her bare feet sunk in mud. The car would rev in a great burst, roll forward an inch then rock back down, inert. Try it again! they yelled. Another rev, another group shove, and it wasn’t budging an inch. People shouted, insulting each other, laughing. The rain was loud, slapping on the slick grass, but still Jane could hear the low constant roar of the river. The jaunty thump of music played from a tape inside where lanterns shone from yellow windows, casting dim smudges. Otherwise everything was black.
Jane could hardly see her hands. The shirt of the person beside her showed because it was light-colored. They kept heaving and shoving against the car. Suddenly it jerked forward, pulling out from everyone. Jane stumbled, managing somehow not to fall. A headless figure with a white shirt slid by as if on skis and grabbed her upper arm. Harry pulled her along so she skated at his side for a moment on the slick ground before they both toppled over into spattering mud. His arms were cupped around her, and they rolled in this clasp down the slope, somersaulting. The face was close and dark with darker spots where the eyes were and when its mouth came near she kissed it, kissing water and rain and bits of grit on his lips, thinking, I’m kissing Harry. She felt his chest warm through his soaked shirt. In her mind were images of the dinner and the faces around the candlelit table, of driving that day on the red snaking road, then of Harry lifting up into the orange air over her. They’d had a lot of wine and her thinking was far off and hazy but one thought did come—this is the way you found a person, crashing into him in the dark, without decision, without knowing where you were going—and even in that abandon she still managed to locate little worn areas of worry pulsing, but with no words to them. Worry didn’t stand a chance against this sliding and this person she was holding. The slope of the hill evened out and they stopped rolling and kept kissing and she had a laugh in the back of her throat with the thought, I’m kissing Harry. She kept thinking it as worry faded. She saw his hands on the steering wheel, his profile and his placid masklike face.
Wet hair plastered her forehead and his cheeks and their bodies pressed against the length of each other on the wet ground. She felt triply alive, as if delivered from an austere place where it was now apparent she’d been for a long time. How had she stayed there so long? Now she had his warm arms and her back was chilled. The rain kept streaming over them and behind in the deeper darkness the sound of the river was rushing and thundering. Harry was a close new thing which she knew very little about and yet at this moment found it seemed to offer her everything.
3 / Esther (#ulink_54fbf6fa-aa93-5faa-8f1a-873198af2c40)
I SIT AMONG the girls in the shade of a tree not so far above my head. It is peaceful with their voices in the air, talking quietly. It might be birdsong for all I understand or care.
I think, I will never be close to anyone again.
We are just now supposed to be drawing pictures of things we would like to forget. You can see why this is strange. We must think, in order to draw them, about those terrible things we would rather remove from our minds. We are told that drawing such things will help us remove them.
Instead I am drawing the tree past the work shed toward the field. It has a curved trunk and resembles a woman twisting to look over her shoulder.
Today I woke with a pressure on my eyes, pulling my forehead. I thought, Perhaps I am getting a cold. Maybe I am.
My mind is uneasy. Since being away, I am used to my thoughts being disrupted. They have cracks in them. I remember in a soft way, as in the distance, how it was to be whole. Nothing. It was like nothing. You just had wholeness, you did not feel it. I would not have known it was there if I had not become as I am now. It has offered me a perspective. It is interesting how one can understand a way that one was only after one is another way.
Beside me the girls’ heads are bent close to the paper. They use ballpoint pens and pencils which are better if you want to erase. Red pencils are often used for the blood and the bullets. At night the bullets were red.
Holly is beside me. She leans on a cardboard cracker box. She has drawn a house with a thatched roof and doorway, her house. Soon she will add men with pangas, a chair on fire, and her lute broken on the ground. She was practicing music when she was taken. Holly’s from the country near Ongoko, not from the town like me. I am from Lira town, which is not far, just a day’s walk.
Past the picnic bench near the shop the boys are together there drawing. I see that one, Simon, with them. His back is to me with his bad leg straight out. When he was shot the bullet was near the bone so his knee is not so good. He swings his foot around when he walks instead of stepping straight. The scar looks like a crack in a window with jagged lines coming out from a shiny pink center against his dark skin. The scars on us are not straight.
Simon is good at drawing so his drawings are tacked up in bicycle repair. One of a car on fire with flames smaller than the smoke, one of a boy with his arm cut off and drips of blood making a puddle. He’s skillful at details, doing three shades of camouflage with one lead pencil. His AK-47s shoot clouds and the soldiers have bouffant hairdos and sideburns as in cartoons. Everyone draws them that way, even though they do not so much look like that. They look like anyone.
A high chain fence follows two sides of the property here and there’s a wooden fence with pieces fallen out of it along the driveway. The playing field has no fence, but one side goes beside a marsh. We are not fenced in. Here is not a prison and still we are not permitted to leave.
I am not so good at drawing. I would rather look at a thing made in nature. I do not finish drawing that tree.
Our camp is called Kiryandongo Rehabilitation Center and we are, during the dry season, a dusty circle cleared in the middle of tangled bush a little ways off the Gulu Road. There are some huts and the office of two sheds connected where Charles our head counselor has an office. The kitchen has a small roof and all sides open to the fire pit and brick oven and there you see Francis cooking. Chickens peck around. We had chickens and when I was small I liked to hold them as pets. They were nervous, but if you keep patient they will calm down and stay in your lap even if their eyes are startled.
We have a parking area for cars. One belongs to Charles and the truck fetches food and supplies. The van is to transport children, but it is broken at this time and has not been used since I have been here.
In the work shed is a shop for making instruments and building chairs and repairing bicycles. Behind in the trees is a large white tent that came from Norway where the boys sleep. The ventilation is not so good and, having sixty boys inside, the air is unmoving and hot. The girls sleep in dormitories with bunk beds so close you can reach over and touch the girl next to you.
Holly is in the upper bunk beside me. She has decorated her area. From the ceiling strings dangle empty boxes of Close-Up toothpaste or fortified protein, an eye-drop bottle, a box of Band-Aids. I have no decoration. Underneath Holly is May, who is very pregnant, due in a month. Her parents do not accept the child coming and have not visited May.
At Kiryandongo we are all united by a thing that also divides us from others. We look at each other and know what we have been through. We also look away for the same reason.
Since my return I meet new challenges of the mind. I have decided to forget everything that happened to me there and so look forward to the remainder of my life. I am not so old, nearly sixteen. My life could still be long.
Before, my life was nothing to speak of. You would not have heard of it. Now, they tell us it is important to tell our story. They have us draw to tell it, but I am not so good at drawing.
We studied the Greeks in school and they had people called rhapsodes who memorized long stories and recited them the way you would a song. The long poems were epics. At banquets or by pools people would sit eating grapes and drinking from goblets and listen to the rhapsodes sing. It was not a song with music, but the rhapsodes still sang. They sang of heroes and of journeys.
When they ask us to speak, I cannot find the words. What I have inside is for me to look at alone. Who else can know it? Not anyone. I cannot say it out loud. How can one tell a story so full of shame?
I listen to the others talk and understand how they struggle. We knew the same things. I stay apart to make peace with it inside myself, if I am able. With the rebels I learned that inside is where it most matters in any case.
I am one of the abducted children. Did I tell you my name? I am Esther Akello.
I have been back about two weeks. The days are strange, I am not used to the peace. I am not used to waking without someone hitting my feet. The first week I slept a great deal and woke with swollen eyes, which in the mirror had dark hoops under them. There is a heaviness in me where gladness does not reach. I know there should be gladness that I have returned. I am free, but gladness does not come to me.
The boys finish their drawings then get up and kick around a ball on the dusty field. Boys forever like to play with balls. This is better than hitting each other. Simon is running with his bad leg. Charles claps his hands, getting them to go faster.
Here at Kiryandongo they always want you to join in. They say, Come on, Esther, I know you can run. Come on. Get up off your seat.
I prefer to sit. When the ants come I brush them away. If they keep coming back to me I pinch them between my fingers. Maybe I will get up when I am ready. Maybe I will not. I hate everyone.
As I said, my town is Lira. At night Lira is quiet and in the day it is not so loud either. We have a pink brick bank and a yellow brick post office and many churches, some with steeples, though most with simply a roof. Goats walk about. The main street is paved from the turnaround at one end and tilts upward past groceries and other shops selling batteries and Walkmans and clothes and stationery to the other end of town where the road becomes dirt and paths squiggle into the countryside. During the dry season the dirt is red and dusty, in the wet season it grows darker and stains our feet like rust.
I was born during the rainy season in April 1982, arriving by way of my parents, John and Edith Akello. I was preceded by a brother, Neil, then followed by sisters Sarah and Judy, and another brother, Matthew. I am told I came out very quickly and my mother who is a nurse said it was the fastest delivery she had seen or heard of. I was anxious to get into the world and to the business of being alive. My eyes opened just then, trying to look at everything even though a baby sees nothing but blurry figures. I was looking to discover things right away. I like to think I came out quickly also to spare my mother pain. From what I have seen giving birth is a terrible thing and I do not know why women must suffer this agony to produce a child. But that is only one of the many things I do not understand. There are many many more things I do not understand than ones I do. Sometimes it seems discovery is the learning of all I do not know. For this reason I am not happy for all the time I have missed school. I want to go back as soon as this is possible.
When we return we first visit the nurse at the clinic. She examines our scars and the sores on our feet. Our soles have become very hard. She checks our bones to see where they might have been broken and looks at our bleeding teeth and chalky tongues. We take medicine for worms and our heads are shaved of lice. The nurse will maybe take a blood test, but she will only do this if you make the request. Most girls do not know to request it because no one has told them. No one wants to frighten them about the HIV virus. They may know a little but choose not to know more. The nurses are advised not to disturb the girls further by informing them to have the blood test.
I ask for a blood test, because my mother is a nurse so I know it is important.
Was. Was a nurse.
The counselors do not like to mention other things. They respect that girls are too embarrassed to talk about the rudeness to which we were subjected. Some things are too private. They do not use the word rape. They believe they are relieving us. We may talk about killing someone with a machete, but rape is too private to speak of.
I have decided not to remember, but pictures appear to me no matter. A girl kicked in the face falls to the ground and immediately gets up, because we are marching. If you do not get up they will kill you. I try instead to think of other things: a river in the morning. I think of my best friend, Agnes, beside me, knocking me with her knee, and of the way her face changed when I said something she had thought of, too. I think of the first time I saw my boyfriend Philip on the street in Lira town and the effect it had on my body. I think about sleeping in my tree. But still come the things I do not choose to think of. The boy whom we were made to watch, for an example of what will happen if you try to escape. The rebels surrounded that boy and started jabbing at him with bayonet blades and pangas. Blood spurted where he was hit and black gobs landed on the dust. They kept cutting that boy, who was crying out. I watched with hard eyes. Chunks of skin came off and fell on the ground. I keep remembering his skin in the dirt.
You must not want to hear such things. Who would?
After my escape I was brought to the government building. The first person I was surprised to see was my aunt, not my mother. Aunt Karen smelling of pomade held me in her arms and cried. She was crying hard.
Your mother cannot come, she said, wiping at the tears. Then I received the shock I was not expecting.
She got very sick, Esther. She had the cancer.
What could I say to that? So I said, When?
Aunt Karen sobbed. It was very bad.
And now? I somehow knew the answer.
She could not get better. Aunt Karen squeezed her eyes and shook her head. Esther, your mother has died.
I thought I had gone beyond what I could imagine with the rebels, but it turned out there was more for me to go. Can it be true? I said.
It is funny, the things we say. Of course it was true. I am afraid it is so.
But for me, death was not so surprising, even when it was your mother.
When?
Aunt Karen kept crying, crying. Three weeks it has been.
I have come too late, I said.
I am not permitted to go home. When you are abducted you are required to stay in the rehabilitation center for some weeks after you return. So it was at Kiryandongo that my family came to see me. Lira is an hour away by car and they would find a ride. They sent word when they were coming so I waited for that day.
When they arrived at the bare yard of the entrance area, I had the feeling of being in a movie when aliens take over a person’s body so their eye sockets are yellow, a sign that the people inside are gone. My family looked that way to me. I thought, My mother dying has changed everyone and they are no longer the same inside.
When they were closer they looked as they were before. Neil my big brother lay his loose hand on my shoulder and greeted me by name, but he looked to his fingers not to my face. I greeted my father.
Yes, it is you, he said. I think there were tears in his eyes. I think we all had my mother in mind and were not thinking perhaps of what had happened to me. I am, after all, still here.
We went to sit in the shade of the dorm. They brought me flatbread they knew I liked. My sister Sarah sat on one side. I saw that Judy had changed the most and appeared older—she was now eight—and Matthew was not as plump as before and his front teeth were gone. Aunt Karen sat on my other side and patted my arm. She was dressed up, wearing her wedge sandals. She was not crying this time, just talking. She asked how was it here and was I getting enough to eat. She said our grandmother Nonni could not come, but I would see her when I was able to visit home. Nothing was interesting to me. I saw she was acting like the mother of this family. My mother did not think her sister was a very good mother. Aunt Karen was more interested in painting her nails and straightening her hair. This day she even looked excited to be in her sister’s place.
My father stayed still and quiet after they parked his wheelchair. He sat, faced to the side not looking in my direction. When he did glance at me his eyes closed as if it hurt. Was he thinking of what I had been through? Was he thinking of his wife who was now dead? I do not know.
In the family we liked to hear the story of their meeting. On a Christmas holiday my mother came home to Lira and went with Aunt Karen to the army dance. My mother saw my father there. She knew who he was. His brother Robert went around with Aunt Karen, but my mother had become a Kampala girl, working in the hospital there, and wasn’t interested in a soldier from Kitgum.
Then, in 1981, with Milton Obote as president, the Acholi and Langi were permitted in the army. Since Idi Amin, the Acholi were not. Idi Amin was against the Acholi. His men had even killed my father’s parents, who both died at the massacre in Bucoro.
With Museveni, our president now, if you are Acholi you are not so welcome in the army either. Many presidents do not look after the Acholi and Langi, because we are in the north, and some people believe it is our history to be persecuted.
I asked my mother what my father said to her that night, even knowing the story. She would shrug. My father asked my mother to dance and she said no, and he said, good, he did not want to dance either. My mother wondered if he was nice or mean. He told her he remembered seeing her when she was young but she did not remember that time and he asked her where she lived and what her work at the hospital was like. Most men she knew talked about themselves only. He said he liked the way she was holding her hands. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at the hands, he said. My mother has long hands. What can you tell about me? she said. It is private, he said. She thought he was being rude. Maybe he would tell her when he knew her better. Maybe you will never know me better, she says. I think I will, he says. Because I’m going to marry you.
My mother laughed and said they had better dance if they were going to get married. So they did, and after they got married he told her what he saw in her hands. They belonged to the mother of his children.
My mother moved back to Lira. They married in June, and my brother Neil arrived six months later. I arrived next. When his army term was up, my father did not re-enlist and instead opened an auto repair shop with his friend Jameson. He’d learned mechanics in the army and liked motors and was good at solving problems. My father likes not talking while he fixes something.
For a while we lived next to Aunt Karen. Sometimes Uncle Robert lived there too, but mostly not. They had a son, Robert Jr., but did not marry. They liked to fight. The brothers were very different. Robert liked being in the army and liked to roam.
My mother and father found a house away from them. Sarah was born, then Judy, then Matthew. We would go to the clinic where my mother was head nurse. Long lines out the door were people from the countryside who would come and wait all day. At home our cousin Lenora looked after us. She started when she was ten.
You see my father in a wheelchair and think maybe he lost his legs in a mine or even from the rebels, but none would be true. When I was five years old, a car fell on him. He was underneath it, making repairs. For a while he was at home, then he got a wheelchair and went back to work. I remember my father standing just once, a time I was on his shoulders. I was high up and scared to hit the doorway as we passed through and he was laughing at me and my worry.
My father does not feel sorry for himself. So if at night when he is home in his chair in the side place in the living room his eyes turn red from drinking this is not so surprising.
When visitors come to Kiryandongo you see how they look or do not look at you. My father does not; my sister Sarah does not stop watching me. If it is your sister you can imagine what she is thinking. I saw her trying to measure if I was wrecked or not. When we were small, people might not tell us one from the other, we have the same shape and face. Looking at her, I have the odd feeling of looking at myself as I was before I was taken.
I ask them about our mother, the ghost hovering there with us. Where did she die? Who was with her? Where was she buried? They told me these things. Did she say anything about me? They said she was worried for me, but believed always I would come home. I thought of my mother’s face, with her wide forehead and chipped front tooth. It was hard to picture her sick. As a nurse, she would have understood everything happening to her. Then I thought how at least I missed seeing this thing. I did not have to watch my mother die.
I was relieved when my family left. I wanted them gone. Then I missed them, too. Two feelings come at once and you feel neither of them.
No one here is at ease. We are all troubled.
The boys especially are fighting many times, but the girls are mean also. I saw Holly stomp a chicken yesterday. And Janet, before she would not have hit her baby. When she saw me looking at her as the baby cried she said, What is this compared to what the rebels did?
Nurse Nancy says we are coming out of it. The counselors have us think that after a while you will stop coming out of it and be as you were, yourself again. I think I will be coming out of it forever.
There is a person inside me who has been very bad and does not deserve a chance at life. She has done things no good person would do. I might argue against that and say, No, I am Esther. I am a good person, as good as I can be. But another voice is stronger and that voice says it would be better if I were dead.
They tell us, You are back and things will get better. Again and again they say, You are the fortunate ones. We say it ourselves. It might be so, but—
Holly was made to beat a boy when the rebels learned she liked him. Another girl here found her son’s leg up in a tree. No wonder you want sometimes to die. Sometimes your spirit is so heavy you say to it, I cannot carry you around.
Nurse Nancy sits with us talking. She is a wiry woman in glasses who lets her long hair fly around, more concerned with looking after us. She asks us about Kony. What did we think of Kony? Maybe we are mad at him. Some nod. Some girls say he is a bad man. I do not answer. I do not say, I’m not mad at Kony. I do not see Kony. To me Kony is nothing.
Kony took my life away from me, Carol says. She is a St. Mary’s girl who has been here a long time. Her parents still have not been found. Below her eyebrows looks filled with sandbags, pressing down her eyes.
Yes, but you have survived, Nurse Nancy says.
I have not, she says. I have not survived.
We have the future waiting for us, Janet says. See, up ahead? There we are. Who knows what is in store.
The future is blackness, Carol says.
Janet says, Do not worry. God will provide.
Christine, one of our counselors, tells us that journalists may come today. Christine was an abducted girl herself, ten years ago. She is about twenty-five and has a square head and round shoulders and wears pearls in her ears. Christine thought she might become a doctor and went to Kampala to go to school, but it did not work out so well, and she came back here and instead became a counselor. The journalists are interested in hearing of our experience, she says. No one has to speak who doesn’t want to. Sometimes it can help you. Recently there was a woman from Germany with a tape recorder.
Holly says she would not dare speak in front of such knowledgeable people, and Holly was even at the front of her grade.
Who wants to talk about what happened out there? I say. What good will it do?
I will speak, Janet says. Emily says she also will speak. Emily does not stop talking anyway, though she does not always say the truth.
They want to spread our story, Christine says in her mild voice. It will help all the children.
We think about this. The journalists do not come.
After you return, even if the world looks as you left it, you are changed and the world seems changed also. It is new. After my father’s accident, my mother said my father did not change. He stayed the same in his new world.
We must find forgiveness, Christine says. We must forgive ourselves.
I am looking for forgiveness, but it is hard to find. What does it feel like?
The fear that I may die any moment is still here. Now and then the fear drains a little from me, but in its place is not a better feeling. There is a hard blankness.
4 / Taking Off (#ulink_f47f425d-f9ad-5b53-9730-29e1cdf1bd9d)
THEY STUMBLED IN the doorway, soaked through. Quiet music played. Jane saw some figures in the dimness past burnt-down candles at the end of the table crowded with bottles and glasses. She felt her way down the hall and found her bag in the dark corner of a room where a couple was laughing in the dark. Returning she bumped into another sleeping body. In the bathroom she peeled off her wet dress and put on underwear and a strapped top. Back in the living room she left the wet dress draped over driftwood bookshelves. Harry emerged behind her carrying bedspreads and kicking cushions to a place on the floor of the living room. Other people were leaning against the wall, some sleeping, some murmuring in a far corner. Harry sat back against a cushion. Come here, he said, his arm straight out, and in the dimness she saw him looking past her, as if a direct look would be too intimate. She sidled against him and put the dry skin of Harry’s chest against her cheek and wet hair. He lay still. She was not tired and far from falling asleep. She lay spellbound. People were whispering; another lantern went out, darkening the stone wall.
Some time later she woke, and everything was black and silent and still. The face near her was dark gray, as if in a dream. She touched it and went to kiss the mouth and hands came up on either side of her head, keeping her there. She kissed him, hardly breathing, making no sound. Then he stopped.
Get up, he whispered. He stood and pulled her off the floor, somehow keeping the Indian bedspread wrapped around her shoulders. He steered her through the dark on the soft straw rugs, knocking her into a stool, toward the darker hall, keeping her shoulders in front of him. They came to the door of the bathroom and pushed in. The walls, she’d noticed before, were a rough barn wood stained brown but she could see none of it now.
Too many people around, he said. Keeping her wrapped he lowered her to the floor. Now let me see Jane, he said in the pitch black.
Her breath felt chopped into pieces. Oh, came out—oh. It kept being chopped.
Shhhh, he said, making no other sound. Did he even breathe? His hands in the dark were moving her around, traveling over her. Noises stayed in the back of her throat. That’s …, she began. Where were the words?
What? he said.
That’s. It’s. Oh.
But, she wasn’t expressing it in the least. Then her breath took over and she went to where words didn’t go or matter anyway.
Shhhh, he said.
His hands made her feel small and pliable, and all her nerves were lit. He shifted around and his weight came down on her.
Oh God, she said rather loud. He covered her mouth.
He was there close, but too dark to see. She thought of the rough wood on the walls. She felt his face sort of become her face. She heard the river nearby foaming down the hill and saw the line of the mangled trees she’d seen earlier in silhouette against a pale yellow sky. Then she felt she was in a green forest. Then she was on a porch. It was not a porch she knew, it was a porch in America. There were children playing down the block under leafy branches and it was summer somewhere in the South with beds and white chenille bedspreads and old light fixtures on the walls and railings twisting up the stairs inside. A man and a woman were having sex in the hallway. Then it was Jane having sex with a man in the hallway. Wisteria vines filled the screen door and the door banged shut. Another man was getting out of a truck; he was partly Harry. He came over the threshold wearing boots and pulled open her shirt. No, he came into a side room and threw her on a table and pushed her legs apart ignoring her face. He’d seen her earlier in town, he said. His face gazing at her breasts had only one thing in mind driving him. He shifts her to the side and lifts her against the door, holding her underneath, having to crouch and bend his knees. I’ve been thinking of this all day, Harry said with his legs pressing her knees out and her back against the rough wood, pinning her, legs dangling, toes just touching the floor. One foot has a sandal on, a strap tight on her ankle. He held her from beneath, lifting her against him, pressing his hips so she’s on the verge of collapsing but is thrown back, her wrists braced against the frame. He grabs her ass and her feet slip off the floor into the air, with one hand flailing to get a grip on the sink anchoring her, inside the sound of their breathing, and she feels in a sort of tornado as if she’s going up a hill powered by wind with gusts rolling dust around and still going up farther and not quite at the top, reaching a crest. Everything starts to shake and unravel with the earth splitting at her feet and the road cracking sideways and air erupting like glass shattering. Her legs flung wide sent off needles of light or song and she had the feeling of falling at the same time rising, of going out and out as she’s gathering in, feeling her arms and legs dissolve into a bright bank of dust and finally stillness.
I’m old, you know.
Which means?
I don’t know, just I am.
I happen to like old.
Right.
The older the better, he said.
Okay, so—what—you’re perfect?
More perfect than you know.
They were twisted into a bound shape on the bathroom floor. They untangled themselves and shuffled, attached, back to the living room.
In the morning they woke next to other lumped bodies under blankets and thin covers, pushed like waves against the stone walls. Jane opened her eyes to see a shirtless man unbend himself from their Indian bedspread and stand in rumpled underwear. He walked slowly toward the sound of the river picking his way over the bodies and disappearing in the light at the door, the back of his head in a rooster’s plume of hair. She thought it was the pilot. On the other side of Harry were two heads touching and four arms draped toward each other.
Her head rested on Harry, on the shoulder of this new person. Her mouth was dry and her eyes heavy, but her body felt loose and light. Some people you met and right away knew they were important. Or it might take a while for you to understand how that first moment when you felt taken aback was a jolt not away but to this new person. And if it turned out the other person had a similar thing happen, then it was one of those connectings that happen not often.
She lay on his shoulder and thought that Harry was now important. What important meant she could not have said, but the word was there. She pictured the letters carved in wood. She thought of his voice in the dark, saying, Take this off. It sounded a little cruel. She drifted on the thought of it, playing it over in her mind.
Later that day they were in the car driving back to Nairobi.
Harry told her about the girl he liked, Rosalie. He saw her at a party, wearing a jumpsuit with zippers. She was small, with skin so pale you could see her veins. Everyone was dancing. Harry had broken his foot and was dancing with a crutch which he threw across the floor and she jumped over. After, they went driving and stayed up all night, sitting on the top of her Jeep and watching the sun rise over Lake Elementaita. She had a boyfriend, so nothing happened. That is, no touching happened, but something had happened. Her hands, he said, looked like an old person’s hands. Rosalie told him that she had to give some thought to her boyfriend now, now that she’d met Harry. Afterward he wrote her a letter and she wrote back. She still loved her boyfriend, she said, and didn’t know what to do. They kept writing letters to each other. She was still deciding.
What do you write to her? Jane asked.
That I’m waiting for her.
Jane lay across the seat with her head in his lap. Harry pushed back her hair. It had been a long time since she’d touched a person. It made a person feel transformed. Before falling asleep in the bumping truck she thought of how she had come to this other country wanting to disappear, but now felt more vivid than ever. It seemed possible that she might actually be finding herself in some new form.
They reached Nairobi after nightfall. On the Langata Road less than a mile from Harry’s, their tire blew and they thumped to a stop. Harry changed it as Jane sat on a dead tree watching in the eerie quiet. A lone streetlight shone amber far down the road like a figure from another era. Harry popped the tire off and cranked the jack, and she watched how youthful his quick movements were and how smooth was the skin of his neck between his parted hair and how nicely shaped were his strong arms, and the perfect contentment she’d felt all day deflated a little with the arrival of her first wish—for more. If only she were that young. She had a keen longing then to be a younger girl whose freshness would make him delirious, the way his was making her.
They were back from their mission, she told herself. Mission was what Harry called it. They’d had a nice moment, she explained to herself. So that was probably that. She would be happy with that, then. Happiness came in pieces anyway. One had to be happy with the pieces as they came. She was trained in gathering pieces. When you had the bad luck to love a person who cared for drugs more than you, then you adjusted to the netherworld of Nothing’s perfect and Whoever said you got what you wanted and It will get better. Those pieces were sharp and cut you, but you still collected them. You justified the cuts.
They went back to Harry’s house. He referred to it as his parents’ house, even though he’d grown up there. A few spotlights shone outside a garage and at one end of a large roof. She followed him across a dark lawn of stiff tropical grass to the guesthouse. Inside was a wide stone fireplace and heavy wooden furniture and to the side a small bedroom with a mattress of clean sheets in the middle of a cement floor. Harry was under the covers when she returned from the bathroom and she switched off the living room light. She slid in next to him and had the lovely surprise, which always remained surprising, of the first contact with the skin of another warm body which felt, well, like a miracle.
He turned her sleepily. She wasn’t wishing for anything then, only this. All right, more of this, then. She felt as if she were on a train, jerking to a start. The slow chugging of the engine was her body coming alive again. As the speed increased, possibilities of the trip expanded. Maybe the journey would not be short. There was hope in the body against her. Maybe it would be a long trip. The Orient Express or the Trans-Siberian Railway. She was riding the shaky rails. She was going faster. Now she was being hurled up against the ceiling.
When she landed in slow motion some time later, her gaze drifted to a blurry window where dawn had turned the sky glass-blue through a pane of lead squares like the windows you see in old churches.
In the late morning, returning to the cottage, Jane found Lana having breakfast in bed with her silver tray. Lana patted the pillow beside her and poured Jane a cup of coffee from a silver pot. Raymond has buggered off, Lana said. He’s tossed us for a safari job. Don’t blame him, really. But—she used a pointedly hopeful tone—Don wants to come.
Don?
Lana shrugged, as if uncertain whether she was ready to promote the idea. He thinks it might be interesting. He has a car …
Jane looked at her.
Lana bit her toast and studied Jane’s face, gauging her reaction. He can always help with the cash flow? she said, chewing.
Later after dinner Lana and Don peeled themselves up off the Balinese bed and slipped away to Lana’s room. It was an early night. Jane and Harry stayed collapsed on the pillows, upholstered in hemp and stamped with a black and beige triangular pattern. In the deeper cushions Pierre was asleep.
I’ll take you, Harry said out of nowhere.
Where?
To Uganda. I’ll drive.
You will?
Sure. I’ve got a truck.
That would be great, she said. Really?
He looked at her. His face was an inch from hers and his lowered eyes were cool. I just said I would.
What about the cows? she said.
Screw the cows.
Really?
Keep saying really and I’ll change my mind.
A warmth spread in her chest.
She couldn’t pay him, she told him, but could cover the gas and his room and board. She had a minor expense account from the magazine, she said, actually, hardly believing it herself, since she had no real credentials as a journalist.
It’s better if you don’t hire me, Harry said. If I’m hired I usually get sacked.
The guest room where Jane was staying had been painted by Lana, salmon and green. Its lantern threw half-moons of light on the stucco wall. Harry got in with her under the pink mosquito net.
He had been with her now three nights and each night in a different bed in a different place. She was in that early lull of physical happiness when going over it was a pleasure, with no real qualms yet. She felt a sinking deeper. And now he was coming with them on her trip. It’ll be what it is, she said to herself, as proof she was without illusion, but having no more idea what It’ll be what it is meant other than a hope against the sinking.
Again departure was postponed so Lana threw another dinner party.
She went into action, arranging what needed to be done, talking to the cook, unruffled and focused. Her energy spread outward and Jane helped her push three tables together and move brass elephants. Lana shook out a long white tablecloth stamped with silver and blue paisley which landed like a sail.
From Jaipur, she said. Lana’s things each had a story—linen napkins were from Porta Portese in Rome, gold-dotted plates passed down from her grandmother in Paris, the striped red and green Venetian glasses from the lover trying to woo her back. That worked, she said, for a while.
The cottage had four small rooms packed like a treasure chest. In her thirty-six years Lana had covered a lot of ground. There were the small business ventures: lanterns from Morocco, the alabaster Indian lamps, the belts with Maasai beading. She’d worked as a set designer and fund raiser, started schools for the Rendille in the bush. Her tastes were both extravagant and rustic. A chandelier hung from a water buffalo horn on the terrace. She was generous whether flush or broke. For all the pleasure she found in things, she did not have the hoarding instinct of the materialist. You liked her bracelet? Here. She would unclasp it from her wrist and snap it onto yours.
She held up a conch shell filled with salt. Sweet, she said. She had dressed for dinner in a short satin slip, boots laced to her knees and dark lipstick. Now, she said, most important, the lighting. They lit lanterns and candles which had been placed in abundance around the cottage on stands and floors and tables crowded with silver cups.
How old is Harry? Jane said.
What do you think?
Twenty-six? Jane said tremulously. Five?
More like twenty-three, darling.
You’re kidding.
Or twenty-two. What, you care? Age doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t?
For dinner there was a platter of grill-marked chicken sprinkled with singed herbs, roast pork beside peeled potatoes, stewed eggplant in tomato sauce, green beans shiny with butter and garlic, curried lentils, ribs, shredded cabbage, sliced avocado. Lana’s housekeeper and another woman carried dishes in and out of the kitchen, taking orders from Lana in Swahili, without seeming to hear them.
By the time the cook’s specialty, coconut flan, was brought out, no one at the table seemed to notice, deep in conversation or having left altogether. Many were out on the concrete terrace, dancing to the turned-up music. By the end of the night however there was no pudding left in the dish. The servants slipped in and out, clearing the plates, leaving glasses and candles and flowers, and a spotlessly washed-up kitchen. The music pounded.
Jane, feeling dazed from drink, from Harry, looked around the room at the people she didn’t know, at ones she barely did, in this place where people returned from war zones, from managing famines, from living in tents among the elephants, or being gored by buffalo, a place where everyone seemed matter-of-factly to lead a life of extremity and daring. Harry was with his parents tonight. They’d just returned from a trip vaccinating livestock before they were to leave again. In his absence, her thoughts of him were more vivid. He was young. He was quite young. She kept thinking of him being young. She remembered how easy it had been at that age to take up with a person. It happened all the time—new people came, you were with them. When they were gone, more new people would come. When she looked at it from that point of view she saw they were no big deal. She thought she’d try to adopt that viewpoint. Adopting other people’s viewpoints, you could convince yourself you were being empathetic—never mind you were ignoring your self.
More people arrived and the dancing grew wilder. One man took off his shirt and was rolling around on the lawn, a dog barking at him hysterically. In between songs you heard the high squawk of an animal, the hyrax who lived and shat on the roof.
Monday morning, readying for departure at last, Jane sat on a bed piled with linen pillows and watched Lana pack. Lana was tall but seemed larger than a normal tall person. She surveyed her room, eyes narrowed, hands on leather shorts. She was accustomed to packing and moving her caravan, but not having to restrain herself in volume. The room was as full as a bazaar, and indeed she had either bought or sold most of the things in it: piles of vintage fabric, leather-trimmed suitcases, necklaces draped on rusted hooks. She picked up an ancient wicker picnic basket with cylindrical holders for wine bottles.
This we take, she said. She opened the lid to show Jane the relics of the 1920s inside—tin plates with embossed leaves, miniature glass salt bottles fitting in felt holders, a silver-rimmed martini shaker.
What else? she said to herself. The tucks on either side of her mouth deepened in concentration. She strode across the room. Unlike some tall people who try to shrink themselves smaller, Lana strode with the confidence of a giant, jangling when she moved. She hoisted a trunk from behind a stand overloaded with brimmed hats and oilskin jackets and fished out a stack of brand new T-shirts. These we bring for the children, she said, and stuffed them in a canvas bag decorated with beadwork, another one of her ventures.
Jane told Harry that Don was coming with them, too. He shrugged. It struck Jane how lightly people here held on to agendas. She was used to a world of people wielding control in order to have things run smoothly which, she noticed, often caused more tension than peace.
Maybe he’ll learn something, Harry said. From Lana.
Jane thought of what Harry had learned from Lana. To fill out the thought, she said, She’s an expansive—Jane was going to say soul but thought it sounded pretentious—spirit.
You mean she sleeps with everyone? Harry did not say it unkindly.
No, I—
Well, she does. He paused then added, Me among them, you know.
Yes, Lana did say … Jane waited for him to elaborate. It seemed that many people here had, if they’d been here long enough, slept with many other people.
Lana’s got a lot to give, he said.
It was a surprise to Jane when someone was not cynical in the least.
Lana was now examining a pair of breakable crimson Moroccan glasses with gold designs. She shook her head and returned them to their hammered brass tray. She found a stack of tin Mexican cups pressed in the shape of bells. Yes, she said, these we can use. It was hard to say which gave her more pleasure—having the things herself, or the thought of offering them to someone else.
When they left Nairobi at last, they got caught in the afternoon traffic. Though if they’d left in the morning it would have been the morning traffic, or in the evening, the evening. There was always traffic around Nairobi, except for late at night when all the cars disappeared and there was no one at all.
Harry drove with Jane beside him. Her body now felt linked to his, and with it came the certainty that his person inside was good and unique and inspiring, regardless of the fact that only a smallest amount of Harry was known to her.
Pierre and Don were in the back on either side of Lana who was tucked into Don’s shoulder. Finally they left the traffic behind and the truck hummed over unsmooth road. The passengers fell asleep, bumping awake over potholes. When Jane woke, her window overlooked a valley dropping off the roadside with houses scattered among greenery and Lake Naivasha a purple disc below. The pink lace at the edge of the gray flats was a flock of flamingos. They stopped at a pull-over overlooking the valley when Lana spotted a display of Maasai blankets strung up on sapling branches, and could determine from a distance they were the old wool ones, not the new polyester blend. A woman sat in the shade with narrow shoulder blades and rectangular beaded earrings and was surprised by Lana’s speaking Maasai to bargain. Harry hunched down to a blanket spread with collar necklaces and belts dangling arrows and beaded leather bracelets. The old bracelets used gut, the new, plastic thread. He bought one, with red and green diagonal bands. Lana pointed out to Don where they were headed, to the right of the lake, her sister Beryl’s house. They were stopping for a night or two. Beryl’s husband Leonard was an artist and Lana was keen to show Don his work.
Back in the car Harry handed Jane the bracelet. You need a souvenir, he said. He gave it to her casually, and she felt her face flush. Thanks, she said, as if she were used to having men give her things. In truth it was rare and, snapping on the bracelet, it seemed important he not know it.
In a valley of light green trees they turned off the paved road onto beige dirt. At an open aluminum gate they drove on a smoother road with farmed fields of crops on either side. At a huddle of trees they passed a white barn trimmed in black with wrought-iron windows and a yard of carts with handle pulls tilted to the ground. A long avenue of towering eucalyptus made a roof as high as a cathedral with a white stucco house at the end. The villa had a red tile roof in the Italian style, with a wide terraced balustrade on one side full of potted palms and blooming hibiscus trees.
They piled out of the truck, and Jane felt the thrill of arriving at a beautiful place. At one end, wide double doors were flung open to a gigantic hall with a black and white checkered floor and a great archway in the shape of a spade. French doors were open all along the veranda. An interior balcony rimmed the second floor, with doors behind the wooden railing, some open to windows beyond, some shut. Children came running across from the far end in wet feet and bathing suits, followed by a young woman in a bathing suit top with a kanga wrapped around her waist languidly advancing, shaking out long wet hair. A swallow swooped past Jane’s head. Lana picked up two children in her strong arms.
I thought you were getting here for lunch, the woman said, gliding across the hall. She kissed Lana’s cheeks.
We tried, Lana said vaguely. To everyone else: This is my sister, she said brightly. Lana stood a head taller though her sister was the elder. Beryl, with her flat stomach and blasé manner, looked more like a teenager than a mother of four.
Well, you’re in time for tea at least. Like Lana, Beryl had the Kenyan brand of British accent, but where Lana’s was full of enthusiasm, Beryl’s was flat. She seemed to be sighing at the boredom of life, particularly incongruous to Jane in this paradise swooping with children and flowers and birds.
Pierre, I knew you were coming, she purred, kissing both his cheeks.
Hey, beautiful, Pierre said.
But Harry, too? Lana doesn’t tell me anything. How’d she rope you into it?
Flying, Harry said, kissing her hello.
That all? Beryl raised an eyebrow toward Jane, but she wasn’t done with the boys yet. And you … are Dan.
Don.
She put out her hand, looking at him straight-on. Welcome, Don. Then she turned to Jane. And you must be the American writer, she said, as if another person might find that impressive.
I am, Jane said. It’s so nice of you to let us all stay.
Oh God, it’s nothing. Thrilled to have visitors. Lana, take them out and I’ll get the tea organized.
She pushed through a heavy door and Jane got a glimpse of a large kitchen with a number of dark-skinned people in light blue uniforms standing at sinks or bent over a table dusted with flour.
They crossed the gigantic hall, Jane’s nerves still vibrating from the jostling ride. The whitewashed veranda overlooked a garden of spiky bushes and hedges dotted with flowers. Mown paths meandered among more tangled jungle beyond. A sliver of light green pool could be seen at the end of an alley of cedar trees and a gigantic palm tree rose far past the other trees like an exploding firework. Marsh stretched beyond with inky grass markings and black twisted trees. The purple lozenge of the lake lay farther.
On the porch a low table with benches had been set for the children. There were bowls of berries and cookies on plates and pink cups filled with hot chocolate. A higher table of dark wood with brass corners and pale wood inlays was set with a silver tea set and plates of digestive biscuits, lemon slices, brown sugar lumps and a pitcher of cream. Blossoms of jasmine and red hibiscus were scattered among the plates.
Now this is more like it, Don said.
Everyone took a chair but Harry, who sat at the edge of the porch, feet hanging down, leaning against a pillar near the children.
Beryl appeared empty-handed, trailed by a woman in a light blue uniform with a white apron, carrying a tray of more tea and more cups.
Asante, Fatima, Beryl said, and sat. She poured the tea. Her arms were thin and tan. A young boy appeared behind Fatima, rattling a red lacquer tray. A wonderful smell rose.
You have croissants, Pierre said with a happy look.
No, no, Wilson, put it here. And take these to the children. No, these. The boy set down the tray, sneaking glimpses at the guests. So, Don, where are you from?
Los Angeles.
Wait. She looked at Lana. Is this the movie producer?
No, Beryl.
Oh, he sounded interesting. What was his name? She frowned at the children’s table. Tessie, stop it. Now.
But Roan’s pushing me off.
Then go on the other side. Roan, you know better. She faced back to Lana. What was his name?
Beryl, Lana said.
What?
It was Michael.
Right, he did that movie about the wizards. The children loved it. But you’re not in the movies, she said to Don, smiling.
No, can’t say I am. I’m in finance.
Right, Beryl said. So you’re all off to Rwanda?
Uganda, Jane said.
Never been there, actually, she said, surprised. Does everyone have tea?
None of us have been either, Pierre said.
So what’s in Uganda? She tucked her legs and curled around her cup, sipping it. Something was knocked over at the children’s table. Mama! someone cried.
Willa, for God’s sakes, ask Tess to pour it. Fatima! Beryl screamed.
That wasn’t me. Porter did it, said a little girl with tangled hair.
Fatima appeared and mopped up the spillage. She spoke to the children under her breath, not in English.
Well, help Porter out, then, Beryl said. Tessie, come on, you’re the one they’re looking up to. Honestly. Beryl decided to stop noticing and turned in the wicker chair, facing away from the children, draping her legs over the armrest. But Uganda has got gorillas, too, I know.
That’s in the south, Lana said. We’re going to the north. Jane’s doing a story about the abducted children.
Oh, right, the rebels. Beryl’s attention was already straying. Tess, enough! She spoke over her shoulder. Go on, if you can’t behave. The children went running off, except for a boy who stayed to talk to Harry. They appeared to be examining a butterfly.
They call themselves rebels, Jane said, but it’s really a roaming band of bandits terrorizing a rural community too poor to defend themselves. They’re not getting much help from the government.
Well, that sounds fun, Beryl said.
Lana was looking at the coins on her necklace, hitting them. Fun isn’t exactly the idea, Beryl.
No, God forbid fun. No, I’m kidding. Obviously. It sounds good. I mean, good for you to do it. Really. To be honest, I wish I could come.
Where’s Leonard? Pierre said.
On safari. Where else? The younger girl came and draped her arm around her mother’s neck, observing the guests. Beryl patted the little hand.
Oh, I thought he’d be here, Lana said. When’s he back?
Think he tells me?
Lana stood and pointed into a side garden. Some of his pieces are here. Don, come look.
Yes, go look, Beryl said, staying in her chair.
Everyone else rose from the chairs.
Dark hedges enclosed large figures that looked at first to be made of sticks. Then Jane saw the material was bones. Hundreds of bones were cobbled together in hulking forms, one in the shape of a birdcage with a large skull inside, another a tornado with bones seeming to swirl. There was a large foot.
He made practically everything we’re sitting on here, too, Lana said.
Don, arms crossed, observed the sculptures with a particular expressive reverence some people display when viewing art. He was frowning and nodding.
My favorite is that one. Pierre pointed down the veranda to a rope hammock strung between two elephant tusks.
Don brightened. That for sale?
God, no, said Beryl.
It’s a little controversial, Lana said.
She means illegal.
He found them, for God’s sakes, Beryl said. Not even Leonard would kill an elly. Lana, shall we show everyone their rooms?
Let’s.
Roy and Damian are flying in tonight, Beryl said offhandedly.
Really? Lana regarded her sister with glittering, knowing eyes. Beryl was absorbed in folding stray napkins and returning them carefully to the tray.
That should be interesting, Lana said. They staying long?
Beryl shrugged. Who knows. I better go see if the children have killed each other. She stood, languidly. Harry, you’re in the blue room. Beryl whispered loudly to Lana. Is he staying with—what’s her—?
Jane.
Right. You have the blue room. With Jane. And Pierre is in the tower. She strolled off.
Cheers for the tea, Harry called after her, practically the only thing he’d uttered since they’d arrived.
You are so welcome, darling. We’ll catch up later. I want to know every little thing.
Lana had a residence of her own on the property, a platform tent out of sight of the house. There was a large bed covered with yellow and orange Ethiopian kente cloth, and a claw-footed bathtub the servants filled with warm water in the evening.
Jane and Harry’s room had a four-poster bed painted silver.
After tea she and Harry took a swim in the light green pool beneath the gigantic palm. The early evening was still and quiet. When an owl flew above them it made an eerie whoosh. Jane and Harry exchanged a glance, heads above the surface. She dove underwater and held the glance with her as if it had entered a vein.
Back in the house the cavernous black and white hall was booming with Beethoven. The transporting melody seemed to roil in the arching ceiling like thunderclouds.
Jane shut the door to their room on the ground floor near the entrance. The music was muted. She lay on the bed and fell asleep in her wet towel. Traveling, one slept at odd times and suddenly. She opened her eyes to Harry’s face with his eyes closed beside her in the soft shadowless light. His face was smooth and inscrutable. In sleep it looked ageless. She looked at the curve of his eyelashes and the dark eyebrows. The thing that frightened her in his open eyes was not there in his shut eyes. When a person was asleep you could ponder his face.
His lip curved over his teeth. The mouth was the same as when awake, composed and calm, a little obstinate. She had the strange sensation that he was a younger version of herself. What was that familiar thing in him? Was it because she had been that age once? She had the odd notion that she’d been inside his head, at another time in her life. But Harry was much further along in self-possession than she’d ever been.
There were no freckles on his face, though his shoulder was sprinkled with them. She kissed his shoulder and, without opening his eyes, he came alive and reached for her and turned her around, pulling her back against him to hold her tight, then lay still again. How many years did she have on him? She hadn’t yet counted, but now she did. Sixteen, no, seventeen. Well, that was a record. She guessed the older one got the more records like that one could break.
He slept against her and she looked around the room. There was an armoire whose ivory handles had carvings of bows and arrows, and by the door an iron hat stand with antler hooks. A brass lamp had a colored glass lampshade. She thought how these things would have had to be transported in some bumping truck, wrapped in thick burlap or canvas, to get here. The silver ribs of the bed curved over them, with a white canopy draped on it. The bed looked Mexican with its thick layer of paint shimmering.
She felt far from everything. She often felt far from things in familiar surroundings, so it was a reassuring alignment when she had the feeling when actually far from home.
Here her thoughts didn’t dominate the landscape. The landscape and the new people in it, asking to be explored, took over. Far from home, she had less need to answer the questions, Why was she here? What was she thinking? What was the point? Those questions hovered, but did not insist on an answer. Habit was left behind, and with it, the old perspective. Her perspective stayed alert when she was far away. Back there was not so important anymore. She dozed off again.
She woke to the deep sputtering of an airplane motor. It grew louder as it descended and seemed to land directly outside her window. Harry was gone from the bed; she got up. She went to the window and opened the shutter to see a small plane in the blue and brown light rolling forward in the field. It came to a stop past where the cars were parked, just another vehicle of transport. The door opened, and a thin metal stair folded down. Two men ducked out and descended. One was pale and fair, the other dark. The pale man went to the rear and opened a door and pulled out some backpacks and a few boxes. The other in rolled-up pants was setting wood blocks under the airplane wheels. An askari with bare black arms and draped in a blanket stood by holding a spear. They exchanged words, and the two men left the plane under his watch. Striding toward the house, they were laughing. Jane wondered which one was for Beryl.
Who was that? came Harry’s voice from the bathroom, echoing in the high ceiling.
Two men in a plane, she said. She wrapped herself in a kikoi and went into the bathroom. A lightbulb clustered by glass grapes hung from the ceiling. The sink mirror was stuck with eagle feathers in a fan shape. Harry was sitting in water smoking a cigar. The tub was cast iron with feet, claws clutching balls.
You look happy, she said.
Come in.
She slipped into the water facing him. It was a long bathtub. A part of her checked to see if she felt shy with him. Only a small part did. Then that part was gone. Jane picked up a blue bar of soap and lathered her hands. She was glad to be there with him, but didn’t say it. Instead she said, Good cigar?
He blew smoke, nodding.
They heard commotion in the hallway, the two men arriving and being greeted.
On the wall was a framed ink drawing of a naked woman, pregnant, lying on her side. Is that Beryl? she said. They both gazed at the frenzy of curving lines.
Yes, it looks like a Leonard.
She doesn’t sound particularly pleased with Leonard, Jane said.
Beryl has a lot of putting up to do.
And four kids on top of it, Jane said.
There was a silence in the tall room. Harry’s face was relaxed. Jane felt silence was something which must be filled.
I can barely imagine having one child, she said.
Which was not exactly true. Silence often got filled with things not exactly true. Jane did in fact imagine having a child somewhat often, and rather more often lately. Images of it appeared in various mirages. She was holding a baby in bed just after birth; a child was walking unsteadily across a lawn, arriving to her outstretched arms. Though in the vision Jane somehow looked more like her older sister, Marian, a real mother, and the child was teetering on familiar grass in front of Marian’s house in New Jersey.
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Susan Minot
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord′s Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities on behalf of their leader, the despicable Joseph Kony. Her life becomes a constant struggle to survive, to escape, to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has travelled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her centre after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.With mesmerising emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa′s beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.