2006 - What is the What (8 page)

There are no clocks visible, though it feels like the middle of the night. There are no traffic sounds outside. It could be midnight or later.

Achor Achor, I don’t want to curse you but this situation would be much different if you saw fit to come home. I like and admire Michelle, and I am proud of you for having found an American who loves you, but at the moment I think your behavior is irresponsible. At the same time, I wonder how the burglars knew that you would be gone, that they could be sure about leaving their son, their sibling, here. It is hard to understand. They are either brilliant or simply reckless.

I wonder what images are troubling you, TV Boy. I am torn—I could talk to you again, waking you from the troubles, or I could relish, in a small way, that the boy who thinks he can crush an African man with a phone book is now suffering night tremors. It does not seem so cruel to let you whimper on the couch, TV Boy. After all, if I were to speak again, what would you drop on me next? I have an unabridged dictionary in my room, and I do not doubt you would use it.

A phone rings, not mine. My phone is gone. The ringtone is that of a popular song I cannot place. My grasp of American popular music is tenuous, I suppose, even after five years and after most of my friends have embraced it vigorously.

Get up, TV Boy, and answer your phone!

The rings continue. The caller might want to tell you to free me; the caller could be the police. Rouse yourself, boy!

Three rings and there is no sign he will awaken. I have to influence these events. At the risk of bringing more objects onto my head, I make as loud a noise as I can. My desperation brings my voice into the higher register; I produce a loud shriek that makes the boy virtually leap off the couch. The phone rings again and this time he picks it up.

‘What?’ he says. ‘This is Michael.’

The voice coming through the phone is a man’s, resonant and slow.

‘She’s not here.’

A question.

‘I don’t know. She told me she’d be here by now.’

The boy is nodding.

‘All right.’

‘All right.’

‘Bye.’

So, it is Michael. Michael, I am happy to know your name. It is a name with less menace than TV Boy, and further convinces me that you are a victim of those charged with protecting you. Michael is the name of a saint. Michael is the name of a boy who wants to be a boy. Michael was the name of the man who brought the war to Marial Bai. It is natural to assume that a war like ours came one day, the crack of thunder and then war, falling hard like rain. But first, Michael, there was a darkening sky.

Now, perhaps, your mood has turned for the worse. You’ve been here too long, in this apartment, and what seemed like an adventure is now tedious, even frightening. I am not as innocuous as you first thought, and I’m sure you’re dreading the possibility that I might speak again. For now I have nothing to say, not out loud, but you should know about the Michael who in 1983 brought the first portents of war to our village.

William K woke me up, whispering on the other side of the hut wall.—Get up get up get up! he hissed.—Get up and see this.

I had no inclination to follow William K, given that on so many occasions I had been asked to run to this place or that place or climb that tree, only to see some hole dug by a dog, or a nut that resembled the face of William’s father. Always the sights were greater in the mind of William K and seldom were they worth the trouble. But as William K whispered through my door, I heard the raised voices of an excited crowd.

—Come! William K urged.—I swear this is something!

I got up, dressed myself, and ran with William K to the mosque, where a curious crowd had gathered. After we crawled through the legs of the adults gathered around the mosque’s door, we raised ourselves to our knees and saw the man. He was sitting on a chair, one of the sturdy wood-and-rope chairs that Gorial Bol made and sold in the market and over the river. The sitting man was young, the age of my brother Garang, just old enough to be married and in his own home and with his own cattle. This man had ritual scars on his forehead, which meant he was not from our town. In other regions and other villages, the men, at thirteen years old or so, are given scars across their foreheads upon their entry into manhood.

But this man, whose name we learned was Michael Luol, was missing a hand. Where his right hand should have been, his wrist led nowhere. The crowd, mostly men, were inspecting the missing hand of the young man, and there were many opinions about who was to blame. William and I remained on our knees, where we could be close to the missing hand, waiting to hear how this had happened.

—But they have no right to do this! a man roared.

There were three men central to the argument: Marial Bai’s chief, a bull of a man with wide-set eyes, his lean and laconic deputy, and a rotund man whose stomach burst through his shirt and pushed against my back each time he made a point.

—He was caught stealing. He was punished.

—It’s an outrage! This is not Sudanese justice. The handless man sat silently.

—It is now. That’s the point. This is sharia.

—We can’t live under sharia!

—We’re not living under sharia. This was in Khartoum. You go to Khartoum, you live under their law. What were you doing in Khartoum, Michael?

The men soon placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the handless man, for had he stayed in his own village and kept from thieving, he would still have his right hand and might have a wife, too—for it was generally agreed that he would never have a wife now, no matter what dowry he could offer, and that no woman should be required to have a husband with a missing hand. Michael Luol received little sympathy that day.

After leaving the mosque, I asked William K what had happened to the man. I had heard the word
sharia
, and some derogatory remarks about the Arabs and Islam, but no one had clearly related the events that had led to Michael Luol’s hand being removed. As we walked to the great acacia to find Moses, William K related the story.

—He went to Khartoum two years ago. He went as a student, and then ran out of money. Then he was working as a bricklayer. Working for an Arab man. A very rich man. He was living with eleven other Dinka men. They lived in an apartment in a poor part of the city. This is where the Dinka lived, Michael Luol said.

This seemed odd to me, that the Dinka would live anywhere considered poor, while the Arabs lived well. I tell you, Michael of the TV, that the pride of the mony-jang, the men among men, was very strong. I have read anthropologists who were amazed at the esteem in which the Dinka held themselves.

—Michael Luol lost his job, William K continued.—Or perhaps the job ended. There was no work. He said he had no more work. And so he couldn’t pay for the rent. The other guys kicked him out of the apartment and then he was living in a tent on the outside of the city. He said thousands of Dinka lived there. Very poor people. They live in homes made of plastic and sticks and it’s very hot and they have no water or food.

I remember at that moment not liking this handless man. I felt like the man deserved to have his hand missing. To be so poor, living in a plastic house! To be asking for food! To have no water! To live so poor near the Arabs who lived well. I was ashamed. I loathed the men who drank during the day in Marial Bai’s market and I loathed this man living in the plastic house. I know this is not an admirable sentiment, to despise the poor, the fallen, but I was too young to feel pity.

William continued.—Michael Luol used to go out looking in the garbage for food. He would go with other men, go through the dump, all the city’s garbage. He would go there in the morning and there would be hundreds of people sorting through. But because Michael Luol was a strong man, he did well. He found pots and boxes and chicken bones. He ate what he could and was able to sell other things he found. He found a broken radio once and sold it to a man who fixed them. When he got that money, he bought a new dwelling. He needed something bigger because he had a wife.

—He brought the wife to Khartoum? I asked.

—No, he got the wife there. He got the wife after he lost his job. William K seemed unsure about this part. It made no sense to either one of us, to marry when one had no money and no home.

—They lived in the new dwelling, something made with sticks and plastic. This is when the man who told his story became very sad. His wife died. She had dysentery because the water they drank was bad water they got from some ditch near the city. So she got malaria and there was no way to get her into any hospital. So she died. When she died her eyes popped out of her head.

I knew William K well enough to know that this last part was fabrication. Whenever possible in William K’s stories, someone’s eyes popped out of their heads.

—So he had this place he had bought, and he sold it. He didn’t need it anymore. So he took the money and he bought some drinks. And then he was taken by the police and they brought him to a hospital and cut off his hand.

—Wait. Why? I asked.

—He took something, I think. He stole something from someone. Maybe from the man he worked for when he was working with bricks. He went back there and stole something. I think it was a brick. Wait. It was a brick but he stole it before. He stole the brick when his wife was alive, because the wind kept blowing his plastic house away. So he took the brick and then they found him. Then he was caught and then the wife died and then he came back down here.

—So who cut off his hand? I asked.

—The police.

—At the hospital?

—He said there were two policemen there and a nurse and a doctor.

The story was enhanced and embellished over the next weeks, by the handless man and by others, but the basic facts remained as William K had conveyed them. Islamic law, sharia, had been imposed in Khartoum and was law in much of Sudan above the Lol and Kiir rivers, and there was growing fear that it would not be long before sharia was brought to us.

This is where it gets complex, or relatively so, Michael TV Boy. The broad strokes of the story of the civil war in Sudan, a story perpetuated by us Lost Boys, in the interest of drama and expediency, tells that one day we were sitting in our villages bathing in the river and grinding grain and the next the Arabs were raiding us, killing and looting and enslaving. And though all of those crimes indeed happened, there is some debate about the provocations. Yes, sharia had been imposed, in a sweeping series of laws called the September Laws. But the new order had not reached our town, and there was doubt that it would. More crucial was the government’s tearing up of the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement, which gave the south a degree of self-rule. In its place the south was divided into three regions, which effectively pitted each of them against the others, with no region left with any significant government power at all. Michael, you’re sleeping again, and I am glad for that, but still you sleep with whimpers and kicks. Perhaps you, too, are a child of war. In some way I assume you are. They can come in different shapes and guises, but always wars come in increments. I am convinced there are steps, and that once these events are set in motion, they are virtually impossible to reverse. There were other steps in the country’s stumble toward war, and I remember these days clearly now. But again, at the time I did not recognize these days as such, not as steps but as days like any others.

I was running to my father’s shop, through the market’s thick Saturday crowd. On Saturday the trucks arrived from over the river, and the marketplace doubled with traders and activity. The shoppers came from all over the region; Marial Bai’s market was one of the largest within a hundred miles, and so drew far-flung commerce. When I reached my father’s store, running as usual at my top speed, I almost collided with the great, unblemished white tunic of Sadiq Aziz.

—Where have you been today? my father said.—Say hello to Sadiq.

Sadiq’s hand descended onto the crown of my head, and he let it rest there. Sadiq was of the Baggara, an Arab tribe that lived on the other side of the Ghazal. The Arabs were seen during market days and during the dry season, when they came down to graze their cattle. There had been centuries of tension between the Dinka and the Baggara, largely over grazing lands. The Baggara needed the more fertile southern soil to graze their cattle when the earth of the north cracked with drought. Arrangements were generally made between chiefs, and cooperation had been managed historically through alliances and payments of cattle and other goods. There was balance. During the cattle season, and often on market days, there were Baggara and other Arabs everywhere in Marial Bai. They moved freely among the Dinka, speaking a jumbled mix of Dinka and Arabic, often staying in Dinka homes. There were very good relations between the majority of their people and ours. In many areas there was intermarriage, there was cooperation and mutual respect.

My father was popular among the Baggara and other Arab businessmen; he was known to go out of his way, sometimes comically so, to court and please the Arab traders. He knew that his own success was due in large part to his access to the merchandise in which the northerners specialized, and so he was ever eager that the Arabs knew they were welcome in his shops and homes. Sadiq Aziz, a tall man with large eyes and arms twisted with bone and ropy muscle, was my father’s favorite trading partner. Sadiq had an eye for unusual things, could find the most exceptional goods: mechanized farm tools, sewing machines, fishing nets, athletic shoes manufactured in China. More important, Sadiq usually brought something for me.

—Hello, uncle, I said. It is customary to call an older man
uncle
, as a term of familiarity and respect. If the man is older than one’s father, he is called
father
.

Sadiq raised his eyebrows conspiratorially and retrieved something from his bag. He tossed it in the air to me and I caught it before I knew what it was. I opened my hands upon some kind of gem. It looked like glass, but inside were radial stripes, yellow and black, like the eye of a cat. It was so beautiful. My eyes watered as I stood, staring at it. I was afraid to blink.