Acts of faith (96 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps you should,” Kasli said.

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

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

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

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

“Only when it comes to foreigners.”

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

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

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

“I need to resolve this question.”

“Please don’t do what he said.”

“It’s important to you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am going to think about it.”

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

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

M
ICHAEL
’
S STRATEGY TO
stage the offensive at the end of the dry season, trusting that the wet would blunt or avert a retaliation, had not presumed a drought. In the fourth week without rain, Khartoum took advantage of the favorable weather and struck back. For three consecutive days, everyone in town and in the garrison heard the distant, ominous rumble of bombs; for three consecutive nights, they saw the spastic flashes of artillery over far-off ridgelines; and for a week afterward reports and rumors came in by radio and bush-telegraph of raids by militia battalions on foot and on horseback, in trucks and tanks. They came from towns Quinette knew and from places she’d never heard of, Toda, Nawli, and Andreba; Tabanya, El Hemid, and Lado. When it was over, seventeen towns had been leveled and thirty-six thousand people had been killed, displaced, or taken into captivity. Tamsit, scorched earth. More woe to the land of the whirring wings beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. New Tourom escaped the onslaught. Government planes attempted to bomb it but were driven off by flurries of anti-aircraft fire; a militia column advancing from a Sudanese army garrison was ambushed before it got within ten miles of the town. It was the safest place in the rebel-held Nuba. For several days, survivors from elsewhere shambled into New Tourom, walking ghosts starved and dehydrated, wounded and sick. They built crude shelters of sticks and straw on the outskirts, and in a short time the town had its own slum of more than a thousand people. It grew to two thousand, to three. The missionaries stopped all other work to help care for the multitudes. Quinette pitched in, making splints and bandages for the injured, dishing out doura gruel, but the numbers kept growing, and with the drought, New Tourom’s citizens resisted parting with their remaining stores of grain. Dysentery swept through the refugee camps. Manfred and Ulrika were overwhelmed. So were Michael’s military police, struggling to maintain order. Clashes broke out between townspeople and refugees, who also fought among themselves over a bowl of food or a jerry can of water. One morning a gun battle erupted between local troops and soldiers who’d fled a distant garrison. Two were killed. Hunger and disease had brought things to the verge of chaos, a breakdown of all ties of family, clan, and tribe that would pit every man against every other man.

With a stunning lack of diplomacy, Kasli chose this time to remind his commander that he had predicted disaster, and now here it was. The dry-season campaign had achieved worse than nothing. The oil was flowing again, all the towns captured had been recaptured and burned to the ground, and half the Nuba was in ruins. Michael couldn’t imagine what his adjutant hoped to gain, speaking to him in such a manner. It was intolerable, he should have sacked Kasli on the spot, but he remained wary of taking that step. Kasli had his followers and sympathizers, fellow Muslims and loyal clansmen, and could stir up trouble if he felt he’d been treated unjustly. Instead of relieving him, Michael sent him into temporary banishment. With a strong detachment, he was to tour the towns hardest hit, assess the damage, and while he was at it, scour the countryside for recruits; Khartoum’s savagery must have created numbers of young men eager to enlist in the SPLA.

Single-handedly, Quinette organized a relief operation.

The emergency had summoned all the discordant strains in her nature to play in concert: her egoism and her desire for self-sacrifice; her need to be of service and also the center of attention; her pity for the victimized and her pride in being their savior; and the lead violinist in this symphony of motives was her jealousy. Her first thought was to aid her husband, who could not cope with a looming famine, a refugee crisis, and his military duties all at once. Her second thought, proceeding from the first, was to show him she was indispensable. She could do what a hundred Yamilas could not. She had the power to make things happen.

She began with Fancher and Handy. Arguing that the needs of the body superseded the needs of mind and spirit for the time being, she convinced them to radio their field office in Loki with a request to send food, medicine, and blankets instead of books, Bibles, and gospel videos. On her laptop she wrote graphic descriptions of the situation, seeing herself as the Nubans’ voluntary amanuensis. Using the garrison’s radio, she broadcast appeals for help to the independent aid agencies. She contacted Doug Braithwaite, begging him to collect supplies and make an emergency delivery. The next day she trekked to the New Tourom airstrip to meet his plane. She gave him her press releases, urging him to fly them directly to Nairobi and hand-deliver them to the news agencies. You could always count on Doug. No other pilot would have agreed so readily to such an extraordinary request.

The independent NGOs came through. Within a week aid flights to the Nuba doubled. Quinette practically camped out at the airstrip, talking to the pilots on a field radio, coordinating the off-loads while a detachment of Michael’s bodyguard kept desperate people from mobbing the planes. Reporters and film crews arrived. Interviewed by the BBC and French and Japanese television, she laced her commentaries with condemnations of Khartoum’s brutality. Phyllis Rappaport from CNN showed up, obnoxious as ever. “You’ve come a long way, baby,” she remarked to Quinette, who swallowed her dislike and gave Phyllis an interview. NBC, German television, Reuters—she’d made the Nuba a focus of world attention, and the publicity brought more assistance. A southern Sudanese doctor and two nurses arrived to help Manfred and Ulrika. John Barrett’s IPA dispatched a team of aid workers with tents, blankets, and cots to build a camp for the refugees. Norwegian People’s Aid established a feeding center. Yet with displaced people still trickling in, all this wasn’t enough.

When Kasli returned from his mission, she obtained the report he submitted to Michael, radioed UN headquarters in Nairobi, and read from the report, requesting airdrops by C-130s and Buffalos. She had to plead with the UN to demand that Khartoum lift its blockade and grant the UN permission to fly into the Nuba.