Sudan: A Novel (15 page)

Idris and the other hunters firing from the top of the cliff had crouched so low when the second round of automatic gunfire pinged off the rocks around them that they didn’t see the raiders’ retreat. When the firing stopped, they peered over the rocks in time to see the rear guard of soldiers disappear over the hilltop.

Idris dropped his weapons, stepped to the edge of the cliff and jumped into the river. He’d done the same thing hundreds of times as a boy, but those memories lasted only until his head cleared the water and he saw the carnage on the riverbank. He splashed out of the water, looked around frantically and called for his family.

“Aleuth! Akin! Abuong! Shema!”

He raced from one bleeding, moaning, injured person to the next, praying that one of them was a loved one—and praying equally hard that they were not.

Suddenly, he heard a cry that stabbed joy into his heart.

“Papa! Papa!” Shema waded out of the reeds and raced toward him. Idris scooped the little girl into his arms and held her tight to his chest.

“Shema, where is your mother?” He knelt and tried to set the child back down on the sand. “Where are Akin and Abuong?”

But the little girl refused to let go of her father. Sobbing hysterically, she wrapped her tiny arms so tight around his neck he could hardly breathe.

Idris finally peeled the child off his chest, stood her on the beach and held her at arm’s length to get her attention. “Where is your mother?” He tried not to sound as panicked as he felt. “Where are your brother and sister?”

Shema pointed to the marsh and managed a strangled, “Mama!” between sobs.

Idris splashed through the shallow water into the reeds with Shema one step behind him. He batted the stalks out of his way as he called his wife’s name in a high-pitched voice he hardly recognized as his own.

“Aleuth! Where are you? Aleuth!”

When he heard a sound off to his left, he scrambled through the reeds toward it and found Aleuth lying on a pile of stalks bent backward by her fall. For one horrified moment, he thought she must be dead. Then he heard her moan.

“Aleuth! Can you hear me? Aleuth!”

Her face was covered in blood from the wound on her forehead, but her eyelids fluttered open briefly, and there was recognition in her eyes before they closed again. Idris knelt, slid his hands under Aleuth’s limp body and lifted her out of the water as if she weighed nothing at all. He carried her out of the marsh and onto the riverbank where he laid her down tenderly and knelt beside her.

Her wound was so bloody he could not assess the damage. But she was alive! Alive!

Suddenly, Idris felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped in surprise. The hand belonged to Akec Kwol.

“How can I help, brother?” Akec kneeled in the sand beside his neighbor. “What can I do?”

“Find Abuong and Akin!” Fear locked his throat and Idris found he could only whisper. “I’ve looked and looked…”

His voice trailed off.

“You take care of Aleuth, and I will find your children,” Akec said.

Then he was gone.

Oblivious to the pandemonium of frightened and injured people all around him, Idris tore off a piece of Aleuth’s skirt and began to wipe the blood off her face. When he went to the river to wet the cloth, Shema was barely a step behind him. The child had stopped crying, but somehow her vacant-eyed silence was worse. She sat in the sand beside him without making a sound and gently patted her unconscious mother’s hand.

Idris could have been kneeling there for five minutes or five hours; he had no sense of the passage of time. Akec suddenly appeared beside him, and when Idris looked up, he knew. He saw it in Akec’s eyes and in the blood smeared on his chest.

Idris’s anguished face asked the question his lips could not form.

“Abuong,” Akec replied quietly. “I found Abuong.”

Idris was seized by a nightmare fear so huge he couldn’t breathe. His body stood up without him willing it to do so. With Shema as his shadow, he moved along behind Akec, though he made no purposeful effort to follow. He stepped over the dead bodies of friends and neighbors without any spark of recognition.

Suddenly, he stopped, immobilized by horror. The force of what he saw was a physical blow that slammed into him so hard he staggered backward. Abuong was lying face-up on the sand. His right arm was missing below the elbow. The top portion of his body didn’t seem to match the bottom somehow. It was contorted, as if the boy wasn’t put together right. It was obvious that he was dead.

Idris didn’t feel his feet touch the sand as he went to his only son. When he lifted the child up off the sand to cradle his lifeless body in his arms, he saw the gaping wound across his back that had almost cut him in half.

Idris hugged his son to his chest, rocked the boy’s body back and forth, and cried. Great gulping, heaving sobs wracked his whole body; his thin frame quaked as he choked on grief so jagged and raw Akec could not fathom it.

Akec had discovered the boy’s body caught in the reeds. He had tried to lift the child gently, to lay him out carefully for his father. But Abuong’s body almost came apart in his hands.

Suddenly, the big man turned away and began to vomit noisily on the sand. When the involuntary retching finally passed, he straightened up. With the sound of his friend’s grief in his ears, he went looking for Akin.

For a long time, Idris was conscious of nothing but the dead child in his arms. The world had stopped revolving on its axis, and the moments of his life were without measurement. He was unaware that wounded and dying people lay all around him on the beach and that others like himself were grieving, cradling dead or injured bodies in their arms. He took no notice at all of the little five-year-old girl huddled beside him.

Idris could not help imagining what Abuong’s last moments of life had been like. What terror and pain his son must have suffered. Just a little boy, not even strong enough yet to pull back the string on his father’s bow. Just a child! Idris was filled with a grief and rage so huge it threatened to devour him.

Suddenly, he heard gunfire in the distance. He lifted his head and for the first time noticed the bloody body of a white-robed Arab lying on the ground a few feet away. The man was looking back at him with terror in his dark eyes.

Idris froze. He did not even breathe, just stared into the black eyes of the Fedayeen guerrilla. Then, he carefully placed the body of his son on the sand. As if in a dream, he walked over to where the Arab was sprawled on his back, gasping for air. A huge, gory wound in his belly had turned his white robe crimson. A bloody machete lay nearby. Idris leaned over and picked it up. When the soldier saw what he was doing, he began to plead for his life in a language Idris did not understand, blood bubbling out of his mouth as he spoke.

Idris took the weapon in both hands and began to raise it up over the Arab’s body.

“Idris.” Akec spoke his friend’s name quietly. He took a step closer to where his neighbor stood with a machete in his hands. “Idris.”

Idris ignored him. He continued to lift the machete until it was high above his head. Then he stood there lifeless, as unmoving as a clay pot, without a clear thought of any kind in his mind.

“I know what happened to Akin,” Akec said.

Idris’s arms went limp, and he dropped the machete in the sand beside the Arab’s head. He knew. Just like with Abuong, he knew.

“They took her,” Akec said softly, trying somehow to cushion the harsh reality of the words. “One of the women saw a soldier toss her into the back of the truck before they drove away.”

All of the air went out of Idris, and he collapsed to his knees beside the body of his son. Shema came and sat next to him, but he did not notice. He knelt silently for a time, his head bowed, his shoulders slumped. Then he began to wail, a high, keening, tormented sound ripped out of his agonized soul. Lifting his tear-stained face to the sky, Idris continued to wail, a sound so desolate and despairing it sent chills down Akec’s spine.

The wailing went on and on and on. It was the last sound the Arab soldier heard before his gasping ceased, and he lay with black eyes staring sightlessly at the Dinkan farmer kneeling beside him in the sand.

T
he unrelenting afternoon sun beat down on Mondala and on its dead, wounded and traumatized inhabitants. Smoke hung in a funeral pall over the ravaged village, mingled with the acrid stench of burned flesh coming from the ruins of tukuls that had been torched with families still inside. In a symphony of agony, cries of pain and grief rose up with the smoke into the clear, blue sky.

The remainder of the day was a blur for the shell-shocked survivors of the attack. Lifelong friends and family members had been shot or hacked apart, children had been trampled under horses’ hooves. The lifeless bodies of the butchered dead sprawled where they had fallen, on the village pathways or in the fields, on the road or by the river.

More than half the tukuls in Mondala had been destroyed. The livestock that hadn’t been slaughtered wandered around disoriented, the zebu lowing in the confusion and the goats skittish, calling to their young with baleful maa, maaa sounds. Guinea hens squawkedand fluttered over the puddles of blood spread out around the bodies that littered the village.

The savagery of the assassins who attacked Mondala was nowhere more evident than in the injuries of the survivors, who had been slashed, stabbed or bludgeoned, their bodies riddled with bullets or missing limbs. Many would not live through the night. The survivors did the best they could with what they had to relieve the suffering. They used river water to wash the wounds and applied herbal poultices and healing roots.

But the need was so overwhelming and their grief so profound that many who had lived through the butchery went into such deep shock they were almost catatonic.

Idris was not catatonic, though the loss of two children at once was so staggering a blow he couldn’t process it. He could only cope if he simply refused to think about Akin. If he did, he’d go mad. She was alive, and Abuong was dead. It was time now to mourn the dead.

With his calloused hand, he gently stroked Abuong’s cheek, as images of his son flashed through his mind, all in a jumble, too many to see at one time. It was like trying to make out each individual bird when a whole flock suddenly takes flight. A baby crawling on the dirt floor of the tukul. A toddler chasing butterflies in a spring field. A small child sitting on a zebu’s back. A young boy’s face—so grave and serious, sometimes, asking hard questions about the world and life and God.

Idris bowed his head and tried to pray. No words came, but that didn’t matter. Words would just have gotten in the way of communicating his groaning grief to God.

Akec stayed with Idris for a time, stood by his side, saying nothing. It was all he could think to do. But other neighbors also needed help. Finally, he leaned over and told Idris he’d be back, but he wasn’t at all certain his friend heard him.

As the afternoon wore on, it became more and more apparent that if the men in the village and on the cliff hadn’t fought back, there wouldn’t have been a single living being, man or beast, left in Mondala. As it was, the death toll was staggering. More than 100 men, women and children had been killed. Another 50 had been seriously injured. The villagers who followed the mercenaries until their tracks disappeared in the rocks discovered the bodies of the women and children who had been dragged behind a truck and then executed, each with a bullet to the back of the head. With them added to the total, everyone in the village was accounted for. Except one, the one who had been abducted. Akin Apot.

As evening approached, the handful of elders who were left in Mondala gathered to talk. The attack had been so unthinkably catastrophic that the men were still too dazed to get their arms around what the village should do now, how they should respond. They knew they must do something, but they were unable to formulate any plan of action.

Akec stood nearby. He was one of the few people in Mondala who had come through the attack unscathed. His wife and married daughters had not been in the village when the raiders struck. His tukul still stood and most of his livestock had not been harmed. Perhaps he was able to think more clearly because he had not suffered an injury or some traumatic loss, as the others had. But it seemed obvious to him what needed to be done, and though he was not an elder and his counsel was unsolicited, Akec gave it anyway.

“We have to get everyone, the injured and the dead as well, into the village—right now,” he said. “It will be dark soon, and the wild animals will come.”

“The wild animals have already come,” one old man said softly.

The others nodded in silent agreement.

“We can go in teams, two men each, so we can carry the bodies,” Akec continued.

He pointed to the now empty animal corral in the center of the village, placed there to protect the livestock from predators at night. “We can put the dead there. We will bury them tomorrow.”

Wordlessly, the men paired off and went to work as the sun slid down the western sky. The last rays of sunset had begun to cast long, thin shadows from Idris’s body over the still form of his son lying in the sand when Akec appeared out of the gloom.

“We’ve come to help you take Abuong back to the village.” Akec laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “It will be night soon.”

Idris nodded. His shadow now covered all of Abuong’s body. The darkness had reached out and taken the boy away.

For a moment, Idris stared at the child, aware for the first time how peaceful his face seemed. Abuong had suffered, but he suffered no more. He was in Heaven now; he was home. Idris leaned over, rested his face on the boy’s chest and told him softly, “Good night, my son” for the last time. Then he straightened up and got to his feet. He spoke tenderly to the expressionless little girl who had risen with him.

“Come, Shema.” He took her small hand into his. “Your mother is waiting for us.”

He turned to face Akec and looked deeply into his neighbor’s face.

“Thank you, friend,” he said.