Sudan: A Novel (28 page)

Idris didn’t know that the oil from the seed of a balanite tree, called the heglig tree by the Arabs, was rich in steroidal sapogenins—naturally occurring steroids. If Omar had been taken to a hospital emergency room, doctors there would have treated the scorpion bites with steroids.

Throughout the afternoon, Idris sat by Omar’s side. He tore off a piece of cloth from Omar’s pants leg and used it to hold the poultice on the bottom of the mercenary’s foot and replaced the poultice with a fresh one every couple of hours. It was desperately hot, and Idris considered trying to give Omar something to drink, but feared he couldn’t swallow and would choke.

Toward evening, Omar’s breathing improved some, so Idris left him alone for a little while to gather firewood. He sat up with the mercenary through the night, tended the fire and applied fresh balanite tree poultices. Shortly after noon the next day, Omar opened his eyes and looked around. Idris wasn’t sure he was completely conscious, but he was responsive enough for Idris to give him a drink of water.

For the rest of the day, Omar drifted in and out of consciousness. By nightfall, an awareness came into his eyes. He was there, confused, but there. Idris tried to give him another drink, and the big man reached up weakly, snatched the water bottle out of the tribal’s hands and drank it by himself. Omar was back.

They remained camped under the balanite tree for two more days, while Omar suffered the agony of putting weight on his right foot and regaining mobility. Idris went out with his spear every day and came back with small game—quail, partridge, guinea fowl and hares—that he cooked over the fire at night. He could have killed an antelope instead, but he didn’t want to draw scavengers to the smell of blood.

As Omar watched Idris work, he was both angry and baffled. Any loss of control triggered rage, and Omar certainly hadn’t been in charge of anything for the last few days. Idris had provided food, fire, water, even protection. And the vague, uncomfortable memories of the tribal taking care of him set his teeth on edge. But he was confused, too. If Idris had been stung, Omar would have left him there to die. Certainly, Idris needed Omar to find his daughter, but the tribal could have taken the money and hired somebody else to do the job. Why didn’t he?

Omar was in turmoil on another front as well. After they broke camp and headed west again, the big man limped along, leaning on an acacia limb he had whittled into a crutch. They hadn’t traveled more than a couple of miles before he began to have flashbacks. It was like he was looking at a series of still photos, but so vivid that the real world around him, the hot dirt under the tender sole of his bare foot--the sweat trickling down between his shoulder blades, the tall Dinka striding along beside him—all of that was gone. The picture was reality. For a heartbeat or two, then the world came back into focus.

The venom-induced delirium was over, but the images from it hadn’t faded away like the smoke from a dying campfire. They had hung on a nail somewhere in his head. He knew where the hut was. He knew who the old man was who wanted the boy to go with him to gather firewood.

As he limped along, Omar remembered.

When his mother escaped from her Mauritanian master, she took her six-year-old son and went home. She’d been kidnapped when she was nine years old and had only the vaguest memories of any other world. But she had traveled the whole length of Sudan to the Imatong Mountains on the border of Kenya to find her family and her life. The hut in the snapshots was his mother’s home; the old man was his grandfather. The hallucination had pulled the scab off his memories, and for the first time in more than 35 years, Omar recalled the day he’d found his mother sitting by herself on the riverbank, sobbing. He’d run and put his arms around her and tried to comfort her, but nothing he said or did made any difference. She cried until she was limp, too weak to cry anymore. When she spoke, her voice was a despairing whisper.

“You must gather all your things together,” she’d said. “We are leaving in the morning.”

“Leaving?” the boy had cried. “No, I want to stay here!”

Life in Mauritania had been a brutal, terrifying nightmare, and the village in the mountains was better than any little boy’s fantasy. He loved the damp, tangled undergrowth in the forest, the cry of the birds and the monkeys in the trees. He loved fishing in the river, the smell of the campfire, and the feel of rough, gnarled fingers wrapped snug around his small hand. He was the old man’s beloved
tenyatta
—grandson. He didn’t want to leave!

But even as he cried out in protest, some part of Omar knew. He had seen how the other women in the village treated his mother; he had suffered the taunts of the village children, who called him names he didn’t understand. Some part of him had expected this.

“I can’t stay here,” his mother said. “I don’t belong.”

“But this is your home, our home.”

“No, it isn’t my home. Not anymore. Once, when I was a little girl, before...” Her voice trailed off. Then she looked into her son’s eyes and saw the pain there, and tried again to make him understand. “The little girl an Arab raider snatched out of her dying mother’s arms is gone. She doesn’t live in me. She’s dead.
They
”--she spit the word out in disgust, and Omar knew who she meant--“They used her, fouled her and killed her! And the woman I am now...” she struggled for words again. “Who I am is a disgraceful thing.”

She pulled her son into her arms and began to cry softly. “And you, even your grandfather cannot make the rest of the village accept you.”

At the thought of her father, she burst into tears and rocked back and forth with Omar held tight to her chest. Though her crying garbled what she said to him then, the little boy understood every word.

“It would be better for my father, better for me and you—all of us,” she cried, between hitching, halting sobs, “if I had died with my mother and sister in the raid on our village.”

Omar and his mother had left the next morning and he never saw the village or his grandfather again. They finally settled in Port Sudan, where his mother spent a decade as a prostitute, using what she earned to feed her son and to feed her growing addiction to the narcotic quat. Eventually, the addiction cost more than the boy. Omar came home one day when he was 16 and found her dead.

The memory of how she had looked, sprawled in a pool of her own vomit on the floor of their filthy, one-room shack vanished in a cry of pain when Omar’s bare foot landed on a thorn that buried itself deep in his flesh. He fell to the ground in a heap and lay facedown in the dirt for a moment, wounded more by the memories than the thorn, grateful to be back in the real world, even if it hurt. Then he rolled over, sat up and began to dig the thorn out of the sole of his foot. He waved away Idris’s efforts to help him, staggered to his feet, picked up his crutch and set out walking again.

It took the two men five days to cross the remainder of the plains, and as they walked, the ghost images in Omar’s mind mercifully faded away. They came upon another herd of antelope but managed to make their way around rather than through it. They disturbed a family of warthogs in the bush, saw giraffe in the distance and heard the trumpeting of elephants. And for one long afternoon, they could hear the roar of lions. Idris led that day’s trek, bearing west but circling downwind of the sound.

They came out on the north-south road at noon, only a few miles south of the track that led from it to Jonglei. At sunset, Omar hoisted a beer in a dark, smoky bar, and questioned an old friend about slave traders.

Koto’s shoulder was still puffy and swollen, but it had started to heal. Antibiotics and a steady stream of intravenous nutrients had done a remarkable job, aided by Helena Greinschaft’s African-flavored home cooking. Dr. Greinschaft’s surgical repair of the trapezoid muscle in the boy’s shoulder had been successful. The arm had a limited range of motion now, and with time, it would get better. But the wound and the chipped clavicle beneath it created a deep indentation on the top of his shoulder that the boy would carry for life.

He sat propped up in the bed on pillows, a new, cushy experience Koto had decided he enjoyed. But it was obvious Koto’s shoulder still hurt badly. It was equally obvious that he wanted nothing in the world more than to tell the people gathered around his bedside what had happened to him, to his family, his village and to the other captives kidnapped by the slave traders.

Ron and Dr. Greinschaft sat on the empty bed on the left side of the boy. Masapha sat on the edge of Koto’s bed. The boy smiled at the little Arab not much bigger than himself. He had instantly bonded with the only person in the room he could talk to. The bond went both ways.

Masapha had set up the recording equipment to make an audio tape of the boy’s story. The microphone lay on the pillow beside the boy’s head; the recorder sat on the bed beside Ron.

“I’m going to ask the boy to begin at the start and from there go to the finish of the story,” Masapha said. “Already, I have heard part of it.”

The Arab had taken a couple of shifts sitting at the boy’s bedside, and they had talked long into the night. It was plain to see that his affection for the boy had grown along with his command of the Lokuta language. It was nothing short of astonishing how quickly Masapha had become fluent in the dialect.

“But all of you need to hear the whole of it.” He pointed to the recorder and told Ron. “What you must do is punch the button—here—where it says ‘on.’”

“Tough job, but I think I can handle it.”

Masapha turned his attention back to the boy, patted his arm and said to him in Lokuta, “Now it is time for you to tell us all of it, the whole story.” He paused, then continued, “Even the parts it is hard to say. Yes?”

The boy nodded and began to speak.

Even though none of them, other than Masapha, knew what the boy was saying, they were mesmerized by the tale and held spellbound by the boy’s intensity as he told it. As he relived the horror, the others watched the drama play out on his face.

This time, the men allowed Masapha to proceed for long periods without interruption. Finally, the boy began to slow down. His words came haltingly, and his voice began to choke with emotion.

Masapha stopped him, patted his leg and turned to the others.

He let out a sigh and cocked his head toward Koto.

“The boy needs to have some breath,” Masapha said.

“Needs a
breather
?” Ron asked.

“Yes, that, too,” Masapha said. “And, actually, I do as well. This is the story of the happenings in his life. Koto was up early to take the family’s zebu to eat grass in the pasture. He was on his way back when he saw two silver
things
in the sky. He didn’t know what they were, but they were flying faster than an arrow shot from a bow, right to his village. He said they made a sound like rumbling thunder.” Masapha looked at Ron. “Gu-ships, you think?”

Ron nodded. “I’m thinking Antonov fighters, maybe. From what I understand, that’s the government in Khartoum’s weapon of choice to annihilate its own people.”

Masapha took up the story again.

“He stood in the field, and the airplanes flew low over the village and suddenly there were explosions, making big holes in the ground, blowing zebu apart; huts turning to fire. In two minutes, the world of his life was gone.”

“And he had a box seat,” Ron shook his head in anger and disgust. “Got to watch his whole village go up in smoke.”

“With his family in it,” Masapha added.

“His family...” Ron groaned. “OK, tell me about them,” he said, and scratched notes furiously on the pad in his lap.

“His mother’s name was Dada.” He turned to the boy. “Dada?”

The boy nodded and Masapha turned back to Ron. “Dada Manut and her husband, John. He had a baby sister named Reisha, and two little brothers, twins, eight years old, Isak and Kuak, so much the same face it is hard to tell them from each other—except for the butterfly mark here”--Masapha pointed to the top of his right hand--“on Isak’s hand.”

When Ron was sure he had the names down right, he nodded his head and Masapha continued.

“Also there was a grandfather, uncles, aunts and cousins, too.”

Ron noted it.

“So he was standing in the pasture, with his village flaming into the sky, and he didn’t know what to do. And then he remembered his father, his grandfather and his mother’s brothers were working in the millet field, so he went in search for them.” Masapha bowed his head. “And he found them.”

He continued in a quiet voice.

“He got to the edge of the field and crouched in the tall grass where he couldn’t be seen. All the men who had been working there—probably 40 or 50 of them—were running to the burning village. And Koto thought they had come to save his home. He saw his father in front—a big man, Koto said he was a very big man.”

Masapha stopped and smiled just a little. “Of course, Koto is a runt, as am I a runt, so I don’t know how big that would make his father.”

The smile faded. “For just one moment, Koto was proud in his heart that his father was coming to fight the soldiers, and then he saw the real reason the men were running. Soldiers in jeeps were chasing them. And the soldiers had rifles, and they were shooting as they were driving behind the villagers, and the men with his father began to die.”