Sudan: A Novel (4 page)

Ron’s present state of semicollapse had not, however, been occasioned by life in a microwave set for popcorn. The issue was sleep, or rather the lack of it. After he’d snatched only a couple of hours a night of it for more than a week, he suspected he might literally be slack-jawed and drooling. His weary face, gray with fatigue, looked as worn and tired as the Nile steamer that had been the instrument of his unintended sleep fast.

As he fought the numbing exhaustion, he wandered through the lobby and searched the passing faces for his contact from the BBC. A poof of dust coughed out of his pocket along with the crumpled scrap of paper as he checked the time and date once more. 
“Noon, 15 March, Bata Hotel, R. R. Olford, BBC.”
 Ron smiled weakly. The R. R. stood for Rupert Reginald. Not many mothers naming their babies 
that
 anymore, he thought. The two of them had met briefly, had a few beers together a couple of times when both were in South Africa. Ron was confident they would recognize each other. He knew he could pick Olford out of a police lineup: tall, skinny, glasses, and bald—with a really bad comb-over.

An Arab woman wearing a powder blue, knee-length salwar kameez and a black shayla wrap that revealed nothing but her face, brushed by him without acknowledging his unkempt appearance. If she saw him, or smelled him, she pretended not to notice. Dark-skinned businessmen dressed in Western-style suits with smaghs on their heads were caught up in a heated argument about something, their voices loud, their Arabic as rapid-fire as machine guns. To Ron’s American eye, all men in smaghs looked like Yasser Arafat. A half dozen Zande porters dutifully stood by the hotel’s front entrance, and scanned the crowd for potential business. Ron couldn’t help noting that none of them had offered to carry his bags.

The first time Ron had stayed at the Bata, he gave the establishment a five-star rating based solely on the gold standard for American real estate—location, location, location. In that department, the Bata Hotel had no equal in all of Khartoum. Half a mile from the Presidential Palace and just over the bridge from the Omdurman markets, the aging edifice offered a sweeping view of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers, a 50-yard-line seat at the birth of the mighty Nile.

Built by a wealthy ex-patriot Spaniard shortly after World War I, the Bata featured an elegant Mediterranean-style red tile roof; spacious balconies and a peach-colored stucco exterior. Though the stucco could have done with a fresh coat of paint, the building still managed a shabby chic that made the peeling paint something of a fashion statement. Inside the lobby, an incongruent mixture of styles testified to the diversity of the hotel’s many owners in the past 75 years. Sturdy leather chairs, loveseats and couches rubbed elbows with delicate French ladder-backs, faux Louis XIV tables and porcelain lamps. The most magnificent Moroccan tile floor Ron had ever seen lay beneath the eclectic collection of furniture, and he was convinced the heavy emerald draperies on the huge windows by the door had been stolen off the set of 
Gone with the Wind
. Where a fully stocked bar once stood—pre-Islamic revolution—a fairly well-appointed phone bank had been installed that offered remarkably good service. Large double doors on the wall past the phone bank led to what was listed in the Khartoum guidebook as a “five-star restaurant.” Ron sincerely doubted the claim, though he’d never eaten there.

He didn’t see his contact, so Ron found an overstuffed chair and gratefully lowered himself into it. The cool and comfort were intoxicating. He’d experienced neither on his trip from Juba to Khartoum. A brief smile skittered across his face as he imagined describing his journey to his college friends who now held cushy stateside media posts. Not one of them had ever seen a conveyance like the one that had transported Ron downriver.

The steamer resembled a Mississippi riverboat on steroids. With motorless barges attached to both sides, the front and the back, it occupied a portion of river about the size of a football field. The third-class passengers on the barges were accompanied by their livestock. Twenty-four hours after it left Juba, the steamer smelled like a floating dung heap. Ron had spent the trip curled up in a space recently vacated by two rusty, long-empty fire-extinguisher canisters that he’d chucked overboard. And he only got that choice piece of real estate when he bribed a crewmember with his pricy American wristwatch.

Where will I get a replacement for my $19.99 Wal-Mart Timex, Ron wondered as he settled back in a polished leather chair in the cool of the Bata’s lobby. And that was his last coherent thought for a while. He only had a couple of tired synapses still firing. They were too exhausted to reach out and touch each other, and the space in between generated random images that appeared, morphed and then disappeared in his head like the shifting mosaic of a kaleidoscope.

Fighting to stay awake and aware, he sat upright in the chair, shook his head violently and dug filthy knuckles into his bloodshot eyes. He forced himself to survey the room, taking in the affluence all around him and pondering a cosmically dark irony. The wealth of the Arabs who glided by him, stirring up the refrigerated air as they passed, kept them pampered and protected, able to sit back and select from the buffet of life only the choicest, tastiest morsels. Wrapped up snug in their oil-driven prosperity and fortified by the rule of 
sharia
 law, they were safely separated from the barbarity on their doorstep. Most of these men in Armani suits and women in flowing satin-trimmed abayas had never spent five minutes talking to the kind of people Ron had lived among for the past three months. The land where their southern countrymen bled and died, forced to watch in helpless agony as their children were kidnapped and brutalized, lay almost within rock-throwing distance of the hotel lobby where they sat in cool comfort, their own children safe and secure in the penthouse suites upstairs.

Ron’s head bobbed only once before he finally lost the battle to keep his eyelids from slamming shut. As his chin fell forward, he slipped his hands through the strap, wrapped his arms around his camera case and clasped it to his chest like a flight attendant demonstrating how to hold onto a seat cushion life preserver.

The explosion of pain in Dada's right leg took her by surprise. She hadn’t heard the crack of the rifle that sent a .308 caliber slug tearing through her body. The force of it spun her completely around; she crashed to the ground, and dragged Kuak and Isak down with her. Reisha flew out of the backpack and landed with a plop on the path a few feet beyond her.

Instinctively, Dada struggled to stand and run. But the shattered femur gave way and spilled her in a heap in the dirt. She looked up helplessly at the boys, shoved them forward and shouted, “Loi! Loi!” Run! Run!

But the twins stood frozen, their eyes wide with shock as they watched the growing pool of blood beneath their mother spread out and begin to soak into the powdery dust on the road.

Dada looked back in the direction of the burning village and she saw him, the soldier in combat fatigues who had shot her. He was striding purposefully down the path toward her and her children.

She looked up again at her sons. This time, she didn’t command, she pleaded. “Loi! Loi!” But the boys wouldn’t move.

Dada’s world began to slide in and out of focus from pain and the loss of blood. The soldier was only a few yards away now, and she turned and began to claw her way down the path, smearing blood in a snail-trail behind her.

Dirty and scratched but too stunned to cry, Reisha sat up and crawled toward her mother. Dada reached out and pulled her baby daughter close, to comfort the child as she had done hundreds of times before.

The shadow of the soldier fell over her body. He looked down at her, then barked a command in an unintelligible language. Another soldier ran to him, grabbed the twin boys and dragged them away. The brothers kicked and screamed, dug their feet into the dirt and reached back for their mother. But the soldier effortlessly yanked them along beside him as he headed toward the trucks.

Dada clutched her baby to her breast. She looked up at the remaining soldier and in stammering Lokuta pleaded for mercy. The big man smiled down at her and ejected the spent magazine from his G3 assault rifle. When he slammed in a fresh 20 rounds of shells, the finality of that sound told Dada that she would die.

She had time to picture John's face. And Koto, such a fine, strong...

Reisha rolled out of her mother’s suddenly limp arms after the gun blast, her tiny eardrums shattered by the explosion. She righted her blood-splattered body, sat up and began cry--not a pitiful mewl but a loud, demanding wail.

There was a metallic racking sound followed by a
ka-chunk
as another bullet dropped into the chamber of the weapon in the soldier's hands. He didn't smile at Reisha. He just pointed the rifle and fired.

The world fell instantly silent. 
Then the raucous cry of a flock of hornbill set to flight by his second gunshot filled the air, and the Sudanese soldier turned and strode back toward the remains of the village.

A tall, thin man, with a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple, nudged the sleeping American. Nothing. He spoke his name. Nothing. He spoke it again—louder.

“Ron Wolfson?”

Ron’s head snapped upright so violently he almost got whiplash. Even exhausted, he’d only been able to sleep in fitful spurts since his previous assignment in Uganda chasing the ghosts of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Machete-slashed corpses and regiments of little-kid soldiers still stalked the dark alleyways of his nightmares. The abrupt intrusion of reality was always startling and usually left him momentarily disoriented.

The BBC correspondent noted the blank, confused look on Ron's face.

“Olford here…,” he said tentatively, “from the Cairo bureau…”

The real world downloaded into Ron’s brain, and he felt a little sheepish that he had reentered it as if he’d just been jabbed with a cattle prod. Perhaps he should explain his response, but that would require energy and he had none to spare. Instead, he merely grunted, “Yes, I’m Ron Wolfson,” as he stumbled to his feet and offered a weak handshake.

“Sorry for the start,” Olford said kindly.

And the thing was, he genuinely was sorry. A gentle, compassionate man, Rupert Olford was far too tenderhearted to survive for long as a foreign correspondent. “I was about to give up on you when I couldn’t locate you. I was sure I’d recognize you, but...”

“But right now I don’t look much like you remember.”

“Well, now that you mention it, you do look a bit of a mess.” Olford wore a white shirt that looked like he’d just ironed it, and a too-narrow black-and-gray striped tie.

“Back home, we call them red-eyes,” Ron said, not referring to the state of his own. “But I don’t know what they call all-nighters in the luxurious accommodations of the Nile steamer.”

Olford nodded knowingly. His thick, wire-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look, and his head bobbed up and down on his skinny neck. “If that’s how you arrived here, I’m not a’tall surprised you look a bit punk.”

The Brit’s gaze switched from Ron to the other guests in the lobby. His eye swept slowly from one to the next, making certain none of them showed even mild interest in his conversation with the filthy American. When he was convinced they were not being watched, he pointed down a paneled hallway. “I have a room upstairs. We can talk there if you like. I’m eager to see what you have and hear your story.”

Ron managed a weak smile and stepped past him. When he did, Olford’s face contorted in an involuntary grimace.

Suddenly aware that his clothes reeked, Ron answered the fastidious Brit’s unasked question. “It’s either goats, zebu dung, dead fish or two thousand sweating bodies that haven’t bathed since the earth cooled off. Take your pick.”

Olford laughed. “You do honk.”

“Honk?”

“Believe you Yanks call it
stink
.”

Ron’s smile broadened as he stooped to pick up his gear. “The assault on your olfactory nerves will be worth the sacrifice when the BBC gets these shots.”