The Smoke Jumper (48 page)

‘
Jambo. Jina langu ni Connor
.’

‘He does not speak Swahili,’ Okello said. ‘Nor English.

Only Acholi.’

Lawrence looked at the hand and then at Okello who nodded permission to shake it. The boy’s little hand felt cold and limp and bony. Connor showed him the picture of Thomas. Lawrence looked at it briefly then looked up again at Okello to check how he should react.

‘Ask him who this is.’

Okello did so and Connor heard the name Thomas in the boy’s reply but couldn’t understand the rest. He cursed himself for not having learned more than a few words of Acholi. Okello translated.

‘He says it is his brother, Thomas, who died a traitor and a coward.’

‘He didn’t say that. If he did, tell him that’s not true. Tell him his brother is alive.’

Okello glanced at Makuma and Connor told the boy himself in Swahili but he could see that he didn’t understand. The boy’s eyes were darting with fear. He was obviously afraid that he might already have said the wrong thing. Okello spoke to him again and when he replied his little voice cracked and he had to pause to clear his throat.

‘He says you are lying,’ Okello said.

Connor had had enough. ‘This is just bullshit. I don’t know what the hell either one of you is saying, but any damn fool can see this poor kid’s terrified.’

‘I think it is you he fears,’ Makuma said. He spoke to Lawrence again and the boy listened, then shook his head violently.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘That you had come here to buy him. I asked if he wants to be sold.’

Connor shook his head and looked away. What a fool he was to think this could ever have worked.

‘I will ask all of them the same question.’

‘Yeah, right. I bet you will.’

Makuma put his arm around Lawrence’s shoulders and turned him around so that he was facing the other children. He spoke for about a minute and simply from the tone of his voice Connor had a clear enough idea of what he was saying. He could imagine the pious bullshit rhetoric and the lies he must be lacing it with. The speech ended with what was clearly a question and all of the children stood silent, too terrified even to look at each other. He repeated it and still no one responded. Makuma turned and smiled at Connor with a smug regret.

‘I asked if any of them want to be sold to you. And you see? Not one.’

‘Tell them that I will take them home. They will be with their families again. Tell them that.’

Makuma spoke again but Connor knew damn well that he wasn’t saying that and so he began to shout it out himself in Swahili. At once Okello turned on him and yelled for him to stop and when Connor didn’t he came at him and struck him across the shoulder with his stick. Connor lunged at him but Okello’s two henchmen grabbed him from behind by his arms and Okello struck him again hard across the face this time and punched him in the stomach, knocking all the air from his lungs.

Connor sunk to his knees gasping for breath and Okello kicked him in the chest and sent him sprawling backward so that his head hit the ground. Connor lay there and looked at their faces scowling down at him with the clear and cobalt sky behind. And the last thing he heard before the blow that delivered him to darkness was Makuma calling out the Warriors for God battle cry and the shrill automaton chant of the children in response.

27

T
he town of Karingoa lay at the head of a valley in that part of Uganda where the arid grass and acacia flatland of the east began to crumple and roll and grow ever lusher as it spread west toward the Albert Nile and the jungle and mountain of the Congo beyond. It was a single street of terraced stores with a church at one end and a police station at the other. In the distant days before the war it had been a sleepy, unassuming place of only a few thousand people, though many more would come daily from the surrounding countryside to trade their produce in its marketplace. Now, however, they had come to stay and Karingoa’s population had grown fiftyfold while homesteads and villages for many miles around lay plundered and burned and deserted.

The government had set up ‘protected’ camps to which they urged the dispossessed to move but many resisted for the camps were far away and riddled with disease and even there the rebels still came at night to steal their children and what little else they had. So, instead, many had flocked to Karingoa and its squalid shanty camp that now sprawled for a mile at either end of town. At least from here those who were brave enough could from time to time sneak back to their villages to plant or gather crops. And often when they did, they found children who had escaped from the rebels or been cast aside, cowering in the bush or wandering the ruins of their homes like bewildered ghosts, searching for their families.

The rehabilitation center of St. Mary of the Angels, where many of these children were eventually brought, stood in the southern outskirts of Karingoa’s shanty-town. Glimpsed from its gateway of crumbled stucco, the old convent building looked a proud and imposing place. It was three broad stories tall and stood square and stalwart at the foot of a gently sloping driveway of red dirt. The driveway was lined with flame trees and beyond them, on either side, were palms and giant mango trees colonized by fruit bats who at dusk would spread their large and leathered wings and clatter forth to feed. Both the convent and the chapel that slid into view alongside it as one came down the driveway were whitewashed and garlanded with crimson bougainvillea. It was only as one drew close that the impression of colonial confidence begin to fade.

The whitewash was flaking and blotched by the water that twice yearly in the rainy season gushed through broken gutters from the cracked terracotta tiles of the roof. The facade of the convent building had six large windows on each floor, all with torn mosquito screens and slatted shutters whose green paint had so badly peeled that it looked like patches of mold upon the wood. In front of the building, the driveway broadened into a forecourt from which four wide steps of cracked cement ascended to a pair of hefty doors. Before the war, when St. Mary’s was still a girls’ school, these had always stood open. Now they were always kept closed and at night were locked and bolted.

Behind the main building was a straggle of smaller buildings that serviced the center’s needs. The kitchens, from whose windows came a constant clamor of voices and clang of pots, stood around a low-walled compound enclosing three tall papaya trees and a well with a hand-cranked pump. Scrawny chickens and ducks scrabbled in the dust for scraps while scrawnier dogs lounged beneath the trestle tables of a vast open-sided tent that served as the center’s dining room.

There were storerooms, a medical clinic and a workshop and a garage where a motley collection of vehicles stood in various states of disrepair. Towering surreally over them was a red double-decker bus which had been driven a decade ago on an epic fund-raising trip all the way from England. It was called Gertrude and, thanks to the loving attention of George, the center’s ancient gardener, mechanic and allaround saint, was still in good working order. Beside it was a red dirt field patched with dried grass where now, in the late afternoon sunshine, the children were playing soccer and basketball. Finally, beyond it all, lay twelve acres of garden, an overgrown eden of orange, banana, mango and avocado.

Surveying this scene from her third-floor window, Julia remembered how alien everything had seemed when they arrived here three months ago and how quickly they had come to feel at home.

She and Amy had just had their daily Acholi lesson with Sister Emily and, as usual, Amy had put her mother to shame. The girl was almost fluent by now, while Julia still sometimes faltered over simple sentences and made mistakes that prompted howls of laughter from Amy and even a benevolent smile or two from Emily. After the lesson Amy had run outside to play basketball when she should really have been up here doing some schoolwork, but Julia hadn’t had the heart to stop her. She could see her down there now, calling for the ball and running with the other girls, her blond curls bouncing in the dusty sunlight.

The room they shared was Spartan but spacious. It had a high ceiling with a fan that didn’t work and pale green walls where little pink geckos with suckered feet and bulbous eyes would hang motionless for hours. There were two metal-framed beds pushed together under one big mosquito net, a wooden desk with drawers, a couple of chairs and a giant closet that smelled of mothballs for their clothes. The only luxury was having their own shower and washbowl which were screened off in one corner. The communal toilets were along the corridor.

Julia checked her watch. She had half an hour before the English class that she had recently started teaching every other evening before supper. The class was voluntary but she made it fun and more and more children were showing up. She turned away from the window and undressed and took a shower, washing her hair and relishing the cool trickle of the water while a gecko watched her from above. Then, wrapped in a towel, she sat at the desk with the sun slanting in on her shoulders and finished a letter to Linda.

In her last letter to Julia, Linda had asked about Connor and whether the people at St. Mary’s knew where he was. They didn’t. But Sister Emily had more recent news than anyone. Only last fall, about six months ago, he had called from Nairobi and asked her for a list of local children known to have been abducted by the WFG. He hadn’t explained why he wanted it and Sister Emily hadn’t asked. She assumed it must be for an article he was writing.

It was clear from the way that she and the other nuns and counselors at St. Mary’s talked about him that Connor was greatly loved. Framed photographs that he had taken of the children hung on the walls of the hallway. Julia gathered that he regularly sent money and great packages of clothing and shoes and that on his last visit he had brought them a new video and stereo system. ]ulia had naturally mentioned that he was Amy’s godfather but not, for some reason, that he was also her father.

On hearing Sister Emily’s news, she had felt such a surge of relief that she had almost burst into tears. Connor was alive. At least he was alive. But swiftly afterward came feelings of hurt and jealousy that he hadn’t contacted her or his own daughter for so long. She presumed that he still didn’t know about Ed’s death, for surely, if he did, he would have been in touch. Julia didn’t divulge these feelings to anyone, least of all to Amy, nor did she now in her letter to Linda. Connor belonged to the past and she had vowed to live in the present and not blight it by a longing that she knew she could easily summon if she let herself.

There were forty-two children at St. Mary’s, two thirds of whom were boys. Of the nine counselors who worked with them, all but three were nuns who had been born and grown up in the Karingoa area. All of them had been at the convent when it was a school and had since been specially trained by the charity to work with traumatized children. Though they were Catholics, the religious tone of the place was low-key and carefully tuned so that those children who were Protestants never felt out of place.

The other two counselors were a jovial, middle-aged Swiss divorcee called Françoise, and Peter Pringle, a sweet and slightly intense young Scotsman who doubled as the center’s physician. He had frizzy ginger hair and was becoming inordinately fond of Julia. He always made sure that he sat near her at mealtimes and blushed when she caught him staring at her. All the staff had rooms on the third floor, while the children slept in segregated male and female dormitories on the second. Peter Pringle’s room was next to theirs. They could hear him through the wall sometimes, singing obscure folk songs rather badly in the shower, which would send Amy into helpless fits of giggles. She had nicknamed him Cringle because of his hair and did wicked impressions of him protesting his undying love for Julia.

She finished her letter and got dressed and gathered the props that she needed for her class. She taught entirely in English and if anyone asked a question in Acholi she pretended not to understand, which quite often she didn’t. She always liked to have a theme and this evening’s was a visit to the market. She had collected a basketload of items that the children could pretend to buy and sell and haggle over. She had about thirty things, from oranges and bananas to clothes-pins and combs, along with several boxes of matches to use for money. Pandemonium was guaranteed.

On her way downstairs she met Amy coming up from basketball, arm in arm with Christine, a ten-year-old Acholi girl, who had been held by the rebels for over a year and horribly abused. But she’d been at St. Mary’s for two months now and was well on the way to recovery. She and Amy had become close. They were both covered in dust.

‘Is it okay if Christine comes to our room?’ Amy asked.

‘Of course it is. But don’t you forget that math, young lady.’

The girls went running past her up the stairs

‘I know. I’ll do it later. We’re going to write a play.’

‘Great. See you later. And take a shower!’

‘Yes, Mom,’ Amy groaned.

The English class went well. There was a record attendance of fifteen children as well as two of the nuns who already spoke the language but wanted to brush it up. The biggest surprise was to see Thomas there, the boy in Connor’s photograph, who still after nearly two years at St. Mary’s had yet to utter a word. He had put on a little weight since the time of the photograph but he was still thin and frail. He had a self-protective way of tucking his chin onto his chest so that he always seemed to be looking up from under the shelter of his brow. No one seemed to know what to do with him. Most of the children at the center stayed for only two or three months before going back to their families. Thomas had once been sent to live with an uncle but it hadn’t worked out. He came back to the center after only two weeks, looking more lost and lonely than ever.