Acts of faith (60 page)

The operating room, with its baked mud walls and ceiling of corrugated tin, looked nothing like the ones on TV medical shows. Except for a breathing apparatus with a face mask hanging from it, there was no high-tech gadgetry flashing signals of life’s functions. Overhead lights shone on a stainless-steel table covered by a stained foam mattress. Hot water steamed in pots on a propane stove. Lily was cleaning surgical instruments in one, dipping them with tongs.

The two strapping orderlies returned and laid Captain Bala on the table. Quinette stepped back toward the door but didn’t leave with the male nurse. She had a special interest in this patient and figured that entitled her to stay and watch; however, her view of the operation was blocked by a wall of backs as Manfred and his assistants went to work. “I had better not put him under, his blood pressure is far too low,” he murmured to Lily. “Let’s see if we can make do with a local.” Lily raised a bottle to the light and filled a syringe. Then the doctor called for a scalpel and forceps, and for several minutes there was complete silence, until he exclaimed, “Ah!” As he turned aside, pinching what looked like a fragment of a coat hanger between the forceps, Quinette saw the front of his smock spattered with a blackish fluid and Ulrika holding a compress to Bala’s side. Manfred frowned when he spotted her, leaning against the door.

“You have a reason for being here?”

“I . . . no—I was just wondering . . . is he going to be all right?”

“You’re not needed here, Miss Hardin.”

She went out, feeling superfluous and embarrassed. She should return to her assigned duties but thought against all reason that if she remained close by, Captain Bala would be okay. Looking up at the stars, more stars than she’d ever seen back home, she prayed to God to deliver Michael’s comrade from whatever danger he was in. Even as she did, she sensed that this petition wouldn’t be granted; so she wasn’t too surprised or saddened when, about a quarter of an hour later, the orderlies marched out with the stretcher between them and the captain on it, the blanket drawn over his face.

“I am sorry for kicking you out,” Manfred said, emerging with Ulrika, Lily, and two other assistants. “I didn’t know you and Miss Hanrahan worked so hard to save that man. The fifth one we lost today.”

“We did a first-rate job, treating the wrong wound,” Lily remarked caustically.

Manfred lit up again, bringing the two fingers holding the cigarette flat against his lips, pulling it out with a quick, nervous movement. “You could have done nothing with the right one.”

“What happened?” Quinette asked.

“A thin piece of shrapnel this long”—he spread a thumb and forefinger about three inches—“pierced his liver, straight through to the inferior vena cava. This is the big artery from the heart to the liver. Not much bleeding on the outside—the piece was like a little cork—but a great deal of internal hemorrhaging. It is miraculous he lasted as long as he did.”

“I’d better find Michael and tell him.”

But at that inconvenient moment, a wave of nausea rolled through her. Hand to her mouth, she moved away and vomited.

Ulrika placed a matronly arm across her shoulders. “
Ach,
you are not used to this.”

“Not that,” Quinette sputtered. “I’ve got dysentery, and—”

“You have something for it?”

“Cipro.”

“Then take one and get some rest. My little house, you can sleep there. I don’t think I will be lying down for some hours yet.”

Quinette shook her head. “As long as Lily is—”

“Do not with me play the heroine,” Ulrika chided. “You have done your share. My little house. I will get someone to show you where it is.”

Shining her penlight into the small room, she saw a box of matches on the nightstand and lit the paraffin lamp. Ulrika had asked her not to turn on the electric lights, to save juice in the solar batteries. The bed with its steel headboard looked like hospital surplus, its stern functional lines softened somewhat by the mosquito net that enclosed it. Figuring the invitation did not include use of the bed, Quinette propped her rucksack in a corner, unrolled her air mattress and sleeping bag, and placed them atop one of the floor mats. It was stuffy inside, and she opened the shutters, sat on a chair, and took off her boots and socks, wrinkling her nose at the smell. All of her clothes had a funky reek. Reckoning she did, too, she stripped and hung her clothes on a peg to air them out, then positioned the chair in the middle of the room, between the two windows, and washed her naked body in the night breezes.

She looked around at the floral print curtains on the windows, posters of German pop groups on the stone walls, a portable radio with built-in CD player on the desk, next to a laptop and a stack of computer-game software. She wasn’t ready for sleep, though she’d been awake since dawn. What she felt instead of tiredness was an inner collapse. Everything she and Lily had done for Captain Bala, all for nothing.
“Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”
The Holy Spirit, however, seemed not to be in a revivalist mood as far as she was concerned, so she got her travel Bible from her rucksack and sat on the bed, holding the book under the lamp, and paged through it aimlessly, hoping to come upon some uplifting passage. Finding none, she lay down for a moment . . .

A knock at the door and the sound of someone calling her name woke her up. At first she thought she was dreaming, the voice and the rapping sounded so far away; but then she was sitting up and looking at her watch. Ten-thirty. She’d been asleep for maybe fifteen minutes, though it felt like hours. By the time her head cleared, Michael had given up and was walking away—she could hear his boots crunching on the gravel pathway. She called to him through the window.

“Miss Hardin? The nurse told me you were here. I woke you up?”

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. She knew, instinctively knew, the reason for this visit and was thrilled he’d come to her.

“Wait a second. I’m not dressed,” she said, and quickly put on her trousers and shirt and fluffed her hair. She was about to tell him to come in when she noticed that she’d left her bra and panties on the peg. That wouldn’t look right, she thought, and stuffed them into her rucksack. Then she opened the door.

He had to duck as he entered; it was a low doorway—she herself had cleared it by only a couple of inches. He took off his beret and folded it under an epaulet and asked if he could sit down. She nodded, and he fell into the chair, looking stricken and exhausted. She placed the desk chair in front of him and sat down.

“I am so sorry,” she said, covering his hand in her two. “I prayed for him, I did, but—”

“I didn’t come here for the kind words.” There was an equal measure of aggression and weariness in his tone. “Bala was a soldier and he died like one, and that’s the end of it.”

“You came because you needed to talk to somebody. And don’t tell me I’ve got that wrong, because I know and I know because I lost someone close to me when I was fourteen. My dad. And afterward, after it finally sank into my teenage head that he was gone and never coming back, all I wanted to do was talk to people. To just about anyone who’d listen.”

“But you
are
wrong,” he said.

She released his hand and sat back, noticing how the lamplight lent a bronze cast to the cicatrix on his forehead.

In an undertone, his lips barely moving, he said, “You have no idea how sick I am of all this. I didn’t come here to talk, but to listen to you talk. I want you to take me out of here for a little while. Talk to me about the Iowa state.”

“Iowa?” she asked with a nervous laugh.

“Yes. I’ve heard Garang speak about his days at university there. He liked it very much. I wish to hear about it from you.”

“There’s not much I can say. I mean, it’s kind of boring.”

“Boring is good. The more boring the better. Because, as you’ve seen this day, Sudan can be so very interesting.”

He cocked his chin as he stared at her, as if defying her to bore him, an unusual challenge that she did her best to meet, telling him that Iowa was very white, racially speaking, and very flat from the Mississippi in the east to the Missouri in the west, flat as a table except near the rivers, where it got hilly but not much, and owing to this flatness and the thick, rich, black soil, it was mostly farmland, corn and soybean fields and cow pastures, and nothing much ever happened there except during presidential election years, when candidates from all over descended on the state, vying for its citizens’ votes because it was a big deal to win the state of Iowa, even though it didn’t have a lot of people, like California or New York—
fat
people, she added, and described how heavy and ponderous everyone had looked to her when she’d returned home from her first visit to Sudan, why, your average Iowan could shed twenty pounds and give it to your average African and the Iowan would still be overweight and the African skinny, and was that boring enough for him?

“Delightfully boring,” he answered. “But you’re not fat.”

It was hard to tell if he meant this as a compliment or as a mere statement of the obvious.

“I probably would be if I’d stayed. My older sister? The last time I saw her, she was getting like this.” She made a circle with her arms. “She’s not as tall as me—as I. I’m the tallest of three sisters. Take after my dad. He was six feet four.”

“The father you lost,” he murmured, and she could tell by the way he said it that he wondered how she’d come to lose him.

“He was a soldier, like you. In the Vietnam War. He got sick because he was exposed to a chemical they used over there. Agent Orange. You heard about it?”

“When I was at Fort Benning, yes. My father was also a soldier. In the British army. He fought with the British in the Second World War. Against the Italians in Ethiopia.”

“You seem kind of young to have had a father in the Second World War,” she remarked.

“He had three wives. I was a son of the youngest, a girl sixteen years old that he married when he was forty.”

Three,
she thought, and that brought a question, one she was reluctant to ask.

“But you haven’t told me about your life in Iowa state,” he said.

She laughed. “Now that would really bore you.”

“I wish to hear about ordinary things.”

She spun random, mundane anecdotes about Cedar Falls and the farm and the dull years in high school. Her life B.A.—Before Africa. A fear leaped within her that she was overdoing it, making it sound more commonplace than it had actually been. However much he wished to hear about ordinary things, she didn’t wish Michael to see her as an ordinary woman, a desire that led her to carry on for several minutes about her sinful years and her eventual return to grace, a tale she thought sufficiently dramatic to balance out all the everyday stuff.

“And so you have come here to Sudan for what reason?”

“I told you. I work for the WorldWide Christian Union—”

“Yes, of course. But what are your own reasons? The reasons in your heart. Was your life in America too dull that you had to come here?”

The honest answer, she knew, was yes, but she didn’t care for the sound of it: too personal, too selfish, and besides, it was not entirely true. “I think I was called here. I think I’m doing something God wants me to do. What about you?”

He smiled. “I’m here because I was born here, Miss Hardin.”

“It’s all right to call me Quinette. I meant, you said you’re sick of all this. Why are you doing what you do?”

“There is a Nuban ballad, one for the modern times,” he answered. “It says this:

The world becomes bad
There is one man who doesn’t want to go to war
If you want me to fight, you must take me by a rope
Around my neck and pull me there. I won’t go.

“Sometimes I wish I could be like the man in that song. To have the courage to say, ‘I won’t go.’ But I don’t have the choice. Some men fight because they love it. I fight because I hate it.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I fight in the hopes that if I fight hard enough, long enough, and with enough intelligence, I can make an end to fighting.”

“I like that. It’s beautiful,” she said, and pulled her chair a little closer to his.

“It’s necessary, not beautiful. I deserted the Sudan army for many reasons, but one was this—my commander told me I could never be promoted if I did not become Muslim and take a Muslim name. When I refused, I could not get paid because the commander said there was no one named Michael Goraende on the muster roll. But, he said, there was a man named Ahmed Goraende. All I had to do was report to the paymaster and say I was Ahmed Goraende. Still I refused. I had a wife and three children in New Tourom, and they suffered because of my stubbornness.”

“Is . . .” Quinette hesitated. “Is your wife still there?”

“She was a teacher at the St. Andrew’s school. She and two of my children, a son and daughter, were killed in the bombing. The third one, the oldest, a daughter, lived.”

After taking a minute to absorb this revelation, Quinette told him how deeply sorry she was—and was appalled that it wasn’t entirely the truth.