Acts of faith (93 page)

Yet there were times when the message had to be delivered more forcefully.

Once, in a village a day’s walk from New Tourom, someone asked Handy what the difference was between Jesus and Muhammad. The stocky missionary’s face lit up, the cords in his neck stood out.

“Jesus was the son of God, Muhammad the son of man and woman, that is the difference. Jesus proved he was the son of God. Jesus healed the sick. Muhammad did not. Jesus made the lame walk. Muhammad made walking men lame. Jesus made a blind man see. Muhammad made seeing men blind. Jesus made a dead man live. Muhammad made living men dead. Jesus multiplied a basket of loaves and fishes to feed five thousand. Muhammad divided the spoils after raiding a caravan. Jesus could walk on water. Muhammad could only ride a camel. Jesus set the captives free. Muhammad made free men captives. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Muhammad teaches to kill and enslave your enemies, as many of his followers are doing today. You can visit Muhammad’s grave in Medina, but if you go to visit Jesus’s grave in Jerusalem, you will find only an empty tomb, because Jesus rose from the dead to join his father in heaven.”

His words seemed to hang in the air, to crackle and spark. Quinette could almost feel them, as if she’d been touched by an exposed wire. Later she asked Handy to write them out, so she could memorize them, in case the same question was put to her. She did not, indeed could not, wait for it to be asked. The next time she preached, she decided to forgo her usual subjects—Sarah and Rachel, Haggai and Elizabeth and Mary Magdalen—and delivered a sermon about the distinction between Jesus and Muhammad. A young Muslim woman approached her afterward, declaring that she wished to become a Christian. Quinette brought her to Fancher, who quizzed her to make sure her desire was genuine. He baptized her the next morning, with water from a plastic jerry can. Quinette witnessed the ceremony. She had reaped her first soul, and from this reaped a feast of purest rapture, to which her mentors added a rich dessert of praise.

All was fulfillment. She had submerged herself in a sacred and a secular cause, but she did not suffer from divided attention because both were one cause to her.

When she wasn’t teaching or preaching, she advised and encouraged her husband, serving as his unofficial adjutant to counter the influence of Major Kasli, who continued to issue dire warnings about the consequences of the forthcoming offensive. Observing that Michael’s orders and reports were written either by hand or with antiquated typewriters, she arranged for laptops, printers, and solar panels to be shipped in on Knight Air planes and spent hours showing the clerks how to use the new machines. She drafted press releases about the Nubans’ plight and gave them to relief pilots for delivery to Lokichokio and eventual transmission to the foreign press corps in Nairobi. One of her communiqués, describing Ulrika’s difficulties providing medical care from her inadequate clinic, brought a Reuters correspondent and photographer to New Tourom. A month later a plane landed at the airstrip, crammed with medical supplies and construction materials. One passenger disembarked, a broad-shouldered, thick-chested man with flaxen hair. It was like seeing an apparition. Recovered from his breakdown, Gerhard Manfred had an emotional reunion with Ulrika, Quinette, and Michael (and a moment of surprise when he learned of the marriage). He had read the Reuters story in
Die Welt
and persuaded German Emergency Doctors to send him back and to fund the building and equipping of a new hospital. It had been his dream ever since his return to Germany. Quinette’s imagination caught fire. With a five-hundred-word press release, she had brought a doctor and a hospital to New Tourom. She had the power to make things happen.

As the time for launching the offensive approached, a crisis occurred. A much-needed arms shipment failed to arrive as scheduled. Michael, in radio communication with Douglas in Lokichokio, learned that Dare had not been paid by the SPLA and refused to fly until he was. His petty selfishness disgusted Quinette and infuriated Michael. He had timed the offensive for the end of the dry season, calculating that the government would not be able to organize a retaliation before the big rains made the roads impassable and the skies too cloudy for effective bombing; but if he was delayed too long, the downpours would hinder his own forces, possibly prevent them from attacking altogether. Somehow or other the problem got resolved, Dare’s battered Hawker landed with the ordnance, and preparations resumed.

The recruits who were going to defend the town dug foxholes, trenches, and bomb shelters. Ammunition and final orders were issued to the veterans, who were everywhere, cleaning and recleaning their rifles, laughing the graveyard laughter of men who knew what they were facing because they had faced it before. Michael made frequent visits to the radio room to converse in code with his subordinate commanders and with Garang’s headquarters far to the south. A tense expectancy charged the air. Quinette herself felt electrified, as if the friction between her hope and dread, her anticipation and anxiety, were generating a current within her.

On the day before the army’s departure, as she was walking to the garrison from New Tourom, she spotted an Antonov at high altitude. It was the cool, dusty hour when the boys drove cattle into the byres for the night and the slanting light caused the contours of the hills to stand out in sharp relief. As always, the appearance of an enemy aircraft brought activity to a halt. The cows plodded on, bells jangling, but the herd boys froze to listen for the whirr and whistle of falling bombs. Watching the silver dot and the contrails in its wake, Quinette experienced a surge of heightened sensation. The colors of the sunset seemed more vivid, the still figures of the herd boys had the beauty of sculpture, the tops of the baobab trees looked lit from within. The plane, probably on a reconnaissance, flew on. Quinette quickened her steps, her spine and scalp tingling, her nerves thrumming like the strings of a Nuban harp, and desire overtook her. Michael must have felt that same erotic magnetism, for he was waiting for her inside their tukul, naked in the bed. They made love like wildcats, Quinette intoxicated by the sheer physicality of it, the strong smells, the quick slaps of damp flesh on damp flesh, and in her orgasm, her religious fervor fused with her sexual passion so the one could not be distinguished from the other. This too was her mission—to make a baby.

She had never known such anxiousness as she did during Michael’s absence. He expected the campaign to last a month. A month! She was in the radio room at least once a day, asking for news, but the reports coming back from the front were murky. Victory, defeat, stalemate—there was no way to tell. She didn’t know what she would do, what would become of her if he were killed.

She was thankful she had so much to keep her occupied, though she was often distracted and unable to concentrate. Physical labor was the only thing that took her mind off her worries. As most of the hard daily chores were performed by her three helpmates, Pearl, Kiki, and Nolli, Quinette started a vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes, beans, okra, and nuts in a little plot outside the courtyard. Negev, her constant shadow, offered to help prepare the ground, but she preferred to wield hoe and mattock herself. She found solace in making the rows straight, in building a thornbush boma around the garden to keep animals out, in the smell of the turned earth, the feel of it in her hands.

Since New Tourom was bombed three years ago, the enemy’s hand had barely touched the town. Some would say that hand had been stayed by Michael’s superb defenses, but Quinette believed New Tourom was under a guardianship more powerful than machine guns and shoulder-fired missiles. Whatever accounted for the town’s exemption, life proceeded as if peace had come. It was threshing time, and women carried baskets heaped with shucked doura to the threshing grounds, where elders and boys, powdered with ash to invoke the spirits’ protection, beat the ears with their heavy paddles. Baskets once again on their heads, the women carried the winnowed grain to the storage silos. Off-duty recruits were pressed into service as construction crews. They began to erect the frame for Manfred’s new hospital, to repair the church roof and, hauling water from a deep pit dug in a dry riverbed, to make mud for the walls of the tailor and carpentry shops. Fancher, who had been in an engineer battalion in Vietnam, acted as foreman, supervising the workmen with a mixture of sign language, English, rudimentary Arabic, and what Nuban he knew. Watching the progress day by day, Quinette recalled her husband’s vision of New Tourom as the tree that would spread the seeds of a new society through all the Nuba, all Sudan. Now, it was coming to pass; the tree had taken root, and she had a hand in it.

An aid plane landed with a dozen sewing machines among its cargo. They were of a kind Quinette’s great-grandmother would have used—black Singers operated by a treadle. Fancher said a Friends of the Frontline board member had discovered the antiques in a movie company prop shop. They ended their journey from Hollywood to the heart of Sudan in the still-to-be-completed tailor shop. A woman familiar with the ancient machines was found, and while workmen clambered overhead, thatching the roof, she taught her sisters how to use them. Quinette had an inspiration: The women could make Nuban dresses for sale to tourists in Kenya. Knight Air planes could deliver them on their return runs. With the cash realized from the sales, grain and other foodstuffs could be bought in hard times. When she presented the scheme to them, the women responded with enthusiasm. She was giving them a chance to earn money; among the things it would buy for them was some measure of independence. In return, they gave her more of their love.

Except for Yamila. Quinette’s charms had no effect on that young woman, sheathed in an armor of passive hostility that Quinette could not penetrate. She’d stopped attending English lessons because Quinette taught them, would not come to women’s Bible study because Quinette presided, and when Quinette entered the tailor shop one day with bolts of cloth, Yamila walked out with her usual haughty bearing. The savage princess.

“I don’t understand it,” Quinette complained to Ulrika that afternoon. “What did I ever do to her?”

The nurse gave her a skeptical squint. “You are not a stupid-head, so do not tell me that you do not know.”

“I really don’t.”

“You married Michael, that is what you did to her.”

Quinette paused, taken aback not by the fact of Yamila’s jealousy but by her own blindness to it. How could she have failed to see it?

“And it is more serious because of what you are,” Ulrika added. “
Ja.
In the mind of a Yamila, there is no understanding why he would take you over her. To her, this is insult, but she blames you.”

Jealousy begot jealousy. From then on Quinette regarded Yamila with fear and suspicion. She wasn’t afraid that her rival—she had to think of her as such—would steal Michael from her but that he would take her as a second wife, if her attraction were ever made known to him. Polygamy was common in the Nuba, but Quinette was willing to go only so far in her efforts to merge herself into the Nubans’ world. She was going to keep him all to herself.

He’d been gone eighteen days when a delegation of five Muslim elders visited her, Fancher, and Handy at the latter’s camp near the church. She and the missionaries were discussing an encounter Handy had had with three women earlier in the afternoon. He made videos for the ministry and had been shooting scenes of town life when he’d heard female voices nearby singing the hymn “Give Thanks to the Risen Lord.” Native women giving impromptu praise to their savior. Thinking this would make for a moment of inspirational footage, he found the trio in the courtyard of a house. They were drunk on marissa, naked to the waist, and had not much on below. Dancing as they sang, “Alleluia, Alleluia, give thanks to the risen lord,” they broke into inebriated giggles when they saw him, then faced his camera and with lewd sways of their hips, gave out another chorus of alleluias. He scolded them, but the admonishment only provoked more laughter. The incident plunged him into one of his fits of despair. These Nubans were incorrigible—they drank to excess, he’d seen children guzzling marissa.

Quinette had the impression that the Nubans weren’t people to him, they were
souls.
When they displayed their human weaknesses, he was disgusted.

“Ulrika told me they drink it because they have a vitamin deficiency,” she said to console Handy. “The millet in the beer makes up for it.”

“It also makes them plastered,” he said, unimpressed by the medical justification for what he considered a moral failure. “The Muslims around here need their vitamins, but you don’t see them getting smashed. What kind of example are the Christians setting?”

As if cued, the delegation appeared—five men in jelibiyas led by the seven-foot Suleiman. Normally jovial, he looked grave. After an exchange of greetings and ritualistic pleasantries, he and the others sat on the ground. He stated the purpose of the call: “We must ask you to stop teaching your religion to our people.”

“By ‘your people,’ you mean Muslims?” Fancher asked quietly.

Scowling, Suleiman replied, Of course that’s who he meant. Fancher earnestly asserted that they weren’t teaching Christianity to Muslims. The ministry’s gatherings were open to everyone, and if some Muslims happened to attend, they couldn’t stop them.

“You do this in the open,” Suleiman shot back. “You play stories from your Book on tape recorders so anyone can hear. You show cinema about your religion so anyone can see. These are things that should be done in one of your churches, where no Muslim would go.”

One of the others, a man of about sixty wearing a wool cap despite the temperature, raised a finger, long and tapering to a point, like a black thorn. “You are poisoning the hearts of our brothers, our children, our wives,” he said in quite good English. “That isn’t proper. It must stop.”