Acts of faith (94 page)

Handy nearly popped out of his camp chair. “Poison?”

“Yes, poison!” the old man replied. “You do worse than teach your religion. You insult ours.”

“You tell us that we’re poisoning people’s hearts and then accuse
us
of insulting
you
?”

Fancher cautioned his excitable colleague to keep calm.

Not finished yet, the elder pointed at Quinette. Because of her, his youngest wife had been turned from the true faith, declaring herself to be a Christian because of words Quinette had spoken to her, blasphemous words that Jesus was not a prophet as was written but the son of God, that Jesus did many miracles while Muhammad, blessed be he, did none, that Muhammad put out the eyes of seeing men, that Muhammad was a murderer and a robber. His wife was young and ignorant and easily influenced. He’d been forced to beat her severely, and he hated to do that because he was fond of her.

Now Quinette had to restrain herself from leaving her chair. Why were Muslims so violent? she wondered. Her convert could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, and the picture of her submitting to this old man’s caresses was as repulsive as the picture of her submitting to his blows. “Then why did you do it, if you’re so fond of her?” she asked in as even a tone as she could manage.

“To bring her to her senses, and because she repeated the blasphemies you spoke to her. No man who calls himself Muslim can tolerate a wife speaking like that. It is an outrage.”

“The outrage is that you beat that poor girl.”

“Do not make things worse with lies. We have had reports from other places about the things you people are saying.”

Suleiman leaped back in, advising Quinette that as the commander’s wife she had a responsibility to promote harmony, not division. Muslim, Christian, or otherwise, the Nubans had a common enemy.

“My brothers and I, we are Sufi. We are not like those in the government. Theirs is the Islam of the sword, ours”—he pressed his chest—“the Islam of the heart.”

“Oh, I see,” Quinette said, a burning sensation in her cheeks—the same heat she’d felt years ago and half a world away, when she’d hurled a rock at an auctioneer. “Is it the Islam of the heart to beat a young girl for repeating something she heard?”

“So you admit teaching blasphemy!” the elder said, sounding like a prosecutor in a courtroom melodrama.

“This has gone on long enough.” Fancher mopped his thinning black hair and looked at Suleiman. “If we’ve offended you, we apologize. I promise you, we won’t offend you any further.”

“You will stop the teaching?”

“What? Altogether? Absolutely not. What we will do is hold our meetings in private. That way your people”—he said this with a note of sarcasm—“won’t see or hear anything you don’t think they should see or hear.”

“There are Nuban priests of your church who are also teaching Muslims,” Suleiman said, advancing a new objection. “That must also stop. Let Muslims be Muslims, Christians be Christians.”

“I can’t control what those men do or say. I’ll ask them to be careful. But I have to warn you, if Muslims ask them questions, they will have to answer. And if we’re asked, we have to answer, too.”

The old man yanked off his wool cap and waved it at the missionary. “That is the same as teaching!”

“We’ll watch our words. We won’t say anything insulting. I can’t promise more than that.”

It was plain that the delegation wasn’t satisfied. It was equally plain that they weren’t going to win any further concessions. Their displeasure remained after their departure, a thickness in the air, almost palpable. Handy was not too pleased either, protesting that Fancher had caved in.

“Got to give a little to gain a little,” the older man responded, in the moderate voice of a father to a hotheaded son. “We’re not going to accomplish everything we’ve got to do with half the population pissed off at us.”

“I don’t think those guys represent half the population,” Handy remonstrated. “And that old dude is bent out of shape just because his wife did something without asking the boss’s permission.”

“We keep doing what we have been, but we do it more discreetly, all right?” Fancher said. “Quinette, I suppose you have an opinion?”

She didn’t give one immediately, looking off at the tailor shop, its mud walls tinged pink by the sunset. The image she could not erase from her mind was of the girl cringing as her aged husband slapped her or punched her or hit her with a stick. Her suffering was a consequence Quinette had not foreseen. She did not hold herself responsible but felt, rather, the same desire for retribution elicited by the slaves’ tales of their captivity. Handy was right—the old man was outraged because the chattel he called wife had made a choice of her own free will. She’d chosen a religion; had it been something else, he would have beaten her for that instead. Unless people like him changed, Michael’s vision was never going to be realized; and if effecting change caused friction, even to the point of pissing off half the population, then by all means, she thought, let us piss them off.

“I’ll be honest, Tim,” she said finally. “I agree with Rob. I think your whole-milk evangelism just got skimmed.”

S
HE PAID HER
daily calls on the radio room and learned nothing; she listened to the BBC’s Africa service on Ulrika’s shortwave and learned little more. There were reports from South Africa and West Africa, from the Congo and Angola, but no word about Sudan—until, twenty-four days after Michael’s departure, the reader announced that “in Sudan, the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, in a sweeping offensive in the Nuba mountains and southern Kordafan province, have seized several government-held towns, sabotaged the country’s thousand-mile-long oil pipeline, and bombarded an airfield and oil facility belonging to the Amulet Energy Corporation. . . . A company aircraft is believed to have been shot down in the fighting, with eight people reported killed. . . . Sudan’s information minister confirmed that the attacks took place but stated that all were repulsed with heavy losses to rebel forces.”

“So they have won,” Ulrika commented. “Whenever the government says the SPLA is defeated, it means they have won.”

Quinette didn’t know what to think. She still had no answer to the questions uppermost in her mind.

She went to bed in a state of emotional suspension and woke in the same condition, wondering if she had the inner strength to be a soldier’s wife. Her grandmothers had waited years for their husbands to come home from Europe, Ardele had endured a year without her Ted, as well as the news that he’d been wounded. Quinette sought to draw from that reservoir of perseverance but felt disconnected from it in her foreign surroundings, thrown back on her own resources, which seemed inadequate.

With little to keep her occupied—it was a Saturday, no school to teach, no Bible study to attend—she spent an hour watering and weeding her vegetable garden. Then she heard the bray of a douberre, the antelope-horn trumpet. Moments later, out of breath from running, Negev appeared. “Missy, the commander and the soldiers are come.” Going into the house, she stripped off her shirt and shorts, changed into a dress, and wiped her sweating face with a soiled bandanna.

Outside, hundreds of people were surging down the road, chanting, singing, blowing whistles and horns. Quinette, hiking her dress, dashed out ahead of the wild procession and, at the gap in the hills, saw the road before her filled with soldiers, trudging toward the garrison. The column stretched back to New Tourom and beyond. Michael was in front. She would have recognized him a mile away—the bright red beret, the slow, deliberate walk, head bowed, as if he were lost in reflection. “Thank you, Lord!” she said out loud. “Thank you thank you thank you.” The throng of civilians caught up to her and swept her on.

The impromptu festival that greeted the army’s return was pure mayhem, an explosion of joy and relief. Women ripped off their clothes and painted their bodies with mud, while men decorated themselves with bits of fur and straw hats and feathers. People danced around the soldiers in human chains resembling conga lines.

Quinette had to contain her own happiness. Thin and drawn, Michael was in the mood that always overcame him after a battle—reticent, secluded within himself. She had learned not to try to bring him out of this somber humor and walked quietly with him through the excited crowds into the courtyard of their house. There he gave her and Pearl each an embrace, asked his daughter to bring some wash water, and sponged off the dust that powdered him head to foot. He collapsed on the bed and slept till the next morning.

Symbolic funerals were held that day for the men who did not make it back, symbolic because it had been impossible for the soldiers to carry their dead comrades over such long distances. Somehow the solemn ceremonies and wails of grief helped to draw Michael out of his isolation. Later, as they sat in the courtyard, he looked at Quinette as if he had just woken up and began to talk about the battles. “Oh, we were like those words you read to me from Isaiah, I forget them.”

“ ‘In that time a present will be brought to the Lord of Hosts, from a people tall and smooth of skin,’ ” she reminded him.

“Yes, like that, and we brought the present, dead Arabs, hundreds of them. We hit them hard, beat them on every front,” he said, but in such a mournful way, you would have thought he had suffered defeat. In time, he got around to revealing what had put him in a clouded frame of mind: men directly under his command had shot down the oil company plane with the foreign workers on board.

She said she’d heard about it on the shortwave. Of course, it was sad, but—

“But this is war and war is cruelty,” he said. “Khartoum is making big propaganda and Garang’s headquarters has issued a statement—the SPLA regrets what happened, the plane was mistaken for an enemy plane, and so forth and so on and et cetera.” He slouched in his chair, big hands hanging between his knees. “I must tell you something. Something that must remain between us.”

She caught his drift and murmured, “But it was no mistake?”

“I knew it was a civilian plane with foreigners on board.”

“How could you possibly have known that?”

“It was a little before sunset, before we began the attack. Enough light to see by. The plane was on the runway. I saw its identification through my field glasses. It was very clear—’Amulet Energy.’ I watched the crew go on board and then the passengers, and I could see they were civilians. I could see they were not Sudanese. Not a dark face among them. I remembered an incident from a long time ago, when the oil fields were being developed by an American company. There was a battle. Workers were caught in the crossfire, three were killed. The company decided Sudan was too dangerous and pulled out. No oil flowed for years, not until Amulet Energy bought the leases and built the pipeline.” He drew out of his slouch and leaned toward her, cupping her chin. “When the airplane began to move, I knew what had to be done, and that was to inflict terror. We were not going to dam the river of oil by making some holes in the pipeline, by smashing up an airfield—those can be repaired—but perhaps we could do it with terror. Terror, my darling Quinette. “ He continued to hold her chin, forcing her to look squarely at him. It was as if he were telling her,
I won’t allow you to turn away. Behold what I am, behold the man you are married to.
“It had worked once, by an accident; perhaps it would work again, by a deliberate act. I ordered the mortars to fire, but the plane was in the air by the time the first salvo hit the runway. I called to the antiaircraft, ‘Fire! Fire!’ The plane was almost directly over our heads, climbing fast. A missile got it. It fell like a stone. Like a burning stone.”

He let her go, but she sat facing him as if his fingers were still there, gripping her jaw.

“In all my years as a fighter, I have never knowingly taken an innocent life. I have prided myself on that. Now, I am no better than a terrorist, and if what I did doesn’t have the effect I intended, it will have been pointless murder. It is murder all the same.” Slouching again, he stretched his legs over the ground, cleft and crazed from lack of rain. “Garang and the high command do not know what I’ve told you. It would make no difference to them if they did—Garang and his Dinkas have spilled a thousand liters of innocent blood—but I thought the denial that it was a purposeful act would sound more convincing if they did not know. My soldiers did not know either. They had no field glasses to show them it was a civilian aircraft. They did only what I have trained them to do—obey orders. You and I are the only ones who own the truth. I have made my wife a party to what I did, and perhaps that is wrong, too, but you see, it is a secret I cannot live with alone. I am not strong enough. I had to confess it to someone, and who else but you? And now I ask you to forgive me.”

“For what you did or for involving me?” she asked.

“For both.”

“Only God can forgive what you did, and He will if you ask Him.”

“I have, more than once. But now I’m asking you.”

She rose and stepped over the fissured ground between them to lay her palm on his arm. He sealed her hand with his.

T
HIN CIRRUS CLOUDS
began to sheet the skies in the afternoons, while the air grew dense with prophecies of rain. The dry season was drawing to a close, and the kujurs conducted ceremonies to bury its trials and to petition the ancestors for a bountiful rainfall. The season’s military triumphs were marked by a celebration more orderly and choreographed than the spontaneous demonstration that had met the army’s return a week ago. Instead of being presented with medals, the bravest warriors were honored in the same way as victorious contestants in the wrestling festivals, with the girls’ love dance, the Nyertun.