That night, several of the women used their precious firewood to make a meal for the three of us, as thanks for helping them. I couldn’t imagine taking food from these people, but Emmanuel told me it was the only proper response.
He shocked me by showing up for the supper, bandaged and smiling, with a bag of onions he’d nicked for the occasion.
Then we all shared kisra and vegetable stew around the cookfire, eating right-handed only from a common bowl. It felt like the right thing to do, almost like a religious experience, special in so many ways.
These were good people, caught in a terrible situation not of their making.
And yet, even they talked freely of frontier justice, the violent kind. A woman proudly told us how criminals were dealt with by the people in her village. They would all rush forward, stab the offending person, put a tire filled with gasoline around his neck, and then light it. No trials, no DNA testing, apparently no guilt from the vigilantes either.
Adanne and I were treated like guests of honor at dinner. There was a steady stream of visitors and a lot of laying on of hands.
When Emmanuel wasn’t around to translate, I got the gist of the Dinka or Arabic from the warmth in the voices and the body language.
Several times, I heard something that sounded like Ali in the middle of sentences. Adanne picked up on it too.
She leaned near me at one point and said, “They think you look like Muhammad Ali.”
“That’s what they’re saying?”
“It’s true, Alex. You do look like him, when he was world champion. He’s still very well loved here, you know.” She nodded with her chin and smiled at a group of younger women hovering nearby. “I think you’ve made a few girlfriends in the bargain.”
“Does that make you jealous?” I asked, grinning, happier and more relaxed than I’d been in many days.
A little girl crawled uninvited onto her lap and curled up. “The word’s not in my vocabulary,” she said. Then she smiled. “Maybe a little bit. For tonight anyway.”
I was finding that I liked Adanne very much. She was courageous and resourceful, and Father Bombata was right about her: She was a good person. I had seen her risk her life for the wood gatherers today, and maybe because she felt responsible for me.
We stayed late into the evening, as the crowd got steadily bigger. Actually, the adults came and went, but the kids pooled all around us. It was an audience I couldn’t resist, and neither could Adanne. She was very free and easy around children.
With Emmanuel’s help, I got up and told an improvised version of one of my own kids’ favorite bedtime stories.
It was about a little boy who wanted nothing more than to learn to whistle. This time, I named him Deng.
“And Deng tried—” I puffed out my cheeks and blew, and the kids rolled all over one another as though it were the funniest thing they had ever heard. They probably liked that I could be silly and laugh at myself.
“And he tried—” I bugged my eyes and blew right in their faces, and when they continued to laugh, it was more than a little gratifying, like an oasis in the middle of everything that had gone on since I’d come to Africa.
“You like children, don’t you?” Adanne asked after I’d finished the story and come back to sit beside her. She had tears in her eyes from the laughing.
“I do. Do you have children, Adanne?”
She shook her head and stared into my eyes. Finally she spoke. “I can’t have children, Alex. I was . . . when I was very young . . . I was raped. They used the handle of a shovel. It’s not important. Not to me, not anymore.” Adanne smiled then. “I can still enjoy children, though. I love the way you were with them.”
Chapter 88
THE NEXT MINUTE or so seemed like they couldn’t be happening. Not that night. Not any night.
The Janjaweed had come back. They seemed to appear out of nowhere, like ghosts out of the darkness. The ambush was brazen and sudden; they had come right into the camp.
It was hard to tell their number, but there must have been a couple of dozen of them. I thought I recognized one, the man I had released, the one who’d laughed at me.
These Janjaweed were on foot—they had no horses or camels. They had guns and also knives and camel whips; a couple of them wielded spears.
One man waved the flag of Sudan as if they were here on the state’s business, and possibly they were. Another carried a flag with a white fierce horseman on a dark blue background, the symbol of the Janjaweed.
The women and children of the camp, who had been laughing and playing just a minute before, were screaming and trying to scatter out of harm’s way now.
The attack was satanic in its viciousness; it was pure evil, like the murder scenes I’d visited in Washington. Grown men slashed away at defenseless refugees or shot them down. The thatched roofs of huts were set on fire not twenty feet away from me. An elderly man was lit on fire.