got a pallet on the bean, no brokens among the sisters. We sang as we rode back, a Salve Regina from the eleventh century in four parts and then “Finnegan’s Wake,” Nora’s addition, she knew all the verses and the rest joining in the chorus, lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake. Nora broke out one of her precious bottles of Jameson and we all had a taste and then Nora hung around my neck a chain with a little brass angel on it and everyone clapped and kissed me. That’s what they were for. And thinking of where I was and who I was when I first saw one of the things, I cried shamefully.
Life at Pibor. Pibor is in thegnk,a Dinka landscape term meaning a woody area with sandy fertile soil above the flood zone. This particulargnk was well outside the usual Dinka tribal regions, which lie to the north and east, and people had fled to the area to escape the GOS depredations. There were Dinka cattle camps all around, with huge round cone-roofed thatched cattle byres and smaller sleep huts of the same design. The zone was considered relatively quiet, and the SPLA sent their wounded there for treatment and recovery along with the larger number of civilians who’d been hurt by the GOS bombings of villages. Our operation was protected by a SPLA militia, a not very effective-looking bunch of teens with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers and a fleet of battered pickup trucks. The Society bribed the local warlord to keep up the protection and also bribed the local GOS commander to lay off. Nora said much can be done with a little money in a place where everyone is dirt poor and loyalties are local. She didn’t think much of the SPLAs either. If there is a real soldier in the whole of the Sudan, I’d like to see him, was her opinion, she said one disciplined brigade could go through the whole blessed country like a dose of salts. But there wasn’t one on either side, and so the war continued without hope of an end.
But something was up and Nora was worried. There had been two bombings in the last month, which meant that the orders had come from higher up, maybe from Khartoum, maybe they thought we were getting too comfortable in our little corner. So there was a lot of digging now, and filling of sandbags. They had an air raid shelter built under one of the tents and another under construction for the post-op ward, the sound of scraping went on all day and night. Wheelbarrows and shovels had filled one of my crates.
We had air raid drills. You could hear the slow Antonov 32s that they used from a long way off, so there was plenty of time and besides they were just cargo planes not real bombers, they just rolled the bombs, welded oil drums packed with Semtex, out the rear cargo door, just barely accurate enough for terror.
I saw Nora working as a nurse for the first time, and also for the first time I saw the white aprons of the Society actually soaked in blood. There was always a slow trickle of casualties, occasionally a flood when a village or another hospital got bombed. Also diseases, malnutrition, although we had plenty of food, if you consider sorghum porridge a food, and dysentery. When necessary I cleaned up diarrhea, working alongside Nora and the others, her always cheerful, ah the romance of the Cat’lic religion! she would call out, wiping filth.
I made myself useful, inoculating and distributing stuff, keeping inventory, and since I was Dinka-speaking, I also helped Father Manes, our priest, another American. Manes was a classic whiskey priest, a big shambling man with a mess of long gray curls, wore a dusty cassock and a straw fedora, God knows where he got the booze. He was always half in the bag, never more, never less. Rumors of a voluntary exile because of a taste for altar boys. The sisters treated him friendly enough, like a large dirty hound, and besides his religious duties he ran the school.
That’s where I met Dol Biong, at the school. I was teaching a class of boys. They loved me, not because I was anything of a teacher but because I had given each of them a notebook and a pencil. Giving an African kid a pencil is like giving an American kid a sports car. I had to insist that they use the pencil to write with, they were so much more useful as cult and status objects. Also, none of them had ever been to school before, so I had to invent the concept for them, me the high school dropout, and I was just describing the wonders of the alphabet, when I saw him, standing one-legged in the Dinka way just outside the circle of the class. I called to him, but he didn’t budge. One of the boys said oh Dol Biong will never come to class he is tooadheng for us. He says he is a chief’s son but we don’t know of what tribe, and they all laughed. So I went on. He never joined the class, but never missed one either, standing there, his eyes burning with something, hate or desire, black as tar, skin and bones, naked except for a ragged T-shirt and shorts. I asked Father Manes about him and it turned out he was an escaped slave, Baggara tribesmen had raided his village and stolen his whole clan. He was from north of here around Wibok. Manes intended to take him back there the next time he could join a SPLA convoy.
He ate alone too. On the other hand I seemed to run into him more than simple chance required. Once or twice he helped me carry the heavy ice chests we used for vaccines, just appearing at my side. Never said a word except with those eyes. The last week in May, the SPLA sent half a dozen trucks with soldiers and supplies and some of our sisters up to Wibok. Wibok was full of orphaned kids who had fled the slave raiding in the north, around Nasir. Manes went with them in the hope that he could get the SPLA commander up there to let him start a school instead of recruiting them all into the rebel army. Trini went to take charge of the aid station there. I thought that Dol Biong would have gone with them, but I spotted him later that day, lurking. I asked him in my best Dinka why he hadn’t gone, and got no answer but that stare.
In all a happy time and the days flew. In the evenings, Nora and I would sit in our tent, she on a cot sipping whiskey and pontificating about the events of the day or the fate of man, me crouched usually at her feet leaning against her thigh like a dog while she idly stroked my hair. I liked being her dog. There is a lot to be said for mindless devotion after a life such as I had lived. Looking back I suppose she had the same relationship with Christ, she was His dog as I was hers, although at the time that was quite beyond my imagination. I would from time to time recite poems from the 500 Best, she liked Yeats Auden Donne Carlos Williams Southey Marvell Herbert. Ah, you’re a wonder, Emily, I niver could remember a blessed thing I had to cheat like a gypsy to pass me exams.
Speaking of gypsy, I got dark again. When I was a tiny kid I used to get very brown in the summers, my Cajun blood, Daddy used to say, but after he died Momma would make me cover up, them Garigeaus had a nigger in the woodpile sure as shit she used to say, but now Africa turned me brown as an Arab.
I am avoiding again I see and I mustn’t there is hardly space to tell the rest, how clever of me it means I will have to stint on some of my crimes. June 13, a Sunday and we are all gathered in the church of the old Italian mission, even the atheists, for Father Manes has left for Wibok and there is no one to say mass, except Nora is doing it anyway, yes our dirty secret we do it all the time in the Bloods when there are no priests, as there very often are not where we work. Perhaps that’s why the atheist Euro docs are in attendance, solidarity with feminism, or one in the eye for the patriarchy, although I know all that’s far from Nora’s mind. Technically the host is already consecrated by the priest on such occasions, but Nora is doing it proper, proclaiming the Gospel, giving the homily, singing the words of the mass in her clear voice, lift up your hearts and so on, and we lifted them up. I didn’t actually see her do it because I was the youngest sister and by our tradition I had my back to the altar, looking out the door for the enemy.
Out the door I could see Dol Biong standing motionless in the shade of a water tank looking like a child’s stick figure drawn in charcoal against its bright corrugated steel. Behind me they were singing the Agnus Dei. In a few minutes one of the sisters would bring me the bread and wine, another little tradition. Then I felt something brush by me and I saw that a little kid, maybe four years old, had dashed out of the church laughing and I called out to her mother I’ll get her! and I ran out. I caught the little girl and tickled her and called herrac (naughty) and started back, at which moment I first heard the engines.
In the Spanish Civil War the fascist bombers used to cut their engines off over the sea and glide inland soundlessly, cranking up only as they approached the target, which worked pretty well before they had radar and it shows you that a good idea is ever green, because the pilot of the Antonov had done it too. I screamed out a warning and started to run back to the church, but they were all singing dona nobis pacem and besides it was too late. The Antonov coasted over at about twelve hundred feet and dropped four large bombs, I could see the long black cylinders tumbling out of the rear cargo bay door. The first bomb hit the motor pool and our fuel dump, the second a group of tents. I had not been bombed before but I knew something about explosives and these blasts were enormous, five-hundred-pounders, a mind-numbing bowel-loosening noise. The third crashed through the tin roof of the church and exploded inside. I didn’t see where the fourth one landed because I was standing there flat- footed with the kid on my hip when the shock wave and the rushing cloud of atomized bricks pews statues hymnals bread wine chalices and people knocked me flat.
I was blown out of your world, really, now that I think about it, and this makes the next part difficult to tell. Out of prose into poetry. Out of the secular into the mythos. Out ofchronos intokairos, God’s time.
No, but not at first. I came to myself and found I was blind and someone was pulling at my arm. Gelling blood lay thick in my eye sockets from a gash on my scalp. I wiped it away. I saw smoke and hanging dust and crumbled ruin with shards of tin roof sticking up, so small, these ruins couldn’t have held so many souls. I screamed her name
