2006 - What is the What (7 page)

I know my task and go about it deliberately. I pour the jerry can’s contents through my shirt and into the bowl, then, carefully, pour the water back into the jerry can. Having done this once successfully, I can’t decide how clean to make the water; what’s more crucial, I wonder: to bring the water quickly, or to deliver it in as pure a form as possible? In the end, I filter it three times, screw the cap back onto the jerry can, and return the bowl to the woman, my gratitude whispered through heavy breaths as I climb the bank.

At the top of the riverbank, in the rough grass, I set off again. I am tired, I realize, and now I run around the path’s many holes, rather than leaping over them. My breathing becomes loud and labored and I curse my loud breathing. I do not want to bring the water to Amath while running slowly or walking or out of breath. I need to be running with as much speed and agility as I had when I set off. I forbid my breath to pass through my mouth, sending it through my nostrils instead, and pick up my pace as I get closer to the center of town.

This time my aunt sees me as I pass her home.

—Is that Achak? she sings.

—Yes, yes! I say, but then find I don’t have enough breath to explain why I’m racing by, unable to stop. Perhaps she, like my father, will guess. I had been momentarily ashamed when my father assumed that my task involved Amath, but quickly I didn’t care who knew, because Amath was so uncommon and appreciated by all that I was proud to call her friend and to be caught on any errand for her, this beautiful Madam who refers to me as young man and gentleman and with her closed-mouthed smile and happy walk is the best girl in Marial Bai.

I pass the school and once in the clear, I can see Amath, still sitting in the spot where I left her. Ah! She is watching me, too! Her smile is visible this far away and she doesn’t stop smiling as I fly closer and closer, my bare feet touching the dirt with toes only. She is very excited to see me with the water, which perhaps she can see is very clean water, very well filtered and good for anything she can dream of. Look at her! Her eyes are huge, watching me run. She is truly the person who best understands me. She is not too old for me, I decide. Not at all.

But suddenly my face is dust. The ground has risen up to pull me down. My chin is bleeding. I have fallen, taken down by a high gnarled root, the jerry can sent tumbling ahead of me.

I am afraid to look up. I don’t want to see her laughing at me. I am a fool; I am sure I have lost her respect and admiration. She will now see me not as an able and fast young man, capable of caring for her and tending to her needs, but as a ridiculous little boy who couldn’t run across a field without falling on his wretched face.

The water! I look quickly and it hasn’t leaked.

When I raise my head further, though, I see her walking toward me. Her face isn’t laughing at all—it’s serious, as it is always serious when she looks at me. I jump up quickly to demonstrate how uninjured I am. I stand and feel the great pain in my chin but deny it. As she gets closer, my throat goes coarse and there is no air within me—I am such a fool, I think, and the world is unfair to humiliate me this way. But I suppress everything and stand as straight as I can.

—I was running too fast, I say.

—You were certainly running fast, she marvels.

Then she is close to me, her hands are upon me, dusting off my shirt and pants, patting me down, making
tsk-tsk
sounds as she does so. I love her. She notices how quickly I can run, TV Boy! She notices all the best things about me and no one else notices these things.—You are such a true gentleman, she says, holding my face in her palms, to run like that for me.

I swallow and take a breath and am relieved again to speak clearly and like a man.—It was my pleasure, Madam Amath.

—Are you sure you’re okay, Achak?

—I am.

I am. And now, as I turn to walk home—I have planned to lean on my sister two more times before dinner—I can think only of weddings.

There is to be a wedding in a few days, between a man, Francis Akol, who I don’t know very well, and a girl, Abital Tong Deng, who I know from church. There will be another calf sacrificed, and I will try to get close enough to see this one, as I saw the last one, when I watched it pass onto the next world. I saw the eye of the calf, watched it as its legs kicked aimlessly. The eye faced straight up into the white sky; it never seemed to look at those who were killing it. I thought this made the killing easier. The calf did not seem to blame the men for ending its life. It endured its early death with courage and resignation. When the next wedding comes, I will again position myself over the dying head of the calf to see how it dies.

I enjoyed the weddings, but there have been too many in recent months. There was too much drinking, and too much jumping, and I was often scared of some of the men when they’d had too much wine. I wonder if this next time, at the wedding of Francis and Abital, I could hide from the festivities, if I could stay inside and not dress in my best clothes and talk to the adults and instead hide under my bed.

But perhaps Amath would be there, and perhaps she would be wearing a new dress. I knew all of her clothes, I knew all four dresses she owned, but the wedding brought the possibility of something new. Amath’s father was an important man, owner of three hundred cattle and a judge in many disputes in the region, and thus Amath and her sisters were often wearing new clothes, and even owned a mirror. They kept the mirror in their hut, and they stood before it for long stretches, laughing and arranging their hair. I knew this because I had seen the mirror and heard their laughter many times, from the tree over their compound, the tree in which I found a very secret perch well placed for knowing what happened inside the hut. I could see nothing untoward from my bough, but I could hear them talking, could see occasional flashes as the sun found its way through their thatched roof, catching the reflection of their earrings or bracelets, sending light into their mirror and back out to the unrelenting dust of the village.

T
V Boy, there was life in these villages! There
is
life! This was a settlement of about fifteen thousand souls, though it wouldn’t look like it to you. If you saw pictures of this village, pictures taken from a plane passing overhead, you would gasp at the seeming dearth of movement, of human settlements. Much of the land is scorched, but southern Sudan is no limitless desert. This is a land of forests and jungles, of river and swamps, of hundreds of tribes, thousands of clans, millions of people.

As I lie here, I realize that the tape over my mouth is loosening. The saliva from my mouth and the perspiration on my face has softened the tape’s grip. I begin to accelerate the process, exercising my lips and spreading saliva liberally. The tape continues to break away from my skin. You, TV boy, see none of this. You seem unaware that there is a bound and gagged man on the floor, and that you are watching television in this man’s home. But we adapt, all of us, to the most absurd situations.

I know everything one can know about the wasting of youth, about the ways boys can be used. Of those boys with whom I walked, about half became soldiers eventually. And were they all willing? Only a few. They were twelve, thirteen years old, little more, when they were conscripted. We were all used, in different ways. We were used for war, we were used to garner food and the sympathy of the humanitarian-aid organizations. Even when we were going to school, we were being used. It has happened before and has happened in Uganda, in Sierra Leone. Rebels use refugees to attract aid, to create the appearance that what is happening is as simple as twenty thousand lost souls seeking food and shelter while a war plays out at home. But just a few miles away from our civilian camp, the SPLA had their own base, where they trained and planned, and there was a steady pipeline of supplies and recruits that traveled between the two camps.
Aid bait
, we were sometimes called. Twenty thousand unaccompanied boys in the middle of the desert: it is not difficult to see the appeal to the UN, to Save the Children and the Lutheran World Federation. But while the humanitarian world fed us, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the rebels who fought for the Dinka, were tracking each of us, waiting until we were ripe. They would take those who were old enough, those who were strong and fit and angry enough. These boys would trek over the hill to Bonga, the training camp, and that was the last we would see of them.

I almost cannot believe myself, but at this moment, I am contemplating ways that I might save you, TV Boy. I am envisioning freeing myself, and then freeing you. I could wriggle my way out of my bindings, and then convince you that being with me will serve you better than remaining with Tonya and Powder. I could sneak away with you, and we could leave Atlanta together, both of us looking for a different place. I have an idea that things might be good in Salt Lake City, or San Jose. Or perhaps we need to be away from these cities, any city. I think I am finished with cities, TV Boy, but wherever we go, I have an idea that I could take care of you. It was not so long ago that I was like you.

But first we have to leave Atlanta. You need to move far away from these people who have put you in this situation, and I need to leave what has become an untenable climate.

Things here are too tense, too political. There are eight hundred Sudanese in Atlanta, but there is no harmony. There are seven Sudanese churches, and they are being pitted against each other constantly and with increasing rancor. The Sudanese here have regressed to tribalism, to the same ethnic divisions we gave up long ago. In Ethiopia there were no Nuer, no Dinka, no Fur or Nubians. We were, in many cases, too young to know what these distinctions meant, but even if we were aware, we had been taught and had agreed to set aside our supposed differences. We were all in Ethiopia alone, and had seen hundreds of our own die en route to a place only marginally better than what we’d left.

Almost from the moment we arrived here, it was impossible to return to life in Sudan. I have not been to Khartoum, so I cannot speak for the style of life there. I hear there is some semblance of modernity. But in southern Sudan, we are by any estimation at least a few hundred years behind the industrialized world. Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not of any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparison. There are few cars in southern Sudan. You can travel hundreds of miles without seeing a vehicle of any kind. There are only a handful of paved roads; I saw none while I lived there. One could fly a straight east-west line across the country and never pass over a home built of anything but grass and dirt. It is a primitive land, and I say that without any sense of shame. I suspect that within the next ten years, if the peace holds, the region will make the sort of progress that might bring us to the standards of other East African nations. I do not know anyone who wishes southern Sudan to remain the way it is. All are ready for what comes next. There are SPLA tanks parading through Juba, the capital of the south. There is pride there now, and all the doubts we’ve had about the SPLA, and all the suffering they caused, have been largely forgiven. If the south achieves freedom it is through their work, however muddled.

I realize that my mouth is soaked and the tape is no longer firmly attached. I blow, and to my surprise, the left half of the tape flaps away. I can speak if I want to speak.

‘Excuse me,’ I say. My voice is soft, much too quiet. There is no indication he hears me. ‘Young man,’ I say, now in a normal volume. I don’t want to startle him.

I get no reaction.

‘Young man,’ I say, now louder.

He turns briefly to me, disbelieving, as if he noticed the couch itself talking. He returns to the television.

‘Young man, can I speak with you?’ I say, louder now, firmer.

He whimpers and stands up, terrified. My only guess is that they told him that I was African, and in his mind he did not think that classification entailed the ability to speak, much less speak English. He takes two steps toward me, stopping in the entranceway to the living room. He is still not sure I will speak again.

‘Young man, I need to talk to you. I can help you.’

This sends him back to the kitchen, where he takes the cell phone, pushes a button, and brings the phone to his ear. He listens but does not get the desired recipient. He has, I am assuming, been told to call his accomplices if I wake up or anything is amiss, and now that I have, they are not answering. He gives his predicament some thought and finally settles on a solution: he sits again and turns up the volume on the television.

‘Please!’ I yell.

He leaps in his seat.

‘Boy! You must listen to me!’

Now he searches for a solution. He begins to open drawers. I hear the rattle of silverware and worry that he might do something drastic. He opens five, six drawers and cabinets. Finally he emerges from the kitchen with a phone book. He carries it over to me and holds it over my head.

‘Young man! What are you doing?’

He drops the book. It is the first time in my life that I have seen something coming toward me and have been unable to properly react. I try to turn my head but still the book lands squarely on my face. The pain is compounded by my existing headache and the ricochet my chin makes against the floor. The phone book slides off, toward my forehead, and rests there, against my temple. Thinking he has accomplished his goal, he returns to the kitchen and the volume goes up again. This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book.

The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.

I
open my eyes, having stumbled into sleep for minutes or hours. The boy is asleep on the couch above me. He has taken his towels-for-blankets and has arranged himself on the end of the couch, his feet neatly stuffed into the cushions. And now he is whimpering. He is having a nightmare, his face contorted like a toddler’s, his petulant frown robbing him of years. But I am less sympathetic now.