‘Amy, hold on there! Don’t get too close! Amy!’
They broke through into the front row of children and there, about four yards away, cowering in the corner and trying to hide under a straggly scarlet hibiscus bush, was the python. It was about five feet long but to Julia it might as well have been twenty. It had a great bulge behind its head which was presumably its breakfast, the late lamented duck. How it could have gotten the darned thing through its nasty little mouth, Lord only knew. Two of the older boys had found sticks and were trying to pitchfork the terrified creature out into the open.
‘Wow, look at that,’ Amy said. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’
‘Frankly, that isn’t the first word that springs to mind.’
The snake was a greeny yellow with rounded dark-chocolate markings edged in white. The children were yelling at the boys who had the sticks, urging them on. And now, pushing through the crowd came Sister Emily and old George, the gardener, who was carrying a shotgun which Amy immediately saw.
‘You’re not going to kill it?’
He grinned down at her. ‘You like snakes?’
‘Yeah, they’re fine. Don’t kill it. Mommy?’
Julia didn’t know what to say. Even Sister Emily beside her seemed lost for words. To protect itself the python had coiled into a bundle and kept moving its head from side to side, keeping as low as it could. But the boys weren’t going to give up. One of them hooked his stick into its coils and managed to drag it out into the open. The children were all shouting for them to kill it. Sister Emily stepped out in front of them and raised her arms and called for calm but her voice was drowned and no one paid any attention to her.
The boys were prodding the creature now and when it suddenly made a halfhearted lunge at one of them they both raised their sticks and started to beat it. Amy grabbed onto Julia’s arm.
‘Mommy! Stop them!’ she wailed.
Julia was about to lead her away, when someone elbowed past from behind and ran out in front toward the boys. He had a piece of sacking in his hand and he pushed the boys aside and turned to face the crowd. Suddenly everyone stopped yelling. It was Thomas Nyeko.
He positioned himself between the boys and the python and for a moment there was utter silence. Both of the other boys were older and taller than he and now one of them raised his stick and tried to step past him to finish the job. A few of the children started to yell again. Thomas blocked the boy’s way and as he did so he opened his mouth and shouted. The boy stopped in his tracks. It was the first time he or anyone present had heard Thomas’s voice and the effect was electrifying. The boy lowered his stick and Thomas went on, not shouting now but talking, addressing everyone.
Julia didn’t understand all that he said but what little she missed she found out later. He said that there had been enough cruelty and killing, that they had all seen too much of both. There had to be an end to it. They had all known hunger too and stolen food to live and this was all the snake was doing. They should respect his courage and let him live. And he turned and threw the sacking over the python and then knelt beside it and wrapped it up. Then he stood with it bundled in his arms and came past the boys toward the crowd. And everyone stood aside for him to pass and watched in silence as he walked away across the compound and into the trees.
Until that day, all that was known of what had happened to Thomas and his twin brother had been gleaned from others: from neighbors who had witnessed their kidnapping and then witnessed their return as avenging devils with Makuma’s men, killing and looting and burning the village; and from the government soldiers who later found Thomas wandering naked and near death in the bush. Now, over the weeks that followed his rescue of the python, he told the story himself.
Every child at the center had his or her own special saga of horrors, and Julia knew it was wrong to compare or to grade them. But Thomas’s was about as shocking as it got and worse than anyone had suspected. The story emerged in a slow flowing of words and drawings during many hours of counseling, both in one-to-one sessions and in group sessions with the other children.
When the Warriors for God rebels came one night to his village, he and Lawrence were forced to watch while their mother was raped and tortured. Then they were forced to club her to death and afterward to do the same to their father and their younger brother and sister. The rebel leader told them that this would make men of them. They and the other abducted children were made to march for many days without food and barely any water to a great camp over the Sudanese border. There the prettier girls were given to the older soldiers as ‘wives.’ The boys and the rest of the girls were trained as soldiers.
Daniel Makuma himself gave them long lectures about the spirit world and how
Tipu Maleng
would protect them in battle. He said that they must anoint themselves with shea butter oil that he had himself blessed so that enemy bullets would bounce off them. In battle they must always run directly into enemy fire, he said, shooting as they went. Anyone who lay down to shoot or to hide was a coward and would be executed.
Their first mission after training was to go back to burn their own village and to kill their friends and neighbors. This, Makuma told them, would free them of all earthly ties and allow
Tipu Maleng
fully to embrace and protect them. Before the attack Thomas and the other child soldiers were given drugs to bolster their courage but in truth, he confessed, there was no need. He knew full well what he was doing. He wanted these people dead because they were witnesses to what he had already done to his family. By killing them and burning the village he and Lawrence hoped to erase all testimony and all memory of their first and far more hideous crime.
At the camp, he said, if any child disobeyed an order, the others were made to club him or hack him to death. If they refused, the same fate befell them. It was after one such murder that Thomas lost the power of speech. He said it was as though God had taken away all his strength. During his last battle he became so useless that the commander abandoned him in the bush. His brother, he said, was braver.
These weeks of Thomas’s slow revelation affected everyone at St. Mary’s, both staff and children alike, bonding them more closely than ever. Some of the older boys who had been reticent about their own crimes seemed to draw courage from Thomas and made confessions of their own. During one of Julia’s morning group sessions one of the would-be python killers, whose name was Alex, admitted taking part in several rapes. To Julia’s amazement, he said that one of his victims had been Amy’s friend Christine. The group consisted only of boys, so she was not present to hear this. Julia asked Alex if he would like to apologize personally and he said that he would. Christine said that she would be prepared to listen.
On first coming to St. Mary’s, Julia had tried to protect Amy from the rawest horrors of what had happened to the children. But the girl had become so much a part of the place that this was now almost impossible. Christine had told her much of what she had suffered at the hands of the rebel soldiers (though not, it transpired, about the rape) and Amy had asked Julia many difficult questions. Faced with the choice of whether to gloss things over so as not to disturb the child or to address the issue squarely, rightly or wrongly, Julia had opted for the latter. The two of them had since had many long discussions about what it was that might drive ordinary decent people to commit such appalling deeds.
Had she been asked to justify her decision, Julia would have argued that children of Amy’s age back home saw real-life horrors unfold every day on the TV news, but in a way that was somehow anesthetized and distancing, in which both villain and victim were nameless and quickly forgotten. Here at St. Mary’s, however, they were real. Amy knew their names and held their hands and played with them and watched them rediscovering the simple joys of love and friendship. What she was witnessing here was nothing less miraculous than the power of redemption. And this, Julia persuaded herself, was a rare privilege that neither of them, nor anyone else involved, would ever forget.
Even so, Julia had wondered if it would be appropriate for Amy to attend Alex’s apology to Christine. She sought the advice of Sister Emily.
‘Amy is what some people call an “old soul,”’ the sister said. ‘She has an inner strength and a wisdom beyond her years. She is part of our family and Christine thinks of her as a sister. Since you ask my opinion, I believe it would be wrong to exclude her.’
That evening, after supper, all of the children and all of the staff were asked to assemble in the hall. Sister Emily announced gently that Alex had something to say and the boy stepped forward. He stared at the floor, twisting a hand in the ragged tail of his shirt and in a small voice began to relate what he had done. Julia stood and listened with her arm around Amy’s shoulders. Every so often Amy looked at Alex, but mostly her eyes were fixed on her friend.
Alex said that he was sorry and that he would never forgive himself for what he had done and as he said it he started to weep and soon many of those who watched were weeping too. Christine, however, kept her composure throughout, although she seemed to find it hard to look at him. When he had finished there was a short silence and she swallowed and gave a little nod and Sister Emily went to her and hugged her and then did the same to Alex. Some wounds ran too deep for instant forgiveness, Julia reflected, or perhaps for forgiveness at all. Christine would bear the scars forever. But the boy’s words might at least have helped with the cleansing.
The following day, Peter Pringle had to drive down to Entebbe airport to collect some medical supplies that had been flown in from Geneva. He returned with sobering news.
There had been a problem clearing the supplies through customs and so he had stayed overnight with friends in Kampala. A British diplomat and his wife came for dinner and talked of little else but the war in the north and how the lull of almost two years was rumored to be drawing to an end. The diplomat said that in the past twenty-four hours there had been reliable reports that Makuma and his army were on the move. And their target was not, as everyone had assumed it would be, to attack the SPLA in Sudan. They were moving south toward the border.
On his drive back north, Pringle told them, he had followed great convoys of government troops and artillery and as he drew near to Karingoa he had seen a first trickle of refugees heading on foot in the opposite direction with their children and their scant and bundled belongings.
Two nights later, as she lay in bed, too hot and restless to sleep, Julia heard a distant thudding that at first she took to be thunder. The rains were late and the land was parched so that even the hint of a cooling storm bore some relief. But it lasted only a moment. For although she had never heard the sound of shell fire, she soon knew that this was what it was and that the promised storm was of a different kind.
30
T
hey did as bidden and traveled only at night. The map was of little use but the sky was mostly cloudless and Connor steered by the stars and by the passage of the thinning moon that rose to eclipse them, casting ashen shadows across a landscape sometimes as lunar as itself. As they hiked higher into the mountains the air grew thinner and cooler and the going more treacherous. They would walk for miles, picking a route among the rock and thorn bush, only to find themselves lured by the lay of the land to the foot of an unscalable cliff or to the rim of some jungle ravine with a thousand feet of blackness echoing below. And they would have to retrace their steps and circle for many miles more before they could continue their journey east.
When they were forced into the lower land they kept when they could in the cover of the trees and in the elephant grass that was often taller than themselves and always away from any road or trail they came across for many of these were mined and monitored. They skirted villages devoid of any life but the crows and vultures that sat atop bleached skulls and skeletons of cattle in the barren fields. Connor knew that the Dinka people who lived hereabout had suffered much at the hands of the rebels, both Makuma’s and those of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. On the second night they saw a convoy of military trucks rumbling slowly south with the dust swirling in the dimmed beams of their headlights. He and Lawrence lay side by side in the shadows watching for an hour while it passed. The boy said that he thought these were Kony’s men and that there were rumors that he and Makuma were joining forces for the invasion.
When the sky began to pale they would start looking for a place to shelter for the day, some shaded enclave in the rocks or jungle glade where they could rest in safety. The food and water that Vincent had given them lasted two days and would have lasted longer if Lawrence hadn’t been so thin and weak. They shared the water but Connor made the boy eat most of the food and he used the iodine to treat the open sores on his bony arms and his bare and swollen feet.
Most of the drainages they passed were dry but they found just enough water to get by. At the camp the children had tried to supplement their meager rations by scavenging in the bush and Lawrence had learned which trees and plants had leaves that were edible. When they came across one he would point it out and the two of them would stop and force themselves to eat. They ate the roots of certain other plants and sometimes even the bark. Connor had eaten many strange foods but none so desperate or foul. All tasted bitter and felt like prickled plastic in his mouth and he had to chew for a long time before he could swallow. Lawrence had grown used to it and grinned at the sight of Connor trying not to gag.
They spoke little and when they did it was mostly to confer about which route to take or place to rest. Only once did Lawrence ask about his brother. He said he had been certain that Thomas was dead and questioned Connor closely about when he had last seen him and how he had looked. He said that he hoped Connor was not mistaken and had not merely seen the boy’s ghost, for it was a land now populated more by ghosts than men. Connor told him that Thomas no longer spoke and Lawrence nodded solemnly and said that he knew this and had thought the same might happen to him. He said that he and Thomas were ‘half of each other’ and Connor didn’t know if this was simply an Acholi way of saying they were twins or if the boy meant something more.