Sudan: A Novel (26 page)

Mbarka’s eyes darted from one woman to the next in growing panic. They were going to do something to her, something so terrible they had to hold her down to do it. Little whimpering sounds of terror escaped as she struggled uselessly.

Mbwena, the Nuer cook, knelt between Mbarka’s legs, and suddenly the girl felt hands touching her where no woman ever had.

She gasped and looked up at Pasha. When she saw what the woman held in her hand, she screamed, shrieked with such force the exploding air seared her vocal chords.

The three-inch blade sparkled in the morning sun, honed to razor-sharp precision. Its handle of polished gray stone fit snugly in Pasha’s palm. She had held it there many times before.

The world froze as Pasha held the knife out in front of her and leaned forward. Mbarka would forever remember that under the thin, black veil, Pasha was smiling.

Wailing, shrieking and crying all at one time, the girl struggled to shrink back from the knife that moved relentlessly toward her. She shook her head frantically no, she begged, pleaded—
Oh, don’t, please don’t!--
before the world exploded in the most excruciating pain Mbarka had ever felt.

Mbarka was conscious for the first two of the four or five cuts it would take to remove forever the most sensitive organ of her body. Then she passed out.

She would have been far better off if she had remained unconscious. But she didn’t. When she came back up to the surface out of the darkness, Mbarka kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She could taste salty tears and heard herself sobbing hysterically. The iron hands still pinned her to the stone. Searing pain beyond description radiated from between her legs. It ran along nerves she didn’t know existed and sent her entire lower torso into writhing spasms of agony. A warm pool of blood was forming beneath her.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. Pasha had waited until she was awake. She smiled again, leaned over and sliced into Mbarka’s body again. The pain hit her like a bolt of lightning, worse than the first time. She shrieked an agonizing wail and passed out again.

Akin, Shontal and Omina stopped breathing when they heard Mbarka shriek and scream. Their eyes were huge, their hearts hammered in their throats. What were they doing to Mbarka? Whatever it was, it was more heinous than what had happened to her the first night in Sulleyman’s tent. Her screams that night had been horrible; her screams now were unbearable. Each girl thought the same two thoughts: What are they doing to Mbarka? Will they do the same thing to me?

T
he morning after their jeep had been stolen, Ron was in a foul mood, but shortly before noon, Masapha crashed his pity party.

“The boy is awake, and he is talking!” he said.

Inside the clinic, Dr. Greinschaft stood by the bed where the teenager lay. The boy didn’t appear frightened, but it was evident he was confused. As Ron and Masapha came into the room, the boy was trying to communicate, but the doctor could not understand.

“I do not know this tribal language,” the doctor said.

“It’s Lokuta,” said Masapha, as he crossed the concrete floor to the foot of the bed.

Greinschaft peered at the little man over his wire-rimmed spectacles. “You speak it?”

“I can understand it better than I can say its words. But from most of the words, I believe I can know what he is saying and at least tell him the place where he is.”

With the aid of facial expressions and some creative hand gestures to boost his struggling Lokuta, Masapha gave the boy a brief description of finding him beside the road and bringing him to the medical facility.

The boy launched into an instant stream of questions, laced with bits and pieces of his own story, all spewed out as fast as bullets from an AK-47. The boy already had demonstrated that he was remarkably resilient; it was quickly becoming evident he was as bright as he was strong.

“Ask him to stop for a moment, Masapha,” Dr. Greinschaft said. “And tell us what he said.”

Masapha interjected three words and held up his hand. The boy stopped in the middle of an unintelligible sentence and was quiet.

“His name is Koto Manut,” Masapha said. “He is from Nokot, a very small village in a valley in the Imatong Mountains.”

“Imatong Mountains?” The doctor sputtered. “That’s on the Kenya border! How did he get
here
?”

“Soldiers attacked his village, and many were the people they killed and the captives they took away. He was marched with other captives for many days, to a place where there would come people to buy them.”

Masapha suddenly stopped and looked at Ron. “I wonder...” He turned and asked the boy a few more questions. When he finished, he looked back at Ron and smiled broadly.

“It is so I thought!” Masapha said. “The how Koto got shot was from the slave traders. It happened when he escaped to freedom from the slave sale and hid in thorn bushes where the soldiers would not go.”

Ron suddenly realized what Masapha was suggesting.

“This can’t be the kid who got shot and just kept going!” At the auction, Ron hadn’t looked closely at the boy’s face through his viewfinder; it had all happened so fast. “Those gunmen fired hundreds of rounds into the bushes that kid dived into. Nobody could have survived.”

“On the other side of the bushes next to the wall of the rock outcrop, there was a long stone, leaning there. Koto crawled behind it, like into a cave, and no bullets came there to hit him.”

The small Arab turned to the doctor. “When we were taking the photographs and video of the slave auction, this boy was making an escape from it. He ran, and we were taking his picture when the bullet hit him and knocked him flying, and he hit the ground and rolled over to be up running again.”

Masapha looked at the boy in admiration. “This is a sturdy boy!”

“
Tough
boy,” Ron corrected.

“He is indeed tough and sturdy,” Greinschaft said, then gestured toward the door. “But he needs rest.”

They left the clinic, and Ron turned to the doctor with a resigned sigh. “Without a jeep, the only way for us to get to Khartoum is by steamer,” he said. “Words cannot describe how thrilled I’ll be to climb back aboard one of those floating dung heaps.”

The doctor laughed. “The steamer’s schedule is unpredictable. Sometimes it comes; sometimes it doesn’t. But you are velcome to wait for it here. Helena and I vould be glad for the company.”

“Many are the times you have wanted to talk to a run-away slave,” Masapha pointed out. “Inside that room is a runaway slave to be telling you his life.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It might make a good little story.”

For three days, the girls endured the heat of the desert sun under their tarpaulin, helping Mbarka swat away the flies attracted to the dried blood on her lower body. Every morning, one of the servants brought out a single bowl of dura for the whole group to share. With each trip, she also brought a small dish of foul-smelling black goo, the consistency of well-cooked oatmeal, for Mbarka to put on her incisions. When Mbarka refused to do it the first time, the woman returned with two other women and the three of them held her down and forcibly smeared it on her. After that, Mbarka complied to avoid further humiliation. Thankfully, the mixture provided some measure of relief. The stench from the goo, potent and rank, was heightened by the heat under the tarp. At least it masked the smell of the latrines and helped keep the flies away.

Mbarka was still in excruciating pain. Every night, the girls suffered through the dark hours with her, awakened by her moans, groans and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing. They couldn’t help her; she wouldn’t let them touch her. So each passed the scorching days and cold nights imprisoned by her own fears.

At breakfast on the third day, Mbarka was able to move around a little. She sat by the bowl of dura with the others and dug her hand with them into the communal dish of tasteless gruel. They all looked at her, their eyes asking questions their lips dared not form and waited for whatever explanation she chose to give about what the Arabs had done to her.

Mbarka ate in silence, weighed what she would and wouldn’t tell the other girls, and finally resigned herself to the reality that the same fate was likely awaiting all of them, too. They had a right to know what was coming.

“They took me to the riverbank, to the flat rocks where Pasha sits when we wash clothes in the river,” she began.

And she told them everything. How the women had grabbed her and pinned her down so she couldn’t move. How they had ripped her clothes off. How Pasha had come at her with the shiny knife—smiling, always smiling.

“She cut off...she took away my...” Mbarka couldn’t continue.

She didn’t know the word for that part of her anatomy. Finally, she simply pulled up her dress and showed them her wounds.

“Here,” she said, deeply shamed and humiliated. “She cut me here. See! She cut out...took...”

Mbarka burst out sobbing, surprised that she still had tears left to cry. Barely able to speak, her words came out in strangled gasps. “I have dreamed about going home. About getting away from these evil people. About having a
life
again.”

The full horror of reality sank in again with sickening finality, and she stopped crying. Her voice was as hollow and dead as the look in her eyes. “But now I can’t. I can never have a life. I can never marry any man. I’m not a woman anymore.”

Mbarka turned away and lay down on her side with her back to the other girls, who sat frozen where they were in horror and terror and disbelief. Though there was dura left in the bowl, none of the starving girls wanted any more. Shontal was the first to move. She suddenly scrambled over to the outer edge of the tent and tried to vomit, but nothing came. Then she collapsed on the ground, panting. She didn’t even rise when the gagging began again, just lay there heaving violently long after what little she had eaten was splattered on the ground in front of her.

Omina’s face looked like somebody had slapped her. Her eyes were huge. She looked around frantically for a few seconds, as if she could find someplace to hide. Then she curled up in a fetal position beside Mbarka.

Akin looked at the other girls, from one to the other. They all had their backs turned to her, all imprisoned in their own torture chambers of horror and fear. She was so scared she thought for a moment that she, too, was going to be sick. But the nausea passed. She bowed her head and began to cry softly, making little mewing sounds like a baby animal separated from its mother.

For the rest of the day, each girl gravitated to a different corner of the shelter, each sought as much isolation as possible to nurse her grieved soul, to be alone with her thoughts.

Late in the afternoon, Omina broke the silence.

“Look.” She pointed to a rising cloud of dust on the horizon. “They’re coming back.”

Soon, the girls could hear and feel the pounding of the galloping camels’ hooves. The reprieve was over. The men had returned from their trip to Kosti, a city on the White Nile River an hour and a half by jeep, three by camel, from the camp. They had gone there to purchase supplies and for a few days’ recreation. With their return would come the return of work. Carrying wood, water, cleaning, washing clothes. Jobs fit for slaves.

That night after the men had their dinner, two soldiers came to the shelter, untied Shontal, and led her away into the darkness. Mbarka was off limits; Shontal was all they had. The other girls saw her ushered to a tent close to where the horses and camels were tethered. When the soldiers raised the tent flap, light spilled out, and the girls could hear boisterous laughter and the voices of the men inside. There were many voices. The soldiers shoved Shontal in front of them, and the tent gobbled her up, the flap closed and there was only darkness.

The next morning, Pasha took the four slave girls to a tent full of sweat-soaked garments. The accumulated dirty laundry and musty saddle pads from the men’s trip lay in piles on the tent floor. Pasha pointed at the heap, barked instructions and gestured outside; the four knew the rest of their day would be spent washing clothes in the river.

Pasha began parceling out the filthy laundry, handing each girl a huge stack. She filled 12-year-old Omina’s outstretched arms with a pile of saddle blankets too heavy for a grown woman to carry. Omina staggered away, and Akin glanced at Shontal, who was next in line. Her glance hung there on the older girl, who stood ramrod straight waiting for her load of laundry.

Something was different. Shontal looked odd. In fact, Shontal had behaved strangely all morning. The moon already had risen high in the sky before the soldiers brought her back from her evening in the men’s tent and shoved her under the tarp. When they left, she didn’t crawl to the outside edge of the shelter where there was a little grass to sleep on. She didn’t move at all. She sat where she landed, staring out into the darkness.

And now that she thought about it, Shontal had been sitting in the same spot when the morning sun in her eyes woke Akin hours later. Had Shontal been sitting there all night?

There was a trance-like quality to the girl’s slow, deliberate movements when she stepped up to receive her share of the load. Pasha was too busy piling clothes and blankets into her arms to notice. When a small black turban fell from Shontal’s stack of clothes to the floor, Pasha pointed to it and kept stacking. The stare on Shontal’s face never changed; she didn’t move. Pasha paused, gave a sharp command and nodded her head at the fallen turban. Nothing. Pasha’s temper flared. She drew back and slapped Shontal hard in the face, her fat hand striking the girl’s cheek and glancing off her nose. Shontal’s head snapped back, and life returned to her eyes. This time, when Pasha pointed to the turban, Shontal balanced the rest of the pile of laundry in one arm, leaned over and picked it up. Then she stood waiting for Pasha to load the other two girls like pack animals, too.