Tears of the Desert (28 page)

I came to sometime later. I was lying on my back with my mother beside me. Her face was tearstained, her expression glazed and empty. I glanced about me at the crowd of wailing women, and suddenly I remembered the image of Omer bent low over my fallen father. My mother glanced down at me, her eyes pools of shock and loss. I went as if to question her, but she shook her head, and fresh tears began to fall. As she did so, I vented my pain and my loss in a guttural howl of agony and emptiness that went on and on and on. I would never stop crying for my fallen father, no matter how long I might live.

There were many villagers who were injured but still alive. There were gunshot victims, burn victims, victims of shrapnel from the explosions, and victims of stabbings. I should have been trying to help them, but I was in such a state of shock that I could do nothing, absolutely nothing. The surviving women and children had gathered together in a group. The crying and wailing and the calling of the names of the dead would have been terrible to behold, had I not been so bound up in my own unspeakable loss.

We were bundled heaps of misery, unable to comprehend what had happened to our lives. As we mourned, the men—my brothers included—went and checked on the fallen, trying to work out who was dead and who might be saved. The majority of the fallen were the men who had stayed to fight. And then there were those too slow to run and save themselves—the old people, children. Pregnant women had been cut down as they ran. Village elders had been burned alive in their huts. Babies had been flung into the fires.

All through that dark, hellish night the men collected up the bodies of the dead. By dawn they were ready to bury them. The first of the donkey carts creaked out of the village, its load a pile of stiff, bloodied corpses. I was in such shock that I was living in the memory of my dead father, his face before me in my mind’s eye, still talking to me and hugging me and laughing and smiling. If I tried to drag myself back to the present all I could see was a film of red mist that obscured everything. It would take a new level of horror to shock me out of my stupor.

A living woman had been mistaken for one of the dead. As the cart moved off toward the graveyard, someone noticed her arm twitching. They called out in alarm and the cart stopped. She was separated from the corpses and laid onto the ground. It was the sight of that dead woman living that dragged me back to my senses. The woman’s name was Miriam. She had lost her husband, her father, and two of her children. Her third child had survived, and he desperately needed his mother to live, for he had no one else in the world.

I bent over her prostrate form. I felt for her pulse. It was faint and she was barely breathing. I checked for any sign of injury, but there was none that I could see. It must have been simply the shock and the trauma that was killing her. I put my head close to hers and started to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After each breath I pressed my weight hard onto her chest. I did this for half an hour or so, her little boy holding his mother’s hand and willing her to live.
I had to save her!
For his sake alone I had to . . .

Suddenly, her eyes opened. She gazed around herself, as if she was coming back from the dead. As soon as she realized that she was still alive, she started to scream and scream and scream. She was screaming out the names of the dead. Why hadn’t death taken her, she wailed? Where was the sweet release of death? I tried showing her that her little boy was still alive, but she was beyond reason, in a place where no one could reach her. The one person whose life I had saved actually wished that she were dead.

Sometime later that day three young Zaghawa men turned up in the village. They wore traditional white robes, and they had their heads swathed in a white headscarf, with only their eyes showing. Each carried a machine gun. They introduced themselves as being from the Sudan Liberation Army, the SLA—one of the main rebel groups. They had heard about the attack, and so they had left their secret base in the mountains and come to investigate. It was the first time that we had seen rebel fighters openly in the village.

We gathered around and told them about the attack. As we talked, the surviving men of the village—my brothers included—were angry and tearful. All they wanted now was to fight. All other interests were gone. Mo and Omer were among the first to volunteer, but scores more followed. I tried to volunteer myself, but I was told that women were not allowed to fight. I tried to offer myself as a rebel doctor, but I was told that there was work enough for me here with the injured.

We gathered as a family and tried to decide what we should do next. But there was an aching void where my father should have been. As the eldest child I knew that I had to take a lead now, alongside my mother. There was nothing in the village to stay for, I argued. Most of the livestock was gone. The crops had been burned, as the
Janjaweed
had turned our beautiful village into a place of scorched and bloodied earth. They had ridden over our fields smashing open the irrigation ditches. Even the fruit trees were blackened with fire.

Mo and Omer’s minds were made up. The rebels would be leaving by nightfall, and they would be going with them. They would kill the Arabs and avenge my father’s death. Nothing else mattered. There was talk of fleeing to Chad, or of going to stay with relatives in the big towns. But many of the injured villagers were too sick to travel, and part of me felt as if it was my duty to stay with them. If I couldn’t be a rebel soldier, I could at least use my medical skills to try to save as many lives here in my dying village.

“Perhaps we should stay,” I told my mother. “People in the village need us. We can stay until they are well again. Then, God-willing, we will leave this place.”

My mother shook her head. “We should go to Chad. We have relatives there. We can go and stay with them. We can take our gold, so if anything happens on the way we have something to bargain with.”

“We still have our gold?” I asked. I’d presumed it had all been stolen.

“We do. Grandma had it hidden well. We could even try to hire some camels in a neighboring village. That might make it easier for us to find our relatives.”

Grandma’s husband had taken a second wife in Chad, so her children were my mother’s halfbrothers and half sisters. My mother knew their names, although she had never met them. If their village had been attacked and they had come to us for help, we would have welcomed them in. My mother knew they would do the same for us. The problem was how to reach Chad safely. We might run into the
Janjaweed
en route, and then we would be finished.

“It’s a long journey,” I remarked. “And we could be attacked on the way. I doubt if the enemy will return to the village. There’s nothing worth coming back for. So perhaps we’re safer staying here for now? Maybe it’s best to stay?”

My mother shrugged. “Sooner or later we have to go. Everything’s gone. There’s nothing to eat. And this is a place of death now. What’s to stay for?”

“There’s people here who have nothing. They’ve got no home, no money, and no relatives to go to. We can’t just abandon them. Plus there’s the injured. We should stay for a while, to help.”

We finally decided to stay. In that way, my brothers would still know where to find us. Once they were trained as rebel fighters, they could return to protect us. At least that was the theory. That evening the men of fighting age prepared to leave. I bade farewell to Mo and Omer, but there were no tears left to cry, and little energy for real sadness. And then they were gone.

All that now remained were the old, the women, and the children in our dying village.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A Time of Fear

This was the beginning of the time of fear. Every waking moment we tried to remain alert, keeping our eyes and ears open. And whenever we slept it was only ever a half sleep, in case they returned in the night to attack us. We were living like hunted animals, and like animals we feared the air above and the earth at our feet. And like frightened animals we herded together, as if there was safety in numbers.

The huts in our compound had stayed largely intact. My mother, my sister, and I moved into the one, while our neighbors took the others. We pooled what little food and bedding we had left. Each evening we would call together the survivors in our area, and we would eat as one big family. As we ate we listened to each other’s stories, and lamented each other’s terrible loss. This was a process of collective mourning, as people shared their pain and their hurt with others who had suffered.

Miriam—the woman that I had brought back from the dead—stayed with us, along with her little boy. Each evening she would cry and cry, and everyone would cry with her. Her pain forced us all to remember, to return to that terrible day again and again. But no one resented her for doing this. She was living inside her pain, and our greatest fear was how would she ever get out. She had to—for the sake of her little boy, if not for herself.

As for me, I had changed overnight. Before the attack on our village I was still a victim, still a woman trying to come to terms with my own horrors. Now all that had been replaced by a burning rage. I wanted to fight. I longed to fight and to kill the Arabs—those who had done this evil. Those who had stolen my father away, my wonderful, wonderful father. Those who had burned and desecrated our village.

The village had become a wasteland. What they couldn’t carry off the
Janjaweed
had smashed, burned, and destroyed. Even the village water pump had been torn to pieces. Corpses had been dumped into the well, to poison the water. We realized that they must have planned it this way. In this way, anyone left alive after the attack would die from starvation or thirst. They came not only to kill us, but to destroy our ability to live.

The little children kept asking why had the
Janjaweed
done this. Why did they want us all to die? How were we supposed to answer such questions? What could we possibly say? When the children were sleeping we talked among ourselves. The Arab tribes had always been poorer than us: They had no settled villages, no crops, and few animals. So where had they got the powerful weapons that they had used to attack us?

We knew that there had to be the hand of the government in this. There had to be a driving force that had ordered them to do what they had done. If they had simply come to loot our homes, why destroy the village? It didn’t benefit them at all. They must have done this with orders from on high. As this realization set in even the simplest villager realized that this government of Arabs had decided to back their own and wipe us off the face of the earth.

We knew now where the lines were drawn. We knew that this government was our bitter enemy. For me, this was hardly a blinding realization. I had long suspected this. I had witnessed the rape of the children of Mazkhabad. I had witnessed that horror, and then the soldiers had come for me. My eyes had been forcibly opened. Together with my father I had railed against the Arab government that kept us down in our own country. But many in our village had lived in naive hope until the very day of the attack.

For three whole weeks we lived like this, suspended in a limbo somewhere between life and death. I spent my time either scavenging for food in the ruined village, or tending to people’s injuries: boiling water and binding up their wounds with whatever came to hand. I gathered the forest plants to make the burn ointment that Grandma had used. I burned the leaves to a fine ash and mixed that with sesame oil. Each day I would apply the paste afresh to people’s burns, and with many it did seem to help.

But some of the little children had burns covering their entire body. It was a miracle that they were still alive. They had been thrown into burning huts, and somehow survived the inferno. But they were in total agony. Their skin blistered and peeled off, the burns becoming infected and pustulous. I had so much training and knowledge, but there was little that I could do without proper medical supplies. It broke my heart. It would have been better if they had died, and each day another passed into the merciful release of death.

But it was the mental injuries that I was least able to treat. In the worst cases women had lost their entire families—husbands, children, and parents all dead. Many of these women had also lost their minds. They sat and muttered and cried and laughed aloud. They hugged themselves and rocked back and forth, gazing at nothing for hours on end. They refused to eat and had no idea of day or night. And I could do nothing to help them.

As I did my rounds everyone was talking about the same thing. What would we do if they came to attack again? How would we escape this time, with no men to defend us? Some were considering going to join their relatives in other villages, but what was there to prevent those from being attacked, just as ours had been? Others were planning to head south, all the way to the Nuba Mountains where we hoped that our black African brothers would offer us sanctuary. Was it in those mountains that we could find safety?

Or was it better to flee across the border to Chad? Our fellow Zaghawa lived there, as that was also the land of our tribe. But was the border guarded? Would the government soldiers or the
Janjaweed
catch us as we tried to cross to safety? Or was it better to try for the big towns? There was little fighting in the towns, so maybe they offered the best chance of escape.

The village was dying all around us. We knew that it was finished. It was about to be scattered to the four corners of the desert, like so much chaff on the wind. People were preparing themselves for that eventuality: remembering how a burned hut had once been so-and-so’s family home; remembering what a wonderful wedding we had had in so-and-so’s yard; remembering how as children we had played in that field, stolen fruit from that orchard, and fought with our clay warrior horsemen in the dust by that fence.

There was an old woman whose only child had been killed. Her husband was already dead, so now she was all alone. She would sit by herself and cry: “No family . . . Nobody at all . . . All of them gone . . .” One evening I found her wandering in her burned hut and singing tearfully to herself. She had composed a lament for the death of the village.

Villagers gathered around to hear her sing. As they listened, people started to cry once more. When she had finished, the old woman said that she would never leave the village. She would die here. She had no family, so where could she go? We tried to persuade her to make some plans to leave, but she refused. Why would she even want to save her life? Everyone was leaving and the village was finished, so she just wanted to die. Others had their children, and something to live for. But she had nothing.

I felt as if I was taking over the role of head of the family. My little sister, Asia, was crying the whole time. As for my mother, mostly she tried to be strong. I may have felt like death inside, but I knew that I had to think and use my head, and find a way to escape. Now and then I reached a place where I just wanted to give up, but I held on.

I kept telling myself that what we needed now was Grandma Sumah’s fire and anger, not lamentations and tears. I tried to imagine what Grandma would have done in the present situation. I tried to put myself into her mindset. What would she have done? I felt certain that she would have chosen to move. She would have led us out of this hell into a place of survival. She would have opted for the journey to Chad.

We will survive it,
Grandma would have said.
We are Zaghawa, we are Zaghawa, and we are strong . . .

By now we were nearing starvation point, so we had little choice but to leave. And, like it or not, that decision was about to be thrust upon us. In the middle of a searing hot afternoon we heard that hateful sound again—the thud-thud-thud of rotor blades clawing through the air. This time no one hesitated for an instant: We turned as one and ran to the forest. The pounding of explosions followed us, as the helicopters tore into the village.

We were terrified, fearing that this time there was no one left to defend us and that we would all be overrun and killed. But the three helicopters seemed content to loop around in lazy circles, blasting the last remnants of the village into fire and dust and oblivion.

The noise of the attack helicopters pounding the village faded away. For hours we waited in trembling fear, crouched in the dappled shadows and straining our ears to hear the bloodcurdling cries and gunfire as the dreaded
Janjaweed
swept in to attack. A pall of smoke drifted above the village, but there was only an eerie silence. If anything this was more frightening, and we wondered if they were sneaking up on us to attack.

With the setting of the sun we crept back into the village. The huts that had escaped the first attack were burning, but there was no sign of the enemy. It was as if the helicopters had been sent to finish off the village, and that was all. With the fiery glow all around us, and the acrid smoke thick in our lungs, we camped out in huddled groups wherever we could. It was clear what we had to do now. Tomorrow we would leave. Tomorrow we would leave. Tomorrow we would all leave and the village would be no more.

Early the next morning I decided to make one last round of my patients. I was their doctor still and I owed them this much. I set off, telling my mother and my little sister to be ready to leave on my return. I went around checking injuries, dressing burns and doing what I could for my patients. With each I talked about where they would go. I feared that some of them—especially the children—would never survive the journey. But what more could I do for them?

By midday I was back, but there was no sign of my mother or my sister. I went next door, to speak with Kadiga’s uncle. Like us he was readying himself to leave. I found him in his yard, stuffing a few possessions into an old sack in preparation for the journey.

“Where’s my family, Uncle?” I asked.

He glanced at me and shook his head. “They’re gone. . . . A group of soldiers came in a vehicle right to your house. They were wearing uniforms and carrying guns. They asked your mother many questions. ‘Where is this Zaghawa doctor who escaped from Mazkhabad?’ they asked. Your mother told them that she had no daughter other than Asia. She told them that she didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“Oh my God . . . Oh my God! But where are they now?”

“The soldiers left a message with your mother. ‘We know she is your daughter. We know you are lying,’ they said. ‘Tell her from us—we are searching for her and one day soon we will find her. Tell your daughter she will never escape from us. Never.’ That was the message. Your mother and Asia were too afraid to stay any longer. They’re gone.”

“But where . . .”

“They’re heading to Hashma, to your Uncle Ahmed’s place. They couldn’t face the journey to Chad without you. Your mum says you must escape. But don’t go anywhere that the soldiers might find you. They said they knew eventually you would find each other again, and be reunited.”

“But did my mum say where I should go?” I asked, in bewilderment.

Kadiga’s uncle shrugged. “She didn’t know. Somewhere safe. Maybe south to the Nuba Mountains. Somewhere far away so those men cannot trace you and get you. And your mother told me to tell you this: ‘She knows where we have hidden the valuable things, the gold. Tell her to take it all, and use it to help her find her way.’ ”

I returned to our yard as if I were in a dream. I dug up the valuables from where I knew they were hidden and stuffed them into my pocket. I took a black plastic carrier bag, loaded into it a handful of dried dates, a spare
tope,
and a thick robe. Then I said my goodbyes to Kadiga’s uncle. I took one last look at my childhood home, turned away, and started walking. I knew in my heart that I would never be returning to this place again.

I said nothing to Kadiga’s uncle about where I was going. I didn’t know for sure, and I wanted to leave no trail that the soldiers might follow. All I knew was that I would go south. Possibly I would try for the Nuba Mountains. It was a long way, but perhaps that was the only choice left open to me. Staying with family was impossible: It would bring the wrath of those who were hunting me down on the heads of those I loved. I set off alone walking south into the sun-baked bush and the desert.