The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (6 page)

“Your home village will soon be attacked,” the sheikh told me as we stood together after tea, watching his people go. He kept track of where the refugees were coming from; he knew where the lines of attack were spreading. So I bid him goodbye and thanked him for his lifetime of courtesies to my family and to me. He said that he had always been honored to serve us; he bid me give his greetings to my father and my mother and to Ahmed and my sister, all of whom he respected greatly.

I climbed aboard a Land Cruiser loaded with guns and men headed in the direction of my own small village. There was not much conversation as we bounced quickly through the wadis. There ahead, in a lovely nest of green, was my home village. I stepped off within sight of my family’s huts and said goodbye for the last time to these fellows in the vehicle.

“See you soon, Daoud,” said an old school friend with a serious smile, meaning
not in this lifetime
.

It was not the homecoming I had longed for after these years away. I was not returning with gifts and money for everyone.

“Daoud is returned,” I heard some men say as I walked by groups that were gathered here and there. I nodded to them but it did not seem to be a time for smiles and joyful greetings.

I walked into the family enclosure where a donkey, several goats, and some chickens watched my arrival. My father was on the far side of the village with some other men, as were my brothers. I saw my mother under the shade roof attached to the cooking hut; she was with my sister Aysha and with several other women of the village; they were all in mourning. Mother looked very old now. Her hair was matted with the earth of grieving. She wore dark clothing, a dark shawl over her old head. She saw me and wept into
her hands, as if it were even sadder for her to think that my homecoming had to be at such a time.

“
Fatah
,” she managed to say, which is what you say when you greet someone in a time of grieving.

“Fatah,” I replied. I stood a distance away from her. We did not touch or embrace, following the custom. She would try to say something, but then begin to cry again into her hands and her shawl. We had lost perhaps twenty cousins in the previous days, and each was like a son or daughter to her. In tribal life, cousins are as close as brothers and sisters and, in such times of loss, it physically hurts. In this tiny village, three children and their mother were killed when the white Antonov bomber came. Six of the fifty houses were burned. This news, which I already knew, was told to me again by the women as I stood with my head bowed a little to my mother.

They recounted the deaths of each person: how it happened, what was happening to that family, and good things to remember about each person. It is good to remember the dead at such times, for soon, after the period of mourning, any photo and reminder of that person will be removed. The person’s clothes will be given away to a distant village. The past is past. There is too much death in the land of no doctors for it to be any other way.

I heard running and then saw Ahmed come through the enclosure. He was, against the mourning custom and his own intentions, smiling somewhat as he grasped my arm in a great handshake.

“Daoud,” he said. “Fatah. So it’s all true—you have come back.”

“Fatah,” I replied, trying not to smile also.

He took me into the sun, away from the low voices of the women. He knew of all my adventures, every detail of every job and every jail, every narrow escape. It was crazy of me to think I would have anything to tell him. The goats and the family donkey came up to nuzzle him as he spoke.

Ahmed looked older but excellent. He now took care of several entire families whose men had died.

“Let me take you to Father,” he said after our brief visit. I gave my greetings again to my mother and my sister and the other women, and he led me out into the village, his long arm draped over my shoulders.

In this I felt at home. I had been feeling like a visitor in Darfur, even in my old village—like someone from another world. But Ahmed’s arm on my shoulder was the gentleness of home.

“It’s very, very good to see you, Daoud,” he said several times. I told him that the sheikh had sent his regards and had warned of an attack soon.

“Yes, an attack I think will come in a few days,” Ahmed said. “Not tomorrow, but maybe soon after that. We are almost ready to move the people out. You can help get some people ready, if you want to do that,” he said.

“Of course,” I answered.

We approached a group of old men talking under an old tree.

“Fatah,” I said to the eldest of them, my father. He was in his eighties, which is unusually old for this land. He stood with the help of his herding stick, opened his arms, and gave me a long embrace.

“Fatah,” father whispered into my hair. “So, you have come back from all your adventures,” he said. “We have learned much of the world and its prisons from following the news about you,” he chided me in good humor.

“Praise heaven you are home safely, but I think you have come just in time for some more trouble for you,” he added. “May God keep you safe.”

The other men stood to shake my hand and embrace me. We visited an hour before I went to look for Ahmed, who had escaped the old men to continue his preparations. I found him in front of his family enclosure, talking to more than twenty men, mostly thirty-five to forty-five years old. They were planning to move the old people and young children in the next two days. Because they also talked about preparing their guns, I later asked Ahmed what this group was going to do.

“We are the village defenders,” he said. “We will stay behind to slow the attack if it comes before everyone has left. It is what we are trained to do, and you are not.”

He told me that most of the younger men had already gone to the rebel groups. There were other defenders in the mountains from other villages who would come when they were called.

In the old days, the sultan of an area had a great war drum. Actually, some of these drums still exist. They are so big that ten men can beat them with great clubs. The sound of this drum—I heard it more than once as a child—will carry over the desert the distance of a two- or three-day walk. In the rain time, when there are low clouds, it will carry even farther. In this way, all the villages in the sultan’s
reach would know that there is a sad problem that must be solved with fighting. The sultan would send representatives to the omdas, and the village sheiks would go to the omdas to get the news and learn the strategy. Perhaps, for example, Arabs had stolen some cattle and would not pay. There was no higher court to take the problem to, so there would be a battle at some agreed-upon field of honor. As I have said, it would be far away from the women and children.

We boys would have to go find the strongest of the male camels so that our fathers and older brothers would have good mounts for the battle. Guns and swords would swing from their saddles as they left the village without a word of information or consolation to the children or women. The camels would know what all this meant, and they would grind their teeth in a way that could be heard all over the village. The sound of worried camels was the sound before battle, while the ululation of wailing women was the sound after the battle. The names of the fallen would arrive long before the weary camels and men plodded back into the village. The surviving men would split up and spend up to two weeks in the family enclosures of the widows, so that the women would have company and could overhear their stories. This was how their lost husbands were honored. In time, the widow might be taken as an extra wife by one of her late husband’s brothers or another man.

I tell you all this because I was hearing again the grinding sound of worried camels, and the birds flew up and down as if they were unsure of which place might be safe.

Over dinner, Ahmed reminded me of all the paths
through the wadi, of all the water points in remote places, and of our childhood caves.

“It will not be easy for all these people to get quickly away,” he said. “Men like you, who tended animals so far into the desert when they were boys, could, if they chose, help them find their way.” He was not inviting me to go, but he was clearly not inviting me to stay and die—and I had no gun. Ahmed was thinking clearly. He had sent another of our brothers to El Fasher, the safest town in North Darfur, as a kind of family insurance: no matter what happened, there would be one alive to help the surviving women and children of the family. There was no way for all the family to go with him, as there were too many animals to tend.

We ate chicken that evening and the next several evenings—wonderful chicken, usually saved for special occasions. Everyone in the village ate chicken those nights.

I borrowed
jallabiya
robes to wear from Ahmed. I had not been in the flowing clothes for many years, but it was pleasant to wear them now—they were cooler in the sun than my Western khakis. They bring you shade wherever you go. I borrowed one of Ahmed’s camels and checked on the animals at the water points. I used the camel whip very lightly to get some speed along the sand. I saw a shadow in the sand of who I might have been had I stayed.

I was happy to find my place again in my big and loving family. Maybe Heaven is like this, a warm reunion of those you love after dark times and a long separation, but with a little excitement to keep things interesting.

Ahmed told me that some of the old people were refusing to leave. They were intent on dying where they had always lived. They would not be humiliated and made to run away from their homes.

I asked about our parents. Ahmed was planning to get them out soon. They were willing to go.

Some families had already left. A few of these had arranged vehicle rides to other villages, but most had children and animals and belongings, and would have to walk.

Our family’s animals, like those of most families, were in faraway places known only to us.

I spent the days helping people get ready. I would ride to the outlying clusters of huts and encourage people to prepare to move. Some did not want to, and would point and say, “We have our great-grandfathers buried over here, and our children buried over there, and so why would this not be a good place for us to die also?” You could not argue with that. This meant we had to think about the women and children and the younger men and help them instead.

Women were getting their children ready for the long journey, and you may know what this is like, though it was probably more serious in this kind of situation. What to take, what to leave—all those difficult choices.

I woke up late one night with a vivid dream. Ahmed was standing in the middle of the village. Two of his fellow village defenders were near him, screaming for him to run. I was shouting down to them from the hillside, telling them to shoot at the attackers.
Don’t yell at Ahmed
, I shouted, shoot the attackers over there, over there, and I pointed because I could see them taking aim at Ahmed. But it was too late,
and Ahmed fell from a bullet.
Why didn’t you shoot the attackers?
I shouted when I got down to the men.
Why didn’t you shoot them?
But Ahmed was dead, and then maybe I was dead.

This dream kept me awake. I walked out of the village to the hill beside it. I was still up there in the bushes at dawn.

I had tea for breakfast at my father’s hut. (Husbands and wives have separate huts, which makes for long marriages.) Ahmed was there and I looked at him like he was a dead man. I could not tell him the dream. Ahmed was telling my father to leave the village right after tea, and to take the rest of the animals out of the village. My father, who said he had heard guns in the night, agreed and left.

At about 9 A.M. I was walking through the village to see how everyone was doing. It was a morning of good weather at the end of the rain time. The birds were singing, which I took to mean we were safe at least another hour. But then there was a strange sound and I stopped walking in order to listen carefully. It was a thumping like a great drum, then more and very rapid thumps of this drum. Then very clearly it was the sound of helicopters turning steeply. I saw two large, green helicopters now through the trees, turning sharply into our narrow wadi. The thumping was their engines as they turned—then the thumping of their guns shook the air. I did not know which way to run so I stood there crazy for a moment and watched the dirt of the village spraying up from the bullets.

I saw Ahmed run from his enclosure with his gun. My other brother, Juma, was with him. Juma is a quiet, very hardworking man. I was not used to seeing him excited and
with a gun. Juma and Ahmed seemed now to be running to the sound of this drumming. They were headed to the mouth of the little valley where the ground attackers would have to enter. Their running also drew the helicopters away from the huts. Other defenders were now running up to the hills on both sides of the village, but mostly to the east to intercept the attackers as far down the valley as they could manage.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” they shouted to one another over the steady
kata-tata
of the machine guns.

The women started screaming to their children
Let’s go let’s go
and everything in the village began to move in a swirl of dust and noise. The animals were wild-eyed with fear, and the donkeys screamed and brayed. I did not see where the bullets were going, but little songbirds flew down from the trees, confused and worried. They perched on my shoulders and then hid in the folds of my robes and shawl. But then I saw they were falling dead from me, their hearts broken by this noise. I ran to my mother’s hut. She and my sister and her children were already leaving, quickly moving between the huts to the safety of the trees and the rocky wadi west of the village.
Let’s go let’s go
, she called to her grandbabies as they ran toward the safety of the trees and the steep rocks to the west of the village. I quickly found myself with other men carrying a child here, boosting some children onto donkeys, urging donkeys along
let’s go let’s go
, finding children and sometimes their mothers standing and crying hysterically and pleading with them to move along.