Thirty Girls (16 page)

Her thoughts turned from herself to Harry. How odd it was that once you kissed a person he infiltrated you. After lunch, while she painted the view with Daphne’s watercolors he’d sat behind her on the concrete deck, his legs straddling her, encasing her. Her body accepted the occupation of him, whether chosen or not. Apparently being occupied by a man did not have to do with suitability or personality. The body decided and the mind followed, helpless. This usurpation seemed to be, she noticed, relegated to females.

She thought of Harry saying his mother was the coolest person he knew. It was better than his mother being a nightmare. A nightmarish mother was something to contend with, though adoration was another hurdle. Jane had met his mother, Sheila, the night before they’d left Nairobi. She was a trim woman with short hair and an intelligent expression, standing at the fridge, looking for supper. Karibu, she said to Jane, neutral. Good trip, she said when they were leaving. She and Harry’s father were scientists, specializing in livestock. Harry’s mother was clearly not the sort of woman to let her body override her mind. That is, she appeared to be an adult.

The weeds were hard to haul through. The stems were strapping across her chest.

She heard Lana shout and turned around to see her following, her broad shoulders visible above the rug of growth. Looks like you picked the easy way back, Lana called. She appeared, however, to be making effortless progress through the tangle. Her body twisted side to side as if she were dancing a rumba. Lana looked to be very much where she was, and always did, unbowed by obstacles in her way.

The last night with the McAlistairs, they went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant off the Gbaba Road. It was in a house on the second floor with a screened-in porch perched in the trees. A Bengal wall hanging covered a fireplace. At most of the tables sat people with light-brown
skin. Many Indians had returned to Uganda after Idi Amin’s banishment in the eighties.

The rice arrived beside the vegetables upside-down in scoops.

At the next table were two handsome men with whom Lana soon made friends. They were doctors. One was an Italian who not only was a paraglider but had just returned from years of working in the north. He told them they had to go to the hospital at Lacor. It was run by a man named Carlo Marciano and was the best hospital in the north, no small achievement given where it was. He scribbled a note on a paper napkin. Tell him I sent you, he said. He was retiring for a while. You can’t work there forever, he said. You begin to go mad. Jane looked at his young face, ragged around the eyes. He and Harry fell into an intense discussion. He was headed to Ethiopia to paraglide.

When Jane was ten, she had decided to be a doctor. She liked dissecting animals in science, and healing sick people seemed like a good thing to do. She pictured herself touching the glands by children’s ears and walking purposefully down a hospital corridor, the way doctors did on TV. But it turned out being a doctor required a lot of reality and a lot of being in the world and Jane found herself drawn more and more into the world of dreams.

Don picked up the torn piece of napkin. This ought to be a big help, he said.

Everyone was learning to ignore Don. Jane folded the note and carefully jammed it into her stuffed wallet.

So, Lana said to her new friends as the check was being examined. She slapped her thighs with gusto. Where can a girl around here go dancing?

The next day they set off for a war zone.

A
FTER WE TURNED OUT
the lights in the dormitory we could hear the wrappers crinkling from the sweets the sisters had given us for the holiday. Agnes was in my bed with me. Agnes and I usually slept together in any case, not just because the rebels were nearby. We hugged each other, pretending to be worried, but we were not really. We had locked ourselves in with the steel bolt. We were safe. We knew about the LRA cutting people’s mouths off and stealing from the villages, but I myself had not seen a rebel. They did not show themselves and hid in the bush. One girl at St. Mary’s, Alison, had an uncle taken when he was fifteen and a week later he was found, not alive, tied to a tree. Margot’s brother had been taken during Easter week in Nebbi and had not come back. You would hear these stories.

Then you find you are in the story. The story is happening to you.

Agnes fell asleep first, as she always did. I heard her breath turn thick, but I stayed awake. I had a math test on Tuesday, and I was thinking how after Tuesday I would be glad that math test was over. I went to more
interesting thoughts. I thought about Philip, the boy of mine. I thought about his hands. His hand was two inches higher than mine, we’d measured. I thought about the last time home in Lira, when we kissed behind the library. He said to me I was different from the girls he knew, but he meant it nice. I remember that night having a safe feeling I was not to have again.

We woke to the banging.

Across the ceiling, lights bobbed like car lights on a bumpy road. We heard shouting, then a large thing banging, banging on the outside wall. They were stoning the glass in the window past the bars. Girls started to cry and others quieted them, putting their hands over their mouths. Maybe they would not know we were inside if we remained quiet. I sat up, with Agnes squeezing her arms around my waist. I kept my eyes in the direction of the banging. They know we are in here, I was thinking. About a hundred and fifty girls slept there. They know the building to find us in. Other times when the rebels were near, we were taken by the sisters to town to stay with different families in small groups. But this time we did not go and this time they had come.

Quick, I told Agnes. Go under the bed.

Other girls were there also. Then noise flooded in. From below the mattress I saw flashlights and the shadows of the rebels climbing in the window. They had pulled out the bars. They came stomping in. Electric lights were switched on, and the first sight of them was frightening. We saw them now. We saw their faces. They had on brown berets and red berets and baseball hats. Some had braided hair and dark glasses. Many wore camouflage shirts. Everyone was screaming. The rebels hit us.

Do what we say or we kill you! They spoke in Acholi. They spoke English also. Line up here! Now!

Agnes was frozen beside me. I held her ankle. She started to move and I gripped her to stay.

Then they pulled the mattress off the bed. I let go. Okay, I thought, we cannot escape them. Agnes was crying. Stop, I whispered. Do not let them know it. I saw Agnes’s face try to keep this idea. We were pushed together roughly. Girls tried to put on their shirts or dresses. The rebels held pangas and guns and with a free hand picked up things, shoes and clothes and blankets, throwing piles on the beds. They told us to
carry these things. Some of us found suitcases. Others made bundles with sheets.

We were made to stand in a line, and they collected us in groups of five or six and wound a rope between us at our waists. When a girl cried, they shouted, Quiet! Maybe they would hit her. Abigail was taking her shoes from the floor and a rebel hit her back, making her fall down. His sunglasses reflected the lights. He was not old; he was young, fifteen or sixteen.

The rebel tying our rope had a chain around his neck with a light-blue oval charm of the Madonna. He tied our hands. I tried to press out my stomach to make extra room but only managed a little. The rope stayed tight. I did not like it, but I found no choice. We had to do as they told us.

Agnes at least was behind me.

In front I had Louise. Louise was tall for fourteen and our best football player. I looked at her strong back, and when she turned I was glad to see she was not crying. We looked at each other without speaking.

Pick up your luggages, they said. I took my backpack. I managed to put my feet into sneakers. Agnes had found only her sandals. I had the thought she’d be sorry to walk in them, a thought next to more important thoughts such as, Am I going to die? I noticed Louise had no shoes either, so I kicked her leg. She understood and starting looking around.

They unbolted the door, hitting it with their guns instead of just sliding it to the side, and we were led across our courtyard. The light from the dormitory reached a small distance across the grass. Smoke blew over us and we smelled burning. The lights at the entrance to the sisters’ area were bright and shone on the white gravel. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the figures of the children crouched against the cafeteria building, hiding. I looked away to protect them.

We walked together, attached by that rope.

Then across the grass I saw a shadow running small as a dog toward the music rooms. A rebel ran and caught up to the shadow. He picked it up. It was a smaller girl, I think Penelope. He didn’t bring Penelope back, but pulled her over to the trees where it was dark, and I did not want to think what he was doing to her over there. She was only ten. Only the other day I was sweeping the sorghum platform when Penelope came and said, I know you. You are Esther. Her six pigtails were held at each
end with a different plastic barrette. I am a good sweeper, she said. Want to see? I gave her my broom and Penelope swept for me, concentrating hard. She asked me how old I was. I said I was fifteen, though my birthday was not for a while.

Where are we going? Agnes whispered.

Into the bush, I said. But what did I know?

Near the chapel we passed through a thick band of smoke and I heard glass breaking. Rebels were hitting the windows with clubs. Smoke streamed out of the chapel door but I saw no flames. Maybe they will not burn it down, I thought. Nearby the Jeep was also burning and we worried it might explode because flames were there.

We walked out of the school gates onto the drive. But soon we veered off that road. We walked and walked in the night without a path, then we would find a path again. We got used to seeing in the dark. I made out the long line of girls. Later I learned there were about one hundred and forty of us in that line. We came to a place of marshy water and were made to walk through and became wet up to our chests. The smaller girls held on to the chests of the others or were carried. The water would be over their heads. When we emerged from the water, Agnes pointed to her feet and one sandal was gone. Agnes was always this way, losing hair clips, losing her papers.

We did not know where they were taking us. We did not know if we would live or die. You now have a new perspective. You do not care so much about the thorns scratching your legs or that your shirt is wet. You notice other things. Above the trees dawn was lightening from dark blue and it made me think of my family in our house in Lira, all sleeping. My mother was the one who decided I should go to school at St. Mary’s in Aboke because I would learn more there. You might make something of yourself, Esther, she said. The ground was still dark, but I could see my light-colored sneakers.

Then the sun rose and spread behind us in a bright band lighting the scraggly branches gray in front of us, and I felt it as if my mother or sisters were offering their hands in help. That light appeared quietly. For an instant I had the feeling I would sometimes get of the world being a sweet place and how lucky I was in that life, then immediately saw that I might not be so lucky now. Inside us were new feelings of fear. The good
world was overlapped by another one. We walked on the road again, then turned for the last time off into the bush.

The rebels had not been so visible to us, walking with guns strapped across their chests, thirty of them, maybe forty. As it lightened, their faces appeared. Kony was not there. We did not know then, but Kony would not go on raids. The man leading us was named was Mariano Lagira. He was a fat one. But he walked as if he was not fat, he walked quickly. Always two or three soldiers walked near him. Some soldiers were very young, younger than me, eleven or ten years old. Even they were carrying machine guns with necklaces of bullets. The young ones looked the hardest. One tall rebel had two scars, one down his forehead and across his mouth and then one going the other way, as if someone had crossed him out. I heard a girl scream then a gun shoot.

Some of us had broken off to escape. Some were brought back. Later we learned that Irene had escaped at that time.

A rebel shouted, If you do like this again we will kill you. Everyone heard.

We went up and down hills. The sun rose and it was morning, but unlike any morning we had ever had before. It was the same thin sun and there were the usual thornbushes with flaking bark we see every day of our lives and dark green leaves like narrow beans along thin branches. One girl, Patricia, she would not stop crying and two rebels hit her on the back and shoulders till she stopped. If we looked to watch, they would raise their guns till we looked away. We learned quickly how it was to be.

We were tired but still we walked. We crossed another swamp and again got wet. We were made to crouch down which was supposedly resting. It was muddy there and I held Agnes’s hand. She had on the white nail polish we put on two days before and it was good and bad to see it.

I mouthed to her, It will be okay. She nodded. Her mouth was open in a round shape, wanting to believe me, but not so sure.

We went farther, down in a valley. We climbed a hill.

The commander Mariano Lagira said, We will stop here.

It was about one o’clock. There was some shade and we were made to sit.

It was then that we saw her thin figure coming up the hill. It was Sister Giulia, our headmistress. She had come after us, having followed in
the night. Mr. Bosco our math teacher also was with her. Mariano Lagira saw them. He said to us, to all the girls, You stay here. If you do not stay we will slaughter this nun before you.

We kept down our heads, but were able to see what would happen. Sister Giulia was not wearing her habit so we saw her light brown hair we had not seen before with a kerchief over it. Sister Giulia, she is very small, with thin arms and skin so light her nose becomes pink in the heat. She is nice to everyone and a fair headmistress and gives soft handshakes to her girls.