Thirty Girls (39 page)

Grace held the tin cup in her hand. It was still full of tea. She hadn’t been able to drink. The brownish liquid had a slick of oil on the surface and was swirling as if with the movement of the planet, and she kept her head bowed, thinking.

The girls, she said, they are one. She began to shake her head from side to side, and her wide curls touched her cheeks. I cannot take one without the others.

Oti straightened his shoulders. This woman was a fool, he was thinking. Then we do not agree, he said, and stood up. Serena said he looked relieved.

The meeting was over. This was easier for Oti. It would not have been so easy to release only one of the Aboke girls. He was not sorry.

Grace stood also. I know you, she said. Your sister was Angelica.

Gregory Oti had stopped looking at her. Perhaps. But it was as if he were deaf. He was already leaving. His soldiers led the way out the door.

Aunt Karen finished talking.

Nurse Nancy spoke. She inquired of Louise, Can you understand why your mother did this?

Louise’s face was blank, but this was usual: a blank face.

Why not just take Louise anyway? Christine said. Then she would at least have Louise back.

Maybe she knew they would punish the other girls, said Nurse Nancy. If she broke her agreement.

They were punishing us in any event, said the girl with the bandaged ear.

I had the strange feeling of everything tilting, and said nothing. We were quiet. We were thinking about this, we were thinking about many things.

Louise stood up. My mother was thinking of all the children, she said, and walked just there, as if to go to the toilet.

When she was gone I looked at Aunt Karen. I had been learning to accept Aunt Karen, but now I wanted to stop learning. Why do you tell her this? I said.

Aunt Karen rubbed her neck. I thought she knew it.

But you see now she did not.

Perhaps it is better not to know some things, Christine said, though she did not sound certain.

The girl with the bandage on her ear, sitting beside her, spoke again: I think it is better to know it.

Nurse Nancy patted her leg again for saying this. We hope this, she said.

Louise returned and sat near me. The others were talking and so Louise and I talked separate. I told her news of Janet and Jessica. I told her I would make her a dress. I did not tell her how one day inside you just say, Enough. I could only stay near her from now on and not leave. She blinked slowly, not ready to believe this new life.

She was facing across the yard and her eyes noticed something far away. I saw why. Her mother was now there, arriving from the road. Grace walked quickly, her brown and yellow dress rippling as she walked. She carried a full straw bag. Louise stood and they embraced softly.

Esther, she said, smiling at me. You are here.

I have come for Louise.

They sat and we all felt the story we had heard. Grace said she had seen the boys in Gulu and they will be fine. Then she asked the new girls what their names were and asked Nurse Nancy about a trip she had taken and talked about being on TV. Louise listened, but she did not look at her mother. She was looking in the distance at nothing we could see.

Much time has passed since that time. Helen, the last one of us, she is still not back. We pray and think of her every day.

I
N HER DREAMS
he was always dead. He appeared, but dead. He didn’t seem upset. He explained nothing about where he’d been or how he’d come back and was unmoved by any emotion shown him.

Then, in one dream, he was alive again. He was sitting in a chair in his parents’ tall living room with the Ngongs out the huge window behind, telling her it had all been a mistake. She fell across his lap and started to cry. There’s so much I have to tell you, she said, weeping. When she woke she had a strap across her chest, making it difficult to breathe, and the grief felt like actual poison streaming into her heart.

She stayed in Kenya with no plans to return. She had a dread of going back to familiar things that knew nothing of Harry and nothing of where she’d been and what she’d seen. She had no urge to see the people she knew and to try splitting herself back into an old life when she felt she’d been turned inside out here and was thoroughly changed.

Pierre was offered a long assignment in Afghanistan and he took it eagerly. He’d been subletting an English journalist’s empty cottage, so Jane sublet his sublet and moved in. It was two rooms with padlocked French doors and bars over every window.

She rode the English journalist’s bicycle around Langata. Lana’s cottage was ten minutes away on the dirt back roads and three minutes through the woods. There were more dinner parties with wine flowing, more long candles burning down to white coins, more people appearing, then leaving.

She worked on the story. It absorbed her.

In a daze, she pondered the usual questions that come with loss. Death steers one toward wonder. What is life after all? Are we made of what we think? Or of what we have done? Is our final measure of life the images and impressions we leave in living minds? Or how engaged life felt to us? Or is it all only dust?

One afternoon Jane bicycled to Lana’s and found Beryl visiting with the four children. Her husband was still not in evidence. The children played in Lana’s scooped-out garden, throwing water from buckets, running along low tree branches. Seeing Beryl had the effect of resurrecting Harry, and Jane’s previous suspicion toward her was replaced with an intense unbidden affection, though Beryl herself had not altered in the least. That evening they all lay outside on large velvet cushions around a fire. The children swooped in the dusk, gravitating toward the fire as the flames grew brighter and night fell. The fire cast its spell and wonder showed on all the golden faces.

Jane stared at the twisting flames and the black wood shimmering into blocks of glowing coal. Loss turned one alert to beauty and tenderness. She felt it like a balm, the generosity emanating from Lana, Beryl’s loose bravery, looking after her children on her own. The wonder coming to Jane seemed new, but maybe wonder always seemed fresh and new, and that’s what wonder was. Who am I? she thought not with anxiety, but with wonder. What good do I do?

Lana and Beryl were chuckling over old stories, the time a hippo charged the Jeep, the time their mum dumped them at the orphanage to go on safari with a lover.

Beryl’s daughter Tess was braiding Jane’s hair with fingers soft as
insects. Jane wondered if she would ever look after a child. She wondered what would it be like if Harry were there beside her on the pillow. She could picture him coming out of the darkness, throwing a log on the fire and sending sparks flying. She remembered another thing she’d forgotten. Around a fire on the McAlistairs’ lawn when they were dancing, Harry had come running out of the darkness and leapt over the fire. He seemed to hang in the air longer than a normal person, skimming the flames. It came to her again, the feeling he particularly gave her, that she was an altogether better person. He was connected to something good and solid and through him she was connected too. She could get to there with him in mind. On her own it was harder. People said that it had to be all in you, that you couldn’t depend on other people to make you better, but that wasn’t true. It was only through people that you learned how to be better.

The women talked and the children fell asleep. Little Tess, with her long tangled hair, had curled up next to Jane and was breathing into her shoulder, in the abandon of sleep, trusting that anybody around this fire with her mother nearby was safe.

Jane wrote the story. In those times of asking herself what she was doing with her life she would fall onto the raft of work and float on the belief that the work would carry her. It was mostly true.

This time when she finished the story, it didn’t leave her.

Usually when she was done writing a piece not only would she have worn out her interest in it, but she would have to strain to keep hold of what had compelled her about it in the first place.

But that didn’t happen with this story. Perhaps it was Harry. Perhaps it was because, unlike her other work, this story was real. In any event the images of the trip continued to throw themselves up like screens between her and the world in front of her. The trip was not fading, but becoming richer. It wasn’t growing lighter, it was getting heavier. It took on the weight of memory.

She couldn’t bring Harry back.
The dead don’t come back
. She repeated this to herself. Despite how obvious and ironclad it was, she still needed to repeat it to believe it. She would not hold him again. She would not tell him the things she had been waiting to say. She had thought there was time, then time for him stopped. How was she to know time would stop?

For a long time it remained impossible to believe.

In the months and years that followed, she also continued to say to herself: I have him forever. Sometimes this felt good and was reassuring. Sometimes it even felt true. But whenever she actually pictured Harry where he was now, it was harder to keep the good feeling.

The dead Harry looked back at her from where he was with all the other dead people. His attitude was decidedly not, I am with you forever. He appeared calm, speechless and apart. His being seemed to express itself in a straightforward way. He did not even say it, but his being did. It said, I am not with you. I am not where you are. I am not alive. I am somewhere else entirely forever.

The only thing to do with loss is to bear it.

The question still pressed on: What to do? It was imperative that she do something, and that it be good.

She thought of the children. Harry would always be mixed in with them. She might do something more for the children. Maybe there was more to be written about them. She couldn’t take away what had happened. What had been done to the girl Esther Akello, that couldn’t be changed. You couldn’t pull the sorrow out of people. It was in them for as long as it lasted, showing in their faces, in the slow blink of their eyes. You could not take away what had been done and lend them good fortune. She couldn’t switch places with them. And would she anyway?

No, Jane couldn’t live anyone else’s life but her own. Though, looking back, she saw she had been trying hard.

She kept thinking, What is my life? What to do?

So many things in this world were cracked and sad, and still a glowing showed through and moments came when everything was lit and love happened. Every tree stood where it belonged, each bird had perfect feathers folded against its tiny body, each holding a heart beating madly. Life was a vibration of light and dark, and love illuminated that life. Then darkness descended and your heart was ripped apart. So that was part of it, a requirement of the miracle. Death stayed, lurking in the shadow of beauty. In the bargain, life both had meaning and had none. So, she kept thinking, what to do? What to do?

A pressure in her would not stop asking. There were not many things she could make better, not many things she could change. And yet … and yet … sparks of possibility still shot out. Unasked for, they came and randomly flew up.

The abduction of the girls from St. Mary’s College of Aboke, Uganda, is based on real-life events that occurred in the early-morning hours of October 10, 1996, following Independence Day on October 9. Sister Giulia’s story is based on that of Sister Rachele Fassera, a nun of the Comboni Order, who followed the rebels into the bush to retrieve all but thirty of her girls. The author acknowledges her experience and the telling of it as an integral part of this book. Of the real thirty girls of St. Mary’s, four died in captivity and the remaining twenty-six eventually escaped to freedom. In fact, the girls were held much longer than those depicted in this novel—many staying with the rebels up to eight or ten years. The last girl of St. Mary’s, Catherine Ajok, returned after being away for thirteen years. She had with her a baby boy.

CAAFIG

“Child soldiers” is a vastly misused term. Children who have been abducted are not technically child soldiers, which describes children conscripted into the established armed forces of a country. A more precise acronym exists, though it’s rather unwieldy: CAAFIG. Children Associated with Armed Forces in Groups.

LRA

The Lord’s Resistance Army was named in 1994. In 1986, when Yoweri Museveni became president of Uganda he ousted Acholi soldiers from the army. They formed a group in the north, Uganda People’s Democratic Army, which was galvanized by a healer named Alice Lakwena,
who took control after being visited by a spirit at Murchison Falls. The tipu took the unlikely figure of a ninety-year-old Italian World War II veteran who had drowned there while visiting the tourist site. In 1987, Alice Lakwena led an attack on Kampala, which failed, after which she was forced out of the country. She was purportedly a relative of Joseph Kony’s, sometimes called an aunt, sometimes a cousin. Kony took over the LRA in 1989.

An estimated thirty thousand children were abducted by 2012. The LRA in 2011 consisted of about six hundred people, four hundred of them children. By 2012, the numbers had dwindled to a couple of hundred. Since then Kony and the LRA have left Uganda, continuing their activities first in Rwanda and now disappeared in Congo.