Thirty Girls (6 page)

I
SIT AMONG
the girls in the shade of a tree not so far above my head. It is peaceful with their voices in the air, talking quietly. It might be birdsong for all I understand or care.

I think, I will never be close to anyone again.

We are just now supposed to be drawing pictures of things we would like to forget. You can see why this is strange. We must think, in order to draw them, about those terrible things we would rather remove from our minds. We are told that drawing such things will help us remove them.

Instead I am drawing the tree past the work shed toward the field. It has a curved trunk and resembles a woman twisting to look over her shoulder.

Today I woke with a pressure on my eyes, pulling my forehead. I thought, Perhaps I am getting a cold. Maybe I am.

My mind is uneasy. Since being away, I am used to my thoughts being disrupted. They have cracks in them. I remember in a soft way, as in the distance, how it was to be whole. Nothing. It was like nothing. You just
had wholeness, you did not feel it. I would not have known it was there if I had not become as I am now. It has offered me a perspective. It is interesting how one can understand a way that one was only after one is another way.

Beside me the girls’ heads are bent close to the paper. They use ballpoint pens and pencils which are better if you want to erase. Red pencils are often used for the blood and the bullets. At night the bullets were red.

Holly is beside me. She leans on a cardboard cracker box. She has drawn a house with a thatched roof and doorway, her house. Soon she will add men with pangas, a chair on fire, and her lute broken on the ground. She was practicing music when she was taken. Holly’s from the country near Ongoko, not from the town like me. I am from Lira town, which is not far, just a day’s walk.

Past the picnic bench near the shop the boys are together there drawing. I see that one, Simon, with them. His back is to me with his bad leg straight out. When he was shot the bullet was near the bone so his knee is not so good. He swings his foot around when he walks instead of stepping straight. The scar looks like a crack in a window with jagged lines coming out from a shiny pink center against his dark skin. The scars on us are not straight.

Simon is good at drawing so his drawings are tacked up in bicycle repair. One of a car on fire with flames smaller than the smoke, one of a boy with his arm cut off and drips of blood making a puddle. He’s skillful at details, doing three shades of camouflage with one lead pencil. His AK-47
S
shoot clouds and the soldiers have bouffant hairdos and sideburns as in cartoons. Everyone draws them that way, even though they do not so much look like that. They look like anyone.

A high chain fence follows two sides of the property here and there’s a wooden fence with pieces fallen out of it along the driveway. The playing field has no fence, but one side goes beside a marsh. We are not fenced in. Here is not a prison and still we are not permitted to leave.

I am not so good at drawing. I would rather look at a thing made in nature. I don’t finish drawing that tree.

Our camp is called Kiryandongo Rehabilitation Center and we are, during the dry season, a dusty circle cleared in the middle of tangled bush a little ways off the Gulu Road. There are some huts and the office of two sheds connected where Charles our head counselor has an office. The kitchen has a small roof and all sides open to the fire pit and brick oven and there you see Francis cooking. Chickens peck around. We had chickens and when I was small I liked to hold them as pets. They were nervous, but if you keep patient they will calm down and stay in your lap even if their eyes are startled.

We have a parking area for cars. One belongs to Charles and the truck fetches food and supplies. The van is to transport children, but it is broken at this time and has not been used since I have been here.

In the work shed is a shop for making instruments and building chairs and repairing bicycles. Behind in the trees is a large white tent that came from Norway where the boys sleep. The ventilation is not so good and, having sixty boys inside, the air is unmoving and hot. The girls sleep in dormitories with bunk beds so close you can reach over and touch the girl next to you.

Holly is in the upper bunk beside me. She has decorated her area. From the ceiling strings dangle empty boxes of Close-Up toothpaste or fortified protein, an eye-drop bottle, a box of Band-Aids. I have no decoration. Underneath Holly is May, who is very pregnant, due in a month. Her parents do not accept the child coming and have not visited May.

At Kiryandongo we are all united by a thing that also divides us from others. We look at each other and know what we’ve been through. We also look away for the same reason.

Since my return I meet new challenges of the mind. I have decided to forget everything that happened to me there and so look forward to the remainder of my life. I am not so old, nearly sixteen. My life could still be long.

Before, my life was nothing to speak of. You would not have heard of it. Now, they tell us it is important to tell our story. They have us draw to tell it, but I am not so good at drawing.

We studied the Greeks in school and they had people called rhapsodes who memorized long stories and recited them the way you would a song. The long poems were epics. At banquets or by pools people would sit eating grapes and drinking from goblets and listen to the rhapsodes sing. It was not a song with music, but the rhapsodes still sang. They sang of heroes and of journeys.

When they ask us to speak, I cannot find the words. What I have inside is for me to look at alone. Who else can know it? Not anyone. I cannot say it out loud. How can one tell a story so full of shame?

I listen to the others talk and understand how they struggle. We knew the same things. I stay apart to make peace with it inside myself, if I am able. With the rebels I learned that inside is where it most matters in any case.

I am one of the abducted children. Did I tell you my name? I am Esther Akello.

I have been back about two weeks. The days are strange, I am not used to the peace. I am not used to waking without someone hitting my feet. The first week I slept a great deal and woke with swollen eyes, which in the mirror had dark hoops under them. There is a heaviness in me where gladness does not reach. I know there should be gladness that I have returned. I am free, but gladness does not come to me.

The boys finish their drawings then get up and kick around a ball on the dusty field. Boys forever like to play with balls. This is better than hitting each other. Simon is running with his bad leg. Charles claps his hands, getting them to go faster.

Here at Kiryandongo they always want you to join in. They say, Come on, Esther, I know you can run. Come on. Get up off your seat.

I prefer to sit. When the ants come I brush them away. If they keep coming back to me I pinch them between my fingers. Maybe I’ll get up when I’m ready. Maybe I won’t. I hate everyone.

As I said, my town is Lira. At night Lira is quiet and in the day it is not so loud either. We have a pink brick bank and a yellow brick post
office and many churches, some with steeples, though most with simply a roof. Goats walk about. The main street is paved from the turnaround at one end and tilts upward past groceries and other shops selling batteries and Walkmans and clothes and stationery to the other end of town where the road becomes dirt and paths squiggle into the countryside. During the dry season the dirt is red and dusty, in the wet season it grows darker and stains our feet like rust.

I was born during the rainy season in April 1982, arriving by way of my parents, John and Edith Akello. I was preceded by a brother, Neil, then followed by sisters Sarah and Judy, and another brother, Matthew. I am told I came out very quickly and my mother who is a nurse said it was the fastest delivery she had seen or heard of. I was anxious to get into the world and to the business of being alive. My eyes opened just then, trying to look at everything even though a baby sees nothing but blurry figures. I was looking to discover things right away. I like to think I came out quickly also to spare my mother pain. From what I have seen giving birth is a terrible thing and I do not know why women must suffer this agony to produce a child. But that is only one of the many things I do not understand. There are many many more things I do not understand than ones I do. Sometimes it seems discovery is the learning of all I do not know. For this reason I am not happy for all the time I have missed school. I want to go back as soon as this is possible.

When we return we first visit the nurse at the clinic. She examines our scars and the sores on our feet. Our soles have become very hard. She checks our bones to see where they might have been broken and looks at our bleeding teeth and chalky tongues. We take medicine for worms and our heads are shaved of lice. The nurse will maybe take a blood test, but she will only do this if you make the request. Most girls do not know to request it because no one has told them. No one wants to frighten them about the HIV virus. They may know a little but choose not to know more. The nurses are advised not to disturb the girls further by informing them to have the blood test.

I ask for a blood test, because my mother is a nurse so I know it is important.

Was. Was a nurse.

The counselors do not like to mention other things. They respect that girls are too embarrassed to talk about the rudeness to which we were subjected. Some things are too private. They do not use the word
rape
. They believe they are relieving us. We may talk about killing someone with a machete, but rape is too private to speak of.

I have decided not to remember, but pictures appear to me no matter. A girl kicked in the face falls to the ground and immediately gets up, because we are marching. If you do not get up they will kill you. I try instead to think of other things: a river in the morning. I think of my best friend, Agnes, beside me, knocking me with her knee, and of the way her face changed when I said something she had thought of, too. I think of the first time I saw my boyfriend Philip on the street in Lira town and the effect it had on my body. I think about sleeping in my tree. But still come the things I do not choose to think of. The boy whom we were made to watch, for an example of what will happen if you try to escape. The rebels surrounded that boy and started jabbing at him with bayonet blades and pangas. Blood spurted where he was hit and black gobs landed on the dust. They kept cutting that boy, who was crying out. I watched with hard eyes. Chunks of skin came off and fell on the ground. I keep remembering his skin in the dirt.

You must not want to hear such things. Who would?

After my escape I was brought to the government building. The first person I was surprised to see was my aunt, not my mother. Aunt Karen smelling of pomade held me in her arms and cried. She was crying hard.

Your mother cannot come, she said, wiping at the tears. Then I received the shock I was not expecting.

She got very sick, Esther. She had the cancer.

What could I say to that? So I said, When?

Aunt Karen sobbed. It was very bad.

And now? I somehow knew the answer.

She could not get better. Aunt Karen squeezed her eyes and shook her head. Esther, your mother has died.

I thought I had gone beyond what I could imagine with the rebels, but it turned out there was more for me to go. Can it be true? I said.

It is funny, the things we say. Of course it was true. I am afraid it is so.

But for me, death was not so surprising, even when it was your mother.

When?

Aunt Karen kept crying, crying. Three weeks it has been.

I have come too late, I said.

I am not permitted to go home. When you are abducted you are required to stay in the rehabilitation center for some weeks after you return. So it was at Kiryandongo that my family came to see me. Lira is an hour away by car and they would find a ride. They sent word when they were coming so I waited for that day.

When they arrived at the bare yard of the entrance area, I had the feeling of being in a movie when aliens take over a person’s body so their eye sockets are yellow, a sign that the people inside are gone. My family looked that way to me. I thought, My mother dying has changed everyone and they are no longer the same inside.

When they were closer they looked as they were before. Neil my big brother lay his loose hand on my shoulder and greeted me by name, but he looked to his fingers not to my face. I greeted my father.

Yes, it is you, he said. I think there were tears in his eyes. I think we all had my mother in mind and were not thinking perhaps of what had happened to me. I am, after all, still here.

We went to sit in the shade of the dorm. They brought me flatbread they knew I liked. My sister Sarah sat on one side. I saw that Judy had changed the most and appeared older—she was now eight—and Matthew was not as plump as before and his front teeth were gone. Aunt Karen sat on my other side and patted my arm. She was dressed up, wearing her wedge sandals. She was not crying this time, just talking. She asked how was it here and was I getting enough to eat. She said our grandmother Nonni could not come, but I would see her when I was
able to visit home. Nothing was interesting to me. I saw she was acting like the mother of this family. My mother did not think her sister was a very good mother. Aunt Karen was more interested in painting her nails and straightening her hair. This day she even looked excited to be in her sister’s place.

My father stayed still and quiet after they parked his wheelchair. He sat, faced to the side not looking in my direction. When he did glance at me his eyes closed as if it hurt. Was he thinking of what I had been through? Was he thinking of his wife who was now dead? I do not know.

In the family we liked to hear the story of their meeting. On a Christmas holiday my mother came home to Lira and went with Aunt Karen to the army dance. My mother saw my father there. She knew who he was. His brother Robert went around with Aunt Karen, but my mother had become a Kampala girl, working in the hospital there, and wasn’t interested in a soldier from Kitgum.