What is the What Read online

  I sat in my father’s shop, playing on the ground with a hammer, pretending it was the head and neck of a giraffe. I moved it with the giraffe’s slow grace, having the neck bend down for water, reach upward to eat from the high boughs of a tree.

  I walked the hammer-giraffe silently, slowly over the dirt of the shop floor, and the giraffe looked around. He’d heard a sound. What was it? It was nothing. I decided the giraffe needed a friend. I retrieved another hammer from a low shelf and the second joined the first. The two giraffes glided over the savannah, their necks pushing forward, first the first, then the second, alternating in time.

  I pictured myself as a businessman, running my father’s affairs, organizing the store, negotiating with the customers, ordering new goods from over the river, adjusting the prices to the nuances of the market, visiting the shop in Aweil, knowing hundreds of traders by name, moving with ease through any village, known and respected by all. I would be an important man, like my father, with many wives of my own. I would build on the success of my father, and would open another store, many more, and perhaps own a greater herd of cattle—six hundred head, a thousand. And as soon as I could manage it, I would have a bicycle of my own, with the plastic still wrapped tightly around it. I would be sure not to tear the plastic anywhere.

  A shadow grew over the land of my giraffes.

  —Hello! my father said in the sky above.

  The greeting in return was not warm. I looked up to see three men, one of whom carried a rifle tied to his back with a white string. I recognized the man. He was the grinning man from the night at the fire. The young man who had raised the question of the What with my father.

  —We need sugar, the smallest of the men said. He was unarmed but it was clear he was the leader of the three. He was the only one who spoke.

  —Of course, his father said.—How much?

  —All of it, uncle. Everything you have.

  —That will cost a good deal of money, friend.

  —Is this everything you have?

  The small man picked up the twenty-pound sisal bag resting in the corner.

  —That’s everything I have.

  —Good, we’ll take it.

  The small man picked up the sugar and turned to leave. His companions were already outside.

  —Wait, his father asked.—You mean you don’t intend to pay for it? The small man was at the door, his eyes already adjusting to the light of the mid-morning sun.—We need to feed the movement. You should be happy to contribute.

  —Deng, you were wrong, the smiling man said.

  My father came out from behind the counter and met the man at the doorway.

  —I can give you some sugar, of course. Of course I will. I remember the struggle. I know the struggle needs to be fed, yes. But I can’t give you the entire bag. That would cripple my business—you know this. We all have to do our part, yes, but let’s make this fair for both of us. I’ll give you as much as I can.

  My father reached for a smaller bag.

  —No! No, stupid man! the small one yelled. The volume startled me to my feet.—We’ll take this bag and you’ll be grateful we don’t take more.

  Now the grinning man and his companion, the man with the gun tied with a string, were back, standing behind the small man. Their eyes held on my father. He stared back at the men, one by one.

  —Please. How will we live if you steal from us?

  The smiling man wheeled around, almost stepping on me.

  —Steal? You’re calling us thieves?

  —What can I call you? This is the way you—

  The smiling man threw a great sweeping punch and my father crumpled to the ground, landing next to me.

  —Bring him outside, the man said.—I want everyone to see this. The men pulled my father out of the shop and into the bright marketplace. Already a crowd had gathered.

  —What’s going on? said Tong Tong, whose shop was next door.

  —You watch and learn from this, the grinning man said.

  The three men turned my father onto his stomach, and quickly tied his hands and feet with rope from his own shop. My mother appeared.

  —Stop this! she screamed.—You maniacs!

  The man with the rifle pointed it at my mother. The small man turned to her with a look of deepest contempt.

  —You’ll be next, woman.

  I turned and ran into the darkness of the shop. I was sure my father would be killed, perhaps my mother, too. I hid under the sacks of grain in the corner and pictured myself living without my mother. Would I be sent to live with my grandmother? I decided it would be my father’s mother, Madit, who would take me in. But that was two days’ walk away, and I would never see William K and Moses again. I rose from the bags of grain and peered around the corner, into the market. My mother was standing between my father and the three men.

  —Please don’t kill him, my mother wailed.—Killing him won’t help you.

  She was a head taller than the small one but the man with the gun had it directed at my mother and I could not breathe. My head rang and rang and I blinked to keep my eyes open.

  —You’ll have to kill me, too, she said.

  The small man’s tone was suddenly softer. I looked through the doorway and saw that the man had lowered his gun. And with that, without any sort of passion, he kicked my father in the face. The sound was dull, like a hand slapping the hide of a cow. He kicked him again and the sound was different this time. A crack, precisely like the breaking of a stick under one’s knee.

  At that moment something in me snapped. I felt it, I could not be mistaken. It was as if there were a handful of taut strings inside me, holding me straight, holding together my brain and heart and legs, and at that moment, one of these strings, thin and delicate, snapped.

  And that day, the rebel presence was established and Marial Bai became a town at war with itself—contested by the rebels and the government. The soccer games were forgotten. The rebels came at night, raiding where they could, and during the day, government army soldiers patrolled the village, the market in particular, reeking of menace. They cocked and uncocked their rifles. They were suspicious of anyone unfamiliar; young men were harassed at every opportunity. Who are you? Are you with these rebels? Trust in the army had evaporated. The uninvolved had to choose sides.

  I was no longer allowed to play in the market. School was out indefinitely. Our teacher had left and was reportedly training with the rebels somewhere near Juba, in the southeast corner of the country. The discussions among the men of Marial Bai were constant and heated, after church and over dinner and along the paths. My father told me to stay home and my mother tried to keep me at home but I strayed and sometimes Moses and William K and I saw things. We were the ones who saw Kolong Gar run.

  It was dark, after dinner. We had gone to the tree where we could hear Amath and her sisters talk. The perch had been my secret until William K had seen me there one day and had threatened to reveal my position unless he were allowed up, too. Since then our nighttime spying had become regular, if not fruitful. If the wind was strong at all, the leaves of our acacia would shake and shush and drown out anything we might hear in the hut below. The night we saw Kolong Gar was a night like that, a starless night with a whirling wind. We could hear nothing of what was being said by Amath and her sisters, and we were bored with trying. We had begun to climb down when Moses, who occupied the highest bough, saw something.

  —Wait! he whispered.

  William and I waited. Moses pointed toward the barracks and we saw what he saw. Lights, five of them, jumping over the soccer field.

  —Soldiers, Moses said.

  The flashlights moved slowly over the field, and then spread further. Two disappeared into the school and threw shards of light around the room. Then the school went dark again, and the lights began to run.

  That was when Kolong Gar ran directly below our tree. Kolong Gar was a soldier for the government army, but he was also a Dinka, from Aweil, and now he was ru
nning, wearing only white shorts—no shoes or shirt. With a flash of muscle and the flicker of the whites of his eyes, he raced under our dangling legs. We watched his back as he flew past Amath’s compound and down the main path out of Marial Bai, heading south.

  Minutes later two of the lights followed. They stopped short of the tree that held us, and finally they turned and walked back to the barracks. The search was over, at least for that night.

  That was how Kolong Gar had left the army. For weeks we were the tellers of the story, which everyone found fascinating and rare, until similar stories became common. Anywhere there were Dinka men in the government army, they were deserting to join the rebels. The government soldiers stationed at Marial Bai had numbered twelve, but soon were ten, then nine. Those remaining were Arabs from points north and two Fur soldiers from Darfur. Public sentiment did not encourage their remaining. Marial Bai was quickly becoming decidedly sympathetic to the cause of the rebels—who wanted, among other things, better representation in Khartoum for southern Sudan—and the soldiers were not blind to this.

  And then one day they were all gone. Marial Bai awoke one morning and the soldiers charged with protecting the village from raids and keeping the peace were no more. Their belongings were gone, their trucks, any and all trace of them. They left the south of Sudan for the north, and joining them were many of Marial Bai’s more prosperous families. The men who worked for the government in whatever capacity—as judges, clerks, tax collectors—took their families and went to Khartoum. Any family with means left for what they considered safer places, north or east or south. Marial Bai, and much of the region of Bahr al-Ghazal, was no longer safe.

  The day the troops disappeared, Moses and I went to the soldiers’ barracks, crawling under their beds, looking for money or souvenirs, anything they might have left in haste. Moses found a broken pocketknife and kept it. I found a belt without a buckle. The building still smelled of men, of tobacco and sweat.

  The few Arab traders who remained in the market soon packed up their shops and left. In a week, the mosque was closed, and three days later, it burned to the ground. There was no investigation. With the soldiers gone, the rebel presence in Marial Bai increased for a time, and soon the rebels had a new name for themselves: the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

  But after a few weeks, the rebels were gone. They weren’t in Marial Bai to protect or patrol. They came when passing through, to recruit, to take what they needed from my father’s shop. The rebels were not there when the people of Marial Bai reaped what they had sown.

  CHAPTER 7

  Michael’s phone is ringing again.

  The boy slowly rouses himself and jogs over to the kitchen to answer it. I can’t hear much of the conversation, but I do hear him say, ‘You said ten,’ followed by a series of similar protestations.

  The call is over in less than a minute and now I must try again to reason with the boy. Perhaps he is comfortable enough with me now, with my unmoving presence, that he will not fear my voice. And it’s evident that he is upset with his accomplices. Perhaps I can forge an alliance, for I still harbor hope that he’ll see that he and I are more alike than are he and those who have placed him here. ‘Young man,’ I say.

  He is standing between the kitchen and the living room; he had been deciding whether to return to the couch to sleep, or to turn the TV on again. I have his attention for a moment. He looks at me briefly and then away.

  ‘I don’t want to scare you. I know this is not your idea to be here with me.’

  He looks at the phone book now, but it seems that because it’s resting against my temple, to retrieve it he would have to get too close to me. He walks past me and disappears down the hall, headed for the bedrooms. My throat goes dry with the thought that he very well might return with the unabridged dictionary after all.

  ‘Young man!’ I say, projecting my voice down the hall. ‘Please don’t drop anything on me! I will be quiet if that’s what you want.’

  Now he is above me, and for the first time, he is looking into my eyes. He is holding my geometry textbook in one hand and a towel in the other. I’m not immediately sure which poses the greater threat. The towel—would he suffocate me?

  ‘Do you want me to be quiet? I will stay quiet if you’ll stop dropping things on me.’

  He nods to me, then takes his foot and gently steps on my mouth, pushing the tape back into place. To have this boy pushing my mouth closed with his foot—it is too much to accept.

  He disappears from my view but is not finished. When he returns, he begins a construction project in my living room.

  He first pushes the coffee table closer to the entertainment center, reducing the space between the three objects: me, the table, and the shelving. Now he drags a chair from the kitchen. He places this near my head. From the couch he brings one of the three large cushions that sit upright. He stands the cushion up against the seat of the chair. Bringing another chair from the kitchen, he places it, with a couch cushion soon resting against it, at my feet. He has effectively eliminated me from his view. My view is now limited to the ceiling above me, and the little I can see between the windows of the coffee table. I lie, finding myself impressed with his architectural vision, until he surprises me with the blanket. The bedspread from my room is carefully spread over the couch cushions until it forms a tent over me, and this is too much. Michael, I have little patience left for you. I am finished with you, and wish you could have seen what I saw. Be grateful, TV Boy. Have respect. Have you seen the beginning of a war? Picture your neighborhood, and now see the women screaming, the babies tossed into wells. Watch your brothers explode. I want you there with me.

  I was sitting with my mother, helping her boil water. I had found kindling and was feeding the fire, and she was approving of the help I was providing. It was unusual for a boy of any age to be as helpful as I was. There is an intimacy between mother and son, a son of six or seven. At that age a boy can still be a boy, can be weak and melt into his mother’s arms. For me, though, this is the last time, for tomorrow I will not be a boy. I will be something else—an animal desperate only to survive. I know I cannot turn back and so I savor these days, these moments when I can be small, can do small favors, can crawl beneath my mother and blow on the dinner fire. I like to think I was luxuriating in the final moment of childhood when the sound came.

  It was like the sound of the planes that flew over occasionally, but this was louder, more dissonant. The sound seemed to be dividing itself, again and again. Chaka-chakka. Chaka-chakka. I stopped and listened. What was that sound? Chaka-chakka. It was like the noise an old lorry might make, but it was coming from above, was spreading itself wide across the sky.

  My mother sat still, listening. I went to the door of the hut.

  —Achak, come and sit, she said.

  Through the doorway I saw a kind of airplane, coming low over the village. It was a fascinating kind of plane, black everywhere and dull, unreflective. The planes I had seen before resembled birds in a rudimentary way, with noses and wings and chests, but this machine looked like nothing so much as a cricket. I watched it as it flew over the village. The sound was rich and black, louder than anything I had ever known, the vibrations shaking my ribs, pulling me apart.

  —Achak, come here!

  I heard my mother’s words, though her voice was like a memory. What was happening now was utterly new. Now there were five or more of these new machines, great black crickets in every direction. I walked out of the hut and into the center of the compound, transfixed. I saw other boys in the village staring up as I was, some of them jumping, laughing and pointing to the crickets with the chopping sound.

  But it was strange. Adults were running from the machines, falling, screaming. I looked at the people running, though I was too dazed to move. The volume of the machines held me still. I felt tired in some new way, as I watched mothers grab their young sons and bring them back into their huts. I watched men run into the high grass and throw themse
lves to the ground. I watched as one of the crickets flew over the soccer field, flying lower than the other machines; I watched as the twenty young men playing on the field ran toward the school, screaming. Then a new sound pumped through the air. It was like the cutting and dividing of the machine, but it was not that.

  The men running to the school began to fall. They fell while facing me, as if they were running to my home, to me. Ten men in seconds, their arms reaching skyward. The machine that had shot them came toward me now, and I stood watching as the black cricket grew larger and louder. I could see the turning of the guns, two men sitting in the machine, wearing helmets and sunglasses like my father’s. I was unable to move as the machine drew closer, the sound filling my head.

  —Achak!

  My mother’s hands were around my waist, and she pulled me with great force into darkness. I found myself inside the hut with her. The sound roared over us, thumping, chopping, dividing itself.

  —You fool! They’ll kill you!

  —Who? Who are they?

  —The army. The helicopters. Oh, Achak, I’m worried. Please pray for us.

  I prayed. I flattened myself under her bed and prayed. My mother sat up, rigid, trembling. The machines flew overhead then away and back again, the sound retreating and filling my head once more.

  I lay next to my mother, wondering about the fate of my brothers, my sister and stepsisters, my father and friends. I knew that when the helicopters were gone, life would have changed irreversibly in our village. But would it be over? Would the crickets leave? I did not know. My mother did not know. It was the beginning of the end of knowing that life would continue. Do you have a feeling, Michael, that you will wake up tomorrow? That you will eat tomorrow? That the world will not end tomorrow?

  It was over in an hour. The helicopters were gone. The men and women of Marial Bai slowly left their homes and walked again under the noon sun. They tended to the wounded and counted the dead.