One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [53]
“We are looking for Charity Anyieth,” I said. “I was to meet her at the school, but she was not there.”
The woman did not respond, but turned over her shoulder to one of the small boys, now silent but fixing an unblinking stare at the khawaja.
“Charity,” she said, and the boy ran off to one of the little houses. A moment later, a tall and elegant young woman emerged. Charity. She saw me, though she did not smile. She came over and shook my hand.
“Charity, my name is Charles. I’d like to talk to you if you have a chance.”
“Yes,” she said in English. “I have been told you will come. I will meet you up at the school. I have to finish my work.”
I agreed and was promptly ushered back through the makeshift door onto the dirt path again. The walk to her school was short, but in the heat it felt like we were walking for hours. We found a spot in the shade and waited in silence. It was too hot for conversation. All one could do was sit and stare. At one point, Simon shook his head, went to look for some water, found none, and returned to rest his head in his hands. I looked at the groups of silent Sudanese men in the compound. They were tall and skinny, their skin a deep black. Some had parallel lines of scarification on their foreheads, a traditional marking for men in southern Sudan who have come of age, though it seems the practice was going out of style. Not many of the men I met in the camp had it. Most of them have grown up under the influence of Western aid groups and United Nations agencies, separated from the traditions of their families and homelands. Neither of the major Sudanese rebel leaders had this scarification either, and I wondered if this influenced the practice.
As we sat, I tried to imagine what the men were thinking. They sat on benches or pressed against buildings, trying to keep themselves in the shade as the sun rose higher overhead. They looked at me and some came over to shake hands and exchange greetings.
“Hello. How are you?” they asked in English.
“Fine, thank you,” I said.
“Very fine,” they responded, smiling. And we shook hands again. Then someone else came and repeated the exact same exchange in the same intonations. A brief receiving line formed and the “conversation” replayed itself a few more times. When everyone had said his “very fines” we plunged back into silence. When it is too hot for action, too hot to entertain lively conversation, when no one has work and everyone is simply waiting for an undetermined event—an arrival, a departure—the days can stretch out forever, like the landscape, flat and unchanging. The morning was filled with stillness and penetrating, bone-boiling light. Another young man entered the compound and we shook hands. How are you? Fine, thank you. Very Fine. Yes. We shook again.
The young man exchanged some words in Dinka with Simon, who nodded, and then the young man went to another group of men, shook hands and sat with them. We were quiet for a several minutes. Noon approached, and our shadows melted into the light. I noticed no discernible change, but suddenly something prompted Simon to speak.
“Charity cannot come today,” he said. “She sent this boy to tell us she has work to do for the family.” He was silent again. We did not rise to go. We waited, preparing ourselves to step from the shade into the sun. As time passed, the temperature rose. I wondered how long we would sit here inactive, neither expecting anyone to come to us nor going anywhere to meet anyone. How could Charity work in this heat? What did she have to do? A fear entered my mind that I could not possibly step into the light again, could not possibly face the heat or make it back to my air-conditioned room before I turned to vapor. I need not have worried. No one moved. No one spoke.
While we sat, I thought of the kids playing with the wooden car. It seemed so natural that boys would be tinkering with scraps, building all the possibilities of their imagination. They fled everything they knew and had to build their cars on strange soil covered in a foreign dust. Despite