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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 have 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 will get up when I am ready. Maybe I will not. 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.
Then, in 1981, with Milton Obote as president, the Acholi and Langi were permitted in the army. Since Idi Amin, the Acholi were not. Idi Amin was against the Acholi. His men had even killed my father’s parents, who both died at the massacre in Bucoro.
With Museveni, our president now, if you are Acholi you are not so welcome in the army either. Many presidents do not look after the Acholi and Langi, because we are in the north, and some people believe it is our history to be persecuted.
I asked my mother what my father said to her that night, even knowing the story. She would shrug. My father asked my mother to dance and she said no, and he said, good, he did not want to dance either. My mother wondered if he was nice or mean. He told her he remembered seeing her when she was young but she did not remember that time and he asked her where she lived and what her work at the hospital was like. Most men she knew talked about themselves only. He said he liked the way she was holding her hands. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at the hands, he said. My mother has long hands. What can you tell about me? she said. It is private, he said. She thought he was being rude. Maybe he would tell her when he knew her better. Maybe you will never know me better, she says. I think I will, he says. Because I’m going to marry you.
My mother laughed and said they had better dance if they were going to get married. So they did, and after they got married he told her what he saw in her hands. They belonged to the mother of his children.
My mother moved back to Lira. They married in June, and my brother Neil arrived six months later. I arrived next. When his army term was up, my father did not re-enlist and instead opened an auto repair shop with his friend Jameson. He’d learned mechanics in the army and liked motors and was good at solving problems. My father likes not talking while he fixes something.
For a while we lived next to Aunt Karen. Sometimes Uncle Robert lived there too, but mostly not. They had a son, Robert Jr., but did not marry. They liked to fight. The brothers were very different. Robert liked being in the army and liked to roam.
My mother and father found a house away from them. Sarah was born, then Judy, then Matthew. We would go to the clinic where my mother was head nurse. Long lines out the door were people from the countryside who would come and wait all day. At home our cousin Lenora looked after us. She started when she was ten.
You see my father in a wheelchair and think maybe he lost his legs in a mine or even from the rebels, but none would be true. When I was five years old, a car fell on him. He was underneath it, making repairs. For a while he was at home, then he got a wheelchair and went back to work. I remember my father standing just once, a time I was on his shoulders. I was high up and scared to hit the doorway as we passed through and he was laughing at me and my worry.
My father does not feel sorry for himself. So if at night when he is home in his chair in the side place in the living room his eyes turn red from drinking this is not so surprising.
When visitors come to Kiryandongo you see how they look or do not look at you. My father does not; my sister Sarah does not stop watching me. If it is your sister you can imagine what she is thinking. I saw her trying to measure if I was wrecked or not. When we were small, people might not tell us one from the other, we have the same shape and face. Looking at her, I have the odd feeling of looking at myself as I was before I was taken.
I ask them about our mother, the ghost hovering there with us. Where did she die? Who was with her? Where was she buried? They told me these things. Did she say anything about me? They said she was worried for me, but believed always I would come home. I thought of my mother’s face, with her wide forehead and chipped front tooth. It was hard to picture her sick. As a nurse, she would have understood everything happening to her. Then I thought how at least I missed seeing this thing. I did not have to watch my mother die.
I was relieved when my family left. I wanted them gone. Then I missed them, too. Two feelings come at once and you feel neither of them.
No one here is at ease. We are all troubled.
The boys especially are fighting many times, but the girls are mean also. I saw Holly stomp a chicken yesterday. And Janet, before she would not have hit her baby. When she saw me looking at her as the baby cried she said, What is this compared to what the rebels did?
Nurse Nancy says we are coming out of it. The counselors have us think that after a while you will stop coming out of it and be as you were, yourself again. I think I will be coming out of it forever.
There is a person inside me who has been very bad and does not deserve a chance at life. She has done things no good person would do. I might argue against that and say, No, I am Esther. I am a good person, as good as I can be. But another voice is stronger and that voice says it would be better if I were dead.
They tell us, You are back and things will get better. Again and again they say, You are the fortunate ones. We say it ourselves. It might be so, but—
Holly was made to beat a boy when the rebels learned she liked him. Another girl here found her son’s leg up in a tree. No wonder you want sometimes to die. Sometimes your spirit is so heavy you say to it, I cannot carry you around.
Nurse Nancy sits with us talking. She is a wiry woman in glasses who lets her long hair fly around, more concerned with looking after us. She asks us about Kony. What did we think of Kony? Maybe we are mad at him. Some nod. Some girls say he is a bad man. I do not answer. I do not say, I’m not mad at Kony. I do not see Kony. To me Kony is nothing.
Kony took my life away from me, Carol says. She is a St. Mary’s girl who has been here a long time. Her parents still have not been found. Below her eyebrows looks filled with sandbags, pressing down her eyes.
Yes, but you have survived, Nurse Nancy says.
I have not, she says. I have not survived.
We have the future waiting for us, Janet says. See, up ahead? There we are. Who knows what is in store.
The future is blackness, Carol says.
Janet says, Do not worry. God will provide.
Christine, one of our counselors, tells us that journalists may come today. Christine was an abducted girl herself, ten years ago. She is about twenty-five and has a square head and round shoulders and wears pearls in her ears. Christine thought she might become a doctor and went to Kampala to go to school, but it did not work out so well, and she came back here and instead became a counselor. The journalists are interested in hearing of our experience, she says. No one has to speak who doesn’t want to. Sometimes it can help you. Recently there was a woman from Germany with a tape recorder.
Holly says she would not dare speak in front of such knowledgeable people, and Holly was even at the front of her grade.
Who wants to talk about what happened out there? I say. What good will it do?
I will speak, Janet says. Emily says she also will speak. Emily does not stop talking anyway, though she does not always say the truth.
They want to spread our story, Christine says in her mild voice. It will help all the children.
We think about this. The journalists do not come.
After you return, even if the world looks as you left it, you are changed and the world seems changed also. It is new. After my father’s accident, my mother said my father did not change. He stayed the same in his new world.
We must find forgiveness, Christine says. We must forgive ourselves.
I am looking for forgiveness, but it is hard to find. What does it feel like?
The fear that I may die any moment is still here. Now and then the fear drains a little from me, but in its place is not a better feeling. There is a hard blankness.
4 / Taking Off (#ulink_f47f425d-f9ad-5b53-9730-29e1cdf1bd9d)
THEY STUMBLED IN the doorway, soaked through. Quiet music played. Jane saw some figures in the dimness past burnt-down candles at the end of the table crowded with bottles and glasses. She felt her way down the hall and found her bag in the dark corner of a room where a couple was laughing in the dark. Returning she bumped into another sleeping body. In the bathroom she peeled off her wet dress and put on underwear and a strapped top. Back in the living room she left the wet dress draped over driftwood bookshelves. Harry emerged behind her carrying bedspreads and kicking cushions to a place on the floor of the living room. Other people were leaning against the wall, some sleeping, some murmuring in a far corner. Harry sat back against a cushion. Come here, he said, his arm straight out, and in the dimness she saw him looking past her, as if a direct look would be too intimate. She sidled against him and put the dry skin of Harry’s chest against her cheek and wet hair. He lay still. She was not tired and far from falling asleep. She lay spellbound. People were whispering; another lantern went out, darkening the stone wall.
Some time later she woke, and everything was black and silent and still. The face near her was dark gray, as if in a dream. She touched it and went to kiss the mouth and hands came up on either side of her head, keeping her there. She kissed him, hardly breathing, making no sound. Then he stopped.
Get up, he whispered. He stood and pulled her off the floor, somehow keeping the Indian bedspread wrapped around her shoulders. He steered her through the dark on the soft straw rugs, knocking her into a stool, toward the darker hall, keeping her shoulders in front of him. They came to the door of the bathroom and pushed in. The walls, she’d noticed before, were a rough barn wood stained brown but she could see none of it now.
Too many people around, he said. Keeping her wrapped he lowered her to the floor. Now let me see Jane, he said in the pitch black.
Her breath felt chopped into pieces. Oh, came out—oh. It kept being chopped.
Shhhh, he said, making no other sound. Did he even breathe? His hands in the dark were moving her around, traveling over her. Noises stayed in the back of her throat. That’s …, she began. Where were the words?
What? he said.
That’s. It’s. Oh.
But, she wasn’t expressing it in the least. Then her breath took over and she went to where words didn’t go or matter anyway.
Shhhh, he said.
His hands made her feel small and pliable, and all her nerves were lit. He shifted around and his weight came down on her.
Oh God, she said rather loud. He covered her mouth.
He was there close, but too dark to see. She thought of the rough wood on the walls. She felt his face sort of become her face. She heard the river nearby foaming down the hill and saw the line of the mangled trees she’d seen earlier in silhouette against a pale yellow sky. Then she felt she was in a green forest. Then she was on a porch. It was not a porch she knew, it was a porch in America. There were children playing down the block under leafy branches and it was summer somewhere in the South with beds and white chenille bedspreads and old light fixtures on the walls and railings twisting up the stairs inside. A man and a woman were having sex in the hallway. Then it was Jane having sex with a man in the hallway. Wisteria vines filled the screen door and the door banged shut. Another man was getting out of a truck; he was partly Harry. He came over the threshold wearing boots and pulled open her shirt. No, he came into a side room and threw her on a table and pushed her legs apart ignoring her face. He’d seen her earlier in town, he said. His face gazing at her breasts had only one thing in mind driving him. He shifts her to the side and lifts her against the door, holding her underneath, having to crouch and bend his knees. I’ve been thinking of this all day, Harry said with his legs pressing her knees out and her back against the rough wood, pinning her, legs dangling, toes just touching the floor. One foot has a sandal on, a strap tight on her ankle. He held her from beneath, lifting her against him, pressing his hips so she’s on the verge of collapsing but is thrown back, her wrists braced against the frame. He grabs her ass and her feet slip off the floor into the air, with one hand flailing to get a grip on the sink anchoring her, inside the sound of their breathing, and she feels in a sort of tornado as if she’s going up a hill powered by wind with gusts rolling dust around and still going up farther and not quite at the top, reaching a crest. Everything starts to shake and unravel with the earth splitting at her feet and the road cracking sideways and air erupting like glass shattering. Her legs flung wide sent off needles of light or song and she had the feeling of falling at the same time rising, of going out and out as she’s gathering in, feeling her arms and legs dissolve into a bright bank of dust and finally stillness.
I’m old, you know.
Which means?
I don’t know, just I am.
I happen to like old.
Right.
The older the better, he said.
Okay, so—what—you’re perfect?
More perfect than you know.
