— Tabitha, for a long time, I said, — I have tried to talk to you about something, but the opportunity never presented itself. I was not sure how you would react to what I wanted to propose.
She stared up at me. She was not very tall at the time. Her head barely reached my chin.-What are you talking about? she said.
There is no lonelier feeling than when a proposal you have rehearsed is rejected out of hand. But through adrenaline and plain stubbornness, I continued.
— I like you and would like to go on a date with you.
This was how we said things at that time, but it did not mean that a real date would ever take place. It was unacceptable for a young man and woman to go off alone together, to a restaurant or even for a walk. A date, then, might mean a meeting at church, or in another public setting, where it would be known only to Tabitha and myself that a date was taking place.
Tabitha looked at me and smiled as if she had been only trying to cause me suffering. She did this often, in those days and in the future-all the years I've known her.
— I'll let you know at a later time, she said.
I was not surprised. It was not customary for a girl to give her answer immediately. Usually, a time would be arranged, a few days later, when the answer would be given either in person or through an emissary. If no appointment was made, it would mean the answer was no.
In this case, the next day, I learned through Abuk that the answer would come at church on Sunday, at the south entrance, after Mass. Those intervening days were torturous but tolerable, and when the time came, she was exactly where she said she would be.
— How was the homework that you gave to yourself? This was my attempt at charm.
— What do you mean?
What I meant was that it might be considered humorous that instead of answering my first question, about a possible date, when I asked it, she went home to think about it for five days. But this was not very humorous, at least not the way I put it.
— Nothing. Sorry. Forget it, I said.
She agreed to forget it. She forgot a lot of what I said. She was merciful that way.
— I've been thinking about your question, Achak, and I have come to a decision. She was always spectacularly dramatic.
— And I've asked around about you…and I haven't heard anything bad. She had not talked to Frances, apparently.
— So I accept the date, she said.
— Oh thank God! I said, taking the Lord's name in vain for the first time in my life, but not at all the last.
I am not sure what might be considered our first date. After that day at church, we saw each other often, but never alone. We spoke at church and at school and, through my stepsister Abuk, I sent messages detailing the extent of my admiration for her, and how often I was thinking of her. She did the same, and so the volume of the messages kept Abuk busy. When the messages were deemed urgent, she would come running across the camp to me, her arms flailing and out of breath. She would finally regain herself and then relay the following:
— Tabitha is smiling at you today.
There could be little private contact between young people like ourselves, even if madly in love, as Tabitha and I were. Like most of the courtship, any interaction at all was done in plain sight, so as to draw no questioning eyes or murmuring among the elders. But even in plain sight, in daylight and in public, we were able to do quite enough to satisfy our modest desires. Those who knew me at Pinyudo, and suspected what happened in the bedroom of the Royal Girls, were surprised by the chaste courtship that Tabitha and I shared. But what had happened in Pinyudo seemed, now, outside of time. It was done by children who did not invest meaning in such explorations.
The first time I was able to hold Tabitha against me was one Saturday morning, amid many dozens of people, during a volleyball match. I was on a team with the Dominics, and we were playing against a group of overconfident Somalis this particular morning, and were being cheered on by a dozen Dinka girls our age and younger. There were no official cheerleading squads at Kakuma, and though many girls participated in sports, on this day Tabitha was there both to cheer for me and to hold herself against me. In any culture, there are certain loopholes that can be exploited by hormonally desperate teenagers, and at Kakuma we realized that under the auspices of the girls cheering us on, giving congratulatory hugs after a winning point was somehow acceptable.
There were five Dominics playing volleyball that day, and four of us had notified our ladyfriends that if they rooted us on, we would be able to hold each other between games or after successful points. So this is how I first held Tabitha. She had not done this cheering and hugging before, but she took to it immediately and very well. The first time I spiked a winning shot past the face of a certain overconfident Somali, Tabitha cheered as if she might explode, and came running over to me, jumping and hugging me with abandon. No one took notice, though Tabitha and I savored those jumping and hugging moments as if they were sacred honeymoon hours.
When it became more widely known that such hugs were available to athletes, the less romantically successful boys altered their priorities. 'I have to learn some sports!' they said, and then tried. The enrollment in intramural sports grew dramatically for a time. Of course, there was a crackdown, soon enough, on the cheering and hugging, when the ratio between sports and hugging became too close to 1:1. But it was very good, indescribably good, while it lasted.
— Tell me!
Noriyaki's appetite for details was insatiable.
— Tell me tell me tell me!
It was puzzling, because I had never asked him about the physical aspects of his relationship with Wakana-to whom he had recently become engaged-but he felt no shame in asking me to recount every meeting with Tabitha. I obliged, to an extent. There was a stretch of several weeks when I worried about the youth of Kakuma, because the two employees of the Wakachiai Project were doing little but discussing my meetings with Tabitha. Thankfully, he did not push me for smells and other sensations.
But they were extraordinary. After three months or so, Tabitha and I had mustered enough courage to visit each other in our respective homes on the rare occasions that they were empty. These opportunities were exceedingly rare, given her household held six people and mine eleven. But once a week we might find ourselves alone in a room, and hold hands, or sit on a bed together, our thighs touching, nothing more.
— But all this will change on the drama trip, right? Noriyaki prodded.
— I hope so, I said.
Did I really hope so? I was unsure. Did I want this sort of unsupervised time alone with Tabitha? The thought made me nauseous. Already I wondered if we had too much time alone, even in public. Her touch was more powerful than she knew. Or perhaps she knew it well, and was reckless with her touching; they sent every part of me into turmoil, and perhaps it was this control she found amusing and intoxicating.
But we would be going to Nairobi, and I would not and could not miss such an opportunity. The computer classes Noriyaki had suggested had not yet been manageable, with the schedule of the camp, and the permits necessary. I had never seen a city, had not left Kakuma for five years, and had no sense of being part of the real Kenya. Kakuma was, in a way, a country of its own, or a kind of vacuum created in the absence of any nation. For many of us at Kakuma, the desire to return to Sudan was replaced by a more practical plan: to go to Nairobi and live there, work there, establish new lives, become citizens of Kenya. I cannot say that I was close to achieving this, but I had more of a chance than most.
Our troupe had conceived of a play called The Voices, and we had performed it in Kakuma for many weeks. A theater writer from Nairobi, visiting a cousin who worked at the camp, saw the play and immediately invited us to perform the play in the capital, as part of a contest involving the best amateur theater groups in the country. We were to travel to Nairobi to represent the refugees in Kakuma; it would be the first time in the history of the competition-quite a long and robust history, we were told-that any refugees had participated in the contest. And so we would all go, Tabitha would be there, and with us only one chaperone, Miss Gladys.