But I was anxious, because very quickly I had fallen very deeply in love with Tabitha. It was impossible not to. All those hours on the phone, with that voice-I tell you, it is hard to describe. The deep music of it, the intelligence and wit. I talked to her in my bedroom, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the deck of our apartment building. It seemed impossible that she could still be seeing Duluma, for we seemed to be talking on the phone six hours a day. In what hours did she fit this Duluma?
'Would you like me to come visit?' she asked me one day.
And then I knew she was testing me. She was ready to jump from Duluma to me and she first wanted to see if she could love me in person.
Two weeks later, she was in Atlanta. It was so strange to see her, to see the woman she had grown into. She was a woman in every particular, a very dramatically shaped woman. She opened her door, not expecting me, and at first, even though she had come to see me, it seemed that for a moment, she did not recognize me. It had been three years since we had last seen each other, in Kakuma. More than three years, and many thousands of miles. After this moment of doubt, the reality of me seemed to settle upon her.
'You've gained weight!' she said, grabbing my shoulders. 'I like it!' She noted my new muscles, the thickness of my neck. Many who knew me in the camps comment on the fact that my body no longer resembles an insect's.
The moment she took my shoulders in her hands, when we faced each other square-so close it was difficult to look straight into her perfect face-we were as man and wife. The fact that Tabitha was spending the night was a source of great fascination among the Sudanese in Atlanta. At that time, it was not common for men like us to entertain women, Sudanese women in particular, in our homes for days and nights. This was before Achor Achor met his Michelle, and he stayed in his room much of the weekend, unsure how to deal with the situation. For me, too, it was a transformative weekend. With Tabitha so close for so many hours, awake and asleep, I felt that I had everything that I had ever wanted, and that I had begun to live the life I was intended to live.
On my couch on the second day, as we watched The Fugitive — she wanted to see it; I was seeing it for the third time-she told me she had left Duluma. He had been very upset at first, she said.
Indeed, he called me that weekend. He was very agitated. He told me that he needed to confide with me, from one man to another. Tabitha was a whore, he said. She had slept with many men, and would continue to do so. And while he said these things, none of which I believed, I was staring at Tabitha, who was lying on my bed, reading a copy of Glamour she had bought when we had gone out for breakfast. She had been pregnant, he said. Pregnant with his child, and she had aborted it. She didn't want the baby and she would not listen to him. She had killed the baby over his objections, he said, and what sort of woman would do that? She is ruined, he said, barren. All the while, I watched Tabitha on her stomach, turning the pages slowly, in her pajamas, her feet crossed in the air. I loved her more with every false and conniving word Duluma said about her. I hung up and went back to Tabitha, to our lazy and luxurious morning together, and I never told her who had called.
Achor Achor is rifling through the magazines on the end table. He finds something of interest and shows me a newsmagazine with a cover story about Sudan. A Darfurian woman, with cracked lips and yellow eyes, looks into the camera, at once despairing and defiant. Do you know what she wants, Julian? She is a woman who had a camera pushed into her face and she stared into the lens. I have no doubt that she wanted to tell her story, or some version of it. But now that it has been told, now that the countless murders and rapes have been documented, or extrapolated from those few reported, the world can wonder how to approach Sudan's violence against Darfur. There are a few thousand African Union troops there, but Darfur is the size of France, and the Darfurians would much prefer Western troops; they are presumed to be better trained and better armed and less susceptible to bribes.
Does this interest you, Julian? You seem to be well-informed and of empathetic nature, though your compassion surely has a limit. You hear my story of being attacked in my own home, and you shake my hand and look into my eyes and promise treatment to me, but then I wait. We wait for someone, perhaps doctors behind curtains or doors, perhaps bureaucrats in unseen offices, to decide when and how I will receive attention. You wear a uniform and have worked at a hospital for some time; I would accept treatment from you, even if you were unsure. But you sit and think you can do nothing.
Achor Achor and I glance through the Darfur article and see some passing mention of oil, the role oil has played in the conflict in Sudan. Admittedly, oil is not at the center of what has happened in Darfur, but Lino can tell you, Julian, about the role oil played in his own displacement. Do you know these things, Julian? Do you know that it was George Bush, the father, who found the major oil deposits under the soil of Sudan? Yes, this is what is said. This was 1974, and at the time, Bush Sr. was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Bush was an oil person, of course, and he was looking at some satellite maps of Sudan that he had access to, or that his oil friends had made, and these maps indicated that there was oil in the region. He told the government of Sudan about this, and this was the beginning of the first significant exploration, the beginning of U.S. oil involvement in Sudan, and, to some extent, the beginning of the middle of the war. Would it have lasted so long without oil? There is no chance.
Julian, the discovery of oil occurred shortly after the Addis Ababa agreement, the pact that ended the first civil war, that first one lasting almost seventeen years. In 1972, the north and south of Sudan met in Ethiopia, and the peace agreement was signed, including, among other things, provisions to share any of the natural resources of the south, fifty-fifty. Khartoum had agreed to this, but at the time, they believed the primary natural resource in the south was uranium. But at Addis Ababa, no one knew about oil, so when the oil was found, Khartoum was concerned. They had signed this agreement, and the agreement insisted that all resources be split evenly…But not with oil! To share oil with blacks? This would not do! It was terrible for them, I think, and that is when much of the hard-liners in Khartoum began thinking about canceling Addis Ababa and keeping the oil for themselves.
Lino's family lived in the Muglad Basin, a Nuer area near the border between north and south. Unhappily for them, in 1978 Chevron found a large oil field here, and Khartoum, who had authorized the exploration, renamed this area using the Arabic word for unity. Do you like that name, Julian? Unity means the coming together of people, many peoples coming together as one. Is it too obviously ironic? Extending the joke, in 1980 Khartoum tried to redraw the border between the north and south, so the oil fields would be in the north! They didn't get away with that, thank the lord. But still, something needed to be done to cut the Nuer who lived there out of the process, to separate them from the oil, and to ensure that there would be no interference in the future.
It was 1982 when the government got serious about dealing with those, like Lino's family, living above the oil. The murahaleen began to show up with automatic weapons, precisely as they later did in Marial Bai. The idea was that they would force the Nuer out and the oil fields would be protected by Baggara or private security forces, and thus would be inoculated against any kind of rebel tampering. So the horsemen came, as they always come, with their guns and with their random looting and violence. But it was mild this first time; it was a message sent to the Nuer living atop the oiclass="underline" leave the area and do not come back.