Holy Spirit, however, seemed not to be in a revivalist mood as far as she was concerned, so she got her travel Bible from her rucksack and sat on the bed, holding the book under the lamp, and paged through it aimlessly, hoping to come upon some uplifting passage. Finding none, she lay down for a moment . . .
A knock at the door and the sound of someone calling her name woke her up. At first she thought she was dreaming, the voice and the rapping sounded so far away; but then she was sitting up and looking at her watch. Ten-thirty. She’d been asleep for maybe fifteen minutes, though it felt like hours. By the time her head cleared, Michael had given up and was walking away—she could hear his boots crunching on the gravel pathway. She called to him through the window.
“Miss Hardin? The nurse told me you were here. I woke you up?”
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. She knew, instinctively knew, the reason for this visit and was thrilled he’d come to her.
“Wait a second. I’m not dressed,” she said, and quickly put on her trousers and shirt and fluffed her hair. She was about to tell him to come in when she noticed that she’d left her bra and panties on the peg. That wouldn’t look right, she thought, and stuffed them into her rucksack. Then she opened the door.
He had to duck as he entered; it was a low doorway—she herself had cleared it by only a couple of inches. He took off his beret and folded it under an epaulet and asked if he could sit down. She nodded, and he fell into the chair, looking stricken and exhausted. She placed the desk chair in front of him and sat down.
“I am so sorry,” she said, covering his hand in her two. “I prayed for him, I did, but—”
“I didn’t come here for the kind words.” There was an equal measure of aggression and weariness in his tone. “Bala was a soldier and he died like one, and that’s the end of it.”
“You came because you needed to talk to somebody. And don’t tell me I’ve got that wrong, because I know and I know because I lost someone close to me when I was fourteen. My dad. And afterward, after it finally sank into my teenage head that he was gone and never coming back, all I wanted to do was talk to people. To just about anyone who’d listen.”
“But you are wrong,” he said.
She released his hand and sat back, noticing how the lamplight lent a bronze cast to the cicatrix on his forehead.
In an undertone, his lips barely moving, he said, “You have no idea how sick I am of all this. I didn’t come here to talk, but to listen to you talk. I want you to take me out of here for a little while. Talk to me about the Iowa state.”
“Iowa?” she asked with a nervous laugh.
“Yes. I’ve heard Garang speak about his days at university there. He liked it very much. I wish to hear about it from you.”
“There’s not much I can say. I mean, it’s kind of boring.”
“Boring is good. The more boring the better. Because, as you’ve seen this day, Sudan can be so very interesting.”
He cocked his chin as he stared at her, as if defying her to bore him, an unusual challenge that she did her best to meet, telling him that Iowa was very white, racially speaking, and very flat from the Mississippi in the east to the Missouri in the west, flat as a table except near the rivers, where it got hilly but not much, and owing to this flatness and the thick, rich, black soil, it was mostly farmland, corn and soybean fields and cow pastures, and nothing much ever happened there except during presidential election years, when candidates from all over descended on the state, vying for its citizens’ votes because it was a big deal to win the state of Iowa, even though it didn’t have a lot of people, like California or New York—fat people, she added, and described how heavy and ponderous everyone had looked to her when she’d returned home from her first visit to Sudan, why, your average Iowan could shed twenty pounds and give it to your average African and the Iowan would still be overweight and the African skinny, and was that boring enough for