wasn’t a memory but a reliving, a kind of poignant flashback. She didn’t know what to make of that kiss. Was it nothing more than the brief cleaving together of two people in desperate conditions? Two people, from places and cultures so alien to each other that they might as well come from different planets. We are literally black and white, she thought, then heard her friends back home questioning her in the crudest terms. You kissed a nigger? She was appalled to feel a flash of shame, and to realize that she was really asking that question of herself. Quinette did not like to think she was narrow-minded, but you could not grow up as she had without absorbing some of the prejudices that still prevailed in the rural Midwest. To overcome that part of herself, to repudiate it and the world from which she’d come, she determined to nurture her nascent attraction to Michael.
One night she tried to communicate with him telepathically. Those mental transmissions proving unsatisfactory, she wrote him a letter by flashlight, confessing that she wanted to see him again. It would be difficult, she wrote, and suggested he could help by sending an official request for her presence. She could show it to her boss, who was coming to Kenya soon in preparation for another redemption mission to Sudan. There was no mail service to rebel-held territory. Her intention was to have the letter hand-delivered by the next Knight Air pilot flying to the New Tourom airstrip; but on the way to the airline’s offices the next day, she had second thoughts, tore the letter up, and went to her office.
The compound where she worked, an oasis of cleanliness and order amid Loki’s squalor, was a mile and a half down an unpaved road from the one where she lived. Behind a thornbush fence, under the green umbrellas of tamarind trees, two stone bungalows faced each other across a dirt yard brightened by rosebushes and raked daily by an old Turkana gardener who looked as thin as his implement. She rode there on a one-gear bike she’d bought from Tara Whitcomb for ten dollars. The tall mzunga who dressed like an African had become a familiar sight to the shopkeepers and townspeople. “Jambo, missy!” they called to her, and she called back, “Jambo sana! Habari ya asubuhi?” pleased to hear herself speaking Swahili so fluently.
The compound housed the offices of logisticians for several Catholic dioceses in Sudan and of the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. From the latter, Ken had sublet a small room for Quinette’s use. With its wooden schoolteacher’s desk, its wood swivel chair, its dented metal file drawers, black desk fan, and straw mats covering the cement floor, it possessed the chaste, ascetic appeal of a convent cell. The attraction that Africa had awakened in her, to the spare, the austere, the basic, had deepened, and so had her abhorrence for the world she’d left behind, consumed by consumption, choking on its own excesses. The only object from that world to invade her cloister was the IBM desktop Ken had furnished. Brand-new twenty months ago, it was probably now as obsolete as the manual typewriter she used when the generator conked out.
Ken had told her that the next mission would be “all-important to the continuation of our efforts.” He was coming with an entourage worthy of a heavyweight champ: besides the usual team—Jim Prewitt and the two Canadians, Jean and Mike—there would be TV crews from the BBC, French Television, and PBS, as well as reporters and photographers from the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Guardian. The reason Ken was bringing so much media had to do with the bad press he’d suffered several weeks ago, when the United Nations Children’s Fund produced a report condemning the buying back of slaves as “absolutely intolerable” and demanded an end to it. The report said that slavery in Sudan wasn’t nearly the big deal he made it out to be, and that only a comparative handful of people were seized in traditional tribal clashes, not thousands in government-sponsored terror raids. What made Ken livid was the implication, voiced by a UNICEF bureaucrat in an interview, that the WorldWide Christian Union was exaggerating the problem as a fundraising gimmick. He fought back, and the upcoming trip was part of his battle plan. Quinette had been kept busy obtaining travel permits for the correspondents and cameramen, arranging for accommodations in Loki and for