“Every woman around here has legs like a gazelle.” She paused. “All right, I’ll tell you something. When I saw you getting ready for your wrestling match, covered in that ash, I thought you looked like Adam, the second after God made him. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
He brushed her plaits again. “How can I say it sounds ridiculous when you compare me to the father of the human race? You wouldn’t be Eve, would you?”
From a distance, the sounds of drums, horn and whistle blasts, and singing spared her from answering.
“That’s the dance?”
“There is dancing now almost every night. For the harvest. It is a ceremony we call sibr. Sibr is the name for sacred spirits and the ceremonies that honor them. This one is the Sibr of Fire. Would you like to see it?”
“Would you?”
“I’ve seen it a thousand times. I would rather be here, talking to you.”
“You knew that’s what I wanted to hear.”
“I’m not a fool. But it’s true all the same. If you want to hear music, I will make it for you.”
He went into one of the huts and came out with a small handmade harp with three strings. Sitting again, he strummed and sang. She couldn’t understand the words, but an undertone of sadness in the melody came through plainly enough. He finished the verse, then translated.
It is a big sibr, and they are happy
They are celebrating because today is the sibr
Of those who died long ago.
Because today is the day the spirits have said
We will celebrate the dead.
“Is it about her?” Quinette asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
“No. It’s only a song.”
“I’m sorry. That was unfair of me,” she said.
“I remember her and honor her,” he said. “We always remember and honor our dead. We pray to their spirits for aid, but that is very different from loving them.”
She wondered if he was being completely honest. No matter how much death he’d seen, how could his sorrow fade after only two years? And if he still grieved for her, was there love in his grief, breathing and beating still?
Then he kissed her forehead, and she almost wept when the carapace of his reserve broke and he clasped the back of her neck, pulling her mouth to his. She craved him more than she’d craved anyone, and yet was relieved when he drew away. There was another silence, and in that silence a distance grew, and filling the distance was the understanding that if they made love, it would change their lives in ways neither of them could foresee.
IN THE COOL of early morning she trekked to New Tourom with her personal bodyguard, a scrawny youth nicknamed Negev after the Israeli machine gun he carried, and a procession of students, children of Michael’s soldiers. Pearl and her friends were among them, wearing white uniform dresses, gifts from the Friends of the Frontline.
In town workmen were roofing the new school, weaving makuti through the beams and rafters. There she was met by a teacher, Moses, a gaunt, middle-aged man in a white shirt who would be her translator. The meks, some of whom had come from villages as far as fifty miles away, were assembled inside St. Andrew’s church. The retriever, Bashir, was with them, looking none too comfortable within Christian walls.
“Salaam aleikum,” Quinette greeted, thus exhausting her Arabic.
“Aleikum as-salaam,” Bashir replied, and sat on one of the halved logs that served as pews.
Breaking out her notebook and tape recorder, she took a seat alongside him. Some of the meks presented handwritten lists of abducted people; the others, illiterate, had committed the names to memory. Deciphering the scrawl, extracting detailed information like ages and dates of capture, was exceedingly tedious. The translations drew the business out even longer. The meks knew no English, each spoke a Nuban dialect different from Moses’s. The only common language was Arabic, which few spoke well, requiring Moses to ask them, over and over, to repeat what they’d said. By midday Quinette had completed interviews with only two of the eight men and had not had a chance to speak to Bashir.
They broke for lunch, to resume in the afternoon. Moses invited her to eat with him and his wife. She might have turned him down had she known that he was also going to invite Ulrika.
They picked her up at her clinic, a square hut in front of which stood a queue of old folks and mothers with babies. Inside, a man sat