white shirts and dark slacks. The warrior had become a political figure, and politically Quinette was something of a liability; a good jet-black Nuban spouse, an asset. Former Lieutenant Colonel now Governor Goraende took part in negotiations that ended the fighting in the Nuba. Earlier the murahaleen warlord, Ibrahim Idris, had made good on his promise to extend the separate peace between him and Michael to all the Baggara Arab tribes. That unofficial armistice became the model for an official one signed by the SPLA forces in the Nuba and the Khartoum government. With the cease-fire in place and foreign troops sent to monitor it, Michael made frequent trips to the capital to discuss with his former enemies plans for making the Nuba a semiautonomous province. He continued to rely on Quinette for advice, but less so than in the past. She was the mother of his children, not a partner, and he made most of his decisions without confiding in her. Thus she discovered a truth about the world she had married into: It was essentially masculine; there was little room in it for a woman’s views.
Michael changed. The man of war had been tender and passionate, as if the brutalities of his calling had summoned up the gentleness in him; the man of politics was more remote and at times harsh and neglectful. He also got fat, the breathtaking soldier-wrestler’s body rounding out into the shape of the typical African “Big Man,” with his pot belly, walking stick, and imperious manner. He took a third wife, as young as the second. Now Quinette was forced to possess but a third of the man of whom she had wanted all. She was deferred to by her sister spouses, she tried to like them, but she often cried herself to sleep on the nights when he went to visit one or the other. The sounds of their lovemaking drove her into fits of violent jealousy. She once told Fitzhugh that if she didn’t have him to confide in and to use as a vent for what she called her “negative feelings,” she might well do something she would later regret.
Pearl and Kiki had meanwhile got married, depriving Quinette of hands to do the hard tasks that were a Nuban woman’s lot. The junior wives took up most of the burden, but even as the senior wife of the provisional governor, Quinette did her share of pounding sorghum in the hot sun, cooking over a wood fire, washing clothes in a riverbed. This in addition to teaching her English and Bible classes, labors she once had plunged into willingly and cheerfully. Now they had become a dull routine. Zeal was no longer in her voice when she gave her scripture lessons. Something was missing—the war. At times she was nostalgic for it. She missed its heightened emotions, the intensity it had brought to life, infusing each day with poignant meaning, charging ordinary moments with the electricity of the extraordinary. It had made the hardships of the African bush endurable. The dust and dirt, the ticks, mosquitoes and spiders, the dry season’s scorch, the wet season’s mire, the diseases and scarcity of water, and the absence of every comfort and amenity had been part of an enormous experience, a great and terrible ordeal. Robbed of drama, the hardships were merely hardships, wearisome, annoying, or debilitating instead of ennobling. After the cease-fire had gone into effect, it was as if a bloody but riveting film had ended and the house lights had gone on, killing the magic darkness, ushering Quinette up the aisle, past the discarded cups and crushed straws through which she’d slaked her thirst for the remarkable, and into a tedious reality. Compared with the high terrors and excitements of bombings and battles, caring for her children and doing the endless chores, no sooner completed than they had to be done again, were tame drudgery.
The armistice had another effect she hadn’t anticipated. The tree of a new society that had sprouted in New Tourom flourished so long as it was watered by the blood of war; in the drought of peace, it withered. Now that it was safe to return, the people who had found refuge in the town drifted back to their tribal homelands, drawn by a magnetism too powerful to resist. Michael’s and Quinette’s grand vision was not to be realized. Jesus still loved her, but her sense of serving a higher purpose had deserted her.