he be included; Manfred did not want to offend the rebels any more than he did the government; the proprieties of neutrality had to be observed, however, and the messenger who’d gone to the village with the invitation informed Michael to come without his uniform, pistol, or bodyguard.
He complied, arriving accompanied by only one of his troops, who was armed with nothing more deadly than a musical instrument—some kind of homemade lyre. Michael’s shaved head was bare of its usual red beret, and he’d exchanged his camouflage for a borrowed jelibiya, as white as an egret’s wing and pinched at the waist by a cord, accentuating the spread of his chest and shoulders. At thirty-five, he was still as hard-muscled as the wrestler he’d been in his youth. Ulrika and her aide locked on to him the instant he appeared, magnetized by his stature, the almost perfect oval of his face, with its deep-set eyes, its vaguely smiling lips and small ears, a gold earring in one. This whole photogenic ensemble rested on a neck that appeared to have been hewn from an athlete’s thigh, its dark musculature set off by a strand of white beads.
“I think it’s customary in the West to bring a gift when you’re asked to dinner,” he said, tilting his head at the musician. “All Nubans love to make music, but this guy is the best.”
The last phrase betrayed the time Michael had spent in the United States, taking military training at Fort Benning. He sat down at the end of the table opposite Manfred while the musician perched on the edge of the mustaba and tuned his instrument, a curious-looking thing consisting of three sticks tied into a triangle, the two longer pieces attached to a calabash with a leather membrane stretched over it to hold the strings.
“We usually play opera at dinner,” Manfred stated, pointing at a cassette player on the floor. “It was to be Verdi today, but live music is best. Thank you, colonel.”
Addressing the guerrilla commander by his rank, Fitzhugh assumed, was the doctor’s way of making up for his earlier brusqueness.
“But where is the American, Douglas?” Michael pronounced it Doug-lass. “I expected them back by now.”
“I told him not too close to the hospital, for reasons I think you can appreciate. Perhaps they took me too much at my word?”
“If they did, that guy Douglas is with, Suleiman, will see to it that it’s far enough,” Michael said. “No one can walk like him. Fifty kilometers a day he can do without a problem.”
Dinner—canned turkey, beans and tomatoes from the garden, with bitter Sudanese beer to drink in tall brown bottles—was nothing like the elegant feasts Fitzhugh had seen laid out in some aid compounds in the south. Manfred prided himself on the austerity of the fare and mocked his counterparts in Médicins sans Frontières. He and his staff ate doura for breakfast, doura and maybe some beans or groundnuts for lunch, like the Nubans, but those froggies, ha, they could not do without their croissants, their fine Bordeaux, their cheeses. Not serious people.
Mouth inches from the plate, his fork darting like a hungry hawk’s beak, Michael ate with single-minded haste, as you would expect from a guerrilla fighter who spent most of his time on the move. Ulrika looked at him, politely aghast, her first impression of the striking lieutenant colonel undergoing some revision. Finished before everyone else was halfway through, he leaned back and closed his eyes and softy joined the musician in a chantlike song that floated with the lyre’s notes above the multilingual hum of hospital shop talk. Listening to the melody, Fitzhugh noticed again a quality he’d observed in Michael yesterday, a quality defined as much by the absence as by the presence of something. He lacked the harshness and arrogance seen in many SPLA officers: those swaggering Dinka and Nuer warlords, reared to lives of violence, taught from childhood that they are the lords of all men, trained to the courage that puts fear of death to flight and also breeds the ferocity to inflict death, if not with eagerness then without reluctance. Michael had to be as brave—he’d been wounded three times—and it had been obvious on the march from the airstrip that he had a gift for command; yet his martial virtues seemed grafted onto an essentially peaceable nature. There was a softness in his expression and voice and manner entirely out of phase with the personal history he’d disclosed to