chair previously occupied by Bashir. It and the other chair, in which the people being interviewed sat, had been moved under the tree. The sun was well up now, so white it looked like a gigantic light fixture.
“The village of Aramwer,” Manute said, and spelled it, Ken typing with sparse brown eyebrows knit, lips pursed. He was a hunt-and-pecker, and his fingers were turning a tedious process into a torturous one.
On every mission Ken collected stories from the former slaves, for inclusion in the reports he sent to the WorldWide Christian Union’s board of advisers and the Human Rights Commission. He needed specifics—the names of the villages the people came from and of the places they were brought to, the names of their captors and the masters to whom they were sold, the dates when they were captured and details about the raids and how their masters treated them. An Oral History of a Crime Against Humanity, that was what Ken called it. Quinette’s job was to hold a microphone between Manute and whoever was being interviewed, so it could pick up both voices, and to keep an eye on the battery light and flip the cassettes in Ken’s tape recorder, a big old-fashioned thing gloved in vinyl.
They came on horseback, many, many of them . . . The woman called Aluet Akuoc resumed her tale. With her oblong face and narrow mouth, the upper lip curled to perpetually bare two front teeth, Aluet was not as pretty as some of the other women. She wore a shapeless striped shift, pulled down over one shoulder so her baby, a boy of perhaps two, could suckle her breast. . . .
Some wore white jelibiyas. Some in light brown uniforms. Some rode two on a horse. One to guide the horse, one to shoot. They shot the men and the old people.
Ken raised a hand, asking Manute to give him time to catch up.
“I think I could do that a lot faster,” Quinette ventured.
Ken looked at her.
“I took a typing and dictation course in high school,” she said, and thought she sounded as if she were applying for a job.
“No end to your talents, is there?”
Another of his hard-to-read remarks. Something he just tossed off, or did he think she was being presumptuous? Whatever, he got up and took over on the tape recorder. She sat in his place, settling the keyboard on her lap, tilting the screen forward a little, to keep the light that speared through the branches from bleaching the contrast. Unlike the tape recorder, the computer was brand-new, state of the art, and a long cable snaked from the DC outlet and across the scalloped circle of tree shade to a small, collapsible solar panel.
My father was running away. He didn’t go far. The Arabs were on horseback. They shot my father. They shot my husband. His name was Kuel. He tried to defend us, but he had only his shield and fighting stick. The Arabs’ bullets went through his shield. I saw him shot down in front of me. Everyone started running, but the Arabs shot anyone who ran, so I stopped running. They caught me and tied me to a long rope with twenty other women. I was separated from my little daughter. I have not seen her since.
Aluet’s was the fifth—or was it the sixth?—story Quinette had heard, and although Ken chose his subjects at random, each story seemed worse than the one before, a chapter in a narrative building toward some unbearable climax of atrocity.
They made a zariba in the forest and put us in it. It was a bad night for all the women. Three men raped me. I was then three months pregnant. That night I had a miscarriage. We had to walk seven days, seven nights to the Jur river. A woman and a child died on this journey of thirst. We rested at the Jur and then walked three days more to the river Kir. There I was given to a man called Abdullai. I worked for him and his wife, Nyangok. My job was to grind sorghum. I did this from morning till night for no pay. At first they treated me harshly. Abdullai put a branding iron to my face so I could be identified if I ran away. Nyangok beat me with a bamboo stick if I did not grind the sorghum fast enough to suit her. Sometimes she beat me for no reason and called me