Tongues of Fire Read online

  Rehv wore a jubba too. He hoped that people would think they were traders. Under their seats were large bundles wrapped in cloth; the sort of bundles that traders carried from town to town, filled with cheap European fabrics, jewelry made from elephant tusks or plastic that looked the same, ebony phallic gods, stone fertility goddesses. But there was none of that in their bundles—just clothing, food, and water. It did not seem to matter. No one took any notice of them.

  Next to Rehv sat an old man in a tattered robe. He was sleeping with his toothless head resting on the top slat of the backrest and his feet on a lamb that lay on the floor. Its legs were bound together by a piece of rope. The man had tribal markings on his forehead—two vertical scars that intersected his wrinkles in a way that reminded Rehv of a framework for X’s and O’s.

  Nothing moved except the sun, which rose higher and higher in the sky. The train was painted white, and most of the windows were overhung with wooden eaves, but everyone’s face was soon coated with a wet shine. “What can they be waiting for?” Rehv said. He felt nervous and annoyed, as though he had just had a very poor haircut.

  “The engineer,” Paul said.

  A beggar came slowly along the track, sticking his hand into all the windows. So much of the hand had been eaten away that giving him a coin meant placing it carefully on the palm. Paul did. “Thank you, master,” the beggar said in Arabic. The definition was gone from his face. He limped away on the stubs he had for feet.

  Later a white man appeared, striding briskly across the platform. He wore sunglasses and a short-sleeved white shirt, and had a folded copy of the Daily Telegraph in his back pocket. Soon after that the train began to move. The man beside Rehv lurched forward and vomited on the lamb. Rehv squeezed closer to Paul. The lamb made a noise and wriggled on the floor. The train stopped.

  A few hours went by. A man on a small skinny horse approached the train. His heavy wife walked behind. She wore a veil. The man dismounted and boosted her onto the roof. He handed her a motor oil can filled with dried salted fish, and a baby. The train started again.

  It rolled slowly south, through fields of cotton. To the east Rehv could see the Blue Nile. It was brown. Later the train ran beside the river, and Rehv saw people camped along it in tents or crude shelters made of rushes and bits of straw matting. Some of them had a few sheep or a goat or a cow. They all had children with bloated bellies and runny eyes. Once he saw a mud hut flying the flag of the United Nations. A long line of people waited outside in the sun, each holding an empty bowl. The train stopped and started. People got on and off. The man with the scarred forehead slept. Rehv slept too. They rolled through cotton.

  When Paul nudged him awake it was almost dark. They were on a bridge, moving west. “The White Nile,” Paul said, pointing below. In the fading light it too looked brown. There were more people camped along its banks; their fires glowed like street-lamps as far as Rehv could see.

  They drank water and ate sardines and oranges. Paul reached into the long pocket inside his jubba and pulled out a few balls of newspaper filled with shelled peanuts.

  “Where did you get those?” Rehv asked.

  “At one of the stops. They’re a piaster apiece.”

  “It’s dangerous to eat anything you can’t peel or shell yourself.”

  “That won’t be very realistic, will it?” the boy said quietly. They ate the peanuts.

  The night air was no cooler, but it grew drier and much dustier the farther west they went. The dust stung their eyes and filled their pores. Now and then Rehv wiped his face with his sleeve. It made his sleeve dirty. After a while he stopped.

  “Try to get some sleep,” he said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  The passengers sitting in the aisle lay down. Those who had seats leaned forward or backward or against the people beside them. Rehv had no idea what the ones on top of the train did during the night. He tried leaning forward, backward, sideways; none of it helped his back. A man snored. A woman whispered. A baby cried. Rehv slept.

  In the morning when Rehv awoke, most of the seats were taken by soldiers, dark men in khaki uniforms. Their rifles lay in the aisle. The old man with the lamb was gone. In his place slept a soldier with sweat stains on his shirt, spreading from his armpits to his waist. Outside people were going by, some on horseback or oxen, a few on camels, most on foot. They carried their belongings in straw baskets or goatskin bags or calabashes balanced on their heads. They were all moving the other way, east, toward the river, whether because of the drought or the fighting, Rehv didn’t know. “It’s been like that all night,” Paul said. It went on like that all day. Ribs. Of horses. Camels. Men. And babies hanging onto shriveled breasts. Sometimes the train stopped, but the people outside did not ask for food or water. They just kept walking. The soldiers were very quiet.

  Somewhere behind him Rehv heard a man say in English, “How do you explain the small canines, then? Or do you dispute that Ramapithecus had small canines?” He turned and saw two white men sitting a few rows away. One of them reminded him of an anthropology professor he had known long ago. That one said: “I don’t dispute it. It’s irrelevant. Molecularly speaking it had to happen much later, that’s all.” They both had well-bred English accents. They were arguing about when man had separated from the apes. They argued about it for an hour or two. All they had to do was to look at what was going on outside to see that it had not happened yet, Rehv thought.

  The train crossed Kordofan, stopping at Umm Ruwaba and Er Rahad, Gaibat and Abu Zabad, and several other places where there was no sign of any habitation. But even at these a few people got off the train and started walking across the red brown plain toward the horizon. They did not seem to notice the refugees moving slowly toward the east.

  The train went by villages where the huts were round with conical roofs of straw, and villages where they were square with V-shaped roofs. It passed huts huddled in the shade of feathery flat-topped acacia trees, and unprotected huts that the sun had bleached the color of driftwood. Rehv saw dark veiled women carrying bundles of sticks on their backs, and darker bare-breasted women pounding millet with wooden pestles, while sweat dripped off their nipples into the mortars.

  His back hurt. He wanted to sleep. He tried different positions. None of them worked. The boy looked out the window. “You should get some sleep,” Rehv said to him.

  Paul turned to him. His hair and eyebrows were covered with dust the color of paprika. The rims of his eyes were red. He didn’t seem to mind. “Hang on,” Paul said. “It won’t be much longer.”

  Just before nightfall the train reached Babanusa on the frontier of Darfur, where the track branched in two. Most of the passengers got out, including the soldiers and the two Englishmen. The Englishmen climbed into a Landrover with the words University of London on the door and drove away. The soldiers prostrated themselves in the dust by the rails, prayed, and then boarded another train that soon rolled away on the track leading west.

  Rehv and the boy were left alone in the empty car. They stood up. They walked around. Then people came in. They carried goats on their backs and chickens in their hands; they had bottles filled with liquid butter, and lumps of millet cooked with pepper sauce wrapped in greasy scraps of paper. Rehv and Paul went back to their seats. Soon all the places were taken. And the aisle was filled. And finally the roof. The white man with the Daily Telegraph in his back pocket came out of the station house and strode toward the front of the train. He had a bottle of beer in his hand. One of the passengers made a clicking sound of disapproval with his tongue, either for safety or religious reasons. With a little jerk the train moved forward.

  It began to pick up speed. After a few minutes it was going as fast as it had at any time during the past two days. Rehv had assumed that was the maximum speed, but it was not. The train went faster, much faster. A hot wind blew through the car, carrying invisible clouds of dust. There was a cry from the roof and a washtub sailed by the window. Round dark forms—th
ey might have been melons—fell out of it and bounced into the darkness. People began to vomit. There was another cry from the roof. The train sped on to the next station.

  A weak yellow light bulb hung over the sign on the platform. Muglad it said in Arabic. “Muglad,” Paul said. Rehv felt a tightening in his chest. No one got off the train except the man with the Daily Telegraph in his back pocket. On the platform he met another white man coming out of the station. They talked for a few minutes. Some of the passengers watched them. The rest slept. The man with the Daily Telegraph said something that made the other man laugh and say, “That’s a good one.” The first man went inside the station. The second man walked toward the front of the train. In a few minutes it began rolling again at its normal rate. Rehv peered out the window, trying to see the town. But the only light was the light on the platform. Muglad slid by in the darkness.

  The wheels beat a complicated rhythm on the rails. It put everyone to sleep except Rehv and the boy. They stared out the window, into the night. At first they could see nothing, but later the moon rose, fat and yellow, on the horizon. It showed them a dark plain and sometimes the shadows of stunted trees. After a long time Paul suddenly stiffened and whispered, “There.” Rehv saw a narrow stream of rocks, like motionless waves, flowing away to the southwest. Wadi el Ghalla. The wheels beat their rhythm into an echo chamber as the train rolled over a bridge.

  Paul turned to him. “When?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Soon.” The train was moving slowly, but he did not want to jump, not with his back the way it was. He waited, hunched forward on the seat, listening for the easing in the rhythm that would mean the train was about to make another one of its stops in the emptiness. Several times he thought he heard it; then he did. The rhythm slowed, broke into its components: wheels rattling on steel, scraping couplings, creaking of carriages. The spaces between the sounds grew longer, like a music box at the end of its song. A few passengers stirred, muttered, went back to sleep. Everything was quiet. Rehv nodded. They picked up the bundles that lay at their feet, climbed through the window, and lowered themselves to the ground.

  They walked west. The night was hot and dry and sucked the moisture out of them. Rehv felt tired and dirty. He wanted a shower and soft cool sheets. He looked at the boy, silent beside him, walking away from showers and soft cool sheets, and tried not to think about it.

  The moon rose higher in the sky. Rehv searched the shadows for reflections of its light in narrow yellow eyes—vipers, hyenas, lions. They were all out there. The books said so. “It can’t be much farther,” he told the boy.

  “Let’s speak English, Dad. No one’s going to hear.”

  “All right.”

  But what would he say? He felt things stirring inside him, trying to push themselves out into the air. He knew if he let them it would end with turning around, going back to Muglad, back along the railway line, back. To somewhere. But after Lac du Loup, after the fingerprinting, he told himself, there was no choice. While he thought about that, the things stopped pressing inside him. That was how he fooled them. It worked for now.

  So they talked about maps and water and cattle brands and drum calls until they came again to the wadi. It had become much narrower, no more than a trickle of small stones almost level with the plain. They followed it. The yellow moon followed them.

  The wadi shrank and shrank and finally vanished in a little pile of pebbles. Rehv turned north. “No,” Paul said. “This way.” And led him south. They walked through the night. It was very quiet. Their sandals padded softly on the dust that lay over the hard clay. Sometimes their jubbas caught on a thorny bush, or they stumbled on a rock. Once they surprised a vulture. It rose heavily into the air, and circled over the bones and ragged flesh of a small cow until they had gone away. “We’re getting close,” Paul said.

  They entered a shallow depression and began walking across it. In the center they came to a small pool of water, not much bigger than a wading pool. Paul bent down, cupped some water in his palm and tasted it. “Salty.”

  “How much farther do you think it is?” Rehv asked.

  “We’re there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Paul gestured around them. “On the map this is all water. The whole depression should be filled.”

  On the far side two baobab trees stood in the moonlight, one much bigger than the other. “You’re right,” Rehv said. They walked up out of the depression and stopped beneath the trees. “We’re here.”

  “Yes.”

  They sat down. Rehv took out his canteen and passed it to the boy. He drank. Rehv drank. They ate some more sardines. “We’d better get some sleep,” Rehv said.

  The boy lay down on his back with his head resting on his bundle of clothing. Rehv lay beside him. Above, the moon rose slowly to the top of the sky. Rehv put his arm around the boy. Then his other arm. The man in the moon looked like Peter Lorre. “He looks like Peter Lorre,” Rehv said softly.

  “Who’s he?”

  “A movie actor.” Rehv remembered how his little girl had liked watching Peter Lorre in scary movies late at night. Paul hadn’t had a chance to see many movies. He tried to imagine the boy at home with them in Jerusalem, watching late-night television, and couldn’t. But then he thought of him sitting by the campfire singing, “My paddle’s clean and bright.” Paul rolled over onto his side and out of Rehv’s arms.

  The moon slipped down the far side of the sky. Neither of them slept. After a while the blackness began to turn navy blue in the east. “You should get going,” Paul said.

  “Not yet.”

  But it was time. After a few minutes Rehv stood up. The boy stood up too. “It’s getting light,” Rehv said.

  “I know.”

  “Walk with me a little.”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other for a moment. Then Rehv embraced the boy and hugged him close. He felt the boy’s arms squeezing him hard. He kissed the top of his curly head.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be at the bridge?”

  “A week from tonight. Where the tracks cross the wadi. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. We’ll go back.”

  “Back?”

  “Somewhere.”

  Rehv held onto the boy. Navy blue advanced across the sky. Rehv became aware that the boy had let his hands drop to his sides. “It’s time,” Rehv said. The boy nodded. Rehv kissed his curly head again and let him go. Two kisses. When was the last one before those? “Until next week,” Rehv said. He turned and started walking away, toward Muglad. He knew he didn’t want to go to Muglad. He wanted to go to the cabin on Lac du Loup. But what about the little white house on Mount Carmel? He reached the edge of the depression.

  “Dad?”

  He stopped. He did not want to turn around. “What?” he called.

  “What if you can’t make it next week? Or if I can’t?”

  He faced the boy. “Then we both try the next night.”

  “And what if you’re not there the next night?”

  “I will be.”

  “But if you’re not?”

  “Then it’s the next and the next and the next. And so on. But don’t worry. I’ll be there. The first night. Okay?” He thought the boy nodded, but he was too far away and it was still too dark to be sure. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Rehv turned and walked down into the depression. “My paddle’s clean and bright, flashing like silver.” The song started in his head, and it wouldn’t stop. It was loud and getting louder. “My paddle’s clean and bright, flashing like silver.” He tried to think of something else, or another song, but no other song came. And somewhere behind the music he heard the screaming start. He kept walking.

  Paul went to the edge of the depression and watched his father moving away, past the shallow pool and up the other side. He disappeared in the gold fringe that had begun to shine on the eastern edge of the navy blue.

  P
aul walked back to the baobab trees and lay down. He felt like crying. He let himself cry. Later he slept.

  When he awoke, it was the middle of the day and very hot. He was thirsty. He drank from the canteen. He ate a couple of oranges. Then he took off his sandals, his jubba, and his underwear and went down to the shallow pool. He sat in the warm water and washed the dust from his body. He walked back toward the trees. The sun dried him before he got there.

  He put on a clean white jubba and sat in the shade and waited.

  Soon he saw a dust cloud in the west. It was red brown and hung low in the air. He sat beneath the big baobab tree and watched it coming closer. After a while he could distinguish little figures beneath the cloud, two-legged ones and four-legged ones. They came closer. Men and women. Children. Oxen. A few horses. Cows. Hundreds of them. Paul stood up.

  They moved slowly toward him across the plain. Tired, gaunt animals and tired, gaunt men. No one saw Paul. They were interested only in water. They came to the depression. The cows went down to the shallow pool. The men who had horses dismounted. The horses went down to the pool. The women removed the gourds, straw mats, baskets, and iron pots from the backs of the oxen and let them go down too. The men and women stood on the edge of the depression. No one spoke.

  After a while they noticed Paul standing by the big tree. They walked around the depression and came near him. They stopped a few yards away. He saw how thin they were, how worn, how dusty; some were dressed in rags, almost naked. But their skin was the same color as his. He looked more like them than like his father.

  They watched him the way he had always known they would. He pointed to a spot on the ground between the two trees and said in Arabic: “Dig here. There is water. But you have to dig deep.”

  They watched him. An old man, brown and wrinkled, stepped forward and crossed the space between them. He looked Paul in the eye. Paul looked back in his. The old man fell to his knees and kissed the hem of Paul’s robe.

  “The Mahdi,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX