Emmylou becomes aware of Lorna staring and grins sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I’m such a pig now. The Dinka would be mortified.”
“Don’t they eat?”
“Yes, sure, but modestly. It’s againstdheeng to show hunger or gluttony. Of course their cooking is pretty bland. It’s mostly sorghum porridge studded with dead flies. Insects ingested with food or eaten purposely are a big source of protein in Africa.”
Lorna feels her stomach heave.
“You get used to it, everything crawling with flies, and it’s interesting,” says Emmylou, picking up the yogurt container. “The Dinka have tons of milk but they don’t have yogurt or cheese. I made some of both while I was there, but it wasn’t a hit. They have butter, though. Also, they don’t care about the actual yield from their cows, only how many cows, like thinking twenty nickels is more valuable than ten quarters.”
Lorna listens without comment, recognizing nervous chatter when she hears it. A precis of Dinka husbandry and custom flows forth, including items that Lorna could have lived without knowing?such as Dinka men pressing their lips to the anus of a cow and blowing air into its gut, to fool it into thinking it was still pregnant?and then the phone rings. Lorna goes into the house and comes back a moment later with a surprised look on her face and the cordless in her hand.
“It’s for you,” she says.
Emmylou takes the instrument as if it were a live grenade. She listens more than she speaks, and that mainly monosyllables. When she closes the connection she says, “That was the Society. They want me back. Unless our friend is going to arrest me again.”
Lorna barely wonders how the Society knew what number to call. “I very much doubt that. What will you do, go back to Sudan?”
Emmylou looks up at the mango tree. “No, I don’t think so. As you probably picked up from my writing, there’s a debate going on about arming our missions, and I’m a prime example of the success of that side of the debate. That’s why they paid to have me rescued and that’s why they’re sending someone to take me away.”
“So you’ll be a military consultant to the nuns?”
She laughs. “Sisters. Yeah, right, a master of war, just like Skeeter. Sister-Colonel Garigeau. No, Nora was right and the prioress general is wrong. I’ll be happy to fold sheets or do anything they want, but all that’s over with for me.”
“But you won your war. You proved her point?I mean the prioress general.”
“God won the war. Saying it was me is like saying a bat and ball won the World Series. No, He formed me from the beginning, the memory thing, making me sneaky, sending the devil into me, my family, Orne and his war library and his weapons, meeting Nora and getting civilized, the bombing of Pibor, all those things made me into an instrument of His will and He used me and gave the Peng Dinka what he wanted them to have. He chose another people for His covenant, and that will go on. They don’t need me anymore, just like the Israelites didn’t need Moses once they got to the Promised Land.”
Lorna now experiences a flash of irritation. She has been keeping a good deal of her real feelings about Emmylou Dideroff bottled up, but now that the woman is no longer a patient, she feels them froth into new life. The infernal arrogance! The shameless manipulation! The lack of caution and respect for the lives of others! Every string of her liberal heart twanged ire and she says, “What about the oil, Emmylou?”
“There is no oil. Didn’t you read the notebook?”
“Yes I did and I saw what you were trying to do. You were totally frank throughout the whole thing, letting out all the awful things that were done to you and that you did, creating an impression of guileless honesty, all to conceal one big lie. They found oil, a lot of it, or Richardson wouldn’t have radioed out, and the Sudanese wouldn’t have launched a huge attack on you, and especially Richardson wouldn’t’ve tried to smuggle out a CD when you searched him. What was it, ablank CD pasted to his skin? You slipped up a little there, it was a detail we didn’t need to know. Sonnenborg must’ve spotted it too.”
“There was no oil. The CD had financial records on it. He was a consultant and he was interested in getting paid.”
“I bet.”
“Lorna, if there was an oil find, don’t you think I would’ve confessed it? He tortured me for days….”
“You’re a religious fanatic. Torture doesn’t work on religious fanatics. As a matter of fact, you’re the kind of paranoid fanatic who regards torture as a vindication. You would have let him shoot me.”
“No, I explained to Detective Paz. He would have only shot me, and in any case there was the angel?”
“Oh, please! And what if Sonnenborg had been able to pull us off the street to some secret basement? You would have watched the bunch of us being tortured to death and you still wouldn’t have said a word.”
The other woman looks away. “God allows people to be tortured to death all the time.”
“You’re not God!”This comes out in a yell, and Lorna is gratified to see Emmylou jump a little.
“No, of course I’m not God, but I believe he used me for a time. For a while we made one little tribe secure. We did something against the toxic, vicious misogyny of Africa, we turned them away from being stupid proud victims, and taught them that God had a special use for them, that He cared about them being righteous. There’ll be a seed, like the one He planted in Israel. When the rich world collapses?”
“Oh, thank you! I should have figured there’d be apocalyptic stuff in there too. Do you have a date figured yet?”
Emmylou looked startled for a moment. “Oh, gosh, no, I’m not talking aboutjudgment day. I’m talking about the fact that it’s unreasonable to assume that ten percent of humanity is going to control ninety-eight percent of the world’s wealth forever. I’m talking long time scales here. A thousand years ago Paris and London looked like raggedy-ass trailer parks and Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the world. There were more books and literate people in Timbuktu than there were in England. New York was an Indian village. For all we know the world will be ruled from Wibok a thousand years from now, or someplace we never heard of. It’s no crazier than telling some sheik in Basra in the year one thousand that his descendants would be kicked around by Englishmen. And look around you, Lorna, look at what’s happening to your country, the stupid apathy, the addiction, the violence, the mercenary army, the corrupt political system, the rich and the poor becoming practically different species again, the collapse of religion…”
“I thought this was the most religious country in the world.”
“I’m talking about actual religion, not these rich pharisees with their rules and their delicate purity, rotting inside painted tombs, hypocrites, and the pagans praying for washing machines; they are all utterly corrupt and God has cast them out. Can’t you see it? ‘And the kings of the earth who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her and lament for her when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing far off for the fear of her torment, saying alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy destruction come.’ ” Her voices rises, becomes a different voice as she recites this, not unlike what happened with the Oya lady at thebembe.
A little breeze rattles the croton leaves and Lorna shivers and tries to think of some logical argument against the fall of the West, and then she thinks What am I doing here, trying to make sense to a maniac? But the maniac has something else to say.
“And have you ever thought that He may be using you too? That this between us, our passing and touching, is part of a larger thing, vast and twisted? He’s brought you through all these dangers for some purpose, some great thing, even if you never learn what it is. You or your seed, a child who might be the one who saves the world. We never do know.”