Very quickly, the thick bush obscured the town, vanished it like a magic trick behind a curtain of green. Seldom is the disconnection so sudden. We were used to the slow fade: you can drive out of such African towns for several miles as bean plots and shabby huts fritter into wilderness. But fear kept Kitgum tightly contained, people cordoned inside the perimeter. They had abandoned their shambas and their homes and their ancestral graves, and within one rainy season, Uganda’s voracious herbage had taken repossession. It was very green and very quiet and you’d never guess how families had so recently toiled upon the land. There was no trace, not even a path.
For 30 minutes, we just drove, hypnotized by the flat, straight road, the simmering green. The horizontal banality of the landscape became hypnotic, almost reassuring. It lulled us. And then: a government roadblock, so sudden, Marco slammed on the brakes. The soldiers demanded our passports, scrutinized Marco. In the photo he looked like Carlos the Jackal; you’d never want to let him into your country.
“This is you, Marco Morals.”
I bit my lip to suppress an ill-timed snicker.
“Moral-es,” Marco corrected.
A young soldier stepped in, examining the name for himself. “Why is the E not silent?”
“It’s Spanish,” Marco explained. “The ‘-es’ in Spanish is pronounced. Frijol-es—beans. Not holes, like English.”
The soldier nodded, “I see.” Then flipped open my passport, “And you are Kay Norton.”
I nodded.
“Kay is a name? I have never heard this name. It is a letter, yes? An initial? What is your real name?”
“Kay. That’s it. K-A-Y.”
“Perhaps your passport is false.”
Marco brought forth a couple of packs of Rothmans to change the subject. “Would you lads like a smoke?” The soldiers began arguing about how to divvy up the smokes. So I handed them two six-packs of Coke. As there were five of them, an intense negotiation began. Was one Coke worth three cigarettes or two?
When you travel to such places, with such intentions as ours, you must be prepared. You will need not just water, food, insect repellent and extra fuel; but cigarettes, matches, sodas, snacks, money in small bills, phone vouchers. Mostly, you will need your wit. You will need to be funny and friendly because these boys in uniform teeter between boredom and fear, and they are heavily armed, and they want the comfort of your good humor.
At first, they refused to let us pass. They told us it was too dangerous, some other journalists had disappeared the week before. But we promised them more cigarettes on the way back, so they let us through. Marco’s contact had told us to continue on to a village 15 miles past the roadblock, to wait there for an escort.
The village was, of course, ruined and deserted. All the metal roofing, furniture, and doors had been scavenged. I had in mind the Beatrix Potter story, The Tale of Two Bad Mice. I imagined General Christmas’s soldiers, like Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, carrying off the wooden benches from the school and the plastic table cloths from the small café and prying off the roof from the shacks. I had the impression of mischief: children let loose to undo the adult world. Because they were children, these merchants of horror, some as young as nine. We journalists jokingly called them The Elves.
Marco and I wandered together as he took photographs. I doubted he would ever use any of the images, but we were fidgety, we had only our professional habits. It was hot, we didn’t know how long we’d be waiting for contact. An hour passed. Marco finally stopped photographing and fiddled with the settings on his Nikon. We sat in the shade of a charred wall and sweated. Another hour, and another. The sun down-shifted and time felt gappy—ill-fitting, itchy. I started not to care anymore. What did we want with General Christmas anyway? Whatever we printed simply fed his hunger for publicity. He had no insight, he had no grand plan, no sense of justice. He was just another asshole with a big gun.
I got up and walked off for a pee—not far, just the other side of the wall, what must have been a pen for goats. The fencing had been pilfered—probably for firewood, but the holes for the posts remained. Sockets in the earth. The word socket rolled around my head, one of those perfectly innocent words. A hole once filled with something necessary. A dark space, emptied out.
Beside one of the holes—the sockets—there was a pile of rags in the dust. I splayed the rags open with my foot. It was a woman’s dress, ripped open from the neck down the back. Possibly, she’d worn it over another dress or wrap, the way very poor people layer clothes because they only have pieces and if they put the pieces together they can make something whole.
But, when I knelt down to examine the fabric, I could see the rusty patina, thick and dried and flaking. There was no other evidence of what had happened here: no smears of blood, no grooves of desperate fingernails in the dust. The crumbling walls were deaf to the screams or sobs of the woman who had died here, the sparrows had turned away and refused to witness. Why watch when you can’t help, when you can’t understand the human purpose of knives and guns, of inflicting pain just for the hell of it?
Deliberately, I put my hand on the fabric. I needed to be sure of its reality, the congregation of molecules. It was all that remained of a woman, maybe just a girl, who’d walked barefoot every day to collect water. Her bones, her body were buried or scattered, consecrated by jackals, hyenas and maggots and scarabs. Selfishly, I felt my own fear of obliteration. Like a climber losing a foothold, I felt the need to grab on, cling tight, but what to? The air, the dust, the still, indifferent afternoon.
General Christmas’s contact never came, and as evening leaned in, Marco “Morals” and I drove back to Kitgum. We drank too much cheap Ugandan beer, we had obligatory sex in the bed that was too small, and when we were finished, he immediately fell asleep, and I could not stand the feel of his body, the smell of him, the shabby whiteness of his skin like the underbelly of a fish. But mostly, it was his gender. Somewhere inside his brain, I was sure, the place he dreamed or pocketed his masturbatory fantasies, lurked that enduring and atavistic hatred of women.