THE PROMISE

Chapter 2: The first letter came eighteen days after Samuel left. I know the number because I counted every day. At first I marked them on my bedroom wall with a piece of charcoal, one line for each morning. My mother found the wall and did not say a word. She just handed me a wet cloth and a look. After that I counted in my head. There was no real post office in Munuki. Letters came with a man called Mzee Bakhit, who drove an old minibus between Juba and the border and kept envelopes in a plastic bag under his seat. That Wednesday afternoon I was sweeping the compound when he stopped at our corner and shouted through the window. "Achol Mading! A message from the engineer!" Half the street laughed. I did not care. I dropped the broom and ran. I did not open it at the stall, where my mother could see me. I carried it down to the river and sat on the big root of the mango tree, the same place where Samuel had put the ring on my finger. Then I opened it. His handwriting was neat and slanted. The paper smelled of diesel and dust. Dearest Achol, I am writing from a small restaurant in Nimule that sells only beans and tea. The convoy stopped here for the night. There were three checkpoints and at one of them the soldiers made us climb down and open our bags. My uncle's name helped me. I try not to think about the people who do not have an uncle. I want to tell you something funny. A man on our truck brought a live chicken, and at the second checkpoint it escaped and ran between the soldiers' legs. Everybody laughed, even the soldiers. For one minute I forgot I was leaving everything I love. I have not forgotten you for one hour since Tuesday. Write to me. Tell me about the tea stall and your mother's temper and the old men's gossip. Your words will be my road home. I keep my promises. All three. Your Samuel I read it four times. Then I pressed it against my chest and cried, but it was the good kind of crying. A fisherman passed in his canoe and looked at me strangely. I laughed at him, and he just shook his head and kept paddling. That night I wrote back. It took three hours and eleven sheets of paper. I told him about the tea stall, my mother's temper, and the old men. I told him the mango tree was dropping fruit and I had saved the sweetest one for him, but it had gone soft before I finished writing. I told him I wore the ring every day and my mother pretended not to see it. At the end I wrote one line: I am keeping my promise. All three. The second letter came three weeks later, from Kampala. He wrote about the wide roads full of motorcycles, the rain that fell every afternoon like a visitor who is always on time, and the old red university buildings covered in vines. His cousin Moses had met him at the bus station and cried when he saw how thin he was. In his first lecture, the hall was so big that his own voice sounded like a stranger's when he asked a question. Achol, there is a professor here who builds bridges in Uganda and Congo. He has a whole wall of photographs. I stood in front of it for one hour. I thought, one day my picture will be there, and next to it will be your name. I laughed out loud. My mother looked up from her mending. "What is funny?" "Nothing, Mama." "A girl does not laugh like that over nothing." "He says there is a professor who builds bridges." "Ah." She went back to her sewing. After a while she said, without looking up, "He writes well, that boy. A man who writes well usually thinks well." From my mother, that was the same as a wedding blessing. For two months the letters came like the rains. I started building my days around them. On the days Mzee Bakhit was due, I swept the compound twice and wore my yellow dress even though the sleeves had become short. The old men at the tea stall teased me. "Here comes the engineer's wife!" they said every time I brought their cups. I stopped blushing and started smiling. It felt good to be a girl waiting for a letter instead of a girl waiting for nothing. I studied harder than I ever had. I did not want anyone to say Samuel had left behind a silly girl. When the national exams came, I sat in the hot, crowded hall with the ring hidden under my sleeve and wrote until my hand hurt. Afterward I wrote to him: I think I did well. I think I will go to Wau. I think we are going to be fine. I believed it with my whole heart. In a country like ours, that is a dangerous thing to believe. The trouble started on a night in December. I was asleep when I heard the first sound, far away, like a branch breaking. I thought it was a firecracker. Then there was another one, and another, and then a long, rattling burst that I had only heard about in stories and in my mother's silences. Mama Rose was at my door before I was fully awake, a blanket around her shoulders. "Get up, Achol. Get on the floor. Away from the window." We spent the night on the floor of the inner room with my little brother Deng pressed between us, shaking like a small bird. The sound came and went. Sometimes it stopped for so long I thought it was finished, and then it started again. My mother prayed in a whisper, one prayer after another. Once I heard her say Samuel's name, and my heart nearly stopped. In the morning the city was different. The streets were empty. Smoke rose from somewhere near the center. The market was closed, and the church too. The soldiers on our corner, who used to stand around looking bored, now held their rifles tight and watched everybody. Some of our neighbors packed bundles and left at first light for villages where they had relatives. Others stayed, because there was nowhere to go. The radio spoke carefully, in frightened voices. The telephone lines were dead. The roads were closed. No bus was moving, so no letter could move either. "Mama," I said on the second day, "Samuel is in Kampala. He is safe." "Yes," she said, staring at the wall. "He is safe." "Then why are you crying?" She turned to me, and I understood she was not crying for him. She was crying for me. She was thinking about her own long waiting years, and how history likes to repeat itself on the people least able to carry it. The fighting lasted only days, but what it left behind lasted much longer. When the streets opened again, many people were gone. Neighbors, shopkeepers, boys I had gone to school with. There were new holes in the walls of buildings I had known all my life. The old men at the tea stall stopped joking and spoke in low voices about who had left and who had not come back. Mzee Bakhit's minibus did not return. I waited one week, then two. Every morning I went to the bus park and stood at the gate asking everyone the same thing. "Do you know Mzee Bakhit? Do you have a letter for Achol Mading?" Some people ignored me. Some looked at me with pity. A woman selling bananas touched my arm and said gently, "Child, the road north is closed. Nothing is passing." "For how long?" "Who can say?" I went back to the mango tree and sat there. I did not cry, because I was too frightened to cry. I only held the ring and whispered, "Come on, Samuel. Write to me. Please." The last letter came in the first week of the new year. It was not Mzee Bakhit who brought it. It was a thin stranger with a cracked voice and a dusty bag, who had walked the last part of the road on foot because no vehicle would take him. He stood at our gate and asked for the family of Mama Rose. When my mother came out, he took a crumpled envelope from inside his shirt. "A young man gave me this at the border," he said. "He paid me to bring it. He said it was very important." My mother did not reach for it. She looked at me, and I understood she was letting me take it first. I held out my hand. The envelope was soft and stained. My name was on the front in his slanted handwriting, and under it, in smaller letters: Please let this reach her. I did not go to the river this time. I opened it right there at the gate, standing in the dust, my mother's hand on my shoulder. Achol, I have heard what is happening in Juba. Every radio in Kampala is talking about it. I have tried to call, but nothing goes through. I have asked three different people to carry word to you. I do not know if any of it will reach you. I am coming back. I have spoken to my cousin. I will find a way to cross the border and travel south, whatever it costs. I cannot sit in a lecture hall while you are in danger. If this letter reaches you before I do, stay with your mother. Do not go out. Do not take risks. Wait for me. I said I would write every month and I will. I said I would come back and I will. Whatever happens, remember the third promise. I will still be the man who sat beside you on the roots. Your Samuel The date at the top was the day after the fighting began. I read it twice. Then I folded it carefully and looked at the thin man who had carried it so far. "Is he coming? Did he say anything else? Did you see him cross?" He shook his head slowly. "I only met him at the border post, sister. He gave me the letter and a little money, and then he went back toward the buses. He was still arguing with the officers when I left." "Arguing about what?" "They were not letting people cross." He lowered his eyes. "I am sorry. That is all I know." My mother gave him all the money she had in her wrapper, plus food and water. I watched him walk away down the road, small and bent, until the heat swallowed him. And I understood, the way you feel the first cold of a long season, that I might never find out what happened at that border. Samuel did not come. I waited one week, then another. I waited through January, when the city slowly began to breathe again. I waited through February, when a few buses started to run and I met every single one of them at the bus park. I waited through March, when the rains came early and turned the roads into rivers of red mud. No second letter came. No third. His aunt had heard nothing. His cousin Moses might as well have been living on the moon. There was not even a rumor to chew on. Only silence. It is a strange thing to be loved by silence. At first it feels like a closed door. Then it feels like a wall. After a while it feels like a person who sits at your table and sleeps in your room. To be continue .