What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers Page B

not blind to this.
    And then one day they were all gone. Marial Bai awoke one morning and the soldiers charged with protecting the village from raids and keeping the peace were no more. Their belongings were gone, their trucks, any and all trace of them. They left the south of Sudan for the north, and joining them were many of Marial Bai’s more prosperous families. The men who worked for the government in whatever capacity—as judges, clerks, tax collectors—took their families and went to Khartoum. Any family with means left for what they considered safer places, north or east or south. Marial Bai, and much of the region of Bahr al-Ghazal, was no longer safe.
    The day the troops disappeared, Moses and I went to the soldiers’ barracks, crawling under their beds, looking for money or souvenirs, anything they might have left in haste. Moses found a broken pocket-knife and kept it. I found a belt without a buckle. The building still smelled of men, of tobacco and sweat.
    The few Arab traders who remained in the market soon packed up their shops and left. In a week, the mosque was closed, and three days later, it burned to the ground. There was no investigation. With the soldiers gone, the rebel presence in Marial Bai increased for a time, and soon the rebels had a new name for themselves: the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
    But after a few weeks, the rebels were gone. They weren’t in Marial Bai to protect or patrol. They came when passing through, to recruit, to take what they needed from my father’s shop. The rebels were not there when the people of Marial Bai reaped what they had sown.

 

    VII.

    Michael’s phone is ringing again.
    The boy slowly rouses himself and jogs over to the kitchen to answer it. I can’t hear much of the conversation, but I do hear him say, “You said ten,” followed by a series of similar protestations.
    The call is over in less than a minute and now I must try again to reason with the boy. Perhaps he is comfortable enough with me now, with my unmoving presence, that he will not fear my voice. And it’s evident that he is upset with his accomplices. Perhaps I can forge an alliance, for I still harbor hope that he’ll see that he and I are more alike than are he and those who have placed him here.
    “Young man,” I say.
    He is standing between the kitchen and the living room; he had been deciding whether to return to the couch to sleep, or to turn the TV on again. I have his attention for a moment. He looks at me briefly and then away.
    “I don’t want to scare you. I know this is not your idea to be here with me.”
    He looks at the phone book now, but it seems that because it’s resting against my temple, to retrieve it he would have to get too close to me. He walks past me and disappears down the hall, headed for the bedrooms. My throat goes dry with the thought that he very well might return with the unabridged dictionary after all.
    “Young man!” I say, projecting my voice down the hall. “Please don’t drop anything on me! I will be quiet if that’s what you want.”
    Now he is above me, and for the first time, he is looking into my eyes. He is holding my geometry textbook in one hand and a towel in the other. I’m not immediately sure which poses the greater threat. The towel—would he suffocate me?
    “Do you want me to be quiet? I will stay quiet if you’ll stop dropping things on me.”
    He nods to me, then takes his foot and gently steps on my mouth, pushing the tape back into place. To have this boy pushing my mouth closed with his foot—it is too much to accept.
    He disappears from my view but is not finished. When he returns, he begins a construction project in my living room.
    He first pushes the coffee table closer to the entertainment center, reducing the space between the three objects: me, the table, and the shelving. Now he drags a chair from the kitchen. He places this near my head. From the couch he brings one of the three large cushions that sit