Andrew Britton: The Exile

Lily turned onto her stomach, covered her head with her pillow, and tried to drown out the thoughts buzzing through her mind. Literally buzzing like a hornet’s nest. There was so much to worry about. As always, the chronic lack of food and supplies, and now the troubling height and weight data from the feeding center. Earlier that evening she had learned that Faisel, a one-year-old boy from the nearby village of Sirba, was still losing weight despite extra rations of milk and close personal attention from the camp’s medical staff. Given his current rate of decline, Lily feared he would not see the end of the week, and she still didn’t know how she would explain his death to his parents. Two weeks earlier they’d lost his older sister, their only daughter, to dysentery. How were they supposed to understand it? What word s of comfort would she find? Did a vocabulary even exist that could mitigate the sort of pain and grief she believed was in store for them?

These were the types of thoughts she could not block out no matter how hard she tried. And meanwhile the buzzing in her ears wouldn’t stop, making her back so stiff, it ached from tension…keeping her awake, wide awake, on her narrow, springy cot inside the darkened tent.

And then, suddenly, she realized that the buzzing wasn’t some kind of weird internal manifestation of nerves and fatigue, after all. When the awareness hit her, she instinctively rejected it, as the alternative just wasn’t possible. The camps were supposed to be safe ground. She had been told as much the day she arrived. But the noise didn’t fade. Instead, it grew steadily louder.

Struggling to suppress her rising unease, Lily climbed out of her sleeping bag, pulled on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and a thick woolen sweater, and threw back the flaps of her tent. Easing her way through the narrow opening, she got to her feet and looked around in disbelief. She immediately realized that her earlier dread was completely justified. Dozens of refugees were struggling out of their makeshift shelters, and they were all staring upward, eyes wide with fear.

She tracked her own gaze in the direction they were looking and saw the plane at once, a black, slow-moving fleck against the starlit sky. For a second, she allowed herself to believe it was just a transport plane-a small Cessna ferrying aid workers back to Abeche, perhaps. Or a medical-supply flight making the daily run to Al-Geneina. Even as she considered these possibilities, though, she could hear-and sense-the panic rising around her.

The refugees had no room in their psyches for denial. It had been scoured from their inner landscapes by hard experience, leaving them with a keen, stark acceptance of reality. They knew what kind of plane this was. More to the point, they knew what was coming, and they had reacted with incredible speed. Hundreds were pouring out of their makeshift shelters, and some were already running toward the rear of the camp, their children and a few meager possessions caught up in their arms.

Frozen with dread and horror, Lily saw Beckett, the camp’s doctor, stumble out of the building, a backpack slung over his right shoulder. As he looked up at the plane circling overhead, he did a slow, strange kind of pirouette, his mouth agape. Then his eyes came back to ground level, and he looked around wildly. For a second Lily didn’t understand what he was doing. Then, as she looked on in sheer disbelief, he took off running, sprinting ahead of the steady stream of people running for the back side of the camp. The two nurses were just a few steps behind him.

“Hey!” she screamed, fighting to be heard over the general panic. “Hey, where are you going?”

She chased after the three fleeing aid workers, but there were too many people moving in the same direction, and she couldn’t break through the crowd. The screams were deafening: parents shouting for their children to hurry, children howling for parents they had lost in the crowd, and Lily’s own cries of outrage, all directed at the fleeing Americans. “Where are you going?” she shouted again. “Where are you…What are you doing? Come back!”

But she was wasting her breath-they had already moved out of earshot. Lily swore in an undertone, then turned and started toward the hospital, dodging the few people in her way. No one was moving in this direction. She could not believe what she had just seen. Beckett and the two nurses had abandoned their patients without a moment’s hesitation. The full measure of their cowardice was staggering, but the worst part was that they knew the consequences of their actions. By running, they were leaving the refugees behind to be slaughtered.

The first bomb hit when she was 10 feet from the building’s entrance. Even though she had been waiting for it, the impact still came as a shock and nearly threw her off her feet. A cloud of flames erupted somewhere off to her left, and she turned in time to see a pair of bodies hurled into the air. The sound came a split second later, a hollow boom that reverberated in her chest, and she heard the screams rise into the smoke-filled air as she sprinted the last few feet, flinging herself through the open door and into the hospital.

Once inside, she steadied herself and looked around desperately, trying to impose a measure of sense on the chaotic scene. Some of the patients had tried to flee, but most did not have the strength. The moment they’d climbed out of bed, they had collapsed to the floor…and that was where they were lying now. A number of them were completely motionless, while others were writhing around and crying out for help.

She went to the nearest, an elderly Fur man trying to claw his way free of the mosquito netting wrapped round his body. She quickly pulled it away from his flailing limbs, murmuring words of reassurance the whole time. Then she lifted him off the floor, shocked as always by how easy it was. All skin and bones, he couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds.

Gently getting him onto the empty bed, Lily moved on to the next person. As she attended to each patient, she was all too aware of the terrible, earsplitting sounds outside-the crump of the falling bombs was loud enough to cover the screams of the wounded, but she could still hear their cries in the short, ominous gaps between concussive blasts. And despite the horror of the aerial assault, she knew that the worst was yet to come. When the bombs stopped falling, the Janjaweed would move in, burning everything in their path, killing anyone left alive.

Part of her knew that her efforts were futile-that everything she was doing to help these people would be wasted in the end. But even as these thoughts entered her mind, she kept working steadily. She didn’t know for how long. Five minutes, ten, time was a measureless thing for her, distilled to a charged, frantic now.

Lost as she was in what she was doing, it took Lily a while to realize that something had changed. She stopped and looked up, listening hard. A quiet, quavering voice to her left startled her back to an awareness of her situation, and she turned to the person who’d spoken the words.

Limya Sanoasi was sitting upright in her bed, her small hands folded in her lap. Her broken left leg, one of the many injuries she’d sustained in the recent raid on her village, was hidden beneath a threadbare blanket. The blanket was still smooth and tucked in at the corners. Lily was struck by the fact that she hadn’t even tried to run.

“It’s the bombs,” Limya repeated in English. Her solemn face was unnaturally calm; only her voice hinted at the true level of fear she was feeling. “That is what you are listening for.”

“They’ve stopped,” Lily whispered.

“Yes. The plane is gone, but the men will follow. You must go now.”

Lily stared back at the girl for a long moment, intensely aware of the sounds outside the building. She could hear the militiamen’s laughter and occasional bursts of gunfire mingled with the blood-curdling screams of the refugees who hadn’t escaped in time.