Susan Minot - Thirty Girls

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada

Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies

A portion of this work originally appeared in different form

in Granta (winter 2012)

Copyright © 2014 by Susan Minot

Design by Kate Gaughran. Cover photographs © Claudia Dewald/Getty Images

Susan Minot asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007550722

Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007568901

Version: 2015-01-30

To beloved daughters Ava Cecily Hannah

and the brave daughters of Uganda

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I: THEY TOOK ALL OF US

1. Thirty Girls

II: LAUNCH

2. Landing

3. Esther

4. Taking Off

III: FIRST DAYS

5. The You File

6. Recreational Visits

7. Independence Day

IV: TO THE NORTH

8. On Location

9. In the Bush

V: IT IS POSSIBLE

10. At St. Mary’s

11. Was God in Sudan?

VI: REFUGE

12. Hospitality in Lacor

13. The You File

14. What Comes Back to Me

VII: GULU

15. Love with Harry

16. Stone Trees

VIII: AIR POCKET

17. The You File

18. Dusty Ground

IX: SPIRAL

19. Where I Went

20. Don’t Go

X: FLIGHT

21. Perhaps It Is Better Not to Know Some Things

22. Where I Didn’t Go

23. The You File

Notes and Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Susan Minot

About the Publisher

THE NIGHT THEY TOOK the girls Sister Giulia went to bed with only the usual amount of worry and foreboding and rubbing of her knuckles. She said her extra prayer that all would stay peaceful, twisted down the rusted dial of her kerosene lamp and tucked in the loose bit of mosquito net under the mattress.

The bed was small and she took up very little of it, being a slight person barely five feet long. Indeed, seeing her asleep one might have mistaken her for one of her twelve-year-old students and not the forty-two-year-old headmistress of a boarding school that she was. Despite her position, Sister Giulia’s room was one of the smaller rooms upstairs in the main building at St. Mary’s where the sisters were housed. Sisters Alba and Fiamma shared the largest room down the hall and Sister Rosario—who simply took up more space with her file cabinets and seed catalogues—had commandeered the room with the shallow balcony overlooking the interior walled garden. But Sister Giulia didn’t mind. She was schooled in humility and it came naturally to her.

The banging appeared first in her dream.

When she opened her eyes she knew immediately it was real and as present in the dark room as her own heart beating. It entered the open window, a rhythmic banging like dull axes hitting at stone. They are at the dorms, she thought.

Then she heard a softer knocking, at her door. She was already sitting up, her bare feet feeling for the straw flip-flops on the floor. Yes? she whispered.

Sister, said a voice, and in the darkness she saw the crack at the door widen and in it the silhouetted head of the night watchman.

George, I am coming, she said, and felt for the cotton sweater on the chair beside her table. Sister, the voice said. They are here.

She stepped into the hall and met with the other nuns whispering in a shadowy cluster. At the end of the hallway one window reflected dim light from the two floodlights around the corner at the main entrance. The women moved toward it like moths. Sister Alba already had her wimple on—she was never uncovered—and Sister Giulia wondered in the lightning way of idle thoughts if Sister Alba slept in her habit and then thought of how preposterous it was to be having that thought at this moment.

Che possiamo fare? said Sister Rosario. What to do? Sister Rosario usually had an opinion of exactly what to do, but now, in a crisis, she was deferring to her superior.

We cannot fight them, Sister Giulia said, speaking in English for George.

No, no, the nuns mumbled, agreeing, even Sister Rosario.

They must be at the dormitory, someone said.

Yes, Sister Giulia said. I think this, too. Let us pray the door holds.

They listened to the banging. Now and then a voice shouted, a man’s voice.

Sister Chiara whispered, coming from the back, The door must hold.

It was bolted from the inside with a heavy crossbar. When the sisters put the girls to bed, they waited to hear the giant plank slide into place before saying good night.

Andiamo, Sister Giulia said. We must not stay here, they would find us. Let us hide in the garden and wait. What else can we do?

Everyone shuffled mouselike down the back stairs. On the ground floor they crossed the tiled hallway past the canning rooms and closed door of the storage room and into the laundry past the tables and wooden shelves. Sister Alba was breathing heavily. Sister Rosario jangled the keys, unlocking the laundry, and they stepped outside to the cement walkway bordering the sunken garden. A clothesline hung nearby with a line of pale dresses followed by a line of pale T-shirts. Dark paths divided the garden in crosses, and in between were humped tomato plants and the darker clumps of coffee leaves and white lilies bursting like trumpets. A three-quarter moon in the western sky cast a gray light over all the foliage so it looked covered in talc.

The nuns huddled against the far wall under banana trees. The wide leaves cast moonlit shadows.

The banging, it does not stop, whispered Sister Chiara. Her hand was clamped over her mouth.

They are trying very hard, Sister Alba said.

We should have moved them, Sister Rosario said. I knew it.

The headmistress replied in a calm tone. Sister, we cannot think of this now.

They’d put up the outside fence two years ago, and last year they’d been given the soldiers. Government troops came, walking around campus with guns strapped across their chests, among the bougainvillea and girls in their blue uniforms. At night some were stationed at the end of the driveway passing through the empty field, some stood at the gate near the chapel. Then, a month ago, the army had a census-taking and the soldiers were moved twenty kilometers north. Sister Giulia had pestered the captain to send the soldiers back. There was never more than a day’s warning when the rumors of an attack would reach them, so the nuns took the girls to nearby homes for the night. They will be back, the captain said. Finally, last week, the soldiers returned. The girls slept, the sisters slept. Then came the holiday on Sunday. The captain said, They will be back at the end of the day. But they didn’t return. They stayed off in the villages, getting drunk on sorghum beer.