Grains of Rice by Sarah Dimick

Every two weeks, a convoy of UN trucks arrived, loaded down with 50 lb. canvas bags of instant milk and rice. It drove in from El Obeid, entering the camp on the road that marked the west edge of the cemetery. On the day I met her, a man was forcing a heavy wheelbarrow over the dusty ground as the trucks passed by with the rations. The wheelbarrow was filled with his wife’s dead body, wrapped in a patchwork quilt sent by American church women. As he heaved the wheelbarrow over the rocky edge of the road, the blanket loosened and one of her arms slumped out, the hand trailing along as he made his way toward the nearest open grave. “Allah Abkar,” he said, chanting softly to himself, “Allah Abkar. Allah Abkar. Allah Abkar.” God is Great. The group of gravediggers glanced over at him, pausing for a moment to rest the handles of their pickaxes against their protruding hipbones as he tilted the wheelbarrow forwards and dumped his wife’s body into the rough hole finished a few hours ago. Then the gravediggers hoisted their axes back into the air, arms sharp and bright with the sweat. More bodies would come as the day grew hot.

Michael and I stood on the back of the convoy’s flatbed trailer and cut open the canvas sacks of dry food. The sweet smell of the milk powder attracted the black flies biting the dead woman’s body, and they left the open wound on her hand to settle between the grains of rice, to burrow into the instant milk while we took inventory. The refugees were already forming a long line between the two tire tracks that led into camp, the children playing in the stagnant puddles by the latrines. By the time we began handing out rations, the line reached so far back that it disappeared into the net of tarp shelters. Michael checked off the names as I scooped the rice into the pots and open pieces of cloth they held out. The line was silent all afternoon as the hot sun sunk into their faces and disappeared, silent as the heat intensified the smell of the cholera feces lying on the ground around us. This silence was the most disturbing thing I have ever witnessed, like watching the labor of a mother whose muscles push until they tear even while she holds in her cries, knowing it will be a stillbirth. The flies dug deeper into the open sacks of rice, and when I picked them out, their thin wings flaked off between the grains. I could hear the dryness of the rice in the air as it fell the few inches from my tin measuring cup to their sacks, only the vaguest of blessings.

We met that afternoon when I bent over to pour the rice into her bowl and she gently slid her hand up from my wrist to my elbow, her slender fingers coming together around my arm. They were shaded fingers, darkest in the lines on the knuckles, shadowed in the cracks where they came together above her palm. She had the smoothest hands I had ever felt on my skin, and before I knew what was happening, the small white granules of my spine trembled, as though my insides had suddenly boiled over. She was about my age, maybe a little younger, twenty-three or twenty-four, her hair held in a small lump beneath her scarf. Looking down as she touched my elbow, I thought I had never seen anything as beautiful as the way the brownness of her fingernails dipped into white slivers near the cuticles, ten perfect grains of rice on each hand.

By that time, it had been almost nine months since we flew in on a UN plane that rasped and shook as its wheels touched the ground. Michael came back to our tent in the evenings, his sleeves discolored with children’s diarrhea, his stethoscope hanging like a weight around his neck. He peeled his shirt off, washed with a pot of boiled water we kept in the corner. “Christine,” he said, coming over to put his hands on my shoulders as I waited for the rice to grow tender, “How are our food supplies holding up?” He moved closer, closing his arms around my waist, resting his cheek on my hair. When we used to stand like this, before coming to Abu Shouk, I would lean back into the curve of his chest, our bodies perfectly fitted to each other, our feet warming in the sunlight that had settled permanently on the carpet of our house. Now I bent over the pot, watching the grains change shape ever so slightly in the heat of the water. “Fine,” I said. “They’re fine.”

That night, I had not boiled the water long enough to kill all the bacteria. We saw that rice for days afterwards, the grains half-digested and shiny in the moonlight as our stomachs wretched themselves dry on the ground outside. Wiping the back of my hand across my mouth, I looked into the dark rows of tarp shelters, felt the vomit that had already dried sticky on the side of my cheek. Michael rolled over inside the canvas tent, got up. As I headed back to our cot, he held the door flap aside, our bodies passing each other like that, back and forth all night as our stomachs clenched and rose. The vomit stayed there on the ground for close to a week, a reminder of what we had lost.

I began to watch for her during ration distributions, at the water pump in the late afternoon. Her name was Zeinab, and she didn’t seem to have a husband. Perhaps they had been split apart into different camps, but most likely he was dead, his body sprawled somewhere on a road next to a child’s yellow sandal and a cracked pot. Maybe he lay a few hundred meters from the ashy shadow of their house, the dusty wind slowly covering the edges of his shirt with ground.

Four children stood behind her as she waited in line for rations. Sometimes she had one in her arms, the oldest swinging the pot by his hip until they reached the front of the line. I felt her gaze on my body as I poured the rations, gathering the proportions of my elbows to my shoulders, the slope of my calves from my knees. Long after she had left, guiding the children back down the tire tracks to camp, that feeling of her eyes stayed on my skin, something unnamed and invisible, like the fine dust that remained on my hands after scooping rice.

On the day we arrived in Abu Shouk, Michael went to take an inventory of the medical building near the entrance to the camp. He left right away, taking the suitcases of antibiotics we had carried with us. I stayed to unpack the few things we had brought, folding his pants in a neat pile, my box of stationary on the table. A few minutes after he had gone, a woman came in by herself, pulling the canvas door flap aside with one arm as she clutched the infant with the other. Although I never saw her again, Michael told me she was from Block 27, the section of camp closest to our tent. I suppose the rumor of the new doctor’s arrival had spread quickly. “Oh,” I told her, “Michael’s gone to check the medical station.” I pointed out in the direction he’d left. She came closer, speaking quickly and loud, but the infant was still shadowed underneath the bright orange cloth wrapped around it. I didn’t understand what she was saying, held my hands up in apology, but her voice got panicked, more insistent. She grabbed my arm, pulled me close, and then I saw the baby, the skin of its chest and the side of its head covered in a deep infection. The odor burnt the inside of my nose, and without thinking, I pulled back in horror. She gestured at the baby again and again, pulling down the cloth so the infection was fully visible. She held it out to me as if to say, “You do something.” All afternoon, while Michael made charts of pills and equipment, I sat on the floor of our tent, holding the baby thrust into my arms. She stood beside me, and after a while, she stopped speaking and crying and then we were just waiting together. I didn’t know how to tell her when I no longer felt the tiny rise and fall that marked the baby’s breath. For hours, I just sat there and held the dead infant in my arms, felt it grow cold inside the bright cloth’s hungry fire.

Before arriving in Abu Shouk, Michael and I planned on having a large family. We stood at the top of the wide staircase in our split-level home and imagined hanging pictures all across the wall—newborns, graduation, grandchildren.

At night, lying on our cot in the canvas tent, Michael would reach over for me, shifting the blankets to the side. When our skin met, I began to smell something like cholera on him, a sickly faint smell that made my stomach clench up. At first, I told him to wash better, to use more soap. But as the militias moved closer, and more and more refugees entered the camp, I realized that no amount of river water could rinse this smell off him. He began to carry the UN radio with him whenever he left the tent, craning his ear close to hear the static voice of the Secretary of State. The more crowded it became, the more desperate bodies that packed themselves around me when I walked down the path, the more the scent of Michael’s skin repulsed me. It was the deep pitch of his voice too, the way his shoulders swaggered when he hurried to the medical building. The overpopulation, the masses of people surrounding us made his shape repellent to me, his mouth taste faintly rotten.

It was the day after our second rice distribution of the month, in the heat of the afternoon, when Zeinab came and stood outside our tent with her soft hands cupped together. Michael was out, tending to a malaria outbreak on the southeast edge of the camp. I felt her before I saw her, felt the water of the pot condense at the base of my neck, across the pink edge of my upper lip. When I walked out to meet her, she opened her palms, revealing a handful of rice. Looking at it there in her hands, the organs near my stomach fluttered, as though they could wake up. She smiled, held the rice towards me.

Motioning to the place where the food convoys usually parked, she thrust her rice-filled hands towards me, insisting that I take it. I had never been as efficient a ration distributor as Michael, spilling a few grains of rice every time I leveled the measuring cup into a pot or bowl. Usually, by the morning after distributions the scattered rice from my shaky hands was gone, collected off the ground. Once, walking home at night, we had seen figures stooped over the area of sand where the trucks parked, picking through the grains in the darkness. It was additional rice, collateral damage, something I had lost without thinking of it.

But this rice could also satisfy a kind of hunger. Zeinab brought it back to me in her soft hands, pouring it into my palm, holding my wrist again to ensure that every grain was saved. As she tipped them between our hands, the small white slivers of her fingernails rested on my skin, as though she were learning my pulse. When the rice moved from palm to palm, the grains made a soft sound against us, like the beginning of a gasp. She placed her palm over my hand, her fingers weaving their way between mine. Then we were holding hands over the rice.

By that time, Michael and I began to talk of the news reports over dinner. He said, “The battle line’s getting alarmingly near. There’s talk of evacuating the camp, but I don’t think that will happen.” He chewed as he talked, and I could see the rice sticking in the cracks between his teeth. I asked, “How could it? That would take more trucks than the UN has in this whole country.” He looked up from his bowl, said, “They’re not talking of the refugees. The issue is getting the aid workers out of here.” He paused for a moment, then said, “All day long I’ve treated kid after kid with severe dehydration. Ten of them were dead today before they reached me, I just had to pronounce them. They might die when the camp is evacuated, but they’re already dying from that dirty water they play in, from simple starvation. There’s nothing I can do about it.” He kicked the floor with his foot, pounding the slab of concrete that the tent rested on.

We sat for a minute without saying anything, and I was about to clear our plates from the table, but then he scooted his chair next to mine, and in a low voice he said, “I want to see your stomach grow round and full.” I jerked my head up, and he leaned over to kiss me hard. “I want a whole loud table of children. I’ve been thinking about it, and we could fly you out of here when the delivery got close. It wouldn’t be impossible.” I began to shake my head, but before I could say anything, he put a finger to my lips. “I know, I know, it’s not ideal. But I need to see this happen, to have one child live.” The sickening smell that lay right below his skin was strong in my nose, and I pushed the last bites of food across my plate with the tip of my fork.

At night, I dreamt the taste Zeinab’s skin, tender rice against my lips, dreams that woke me warm in the earliest hours of the morning as though my mind had steamed itself awake. Pushing the blankets off my hips, I doubled them over Michael and stood outside the entrance of our tent, finding her fingers in the lingering sliver of the moon. She had begun to leave her children with an older woman in a nearby shelter every afternoon, just for half an hour or so, to come and sit with me while Michael was working in the medical station. I looked out through the darkness, across the rows and rows of slanting tarps, the deep tire tracks left by the convoys. When Michael came out to check on me, I told him I felt queasy, not sure of what my insides were about to do.

There was concern that the next food delivery would be delayed if the roads were impassable due to guerrilla occupation, and supplies in the camp were already at a dangerous low. Michael began to radio a man at the UN, but the reception was poor, and he often couldn’t get through. Still, every day we added new arrivals to the lists on our clipboards, stretching the last bins of milk powder a little thinner. If I stood out past the cemetery in the afternoon, right at the entrance of the camp, I could see figures coming on the flat horizon, small lines that turned to real colors as they kept walking.

Zeinab always came in the late afternoons, slipping through the door of our tent while Michael finished his rounds. It was the time of day that I boiled the rice for dinner, and she stood beside me as the steam gradually turned starch-scented, sweet. Some days we tried to talk to each other, using the few words I knew, her soft hands circling and acting out life in the air. Other times we just waited for the rice, testing it with a spoon, taking turns eating three or four grains to see if it was done. She only stayed until the rice had finished cooking.

While Michael became haggard and anxious, while the camp strained in a frenzy of bodies, my days grew in a fullness I had never imagined possible. If I walked through the camp to the water pump, to the medical station, I saw the children’s sunken cheeks, their eyes grown so large I wondered how they ever shut them. In a place where it is impossible to shut your eyes though, your body adapts so you can live with them open. Some parts of my body receded while others emerged. As I lay with Michael on the cot and listened to the sounds of the camp settling down, the plastic creaking of tarps, the soft taps of flip-flops tossed outside, I don’t think Michael ever noticed the way the hunger in Abu Shouk let my body move away from him—maybe in retrospect he identified it, but I’ve never asked him.

While the flies began to land on old people’s skin in anticipation of their death, we kissed for the first time, hidden inside the steam of the water. It happened slowly, both of us pretending to peer into the pot as the sides of our arms grew warm against each other, neither of us moving away even though the steam made our faces wet, our cheeks flushed. But it was Zeinab who touched me first, turning and stroking all twenty of her fingers across my cheeks, placing her lips against mine until I tasted the ripe grain of her mouth, the way her tongue was gentle around the edges, like rice when it is half-cooked, still floating on the surface of the water. We fed each other until all the water had evaporated from the pot, and then she headed back into Block 27.

For the next few weeks, food packages were air-dropped from a UN plane, small packages of pre-cooked rice and beans that scattered the dust when they hit the ground. The people who ran the quickest got four or five, the old people who couldn’t run at all got none. When we gave out rice, it wasn’t cooked, so the women were the ones who controlled it, boiling the water, stirring it to make sure the bottom didn’t burn, doling it out to the children, uncles, husbands. With the rice already cooked, the women weren’t needed to change it from hard to soft, and sometimes the men didn’t bring it back to the rows of tarps, choosing to trade it for a plastic watch or wheelbarrow instead. The women went hungry.

In the midst of this hunger, Zeinab’s oldest boy came down with malaria. He lay beneath the tarp that they had propped up on a few sticks, shaking and breathing heavily in and out. Michael listened to his chest with his stethoscope, told her to give him only clean water. But the pump had run dry, and sometimes fights broke out in the long lines waiting to use it, women pushing their way to the front in desperation. So Zeinab’s boy died in Block 27, the other three children squatting beside him as his shaking stopped altogether. Then they helped their mother pick him up and carry him to the cemetery, the shortest one walking beneath his corpse, holding up his back with her hands.

That afternoon, when she came to my tent, I noticed the way her torso curved in so much that when she let her arms hang at her sides there were large spaces of air between her elbows and her waist. Her face was wet, and this time we kissed right away, not even standing together over the rice for a few minutes before her soft hands reached out for my head. When I took the hem of the old basketball t-shirt she wore above her skirt and lifted it over her head, I saw how her smooth skin grew creased and loose around her stomach and upper arms where it was still fitted for a larger person. The ribs were there too, reflections of the dusty tire tracks that cut through camp. But it was her breasts that made me gasp. They were gone, shrunken in on themselves, and next to my full ones, they looked so dry, as though her body had spent all the water it had on tears, no moisture left for anything else. I took her hands and rubbed them over her chest, the smooth skin that still made the white granules of my spine tremble when it touched me finally returning to herself. We loved in defiance of procreation, in response to the bodies that lay around us. We loved in the vaguest of blessings.

Michael came home that evening, said, “You know how the flies have been multiplying so fast lately?” I nodded. “Well, I spent all afternoon out behind the medical station, burning those donkey carcasses that people dump there after working them to death. I think most of them were coming from there. Hope it will keep the cholera under control.” He smiled to himself, said, “They swarmed up when I lit the pile on fire, but the smoke got most of them.” I went with him that evening to check on the cinders, make sure there was no danger of sparks. The bodies had burned away, leaving only bones that were blackened on the edges, smoke that hung over the rows of tarps and closed us all in. Michael took a stick and stirred the ashes, poking in between the bones in the places where the skin and muscles used to hang. The flies didn’t improve, and the next morning, when I woke up, there were three crawling over my arms.

Abu Shouk was evacuated a week later. Michael came home at a run, throwing the tent flap aside to find us standing in the steam, our bodies shaped perfectly into each other. He looked at the way her arms were draped around my neck, and then we startled, her foot jarring the pot of water and spilling the rice across the floor, the burning water splashing on her skin. Michael pulled the tent door open farther, letting the steam evaporate out over the people folding their tarps into small bundles to hold under their arms. He held the door open as Zeinab slid her shirt over her head and ran out into the rows of Block 27, calling for her scattered children.

We did not look at each other, but Michael said the evacuation vehicles had arrived, to grab my bag. It was urgent, he said, the war zone had extended to only a few miles away, it would engulf the camp within the next few hours. Suddenly, he glanced down at the rice spilled across the floor, at the red burn on my arm. “Christine,” he said in a tired voice, “are you okay?” I said nothing, turned away from him. No matter where we lived, how much I ate and curved, his body would never fit mine again. He gathered my things for me, strapped them to the back of the convoy.

As the trucks passed the cemetery, there were a few graves abandoned so quickly that no one had thrown dirt over the bodies. I saw her leaving, walking along the tracks that led out of camp. The three remaining children straggled behind her, the little girl grasping her mother’s skirt. As the convoy picked up speed, the children shrunk until they were nothing but specks, small grains left in the hardness of the sun.

Works Consulted

Murphy, Brian. “One man's death in refugee camp: Stark example of Afghan reality.” Suburban Chicago Newspapers. 15 December 2001. 5 June 2006. .

Guerin, Orla. “Horror Continues in Sudan’s Darfur.” BBC News. 1 May 2006. 5 June 2006. .