But I’ve never experienced what happens in my dream. A train approaches from a long, black tunnel, and I’m terribly scared because someone’s lying on the track bed below and the train’s going to run him over. I have this dream over and over again, and when the train arrives and its headlights shine in my face, I wake up and lie there in the dark with blood pounding in my ears.

DAY TWENTY

Henri

I tumble out of the moving jeep and cover Marie-France’s body with mine, shielding her head with my hands. She’s screaming beneath me, and the sand is hot and burns my knee through my trousers.

The jeep rolls a few yards farther and crashes into a wall. Nelson, our driver, is slumped over the steering wheel. The two Blue Helmets lie dead, their faces turned to the sun, on the scorched grass beside the road through Wau in the Bahr el-Ghazal region.

The boy with the machine gun staggers out of the hole where he was crouching when he shot Nelson. A hole with a strip of cardboard over it.

Marie-France is whimpering now.

The gunman is young, perhaps thirteen, but his eyes are as old as death. He is just as scared as I am. The boy crouches down, cradling the rifle loosely in front of him, and shuts his eyes.

“Don’t go! Don’t go!” Marie-France yells as she notices my weight lifting from her body.

I stand up and walk slowly toward the boy, displaying the palms of my hands. He doesn’t even glance at me and offers no resistance when I relieve him of the rifle. I empty the magazine and toss it as far away as I can, then squat down beside him. His upper body is rocking back and forth, back and forth, and all around us is silence. Sudan is paralyzed by horror and heat, and I’m thirty-one and have spent far too long in war zones. I’ve also seen far too many of these aged children. UNICEF flew two thousand five hundred of them out of here last week, and others are congregating in hastily erected SOS Children’s Villages in the savannah. The objective is to disarm them and provide them with new papers and identities. They would no longer be known by the weekday on which they were born. But what, after all, is in a name? You’re nothing without your community.

At the SOS children’s camp we would like to talk to the demobilized child soldiers who can neither read nor write but are capable of aiming a gun, pulling a trigger, and locating mines. None of the laws we know apply here; the only law is the law of the gun.