Ghost Season: A Novel

by Fatin Abbas

Genres: War & Military; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A dynamic, beautifully orchestrated debut novel connecting five characters caught in the crosshairs of conflict on the Sudanese border.

A mysterious burnt corpse appears one morning in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan. For five strangers on an NGO compound, the discovery foreshadows trouble to come. South Sudanese translator William connects the corpse to the sudden disappearance of cook Layla, with whom he’s fallen in love. Meanwhile, Sudanese American filmmaker Dena struggles to connect to her unfamiliar homeland, and white midwestern aid worker Alex finds his plans thwarted by a changing climate and looming civil war. Dancing between the adults is Mustafa, a clever, endearing twelve-year-old who schemes to rise out of poverty.

Amidst the paradoxes of identity, art, humanitarian aid, and a territory riven by conflict, these unforgettable characters must forge bonds stronger than blood, ethnicity, and nation. For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Maaza Mengiste, Ghost Season is a gripping, vivid debut that announces Fatin Abbas as a powerful new voice in fiction.

Release date: January 10, 2023

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Print pages: 314

Sample

DENA PICKED UP THE CAMERA BAG, LIFTED THE TRIPOD under her arm, and, in the courtyard, stopped to look up. The light was mellow, caressing surfaces: the thatched roof of the gazebo that stood at the back of the compound, the clay walls of the storage room, the pale canvas of the tent set up by the office. Light like this was rare—it was only because of a haze of morning clouds, which might melt away at any moment—and so she hurried across the yard to the kitchen, where she found the boy Mustafa sweeping.

He glanced at her and smiled and then his eyes returned to the work. There were few formalities between them now. She didn’t have to ask, as she used to, whether she could switch on the camera. He knew why she was there, that her work was watching him, and he’d accepted it, though not without some lingering bewilderment.

She unpacked her things—headphones, a piece of paper to check for white balance, batteries—then turned on the camera and framed the boy sweeping dirt. Sweat trickled into the crease of her one shut eye, and through the other she watched his arms move, the cloudy sunlight hitting them just-so, reflecting the smooth skin just-so against the brown mud of the kitchen wall behind. At his feet the dust swirled up luminous from the uneven ground, rising, then unfurling out in a shadowy motion, the cloud thinning then dissipating in the morning air.

“Look,” he said, shading his eyes. Dena watched him through the lens. “There’ll be rain later.” His hand remained above his brow for an instant, and then he reached for the broom again.

In the background, echoing through her headphones as though from a faraway place, she could hear a tune pulsating on the radio, and behind that the sound of water splashing in the street. The scent of baking bricks and dung came and went, carried by the river breeze, and still she looked, drifting between the face, the hands, the dust, the moving broom, so lost in looking that the pulse in her aching arm no longer felt like pain but only rhythm.

IN THE OFFICE Alex sat on a stool too low for the makeshift desk, a map spread out in front of him. The room was the only one built out of concrete in the compound. It was cramped, barely big enough for the table, chair, and a metal filing unit set against the left-hand wall. A poster was pinned above it, showing the logo of the organization: a white globe floating above two green palms raised upward as though in prayer.

He’d spent the morning reading an agricultural report, but, bored, had pulled open one of the maps lying on the desk. He never got tired of looking at maps. He leaned forward on his elbows, eyes tracing the northern border, a line bolting straight across the Sahara. His gaze drifted down, following the river to its source as it meandered through the thick yellow belt of desert to the capital, where it split in two, a branch curving up toward the Ethiopian highlands in one direction and the other continuing south toward Lake Victoria. He stopped at a dot marking the town he was in now—Saraaya, at the boundary between North and South. Here the desert merged into grasslands, swaths of pale green that became darker and denser toward the tropical south of the country.

He’d come to this town to make a map, sent by his organization to chart farmlands, villages, grazing pastures, water wells, district lines as part of an information-gathering mission. The maps that existed were outdated, drawn up by the British more than fifty years ago and still used by the local authorities; a good map was needed to give direction to the organization’s aid efforts in the area.

It was late November. He wanted to begin, but two weeks into his stay he was still waiting for official permission from the authorities. And his surveying equipment, which should have arrived a week ago from Khartoum, had been shipped to the wrong town, two hundred kilometers away, and was only now on its way over.

A shadow blocked the light coming from the yard, and when he looked up he saw William, the translator, looming in the doorframe.

Teeth flashed in a smile beneath glinting eyes. “Good morning,” said William.

A fresh, zesty fragrance wafted into the office. William had been drenching himself in cologne lately, and Alex thought it had something to do with the pretty new cook who had started working in the compound.

Alex raised his nose in the air and sniffed. “Has my translator turned into a lemon tree or what?”

William grinned, his long, handsome face bashful. “It’s a new cologne,” he said in a lilting accent, drawing out the vowels. “Maybe you could do with some yourself.”

It occurred to Alex that he didn’t make a very pretty picture. He sat shirtless, his chin overgrown with stubble, his light hair dangling in wet tendrils around his ears. Sunburnt skin was peeling off his nose. In contrast, William was a picture of elegance: His shirt glowed crisply white against the dull clay walls of the compound. His hair was buzz-cut close to his scalp so that the line between it and the broad, dark forehead was almost impossible to discern.

“Any news?” asked Alex. “About the authorization?”

“Not yet,” said William. “But soon. Any day now.”

It was the same answer that William always gave him.

“It’s been two weeks. How much longer am I supposed to wait?”

He was suddenly irritated by the neatness of William’s white shirt.

“I’ll talk to them again tomorrow,” said William. “But I can’t rush the authorities. They will slow things down even more if I push them.” He stepped out into the yard. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Call me if you need me.”

He closed the door before Alex had a chance to say more.

WILLIAM WALKED PAST the plants and the old tires and the sacks of sand piled by the gate. He saw Dena and Mustafa by the storage room, heard the rhythmic swoosh of Mustafa’s broom like an accompaniment to the tempo of the music coming from the radio.

His heart clattered in his rib cage. He had tossed and turned all night in bed thinking of Layla—there, now, in the cool darkness of the kitchen. He had plotted and considered what he was about to do: walk into the kitchen and, under the pretense of seeking a glass of water, linger to make conversation about the weather, the crops, the seasonal arrival of the nomads. Then he might venture into more intimate questions: ask her where she lived, about her family.

He stopped by the office wall, smoothed his white shirt, ran his tongue over his teeth. Since meeting Layla his body was not his own, existing only as she perceived it in his imagination. Now, in anticipation of her presence, he was suddenly aware of his long legs, thin and gangly as a camel’s. His too-big teeth. His clammy hands, which were as broad as bird traps. His dark skin, black as water on a moonless night.

He took a deep breath and turned right along the office wall, glanced through the doorway at Alex’s back, passed more plants potted in rusty oil drums. He waved to Dena and Mustafa across the yard, but the turmoil in his chest was growing. By the time he reached the kitchen door his gait was stiff and his eyes were wide. His jaw was clenched in a manic smile. He walked in blindly and stepped to the orange water cooler, poured himself water and drank. His throat gurgled and the glass wobbled and his Adam’s apple bobbed. Only when he dropped the empty cup on the counter with a clatter and looked around did he realize that Layla wasn’t there.

“HOW’S THE FILMING?” The question came abrupt and electric through the headphones, startling her.

She didn’t answer but felt his shadow lingering. Finally she pressed the Stop button and pulled the headphones from her ears. She’d been following Mustafa around the compound all morning, and now they’d ended up near the two beds in the courtyard, him sitting on a stool with wet knees above a large metal basin full of bedsheets in bubbling water, her crouching opposite him.

“It’s fine,” she said, looking up at Alex. There was an eagerness, an intrusive familiarity in the bold gray eyes.

Mustafa stopped washing for a moment and flicked his hands into the dirt, drying them. Drops of water flew everywhere and Dena shielded the camera with her arm.

“What’s it about, your documentary?” Alex asked.

He was shirtless in the heat and she glanced at the few scattered hairs on his chest, noticed a dark mole beneath a pale nipple. She looked away, more embarrassed by this physical intimacy than he seemed to be.

“I’ve just started filming,” she said.

“What’s it for?”

“It’s not for anything. It’s for me.”

He paused, bewildered. “But what are you going to do with it when it’s finished?”

Again her eyes wandered down to his torso, to its easy nakedness.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.”

He watched her fingers on the camera’s dials.

“What’s the point of making a film if it will just sit there?”

The question vexed her. In this poor, troubled corner of the country there was room only for victims and saviors.

“And your map? What’s the point?”

He seemed to register the challenge in her question, but his tone was casual when he answered. “It’s simple. Information. The more information we have the better, right?”

She smiled, not a friendly smile.

There was a sudden brightening, a glinting of the rim of the metal basin, and she realized that the clouds were thinning and the sunlight was getting stronger and she would have only a few more minutes of good morning light left to film.

“Do you mind?” She gestured toward Mustafa, who had been following the tense inflections of the conversation, though not the words, which he only half understood.

“Of course,” said Alex, spreading his hands. “I’ll let you get on with it.” He turned away and she watched as he ambled back to the office, his tanned arms and neck seeming to belong to a different body from the ghostly torso that connected them.

MUSTAFA CLIMBED UP on one of the beds and unhooked the mosquito net from the bamboo frame, then dumped the material on the mattress. He went over to the other bed and did the same. It was almost noon. Dena had put away her camera and gone to the kitchen to prepare lunch for everyone. Layla had not shown up today, and no one had eaten anything all morning.

He heard the pop and fizz of hot oil, and the smell of falafel drifted out of the kitchen doorway. The radio was still playing under the gazebo, though Dena had tuned in to the BBC station, and now the presenter’s English speech drifted over the courtyard, staticky, sonorous, the words rippling over Mustafa mysteriously.

It was Thursday and the football championship final was tonight. There was only one place in all of Saraaya that was showing it: Omar’s juice stall in the market, and it would cost him three hundred pounds to watch the game. But he had no money. Just last week he had spent all of his measly savings on buying merchandise for his underwear venture in the market. He had given his mother the rest of the fifteen thousand pounds a month he received for performing daily chores at the compound—cleaning and taking out rubbish and washing. His mother was widowed with two children much younger than him, and so most of his wages went to help her.

His friends wouldn’t have any to spare. His mother would think it a waste. And she had given him a thousand pounds last month as a present for his twelfth birthday, which he had spent already. He listed in his mind the things he remembered buying: three bottles of Coca-Cola, two sweet pastries at the market, a pair of battered sunglasses from his friend Ibrahim—eight hundred pounds in total. But he couldn’t remember what he had spent the remainder on.

He picked up the nets in his arms and crossed over to the mudroom used for storage. The air was stuffy in there, dusty. Cartons were stacked against a wall all the way up to the wood-beamed ceiling. Piles of blue tarpaulin sat in one corner, on top of an old, damaged generator with rusty gears. Cracked earthen pots were lined up underneath a wooden table by the door. Alex’s belongings—a blue backpack and a small suitcase—were wedged in between them. On top of the table sat a rolled-up mattress and plastic bags full of bedclothes, pillows, and old newspapers. Mustafa stuffed the mosquito nets into one of the bags and went outside again, heading toward the beds.

On the way William hurried out of the office and caught up with him. “Where’s Layla today?” he asked in Arabic.

“I don’t know,” said Mustafa. “She didn’t come in this morning.”

“Did she say anything yesterday?”

Mustafa shook his head. He had seen the way William’s eyes followed her around the compound. How he tripped over his long legs when he noticed her watching him.

William drew closer. “Can you find out where she lives?”

Mustafa considered, sensing an opportunity. “Maybe. But.”

“But?”

“It’s another chore.”

William stared at him. Then he understood. He pulled notes from his back pocket, counted them out.

“Here’s two hundred pounds.”

“Four,” said Mustafa.

“Four? You’re a thief.”

“It’ll take up half my day finding out where she lives. I have to ask around, go looking, find the house . . .” He tried to think of other ways to convey the magnitude of the errand.

“Fine, fine. Here’s four,” said William, adding to the notes. “Do it today. Tell me if she’s coming tomorrow.”

Mustafa took the notes and folded them in half. The game. A bottle of Coca-Cola. He smiled. He stuffed the money carefully into his pocket.

“I’ll go after I finish here,” he said. William patted him on the head and returned to the office.

He was dragging one of the beds toward the gazebo when there was a loud thumping at the gate. He continued pulling the bed until it was under the shade of the thatched roof, parallel to a hammock strung up between two poles made of tree trunks. When he walked back into the light he saw William standing by the gate. There was the sound of voices, but he couldn’t see who was outside the door. William opened the gate farther and three men walked in, struggling to carry a heavy bundle wrapped in sackcloth. Nilot men, tall and dark like William, wearing faded, dusty vests, T-shirts, and cutoff trousers.

William spoke to them in Nilotic and directed them to the middle of the courtyard, by the bed. They laid the bundle down on the ground. Crouched over it. As one of them spoke he pointed to a location beyond the wall, his words visible in the excitement of his hands, fluttering up constantly, drawing a scene. The other two men sat quietly, listening and nodding occasionally.

When Alex stepped into the yard William called him over. One of the men drew open the top of the sackcloth. Mustafa couldn’t see what was inside. Alex’s eyes went wide and his face became suddenly paler. William covered his mouth and nose and drew his head back. Mustafa crossed over to the group. Something sweet and rotten in the air. Dena stepped out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishcloth.

“What is it?” she called, coming over. Mustafa wedged himself in between Alex and William.

One of the Nilot men was removing the sackcloth now, gingerly lifting the corners. The two men who stood on the other side of the bundle moved back as he threw the cloth open.

The stench rose, rancid and sweet and sulfurous, more a taste than a smell, filming their tongues. The skin—or what remained of it—was black and rutted in parts. It had melted onto the rib cage and flakes of it hung dryly on the bone; below it the scorched piping of the intestines spilled out. The arms stretched upward above the head, charred fingers coiling. Legs dry as wood were bent with the feet floating stiffly in the air. The lips had been burnt off, leaving the teeth protruding in a silent screech below the blackened stump of a nose and closed eyes.

The heat and stink concentrated around the grisly flesh were stifling. Dena stepped outside the circle. Alex covered his nose with his arm. William pulled his shirt over his face. Mustafa stood up and stepped back, breathing through his teeth. The three strangers were covering their noses now, too, swatting away the fat, buzzing flies that spun above the corpse. The even drone of the BBC presenter’s voice washed over them. In the brightening sunlight the rough outlines of the body were stark against the brown dust of the courtyard floor.

Alex spoke over Mustafa’s head to William, his voice muffled by his arm. “Where did they find it?”

William translated to the men, two of whom sat squatting along one side of the body. They were strong-muscled, their arms and faces splotched with dung ash. The same man who had spoken to William earlier—with high cheekbones and small, deep-set eyes—answered, the pitched syllables of the language moving fluidly back and forth between him and William.

“They were out grazing cattle upriver,” said William, turning to Alex. “They found it in the grass, along the left bank.”

“Do they know who it is?” asked Alex.

“They say word’s been put out that a body has been found, but no one’s claimed it yet.”

The space of the courtyard contracted into the tight circle of people around the corpse. There was a movement and when Mustafa looked up he saw Dena, at the foot of the body, uncapping the lens of her camera and lifting it. The looming glass eye caressed the dead flesh, moving slowly, up and down, along the stiff curves of the legs and arms and torso. For a moment everyone’s attention shifted to the thin woman with the camera. One of the two strangers sitting along the left side of the body whispered something to his companion. They stared up at Dena. Then their eyes returned to the corpse.

William spoke again. “They came to ask if we can drive them to the cemetery in the pickup truck. It’s too far to walk, and they want to bury it.”

“Did they go to the police?” asked Alex.

“They went there this morning. The police said the body’s unidentifiable and there’s nothing they can do about it unless someone comes forward. They will investigate, but they told them to bury it.”

They all looked on in silence. A donkey cart rattled by in the street. A burst of music came from the radio, marking the end of the news program.

“I’ll get the keys,” said Alex, and stood up and went into the office.

One of the men leaned across the body and pulled the sackcloth over it. Everyone rose. The sun suddenly disappeared behind a tufted cloud, and the stark shadows of the walls, the gazebo, the colorful flags strung up along the periphery of the yard grew hazy as a dimness fell over the compound. A breeze drifted through the courtyard and the gate creaked languidly but insistently. The sackcloth covering the body quivered, wafting up, and William stretched forward and pulled it down again. Dena switched off her camera and held it dangling by the handgrip. Two of the herdsmen knelt and pulled the cloth taut around the corpse, then gripped the outstretched arms and feet. They lifted the body, and when Alex came out of the office, now in a blue T-shirt, he and William followed the men out through the gate.

Outside, the street was quiet in the midday heat. A stray dog trotting by slowed, then paused at a wary distance and tilted its head, scenting the flesh. Three women walked past on the opposite side of the road balancing plastic tubs of water on top of small padded cushions on their heads. They turned carefully, keeping their long necks steady, to watch the group of men maneuvering the brown bundle into the bed of the battered truck parked outside the compound. Standing just inside the gate, Dena and Mustafa suddenly felt a cold, wet pattering against their skin. They looked up at the sky, which was low and heavy with rain, the sun that was glaring only minutes ago nowhere to be seen.

WILLIAM, OUTWARDLY CALM, kept telling himself that he was imagining things. He stood—Alex fidgeting nervously to one side with a shovel, the three herdsmen opposite him leaning on theirs—in a cemetery on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t clearly demarcated so much as a patch of brown land that blended into a broader patch of brown land, the only indication that bodies were buried here the slight mounds of dirt rising from the earth, here and there the occasional misshapen headstone.

The shrouded corpse lay a few feet away, to the left of one of the herdsmen. It had been found kilometers out of town, surely far from where Layla lived. Things were flaring up again with the rebels, who were somewhere in the area, and probably the corpse had some connection to those troubles. There would have been news from her family if she’d disappeared.

Still, from the corner of his eye William was aware of the corpse’s fingers straining against the fabric, as if wanting to tear through the shroud. He looked away, past the herdsmen and the corpse, to the tracks of dirt road near where the truck was parked, and farther along to the line of homesteads hugging the earth in the far distance, marking the southern periphery of the town. The drizzle had stopped, but the sun was still hidden behind a layer of clouds.

“Should we bury it here?” asked one of the herdsmen, the same one who had done most of the speaking at the compound. The other two looked at William—the question was addressed to him. This was one of those times when he wished he could escape the burden of his own authority. He was from here, but his work, its educated nature in a place where most people were farmers and cattle herders, separated him from the locals. He was just a translator, but in Saraaya that meant being a big man.

He lived in a town whose strategic importance in the war was in inverse proportion to its provinciality, its cut-offness, located, as it was, in the middle of nowhere—desert to the north and endless swamp and grasslands to the south—but here, at least, he’d been able to make a decent living for himself. Anyway, that’s what he told himself. He’d been lucky, getting this job. He had a way with people, a talent for making himself likable (only with Layla did his powers seem to fail him), and because of it he knew how to get on with the police, the security men, the nomads, the Nilotes, the NGO staff, and expats like Alex whom he had to look after during their stays here.

Besides, at thirty-three, his desires were simple: He wanted a wife, children, his own home. He’d wanted more once, back when he was still a young man in Khartoum, where he’d turned up at the age of twenty, accounting diploma in hand, determined to make something of himself. He’d ended up in manual labor, working on construction sites in the city, on the extravagant, garish edifices that were rising up with the oil money spurting from wells all over the South.

In his first weeks in Khartoum—shaved, shoes polished, fake gold watch glinting on his wrist, accounting diploma carefully secreted in a plastic folder—he’d assaulted the offices in the central districts.

“We don’t need an errand boy” was the bewildered response of the secretary in the first office he stepped into. He still remembered her: eyes winged with eye liner, round face wrapped tightly in a purple headscarf that cascaded elegantly on one side onto her shoulder. She was confused by his nice clothes. They didn’t fit the pitch-black skin and the gangly frame that broadcast him as a Southerner.

The plastic folder crinkled as he reached into it. “I have a diploma.” He handed it to her. She skimmed it. “I see . . .” She glanced left and right as if looking for a rubbish bin to throw it in. She leaned forward. “I’m sorry. No one will hire you for office work. I’m telling you this to save you the trouble. If you’re looking for errand work, you might find something.”

William stared. He replaced the diploma.

“Thank you,” he said, and walked out.

In the next office, and the next, it was the same. Wide-eyed secretaries confused by his perfumed, elegant presence. His polished shoes. His spotless white shirt. The confident air with which he strode forward for a handshake. “Hello, my name is William Luol.” Like an executive. Not a Southerner. Everywhere the same answer. No. We don’t have anything. Nothing. Each defeat emboldened him rather than set him back. He swaggered more. Flourished his diploma. Boldly stared down the secretaries. Demanded to speak to their bosses. The more desperate he grew, savings quickly dwindling in his pocket, the more persistent he became.

Until one day he had no money left to pay rent for the house that he shared with his cousin and three other men from their hometown. ...