Bettany's Book (10 page)

Prim had a sense of concerns being very pleasantly allayed; of the lessons of resignation being taught.

He said, ‘I receive regular reports from village sheiks and policemen. What you have to say was not utterly unexpected. But I cannot myself authorise a survey of Darfur to determine the scale of distress. It’s a huge area with poor roads, and I lack adequate staff. And I cannot myself invite any international relief effort. That is a decision reserved to the president himself, His Excellency President Jaafar el Nimeiri.’

Prim wanted to keep the right aloofness. Everyone said it was easy to be charmed by the Sudanese bureaucracy, by people like Unsa. It was easy, under the influence of the big sky, to go along with what had been said to her and Stoner earlier, something about God knowing and taking whomsoever he wanted. Since God is a being of deserts, of the great one-eyed sky met in deserts, it was seductively easy to take the God-like view; easy – even for a disbeliever – to shuffle the papers and sigh, and wait on God’s will or something slower, a new direction from Khartoum. Prim was dressed in the pure white cotton that stood for Sudanese acceptance of the world as it is, and had to struggle against that tendency.

So she made a self-conscious attempt to summon conviction and zeal. ‘I would like to ask you this. If I or someone else tries to get the permission of the president to conduct a more thorough survey, could we safely say that we have the approval of the governor of Darfur?’ She felt the blood pounding in her throat. How could she make such a plea? A disconnected soul, ten months in the Sudan! ‘And … would you consider putting that provisional approval in writing. For me to take to Khartoum?’

With a handsome smile he asked, ‘That’s Mr Stoner’s idea, isn’t it?’ Then to her amazement he nodded and reached across his desk for a sheet of paper, writing in English a draft letter with an old-fashioned, chubby fountain pen. When he had finished, he read it to her.

Provincial Administrative Palace
El Fasher
Darfur Province
Republic of Sudan
22 April 1985

To whom it may concern

The bearer of this letter brings to the provincial capital intelligence of a supposed food emergency in the Nyala region. Her anecdotal evidence is based on the observations not only of herself but of another experienced aid officer, an officer of the European Economic Community, who calculated that the present emergency may affect as many as 300 000 people or even more. The report is such as to warrant inquiry by Government, and should His Excellency the President of the Republic authorise an assessment and the initiation of an international relief operation, he may depend upon the assistance of the Provincial Government.

He asked Prim whether that did it, and promised her it would be reliably transmuted into Arabic. When she was effusive with her thanks, he held up a hand, salmon-coloured on the palm. He called in a secretary, and chatted with Prim until the letter was copied in Arabic in the outer office. Between them, he and Prim polished off the pot of tea. And even grateful for his generous letter, and not wanting to bite the hand that signed it, she still wished to ask, Are you a slave-holder, you bastard?

She could not understand why the matter pressed on her. Even if she were an abolitionist, she was not even sure slavery existed. Did she want it to? Did its reality suit some fanatic need in her?

They celebrated her success at the palace with a meal of
gonnonia
, sheep’s stomach stewed with onions and tomatoes, eaten in the Berti’s dining room. Throughout she could not be utterly at ease. She watched Stoner with an excessive, spooky fear that he might try to drag their partnership further than it could be permitted to stretch. It was not so much an offer of sex she feared. It was that she believed she would find it beyond bearing if she saw in Stoner’s face the same radiant, childlike striving which had characterised Auger in seduction mode.

The next morning an Eyptian pilot from Nile Expeditions Charter turned up by cab and took them out to the edge of the town to a tarred airstrip, a radio beacon above its little white terminal building. As the pilot gathered up their movement permits with their passport-sized photographs attached, and went inside to have a chat about his flight plan, Stoner and Prim sat on chairs by the outer wall, watching as their Cessna was being filled, from a white, cylindrical reservoir of aviation fuel beside the runway, by a chain of young men in
galabias
and loose white turbans carrying watering cans with the roses taken off. These they handed up to a foreman who stood bare-headed, first on the starboard wing of the Cessna, then on the port. Prim was pleased to see that the Egyptian pilot, when the starboard tanks were full, checked them for water contamination with a gauge he carried.

Beside her on his plastic garden chair, Stoner said, ‘You see that? They don’t have enough foreign exchange to buy a fuel pump for el Fasher. Or they probably have a pump, but, you know, they can’t afford the replacement parts.’ He went on as if this were part of a seamless argument. ‘What do you reckon if I took the liberty of inviting you to dinner at the Rimini?’

The Rimini Hotel in Khartoum was owned by Italians, a family which had been in the city for most of the century. In their dining room white-clad and turbaned Sudanese waiters, resembling to Prim’s semi-informed eye classic Nubians from a film, served tall tumblers of iced lemonade, and plates of robust soup and Nile perch.

He looked at her frankly. ‘Jesus, you’re – you know – such a lovely bird.’

‘Did you run out of courage to say that last night?’

‘Hey, don’t be a hard bitch.’

The idea of his nervousness made her brave.

‘Listen, you’ll get nowhere with the old lines! Besides, I couldn’t go. I’m spending the night with Helene Codderby.’

‘Are you?’ he asked as if he knew it was a lie. He did not seem much disappointed. ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But look, one thing I’ve got to tell you for, you know, free. Don’t pursue this slave business.’ She had mentioned to him not only the tale of Abuk Alier the midwife, but the two boys at the governor’s palace. ‘The whole thing’s too arguable,’ he said. ‘Let’s put the question in a, you know, a Western context. Take California say, where you’ll find live-in maids, Mexican, working seven days for $50 a week and board and scared if they make demands they’ll
be reported to the immigration people. Say you wanted to make representations about that! Would it be the most fruitful thing to inform press and politicians that this is slavery? People would say, if this is slavery, why are so many men and women crossing the border every night to get in on it?’

Prim said nothing. She felt half-ashamed, like a person being chastised for a pornographic interest.

‘If you so much as shout, “Slave!” no one out there in our world’s going to listen. Whereas they’ll listen to Darfur, see.’

Prim was willing to pretend that he had defused her callow moral imagination. The food crisis was certainly the immediate game. Besides, the pilot, beside whom she sat for the flight, mentioned some chance of a
haboob
– a sandstorm. For the first hour, however, they traversed the bell of unsullied blue above a sloping plain which ran illimitably down towards the shores of the White Nile. Higher than Jabal Marra, Prim savoured this map of desolation, with every nuance of earth, every wadi, exactly visible. The el Milk, a dry Mississippi, ran hundreds of miles north-south, and a robust play of light defined it, its banks as discernible as if they brimmed with living water.

But around ten o’clock, and within ten seconds, all the sharpness and clarity of earth vanished. A bottomless grey wall rose before them, an apparently static explosion of earth into air. Its top was close and level with the nose of the aircraft. Prim felt very little turbulence. The great globe of dust seemed too concerned with its own inner physics to give the charter plane a shaking. She avoided asking the pilot whether this moiling ball, huge as a moon, could affect the engines. She knew it could penetrate a scarf and fill a mouth. In Khartoum she had sat with all doors and windows shut against the sibilant pinging of the raging grit, and seen the particles intrude beneath an unplugged rim of door.

‘Time we tried it,’ the pilot cried merrily. He eased the controls imperceptibly forward, and the world vanished. A greyness thicker than cloud pressed up against each window. No margin of air existed between it and the windscreen. The interior of the plane became instantly fierce. For a while Prim played with a ventilator beside her, jiggling and twisting, as if coolness could be persuaded to enter. At ground level in Darfur, the famished moved with game dignity to non-existent succour. In the South forces armed with AK-47s moved against each other with Old Testament fervour. Why should she still believe herself the immortal centre of things?

‘Tell me if you see the ground,’ the pilot cried.

At a little over 2000 feet, give or take the margin of error the pilot was willing to ignore, Prim and Stoner simultaneously saw a road and densely packed houses of mud brick. ‘There, there,’ they both cried. But then the sight was swallowed again, and the pilot took the plane up. Prim felt a strong annoyance. She had discovered the ground for him, and he had lost it on her. Somewhere below, shut in, were the secure comfort of her books, her bed in the corner, her prints of Fred Williams’s Australian landscapes affixed to the wall with little gobbets of dry putty.

But the second descent and attempt to find Khartoum was successful. At 1800 feet they saw again streets of dust and shuttered houses, exquisite in the fog of sand. With restored professional certitude, the pilot banked the plane in air which was now blue-grey, the air of a London winter dusk, though it was still mid-morning in Khartoum. Far out, away to their right, Prim saw Khartoum airport, end-on, all its lights glittering, and wind seemed to blow their aircraft into line with this illumined avenue. The touchdown was accomplished with an almost flamboyant delicacy, and they taxied off to the charter company hangar, the hut which served as company office. A number of charter pilots – Egyptians, Frenchmen who had flown aircraft for the Chaddian forces, handsome Somalis – emerged in company uniforms and epaulettes and began shaking the hand of the Egyptian and clapping him on the shoulder, a fraternal exhibition which seemed to confirm that there had been some peril. The terminal itself lay shut tight. No big jet, with its tendency to ingest birds and debris, could do what the Egyptian’s plane had done.

Landed now in the miasma of this storm, they found the air intolerably dense, scalding and yet still. They took a taxi to Stoner’s office at the EC compound which was empty except for the doorman, who reclined on cement in the corridor. He opened up the office where, beneath creaky fans, Stoner and Prim wrote and faxed further reports of the Darfur emergency to their respective headquarters, asking them to be ready to act, and to use their good offices to alert governments and exploit diplomatic channels.

But Stoner had not quite finished asking Prim for favours. He got the doorman to make them tea and as he and Prim sat in air dense as cotton wool, muttered, ‘I know this other bloke.’

‘What other bloke?’ Prim asked.

‘Well, he’s a Sudanese doctor. Got a practice in Khartoum. Does some gynaecology. Now most Sudanese guys will, you know, divorce their
wives if they see a male doctor, so his practice is limited to the liberal bourgeoisie … bit of a shrinking class in the good old Sudan. But this doctor’s well-connected to the president’s office. His cousin’s an economic aide to the president. His name’s Doctor Sherif Taha. Maybe … you know … you could go and see him.’

‘Another damn hoop to jump through?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s like the problem with Colonel Unsa. EC people aren’t supposed to go breaking down doors.’

‘And so I’ve got to go and see this doctor, and ask him to introduce me to his cousin. And what do I have to do for you after that? What other odd jobs?’

‘Okay, it isn’t like my fault there’s a bloody disaster down there,’ said Stoner with some justice. ‘I promise to do my part – I’ll send out a story on the BBC by way of that stick the Codderby woman. The Sudanese won’t like it, but it’ll help mount pressure.’

It was vanity to think he might be trying to cement her to him by setting her tasks. And yet, even in the face of the Darfur catastrophe, she feared that.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But after this, I’ll go back to taking orders from Austfam, not from you. That doctor again?’

‘Sherif Taha,’ said Stoner.

‘Okay. I’ll see him,’ said Primrose. Having been delivered safely from the huge ball of sand, she felt she must go the full distance.

‘Good girl,’ sighed Stoner.

Back at the offices of Austfam, she found a letter which Erwit the Eritrean driver had put aside for her, a letter which was clearly from Dimp.

Woolarang
Double Bay
21 April 1985

Dearest Prim,

Sent yesterday to Khartoum the things you ordered. Imagine them not being able to afford importing tampons any more! Come home for sweet Christ’s sake! I don’t know why you’ve chosen to stay in that place, particularly since they’ve left you in the lurch and not appointed any replacement for that Crouch fellow. Is that industrial justice? I ask. You’re running the whole place and getting a mere assistant field officer’s pay. Tax-free, I can hear you say. So what, if you can’t buy tampons!

Now look, that bastard Dr Robert bloody Auger has buggered off – got a chair at some cow university in America. He’s absolutely forgotten round here. Lechers are okay, you know what they want. But lying and forging, that’s too much for me. Enough said. I know you’ll be shitty at me for mentioning A–u–g–e–r. But I’m bloody shipping you tampons, so be nice.

The matter of Bren: I can’t believe how long this crowd at the Holy Roman Rota – that’s the marriage court of the Vatican – are taking to come up with the annulment. The archdiocese here has already recommended it, so apparently it’s as good as in the bag. But the Rota are taking longer than the first marriage lasted, and the longer they take the more conscious I become of Bren’s first wife, Robyn, of whom I have no clear picture but whose reality this bloody delay seems to reinforce.

In the meantime, don’t come back if you’re still deluded enough to think anyone gives a damn about the
affaire
Auger. It’s not that they do know. It’s the expectation that they might know – that’s what you’re scared of. But you could surely make a life somewhere they sell aspirin over the counter.

I even have proof that sensible people are giving up on the Sudan. There was a fellow from Foreign Affairs at a dinner we went to the other night, and he told me, while every other boring bastard in the room was talking bauxite and molybdenum, that the government’s own agency is edging out of Africa anyhow. Asia’s closer, more definitely our business and, he says, somewhat less volatile and more responsive in every sense to the development dollar. If you want to see results for your aid dollar, Asia’s the go! Sudan – he just laughed. The crazy invalid. The sick man. And as you have pointed out, the sick poor bloody woman too. So the most intractable case of all is of course the place you – with your infallible nose for these things – have chosen as your domicile.

So consider your region, eh sis? If you have to work in places with cerebral malaria, choose somewhere where your dear native Southern land has diplomatic and commercial stakes.

Hey, if that annulment ever comes through, will you come to the wedding? It’ll be nice. Bren has a Jesuit lined up to do it. None of those nuptial masses. Just a little ceremony. Vows, and a prayer for the bride. Who is, to be believed or otherwise, until you come home, your admiring and very concerned poor old sod of a sister.

Dimp

As Prim read the pleasant, plain letter from her sister, a mild fever shook her shoulders. Perhaps as a result of too many shocks on the road, she developed something like the flu overnight, as if her body wanted to accommodate her with a reason to call Dr Sherif Taha and make an appointment in halting Arabic. His listing in the English language directory for Khartoum had the subtext: ‘Sudan Institute of Epidemiology’, and in smaller print still he admitted to being involved in general and obstetrical practice, to have qualified at Guy’s hospital in London and to have a Master of Science degree in tropical fevers from Louisiana State University. Two empires had given him the nod, thought Prim.