Bettany's Book (14 page)

Prim travelled with Erwit in her own vehicle in convoy with the personnel of the North-East team. They found the villages of north-east Darfur more depopulated – there had been a scatter of rain a few weeks past, and then a determined dry spell. In some cases, women and old men, left behind to tend and protect the house while the rest of the family made off to find work or food in the big towns, told them the millet crop had already been baked to death in the earth.

The leader of the North-East team, a Dutchman named Martin, told Prim after their visit to el Fasher and Mawashei, which had if anything swelled as a camp in the few weeks since Stoner and she had been there, that his estimate was that this crisis would kill 200 000 people.

Prim was sceptical. ‘As many as that?’ she asked.

‘Of course. Why would you argue with such a figure?’

‘These people are clever, that’s all. Adaptive. They’re so determined. They’re not very willing to lie down.’

She had seen thin women, encouraged by a light scatter of rain to return from the city to plant millet, beating at termite nests to expose the grains that ants had stolen in better years. Would 200 000 of them and
their children perish? She remembered the day she and Stoner first encountered the columns and observed a death, a limb protruding from a grave of stones. Could that happen 200 000 times?

As the first relief convoy for Darfur gathered on 21 May, the government of President Nimeiri, subjected to even fiercer wounds than those inflicted by the letter of the provincial governor of Darfur, was overthrown by the army. It seemed a remarkably easy transition – the chief parties to the relief operations in Darfur did not need to let themselves be distracted. Large resources of international emergency food had been gathered in warehouses in North Khartoum, Omdurman, and at the edge of the New Extension, and the new regime seemed happy to see the Darfur crisis attended to.

The effort was by consent of all participants named Project West. Stoner and his staff, with the officials of the Office of African Emergency, were principally responsible for the creation of an office in Khartoum named the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They controlled a fleet of nearly four hundred trucks, and the movement of food.

Prim and Erwit were at a truck marshalling point on the western edge of Omdurman when the radio announced that the Military Council had appointed an interim civilian prime minister, who was soon pleased to cite the Darfur crisis as an indication of Dr Nimeiri’s maladministration.

The co-ordination office had assigned to Austfam an emergency feeding station in the town of Abu Grada, situated on a wadi below nubbly hills in north-east Darfur, reached by convoluted and obscure tracks in the clay. The town was a settlement of stone, mud and brush habitations occupied by people of the Fur tribe.

When the first relief truck arrived it was mobbed by people of all ages, and as Prim and Erwit joined the person in immediate charge of the proposed feeding station, a young Indian man named Pradesh from Save the Children, the cries of hungry women and youths were so intense that bags of sorghum needed to be opened on the truck itself, and people’s pannikins filled directly. Prim handed high-protein biscuits and powdered milk over the sideboards of the truck into reaching hands, some of which held pots. She saw that victimhood – although she still had doubts that these people would wish to be described as victims – did not improve human habits.

As this first, frenzied, panicky issue was in progress, an old man, who turned out to be the uncle of the town’s sheik, appeared on a wooden crutch and chastised his fellow citizens for forgetting their pride, for being raucous, for pushing the weak out of the way. His intervention permitted a conference between Prim, Pradesh and the sheik himself to take place in the shade of a brush shelter outside a mud-walled cluster of huts which belonged to the sheik’s clan. The old uncle sat by reminiscing on how the wadis, in his youth, had been full of trees, and the rainfall reliable. El Fasher, where half the town had gone in desperation to find work, had been a green city.

Under the sheik’s patronage, lists of townspeople were drawn up. Tents and tarpaulins were erected in a thicket of acacias, and supplies unloaded there. An instant feeding station was thus created. It worked by a simple equation – 5 tonnes of high-protein biscuit, and 10 US tons of sorghum were sufficient for two weeks short ration to the 2457 people whose names were on the rolls. In the next seven weeks, 157 US tons of sorghum, 43 US tons of powdered milk, and 85 tonnes of high-protein biscuit were distributed in Austfam’s name. By then the Darfur famine had been written about in
The Times
, the
New York Times
, and the
Washington Post
, and
The Times
had declared, like the Dutchman, that 200 000 lives were about to be lost. As famished as the citizens of the town, and their brethren now returning to Abu Grada from the cities, as regularly as babies perished of gastroenteritis or measles and were carried away by fathers to a cemetery area in a ravine and buried in the earth beneath heaped stones, Prim found it hard to believe so many would become victims. Such was the fame of the Darfur emergency that a Canadian NGO took over Abu Grada after some weeks.

In this time Prim discovered some of the subtleties of such emergencies. Food saved, but could also corrupt. She and Pradesh needed to complain to the sheik about families who managed to pass themselves off as greater in number than they were, or who tried to hoard and sell on to town merchants. The sheik himself was a problem: he was something of a town bank, and had loans out everywhere. He had declared no moratorium in this hard time for his borrowers, though he was genially open to adjusting repayment.

Prim, as thoroughly absorbed in the tasks of storage, distribution and record-keeping as she had ever hoped to be, was still possessed at most conscious moments by the thought of Sherif, or by the redolence of his character.

When the Canadian NGO took over Abu Grada, and Prim was back in Khartoum, feeling enlarged by the zealousness of what she had been engaged in, and suspicious of how that might cause her to act towards Sherif. Soon he visited with a draft proposal and questionnaire to send to Canberra. He also said that his Friday afternoons were free, and when he asked had she seen the
souk
in Omdurman, she found herself saying, ‘Just a flying visit.’

Thus she travelled as if for the first time in the aromatic avenues of spice dealers, amongst women who displayed coffee beans, ground nuts and fruit on woven panniers, past the stalls of the makers of filigreed jewellery and the sellers of amulets. Sherif said the small size of the produce market showed how scant Sudanese product was, and showed how poorly infrastructure – roads, railways – operated. But Prim shook her head. She did not want, amongst the fortune-teller stalls, to be distracted by politics.

The hornet’s nest dome of the tomb of the Mahdi hung over their Omdurman excursion. The Mahdi’s supporters had overrun the Anglo-Egyptian forces in the Sudan, and he had not lived to see General Kitchener take the country back for the British in 1898. Yet his ghost was so potent that Kitchener had destroyed the mausoleum. Rebuilt in modern times, entry to it was forbidden to infidels, but the house of the Khalifa, the Mahdi’s successor, was available to all-comers. Prim realised she had scarcely looked at it when Helene Codderby had brought her touring. She was suddenly engrossed by relics of the Mahdi’s war and Kitchener’s invasion, on which Sherif was calmly discursive. After God gave him his victories, said Sherif, the Mahdi lived and died in ‘heroic depravity’.

Prim wished to believe that her lack of interest the time Helene took her there to see mementos of past Sudanese travail, and the patchwork uniforms of the Mahdi’s devout soldiers, had been due to her having been in the country such a short time, of having no sense of its diversity. Besides, Sherif knew so much more even than Helene – he knew in religious terms what the diamond-shaped patches of cloth on each uniform stood for. She could see him as a calm, convinced warrior, driving out the occupying unbeliever.

Prim had a long-standing arrangement with Helene to visit the whirling dervishes in Omdurman, who danced to achieve union with God. She had found regular reasons for putting it off. When, a few days later, Sherif suggested it, she agreed to go with him. He drove her across the
White Nile bridge, left the car by the soccer stadium, and walked through a suburb of shanties before arriving in a square in front of a mosque named after a famous mystic, Hamad el Niil. This was late May, when temperatures were at an apogee, yet Prim had a sense, moving in long-sleeved blouse and knee-length skirt, of pushing aerobically through the heated air, her thin hands brown as an Egyptian’s.

By the gate of the mosque a flautist was surrounded by drummers, and in front of them was the sheik of the mosque wearing black and kneeling on a carpet of red. Red, Sherif told her, was the colour of unity with God. The flute was joined by drums, by whose thudding the dervishes appeared in fez-like hats and black cloaks from the direction of the nearby graveyard. They approached the sheik, kissed his hand and began to whirl, while the orchestra played and sang of the divine union which the dancers strove to achieve through giddiness.

The dancers shed their black overgarments and danced in patchwork tunics, just like the garments of the soldiers of the Mahdi. The name ‘whirling dervish’ had been applied to all the Mahdi’s troops but, said Sherif, it was only a minority of Sudanese who pursued Sufism, the mystic side of Islam. The Mahdi himself had danced towards God in a giddiness of eroticism.

Why did Sherif insist on taking her to such places? Why share a meeting in a palm-shaded tea-house at the city’s dusty Botanic Gardens, during which he talked drowsily, in a tannin-sated voice, about the spread of desert since his grandparents’ days, about his father who had been elderly when he was born, and a mother who died young of meningitis. As he spoke, the contours of his sentences felt so familiar to her that she forgot for minutes at a time that she was not Sudanese.

Since the successful graduation of Abuk Alier, Austfam was supporting two more women at the School of Midwifery attached to the women’s hospital in Omdurman. Partly from duty, partly out of interest, Prim visited them, and they walked her through the wards. In one room she saw an exquisite young Sudanese woman, dark-skinned but with well-defined Arab features, lying on a bed, dressed in long white skirt and embroidered shirt. Her eyes were skilfully accentuated with kohl, and the tips of her fingers were darkened with henna, as were the ankles and soles of her feet. Prim and the midwives-in-training possessed enough Arabic between them to speak with her, and during the conversation her
eyes kept straying to the door. She was waiting for her husband. She was to go home that day with her new child, who was sleeping, and for its father’s arrival she was beautified. A severe-looking nurse, dressed in layers of white, joined the group, and proved jovial. They all shared the young mother’s exaltation at having given birth to a healthy Sudanese boy, and now she was prettified and – neither the nurse nor the wife were embarrassed to say it – sewn up again. The labia had been sutured together –
infibulated
was the medical term – allowing only enough space for sex. Thus the vagina was restored to a tightness considered beneficial to any marriage. The midwives unabashedly discussed the practice – all the women of the region seemed to talk freely about it, but only in all-female company. Infibulation provided the eternally, the artificially unstretched vagina, demanded by men – even of the educated urban middle class to which this woman’s husband belonged – and promoted by mothers who had been through it all themselves. The severe-looking nurse turned to Prim and said in English, ‘It pleases her husband, who gives her gifts.’

Thus Sherif could not be interested in her, Prim believed; even if she tried she could not make herself lovely with kohl and henna. She was the sort of obsessed Western woman who had lost the gift for loveliness, though beauty might still perversely cling for a time. And she could certainly not countenance infibulation: her culture disposed her to see it as a regional lunacy, just as the lack of infibulation made the West seem lunatical to many Africans. Yet her imagination was fired by the joy and wifely alacrity of the young woman waiting, a restored bride, for the bridegroom. Well, it was just another case of women being suckers, and she had been an adequate sucker. But she could never provide such a display, such a waiting, such a sacrifice of flesh, even for Sherif.

Unhenna-ed and uncut, Prim had good reason to be armed against the fatal soppiness of womanhood. Yet in a recurrent daydream which arose without any conscious welcome from her, she saw herself grafted to Sherif. This was not in any frankly erotic way – she could avoid thinking about his chest, the mystery of his penis, the more frankly legible contour of his arse. She imagined herself instead as a little bio-packet of material, lodged under his skin, a kind of slow-release, beneficial substance which became assumed into him, growing, breathing, declining and willingly dying with him. This, she was aware, was desire attempting a conceit, imagination trying to lead her to the bed but dancing behind an image more medical than sexual. She felt obligated to see through all these tricks.

Secure in seeing through herself, in her contempt for fantasy, she invited him to the office to arrange dates for the proposed Adi Hamit survey. It could not occur before September, she would need to tell him. She would be involved in Darfur, or in the office, working with the relief effort, until then.

He came to the office and brought his normal surreptitious bottle of booze, this time vodka. The dates for the Adi Hamit survey finalised, they moved upstairs for a drink. ‘I am pleased to have such a pleasant boss,’ he told her. When he got up to go, she reached from her seat and took his wrist. ‘Stay a bit longer,’ she said. Outraged with herself, she could hear her own pulse.