Bettany's Book (9 page)

Nyala was approached through a long canyon which gave way to a plateau. On the plateau too a scatter of people were moving, and Stoner consented to take on board a lean woman who lay by the side of the road with her husband and two children. Rahmin was not happy to admit these people to his white if dusty vehicle. The husband and children emitted a mousy smell of want and fever, yet they did not have an air of defeat, Prim thought. They travelled in hope, well or ill-founded.

Scattered groves of gum arabic and vacated fields of ploughed dust yielded in the end to the unofficial outskirts of Nyala. On the town’s southern rim, by the great weathered timber enclosures of the cattle market, a huge shanty town of brush, stone, plastic, lath and old canvas spread. Because the world knew nothing of this settlement of shacks, because it was on no NGO’s map and had been given as yet no international mercy, no yardage of fresh plastic or canvas, it seemed more disreputable than Adi Hamit. The old men of this emergency, squatting on the earth and squinting through cataract-dimmed eyes at this rare entity, a white vehicle with its tranquil blue badge, were unexcited. A few of the children of this new town felt well enough to chase the truck. Even at this extremity these people bore what Prim thought of as the onus of Islam: the pride in being numbered amongst the elect; the willingness to await the decisions of an intimate God.

Nyala’s hospital was a two-storey building where, at the side door, Stoner showed admirable insistence to get the woman admitted, as the husband bowed to him and to Prim and even Rahmin, intoning, ‘
Shokran, Ya Doctour
!’

‘I’m not a doctor, sport,’ said Stoner. To which the man responded with a resonant farewell. ‘
Assalamu Alaykum
.’ ‘Depart in God’s name.’ Something like God’s work certainly waited to be done, even by egotists like Stoner and herself.

Around the barely stocked stalls of the
souk
, the newly arrived women of the countryside, their faces covered against the sun, sat in what Prim read – perhaps wrongly, she realised – as postures of acceptance. They held sleeping or sick infants at breast or lap in gracious folds of dust-dulled cloth as children tottered around them, almost casually hunting for a sorghum grain or chickpea in the dust. Hardly anyone but an egg
salesman was trading. Further up Sharia el Mellit, the stores which had shopfronts had shut themselves up tight to resist the rabble tide from out of town.

On the way north out of the city, they were in the presence of the great mountain which filled the sky to the west: Jabal Marra. Above the dirt road, raggedy tracks ascended the great, austere peak, its orange, brown, blue and grey slopes massive yet without snow, a barren mother, copious not with water but, high up, with sulphur springs. The el Fasher road ran over the lower slopes where in wadis trees grew on the strength of underground water. In such shade an occasional family took some rest, but the lines seemed thinner than yesterday’s. ‘Smaller … you know … smaller population,’ said Stoner. As the EC truck progressed and Stoner made his calculations, Prim had a glimpse of an aged woman, perhaps as old as fifty, sitting under a tebeldi tree and surrounded by her clan, while a debate raged amongst the men as to the wisdom of some continuing to town, and the weak waiting. Whatever mercy Stoner and Prim were engaged in, it would likely be too late for this matriarch.

‘What I can’t understand,’ Stoner announced, ‘is that space is full of these damn satellites. Okay? You can read a numberplate in a street in Paris, or the brand of tissue a Bulgarian’s using to blow his bloody nose. Yet the lines form up here in Darfur, and the satellites are blind as a bat to that! They’re trained like, those satellite guys, to read rocket silos and camouflaged armour. But it’s left to us, it’s left to us travelling in a bloody thirty miles per hour truck if we’re lucky to find
this
sort of thing and take a few pictures.’

That evening, on ground littered with stones, Prim, in light suddenly scant, began gathering rocks for a fireplace, soundly kicking each one before she lifted it, for fear of scorpions and camel spiders. Stoner, striding across the landscape in his huge boots, looking for kindling, sang ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the authentic accent. Eastwards of the truck, Rahmin had spread a mat and completed the obeisance of his evening prayer. Eating quickly – tuna, flatbread, tea – they retired one by one to a rock platform up the slope where a rock cleft had been chosen to serve as the outdoor cloaca. Prim washed her arms and hands with the moisturised tissues Dimp sent her from Sydney. She settled herself on her bed-roll by the rear of the truck and watched the dark mass of Jabal Marra cut into the fields of stars.

Stoner, returned from the rock platform, intruded on her feelings of separateness and repose. Standing crookedly above her, he said, ‘It’ll be colder later.’

Prim yawned and said nothing, hoping it would dismiss him. But he got down on his haunches. He sounded languid. ‘I mentioned I know the provincial governor. He’s an army man, Colonel Unsa. Given what we’ve seen, Primrose, d’you think you’d like to have a word with him? If I can fix it, okay?’

‘Me! I thought it was going to be
us
.’

‘Well, see … I’m supposed to work through the central government. Spilling the beans, you know, to a provincial governor first … that’d be a violation of the protocols.’

Since he had deprived the night of all which had been sedative, she sat up. But who was she to complain?

Stoner said, ‘I should warn you, you’ll get nothing out of the bugger, not at first. He’ll say you’ll have to approach the Khartoum authorities. I’ll do that anyhow. But when I do, it’ll be like good for the sods to know that through you the responsible locals have been told. I mean, you might get something written out of him. Maybe something recommending the government to give you a bit of a hearing. A note from him … that’d be fantastic.’

As much as ever she felt that the moral force of his demands was difficult to challenge. ‘I have my NGO to think of,’ she argued. ‘It isn’t that I don’t want to help. But we have our way of doing business too.’

‘My God, the man’s not going to give Austfam any problems. His Excellency Colonel Unsa’s chief demeanour will be a kind of haughty embarrassment. And by the way, I ought to tell you, he’s a, you know, a sybarite. Keeps boys. Mustn’t let your colonial puritanism show through, eh?’

He left without more argument and walked to his bed-roll. He still wore his boots. ‘Do you always wear your footwear to bed?’ she asked.

‘Footwear,’ he said, laughing at the nicety of the term. ‘Okay, why do you behave as if you don’t care how good-looking you are?’ Prim felt a flush of anger at this banality. ‘I’m not going to answer a question like that.’

He grinned crookedly and made a sceptical noise. ‘Good night,’ he said.

El Fasher was a traditional marshalling point for camel caravans, which would sound romantic, she realised, to those who’d never met a camel or a camel wrangler. In a sweltering mid-morning she saw the el Fasher minarets wavering in the haze. She and Stoner took rooms in the Berti, an old-fashioned hotel of what seemed to be crumbling mud brick adobe, and Stoner rang his contact, the governor’s aide, and seemed with ease to arrange an interview for Prim. Stoner had done some calculations of uncertain value (at least in Prim’s eyes) of the scale of what was, however measured, a disaster, and briefed Prim on her pitch to the governor.

Asked by Stoner and Prim if refugees had reached the city, the hotel owner said there were people living in hovels at a suburb named Mawashei, just by the huge camel trading market to the north. They were, he said,
nazihiin
, beggars, from some low-caste northern tribes like the Zaghawa who came to town each year to sell fodder and charcoal. Their women and children were with them, but only because Ramadan started in four weeks and in that time of charity the fasting city people were more likely to be kind to beggars. Don’t you worry! the hotel manager said. That’s what they’re here for!

They drove to Mawashei, and its houses of sticks and pieces of fabric. Women and children were searching the afternoon dust outside a haulage garage for grains of sorghum, and – it seemed – for straw to eat as pottage. Stoner and Prim chatted with a turbaned, talkative man who lived there – of indefinite age, very thin, but of good morale. He told Stoner the provincial government had issued a ration of sorghum earlier in the month. It didn’t have much more money though, he stated with a lack of bitterness. Did he come here every year? Stoner asked him. Oh yes, in the months when people waited for rain. If it rained he would go home to his village to the north-east and take his widowed mother, wife and children with him. But God willed no rain in the country last year, and rains were already late this year.

Women and children in the yards, and amongst the hobbled camels, looked as if they were combing the animals’ fur, and the man admitted without any apparent shame that they were collecting camel fleas. Prim managed to ask him why in passable Arabic. He said, to eat of course.

At the
souk
Prim bought a long white dress for the interview, and a white shawl for her head and shoulders. She walked the few blocks to the palace, mentioned her appointment to the soldier at the gate in the
wall, and was led within. From the courtyard the place had the look of a left-over barracks out of Kipling – a high wall, a working fountain, a garden and small parade ground, a U-shaped two-storeyed, plastered white building encasing the central space. The governor’s office was on the upper level. A handsome army captain in fatigues met her at the bottom of the stairs, saluted, smiled as if signalling he was in conspiracy with her, and led her upstairs.

Colonel Unsa answered the knock, rising from a large desk by a wide-open French window. He was lean and good-looking, and he too wore military fatigues. He pointed Prim to a chair, which the captain adjusted for her before departing. Her only nervousness as she sat was to do with being an effective advocate for people who were more strangers to her than to him.

Sitting behind the great, ungracious desk, the governor gave off a mixed message of severity and whimsy. Stoner had warned Prim he was a cultivated sybarite, and he proved to be English-speaking, and with a posh accent – he’d been to the Royal Staff College some time back. They chatted about broad matters – he’d read a lot of Graham Greene, and loved and disapproved of his novels.

‘Have you, for example, read
The Heart of the Matter
?’ he asked lightly, like a man with a well-developed thesis. ‘It represents high imperialism as far as I’m concerned. Africa existing merely as a nether-world to assure the damnation of whites who deserve it, cannot escape it, and – in their sins – desire it. I do hope young persons from the West have achieved a healthier view. After all, Africa is more than a highly coloured backdrop for flawed Europeans to anguish before.’

Prim felt edgy about defending Greene, since she had till this journey seen, and perhaps still did see, the Sudan as serving a purpose, a sanctuary in which she might be numbly safe. ‘Don’t you think though that if every Westerner knew as much about Africa as Greene, there’d be better lines of communications between the two worlds?’

The governor’s eyes were alight. ‘Ah, there you have it. The two worlds, you say. What happened to the third world on one hand, and on the other, one world of universal brotherhood?’

‘Well …’ said Prim, feeling not so much bested but subjected to conjuring. She wondered if she had failed a test, but before she could go on, refreshments were brought in.

They were borne by the sort of people who lived in the camp at Adi Hamit, by two lovely Dinka boys dressed in immaculate
galabias
. Each
was carrying a tray, one with tea cups and cinnamon sticks, and another a teapot and a plate of figs. Prim saw His Excellency’s hand close round the lower arm of one of them, and wondered whether this was a caress, and if so, avuncular or indecent? Stoner had accused her of being a puritan, but it was more than the mere puritan in her that was appalled. Colonel Unsa saw it and explained that they were Dinka boys from the war zone. He was, he said, educating them. They would live in misery without him, he implied.

Prim tried to clear her brain of this new bug, the impulse to make an accusation, or an utterly stupid offer to buy the boys back. Out of respect for the chief debate, she decided, she must suppress that impulse and start talking about His Excellency’s citizens, the people whom she had seen crowding into Nyala just to achieve visibility.

The colonel absorbed the news of what Prim and Stoner had witnessed around Nyala. He did not try to explain it away, he did not stoop to blaming the West and the spread of the desert, badmouthing the international commodity market and the International Monetary Fund, all the stuff more commonly heard around Khartoum.

‘This sort of crisis,’ he said, ‘is hard to read. Did you take any film footage?’

‘No. We have photographs still to be developed. But whatever my limitations, Fergal Stoner can read the signs.’

‘Oh yes, I suppose he could,’ said the governor, playfully evasive. ‘After all, Mr Stoner represents Europe amongst us. But I’m sure you know that for many people in the countryside, coming to the city to work or beg while waiting for the harvest is a yearly event.’

This sounded dismissive enough to make Prim lean forward and draw together her knees in their immaculate fabric. ‘Yes, but I’m told they don’t move out in entire clans. Stoner and I saw whole clans. And there are entire clans at the camel markets too. And they tell us that you’ve made a special issue of sorghum.’

‘Oh yes,’ said His Excellency lightly.

‘We wondered, if these are normal times, why is there a need of a special issue?’

‘Well, of course, this is a year of special hardship. But even under special hardship, you know, people have their devices for getting through, and they have their pride.’

Since this was a thought Prim had had the day before in Mawashei, to hear it come from his lips was confusing. It was as if he could
immediately see the advantage he had. Now he became dolorously sincere. ‘An individual will sometimes starve rather than be fed by a person who takes away his pride. I’ve seen it happen. Even amongst the enemy in the South. And if poor people from north and west of el Fasher, from say the hills, or the banks of the el Ku, have pride which surpasses death, so does the nation. Before a nation holds out its hand to the world, it always considers the implications for its self-esteem. This should not surprise anyone. Look at the gulf between black and white health in the United States! No one in the US likes even well-meaning foreigners trying to influence policy on such matters.’