Bettany's Book (97 page)

She reached over his waist, spilling tears. ‘Don’t cry,’ he told her brightly. ‘It won’t make the Nile any higher.’

It was a Sudanese proverb, and his loyalty to his own idiom moved her to increased tears.

‘Do you have any coffee?’ he asked.

‘I’ll stop at the corner and buy some.’ She slotted herself behind the steering wheel and slammed the door in the face of the sentry.

‘Are you in pain, darling?’ she asked, pulling away. ‘Do you have pills for it?’

He unleashed his strange new laugh. ‘They gave me ten aspirin,’ he said, and anyone else would have thought he was hugely tickled by that, the gesture, the precise number.

‘And sleeping pills?’

‘I’ve got them at home.’

‘They won’t let me stay with you the night.’

He said nothing, neither in fear nor disappointment. She wondered if
she needed to mother him perhaps more than he needed to be mothered. Wherever they lived in the future, she would take courses in how to live with the victims of torture, and behave with greater certainty than she knew how tonight. How many questions did one ask? Was a person meant to inquire, ‘What did they do to you?’ Or was it the right thing to ignore the fact that the beloved had spent some time in the pit?

‘It’s cooler,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

He began to laugh again. ‘That was Safi, you know. Safi el Rahzi. Under the sheet.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I saw the el Rahzis in the hospital corridor.’

‘I fared better than him,’ said Sherif frankly, turning his face however, looking out the window at the near-curfew streets. ‘Remember that meal at the el Rahzis’, when el Dhouma talked about that mad theologian and the Big Bang, and time running backwards? All the evil deeds taking place and then feeding themselves back to their beginnings. All our good deeds connected by a golden thread – he said that, a ‘golden thread’ – to their founding impulses. I haven’t seen too many golden threads in recent times.’

And he kept laughing in that same odd way. Prim dreaded that laugh since it put him back in a cell of his own. She felt less than a secure hold on events as she parked outside the corner store, in which a dim yellow light still shone, and bought some coffee. As she emerged, she came close to collision with a tall, Southern man. He wore a cloth around his lower body, but on his upper body a shirt and vest and tie. His head was bare. ‘Would madam like Scotch whisky?’ he murmured.

Prim could think at that moment of few things more necessary to the hour. But of course, she understood, the man was an
agent provocateur
, put there to drag her and Sherif back into official torments. It then graciously came to her that such a minor instigation would be unworthy of the system. The fellow was merely a black marketeer. She found the requested £60 Sudanese in her pocket. From within a slot inside his waistcoat, the man extruded a full bottle of whisky sheathed in corrugated cardboard. He dropped it into the large paper bag which held the coffee. He too was making his way in the Sudan.

As Sherif and Prim entered the withered garden of his medical practice, Sherif moving with upright wariness. ‘Is your back hurting?’ asked Prim, walking behind with the coffee and whisky.

‘A little,’ he said. ‘One of the vertebrae.’

‘You may need an x-ray.’

‘Oh, they x-rayed me for free at the hospital. The doctor said it would give me some discomfort all my life.’

‘Some discomfort?’ asked Prim, and then, tentatively, ‘Did he know how you got it?’

‘I told him it was a fall I had, getting down from a truck.’

And the laughter again. Should she ask how it happened? Did she have licence to ask? There would be time to do it, in safer latitudes.

They went in past the surgery. ‘Perhaps I should get the rubbing alcohol,’ chuckled Sherif.

‘Oh, I didn’t tell you, I got some Scotch from a man outside the store.’

‘Good girl!’ he said. ‘Very good girl! Nothing like a party!’

At the head of the stairs Prim unlocked the living room door with her key, and, somehow amazed that throughout Sherif’s time in torture the filament of this living room light had remained intact. She had feared the punitive darkness, yet was now able to consult her watch. ‘We have an hour and a half before I must go,’ she said. She wanted him, her maimed man, but it was unlikely he could yet consider such things. She opened windows and the door onto the balcony, but near-closed the jalousies.

‘I believe there’s some pasta and a few cans of tuna,’ he said. ‘We can spice it up with Worcestershire sauce. The mainstay of my student years.’ And again he laughed. Almost anything he found hilarious, yet he could not look away from her quickly enough.

‘First, you sit down,’ Prim said, helping him to a seat. She went to his kitchen, poured them each a glass of Scotch and filled it up with bottled water from the refrigerator. She raised her glass in a toast. She had intended to say, ‘To us, Sherif and Primrose,’ but an uncertainty overtook her. He was looking sideways in any case.

‘Happy days,’ she decided on.

‘And smiling dawns,’ he said, but again avoiding her eye. She took a sip of acrid liquor, standing above him as he left his untasted. Then she put the glass down and drew him gently sideways to her, so that his shoulder lay against her hip.

‘Sherif, my love, I will go anywhere with you. England, Germany.’

‘Oh, I think I’ll stay here,’ he said in a dazed, muffled voice. ‘Home base.’

‘You can’t mean that,’ she said. But there was no point in arguing with him when he was barely home from an unimaginable planet, from events so obscure that they occurred in places called ‘ghost houses’.

‘I want to stay here. And have my patients back.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what if you took Australian citizenship as a precaution?’

He drank. ‘How could I achieve such a precious jewel?’

‘Well, I don’t want to be forward, but by marriage. That’s a good way.’

‘That’s a very good way,’ he said. ‘And the Scotch is wonderful. I want to stay here.’

She chose to laugh now, when he was not laughing at all. ‘It’s such a short ride from here to the airport, dearest Sherif. Your cousin says he’ll get you an exit visa. You can go to Riyadh or London or Rome. Or Sydney. Marry me, for God’s sake, Sherif. There, I’m doing the proposing. I can make you an Australian.’

‘And live in Australia?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’

She sat and pulled him closer, but again with regard for his scars, his tender points. His head lay still between her breasts. It was utterly unmoving, and she began to wonder if she was hurting him. She relaxed her hold.

‘Will everyone pity me for being a Sudanese? I wouldn’t want to be pitied for that.’

‘No one will pity you. You will have respect. You can practise medicine.’

‘Yes. But they’ll want to talk about the wardrobe!’

‘The wardrobe?’

‘The little space they lock you in. It’s called a wardrobe. They would want me to say my people are uniquely cruel. Well, they are not!’

‘They … no, look, you wouldn’t need to talk about anything. You could just … practise medicine. You’d walk straight into an Australian job.’

‘But they would want to know. They would ask.’

‘Ask what?’

‘The wardrobe,’ said Sherif again. And then he spoke with abnormal rapidity. ‘And you see they wet the bedstead to increase conductivity and put clips on nipples and balls and there’s a little hand generator on the table, and he turns the handle and zippo! it’s all fried and shouting alleluia.’ His voice took on the tranquillity of a craft which had just shot the rapids. ‘They’ll want to know about that but they won’t be equipped to understand it.’

‘Please. Relax. You don’t have to decide anything. And you don’t have to explain.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s pig’s arse, Primrose. That’s supreme pig’s arse. Until I explain myself, no one can understand me.’

‘Tonight,’ she said, holding his shoulders gently, ‘none of that applies.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘some of it does. Why is your Arabic so pedestrian, Primrose? Why did you resist it?’

‘I didn’t resist it. But I’ve found it difficult.’

‘If you did not consider us contemptible, would you have learned at a greater pace? Would you have had the same difficulties with French or German?’

She stepped back. She wondered whether, as well as burning and bruising him, they had indoctrinated him?

‘Arabic is a reach for me, Sherif. We share common words with French and German.’

‘You don’t even see the point,’ he said, and he took his glass of whisky and drank it very quickly, all but draining it. ‘Ah, that is very nice. Forbidden, fermented grain. John Barleycorn, as they say. You say you are my beloved, but you resist my language.’

‘No,’ said Prim. ‘That’s untrue.’

‘And if I leave the Sudan, I cannot tell anyone anything. For they do not have the ears to hear. They don’t know the language. They see themselves as bringers of something to me, and me as a bringer of human rights gossip to them. My tale, if I could tell it, would give them a
frisson
but change nothing. If I wish to speak, I must stay in my country. It’s here that the meaning of anything I say will be understood at once. No one would say, “Those contemptible Muslims! Those contemptible Sudanese!” Only here, in this city, in this bloody, bloody desert, do I have anything to say. Elsewhere, I would be rendered dumb.’

It was a statement of too much weight to argue with. She disengaged herself.

‘Let me make dinner.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Do you want more whisky?’

‘It causes insomnia,’ he told her, and there was the turned head and the laughter again.

So she found the dry spaghetti and began to boil water and salt, and she shed tears as she worked. She opened two cans of tuna and put them in a bowl. When she went into the living room to look at him, she saw
that he had poured more whisky. She had already bought him a ticket, Khartoum–London–Sydney. She had thought he might report to Human Rights Watch in London. It had not occurred to her that although he believed passionately that he had been tortured, he did not believe in the capacity of outsiders to hear.

She was reduced to domesticity, to taking plates to the table.

‘How are your anti-slavery people?’ he asked suddenly.

‘There’s some hope the UN is listening.’

There was a mirthless snort from Sherif. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we can all rest easy now.’

She tried to make it a joke and told him he was a cynic, as if any other posture were appropriate for one who had seen what he had seen. She had an image she wished to dismiss, of Sherif spreadeagled against a wall, a crucified Muslim. Had he screamed to behold the electrodes?

She shook her head. ‘You know,’ she said, almost for something to say, her words sounding to her shrill with nervousness, ‘there are still parts of your body healing … I know you are a private and proud man. I didn’t come here with any expectations …’ And yet her voice would not stop trembling with expectation. She wanted to consume his vulnerable flesh. He turned his head in acknowledgment or rebuff.

She went to test the spaghetti, which proved to be
al dente
. She poured it through a too-small strainer, so that ropes of it fell to the floor. I’ve done very badly, she thought. I have handled this meeting very poorly. As she stooped she saw by her watch that she had a little less than an hour to resolve all questions. There would be other meetings. But would his face always be turned? She put the tuna on top of the bowlful of spaghetti. It looked like a less than satisfactory meal for a man released from a ghost house. She bore it to Sherif anyhow.

‘I saw your friend el Rahzi again,’ she said on an impulse as she filled his plate, as if it might serve as some sort of shock tactic. ‘I went to
hidad
at the house. Helene Codderby tells me they are planning peace meetings with the relatives of other dead soldiers. They intend to compile lists ––’

‘El Rahzi himself is safe enough,’ said Sherif. ‘Half the cabinet were taught by him.’

‘I hope he is safe,’ said Prim, but she was aware that her instinct, that this news would act as a catalyst, had been mistaken. He seemed more grafted in place, here in his rooms in Khartoum, than ever before. So she set herself to the task of heaping his plate, refilling his whisky glass and asking, ‘Shall I pour some more sauce? Say when.’

Standing above him she saw his skull, dry beneath wiry hair. She bent and kissed it.

‘I’m sorry, my love,’ he said, putting his arm around her. ‘I cannot become a foreigner again. When I was a foreigner before, I was still young.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said. And yet in a kind of desperation, ‘We can live anywhere you choose. Egypt. That’s not so foreign. Saudi.’

Above his untasted food, he had a sip of his whisky.

‘I’m a broken man,’ he said.

‘And I’ll mend you. Somewhere.’

He turned his head and did the laugh. ‘But I’m Sudanese.’

‘I was aware of that.’

‘I’m Sudanese,’ he said again.

Then he began to eat, forking up the spaghetti and tuna quite hungrily for a man with scars. He resembled someone eating a solitary, not a shared meal.

She had no option but to sit opposite him and eat some spaghetti and tuna herself, hoping that she would turn him back into her betrothed by demonstration. Look, I eat from the same bowl as you! She was to leave within days. She presumed but could not be certain that she would see him again. But she could not hold through a night and persuade him.

He took another swig of the whisky.

‘Prim,’ he said, ‘there was never any need for you to buy into this curse. It was a kind of wilfulness. Misdirected. Nothing could come of it. Of course, I didn’t know this at first. I’m culpable in my desire.’

Prim pushed her plate aside and wept as quietly as she could.

‘Don’t be upset, baby,’ said Sherif. ‘Baby’ was not a normal endearment for him. It had the sound of threat. And she desisted, since she did not want to cause him any more pain. The regime had done that: the courses open to normal lovers – devices, stratagems, pleadings – had been stolen.