In High Places (8 page)

If only he had learned to read and write, to use pencil and paper for storing things from the mind, as this man and others like him did. Then he, too - Henri Duval - could preserve thoughts and the memory of things past. And not everything would have to stay in his brain, as on a shelf, hoping it would not become lost in forgetfulness, as some of the things he searched for now, it seemed, had done.

His mother had spoken once of schooling. She herself had been taught as a child to read and write. But that was long ago, and his mother had died before any schooling for himself could be begun. After that there was no one else to care what, or whether, he learned.

He frowned, his young face creased, groping for recollection; trying to answer the questions; to remember, remember, remember...

First there had been the ship. His mother had told him of it and it was on the ship that he had been born. They had sailed from Djibouti, in French Somaliland, the day before his birth and he believed that his mother had once told him where the ship was bound, but he had long since forgotten. And if she had ever said what flag the ship flew, that was forgotten too.

The birth had been hard and there was no doctor. His mother became weak and fevered and the ship's captain had turned his vessel, putting back into Djibouti. At the port, mother and child had been taken to the hospital for the poor.

- They had had little money, then or later.

Henri remembered his mother as comforting and gentle. His impression was that she was beautiful, but perhaps this was

'only fancy because the memory of how she looked had faded in his mind and now, when he thought of her, her face was in shadow, with features vague. But she had given him love; that much he was sure of, and he remembered because it was the only love he had ever known.

The early years were disjointed fragments in his mind. He knew that his mother had worked, when she could, to keep them in food, though at times there had been none. He had no recollection of the kind of work his mother had done, though he believed at one time she had been a dancer. The two of them had moved around a good deal - from French Somali-land into Ethiopia, first to Addis Ababa, then Massawa. Two or three times they had made the Djibouti-Addis Ababa trek.

At the beginning they had lived, though meagrely, among other French nationals. Later, as they had become poorer still, the native quarter was all the home they knew. Then, when Henri Duval was six, his mother had died.

After his mother's death his memories were mixed again. For a time - it was hard to be sure how long - he had lived in the streets, begging for food and sleeping at night in whatever hole or corner he could find. He had never gone to the authorities; it had not occurred to him to do so, for among the circle he moved in the police were looked on as enemies, not friends.

Then an elderly Somali, living alone in a hovel in the native quarter, had taken him in and provided shelter of a sort. The arrangement had lasted five years and then, for some reason, the old man left and Henri Duval was alone once more.

This time he drifted from Ethiopia across into British Somaliland, getting work where he could, and for another four years he was variously a shepherd's helper, a goatherd, and a boat boy, eking out a precarious day-to-day existence with wages seldom more than food and shelter.

Then and later, crossing international borders had been simple. There were so many families with children on the move that officials at border points seldom bothered with the children individually. At such moments he would merely attach himself to a family and pass unnoticed through the guards. In time he became adept at it. Even in his late teens his small stature continued to make this possible. Until, at twenty, after travelling with some Arab nomads, he was stopped for the first time and turned back at the borders of French Somaliland. ,

Two truths were now revealed to Henri Duval. One: his days of slipping across borders with groups of children were over. Second: French Somaliland, which until this moment he had regarded as his own country, was closed to him. The first thing he had already suspected; the second came as a profound shock.

Fatefully, inevitably, he had encountered one of the fundamentals of modern society: that without documentation - the all-important fragments of paper, the very least of which is a certificate of birth - man is nothing, officially non-existent, and belonging nowhere on the territorially divided earth.

If men and women of learning have, at times, found the proposition hard to accept, to Henri Duval - without schooling of any kind and forced through his years of childhood to live like an unloved scavenger - it had come with shattering impact. The Arab nomads moved on, leaving Duval in Ethiopia, where he now knew he had no right to be either, and for a day and a night he sat huddled near the border crossing point at Hadele Gubo...
... There was a fold of bleached and weathered rock. In its shelter the twenty-year-old youth - still a child in many ways - stayed unmoving and alone.. Directly ahead were the arid, boulder-studded plains of the Somalilands, bleak in moonlight and barren in the bright noon sun. And across the plains, sinuously winding like a dun-coloured serpent, was the dust-blown roadway to Djibouti - the final tenuous thread between Henri Duval and his past, between his childhood and his manhood, between his body, undocumented except by its living presence, and the sun-baked coastal city whose fish-smelling alleyways and salt-encrusted wharves he had thought of as his birthplace and his only home.

'Suddenly the desert ahead seemed familiar and inviting ground. And like a creature drawn by some primeval instinct to the place of its birth and mother love, so he longed to return to Djibouti, but now it was out of reach, as so much else was out of reach and would remain so for always.

Then, thirst and hunger at last stirring him, he rose. He turned from the forbidden country, heading north, because he had to head somewhere, towards Eritrea and the Red Sea...
The journey into Eritrea, west coast territory of Ethiopia, was one that he remembered clearly. He remembered, too, that on this journey he first began to steal systematically. Previously he had stolen food, but only in desperation when begging or work had failed. Now he no longer sought work and lived by thievery alone. He still stole food whenever there was an opportunity, and also goods or trinkets which could be sold for small amounts. What little money he got seemed to disappear at once, but always in back of his mind was the thought of accumulating enough to buy a passage on a ship - to some place where he could belong and could begin life again.

In time he had come to Massawa, port of coral and gateway from Ethiopia to the Red Sea.

It was in Massawa that retribution for stealing came close to overtaking him. Mingling in the crowd near a fishmonger's stall, he had purloined a fish, but the keen-eyed merchant had observed and given chase. Several others in the crowd, including a policeman, had joined in and within seconds Henri Duval was being pursued by what, to his youthful frightened ears, sounded like an angry mob. At a desperately fevered pace he had led them around Massawa's coral buildings and through tortuous back streets of the native quarter. Finally, having gained enough headway to reach the docks, he had hidden himself amid bales of ship's cargo awaiting loading. From a peephole he had watched his pursuers search, then eventually give up and go away.

But the experience had shaken him and he resolved to quit Ethiopia by any means he could. In front of his hiding place a freighter was moored and after nightfall he crept aboard, stowing in a dark locker which he stumbled into from a lower deck. The vessel sailed next morning. Two hours later he was discovered and brought before the captain.

The' ship was an antiquated Italian coal burner, plying leakily between the Gulf of Aden and the eastern Mediterranean.

The languid Italian captain boredly scraped dirt from beneath his fingernails as Henri Duval stood, trembling, before him.

After several minutes had passed the captain asked a sharp question in Italian. There was no response. He tried English, then French, but without result. Duval had long forgotten the little French he had learned from his mother and his speech was now a polyglot hodgepodge of Arabic, Somali, and Amharic, interspersed with stray words from Ethiopia's seventy languages and twice as many dialects.

Finding he could not communicate, the captain shrugged indifferently. Stowaways were no novelty on the ship and the captain, unhampered by tiresome scruples about maritime law, ordered Duval put to work. His intention was to dump the stowaway at the next port of call.

What the captain had not foreseen, however, was that Henri Duval, a man without a country, would be firmly rejected by immigration officials at every port of call, including Massawa, to which the ship returned several months later.

With the increasing time that Duval spent aboard, the captain's anger increased in ratio until, after ten months had gone by, he called his bosun into conference. Between them they devised a plan - which the bosun obligingly explained to Duval through an interpreter - whereby the stowaway's life was to be made so untenable that sooner or later he would be glad to jump ship. And eventually, after something like two months of overwork, beatings and semi-starvation, that was precisely what he did.

Duval recalled in sharp detail the night he had slipped silently down the gangway of the Italian ship. It was in Beirut, Lebanon - the tiny buffer state between Syria and Israel where, the legend says, St George once slew his dragon.

He had left as he had come, in darkness; and departure was easy because he had nothing to take and no possessions except the ragged clothes he wore. Once disembarked, he had at first scurried through the dockyard, intending to head for town. But the glimpse of a uniform in a lighted area ahead had unnerved him and sent him darting back, seeking shelter in the shadows. More reconnaissance showed that the dockyard was fenced and patrolled. He felt himself trembling; he was twenty-one, weak from hunger, incredibly alone, and desperately afraid.

As he moved, another shadow loomed. It was a ship.

At first he thought he had returned to the Italian freighter and his immediate impulse was to steal back on board. Better the misery he knew than the prison he envisaged waiting if police arrested him. Then he saw that the shadow was not the Italian ship but a larger one and he had scurried aboard it like a rat up a rope. It was the Vastervik, a fact he was to learn two days later and twenty miles at sea when starvation conquered fear and drove him, quaking, out of hiding. ,

Captain Sigurd Jaabeck of the Vastervik was very different from his Italian counterpart. A slow-speaking, grey-haired Norwegian, he was a firm man, but just, who had respected both the precepts of his Bible and the laws of the sea. Captain Jaabeck explained sternly but carefully to Henri Duval that a stowaway was not compelled to work but could do so voluntarily, although without pay. In any case, whether working or not, he would receive the same rations as the ship's crew. Duval chose to work.

Like the Italian shipmaster. Captain Jaabeck fully intended to dispose of his stowaway at the first port of call. But unlike the Italian - after learning that there was to be no quick disposal of Duval - the thought of ill-treatment did not occur to him.

And so for twenty months Henri Duval remained aboard while the Vastervik mooched, cargo questing, over half the oceans of the world. They jogged with tramplike monotony through the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. They touched North Africa, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, England, South America, the United States, and Canada. And everywhere the petition of Henri Duval to land and remain was met with an emphatic no. The reason, when port officials bothered to give it, was always the same - the stowaway had no papers, no identity, no country, and no rights.

And then, after a while, when the Vastervik had settled down to accepting Duval as a permanency, the young stowaway had become something of a ship's pet.

The Vastervik's crew was an international miscellany which included Poles, Scandinavians, Lascars, a Chinese, an Armenian, and several English seamen of whom Stubby Gates was the accepted leader. It was the latter group which had adopted Duval and made his life, if not pleasant, at least as tolerable as crowded conditions in the ship allowed. They had helped him in speaking English, and now, although his accent was thick and phrasing awkward, at least with patience on both sides he could make himself understood.

It was one of the few genuine kindnesses that Henri Duval had ever experienced, and he responded much as an eager puppy dog responds to approval from its master. Nowadays he did personal jobs for the crew, helped the officers' steward, and ran shipboard errands. In return the men brought gifts of cigarettes and sweets from their trips ashore and occasionally Captain Jaabeck provided small sums of money which other seamen spent on Duval's behalf. But with it all, the stowaway was still a captive and the Vastervik, once a refuge, had become his prison.

Thus Henri Duval, whose only home was the sea, had come to the gates of Canada on the eve of Christmas.

Chapter 6
The interrogation had taken almost two hours. Partway through, Dan Orliffe had repeated some of his earlier questions in different terms, seeking to trip the young stowaway into an admission or inconsistency. But the ruse failed. Except for misunderstandings of language, which were cleared up as they went along, the basic story stayed the same.

Near the end, after a leading question phrased with deliberate inaccuracy, Duval had not answered. Instead he had turned his dark eyes upon his interrogator.

'You trick me. You think I lie,' the stowaway said, and again the newspaperman was aware of the same unconscious dignity he had noted earlier.

Ashamed at having his own trickery exposed, Dan Orliffe had said, 'I was just checking. I won't do it again.' And they had gone on to something else.

Now, back at his beat-up desk in the cramped, cluttered newsroom of the Vancouver Post Dan spread out his notes and reached for a sheaf of copy paper. Shuffling in carbons, he called across to the night city editor, Ed Benedict, at the city desk.