Jimfish (12 page)

C
HAPTER
25

Crouching behind a
dune on the beach Jimfish and Zoran watched the first frogmen coming ashore. Under the full moon they looked in their wetsuits and flippers like walking fish. Jimfish remembered Port Pallid, the old captain who had been good to him and the great blue fish with four small legs that lived secretly in deep undersea caves, stood on its head, swam backwards and had lived on, quietly, successfully, for millions of years even though everyone was sure it was dead.

He knew, then, that it was time to go home. And yet what good would that do? When he had shot his future brother-in-law, as well as an American secret agent, plus a Minister of Education, and left his dearest Lunamiel to the mercy of a Liberian brigadier who wore nothing but his boots; and when the rage that his old teacher Soviet Malala – dead in distant Ukraine – called the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat had turned to tears and treachery, and his dream of arriving on the right side of history seemed as far away as ever.

As he and Zoran watched, three inflatable rubber landing craft packed with marines – their faces daubed black, carrying packs and weapons – slid out of the surf and on to the sand. It was then, as if the beach had been hit by a bolt of lightning, that night turned to day. The lights belonged to dozens of camera crews who had been waiting in the darkness.

The frogmen and the marines in their night-vision goggles were blinded by the lights and mobbed by men with important, carefully combed hair, speaking earnestly to camera. The cameras then filmed a short ceremony in which a banner was unfurled and planted on the beach; it read O
PERATION
R
ESTORE
H
OPE
.

‘What are they doing with all these cameras and lights?' Jimfish asked Zoran.

Zoran looked at his watch. ‘It's prime-time evening news hour in the US. Big story: “Marines ambushed by the media in Mogadishu”.'

The marines forced their way past the anchormen and began digging in, and the film crews wheeled their cameras close up and followed every spadeful of beach sand. Jimfish felt sorry for the soldiers. You land on a beach expecting to kill or be killed and, next thing you know, someone shoves a mike at you and asks if you have a special message for your girlfriend watching at home in dear old Savannah.

Next on to the beach came the amphibious vehicles, rolling up the sand dunes with their drivers yelling at cameramen to get out of the way because there was a war going on. At this point, three Somalis rushed towards the marines, holding their arms above their heads, calling, ‘Don't shoot!'

They were immediately thrown down on the sand and bound by the marines, while the cameras watched.

‘We are interpreters!' one of the men managed to shout, before all were gagged and turned face down in the sand.

Zoran told Jimfish to be ready to run for his life. ‘Any minute now both media and marines will be ready to march on Mogadishu.'

‘How can you be so sure?' Jimfish asked.

Zoran looked at his watch. ‘We're probably in a commerical break right now. The networks will want to see the troops in place outside Mogadishu, ready for the next segment of the show. Straight after the ads. That's when the marines march triumphantly to the capital and the locals cheer.'

Jimfish was reassured to hear this. ‘So far, so good. Mission accomplished.'

‘So far, so bad and getting worse,' said Zoran. ‘These poor guys haven't a clue what they will be facing. Mogadishu is a mean town: lousy with burning tyres, burning rubbish, burning hatreds. Foreign invaders with nothing to gain hunting locals with nothing to lose. A recipe for disaster. These marines are on a hiding to nowhere.'

As he predicted, film crews, marines, make-up men, hair stylists and news anchors, still talking earnestly to camera, began marching off in the direction of the capital, under the banner, O
PERATION
R
ESTORE
H
OPE
.

‘Now we grab one of those empty landing craft the marines arrived in,' said Zoran, and made for the water.

‘What do we do about them?' Jimfish pointed to the
interpreters lying on the beach where the Americans had trussed them. ‘Let's untie them. Then the two sides can talk to each other.'

‘What good would talking do?' Zoran pushed Jimfish into one of the inflatables. ‘Who wants to hear what the other side is saying? Let's get out – before this dialogue of the deaf turns into a dance of the dead.'

As they were floated into the surf, a squadron of helicopters flew overhead, heading for Mogadishu, and Jimfish was proud to be able to identify them.

‘Blackhawks. Most modern killing machine around, so I'm told.'

Zoran raised his eyebrows. ‘From what I've seen in ex-Yugoslavia, I'd say that prize still goes to a human with an enemy in his sights.'

Jimfish gave one last look at the three Somali interpreters still bound, gagged and kicking in the sand, and asked again if he could free them, but his words were lost as Zoran fired up the motors and they headed out to sea.

C
HAPTER
26

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1993

The useful thing
about a large, ribbed, inflatable landing craft with two good outboard motors and loaded with plenty of extra fuel, in methodical marine fashion, was that it carried Jimfish and Zoran well down the east coast of Africa to Mombasa in Kenya, where they took on more fuel and sailed south.

During their voyage from Mogadishu the news reaching them on the landing craft's radio had been unfailingly bad. The dance of death Zoran predicted had grown into a grisly ball. Blackhawk choppers had been shot out of the sky and the mutilated bodies of American soldiers had been dragged through the streets to the cheers of onlookers. Throughout Operation Restore Hope, Somalis had gone on dying in large numbers, until eventually the Americans, along with international peacekeepers and aid agencies, declared that hope was not to be restored after all, and fled the country.

More and more often Jimfish found himself questioning the ideas of his old teacher Soviet Malala about rage, rocket
fuel and the lumpenproletariat. It seemed to him as though many people were so poor and so hungry that rage was a fuel they could not afford; they were running on empty. The proletariat was not a class or category they would be allowed to join, and all they might expect was silent agony, speechless victims of the men in hats.

The two travellers arrived some days later in the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where their plan was to continue their journey by air. Their destination was South Africa, for Jimfish felt increasingly homesick and Zoran was as determined as ever to learn more about tribal homelands, ethnic enclosures and radical balkanization, as set out in the theories of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, of which six brand-new tribal reserves carved from the old Yugoslavia were, said Zoran, a triumphant vindication of the vision of the apostle of apartheid.

Jimfish explained time and again to the Serb that South Africa was now another sort of place where old obsessions with race and colour had been eradicated.

‘That way of life is gone, it's dead and buried.'

Zoran said simply, ‘Perhaps. But your past is our future. If I study what you were so good at: racial division, sectarian hatred, ethnic cleansing and triumphant tribalism, I might begin to understand what we've achieved in my ex-homeland.'

Jimfish's satchel of diamonds, once the property of the late Deon Arlow, Commandant of Superior Solutions – a proudly South African company – which had been of so little use in Mogadishu would be perfectly good exchangeable currency in peaceful Dar es Salaam. And so it was on
a sun-soaked morning in the port of Dar es Salaam that Zoran the Serb set out with the satchel to buy tickets for Johannesburg.

Jimfish was keen to see something of the capital city and he walked through the streets enjoying the friendly smiles of the inhabitants. Although still sad at losing his poor Lunamiel to Brigadier Bare-Butt, he was happy to have escaped from Somalia; the sun was shining, the sky was high and blue and home felt closer and closer.

He had just turned into a narrow street behind a row of tall houses when, suddenly, he was caught fast in a net dropped dexterously over him from a high window. The net must have been attached to an articulated arm, because Jimfish was hoisted into the air and whisked through an upstairs window into a large room.

He heard someone giving careful instructions to the operator of the articulated arm.

‘Raise him up into the rafters and rope him to a beam. Be careful not to touch him. Any human contact with the material will affect the potency of the magic.'

Jimfish was strung from a beam beside another man, trussed just as tightly, who told him his name was Benjamin and advised him not to struggle.

‘We've been netted like fish. Better to accept our fate. This is a saleroom and it will soon be crowded with buyers.'

Jimfish struggled to understand what he was hearing. ‘But what's for sale?'

‘We are,' Benjamin told him. ‘This is an albino auction. It's absolutely illegal, but albinos are prize catches, demand is high and we will be knocked down to eager bidders.'

‘What do they want with an albino?'

Jimfish was again really angry for the second time in his life and he thrashed about in the net, which did no good at all, as his fellow captive had warned him.

‘Magic,' said Benjamin sadly. ‘Ridiculous as it sounds. We are like rhino horn that some swear boosts sexual potency and pay vast sums to buy. But not even the very rich can afford an entire albino. Our body parts will be auctioned off a bit at a time. Eyes, legs, fingers and toes, each bit has a reserve price.'

‘Are you saying that we're to be cut into pieces?' Jimfish demanded, as anger ignited into fury and flamed within him.

‘Once the sale is over, yes,' came the reply. ‘Until then, they need us in one piece to keep us fresh.'

‘This is barbarism!' Jimfish said.

The other man shook his head. ‘The albino auction is the civilized end of the market. There are those in Tanzania and beyond who believe albinos are mystical creatures who bring luck or babies or riches or wives or husbands or cures for cancer. Better the auction room than the bounty hunters. They are really wild. You can be having a meal with your family and the hunters burst in and start hacking off legs or arms, right there and then. I'm sorry, my friend, in a few minutes we'll be knocked down to the highest bidder, then killed, then chopped up.'

‘But I am not an albino,' Jimfish said. ‘I am from South Africa.'

‘Better not say so,' Benjamin advised. ‘Foreign albinos fetch even more than the homegrown variety.'

The room was filling with buyers now. The auctioneer
opened the bidding and it soon became clear that, as his fellow captive had warned, they were being sold off, piece by piece: an eye here, an ear there, toes and fingers; a whole or half a leg. The bidding was lively and every so often the auctioneer's assistants, armed with poles, would carefully poke each net and set it spinning, to allow the bidders to get a good look at the lots on offer.

It was agony for Jimfish. True rage was welling up in him at long last, yet he was helpless, a fish caught in a net, unable to move a muscle, forced to listen as various bits of his body – from his teeth to his testicles – were briskly sold off.

It was then that a man at the back of the room joined the bidding and, to his astonished relief, Jimfish recognized Zoran the Serb. He quickly outbid all competitors, first for Jimfish, then for Benjamin. Zoran had been bidding backed by the enormous funds open to him when he exchanged a handful of the diamonds he carried, courtesy of Jimfish's late future brother-in-law. The two prize lots in the rafters were knocked down to him and the auction room rang with the hubbub that greets record sale prices.

‘Does sir want them dismembered?' the auctioneer asked Zoran.

‘I'll take them as they are, thank you,' Zoran told him.

‘I can hear from your accent that you come from Europe,' said the auctioneer to Zoran. ‘You've been very lucky to buy a pair of prime specimens – Africa's answer to the unicorn. Albinos have proven to be infallible cures for rabies, scabies, infertility, cancer, impotence, dropsy and so much more. And they're really so economical: a fingernail,
an ear lobe, a single eye can work miracles. No part is wasted. Even the hair can be woven into fishing nets and guarantees a wonderful catch. Though, if you don't mind my saying so, Europeans are often sceptical of albino magic.'

‘I'm from ex-Yugoslavia and, given the incredible things people in my part of the world already believe about each other, they'll be perfectly ready to buy miracle cures made from Africa's unicorn,' said Zoran.

He paid the auctioneer, called a taxi and ferried his two purchases back to the harbour. Once aboard their boat, he cut Jimfish and Benjamin free of the enfolding nets and told them how he had happened to save them.

‘I was on my way to buy our airline tickets when a tout offered me the sale of a lifetime: two milky-white African unicorns. We Serbs are more used to massacres than magic and I thought “What the hell?” and followed him to the auction room. You can imagine my surprise to find you and Benjamin, each strung from the ceiling in great nets, like a catch of herring.'

Zoran was all for setting off into town once again to buy air tickets, but Benjamin warned against this: ‘Jimfish is now seen as one of us and word will be out. You'll be recognized before you ever get to the airport. Once an albino, always an albino. You're worth far more dead than alive and next time you won't be so lucky. Cut up into pieces and sold.'

‘Why do they kill albinos?' Jimfish asked.

‘It's not seen as murder,' Benjamin told him soberly. ‘They say we're ghosts already. Or our mothers slept with
white men. Or we have no souls. The sooner you get away the better.'

‘Why don't you escape with us?' Jimfish urged. ‘We'll take our boat and sail to South Africa.'

Benjamin shook his head ‘From what I hear about your country, it is full of crazy people. Racists and xenophobes. And colossal ignorance about Africa. How long would a Tanzanian albino last? I'd rather stay in my own country, even if it's no home for people like me.'

‘Well, at least let me help you.' Jimfish handed him a fistful of diamonds.

Benjamin was grateful. ‘I can buy some protection for a while.'

‘Why not buy guns instead?' asked Zoran the Serb. ‘Take the Yugoslav option: announce you can't abide anyone who doesn't belong in your ethnic group, start a war of independence and throw out anyone who isn't of your family, tribe or faith.'

‘But I'm not an ethnic group,' said Benjamin. ‘I just have a skin condition, resulting from the way my genes work.'

‘Doesn't everyone have just skin conditions, when you get down to it?' Zoran asked. ‘So set up your own Albinostan and cleanse it of anyone who doesn't belong.'

Benjamin considered this idea. ‘But that would mean anyone who wasn't as palely pigmented as I am. And that wouldn't help. Because under this white skin I'm actually a real black African.'