Stone Kingdoms (32 page)

At regular intervals we passed lines of people and little camps hugging the side of the road, where families seemed to have collapsed around tiny heaps of possessions. Some of them held their hands out to us but we sped past them as if they were invisible. Once we passed two bodies rolled in cloth and tied with string, as if left out for collection, and later there was a group of half a dozen young children wandering along the road, some of them without clothes and with no adult to be seen. The younger ones held hands and all of them had a dazed, bewildered look. One of them trailed a red blanket as he walked, its tails slithering through the dust. It was their only visible possession. As we passed them they bunched together and closed their eyes as we showered them with dust. The child holding the blanket tugged it back, as if frightened that it might be pulled under our wheels. I watched them in the truck's side mirror as they set off again down the road, until the red blanket vanished into the distance.

My throat was sore and sometimes I felt dizzy. I knew my temperature was rising, but when I tried to sleep the noise and bump of the truck made it impossible. Hot air streamed into the cab and my clothes stuck seamlessly to the back of the seat. We might have been better off sitting in the back among the bananas. Then I remembered what it was like for those walking the road and tried to feel grateful. I said nothing to Nadra about how I was, frightened that if we were to stop and get out, the truck would carry on without us. By then I knew I couldn't have walked more than a short distance. I think she realized
that
I was suffering, because she spoke to the driver then told me that in another hour we would reach a small town and that he planned to stop there for a short rest and to refill his tank. She pushed my head on to her shoulder and as I tried to doze my eyes fixed on the dashboard, where there was a magazine picture stuck on with black tape. It was a picture of a young woman with blonde hair in a white T-shirt and shorts, drinking from a bottle of Coca Cola. As she tilted back her head the T-shirt tightened over the shape of her breasts. Behind her on a white sweep of beach was a group of teenagers enjoying a barbecue. Two of them were dancing, and behind them a girl was throwing a beach ball in the air.

The closer we got to the town the better the road became, and I slipped into sleep. When I woke I was conscious only of silence. The truck had stopped outside a green-walled building with a flat roof. There was a wooden stool beside its open door, and on the wall above, the green paint was flaking off in great blisters, revealing the brown surface underneath. In front of the building stood two thin petrol pumps, streaked and spotted with dust. The driver disappeared inside and we climbed out of the cab. I stood on the little stool and tried to fan some coolness against my face. The town seemed little more than a main street with a few narrower streets off it, there was little on the fronts of buildings to indicate if they were shops or dwellings, and in the strangeness of the silence there was no one to be seen. Halfway down the street a bicycle lay on the ground, light reflecting off its spokes in a way that made it look as if the wheels were turning, and further away a scatter of cardboard boxes rested on their sides, empty apart from scrunched newspaper.

When the driver came back he was holding two bottles of lemonade, and handed one to us. He drank his in two quick gulps, tilting the bottle steeply to drain the last drops. The pumps were empty but the truck carried its own emergency
canister
of petrol and he poured it into the tank, careful not to spill any. While he was doing this some movement, some glint of light on the opposite side of the street, caught my eye. In a gap between two houses was a white-walled building with double wooden doors. Above the doors a black cross was embedded in the plaster. As I looked, both of the doors opened slightly, forming a narrow seam of black, then through the widening gap stepped a child, but when she saw us she turned and vanished inside again and the doors pulled tightly closed. I got up and walked across the road, with Nadra following a few steps behind and urging caution. As I paused before the doors I heard the jangle of a key. The sudden surge of silence; the musty air which clings to my face like web; the clack of his heels as we walk down the stone-floored aisle; the echoes swallowed by the great vaulted mouth of the roof. In church the light is always strange – dust-flecked, grained and coloured by the high windows, always moving. And I never look up, because I think I will look into the face of God and something terrible will happen.

My hands rested on the hot iron rings of the doors for a moment, and then I pushed them open. There was a silence, broken by the faint rustle of women's clothing. I breathed the fetid air, searched the gloom, saw the women who sat singly on the wooden chairs or in little groups of two or three. The children sat on the floor at their feet or knelt with their heads on their mothers' laps but no one spoke and nothing stirred the moment into life. One woman lay curled on the floor, her face turned to the wall; another crouched at the side of the altar. Above them was an alabaster statue of a white Christ blessing a kneeling black man. Both faces were pocked and blotched with white where they had been disfigured. Scattered about the floor were ripped vestments and empty beer bottles. As I walked among the women I tried to speak to some of them but they clung to their own silence, their eyes glassy and focused on nothing but the tight circle of their own space. When I touched
one
she shook my hand away and her children buried their heads in the folds of her clothes. Nadra knelt beside a young woman who nursed a baby, and suddenly the silence was broken by a whisper of words and a low whimper. At first I thought the sounds came from the baby but they grew louder, more insistent, and I realized that they came from the woman herself. She sat bent over her child and her bare feet slithered back and forward over the floor. One foot had a cut caked with dried blood. Slowly the noise seemed to penetrate the pockets of silence the women had pulled about themselves, and their faces turned to where we stood and gradually the cry was taken up by others, and it spread round the church until it broke against the walls and sought to break into some space beyond the one confining it.

I knew before Nadra told me. They had been raped. They had been raped and some of their husbands and sons herded into cattle trucks and driven away. Anyone who resisted was shot. They had come to the church to hide, but the soldiers had found them. The priest who had tried to protect them had been one of the first to be killed, and afterwards the attackers had dragged his body through the town tied to the back of a jeep. Their men had been taken away for questioning. Almost a day had passed and still there was no sign of them. Now they were too frightened to leave the church and go back to their own homes. There was nothing we could do for them, nothing we could give them, and I looked at Nadra but she shook her head, and when we went to the woman curled to the wall and tried to comfort her, her body was stiff and indifferent to our touch. Their cries had fused and grown in strength and I wanted there to be anger in them, to be able to join my voice with theirs, but there was only the steady, rising sound of despair, of suffering beyond endurance, and we were excluded from even that. As I stood there under the broken, blasted face of Christ, the wailing voices burrowed deeper and deeper inside me until it felt as if what little strength I had left would collapse into
nothingness.
There were children's voices too, rising high like some descant, and then Nadra was tugging my sleeve and I heard the truck's horn warning that it was leaving and we turned away, closing the doors of the church behind us.

As the truck drove quickly along the main street, faces peered out at us from hiding places, and once a door slammed shut. A solitary dog ground itself into the dust and growled as we passed, then ran barking after us but wearied after a few seconds. At the end of the main street there was a body lying face down, the head framed by a dark pillow of blood. Leaving the town we passed a row of advertising hoardings, some of them plucked and ripped with bullet holes. Do I dream it? Have I confused it with something else? The last one hangs loose, broken off from its supports and daubed with paint. On it are two black hands, one male, one female, with bright red fingernails and a clustered diamond ring, and they are holding two glasses of Guinness. Underneath it says in English ‘The Power of Love'.

As we drove out, we tried to fill the silence with talk, and spoke only of what we should do when we reached the capital. We had no real plan other than contacting the Agency for news of Bakalla and returning there as soon as it was possible. Nadra said we should stay with her father until we were able to go back. I knew she didn't want to go to him, but there were no other options open to us and we knew nothing of what was happening in the capital. Our driver could tell us little, other than that there had been much fighting and that different clans fought for control of different areas. It was clear that he grew more nervous the closer we got to the city. When we started to pass the first scattered outcrops of housing he steered the truck off the road and told Nadra that it might be dangerous for us if I were seen by the wrong people. He asked us to travel in the back and to keep my face covered until he was able to drop us off. And so we climbed in among the piled heaps of bananas, sitting with our backs to the cab.

The
road was full of traffic now, and where other roads joined the main one vehicles and bicycles flowed into it without stopping, and the air was filled with the angry blare of horns. Young men riding scooters or motorbikes weaved in and out of the slower traffic, their shirts billowing out. High-sided carts pulled by donkeys plodded dispiritedly along, indifferent to the noise and rush around them. The city streamed out behind us, spinning out through widening tree-lined avenues bordered by white-walled buildings and the sudden climb of minarets from blue-domed mosques. Sometimes too, there were burnt-out cars, their blackened shells pushed to the side of the road, children playing in them, climbing through the windscreen or bouncing on the roof. As we drove on, we saw the first badly damaged buildings, their crumbling brickwork punctured with holes, sections sliding into collapse or lurching precariously over the street. Once there was the screech of brakes and a technical raced past in the opposite direction, the long thin barrel of a machine-gun bisecting the space between the driver and front-seat passenger. On either side of it sat three men, weapons resting across their laps, and behind the gun, looking down its sights, was a young man in a white shirt. As the technical swerved, he clutched the struts to stop himself falling. There was another sound, one that I recognized, and I looked up through the slats to see a white helicopter hanging high in the sky, then dropping lower. For a few seconds it disappeared as we passed under a great archway, some other culture's monument in stone to its moment of triumph. Then, with the sound of the helicopter still lingering in the air, we sped on until the traffic and crowds slowed us to a crawl. Lying flat on the floor of the truck, I peered out through the wooden struts at the people we passed and felt the hot stream of faces and noise wash over me.

Then we were turning off the broad avenues and into narrow streets where the house-fronts were draped with drying washing like unfurled flags, or rows of bamboo birdcages with
tiny
coloured birds. In the narrower alleyways the houses tilted so close together that it seemed their tops must touch, and from the open windows people leaned out, studying the world below. Past waste ground with makeshift shelters and market traders and penned livestock, until eventually the truck came to a halt outside what looked like a row of warehouses. There the driver called out to us, and after a brief offering of thanks we left him and set out into the night streets. We paused in the doorway of a derelict building for Nadra to arrange my headcovering so that it covered most of my face, and smear dust from the road onto the skin that was still visible. Then I followed her, my head bowed, through the tight mesh of streets. Many of them were lit by what looked like kerosene lamps and front rooms open to the street were like little grottoes, each revealing a different scene. In one of them an old man sat cutting leather to make shoes; in another a woman wove a cane basket, the cut rods beside her soaking in a bucket of water. But we hugged the shadows, skirting groups of people, avoiding eye-contact with those who passed us and hurrying on without ever breaking into a run which would draw attention to us. Sometimes Nadra hesitated, confused about which direction to take, and once she made me wait a short way ahead while she went back to speak to some women.

Eventually we found it, and it was just as she had described it in the cave. There were children playing in the courtyard, throwing small stones and hopping to pick them up, so absorbed in their game that at first none noticed our arrival. As we climbed the stone steps we heard the sound of a baby crying, and for a second Nadra hesitated. When she called out to her father her voice was strange to me.

He was younger than I expected, not so tall as his daughter but with some of the fineness of her features. He seemed confused at first, and his greeting was a mixture of formality and affection. As she started to explain who I was, he hurried us indoors, dropping the beaded curtain quickly behind us. In
the
doorway of an inner room a young woman stood, trying to nurse the crying out of her baby, its head resting on her shoulder, but as Nadra's father brushed clean a wooden chair for me, she vanished from view and only the intermittent cries of the child revealed that they were still there.

While Nadra and her father talked I looked round the room, taking in the few pieces of furniture, the radio-cassette player, a pink-coloured glass tray with tiny glasses, a hand-driven sewing machine beside what looked like a pile of pillowcases. I had taken off my head covering, tried to clean my face. He glanced at me, nodding his head at what Nadra was saying.