Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Surely not,’ said Prim. The concept – Abuk a slave – struck her at once with an obscure but intense force. Its redolence was so strong. It was as if something live had not only nudged her mind but physically quickened within her, jolting her, making her stumble in search of equilibrium. She felt herself trembling, as she had on seeing the town-bound clans. But where they had numbed her, this enthralled her, producing in her a form of particular rage she had not felt this morning.

  ‘It’s a fact,’ said the nurse. ‘She was property of an officer. And let me say: With all that entails! See, her village was raided. She saw one of her children thrown on to the fire by soldiers, and another one hacked to death with a banja by militiamen. Death’s very graphic down there in the South, by all accounts. The militia still ride round on horses, with big swords. And Kalashnikovs of course. They sold her to the officer, and when he was finished with her, he on-sold her to a farmer south of here. It isn’t uncommon, you know.’

  The tale of children hacked and ablaze hung in the air with its normal fearsome weight. Such stories were regularly heard, were the commonplace of discourse.

  ‘But she’s here now. How did she get away?’ Prim heard her voice quaver.

  ‘There’s an Austrian woman – you know the one – what’s-her-name? God almighty, I can’t remember. Is it Trotsky? Something like that. Stoner probably knows her. Comes into the country with lots of money and just buys people back. In batches, sometimes. She’s the only one who does it. They say she’s a little nutty. The group she works for brings out this yearly report on her activities. But no one believes them because they’re kind of Alleluia Jesus Protestant evangelicals. Anyhow, that was the woman bought her from the farmer, and then Abuk came here, where her mother and surviving child had turned up, and then she’s selected to be a midwife. Great little woman. We should congratulate ourselves.’

  Prim had heard at parties in Khartoum whispers of slavery and tales of anti-slavery antics by an Austrian woman. Veteran NGO people shook their heads and laughed over her occasional excursions to the Sudan. This was the first time Prim had heard the word ‘slave’ used of a face she knew, and the previously abstract term ran through her like a claim.

  A Dinka woman in dyed cloth shirt and skirt brought in a plate of wheaten bread and tea. Smiling Abuk was with her, transformed, no longer wrapped up in layers of white, but wearing a shirt with a collar and floral-patterned skirt. She retained, as indicating her status, her sandals. They sat on stone benches and chairs around a little table.

  What am I to do here? thought Prim. I am a refugee. I need the Sudan more than it needs me. But here is a woman to whom something worse than Auger has occurred.

  The nurse spoke both in Arabic for Abuk’s convenience, and English for Prim’s ‘So now, Abuk. Tell me again what’s this clan of yours?’

  ‘Ifo,’ said Abuk. Then laboriously, in English, smiling at Prim, ‘It is … Ifo.’

  ‘So when’re you going to marry some thumping big feller from a related clan, eh?’

  Abuk covered her mouth with her fingers and laughed. The Irish woman lowered her voice. ‘You can get hellish fights here, even amongst middle-aged old duffers. You’ve got clans still quarrelling over their grandad’s grazing rights, for dear God’s sake. Meaningless, given their situation …’

  Stoner, arriving, seemed grateful to turn to Prim. The Canadian from Earthwater was already meeting with the water committees, he said, tracking them down by asking at tent flaps. ‘He’s looking at these old British hydrogeological maps for the area too. Can you imagine? Those old Imperial guys, you know … beating the bloody Mahdi one day, out here the next day surveying for water. Got to give it to ’em. Rule bloody Britannia.’

  He shook his head as if he had no stake in what they had done, was not quite himself a Briton.

  Prim was conscious of Abuk, who sipped her tea absent-mindedly, like a woman who had never known want. Prim thought, slave. How astonishing, how old-fashioned, and yet how intimate a word.

  After, still taken by the idea of Abuk’s enslavement, she made her way through the last sting of the day’s heat to a slightly elevated platform of soft red shale west of the camp. A crowd of women and children had gathered and were watching and chatting about the endeavours of Earthwater. Stakes had been driven into the ground and rope run from one to the other to create a security fence. The mud-pump and the drilling engine still sat on the trucks, and had not yet begun their work, but piping and drill parts, and what looked like lights and a small generator, had been neatly piled on blue plastic on the ground. All this energy exhilarated Prim. She could hear the seven or so men of the drilling team chortling with each other, apparently pleased with their progress.

  As Prim ducked under the rope, the Canadian foreman strolled over to her to report. He’d drill from dark until his men got tired – about 2 a.m. He pointed out the way acacia bushes ran on the slope, and the line of certain termite mounds. Termites always built along the line of sub-surface aquifers.

  The visit to the drilling site, the energy of the Canadian and the Sudanese drillers, restored her to clarity. It was not negligible to leave water behind, even if it was evident that aquifers of fossil water, once breached, could never be renewed. An emergency was an emergency and it was something to leave water here, in a cistern of steel, under a blue, anti-evaporative lid.

  When she turned back to the clinic, advancing darkness made her party to, yet separated her from, all the night noises of the camp, from the yelps of children and the smell of frying bread. You would think from the eloquent voices that this was a happy town, in possession of itself.

  Sleeping on a bench in the clinic, Prim woke once, to the flaying of torchlight from the back of the building. Abuk was there, running to the white cabinets then vanishing. Prim slipped on her boots and followed the midwife out through the lean-to. She waited in a camp laneway, looking into the lamplit interior of a tent, as after four hearty yells a large-boned woman pushed out a blood-covered little exile.

  Abid, thought Prim. Slave. Poor little bastard.

  In the morning, Prim woke in her clothes without any memory of having settled to sleep after attending that Dinka birth in the small hours. Sitting upright, she could see, through a window without glass, a bare-chested Stoner washing from a basin beneath a brush shelter. He looked very businesslike for a man whose sentences were so crabwise and tentative.

  The light, already so sharp that some of the Dinka aged who had slept in the open were hobbling to shade, reminded her of Central Australia, of morning in the Burranghyatti reservation at Mount Bavaria. To dispel that memory, she called to Stoner casually through the window.

  ‘Could I use that after you?’

  Stoner had an English sort of body, strong but without muscular definition. She was unwelcomely reminded that by contrast Auger had possessed a bough-swinging, tree-climbing stringiness, the inheritance of his American boyhood. She watched Stoner pour out his used water and fill the basin by dipper from the washing-water drum. Courteously, he carried it indoors to her and set it at the bottom of her bench.

  ‘Forgive the gallantry,’ he murmured. As he went to where he had slept and assembled his kit, she turned her back, took her shirt off, and washed beneath her neck, under arms and breasts. Stoner, throughout her ablutions, had the grace to go on packing. He turned when Prim had hitched her voluminous brown pants on, had shed her dust-clogged socks, and was functionally washing her feet.

  ‘Listen, I gotta leave, okay?’ he told her. ‘In view of what we saw … I reckon you ought to come too.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘The drilling …’

  ‘That Canadian bloke’s reliable. He’ll be back in the old corral in Khartoum in a few days. But us? We owe it to everyone … you know, to test out the scale of what’s happening. I suggest we go north through Nyala, check out conditions. Get a bigger picture.’

  Therese had come in from her morning inspection. Last night’s child was at mamma’s bre
ast, she said. All parties were in the pink. She sat down, an honest eavesdropper, as Stoner went on outlining his plans. ‘Rahmin could drive us up to el Fasher and we can like fill in the provincial governor – I happen to know him. By the time we front him, we’ll know more than we do now. And there’ll be the two of us. Four eyes, okay?’

  ‘That’s a journey though!’ Therese said, whistling. ‘Trucks take days on that bloody awful road.’

  ‘We’ll do it in two.’ He turned to Prim. ‘I called the office. They’ll send the plane to el Fasher for us Tuesday.’

  ‘It isn’t my job to go with you,’ said Prim, and there was in her something like a fear of being dragged back to the mass of city-bound Darfur people.

  ‘Jesus, toots!’ Stoner argued. ‘This is like the cataclysm, waiting for us, out there! Look, ever since Lebanon I got this repute as a wild bugger. There’re people who’d rather ignore what I say. Plenty of ’em in government departments in Khartoum too. You don’t carry any baggage that way.’ He shook his head back and forth and held his long hands up in mock surrender. ‘Okay, okay. It’ll be very gratifying to stay here and, you know, see Dinkas laughing in a gush of water. But this is huge, and we’ll only know how huge by reconnaissance.’

  She could not deny the force of his argument, yet she had a sense of being conscripted. It struck her she wanted to stay to talk to Abuk – maybe through Therese’s interpretation – about the midwife’s enslavement. But forty minutes later, she made a final visit to the drillers as a prelude to going to Nyala and el Fasher with Stoner. At the drilling site the Sudanese team was already mixing cement to make a pad around what, it seemed, had been a successful strike. The Canadian was enthusiastic. They had hit an aquifer at a little less than 100 feet. The flow had been tested, he said, with an air compressor. Damn good readings. Acceptable pH and nitrate, good calcium and magnesium. His field microscope showed no faecal coliform, but if the camp expanded to higher ground to the west, the water would need regular re-testing. That would all be in the report, he said. He’d already reconnoitred a site for a second well, on the camp’s southeast, above the clinic. They’d be finished everything in three days if the second well came in as easily as the first.

  It was clear to Prim that, as Stoner had said, Earthwater and the Dinkas had no need of her presence that day.

  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.