Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Asked by Stoner and Prim if refugees had reached the city, the hotel owner said there were people living in hovels at a suburb named Mawashei, just by the huge camel trading market to the north. They were, he said, nazihiin, beggars, from some low-caste northern tribes like the Zaghawa who came to town each year to sell fodder and charcoal. Their women and children were with them, but only because Ramadan started in four weeks and in that time of charity the fasting city people were more likely to be kind to beggars. Don’t you worry! the hotel manager said. That’s what they’re here for!

  They drove to Mawashei, and its houses of sticks and pieces of fabric. Women and children were searching the afternoon dust outside a haulage garage for grains of sorghum, and – it seemed – for straw to eat as pottage. Stoner and Prim chatted with a turbaned, talkative man who lived there – of indefinite age, very thin, but of good morale. He told Stoner the provincial government had issued a ration of sorghum earlier in the month. It didn’t have much more money though, he stated with a lack of bitterness. Did he come here every year? Stoner asked him. Oh yes, in the months when people waited for rain. If it rained he would go home to his village to the north-east and take his widowed mother, wife and children with him. But God willed no rain in the country last year, and rains were already late this year.

  Women and children in the yards, and amongst the hobbled camels, looked as if they were combing the animals’ fur, and the man admitted without any apparent shame that they were collecting camel fleas. Prim managed to ask him why in passable Arabic. He said, to eat of course.

  At the souk Prim bought a long white dress for the interview, and a white shawl for her head and shoulders. She walked the few blocks to the palace, mentioned her appointment to the soldier at the gate in the wall, and was led within. From the courtyard the place had the look of a left-over barracks out of Kipling – a high wall, a working fountain, a garden and small parade ground, a U-shaped two-storeyed, plastered white building encasing the central space. The governor’s office was on the upper level. A handsome army captain in fatigues met her at the bottom of the stairs, saluted, smiled as if signalling he was in conspiracy with her, and led her upstairs.

  Colonel Unsa answered the knock, rising from a large desk by a wide-open French window. He was lean and good-looking, and he too wore military fatigues. He pointed Prim to a chair, which the captain adjusted for her before departing. Her only nervousness as she sat was to do with being an effective advocate for people who were more strangers to her than to him.

  Sitting behind the great, ungracious desk, the governor gave off a mixed message of severity and whimsy. Stoner had warned Prim he was a cultivated sybarite, and he proved to be English-speaking, and with a posh accent – he’d been to the Royal Staff College some time back. They chatted about broad matters – he’d read a lot of Graham Greene, and loved and disapproved of his novels.

  ‘Have you, for example, read The Heart of the Matter?’ he asked lightly, like a man with a well-developed thesis. ‘It represents high imperialism as far as I’m concerned. Africa existing merely as a nether-world to assure the damnation of whites who deserve it, cannot escape it, and – in their sins – desire it. I do hope young persons from the West have achieved a healthier view. After all, Africa is more than a highly coloured backdrop for flawed Europeans to anguish before.’

  Prim felt edgy about defending Greene, since she had till this journey seen, and perhaps still did see, the Sudan as serving a purpose, a sanctuary in which she might be numbly safe. ‘Don’t you think though that if every Westerner knew as much about Africa as Greene, there’d be better lines of communications between the two worlds?’

  The governor’s eyes were alight. ‘Ah, there you have it. The two worlds, you say. What happened to the third world on one hand, and on the other, one world of universal brotherhood?’

  ‘Well …’ said Prim, feeling not so much bested but subjected to conjuring. She wondered if she had failed a test, but before she could go on, refreshments were brought in.

  They were borne by the sort of people who lived in the camp at Adi Hamit, by two lovely Dinka boys dressed in immaculate galabias. Each was carrying a tray, one with tea cups and cinnamon sticks, and another a teapot and a plate of figs. Prim saw His Excellency’s hand close round the lower arm of one of them, and wondered whether this was a caress, and if so, avuncular or indecent? Stoner had accused her of being a puritan, but it was more than the mere puritan in her that was appalled. Colonel Unsa saw it and explained that they were Dinka boys from the war zone. He was, he said, educating them. They would live in misery without him, he implied.

  Prim tried to clear her brain of this new bug, the impulse to make an accusation, or an utterly stupid offer to buy the boys back. Out of respect for the chief debate, she decided, she must suppress that impulse and start talking about His Excellency’s citizens, the people whom she had seen crowding into Nyala just to achieve visibility.

  The colonel absorbed the news of what Prim and Stoner had witnessed around Nyala. He did not try to explain it away, he did not stoop to blaming the West and the spread of the desert, badmouthing the international commodity market and the International Monetary Fund, all the stuff more commonly heard around Khartoum.

  ‘This sort of crisis,’ he said, ‘is hard to read. Did you take any film footage?’

  ‘No. We have photographs still to be developed. But whatever my limitations, Fergal Stoner can read the signs.’

  ‘Oh yes, I suppose he could,’ said the governor, playfully evasive. ‘After all, Mr Stoner represents Europe amongst us. But I’m sure you know that for many people in the countryside, coming to the city to work or beg while waiting for the harvest is a yearly event.’

  This sounded dismissive enough to make Prim lean forward and draw together her knees in their immaculate fabric. ‘Yes, but I’m told they don’t move out in entire clans. Stoner and I saw whole clans. And there are entire clans at the camel markets too. And they tell us that you’ve made a special issue of sorghum.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said His Excellency lightly.

  ‘We wondered, if these are normal times, why is there a need of a special issue?’

  ‘Well, of course, this is a year of special hardship. But even under special hardship, you know, people have their devices for getting through, and they have their pride.’

  Since this was a thought Prim had had the day before in Mawashei, to hear it come from his lips was confusing. It was as if he could immediately see the advantage he had. Now he became dolorously sincere. ‘An individual will sometimes starve rather than be fed by a person who takes away his pride. I’ve seen it happen. Even amongst the enemy in the South. And if poor people from north and west of el Fasher, from say the hills, or the banks of the el Ku, have pride which surpasses death, so does the nation. Before a nation holds out its hand to the world, it always considers the implications for its self-esteem. This should not surprise anyone. Look at the gulf between black and white health in the United States! No one in the US likes even well-meaning foreigners trying to influence policy on such matters.’

  Prim had a sense of concerns being very pleasantly allayed; of the lessons of resignation being taught.

  He said, ‘I receive regular reports from village sheiks and policemen. What you have to say was not utterly unexpected. But I cannot myself authorise a survey of Darfur to determine the scale of distress. It’s a huge area with poor roads, and I lack adequate staff. And I cannot myself invite any international relief effort. That is a decision reserved to the president himself, His Excellency President Jaafar el Nimeiri.’

  Prim wanted to keep the right aloofness. Everyone said it was easy to be charmed by the Sudanese bureaucracy, by people like Unsa. It was easy, under the influence of the big sky, to go along with what had been said to her and Stoner earlier, something about God knowing and taking whomsoever he wanted. Since God is a being of deserts, of the great one-eyed sky met in deserts, it was seductively easy to take the
God-like view; easy – even for a disbeliever – to shuffle the papers and sigh, and wait on God’s will or something slower, a new direction from Khartoum. Prim was dressed in the pure white cotton that stood for Sudanese acceptance of the world as it is, and had to struggle against that tendency.

  So she made a self-conscious attempt to summon conviction and zeal. ‘I would like to ask you this. If I or someone else tries to get the permission of the president to conduct a more thorough survey, could we safely say that we have the approval of the governor of Darfur?’ She felt the blood pounding in her throat. How could she make such a plea? A disconnected soul, ten months in the Sudan! ‘And … would you consider putting that provisional approval in writing. For me to take to Khartoum?’

  With a handsome smile he asked, ‘That’s Mr Stoner’s idea, isn’t it?’ Then to her amazement he nodded and reached across his desk for a sheet of paper, writing in English a draft letter with an old-fashioned, chubby fountain pen. When he had finished, he read it to her.

  Provincial Administrative Palace

  El Fasher

  Darfur Province

  Republic of Sudan

  22 April 1985

  To whom it may concern

  The bearer of this letter brings to the provincial capital intelligence of a supposed food emergency in the Nyala region. Her anecdotal evidence is based on the observations not only of herself but of another experienced aid officer, an officer of the European Economic Community, who calculated that the present emergency may affect as many as 300 000 people or even more. The report is such as to warrant inquiry by Government, and should His Excellency the President of the Republic authorise an assessment and the initiation of an international relief operation, he may depend upon the assistance of the Provincial Government.

  He asked Prim whether that did it, and promised her it would be reliably transmuted into Arabic. When she was effusive with her thanks, he held up a hand, salmon-coloured on the palm. He called in a secretary, and chatted with Prim until the letter was copied in Arabic in the outer office. Between them, he and Prim polished off the pot of tea. And even grateful for his generous letter, and not wanting to bite the hand that signed it, she still wished to ask, Are you a slave-holder, you bastard?

  She could not understand why the matter pressed on her. Even if she were an abolitionist, she was not even sure slavery existed. Did she want it to? Did its reality suit some fanatic need in her?

  They celebrated her success at the palace with a meal of gonnonia, sheep’s stomach stewed with onions and tomatoes, eaten in the Berti’s dining room. Throughout she could not be utterly at ease. She watched Stoner with an excessive, spooky fear that he might try to drag their partnership further than it could be permitted to stretch. It was not so much an offer of sex she feared. It was that she believed she would find it beyond bearing if she saw in Stoner’s face the same radiant, childlike striving which had characterised Auger in seduction mode.

  The next morning an Eyptian pilot from Nile Expeditions Charter turned up by cab and took them out to the edge of the town to a tarred airstrip, a radio beacon above its little white terminal building. As the pilot gathered up their movement permits with their passport-sized photographs attached, and went inside to have a chat about his flight plan, Stoner and Prim sat on chairs by the outer wall, watching as their Cessna was being filled, from a white, cylindrical reservoir of aviation fuel beside the runway, by a chain of young men in galabias and loose white turbans carrying watering cans with the roses taken off. These they handed up to a foreman who stood bare-headed, first on the starboard wing of the Cessna, then on the port. Prim was pleased to see that the Egyptian pilot, when the starboard tanks were full, checked them for water contamination with a gauge he carried.

  Beside her on his plastic garden chair, Stoner said, ‘You see that? They don’t have enough foreign exchange to buy a fuel pump for el Fasher. Or they probably have a pump, but, you know, they can’t afford the replacement parts.’ He went on as if this were part of a seamless argument. ‘What do you reckon if I took the liberty of inviting you to dinner at the Rimini?’

  The Rimini Hotel in Khartoum was owned by Italians, a family which had been in the city for most of the century. In their dining room white-clad and turbaned Sudanese waiters, resembling to Prim’s semi-informed eye classic Nubians from a film, served tall tumblers of iced lemonade, and plates of robust soup and Nile perch.

  He looked at her frankly. ‘Jesus, you’re – you know – such a lovely bird.’

  ‘Did you run out of courage to say that last night?’

  ‘Hey, don’t be a hard bitch.’

  The idea of his nervousness made her brave.

  ‘Listen, you’ll get nowhere with the old lines! Besides, I couldn’t go. I’m spending the night with Helene Codderby.’

  ‘Are you?’ he asked as if he knew it was a lie. He did not seem much disappointed. ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But look, one thing I’ve got to tell you for, you know, free. Don’t pursue this slave business.’ She had mentioned to him not only the tale of Abuk Alier the midwife, but the two boys at the governor’s palace. ‘The whole thing’s too arguable,’ he said. ‘Let’s put the question in a, you know, a Western context. Take California say, where you’ll find live-in maids, Mexican, working seven days for $50 a week and board and scared if they make demands they’ll be reported to the immigration people. Say you wanted to make representations about that! Would it be the most fruitful thing to inform press and politicians that this is slavery? People would say, if this is slavery, why are so many men and women crossing the border every night to get in on it?’

  Prim said nothing. She felt half-ashamed, like a person being chastised for a pornographic interest.

  ‘If you so much as shout, “Slave!” no one out there in our world’s going to listen. Whereas they’ll listen to Darfur, see.’

  Prim was willing to pretend that he had defused her callow moral imagination. The food crisis was certainly the immediate game. Besides, the pilot, beside whom she sat for the flight, mentioned some chance of a haboob – a sandstorm. For the first hour, however, they traversed the bell of unsullied blue above a sloping plain which ran illimitably down towards the shores of the White Nile. Higher than Jabal Marra, Prim savoured this map of desolation, with every nuance of earth, every wadi, exactly visible. The el Milk, a dry Mississippi, ran hundreds of miles north-south, and a robust play of light defined it, its banks as discernible as if they brimmed with living water.

  But around ten o’clock, and within ten seconds, all the sharpness and clarity of earth vanished. A bottomless grey wall rose before them, an apparently static explosion of earth into air. Its top was close and level with the nose of the aircraft. Prim felt very little turbulence. The great globe of dust seemed too concerned with its own inner physics to give the charter plane a shaking. She avoided asking the pilot whether this moiling ball, huge as a moon, could affect the engines. She knew it could penetrate a scarf and fill a mouth. In Khartoum she had sat with all doors and windows shut against the sibilant pinging of the raging grit, and seen the particles intrude beneath an unplugged rim of door.

  ‘Time we tried it,’ the pilot cried merrily. He eased the controls imperceptibly forward, and the world vanished. A greyness thicker than cloud pressed up against each window. No margin of air existed between it and the windscreen. The interior of the plane became instantly fierce. For a while Prim played with a ventilator beside her, jiggling and twisting, as if coolness could be persuaded to enter. At ground level in Darfur, the famished moved with game dignity to non-existent succour. In the South forces armed with AK-47s moved against each other with Old Testament fervour. Why should she still believe herself the immortal centre of things?

  ‘Tell me if you see the ground,’ the pilot cried.

  At a little over 2000 feet, give or take the margin of error the pilot was willing to ignore, Prim and Stoner simultaneously saw a road and densely packed houses of mud brick. ‘There,
there,’ they both cried. But then the sight was swallowed again, and the pilot took the plane up. Prim felt a strong annoyance. She had discovered the ground for him, and he had lost it on her. Somewhere below, shut in, were the secure comfort of her books, her bed in the corner, her prints of Fred Williams’s Australian landscapes affixed to the wall with little gobbets of dry putty.

  But the second descent and attempt to find Khartoum was successful. At 1800 feet they saw again streets of dust and shuttered houses, exquisite in the fog of sand. With restored professional certitude, the pilot banked the plane in air which was now blue-grey, the air of a London winter dusk, though it was still mid-morning in Khartoum. Far out, away to their right, Prim saw Khartoum airport, end-on, all its lights glittering, and wind seemed to blow their aircraft into line with this illumined avenue. The touchdown was accomplished with an almost flamboyant delicacy, and they taxied off to the charter company hangar, the hut which served as company office. A number of charter pilots – Egyptians, Frenchmen who had flown aircraft for the Chaddian forces, handsome Somalis – emerged in company uniforms and epaulettes and began shaking the hand of the Egyptian and clapping him on the shoulder, a fraternal exhibition which seemed to confirm that there had been some peril. The terminal itself lay shut tight. No big jet, with its tendency to ingest birds and debris, could do what the Egyptian’s plane had done.

  Landed now in the miasma of this storm, they found the air intolerably dense, scalding and yet still. They took a taxi to Stoner’s office at the EC compound which was empty except for the doorman, who reclined on cement in the corridor. He opened up the office where, beneath creaky fans, Stoner and Prim wrote and faxed further reports of the Darfur emergency to their respective headquarters, asking them to be ready to act, and to use their good offices to alert governments and exploit diplomatic channels.