Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘I think you’re very brave,’ Prim murmured, and turned to the baroness. ‘When you … go to work … what’s the process exactly?’

  The baroness nodded, delighted to have a potential disciple. ‘I have a network of Sudanese friends in the South – some of them are Coptic priests, some Sudanese officers, some rebels. When they visit this or that house, they’re shocked to find this or that young person in a state of slavery. They report to me and over time I build up a map of where the young are being held, go down there, hire a truck and drive from place to place buying them back and returning them to their families.’

  ‘But this time we’re doing it different,’ Connie told Prim. ‘We’re flying into the South together. The details are under wraps for now.’

  The baroness pressed on. ‘We were wondering if your time and situation here would permit you to join us as an observer on our forthcoming excursion. We are going from here in two days, weather allowing. And don’t worry about any danger. We know the terrain.’

  The idea of travelling with the baroness and Connie, of verifying the truth of enslavement, filled Prim with a certain fear and exhilaration. Of course, Peter Whitloaf would be appalled.

  Prim asked the least important question first. ‘How much time would that occupy?’

  ‘Maybe a week,’ said the baroness, ‘by the time you had a good look around Lokichokio and went on to Nairobi to catch a commercial jet back to Khartoum.’

  ‘I could get you down to Nairobi,’ offered Connie, ‘and with your NGO passport and my reputation, you shouldn’t have too many troubles.’

  Prim took thought again. ‘My NGO won’t want me to go. You mention Lokichokio and Nairobi. But first you land in the South? To load up?’

  Connie Everdale put her finger to her lips, in a ‘walls have ears’ sort of gesture. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, hon. I’ve touched down in the South hundreds of times, and no one knows I’ve even been there. But like the baroness says, it’s up to you.’

  ‘I want to go,’ said Prim. One day she might be able to give a testimony of what she saw – the transaction, the liberation. She would need to tell a lie or a half truth to Peter Whitloaf, but it seemed a small price.

  ‘We’re meeting an agent this time,’ Connie explained. ‘He’ll bring the kids to us. He’s a man in the Arab militia. You know, the Beggarah. You’ve heard of those guys?’

  The baroness trilled a correction. ‘Actually the fellow we’re dealing with is a Rizeighat, one of the sub-groups. Have you heard of them?’

  The Sudan abounded with ethnic sub-groups, but Prim had heard of the Rizeighat. They provided a fierce pro-government militia and figured in many of the narratives of slaves.

  The baroness said, ‘Last of all, we are taking a highly reputable Khartoum man with us to act as our negotiator.’

  ‘What sort of person would volunteer for that?’

  The baroness smiled faintly. ‘For now, if you will forgive me, it remains a small secret.’

  Tempted and appalled, Prim turned to Mrs el Rahzi. ‘Could I have more tea, please?’

  The professor’s wife smiled and said, ‘You are between two hard cases with this pair.’

  Prim gathered herself to send a half-true totally deceiving fax to Canberra.

  FROM: Austfam, Khartoum/Prim Bettany

  TO: Peter Whitloaf, CEO, Austfam, Canberra

  DATE: May 6 1989

  1 page message

  Dear Peter,

  I have a chance to fly down to Lokichokio by charter plane at no expense to myself or Austfam to have a look at southern Sudanese reception centres in northern Kenya. I shall then return to Khartoum from Nairobi at my own expense. I hope that in this reasonable cause you will forgive an absence of a week from the Khartoum office.

  Prim

  As easily as Prim could deceive Peter Whitloaf for a good end, she could not undertake the flight without telling Sherif.

  He listened quietly when she told him she intended seeking leave from Austfam to fly to Lokichokio to look at some of the refugee arrangements down there. She was flying with a woman named Connie Everdale. At Connie’s name, he raised a hand. ‘And I know, I know. Those women are in Khartoum!’

  ‘What women?’

  ‘Those slavery nuts. I bet you’ve talked to them. You are actually going to be foolish enough to fly with that Austrian woman and land in the South?

  ‘Look, I must. Connie’s done it so often. She says it’s routine.’

  ‘Maybe. One day it will turn non-routine. Besides that, you will remove Sudanese nationals to a foreign country?’

  ‘Sudanese slaves,’ she said.

  He shook his head in long, slow sweeps. ‘I don’t want you to do it. It’s a foolish thing to do. What’s to become of me if anything should happen to you? I would find life impossible.’

  ‘You’ve been yourself to the South with me.’

  ‘That was authorised. This is piracy.’

  She pretended to think about this for a while. In reality the imperative to accompany the baroness and Connie was lodged solidly under her ribs.

  ‘I have to go. Forgive me.’

  ‘I’m not sure I shall. You represent an NGO. And what you plan, apart from the danger of being shot down, is illegal.’

  ‘Like drinking gin,’ Prim suggested.

  ‘Well, you’ll go without any blessing from me. I think it’s an indulgence, and a dangerous one. Reconsider. Please.’

  But even for Sherif Prim would not reconsider.

  On the night before the flight she and Sherif sat glumly, drinking tea together, Sherif in a rare sulky mood. Faxed approval from Peter Whitloaf allowing her to visit northern Kenya, a region of plentiful refugee camps, had come through.

  Connie Everdale had advised Prim that the first day might be long. No haboobs were predicted, but the Air Sudan strike was still in progress on the designated morning. Prim arrived at Khartoum airport, eastwards from the New Extension, at 5 a.m., and found the main terminal closed and guarded by soldiers. She was permitted to stroll to the hangar for charter services. Here she found the baroness and Connie, dressed in full blouses, skirts and heavy boots, in the shade of a hangar before which a box-like but sizeable aircraft, the much-discussed Sharps, stood in its dull silver metal, its fuselage marked with sober blue and white lettering: Northern Kenya Charter Services. The women were drinking tea reflectively from mugs, and offered Prim a cup.

  ‘It ain’t pretty,’ said Connie, seeing Prim frown at the sight of this apparently ungainly aircraft, ‘but it’s got the range.’

  Through that hour’s pure light, undistorted yet by a high sun, a sad-looking customs official in khaki shirt and trousers strolled up from an office a hundred yards away and asked to see their passports.

  He was still weighing the passports in his hand when Professor el Rahzi emerged from a taxi in front of the charter services hangar. Today he was dressed not in his normal traditional mode, but for the bush, in khaki pants and shirt, just like the immigration man. When he saw the official the professor added his own passport to the pile the man was holding.

  ‘Off to Lokichokio, professor?’

  ‘And returning from Nairobi,’ said the professor helpfully.

  ‘Very well, come with me.’ And the immigration official, taking all the passports, led Rahzi off to an office.

  ‘Typical,’ said Connie, wagging her close-cropped blonde head. ‘Had to wait for a guy to turn up before he could do business.’

  ‘What is Professor el Rahzi doing here?’ asked Prim.

  Connie lowered her voice. ‘He’s our respectable Sudanese gentleman in good standing. These Arab militia guys don’t always like doing business with an old tart from Stratford, Ontario.’

  ‘Or an old tart from Vienna, when it come to that,’ said the baroness in her fluting voice.

  The professor emerged from the immigration hut, crossed the patch of sunlight, and came to the women. He waved the batch of passports. ‘We are permitted to go t
o Kenya with the blessing of the government of the Sudan,’ he announced with a broad smile.

  With the casual fatalism African people, black and white, feel towards aircraft, the party boarded through the fuselage door. The baroness, Connie, and the professor sat stooped in the cargo space where some blankets, plastic bottles of water, and packages marked ‘High-Protein Biscuit’ were casually stacked. Here they studied a map Connie had produced from a briefcase. It showed in its contours the White Nile swamps, and hilly country. Towns were marked to the level of individual structures – the settlements of Mbili and Kawajena, on the road to Wau, middled between reed swamp and plateau.

  The professor’s large finger was indicating a line beyond a watercourse which ran towards the Bo River. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘on an east-west axis. Marked by two red oil drums on one side, and two on the other.’

  Connie Everdale had an old-fashioned pair of protractors in her hands, and began plotting a course from the raw landing place the professor had indicated to her home airfield. ‘Forty-nine degrees 15 minutes 23 seconds south to Lokichokio. Keep Juba well to starboard, there’s artillery there. Then Mount Kinyeti to starboard too. I can pick up the Kakuma track from the Sudan–Kenya border with eyes shut.’ She punched the map with her finger. ‘Two and a bit hours tops.’

  It was a comfort to hear Connie speak of the line of flight they would take after their ill-advised southern landing. Connie took the chart forward with her to the cockpit.

  ‘You like to sit with me, Primrose?’ she called over her shoulder.

  The baroness and the professor disposed themselves in passenger seats, as Prim came forward to take her place beside Connie. Connie handed her earphones and indicated she should wear them. After some clipped communications with the tower, still apparently staffed in this season of haboobs, strike and civil doubt, the fragile-feeling, boxy aircraft trembled at Connie’s throttle thrusts and dragged itself, a little crookedly it seemed to Prim, down the runway dazzled by early light. They bumped along a few feet, it seemed, above the flat rooftops of Khartoum, banked across the opaque Blue Nile, crossed the White Nile, and levelled out above the burnished dome of the Khalifa’s palace. Prim strained in her seat to see how the baroness was faring, and saw her with closed eyes and clasped hands. Baroness von Trotke had such a worldly presence it was easy for Prim to forget she was an evangelical Christian and might pray at points of departure. The professor, Prim saw, was reading the international weekly edition of the Guardian. Now they swung over the dam twenty miles south of the city and across the irrigated fields of the Gezira, the broad triangle of fertile soil produced by the drawing together of both Niles. Patterned cotton fields stretched away into haze. A glory of government planning, so it was once thought. The client farmers and labourers were these days discontented about the world price – to them, another item in the exploitation of the Islamic world by the West.

  As the plane reached higher in a sky utterly lacking in vapour, Connie aligned the nose above the dam, twenty miles south of Khartoum, with the general drift of the White Nile.

  It was at once apparent to Prim how broadly and with what languid grace the river tried to distribute its kindnesses, mothering the hard surfaces of the angry republic, embracing quadrants, spaciously expanding intoreed swamps, cunningly defeating exploration. It was a mother who, working twenty-four hours a day, could still not soothe her rabid child.

  ‘Bahr el Abiad,’ murmured Connie through the earphones. ‘White Nile.’

  Prim had noticed similar awed intonations of the names of the river by other Europeans. Seeing it, they were forced to name it softly. So profoundly did this river run in everyone’s cortex, the first great river of our infant storybooks, the one earliest drawn, told stories of, made the basis of essays and projects and drawings in all our childhood classrooms.

  But then the river was lost behind them. Visual relief to the great grey-yellow-tan orb below was provided by the Kordofan plateau ahead, whose wadis they soon crossed. The plateau, traversed, fell away to lowlands again. One high brown plug of mountain – Jabal el Liri, said Connie – rose through a base of haze to the east. From such a height the landscape seemed apolitical and formless, possessing only the property of vastness. Above all it seemed to lack strategic meaning, and lacked, too, either an angry or suffering populace. It was as if no eye existed amongst the papyrus swamps, the grasslands and the folded hills.

  Connie asked through the earphones, ‘You got a guy, hon?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Prim. It sounded a starched, defensive reply even to herself.

  ‘Well, let’s say a good friend then?’ said Connie, getting her number, and squinting out amused at the prodigious sky above them, in which, far beyond the dazzle, lay a hint of the universe’s intense dark. Why couldn’t she yield, like Dimp, and accept the normal, banal words – boyfriend, fella, bloke, guy, squeeze, lover? What exclusivity did she claim for her desires? For he was a guy, he was a lover! She had sat joyously on his prick, howled to absorb him, urged him to pay his substance away. Wanting to hold all his resources forever and, above all others, in her blood’s dark bank. Wasn’t that what anyone did? Wasn’t that what it meant to have ‘a guy’?

  ‘You could call him a guy,’ Prim conceded. ‘He’s a doctor in Khartoum.’

  ‘Sudanese?’ asked Connie.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hey … none of my business, but watch it, hon.’

  ‘Very Westernised,’ Prim said, as if Sherif needed defending. ‘Studied in England and America.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Some of ’em like white women. They like forthrightness and light-coloured hair. But only when it’s going their way.’

  ‘You?’ Prim asked, changing the angle of the discourse. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘I was married four years – ’58 to ’62. No kids. I was a bad wife and mad at the time. Honest. I get the sweats in the dead of night just thinking what I was like. My folks wanted me in a sanatorium. It was the flying thing, combined with the fact I was such a miserable bitch. None of the purpose of all that misery I lived through was clear to me until round about seven years back.’

  ‘When you had your … conversion?’

  ‘When I said yes to Jesus. I felt all the foulness, but above all the madness lifted off me. A good thing too, because I felt heavy-burdened and was beginning to wonder should I just fly a plane into a mountain. The way I see it, you take on a sufficient weight of the world’s pleasures, woes and sins, and then they reach critical mass and kill you. My sins in the commission were light as a feather, but they weighed tons in retrospect.’

  ‘What happened, if you don’t mind telling me?’

  ‘No, not at all. I’d already done one run for the baroness. Thought she was pretty much an eccentric, which she surely is. Anyhow, there’s this mission near my airstrip. It’s American, run for the past thirty years by a couple named the Wagons. If they needed a plane, they chartered me. The Mission of Jesus True Saviour – they’ll take the kids we pick up into their dormitories there. Anyhow, I was flying this old guy Caleb Wagon and his wife down to Nairobi for some medical treatment he needed, and old Caleb was sitting beside me, in this single engine Cessna, and we’re chatting through the earphones like you and me. And I asked him what he used to do – and of all things he was in youth a sales rep going round six southern states of the US selling syrups to factories and restaurants, and so on. And it was such a big business that his boss and he used to take their favourite clients to Las Vegas and – to quote Caleb – “supply them with ladies”. He woke up one morning with a mouth like a cesspit and went to a window and looked out, and there was this grey haze over everything in Vegas. None of the normal stuff, no clear, eye-scorching, wake-up-and-go-for-a-swim weather. I suppose something like one of our haboobs. And he says that without the Strip and the palm trees to distract him, there was a vacancy inside his head. And a voice inside him went, “This can’t go on.” And when he told me this in my plane on the way to
Nairobi, it was as if the same voice went off in my head. Even though I was flying along at 10 000 feet, I felt I was in a pit I’d dug myself, or like I was trapped between two stone walls, with only a sliver of sky showing. And then I felt something with wings come down on me and lift me out of the pit and over the mountains, till I was at last level with myself, with the altitude of the Cessna. My soul, which after all was flying the body and in danger of forgetting it was, was at last on a level course. Like that, I was reunited to myself. But I knew I hadn’t done it myself, lifted myself up on wings, reconciled my body and soul. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jesus had lifted me.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I just knew while it was happening. It was the Holy Spirit of Christ. And I thought, I mustn’t ever let myself get separated again. By the way, see that reed swamp and meander down there? That’s the Jor, flows into the Bahr el Ghazal, flows into the Nile. In other words, we’re in the South, hon.’

  Prim was aware now of an increased degree of watchfulness in Connie Everdale. The army had placed occasional anti-aircraft batteries throughout the South to frighten off aircraft whose flights had not been authorised by Khartoum. Though they were widely scattered, and though Connie rode on the wings of the Holy Spirit, a given aircraft might be unlucky. Randomness was the special terror of the agnostic, Prim knew, and randomness weighed somewhat on her.

  The earth had now changed to look more Central African. Apart from forests of reed and water hyacinth, there were date palms and thickets of trees. This was a land over which sovereignty was always uncertain. Ahead lay green hills, off-shoots of a plateau which swept up from Zaire and Chad. The professor appeared behind Connie and shouted in her ear, referring to his map and occasionally looking at his watch. At last he and Connie nodded a number of times and he went back to his seat. Connie threw a partially unfolded map in Prim’s lap. It was much marked in ballpoint pen and dog-eared.

  ‘See that long north-south running watercourse? Yell if you spot it.’