by MP Miles
San-ge and others were coughing and scratching, shaking life into numb limbs.
“What time is it?” he asked.
His mouth felt dry and sticky, his arms itching and covered with fine cuts from razor-edged leaves.
Azzurra stood up.
“Come on. I need your help. Bring those.”
Stumbling, he followed her and the men back into the forest, his arms already aching from the weight of the oil containers she’d asked him to carry. The only illumination came from thousands of fireflies that congregated on the tree trunks and lit them up with a soft glow. In places, luminous mushrooms and lichens cast enough light to see the path and Azzurra’s legs. The Pygmies moved soundlessly in front of them but Ralph, unable to see and burdened, crashed and swore. He felt lightheaded and needed water.
They emerged into an area of felled trees. Ralph couldn’t see but felt that they’d all stopped in front of him. He put down the oil containers and shook his arms. A stream ran noisily to one side of them. The light in the clearing was dark grey while all around remained black, like dawn at sea. In the greyness greyer shapes stood angularly.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“It’s a new logging camp. They haven’t finished it.”
Azzurra walked toward the buildings. There was a small collection of six square rooms, roughly built from fresh timber with uncovered plywood sheets making a flat roof, a structure open on all four sides, possibly a kitchen or for machinery storage, and a larger rectangular house with no windows. Azzurra walked toward it with San-ge.
Ralph looked around for the other Pygmies but they’d disappeared back into the forest. He picked up the oil containers.
“What are we doing?” he repeated.
“The loggers are moving in. This is the first camp.”
Ralph stood in front of the central house and in the dawn light looked inside. It had been partitioned with eight by four sheets into tiny rooms, hardly big enough for two people to lie down, the size of a single bed.
He looked at Azzurra. She stood back from the door.
“It’s one of the first buildings they make. It’s for the women. The Pygmy girls they’ll take from San-ge.”
She picked up one of the oil containers.
“It’s a brothel.”
Ralph knew now why she’d given him a lift, what help she needed from him. He understood why they’d spent the night with the Pygmies, the smell of petrol in the pickup that had made him feel sick.
“You want to burn it down?”
She looked at him as she had the previous evening when they’d made love on the dirt floor of a bamboo hut, passionately with tense lines around her neck, breathing quickly, eyes wide.
“I understand,” he said. “Sometimes telling the truth isn’t revolutionary enough.”
*
As they left the logging camp San-ge, excited by the flames and smoke from the burning building, made shrieks and hooting noises into the forest.
Azzurra looked at her hands, unable to stop them shaking. It had been the same the time four men had come to the Pygmies. One had been wearing a very faded camouflage jacket with matching cap, the rest a mixture of old tee shirts and cheap shiny sports gear. Everyone had been carrying automatic weapons and had taken up undisciplined postures, leaning cross-armed on the guns slung around their necks, or resting the end of the barrel on their shoe. One had very short hair and round dark sunglasses that even in the dim forest light he had kept on, looking furtively yet blindly at the Pygmies. None of them had been soldiers.
Azzurra had known what they were and her hands had started shaking as she picked up her medical bag. There had been no way of telling if they might be paramilitary vigilantes for Batutsi or Bahutu. They probably hadn’t known themselves. They were kids taken from towns, kept high on khat and given an old gun. At a time when both sides in a civil war were under the international spotlight it helped to have cheap, unrecognisable and deniable thugs to do the dirty work.
They had arrived carrying an injured man laid face down on a bamboo stretcher, one side of his trousers soaked with blood. Azzurra had quickly asked them the most important question, in French. “Quand?” When? They had been vague. They’d all been drunk. It had been the previous evening. Or in the night.
Azzurra had guessed straight away that the ‘golden hour’, when prompt treatment may have meant the chance of survival would have been high, had long past. Nervously she’d tried to keep her movements decisive, not crazy or panicked. She’d given reassurance, knowing it was herself she was trying to reassure.
It had been a gunshot injury to the buttock from close range. The exit wound looked clean like the entry, much as if a fat pencil had been pushed straight through. There had been little time for the bullet to become unstable and start to yaw or tumble. Azzurra had been taught that military ordnance was designed to be deliberately unstable by moving its centre of gravity. A high-powered rifle bullet would then deliberately cause massive tissue damage as it cartwheeled and thrashed its way through an enemy’s flesh. The injury that Azzurra had been looking at had probably been caused by a handgun, possibly as an accidental discharge. The boy had doubtless thought it cool to put the gun in the back of his trousers, like in the movies.
The bullet had penetrated cleanly and the permanent cavity created had been narrow. There was undoubtedly some stretching of the elastic tissues from the stress wave but the bullet had not fragmented. There would have been secondary fragments, bits of clothing fabric, but as far as she had been able to tell no bone had been shattered.
Azzurra had known that there was no good area of the body to get shot in. Even gunshots to fleshy areas like the shoulder and thigh could kill quite easily. The subclavian artery in the shoulder fed into the brachial artery, a massive vessel supplying the arm. The brachial plexus formed a bundle of nerves controlling arm function and was, like the shoulder joint itself, impossible to repair if shattered by a bullet. It was the same with the thigh. Just a tiny nick in the giant femoral artery would lead to massive blood loss that could be fatal in minutes. She had seen such injuries while training in Turin and Milan. A gunshot to the buttock was probably the one with the most chance of recovery, assuming timely control of blood loss and no infection.
She had applied dressings to both wounds and pushed them hard, then increased the pressure as much as she had been able. They had soon become saturated so she’d put more dressings on top, desperately trying to stop the blood moving, as only then would it clot.
The boy in front of her was lethargic, conscious but breathing rapidly and with an increased heart rate. The bleeding had been a steady dark red ooze, not pulsing, but at one time it must have been gushing out.
She had recognised that he was in advanced shock. He had lost forty per cent or more of his blood. He would soon lose consciousness and have a cardiac arrest. With a large rock putting weight on the wound dressing, she had prepared a nasal pharyngeal airway, coating one end in lubricant gel.
The other men had stood away, curiously watching the boy like interested but remote observers.
More blood had filled the dressings. It had to be venous. He’d been unlucky: the bullet had hit the gluteal vein. Azzurra had applied more dressings, more pressure, his blood coming through her fingers, on her face, in her hair. Then he’d died and she’d wondered why she stayed in Africa and what she could hope to achieve there.
Then, as now, she held shaking hands to her chest and questioned herself. Then she had been unable to save the boy, and now she was unable to save the Batwa. The fire had destroyed the camp brothel. They’d build another and the Batwa would move anyway. Unlike herself they had a healthy avoidance strategy.
She should go home. She could live comfortably in Turin, do a worthwhile job at the hospital or the university, paediatrics maybe. She would go to the Porta Palazzo market and spend her mor
nings in the cafés, the Fiorio or Al Bicerin. She might walk in Parco Del Valentino, buy art in a galleria and sit in the evenings with friends in the Piazza Castello, San Carlo or Bodini. She could find a nice boy and make her mother happy.
“Ralph. What are your plans?”
“Well, I’m really thirsty and I’d like to eat something.”
Men were like children, or dogs. She’d had men that were Labradors, big, devoted, slightly stupid. She’d had men like greyhounds, lean and athletic but sensitive and needy. Ralph, like a happy scruffy mongrel, seemed cheerful, amenable and independent.
She could love a dog like Ralph, or an Italian version of him – Raffaele maybe. She could work in Turin and they would live in a little apartment by the Po. In the summer they could go to Monterosso in the Cinque Terre to sail or swim, and in the winter drive to Bardonecchia to ski. She could have children.
She was dreaming but her hands were calmer now. She remembered the Batwa girl in hospital, younger than herself but with too many children, suffering from an ulceration and infection of the cervix following a uterine prolapse. She’d had to fight for treatment to save her.
She should check. She could drive now to the hospital in Ngozi, twenty kilometres to Kayanza and then just over thirty more, maybe an hour.
“Come on,” she said. “I have water in the car.”
*
In Kayanza the road forked in the middle of town, left to the border with Rwanda and right to the hospital at Ngozi. Azzurra stopped the car and looked at Ralph. He was very young.
“What are your plans?” she asked again.
He looked ahead to the road that meandered to the border. It led downhill through cultivated land of maize and sorghum, an easy eight-hour walk.
“I have a flight to London from Nairobi. It’s a cheap ticket.”
He looked at her uneasily.
“I can’t change the date.”
She smiled.
“There’s a truck park on the Rwandan side of the border. It’s always busy. Everything has to be brought in by road from Kenya.”
Ralph nodded.
“Talk to the drivers. They’re Somali. They’ll take you along. White men are a talisman that makes the trip easier for them. Usually.”
She held his hand.
“You’ll be in Nairobi in four or five days.”
There seemed no point in delaying, early morning always a good time to talk to people at the hospital. She’d be there in thirty minutes.
She looked at him and the morning sun lit her hair like a beacon so that Ralph expected it to flash a warning letter in Morse.
“In Burundi we say Amashyo.”
Ralph repeated it.
“It means ‘May you have herds’.”
“And the response?”
“The reply is Amashongure. It means ‘May you have herds of females’.”
Both laughed.
“Ralph. I have to go.”
Ralph hastened to leave, gathering his rucksack.
“But of course. You’ll be late.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I have to go, because this is what I do.”
She smiled at him.
“For the moment anyway.”
Ralph opened the door. He stood stiffly on the road, looking forward to the walk to loosen up.
“Amashyo, Azzurra,” he said.
“Amashongure, Ralph.”
He lifted his rucksack and stretched backwards, arms high, bending at the waist. Ahead some animals hobbled down the road, a man herding them forwards by throwing stones. Ralph thought he’d catch up with him quickly. He’d talk to him about his sheep. Were they sheep or goats? Tails hanging down. Sheep. He stepped out, almost a jog. When he looked back Azzurra had gone, her wheel tracks in the dust already fading as if washed by a tide.
Sixteen
Angel had arrived in Kenya hoping to find Ralph waiting at a budget hotel for his onward flight to London. It would be easy. Instead he’d wandered, growing increasingly anxious, as he failed to track Ralph down. A group of Dutchmen he’d talked to in the ‘Olde English Pub’ at the Intercontinental Hotel had been certain a boy meeting Ralph’s description had a bed in a dormitory at the Iqbal Hotel on Tom Mboya Street. Angel had found it popular with travellers. It appeared clean, central, with hot showers, a safe place to leave baggage, and only six Kenyan shillings to sleep on the floor. At the black-market exchange rate of just under eighteen shillings for one US dollar it made it about thirty cents a night. Angel thought this probably even within Ralph’s meagre budget. It turned out to be a false trail.
Two Swedish girls, with whom he’d shared an as-much-as-you-can-eat south Indian vegetarian curry at the Super Hotel on River Road, thought he may have been at the nearby Zahra Hotel. They had recently asked a cute English boy to share a room with them to save cost, but he’d seemed embarrassed and paid the full twenty shillings to be on his own. Angel had checked it out and had then started to worry. The Zahra, and others in the River Road area, seemed especially dangerous at night. Reports of armed robberies and muggings were common. He was relieved to find that Ralph hadn’t been there.
In desperation Angel had hovered outside the British Embassy at Bruce House on Standard Street, waited outside the railway station on Moi Avenue, checked that Ralph hadn’t tried to cash cheques at American Express or use their Poste Restante, and chatted in Swahili to bored girls at the Airways Terminal in town. Over a bowl of beans and potatoes at a food shack at the bottom of Latema Road he’d concluded that Ralph had not yet arrived in Nairobi. He wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.
As a last chance he took a twenty-five-cent bus ride from the city to the Salvation Army Hostel near Kanakore Market and spent an uneasy night in a ten-shilling mixed dorm. In the morning, feeling as if hung over, he boarded a number thirty-four bus from outside the Ambassador Hotel to the airport and watched British Airways counter staff preen and strut around their check-in area. By then he already knew what he had to do.
In the airport gift shop he bought road maps of the Great Lakes area at various scales, and from Haji Motors, off the Mombasa Road on the way back into town from the airport, he bought a ubiquitous Toyota Hilux with a ripped brown vinyl bench seat. It was the two-door second generation model, ten years old and with a tired two-litre engine driving the rear wheels only. The registration was Kenyan, three letters and three numbers, starting KP for Nairobi area vehicles that had been first licensed in 1972. There had been a discount for cash dollars and no questions asked. He drove back into town smiling.
At Rajabz Apparelz, ‘Bringing class & finesse without straining our clients’ pockets’, he bought a white cotton kanzu, cheaper than linen. The ankle-length loose tunic had maroon embroidery at the collar. With a green and gold kofia cap it became formal wear for both Muslims and Christians, and suitable for a wedding.
The Thorn Tree Café, under the New Stanley Hotel, seemed somewhat touristy but reassuringly busy. Angel wondered if he should leave a note on the travellers’ noticeboard. Looking for Ralph Phillips, eighteen and English, flying from Nairobi to London, in relation to a million-dollar inheritance from a druggie heiress he once slept with. Contact the South African National Intelligence Service on… It was preposterous. With a sigh, Angel spread his maps and considered his plan. He had little time in hand. He had a seven-hour drive before dark.
*
Ralph stood and looked up at the night sky. Earlier that day he’d crossed the equator, and at a town called Kayabwe on the Masaka to Kampala road Ralph had re-entered the northern hemisphere. Ursa Major must be somewhere above his head. From the two pointer stars Merak and Dubhe, he should be able to visually trace a line to find the direction to Polaris, and if he mentally multiplied by five the distance between the same two stars he would know how far along that line to look for the often-faint Pole Star. It w
ould show him the way north, the way home.
It would be low on the horizon, too low to see. At home, Polaris was nearly four hands above the horizon. In Kampala, so close to the equator, Polaris would always be just out of reach, like so much else in Uganda. Ralph couldn’t see the horizon anyway, he could only see the sky. The lorry driven by Somalis had pulled into Kampala at dusk and driven straight into a compound for the night. It was a small rough square, big enough for three trucks, with corrugated iron sheets on a wooden frame about six metres high as a security barrier all the way around. Cheerful men with guns patrolled inside like rats in a cage. A wide door had been pulled open to let the truck enter, then chained and padlocked. Above the iron sheets occasional streams of tracer raced across the Ugandan night, automatic gunfire echoing around them.
Ralph thought how lucky he’d been to find a ride from the Rwandan border to Kenya through dangerous Uganda. The first part had not been easy, mostly due to a difficult customs officer in Burundi. After leaving Azzurra, he’d walked eight hot hours and had arrived at the border post exhausted. He’d been told to wait. The wait lasted all night and half the following day. He’d slept fitfully in a mosquito-ridden customs waiting room and, scratching like a dog, was told to wait some more. He’d quietly left and crossed the bridge into Rwanda without completing the Burundi formalities. He’d walked down the road, didn’t stop for the guard and crossed the bridge into Rwanda expecting to be either called back or shot. Halfway across, in no-man’s-land, he found himself sweating and shaking and singing a hymn faintly remembered from school. He’d never considered himself religious but at that time he found himself praying that someone should look over him.
The rest, however, had been easy: a truck stop near the border, a cup of sweet tea with a gentlemanly old man, an empty fuel truck returning to Mombasa. He had now been travelling hairpin roads up and down steep Rwandan mountainsides for three days, the Land of a Thousand Hills living up to its name. It had been torturously slow but he’d loved being with the gentle Somalis, strikingly tall people with ebony skin and aquiline features. They’d been calm, quiet and dignified, content not to talk, happy to ignore strangers. With them in their venerable steaming Bedford, eating their plain boiled pasta for dinner, sleeping with them under the lorry, listening to them talk softly in their own language, Ralph was happy too.