Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  “Why would NIS be interested in him?”

  “Perhaps they think Elanza’s money is really South African money.” Nels paused. “Or the PM does.”

  “The PM?” Snyman shouted. “What the fok did you tell them?”

  Snyman looked around at the other people in the restaurant. He knew most of them. The Jewish community was tight-knit, a white tribe tolerated but not revered, and it stuck together. He thought he would make a rare visit to the Great Synagogue on Smit Street after breakfast. He suddenly felt inclined to pray.

  *

  Ralph’s room in the Hotel Africa was a dormitory of about a dozen beds. There was no one else there. The Nile River Transport Corporation steamer service to Kosti departed fortnightly and the boat had left five days previously taking everyone staying at the Hotel Africa, and a lot of the staff, with it. He had nine days to wait before the next one.

  Ralph spread his map on the bed. Sudan looked huge, the largest country in Africa. If placed over Western Europe it would have covered from England to the toe of Italy and from Portugal to Switzerland, with the same number of people as the Benelux. It was the same length as from Houston Texas to the top of North Dakota close to the Canadian border, the whole length of the US but with the population of California.

  Sudan on his map had been split into two colours: the top half brown and the bottom half green.

  The northern brown half was dry and Arabic, Sunni Muslim. The Nubian Desert from the Egyptian border stretched to the capital Khartoum, supporting little life other than in the Gezira between the White and Blue Niles, and the country stayed dry as far as Kosti. Rain hardly ever fell in these areas and when it did it created raging torrents in the dry river courses of the wadis that cut communications for months.

  The southern green half was wet and African, superficially at least Christian. The impenetrable swamps of the Sudd and the flood plains of the Nile eventually gave way to rainforest in Zaire and Uganda. It was the home of the Nilotic African peoples that continued beyond the Great Lakes.

  Virginia had lectured him on Sudanese political history, as she would have done to a class at Columbia. As usual, the physical geography had determined the politics. Arab Islamic armies had made no inroads south beyond Kosti until the fourteenth century. The Sudd had stopped them. The Egyptians finally invaded southern Sudan in the nineteenth century, desperate to ensure a constant supply of conscripts for the Egyptian Army, and employed General Gordon to push the boundary of Sudan ever further south.

  Into this land of opposite extremes came Gaafar Nimeiry, an Egyptian Army colonel born in Cairo and son of an Egyptian politician, who in 1969 led a coup and became chairman of a revolutionary command council before becoming President. Somehow he’d outmanoeuvred his domestic rivals while actively encouraging economic and military assistance from abroad. He had governed one of Africa’s most divided countries for half of its independent life.

  The south, however, remained problematic. There was a historic hostility from the Nilotic peoples to the Arabs, who were identified with the slave trade and oppression in the south. Egyptian state involvement in the slave trade had continued until the late 1800s, the last vestiges of slavery persisting in southern Sudan until after World War One.

  Ralph found his location and put his finger on the map – Juba. He was at the bottom of the green half. The country turned from green to brown nearly a thousand kilometres due north at his next port of call, the river town of Kosti, the destination of the Nile River Transport Corporation steamer that he planned to take in over a week’s time.

  There were few other travel options. There was simply nothing but scrub to the east through Eastern Equatoria, and no way to loop around the Sudd by entering Ethiopia, itself completely closed to foreigners other than if transiting through the capital Addis Ababa by air. To the west a railway ran from Wau to Khartoum, with a slow train prone to inexplicable delays and breakdowns. There were two roads from Juba to the town of Wau and its railhead, the shorter of the two which went through Rumbek impassable except in the driest conditions. The longer route had little traffic, with rumours of people waiting a month for a lift in the mail truck. It wound eight hundred kilometres through Maridi, Yambio and Tambura, nearly a month’s walking through the Nile and Congo basin. Ralph wasn’t sure he felt up to it. To the north an unpaved road roughly followed the river but was always closed nine months of the year through flooding. Which left the Nile River Transport Corporation steamer to Kosti. There was nothing Ralph could do but wait; there were no choices to be made, and he had no influence on any outcome. For the first time since leaving Johannesburg Ralph relaxed. The burden of decision-making had temporarily been taken away, and as soon as he realised it fatigue flooded over him. He felt tired with a persistent dull ache in his abdomen that had started in the aeroplane the night before. It would be good to rest. He lay on his bed, alone in the room in the middle of the afternoon, and slept immediately.

  *

  It was night and he’d been dreaming. A strangely coloured grey and white dog with blue eyes had been running up a field away from him. A woman was smiling and then laughing. She always laughed and he loved her for it. He ran after the dog, jumping leafy green plants, both racing away from water raining down from a machine like a huge cotton reel on its side. Water cascaded everywhere, all around him and the dog, and the woman stood watching and laughing.

  Ralph felt terrible, the bed wet with his sweat. He had pain in his joints, at the knees and elbows. He felt sick and his stomach ache felt worse. He should go to the toilet.

  Ralph staggered to the bathroom outside in the darkness. It was better not to turn on the lights and attract mosquitoes and flies. In the dark he could only hear and didn’t have to see the seething mess in the pit below the hole he had to crouch over.

  He crawled back across the hotel to his room and stumbled onto his bed weak and shaking, confused by his fever. It should leave him and return after forty-eight or seventy-two hours. It had started a day ago, on the ground in Loki, but Jim and Quebec Jean and the aeroplane called Betsy already felt as though they had happened in a previous life. He’d know this time tomorrow, or the day after, what type of malaria he had.

  Ralph never found out. He slept, unconscious, for three days.

  When he awoke the dormitory was empty, and for a moment he hadn’t known where he was or how long he’d been asleep. He felt weak but not feverish, his mouth dry. He wanted to ask someone what day it was. He suddenly felt anxious that he may have missed the steamer, but he was still alone and there was no one to tell him. He needed water but was reluctant to make another trip to the toilet. In the end he dragged himself to a broken tap and in a mirror above noticed that the whites of his eyes had gone yellow. He knew what it meant. Not malaria. By confirmation his toilet runs became more and more remarkable as his stools experimented with half the spectrum but finally settled on the colour of grey clay. Not to be outdone, his urine changed from dark orange to brown. Now aware that he needed some help he left his rucksack laying claim to his bed and walked hesitantly into town, his vision ahead just a foggy tunnel.

  *

  The Sisters of The Sacred Heart of the Virgin Mary had been in Sudan since the 1950s, the first four postulants receiving habit from the Bishop of Equatoria in 1952. Sister Kathleen was appointed the first superior general, as well as the novice mistress, and two years later all the novices were professed and the congregation established. The Holy See in Rome approved the young institute the following year. Sister Kathleen and her three assistants had been in Juba ever since, responding to the needs of the poor, the neglected, and those who had not heard the Good News of Salvation. They were a Catholic institution with a local congregation that was constantly on the move, but they fought hard to evangelise and educate children in their own school, and in time began other activities like social work and nursing to expand the congregation.

  Get
ting bums on pews wasn’t easy. The Nilotic peoples had their own indigenous religions in which cattle played a significant role in rituals. They were indifferent to Christianity, which the north had at one time vowed to destroy. When people in Juba did embrace the Church rather than the mosque, and the English language rather than Arabic, it was more a symbol of resistance to the Muslim government than piety.

  But as Sister Kathleen liked to remind them: ‘The children are the hope of every nation’, and education needed to be given the highest priority. Children, with free minds and enthusiastic hearts, would eventually fill the congregation. It was an inspired strategy, and the sisters’ work was helped by southern Sudan having a third of the nation’s population while the government in the north provided the same area with only a sixth of the nation’s primary schools. All the sisters of The Sacred Heart had to do was keep them alive – not easy when half the children under fifteen were malnourished and in the south there was only one doctor for every eighty-three thousand people – and then teach them.

  It had been Sister Barbara who had seen him first. She had been fetching the liturgical calendar to decide the Daily Gospel and happened to glance outside. A boy, looking at the church, had noticed her and raised his hand. She was about to turn away when he rocked forward and fell to the ground. He lay there, immobile, his hand still outstretched. She called for Sister Kathleen.

  *

  Ralph found himself in a narrow bed in a small room with no window. A white sheet had been tucked in so tightly around him that he found himself unable to move and to his surprise he found that he was naked. He looked around the room. There was little in it: a metal chair against the wall with his clothes neatly folded; a bookcase with religious texts sandwiched between guidebooks and medical brochures; a table with a jug of water covered with a dainty white napkin. He had no idea if he was in a hospital or a prison – it could have been either. He thought he should call out but when he tried his voice, like the rest of him, was feeble.

  A noise at the door made him try and turn his head but it was too painful to move, with flashes of bright light and cracks like twigs snapping. When he opened his eyes, four nuns in white tunics formed a semicircle around the foot of the bed.

  A friendly motherly lady smiled at him. She had a devotional scapular around her neck with an image on it which she held tightly to her chest in case it fell in the glass she was holding.

  Ralph put a hand to his own chest. The wallet usually held on a bootlace around his neck was missing.

  “Drink this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Drink it. It will help you rest.”

  Ralph drank the cloudy liquid and lay his head on a pillow.

  “My name is Sister Kathleen.”

  “How did I get here?”

  She nodded to the nun next to her.

  “Sister Barbara found you.”

  Ralph remembered nothing.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been sick.”

  “Well, the good news is you aren’t going to die. Is he, Sister?”

  “Not yet,” said Sister Barbara.

  Barbara didn’t seem very happy but cheered when she spoke to him.

  “You have hepatitis.”

  Ralph groaned.

  Sister Kathleen held her hands in front of her as though about to pray.

  “Now, don’t make a fuss. There are five types, but you will have hep A, I’m sure. You would have got it from dirty water.”

  Barbara glowered at him in a Scottish way.

  “Unless it’s the hep B, which you would have got from dirty women.”

  Ralph groaned some more.

  “Don’t worry. Your hepatitis is going to be acute not chronic.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, it won’t last more than six months,” she said cheerfully.

  Ralph wanted to howl.

  “Most people around here have been infected. This is an area of the world with poor sanitation.”

  Ralph closed his eyes.

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “You wouldn’t have got it here,” scowled Barbara. “Unless you’ve been here for two to six weeks. The average incubation period is twenty-eight days.”

  Ralph thought where he might have been four weeks ago. Probably walking through northern Zambia from the Tanzam railway to the bottom of Lake Tanganyika, just as his iodine supply had run out. Five days through remote villages, filling his bottle with unsterilised water from communal standpipes, eating fruit from local markets. Plenty of opportunities for faecal–oral transmission.

  “There’s no cure. You just have to rest.”

  Barbara waved a finger in his face.

  “And no alcohol.”

  Kathleen agreed with her.

  “Yes. No alcohol and no paracetamol. Too harsh on the liver.”

  She took the glass away.

  “This will help. You’ll sleep again now.”

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  She straightened up.

  “Don’t thank us. Christ fed the hungry, healed the sick, enlightened the ignorant and consoled the afflicted.”

  She wasn’t talking to Ralph.

  “Don’t forget our episcopal motto, Sisters.”

  A very slight nun answered her.

  “So that they could have life.”

  “Thank you, Sister Brenda.”

  She leaned toward Ralph to check if he was still awake.

  “Our charism, our special gift from the Holy Spirit, is evangelisation. What do I mean by that?”

  Ralph didn’t know the answer and didn’t care.

  “We make Christ known and keep him present among the most needy.”

  Ralph watched Sister Barbara search his clothes. His wallet had been stained with sweat from lying against his chest. It was fragile, the leather crumbling at the edges. She held it in two fingers like something toxic.

  “Ours is not an enclosed order. We have few rules. You may have noticed, for example, that we don’t always wear a wimple. And we take only simple vows.”

  Ralph wanted to ask about a wimple but was unable to talk. His eyes felt leaden and his head heavy.

  Sister Kathleen looked at him and nodded to Sister Barbara.

  “Ours is a journey of faith and hope. Sister Barbara, give the wallet to Sister Hilary.”

  Barbara reluctantly passed it to the other nun. Hilary opened it and removed a fifty-dollar note.

  Barbara snatched the wallet back and peered inside.

  “Is that all?”

  She went close to the bed.

  “Is that all you’ve got?”

  Ralph struggled to speak.

  “Give me my money,” he croaked and collapsed.

  Sister Kathleen rested her hand on his head.

  “Sometimes our institution isn’t able to meet all the requests asked of us. Our disciples are few and our resources are limited. This money will be a great asset to our congregation. The little children are our priority. We educate to liberate from ignorance, poverty and low self-image, to bring them into the light of God and knowledge. The Lord thanks you for your donation.”

  “But it’s not enough,” Sister Barbara hissed.

  Ralph tried to sit up.

  “Rest. We’ll look after you, and then when you feel able you can find us some more money.”

  She addressed her congregation.

  “Sisters. This is an opportunity to reaffirm ourselves and our resolutions, to focus with a single mind on our calling and mission.”

  Kathleen held out her hand.

  “And Sister Hilary… I’ll look after the cash.”

  Twenty-three

  Angel looked at the Nile from the aeroplane window as it approached Juba’s airport. Between Juba and Kosti the river was call
ed the Southern Reach but known locally by different names. Here at Juba it was the Bahr al Jabal, the Mountain River, but at the northern end of the Sudd swamp at Lake No, some way before Kosti, it was joined from the west by a river that drained a basin larger in area than France, Bahr al Ghazal, the Gazelle River. From that point, way beyond Angel’s sight, the river became Al Bahr al Abyad, the White Nile. It wasn’t simply the Nile until joining the Blue Nile at the confluence north of Khartoum.

  Angel planned to focus his attention on the river and anticipated finding Ralph, or proving that he’d been and gone, quite quickly. He didn’t want to be in Sudan, his thoughts continually drifting to Elanza. He’d stay at the best hotel in town and ‘the firm’ could pay. Perhaps there would be a phone in the room and he could call her. South Africa could pay for that too.

  Sudan Airways threw him to the ground with determination, an arrival rather than a landing, but Angel felt relieved to be out of the sky. He’d flown through Kenya on two different tickets and had bought the one for the final leg to Juba in Nairobi airport, keen to disguise his place of origin. He travelled on his own British passport, the South African stamps, like the Israeli ones, always on pieces of paper he could later remove. Immigration hated doing it but a quiet word with a supervisor, along with his NIS identification, was usually sufficient to persuade them.

  A smiling and polite officer in the terminal at Juba had welcomed him to Sudan without questioning his reason for travel. Angel was vaguely disappointed. He’d been ‘getting into’ his cover story all the way from Johannesburg, like a method actor. He’d spoken only English, chatting over the meal to a family from York returning to London after a safari, telling them excitedly of his life as an academic librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies on Russell Square, the thrilling trips he often made to teach aid workers how to correctly catalogue field reports before submitting them to the UN.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr Rock”, was all the immigration officer had said, and Angel believed that he meant it.

  The airport, inside the terminal and out, had been empty. The only other aircraft had been a vintage Dakota, identical to the ones he’d jumped from in the Army, with its engine cowls open, two men standing on a table looking inside and occasionally plucking out fragments like entrails from the dissection of a large farm animal.