Jimfish

by Christopher Hope

  ‘Who blew it up?’ Jimfish asked.

  ‘We did. It started when the Slovenes wanted to leave Yugoslavia, and I was sent to fight them. It wasn’t much of a war and they won – or, maybe, we just let them go. We didn’t see what was coming. Overnight they ditched the old Yugoslav dinar for the German Deutschmark, threw out the Serbo-Croat dictionary and told everyone that Slovenia was the new Switzerland. It was hard to keep a straight face. Their border crossing was a bit of rope stretched across the motorway, manned by goons with guns who called themselves customs officials, lolling in deckchairs under umbrellas advertising Malboro cigarettes, and a banner that said “Welcome to the Republic of Slovenia”.

  ‘Then came the next war; this time in Croatia. I was based in Karlovac and we rode to the front along the motorway, like commuters, ready to take the next exit to the battlefield. Sometimes we blew apart cities; other times we fought in quiet meadows, where a sniper hid in the belfry of the pretty little church across the fields. Our side shelled patients in hospitals, and their side blew up schoolkids. This was more like a real Balkan war and the Croats had form. They slaughtered Serbs in the Second World War; and they seemed keen to do it all over again. Our answer was to slaughter Croats. And when that sort of thing begins, no one is safe, because it’s catchy, that old slaughter music. In no time all – in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia – slaughter was Top of the Pops. Those things Serbs know about. Over the centuries, Belgrade has been wiped out more than a dozen times. And we also know about world war – we virtually started the First and died in droves in the Second. But this war we did not understand.’

  ‘What brought you all the way to Africa?’ Jimfish wondered.

  The answer surprised him.

  ‘I came to be enlightened. I said to myself, “If race is all the rage, if ethnic cleansing is coming soon to a ministatelet near me, then it’s time to brush up on ethnic hatred and to take a look at the way others do things.” But where to start? Kashmir and the Pakistani–Indian partition? Or the Israeli–Palestine split? Belgium, where the tribes detest each other? Northern Ireland, where the sects prefer suicide? Then it came to me: who has done Balkanization better than the Balkans? South Africans! They’re the champs. For decades they’ve been splitting their country into ethnic islands and locking up people in the prisons of race and tribe, colour and culture. Each piece of their crazy jigsaw has its own parliament, flag, president, army, borders. Everyone lives in a little hate-state where you’re free to loathe the clan or the crowd down the road or across town or over the next hill.’

  Jimfish did not want to say where he was from, but an unexpected surge of patriotisim made him defend his country.

  ‘Maybe that was so in the old South Africa,’ he said. ‘But Nelson Mandela’s out of jail now and he’ll be the next President. Apartheid is dead and buried. There will be free elections, a free health service, jobs for all and a chicken in every pot every Sunday.’

  Zoran the Serb shook his good head of hair in his gloomy way and waved a cautionary finger.

  ‘If ex-Yugoslavia is anything to go by, elections just put new hats on the same old heads. In Belgrade cradle Communists turned into noisy fascists overnight. Same thing in Croatia.’

  With a sinking heart, Jimfish remembered the men in hats on the roof of the Central Committee Building in Bucharest. But he felt he must defend the achievements of his country.

  ‘In South Africa I’m sure the change will be blindingly clear.’

  ‘Blinding, perhaps,’ said Zoran, ‘but clear? In ex-Yugoslavia socialists wore red and fascists went for brown. But then came the war – and we couldn’t tell the difference any more. Scratch a red and he bleeds brown. And vice versa. So I decided on South Africa. Because that’s where we’re heading in ex-Yugoslavia.’

  ‘You’re too late.’ Jimfish tried to get his cellmate to see sense. ‘Those ideas are dead and gone. And so is the apostle of apartheid who invented them – Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.’

  ‘Maybe dead down your way, but he’s alive and laughing where I come from,’ said Zoran the Serb. ‘My first taste of Africa was in Zaire. The Great Leopard rented a batch of us Serb and Croat sharpshooters. We lived in separate barracks, ate off separate plates with separate knives and forks, and used separate toilets. But at night, after a day in the field, we relaxed over slivovitz and spoke Serbo-Croat. We hated each other at home and fell in love in Zaire. But one day Mobutu figured out that if he wanted to modernize Zaire ballots beat bullets. Just like our man Milošević in Belgrade, he saw that elections, carefully run, are the up-to-date way to emasculate the electorate.

  ‘Sharpshooters were suddenly surplus to requirements in Zaire. Luckily, demand for skills like mine never slackens. Siad Barre in Somalia was recruiting snipers. I’d barely signed on when the Victorious Leader climbed into a tank and headed south, taking the national bank deposits with him. No one wanted snipers any more. No money to pay them. And it’s slow work, taking out one man at a time. Somali clan leaders were looking to mow down their enemies in numbers. Luckily, the Americans stepped in with RPGs and heavy automatic stuff, which the warlords love. They mount them on pickups and blow away scores of people in no time at all.’

  Jimfish felt a surge of familiar confusion. ‘But why should Somalis hate each other? If they’re one people with one language and religion.’

  Zoran the Serb smiled his sad Serbian smile. ‘Ethnic hatred is a help if you’re hoping for civil war. But you don’t need distinct tribes worshipping different gods to whip up a good massacre of the neighbours. A happy family can be at each other’s throats quicker than you can say “ex-Yugoslavia”. In Somalia it’s your clan that counts. Yours against theirs. And their family feud has killed hundreds of thousands. Even more are starving. Outsiders try to help, but aid trucks get ambushed, cargo planes shot down, ships can’t dock. Anyone who isn’t dead is dead broke. The latest idea is to sell hostages. That’s why they locked me up here. I told them: “I’m a Serb – no one wants to buy a used Yugoslav. Hell, we’re worth even less than South Africans!”’

  Jimfish decided it was time to tell his cellmate the truth. ‘I happen to be from South Africa.’

  For the first time Zoran looked quite cheered. ‘Good heavens! A Serb and a South African – twin polecats of the western world and we end up in the same cell!’

  Suddenly, helicopters were clattering overhead and they heard the sound of shooting. Zoran walked to the door of the cell and, to his astonishment, it opened.

  ‘Our jailers – they’ve gone! What is going on? I’m getting a bad feeling.’

  Jimfish was happy to reassure Zoran. ‘It’s very good news. They’ve gone to the beach. It means the Americans have landed.’

  ‘Americans invading Somalia?’ Zoran was incredulous. ‘I’m getting a very bad feeling.’

  ‘Not invading,’ said Jimfish. ‘Intervening. This is a humanitarian operation. The Somalis will greet them with open arms.’

  ‘They’ll open fire, more likely,’ Zoran said. ‘The soldiers who kidnapped us have gone hunting for high-end hostages. They don’t need us bottom feeders any more.’

  Jimfish was shocked at Zoran’s Serbian cynicism. ‘The Americans plan a short, surgical intervention. They’ll feed the starving, treat the sick, shoot the warlords and leave.’

  ‘My very bad feeling just got worse,’ said Zoran. ‘How do you know all this about the American plans?’

  Jimfish reassured him. ‘Because I am the first stage of the mercy mission – I am the harbinger of hope.’

  ‘More like the canary in the coal mine,’ said Zoran. ‘Let’s get out of here before the goons get back with new hostages and shoot us because they need the cell space.’

  CHAPTER 25

  Crouching behind a dune on the beach Jimfish and Zoran watched the first frogmen coming ashore. Under the full moon they looked in their wetsuits and flippers like walking fish. Jimfish remembered Port Pallid, the old captain who had been good to him and the great blue fi
sh with four small legs that lived secretly in deep undersea caves, stood on its head, swam backwards and had lived on, quietly, successfully, for millions of years even though everyone was sure it was dead.

  He knew, then, that it was time to go home. And yet what good would that do? When he had shot his future brother-in-law, as well as an American secret agent, plus a Minister of Education, and left his dearest Lunamiel to the mercy of a Liberian brigadier who wore nothing but his boots; and when the rage that his old teacher Soviet Malala – dead in distant Ukraine – called the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat had turned to tears and treachery, and his dream of arriving on the right side of history seemed as far away as ever.

  As he and Zoran watched, three inflatable rubber landing craft packed with marines – their faces daubed black, carrying packs and weapons – slid out of the surf and on to the sand. It was then, as if the beach had been hit by a bolt of lightning, that night turned to day. The lights belonged to dozens of camera crews who had been waiting in the darkness.

  The frogmen and the marines in their night-vision goggles were blinded by the lights and mobbed by men with important, carefully combed hair, speaking earnestly to camera. The cameras then filmed a short ceremony in which a banner was unfurled and planted on the beach; it read OPERATION RESTORE HOPE.

  ‘What are they doing with all these cameras and lights?’ Jimfish asked Zoran.

  Zoran looked at his watch. ‘It’s prime-time evening news hour in the US. Big story: “Marines ambushed by the media in Mogadishu”.’

  The marines forced their way past the anchormen and began digging in, and the film crews wheeled their cameras close up and followed every spadeful of beach sand. Jimfish felt sorry for the soldiers. You land on a beach expecting to kill or be killed and, next thing you know, someone shoves a mike at you and asks if you have a special message for your girlfriend watching at home in dear old Savannah.

  Next on to the beach came the amphibious vehicles, rolling up the sand dunes with their drivers yelling at cameramen to get out of the way because there was a war going on. At this point, three Somalis rushed towards the marines, holding their arms above their heads, calling, ‘Don’t shoot!’

  They were immediately thrown down on the sand and bound by the marines, while the cameras watched.

  ‘We are interpreters!’ one of the men managed to shout, before all were gagged and turned face down in the sand.

  Zoran told Jimfish to be ready to run for his life. ‘Any minute now both media and marines will be ready to march on Mogadishu.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Jimfish asked.

  Zoran looked at his watch. ‘We’re probably in a commerical break right now. The networks will want to see the troops in place outside Mogadishu, ready for the next segment of the show. Straight after the ads. That’s when the marines march triumphantly to the capital and the locals cheer.’

  Jimfish was reassured to hear this. ‘So far, so good. Mission accomplished.’

  ‘So far, so bad and getting worse,’ said Zoran. ‘These poor guys haven’t a clue what they will be facing. Mogadishu is a mean town: lousy with burning tyres, burning rubbish, burning hatreds. Foreign invaders with nothing to gain hunting locals with nothing to lose. A recipe for disaster. These marines are on a hiding to nowhere.’

  As he predicted, film crews, marines, make-up men, hair stylists and news anchors, still talking earnestly to camera, began marching off in the direction of the capital, under the banner, OPERATION RESTORE HOPE.

  ‘Now we grab one of those empty landing craft the marines arrived in,’ said Zoran, and made for the water.

  ‘What do we do about them?’ Jimfish pointed to the interpreters lying on the beach where the Americans had trussed them. ‘Let’s untie them. Then the two sides can talk to each other.’

  ‘What good would talking do?’ Zoran pushed Jimfish into one of the inflatables. ‘Who wants to hear what the other side is saying? Let’s get out – before this dialogue of the deaf turns into a dance of the dead.’

  As they were floated into the surf, a squadron of helicopters flew overhead, heading for Mogadishu, and Jimfish was proud to be able to identify them.

  ‘Blackhawks. Most modern killing machine around, so I’m told.’

  Zoran raised his eyebrows. ‘From what I’ve seen in ex-Yugoslavia, I’d say that prize still goes to a human with an enemy in his sights.’

  Jimfish gave one last look at the three Somali interpreters still bound, gagged and kicking in the sand, and asked again if he could free them, but his words were lost as Zoran fired up the motors and they headed out to sea.

  CHAPTER 26

  Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1993

  The useful thing about a large, ribbed, inflatable landing craft with two good outboard motors and loaded with plenty of extra fuel, in methodical marine fashion, was that it carried Jimfish and Zoran well down the east coast of Africa to Mombasa in Kenya, where they took on more fuel and sailed south.

  During their voyage from Mogadishu the news reaching them on the landing craft’s radio had been unfailingly bad. The dance of death Zoran predicted had grown into a grisly ball. Blackhawk choppers had been shot out of the sky and the mutilated bodies of American soldiers had been dragged through the streets to the cheers of onlookers. Throughout Operation Restore Hope, Somalis had gone on dying in large numbers, until eventually the Americans, along with international peacekeepers and aid agencies, declared that hope was not to be restored after all, and fled the country.

  More and more often Jimfish found himself questioning the ideas of his old teacher Soviet Malala about rage, rocket fuel and the lumpenproletariat. It seemed to him as though many people were so poor and so hungry that rage was a fuel they could not afford; they were running on empty. The proletariat was not a class or category they would be allowed to join, and all they might expect was silent agony, speechless victims of the men in hats.

  The two travellers arrived some days later in the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where their plan was to continue their journey by air. Their destination was South Africa, for Jimfish felt increasingly homesick and Zoran was as determined as ever to learn more about tribal homelands, ethnic enclosures and radical balkanization, as set out in the theories of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, of which six brand-new tribal reserves carved from the old Yugoslavia were, said Zoran, a triumphant vindication of the vision of the apostle of apartheid.

  Jimfish explained time and again to the Serb that South Africa was now another sort of place where old obsessions with race and colour had been eradicated.

  ‘That way of life is gone, it’s dead and buried.’

  Zoran said simply, ‘Perhaps. But your past is our future. If I study what you were so good at: racial division, sectarian hatred, ethnic cleansing and triumphant tribalism, I might begin to understand what we’ve achieved in my ex-homeland.’

  Jimfish’s satchel of diamonds, once the property of the late Deon Arlow, Commandant of Superior Solutions – a proudly South African company – which had been of so little use in Mogadishu would be perfectly good exchangeable currency in peaceful Dar es Salaam. And so it was on a sun-soaked morning in the port of Dar es Salaam that Zoran the Serb set out with the satchel to buy tickets for Johannesburg.

  Jimfish was keen to see something of the capital city and he walked through the streets enjoying the friendly smiles of the inhabitants. Although still sad at losing his poor Lunamiel to Brigadier Bare-Butt, he was happy to have escaped from Somalia; the sun was shining, the sky was high and blue and home felt closer and closer.

  He had just turned into a narrow street behind a row of tall houses when, suddenly, he was caught fast in a net dropped dexterously over him from a high window. The net must have been attached to an articulated arm, because Jimfish was hoisted into the air and whisked through an upstairs window into a large room.

  He heard someone giving careful instructions to the operator of the articulated arm.

  ‘Raise him up in
to the rafters and rope him to a beam. Be careful not to touch him. Any human contact with the material will affect the potency of the magic.’

  Jimfish was strung from a beam beside another man, trussed just as tightly, who told him his name was Benjamin and advised him not to struggle.

  ‘We’ve been netted like fish. Better to accept our fate. This is a saleroom and it will soon be crowded with buyers.’

  Jimfish struggled to understand what he was hearing. ‘But what’s for sale?’

  ‘We are,’ Benjamin told him. ‘This is an albino auction. It’s absolutely illegal, but albinos are prize catches, demand is high and we will be knocked down to eager bidders.’

  ‘What do they want with an albino?’

  Jimfish was again really angry for the second time in his life and he thrashed about in the net, which did no good at all, as his fellow captive had warned him.

  ‘Magic,’ said Benjamin sadly. ‘Ridiculous as it sounds. We are like rhino horn that some swear boosts sexual potency and pay vast sums to buy. But not even the very rich can afford an entire albino. Our body parts will be auctioned off a bit at a time. Eyes, legs, fingers and toes, each bit has a reserve price.’

  ‘Are you saying that we’re to be cut into pieces?’ Jimfish demanded, as anger ignited into fury and flamed within him.

  ‘Once the sale is over, yes,’ came the reply. ‘Until then, they need us in one piece to keep us fresh.’

  ‘This is barbarism!’ Jimfish said.

  The other man shook his head. ‘The albino auction is the civilized end of the market. There are those in Tanzania and beyond who believe albinos are mystical creatures who bring luck or babies or riches or wives or husbands or cures for cancer. Better the auction room than the bounty hunters. They are really wild. You can be having a meal with your family and the hunters burst in and start hacking off legs or arms, right there and then. I’m sorry, my friend, in a few minutes we’ll be knocked down to the highest bidder, then killed, then chopped up.’