Zanzibar

by Giles Foden

  While the planned trip to Lyly and the tagging of the lobsters would have to wait till his gear came, he’d had some successes. Modest as it was, his survey of molluscs on the intertidal flats had been well received when he sent the results to Washington. He had also, at last, seen one of the elusive leatherbacks – almost bumped into it, in fact, during his evening swim. Huge, about six feet long and four feet wide, it had lifted its head out of the water, regarded him for a moment, then dived, paddling strongly with its broad front flippers and trailing out its back ones behind, using them to steer. It disappeared swiftly. He’d swum back to shore feeling sublimely happy, as if he’d fulfilled his aim in coming to Zanzibar; although he knew really to do that he would have to save one or two of the glorious animals.

  He recorded the sighting in his notebook, an old green-leather accounts ledger he’d bought in a junk shop in Stone Town. It was mostly lists of fish species that he logged there – triangular box-fish, barred needlefish, starry dragonet – but other observations went in too. Different to the work he did on his computer, his real work of charts and graphs and reports to Washington, this was where he doodled great spirals of nothing in particular, listed fanciful objectives for his future life and career, and recorded his impressions of people he met.

  It was in the ledger, too, that he wrote up a little private project he was doing on life and death among the sponges. Just a short distance out into the bay from the Macpherson was a whole field of these multicellular members of the sub-kingdom Parazoa, all waving eerily in the undersea currents. They lived their passive lives subject to ebb and flow, the water constantly filtering through them. Somehow they fascinated him, and he had even gone to the trouble of drawing, in pencil and not very well, the olynthus of a simple calcareous sponge with part of the wall cut away to expose the paragaster, the central cavity of the body. It was through here that water left the sponge, having entered via the pores and washed around, feeding it with oxygen and microscopic nutrients. Sponges were, he’d come to believe, among the strangest creatures in the ocean.

  There were others. The most exciting thing he had done lately – an account of which had gone into both ledger and laptop – was to sew a twenty-centimetre transmitter into the belly of a shark. For this he’d had to catch it (which he’d got some Zanzibari fisherman to do), and turn it upside down. Then it stopped thrashing about and became manageable, going into a trance-like state known as tonic immobility. The transmitter sent signals to a satellite, which in turn bounced the shark’s location back to Washington, enabling scientists to track its movements. The whole thing had been fascinating, but his satisfaction in doing it right was chilled by the memories the shark brought of his father, that dark page of earlier life that he tried to keep shut but which still, sometimes, brought secret tears.

  He knew that activity was the cure, not standing around dreaming of some imaginary perfection in which he wasn’t bereaved. And so, notwithstanding his new attachment to Lyly, he had given himself over to a full exploration of Zanzibar itself. After much tinkering, he had managed to get Leggatt’s bike working. The boy, Sayeed, had helped.

  The repair of the Norton opened up the place to him. Every weekend he would take a long tour, up to Nungwi in the north or down to the stretch of road that ran between Pingwe and Makunduchi village on the far south-western tip, stopping on the way to look at the hulk of the East German warship that had been abandoned here at the end of the Cold War.

  Sometimes he’d ride on the beach, wild and bare-headed. Then dismount to sit in solitude by the billows, listening under the deeper boom of that heavier water for how the sea-spray’s mesh of falling droplets boiled and hissed on the Norton’s engine.

  The ritual ended with the obligatory sunset, and then there was the homecoming on winding tracks, the two brown lines and cockscomb of frazzled grass that led him all the way back here: to see the sign, Macpherson Ruins Hotel, through gritty eyes. To see also da Souza, fastidiously preparing a gin and tonic for him behind the teak-wood bar. Or the woman whose head-to-toe black chador, as she swept the courtyard or turned down the beds each evening, struck a blow for chambermaids everywhere with its resistance to the male eye. In spite of his fascination with this Darth Vader-like character, Nick took care not to stare at her. Yet he often wondered how it must feel to be separated from the reality of things like that by the net of the veil.

  The hotel itself was more revealing, releasing its staggered secrets like the split vanilla pods he sometimes ran over on his bike. While the main building was modern – though in a tasteful way, unlike so many of the horrors that developers all over the island were cooking up – the ruins, which stood in majestic gardens, were full of history. He had learned from da Souza that during the nineteenth century the ruined buildings had been a missionary school run by Caroline Thackeray. The Goan said that this lady was the cousin of a famous novelist from England and that the purpose of the school was to educate orphaned girls. Macpherson himself had been the bishop under whose aegis the mission school fell.

  It was only a few weeks later, after he had wandered around the gardens and the crumbling, creeper-covered buildings several times, that Nick discovered these orphaned girls had been freed from slave-dhows captured by British warships. Now, whenever he wound his way under the ancient palms or large old mango trees, he would imagine the spirits of these poor creatures learning to read and write, or how to sew or cook rice.

  The gardens themselves had been neatly laid out, with labels giving the names of the plants. Sometimes the reason for the name was obvious: elephant ear, powder-puff tree, umbrella plant, African hat plant, Dutchman’s pipe, woman’s tongue. Others were more arbitrary. He could stand looking at these stranger flowers for ages, wondering about their stories: beefsteak begonia, St Anthony’s rick rack, bullock’s heart … There was one, which the label said was from Peru, which was just called ‘four o’clock’.

  Nick was now officially an ‘expert’. Most African countries suffered from a surfeit of these, and mostly they were white. But Zanzibar had surprisingly few. Nick only knew two or three, including the British specialist in Sudden Death he’d met in the bar in Stone Town, and for whose team he now played soccer on Wednesday evenings. Not very well, but he was coming along under Catmull’s tuition. Tim was also teaching him to play snooker at the Africa House hotel, a regular night-time gig, with beer, after the soccer. They planned a trip to Pemba, Zanzibar’s second island, where Tim often took weekend breaks. There was a good marina there, he said.

  Another member of the soccer team was Olivier Pastoureau, a melancholy Belgian land reclaimer who worked down at Makunduchi. He had the best boat on the island, a handsome white motor cruiser paid for by the European Development Fund, the agency running his project. He was understandably proud of it, in particular the electronic gadgetry, which included an echo sounder and side-scan sonar to map the shape of the seabed.

  Olivier had shown him how they worked during one of the Sunday-lunch barbecues for which the foredeck of the Cythère, as she was called, was splendidly equipped, having a minibar and a small gas brazier. The echo sounder gave an aerial view of the seabed, looking straight down, while the side-scan gave a horizontal view. Lowered by cables off the edge of the boat, the side-scan looked like a kind of torpedo or cruise missile. Then they would go back in the cabin and see the patterns of the ocean floor transmitted to the screen, its undersea hills and declivities all mapped out in glowing purple patterns.

  Olivier needed to know the shape of the seabed so that his dredgers avoided the reefs when they went in to get the sand on which the planned new port at Makunduchi would be built. This conservationist impulse, which made the whole thing fantastically expensive, as the dredgers had to range much further, was to Nick’s mind misplaced. Dredging would stir up so much sediment that it would block out the light the coral needed to live. So it would die anyway, in time.

  The whole project sounded crazy – building on sand? – but obviously it wasn
’t possible for him to get into that in a big way with Olivier. He’d offered to look at ways of limiting the sediment drift on the bigger reefs by taking account of seasonal currents, which the Belgian said he would put to his superiors back in Brussels.

  ‘But then,’ Olivier added with a shrug, ‘the project will be delayed further because we have to wait for this current or that, like a bunch of … how do you say, bonnes femmes, waiting to do their washing.’

  Even when he was sitting out in a sapphire sea, drinking bottles of beer and turning over swordfish steaks on the brazier, Olivier always, though with some self-deprecation, saw the glass of life as half empty. Tim said the Belgian was mad as a snake. This might have been jealousy. Olivier was very attractive and had a funny effect on women. His wife – his ex-wife – was very beautiful. According to Tim, he had found the decline in her sexual desire after marriage difficult to accept. Nick and Olivier never spoke of this matter. They spoke of science and politics and higher things, from the creation of plastic to the Gulf War – oil, in that case, being the link.

  So they had talked, that particular day, and so it unspooled again in his head. The history of our century was, Nick recalled the Belgian saying solemnly, the disgrace of humanity. All that was good, he said, had become like a dream flickering in the mind of a sleeping person: the future held only catastrophe, the triumph of death and sin. When he asked Olivier what exactly he meant, the Belgian simply shook his head gloomily and said the world was a wrecked vessel.

  *

  The phrase came back to Nick again at breakfast as he contemplated his little orange canoe of papaya. Served every morning, it had ceased to be exotic. He had almost begun to miss his bowl of Cheerios. After all (he remembered the ad), ‘There’s a lot of goodness in those little Os.’

  Da Souza sailed toward the table, all smiles and hair oil, bearing the coffee jug for a refill.

  ‘And how are we today, sir?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘You are unhappy, sir?’

  ‘Just … papaya again.’

  ‘You don’t like?’

  ‘Forget it. I only mention it to illustrate a point.’

  ‘This came, sir.’ The manager produced a letter from his jacket pocket.

  The envelope had a State Department seal. And a Dar postmark.

  ‘This has taken over a month!’ cried Nick, looking at the stamp.

  ‘I am sorry, sir, but –’

  Nick raised his hand. ‘I know, stop there. It’s Zanzibar.’

  He tore open the letter. Brief, formal, and to the point, it was from the US embassy in Dar-es-Salaam, notifying him of the arrival of his scuba equipment.

  PART TWO

  12

  They travelled to Pakistan in a battered green minibus. The journey through Afghanistan had been mortally slow, since the road from Kandahar to Kabul was full of potholes. There were also many checkpoints, but Zayn had all the correct papers and passwords to satisfy the Talibs. Having skirted the capital itself and crossed the Kabul river in the dark, they spent a night at Khost, where the Sheikh had a complex of camps. It was there they were shown Ahmed the German’s videotape surveillance of the target.

  The following day, after winding through fields of scree along a narrow road packed with lorries belching black smoke and piled high with produce, they crossed the border without incident. There was nothing in their baggage to arouse the suspicions of the Pakistani authorities. The ordnance for the task had followed a different route: from Italy and the Czech Republic to Oman, using the services of a Russian freight company called Air Yazikov, with which al-Qaida had connections. Then across the Gulf by boat down to the East African coast, trade routes that had been used for centuries.

  Loads carried to far-off lands … Ships whose cargoes bring pleasure to peoples … The holy words jostled with the thoughts in Khaled’s head as he looked out of the window of the minibus at the rocky hilltops of northern Pakistan. He told himself to be strong. Was it not true that only God knows what lies before people? Human beings can only understand those parts of His truth that He chooses them to understand.

  In Peshawar, they booked into a hotel owned by the Sheikh. It was known as the Bait al Ansar, the House of Support, and many people from al-Qaida and other Islamic groups stayed there as they passed through, before and after operations. Zayn had told them to keep a low profile, but Khaled managed to slip out – after a breakfast of bitter coffee, dates and yogurt – to wander round the streets, which were thick with people and traffic and dirt.

  The crumbling yellow walls of many of the buildings were covered with brightly coloured posters of Pakistani film stars. There was a large garrison of soldiers and, testament to what years of war can do to a region, a large army of limbless beggars. Those who had lost legs scooted about through the black clouds of exhaust fumes on low wooden boards fixed with wheels, pushing themselves along on fists wrapped in bundles of filthy cloth.

  The bazaars were full of all manner of goods, including a fearsome array of weaponry. He saw one stall where grenades were piled up like pomegranates. Peshawar was said to be full of smugglers. He suspected that these people were mostly ordinary traders, but it was certainly true that besides the local Pashtuns, the streets were busy with men from all over Central Asia: Uzbeks with florid whiskers, Turcomans in black woollen hats that looked like wigs, Nuristanis with blond hair and pale blue eyes …

  He bought a glass of black tea and sat watching the faces passing by the tea-house window. The variety of countenances pleased him. For although there is no God but God Himself, are not the most glorious places under Allah’s sky those that are like this? Places where it is not one thing or the other that counts, as the Talibs would have it, but the great thronging mixture itself. His homeland was like that. Zanzibar, Pemba, Lamu … The whole coastline, Kilwa, Mombasa and Malindi, all the way down to Sofala in Mozambique, the port which the old men said was once the gateway to a fabulously wealthy African kingdom, long before white men came.

  Home. Soon he would be there. The plan was that they would fly to Dubai. There, in the transit lounge, they would switch passports covertly with al-Qaida members inbound to Pakistan. Some of the passports were false, some were real. There was a facility within al-Qaida, a man who forged the documents. From Dubai they would fly on to Muscat to catch the Gulf Air plane that flew directly between the Omani capital and Zanzibar. This flight served those Arab families that divided their time between the island and the desert – subject, as always since the Revolution, to the residence laws that prevented Arabs from living on Zanzibar for longer than one month in four.

  This aspect had been one of Khaled’s own contributions to the operation. He liked to put a braver gloss on it, but sometimes he suspected he had been brought on board simply because he had the correct passport and visa, and the local knowledge. His documents had all been copied by al-Qaida’s forgers. Zayn, a Palestinian by birth, and Yousef the Syrian were now fellow Zanzibaris of Omani extraction. Together with Khaled they could pass through the minimal controls at Zanzibar’s tiny airport without hindrance. No one ever checked properly, Khaled had explained. By taking the direct Gulf flight they avoided having to go through immigration on the Tanzanian mainland.

  This was important. In keeping with the semi-fiction that Zanzibar was a separate state in federation with the mainland, the authorities on the island had their own immigration service. But it was underfunded. Most important of all, it had no computers. Paper records of exit and entry to the island were rarely made either. Effectively, the representatives of al-Qaida would be entering the country invisibly.

  Zayn was angry when Khaled returned from his wander round Peshawar.

  He shouted. ‘You are a young fool! What if a Pakistani policeman had stopped and questioned you?’

  Khaled simply bowed his head miserably and waited for the stinging blow which the flat of Zayn’s hand delivered on such occasions. There had been many.

  After lunch, Zayn sent h
im into town to buy more units for the satellite phone that they would use in the course of the operation. It struck Khaled as something of a contradiction: surely he was far more likely to be noticed at the satellite agency than sitting in the window of a tea-house?

  Later in the afternoon, feeling wronged, he went up on to the flat roof of the hotel. As he walked out onto the squared concrete, he saw a small figure. It was a boy flying a kite – one of the hundreds of little paper triangles that fluttered above the city every afternoon. Most were made of green or red tissue. Some of them were covered in pictures, though these could hardly be seen from the ground. Khaled stood watching. Kite-flying was a craze in this part of the world. The boys glued ground glass to the strings of their kites and engaged in fights, sawing away at the string of the other.

  He sat down on the low, rough-plastered parapet of the roof wall and continued watching, to the boy’s great pride and pleasure. Along with satellite television, videos, football and chess, the Taliban had banned kite-flying over the border. Khaled could not begin to fathom the reason. Perhaps they thought kites were in some way idolatrous. But kite-flying seemed such a harmless pastime.

  As he studied the boy skilfully swerving his craft through the air, deft movements of the hand producing corresponding swirls and flourishes in the sky, Khaled felt happy again. Breaking through the clouds above the hills round the city, sunlight was bathing the whole place, making the yellow-brick town reflect upwards with a golden glow, in the midst of which danced the red and green dabs of the kites. It gave – he had to confess his thoughts took this shape – what could only be described as the impression of a painting.

  The feeling soon passed however. Later Khaled could again feel Zayn’s hot eyes upon him when, as dusk fell, they inaugurated their evening prayers in the hotel room. Khaled knelt and lowered his head. A fan whirred above. He heard Yousef’s whispering voice beside him, and joined in the recitation.