Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  Predictably, these same fighters returned to Somalia and built a new and more radical organisation, with a heightened martyrdom complex, recapturing south Somalia town by town. They discredit merchants who oppose them and dismantle their businesses. They tax goods and livestock coming and going: fuel, rice, pasta, the narcotic leaf qat, which Somali men chew to get high, and all the market stalls down to the fish on their slabs.

  The lesson of 2006 has been taken to heart. A jihadist must know how to hide on the land and in the swamps. Somalia is wild. It is from another time. It is possible to live in the scrub with a gun. A man can recite his prayers far from any road, experiencing a sense of holiness, hardening himself. It is not a secure refuge – its fruits are bitter-tasting as Afghanistan’s once were – but it holds a similar promise of paradise. That is why Somalia serves as a trapdoor for Saudi Arabia. Young Saudis are sent there to lay low and to learn how to fight. They are marginal characters – on the run from themselves as well as from the police – withdrawn, stammering, younger brothers, with unresolved inner conflicts, most of them sexual.

  She abandoned the beaked whales, left Spesa behind, but kept the cabin in the mountains. She completed her doctorate in Zurich, and remained in the morbid heights of Switzerland for seven years. Her interest in the deep became sharper. It also became more poetic, fed by visits to the Sumerian archive at the University of Zurich.

  In those years she liked to board a train to the Alps with her bicycle, choosing the platforms at Zurich main station at random. She found there was veracity in the claim that, in landlocked countries, espionage takes the place of adventure, and police take the place of pirates. Nevertheless, she pushed on into the deepest valleys, the ones which lost their winter sun in the early afternoon. She biked along the valley floors and visualised the day they would be at the bottom of a new sea. The steepness of the slopes matched those of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Waterfalls plunged off rock. They fell in the air, through air. She prefigured them as underwater cascades, water pouring through water. She pictured the ski pistes on a sonar display, the chalets lit up by pinpricks of light, the heated municipal swimming pools as hydrothermal vents thick with mats and carpets of microbial life and not day-trippers from St Gallen.

  ‘I go to Switzerland once a year,’ he said to her, in bed in the Hotel Atlantic.

  They shared memories of Zurich airport. If by some new method these images were downloaded from their minds they would correspond. They had similar sensibilities, and a similar way of watching the flow of people and landscapes and framing them. They had both looked out of the windows of the air terminal to the cow pastures and forest, the streams flowing to Lake Zurich, the inferior coffee in a white china demitasse, the snow on the Alps, while around them was a constant motion of humans and machines, families walking to their gates, the airport train gliding in, the Swiss planes circling above, white crosses on red, but these images were differently settled in their minds.

  She retained hers as something familiar; the landscape she looked out upon as a student, the system she worked in. He arrived in Zurich from poorer countries and was uplifted. He saw through the window a display of labour and efficiency which stood in contrast to the Muslim communities he was charged with observing.

  They came to the edge of the wood. They wanted to reach the village.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I can’t go in.’

  He already had a foot in the wood. He turned. She was teetering. ‘Are you all right?’

  She looked into the wood. The branches and ferns made her nauseous.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not. Oh, I think I’m going to be sick.’

  The trees sliced away the day, producing narrows and shadows on the snow and polygons whose angles were irresolvable.

  ‘Come away,’ he said, and he put his arm around her and walked her out into the field, into the light. He made her drop her head and breathe deeply. Her recovery was instantaneous.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’ve no history of claustrophobia. Not even in a submersible.’

  They set off in another direction.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, as they walked in open space, ‘we had horses that refused to jump. They had cleared hedgerows and ditches without question, then suddenly were afraid of heights.’

  ‘I’m a horse?’ she said with mock displeasure.

  ‘I’m saying you might be afraid of the dark.’

  Kismayo is famous for its magicians and for the refreshing breeze blowing in off the Indian Ocean at night. The great Muslim travellers visited the town, so did Zheng He and his Chinese fleet. The Portuguese built a fort there, which the Omanis captured. The Somalis drove out the Omanis, then yielded to the Italians.

  The town broke down during the civil war and continues to deteriorate. Its population is growing rapidly as a result of the large numbers of internally displaced. Half of its people are under eighteen years old. There are few schools. There are hardly any jobs.

  The port no longer has any warehouses. The Taiwanese tuna boats are gone, chased away by the pirates. But the dhows still bring in diesel, cement and crates of bullets, and they still take away fish, bananas, mangoes, coconut matting, and animals, always animals. It is a scene at night. Black waters lap within, lanterns and fires burn on the quay. It is loud, heaving with livestock. The beasts are walked down to the port at dusk from their grazing at the edge of the town. The camels are roped together three at a time and hoisted onto the vessels. It is remarkable to see how the handlers whisper religious verses into their ears to calm them before they are lifted.

  They allowed him to walk with them in town one evening to witness a feeding that had been set up for the people sleeping rough in the port. Several men went with him. He was ordered to conceal his face. He felt stronger. He saw things more clearly. It was beautiful to go forwards as if through walls. They went by shattered buildings and others not completed. He looked at one structure and knew from its exterior that it was where he had been held.

  A crowd of boys played a game of table football on a street corner. They dropped their hands to their sides and fell silent as the fighters went by. There were candlelit stalls of women who told fortunes, and women who painted henna patterns onto hands and wrists. There was a hair salon called Le Chinoise lit with a single electric bulb. A woman in a veil pushed by him in a narrow street. Her eyes flashed. They turned a corner and there was the overpowering smell of the fish market and the trilling voices of women selling the last of the day’s catch. Girls scavenged through a rubbish heap. Older women sat on a wall further on, not veiled, still wearing their daytime facemasks: red from avocado to protect against pimples, yellow from sandalwood to protect from the sun. There were so many women out in the world. In his captivity there had only been Aziz’s Somali wife, who placed her hands on his broken chest. In one dark alley they told him to kneel and look away while they urinated against a coral wall. There was a stale smell of piss. The alley was a urinal. A cloud of mosquitoes rose up.

  They walked by the shore. Fruit bats fell from the palm trees and flew out and touched the sea and other fruit bats circled a minaret, as big and indecent as dogs. It was the same minaret Kismayo’s last Catholic stole up with his trumpet, to protest against the intolerance of the Islamist regime. He was an old man, cogent, certain of himself, who had played in the town band during the Italian period. The band wore a green uniform with gold epaulettes and had a repertoire of military marching songs of the Italian Alpini regiment, anthems, polkas from the Tyrol, and dance numbers of the day. But when the Catholic took his trumpet up the minaret he had a mind to play a piece of jazz. Alas, there was no time. They were already after him, charging up the narrow staircase, so, instead, impulsively, he seized the loudspeaker and spoke ‘Hail Marys’ for all that part of the town to hear, the words clanged on the ears of the believers, until there was a grunt, which was the old man being knocked over the head with a brick. They dragged him down th
e steps. He was almost beaten to death. To save his life, his family declared him mad and dispatched him to Kenya.

  They kept a gun trained on him. They did not speak English or Arabic. It was disconcerting. Their faces were covered and it was not possible for him to interpret their body language. They walked across the beach to the port and that troubled him too. He was a strong man, but the mock execution had traumatised him. He took off his sandals and felt the warm sand between his toes. The fighters would have walked barefoot even in the middle of the day. They had no nerves left in their feet. The wind blew and raised the sand in places into eddies. At the water’s edge there were eels writhing and feeding on washed-up tuna and crabs of many sizes and patterns of shell scuttling sideways back to their holes.

  The port was packed. Two dhows were tied up. Dirty goats were being thrown onto them. They bleated in the air and landed on the deck; square on their hooves. They were headed for Mecca, to be slaughtered there by pilgrims.

  The famished were all around, pressed in with the animals; weaker than them, more dazed. They had staggered in from the dead country. There was nowhere else for them to go. Some slept under the lorries, or along the coral wall. Their mouths were full of dust. They were hollow-cheeked; in some faces the narrowness produced a rodent-like expression. Several hundred of them were in the overgrown garden of an abandoned villa, waiting to be fed a meal. Other fighters were already there, cudgelling them into a line. The food was cooking in a cauldron on an open fire. A stray dog stepped forward and shat in the dust, then moved back into the bushes. Some people fainted before they reached the food and there was no one to lift them up. The fruit bats went by, brushing low. They had fur bellies and beads for eyes. Their teeth were sharp, overlapped and interlocked.

  There was some delay. He could not see what. A rock was thrown. Possessions were thrown up in the air. A baby was trampled, then recovered. The man who threw the rock was pointed out and executed with a shot through the mouth and then there was just the sound of the food being served and the scraping of hands against the bowls.

  The bare wooden floor of the billiards room was scattered with sawdust. A stove threw out thick waves of heat, like in the railway station waiting room in La Roche. The unvarnished card tables were inset with leather. Low hanging lights illuminated the billiards tables. He rolled balls across the felt. The japanned reds and whites clicked and the completeness of their colours resembled the sound of their clicking.

  The room smelled like a city villa and a sanatorium; Swiss. On little plinths around the room were marble busts of historical figures. He went over to where she was sitting, under Garibaldi’s head. They were cold from their walk and were turned towards the stove. Pastries and hot chocolate were brought to the adjoining table. It was afternoon. They played backgammon.

  ‘I’ve been reading up on the ocean,’ he said. ‘Is it true that every third breath we take is from oxygen stored in the sea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust it. It sounds like something a journalist would write. Although’ – she rolled the dice – ‘it does speak to a larger point.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘We’re entering an age when everything will be quantified. What we have thought of as abundant we will understand to be limited.’

  ‘The seamounts?’

  ‘I’m talking the world and everything in it.’

  ‘What about fresh air? Will we quantify that?’

  ‘Of course. Oxygen will be a proven reserve. It will have to be managed, just as we manage water and minerals and fuels.’

  ‘The great aqualung in the sky.’

  She looked at the board and smiled. ‘You’re blocked in.’

  ‘I just need a six.’

  A three.

  ‘In Rwanda,’ he continued, speaking as the water engineer, and as himself, ‘they used to have hunting dogs that tracked and killed serval cats in the forests. Princes who lived in grass huts high enough for you or I to stand up in wore the skins. The wicker partition inside the huts spiralled inwards like so’ – he danced his fingertips on the card table – ‘a snail shell, and the only light came in through a hole in the roof, and the smell was naked; dung, cow blood. You wound in to a grass bed at the centre raised up above the rats and snakes and there was a teenage girl on her knees, waiting for the prince to enter, a different girl from the night before.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is that the prince and the girl belonged to a land of plenty. There was enough then, whereas today every hillside in Rwanda is cultivated. The serval cats and the hunting dogs are gone, so are the grass huts. Nearly all the forest has been cut down, and the perpetrators of the genocide and the victims have nowhere to hide from each other. In some places the wells are running dry, in others the earth is washed away in streams. Rwanda has to develop now, or face another genocide. It’s quantified.’

  ‘Very much so,’ she said.

  He could not get the six he needed to put his final piece back into play. She was overtaking him. They talked on through several more games. Towards the end, she spoke about the future. But when he spoke about dead aid to Africa – how the money given out by charities was wasted – her interest wavered and she became intent on the game.

  He tracked tiny movements of small people. Here today, still there tomorrow. He ate sandwiches in the canteen, chaired teleconferences, left the office before rush hour. If he was ever allowed to speak to her about the explosive part of his job, he knew he would not have the words. He would not be able to describe to her the adrenaline rush of lifting and aiming a gun. He would have left her only with a description of the noise a firearm makes when it is fired and the smell of cordite, which lingers.

  There was defeatism in their conversation which allowed a greater part to Malthus, he decided, and did not take into account the advances of mankind. Among the busts around the room the only Englishmen were Isaac Newton and John Milton. He looked at Milton – impassive, unseeing – and verse crowded in. The greatest privilege of education, he thought, was to renew and clarify your mind through the perception of others. Milton had more than played his part. Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Republic; a freethinker who stood to the right of Oliver Cromwell, where the Levellers and Ranters stood to the left: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties.’

  He thought of how in Paradise Lost the Archangel Raphael sat down in Paradise with Adam and Eve, not in the form of mist, but as a hungry creature who needed to eat. He spoke aloud the last lines of Book XII.

  ‘Say it again,’ she said. She liked the sound of his voice.

  ‘Some natural tears they dropp’d,’ he began, ‘but wip’d them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.’

  She had suffered from the divide in the English education system, which holds that scientists do not study Milton, and those who love Milton have no comprehension of Newton’s gravity, which brought Lucifer tumbling from heaven. But she had recovered to become a voracious reader.

  They played billiards. The cues were stacked against a stone sink, where in days past billiard players would have washed their hands and faces. The emptiness of the room and the echo of their footsteps on the wooden floorboards gave the game a slightly eerie feel. Neither of them knew the rules. They made them up. She bent over the table.

  ‘Hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m terrible. Isn’t this longer than a pool stick?’

  ‘Come around this side,’ he said.

  He moved in behind, wrapped her up, and it began again. She was a flower about to open. He touched her arms and hands. They pulled back the cue, together they struck the white ball, it clicked the red, and for her his kiss was more than the balls striking; he touched her life, she touched his, their lives so independent and far apart from each other.

  There is a d
warf antelope in east Africa called the dik-dik. They are easier to kill from a distance than to catch. In his intelligence reports he called the fight against jihadists in Somalia the dik-dik war.

  But jihadists were more like weeds really, he thought. If you left them alone, they grew thick on the ground. If you cut them down, they came back stronger. So the strategy employed in the dik-dik war was no kind of strategy at all, just a periodic spraying from the air.

  A bird flew into the surgery on the same day a girl was stoned to death in the square. It entered with furled wings looking to nest and lost itself, battering itself against the walls and windows. He shouted out when the bird struck him and the guards came in. They wrung the bird’s neck and beat him. It lay dead on the floor. Its claws looked like nibs dipped in ink. It was not a songbird. That is also what the cleric declared about the girl who was stoned to death in the town square: ‘She’s no nightingale.’