The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  The first reason was called political but was often territorial: to dislodge an interloper, an unfair regime, a sadistic warlord. Then, to change the world, to upend a corrupt system and suspend the false consciousness that made its existence possible. ‘Ideology. The Che Guevara motive,’ the instructor had said.

  The third was identical to the political motive but with a twist: religious indoctrination. Religion was a façade for ideology, which was a façade for power. Finally, the fourth: bad luck – you were caught up in events, you came to consciousness in a civil war, your parents were killed, you drank revenge like boiling petrol and it fuelled you, you had no choice. The four reasons could coexist, the army major said, but one rationale always trumped the others.

  She tried to see behind the veil of Ali’s eyes. She failed to find the rancid hatred of the religious ideologue, or the ordinary fury of the politically motivated. If history had not come along and bullied Ali into war, he might have been exactly what he looked like – a village schoolmaster. Perhaps, with luck and the right connections, he might even have risen to be minister of education for a region or a province.

  She thought of all this as he began to tell her a story. At its start she took it for a follow-up to his shark parable. The story was about his uncle – or perhaps his cousin, she missed the exact tie – ‘A very important man,’ Ali said. His name was Mohammed Ibrahim and he was a religious elder in Gikayo.

  ‘He was about to take over the area. He was the second in command to Omaar.’ He said the name as if he expected her to know it. ‘He would have changed everything. He was educated in London, he was a real statesman.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The daughter of his cousin came to visit. He was very fond of her. He was a careful man, Ibrahim. He had everyone who came into his compound frisked, even his servants of thirty years. But Zainab didn’t like being frisked by men. She told Ibrahim it was un-Islamic.’

  ‘Zainab killed him?’

  ‘And herself.’ Ali nodded once, then twice, as if to seal a deed.

  The diesel generators sputtered into life. It was dark now.

  Ali folded himself back into an upright position with a deliberate, angular grace. She left the tent with him and watched him glide into the night. Overhead the stars were punched into an implacable, black sky. One moved suddenly, spewing a shower of light in its wake.

  ‘It’s the international space station.’ Suddenly, Andy was beside her. Where had he come from?

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’d show you it on the NASA site if we had the bandwidth. They’ve passed over here before.’

  ‘There they are, twisting knobs or whatever it is they do up there in zero gravity, with us down here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Andy said. ‘It must feel great to be above it all.’

  He was quiet for a moment. ‘I see you’re getting along with Osama bin Laden.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He’s well-educated.’

  ‘He is,’ she conceded. ‘But not that well-resourced. Although he was in charge, definitely. Is in charge.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Aisha recognised him.’ She looked at him quickly. ‘It’s important he doesn’t know.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Aisha had waited three days after he had first arrived to tell her. She came to find her on the edge of the camp, where she had gone to check on her camel.

  These men, they are different. Foreigners.

  From where?

  Arab countries. Not Africa. They use false names. Aisha’s mouth sank in disdain. They speak Arabic – pure Arabic. They have come with guns for our men. There is one man – I don’t know his name. He is the leader. He looks like a schoolteacher, but he is very brave. No. She switched words. Brutal.

  Aisha had not actually seen him, she’d told her; she’d heard his voice on two of the nights she’d spent in the desert in hiding. It was Ali and his men she was hiding from, although neither of them knew it. As they passed nearby, Ali was speaking to his men. ‘Something about Gikayo,’ Aisha said. Aisha had passed through the town, although at the time she did not know its name, on her long pilgrimage from her home. Gikayo was where she had lost her last remaining camel, bar Montague. She had been too afraid to move from her hiding place, and had to listen as he was trapped by a group of men and butchered alive.

  Andy peeled away from her and walked towards the accommodation block. She never knew what to make of his visitations. She had the impression he was watching her, and not with ordinary curiosity. Or there was a more specific reason: to catch her out in the act of making an avoidable mistake, maybe. Or some other motivation – something she had not even thought of.

  She would talk more to Aisha tomorrow. Then she would make up her mind.

  As she walked across the compound she saw Mustafa. She nearly used the greeting she’d learned in war zones. But you are alive!, the childlike glee that powered it. There was no point in saying hello, or how are you? You were there. You were not a ghost. Not yet.

  ‘How long is it since I have seen you?’ she asked in Arabic.

  ‘Long enough, Inshallah.’

  The twenty-one-year-old had a rangy but gentle smile. He was one of the cross-fire casualties from the village. He had nothing to do with Al-Nur, she was sure of it. In two days he would be well enough to go home to his goats. At this news he gave her an instant smile. All of the Bora men she had met performed these quick-change expressions, lurching from a sombreness to childish, reckless smiles.

  She said goodnight to Mustafa. She didn’t know what she would do that evening. She would have a tea, stare at the ceiling, or just sleep. She dreaded the questions that came with these bleached hours in camp. What has she become? Has she lived a life worth living? Why did she fail to grasp the present, even when it slid over her?

  She missed the city – any city. She’d been in the capital only three days before flying to Gariseb, and that was four months ago now. She wanted desperately to be in a city again. There, she could have a drink, she could watch strangers – people who she would not have to eat three meals a day beside for months on end, whose names she would never know. It was not sex she wanted. In any case sexual desire was always abstract, for her, until attached to another person. It was a moral decision, in part. But also she had never felt the kind of physical hunger that drove others to sleep with strangers. She took intimacy seriously. But she liked to observe people who did not, who circled each other languorously in the city’s bars and clubs like cheetahs. She felt superior and left out at the same time. She kept her loneliness intact.

  He came to find her the following afternoon. He repeated his entreaty. ‘I would like to listen to the radio.’

  ‘I will need to discuss with the others,’ she said. This was the tactic she used, with impossible requests, learned from observing village elders and their dispute-settling tactics. The invitation to sit under a tree cross-legged and eat dates was like a magical potion.

  He turned his liquid eyes towards her. ‘I had a dream last night,’ he said. ‘I was riding a black horse. There was a full moon, but around it was a green colour, like a shadow. It curled around the moon. I could not decide if this was a good omen or bad. I had a horse because there were no trucks. Perhaps it was a time before trucks. The horse was black, and we had come from the city together. What city, I don’t know. There were black birds in the sky and I didn’t like this either. Black birds flying towards the mountain. Where I come from, this is always a bad sign.’

  ‘Why is everything either a good or bad sign?’

  ‘Birds are intelligent.’

  ‘They are,’ she agreed. ‘But they don’t know the future.’

  He looked at her with an expression that might have been shock.

  She was tired. The future: she felt its bully burden through these people she treated, she felt the eyes of God and his intentions. From now on she would have to stop herself from looking at a fl
ock of migrating black starlings and seeing the dark coagulations of fate.

  She ran a hand through her hair. Dust and oil coated her fingers. Water in camp was low; she hadn’t showered in days.

  Ali had turned to leave.

  ‘Perhaps we can listen to the radio together,’ she said. ‘It’s on my computer. I can stream a radio station once in a while. I’ll have to work, I must write up my notes. But I can listen to it in the background.’

  She had a vision of Anthony and his team calling up the World Service for the files, listening to the broadcast over and over again in the company of two simultaneous translators from the Bora refugee community commandeered from Tottenham that morning, in a room with a smooth conference table made of pale wood and the grey snake of the Thames in the distance, trying to parse what message might be encoded in these broadcasts Ali was so keen to hear.

  ‘Tomorrow, come at noon.’

  A smile spread across his face, slowly at first, then rapidly gathering force. He was a wire; he transmitted information. Even his hands and fingers were fine, like antennae.

  The sun was setting. She had not had a drop to drink for three months. She had not tasted yoghurt or fresh fruit, apart from hard, pitted oranges. Their bitterness was a tonic; it had within its bite an honesty, as if only in denial would she discover the true taste of sweetness.

  The first casualty of the day was a camel herder who had strayed too close to a skirmish between militia and government forces. The herder was unconscious when he was brought in, but his wounds told the story. The militia had their semi-automatic weapons mounted on the back of pickups; the bullets fired downwards.

  In this case the young man his friends had brought, tearing across the plateau in a borrowed jalopy, was shot through the gut. He was stick-thin; jaundice had already set in.

  She and Rafael arrived in the tented triage station in the same moment. They slapped on gloves.

  ‘You open him, I’ll have a look. Then you can rummage.’ Rafael’s words were half eaten by the sound of fabric being cut away.

  She had always been good with tissue. ‘Women often are,’ Rafael said, when he first observed her dexterity. It was as if her fingertips had a feel for how muscles, veins, adipose tissue, epidermis wanted to lie. She handled insides coolly, unfazed by the maze her fingers often found themselves in. She possessed the ability to keep calm even when she felt fearful and uncertain that her instincts were the right ones.

  The man – a boy, really, he couldn’t have been twenty – was bleeding profusely. At least one bullet had torn through the intestinal area. They poked through its spirals. The gut was bruised and shredded badly in only the descending colon. Otherwise the wounds were small punctures that could be fixed with deft stitching.

  Rafael lifted his face to hers. His eyebrows went up, his I think we can do this signal. He was a quiet surgical companion, always, preferring to talk with his face.

  He left her to close up. She joined the layers of the abdomen and sutured the epidermis. After three years doing field surgery, albeit in intervals, separate chapters in different countries, performing these procedures with limited equipment and in these conditions was beginning to feel routine. Burns was the only injury that truly frightened her, both professionally and personally, and why she sometimes cowered under her desk during rains of mortar, clutching her tiny office fire extinguisher.

  ‘Hey, Rebecca, we’re off to town,’ Andy yelled from outside the theatre. ‘Want to come?’

  ‘Why are you going?’

  ‘Supplies. We need UHT and the UN plane is broken. We thought we’d drop in on Lars.’

  ‘No, man,’ she heard the scratchy voice of Bernard, their facilities engineer, a dry South African. ‘Not those guys. They’ll make us drink terrible vodka and I’ll get a headache.’

  ‘Listen to yourself for a minute,’ Andy said. ‘These guys have got alcohol.’

  Nasir was fifty kilometres away, and hardly a town. But she felt a need for her eyes to light upon something other than camp, if only so that she could return with fresh eyes.

  She forgot about her appointment with Ali. She threw her medical bag in the back of the truck and climbed into the cab for the sweat and dust of the journey.

  They arrived in Nasir in time for the Dhuhr, the noon prayer. Women draped in cerise and orange thoubs melted into doorways and alleys as they drove past. Her gaze was drawn upwards, into an insolent cloudless sky. It was ringed by sandbagged rooftops of destroyed apartment buildings. The town bristled with radio masts, some cut in half by shrapnel.

  Lars and Maurice were Belgian doctors. They manned the fort at a small MSF station in the town. Their role was to pick up the walking cases from the front line who had retreated this far, leaving the real war wounded for Gariseb. Individually they were mournful; together Lars and Maurice did a good impression of the Seventh Seal.

  They were met by two gaunt forms under the arch of their clinic, which was housed in a pretty, undestroyed ex-residence framed in hardy bougainvillea.

  ‘Lars, man, you’ve put on some weight.’ Andy encased him in a bear hug.

  Lars gave them all a sceptical glance. ‘Not enough carnage at the front line?’

  ‘It’s been a slow day, only fifty amputations this morning.’

  Maurice, the warmer of the two, rushed forward to shake her hand. ‘What a delight to see a woman. Oh –’ he very nearly put his hand to his mouth – ‘but you are beautiful.’

  ‘Thanks, Maurice, but that’s because I’m here. Once you get home to Antwerp, or wherever, I’ll seem quite plain.’

  Maurice smiled his wan cadaver smile. He shepherded them all through the arch. Suddenly, a crack racked the air. She knew what it was, she did not even need to turn around. Maurice was behind her, doubled over, his thin, fine hands placed in a squelching pool of blood on the floor.

  ‘Get down.’ Andy pushed her down; hard, she would think later, looking at the bruise his fingers left on her neck.

  They spent perhaps a minute on the floor. Maurice began to gurgle. She stood up. ‘Where’s your theatre?’ Lars had a frozen look on his face. ‘A bed, a table – anything!’ she was shouting. She bent down and draped Maurice’s arm over her neck. ‘Are you going to help or what?’ she barked at them.

  The three men leaped up. Together they dragged Maurice into a brightly lit room which must have served as their consultancy, although it would have been a pantry once. Shelves lined it at shoulder height; an old sink squatted in the corner.

  ‘Shit, my bag.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘It’s in the truck.’ She was gone before they could stop her.

  She leaped from the shadow of the villa’s stone archway into the area of the truck’s wheelbase and crouched. She heard no gunfire report, so she lunged for the door. Behind her, a ping, a puff of smoke from the stonework. They didn’t have an angle on her, but they might get one, any second now.

  She grabbed her bag. It nearly slipped in her sweat-covered palms, but she had it. She didn’t close the door of the truck. She used it as a shield as she flung herself into the dark mouth of the archway.

  An hour later it was over. ‘Okay, that’s it. Let’s leave him on the drip.’ She peeled off her gloves, went to put them in the pedal bin, and then remembered where she was, that she had only five pairs of surgical gloves in her small travelling kit.

  For the first time since the attack she ventured to look out the window. It was mid-afternoon. Unfamiliar starlings swirled around the orange trunks of palms in great black eddies. She missed her binoculars. It always surprised her that these habits of the natural world continued among the mortar explosions, the rapes and clustered executions: weavers carried on weaving nests, camels drank shyly from troughs, wasps landed on her lapel, from where she evicted them with a single breath.

  The birds came to rest in the tree in the courtyard. Small pendulous appendages, like an extra tongue, hung from their beaks – wattled starlings. She shoul
d have known from their waxy, excited call.

  Lars sat on a wooden chair with three legs, holding his head. He looked up at her – a plaintive, unreadable look.

  ‘He’ll be fine. A nice exit wound, I showed you.’

  He nodded. ‘We’ve never been attacked.’

  ‘First rule of operating in a war zone,’ Andy said. ‘Anything can happen.’

  ‘This is not a war zone,’ Lars argued. ‘There is a ceasefire.’

  ‘I’m radioing Rafael,’ she said. ‘You can come with us to Gariseb or we’ll get you on the medevac flight with Maurice. You’re not staying here.’

  ‘You don’t have the authority.’

  ‘I don’t now, but I will.’ She took her radio out of her rucksack. The VHF would reach Gariseb. Rafael would call London on the satellite phone, London would call Brussels, and they would make the arrangements. But for that night, they would all have to stay.

  They had a dinner of tinned tuna in tomato sauce, brewed up by Lars on a hotplate in the once-grand kitchen. A corner where the brickwork had been blown away was open to the sky. Through it fell the pins of stars.

  Every ten minutes she went to check on Maurice, who remained stable. She thanked the walls around her that the bullet had gone clean through the muscle of his shoulder. He would have to wear a sling until his lateral movement repaired, but other than that he would be fine.

  She and Lars took turns waking at hourly intervals to check Maurice’s condition that night. The patient slept soundly, better than the rest of them, who for security slept together in one small bedroom, half-rusted kitchen knives under their pillows.

  At dawn she braved the back entrance, which led onto an alley. She wanted to see the day come. She gambled on the snipers being asleep or at prayers.

  Beyond the boundary of the ruined back garden children scurried along the alleyway. Where they were going, she didn’t know – there had been no school in Nasir since the ceasefire. She had seen these same children in the streets of Kabul or in Kurdistan, playing in their dust-hemmed clothes with makeshift toys. Sometimes live fire found them. These children grew up knowing they could be killed at any time. Still they played.