by Jean McNeil
The embassy was in the suburbs. Most of the Western embassies had been moved from the city centre a decade ago, Anthony later told me. In the suburbs they could be protected by high walls topped with four tiers of electrical wire and concrete crash barriers. There, embassy staff could drive their armoured cars less than a kilometre away to the local Roastery café outlet in the Baridi shopping centre with its fifteen guards wielding AK-47s.
We climbed into the Tembo Hills. The land on either side of the highway became steadily greener. Here the exclusive suburb of Hatton spread itself in the shadow of a dormant volcano. Its caldera had been dammed to provide water for the wives of millionaires who played at running smallholdings, keeping cows and chickens while gardeners laboured in their vegetable patches.
Everything I knew about the capital Anthony had told me. He was revered for the thoroughness of his briefings, both written and oral. It was rumoured his staff was composed entirely of failed novelists who vented their frustrated ambitions into picaresque reports on arms dealers, tax equality campaigners, Heathrow runway protestors, minor heads of state and the most prized quarry – the adherents of radical Islam.
The capital was only a hundred and fifty years old. It had begun life as a railway station where two lines built by the British using Indian coolie labour converged on an arid plateau. The water was good: clear and cold and, crucially for the European settlers, parasite-free. Three streets turned into ten, then, within two years, by 1895, there were four import-export houses and three banks.
The city had been built by Germans, and some streets still bore their names, vying with African liberation heroes on others: Bismarck Avenue crossed Nyerere Street; Kaunda Avenue ran parallel to Schoenberg Allee. Then the English had come, the nascent colony was one of the bounties of the European victory in the First World War. With the English had come their obsession for domesticating the land, and the market gardens of Hatton.
It was the only country apart from South Africa where the whites had stayed after Independence in enough numbers to constitute an ethnic group. They were farmers, safari operators, UN consultants, high school teachers and businesspeople, running bean-exporting or cheese-making conglomerates, heading up the regional branch of Unilever or Deutsche Bank.
The country’s whites were neither one thing nor another: no longer British or German or American, but the wrong colour to be legitimately African, as Bill would later tell me. They had made their fortunes in a country where they had little political influence, where they were increasingly seen as a freakish hybrid species whose numbers were in permanent decline. In England they would have been ordinary middle class, driving BMWs from Kent to insurance jobs in the City. Here they had become heliotropes; they would wither without the sun. They grew and grew, flaxen stalks of wheat, until they were tanned and daring.
Among the Africans there were three ethnic groups with distinct characters, Anthony’s briefing informed me: the Milau, the Tswalu and the Kandinka. The Milau are wily and profit-minded; they run the businesses in the highlands, and so the country. The Tsawlu are fastidious cattle herders, interested only in money and blood. The Kandinka are seemingly sweet-tempered fishermen or dairy farmers or cultivators of ostriches, but when called to war they are merciless.
Anthony’s voice had begun to ring in my ears, now that I knew I would see him again. We might not need you. He had a voice of gravity and a honeyed accent of such patrician character that it almost sounded put on. I could not imagine him as anything other than an intelligence agent. He inhabited the role so thoroughly. Many doctors are like that, too; there is no other calling, no alternate version of themselves. Even if they gave up medicine tomorrow and set up an artists’ commune in the Pyrenees, they will always be doctors.
We might not need you. But now they did.
Traffic lunged towards giant roundabouts controlled by white-gloved policemen. It was a city in love with cars. We were wedged in four lanes of solid Prados, Land Cruiser Xs, a gleaming new purple Range Rover and even a white Porsche 4x4 slinking among the battered minibuses painted wild colours – one with green and purple ants – which conveyed armies of workers from the slums surrounding the city.
We pulled up at the embassy. It had been the home of one of the original settler families, a sprawling two-storey building with many-paned windows. The tiled roof bristled with cameras. Two armed men in army fatigues stood on either side of the building. A van with blacked-out windows and an antenna on its roof crouched nearby.
‘You’ll have to wait for a consular officer,’ a PA told me. It seemed I was just another doctor, pitching up for credentials and a logistics briefing. The PA told me I could wait in the garden.
There, huge acacias threw feathery shadows on the stone pathways. At first it was quiet. The upcountry birds – the black and Klass’ cuckoos, the African mourning dove – had finished their morning song. A cloud obscured the sun and I heard a deep hoot. A turaco – Schlaow’s, perhaps, or Hartlaub’s, considering the elevation. It flew between the tall pines, flashing its opposing red and green on its wings, its smart anvil-shaped head.
‘Dr Laurelson.’
I turned towards the PA’s voice and saw him.
He stood under the building’s broad verandah. He lunged forward – he had the same energetic, spring-built step many doctors have – and took my hand. ‘Rebecca. So good to see you.’
‘I can’t say I’m happy to see you again.’
He nodded – an understanding, practiced nod. ‘Come to my office. I’ve just come out to get a blast of light. We work in one of the most beautiful countries in the world and I never get to see the sun.’
The man was tall and thin. He had a particular elliptical gait, as if his legs had been misaligned slightly with his hip joints. He tipped his head towards me solicitously as we walked. ‘How was your flight? Looking forward to getting stuck in in your new post? We’ll make sure it goes as smoothly as possible for you.’ He didn’t wait for answers.
His office was at the back of the building. Through the window I saw the three serene crests of the Tembo Hills.
‘So.’ Anthony fingered a blue folder on his desk. ‘Gariseb.’ He gave me a look which might have been encouraging. ‘A tricky place. There’s no backup nearby. As you’ll know the nearest army base is three hundred kilometres away and we have no jurisdiction in Gariseb.’
‘Do you see that as a problem?’
‘Not a problem. A challenge. The most important thing is to maintain your cover. These confined environments can be hard, I know. You’re isolated. You have to keep your counsel, as we explained. Email once a day, satellite phone, restricted Internet.’ He looked at me. ‘But you’ve done all this before.’
I was thinking about his phrase, keep your counsel. An elegant stand-in for secrets.
‘Not in places quite as isolated or unsupported, I have to say.’
‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘You’ll have to think for yourself.’
‘And I haven’t quite been in this position before. I’ve always just been a doctor.’
‘You are still just a doctor.’
He sat back in his chair. My mind slowed enough – it had been racing for so long now I hardly noticed it – for me to take him in as a person, rather than a pure threat. He wore a blue shirt and lightweight trousers. I stole a look at his shoes, just visible around the corner of his handsome rosewood desk. Brogues, a sandy hue, handmade.
I never got to know any of his colleagues that well, so Anthony was my measure of the intelligence agent. In London he’d taken me to lunch, to the restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall. It was spring and tourist boats puttered down the Thames.
He was surprisingly confiding. ‘I have a soft spot for doctors,’ he’d said, before we had even ordered our starter. He had been brought up by a pair of doctors, both men, long before the days of civil partnerships. He was thirty-three, three years younger than me at the time.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ he’d said.
‘You already know everything about me.’
‘That’s not true. The facts, maybe. Grew up in Clapham. Graduated in medicine, Cambridge, four years in the army medical corps, two years with MSF in Kurdistan. Now taking your consultant exams. Emergency medicine at St Thomas’.’
‘What else would you like to know?’
He smiled. ‘Never married?’
‘Engaged, when I was twenty-eight. To a pilot, Alexander. He died in South Sudan. But I think you know about that too.’
‘I’m very sorry. And since then?’
‘Since then I’ve been concentrating on my career.’
I liked the expression in his eyes, very experienced, certain. This man knew things I would never know, was privy to information perhaps only twenty people in the world, including the President of the United States, knew. His knowledge created an authority, and this became a force field.
‘I’ve always admired doctors,’ he said. ‘But what you do, working in remote environments, in conflict situations, it seems –’ he gave me an almost beseeching look – ‘heroic. Really.’
‘Once you start thinking of yourself as a hero you’re done for. I think that applies to any profession.’
‘Why did you choose it? I mean, remote environments, the deprivation.’
‘To see how much I could take. It seemed to me a useful thing to know.’
‘And how much,’ he smiled, ‘would that be?’
‘Everyone has a different relationship with fear. Fear is abstract, until you encounter it. Everyone has their breaking point, when they succumb to fear. Mostly you find out that what you thought you feared doesn’t frighten you at all, but then something comes along which you had never thought of, and you’re terrified.’
‘I was rather hoping to learn what you might be afraid of.’
‘I know, and I’m not going to tell you.’
A grey-hued ship, like a mini-destroyer, slunk down the Thames. We watched its progress, our gaze arrested by the same spectacle.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could be quite good at this. You have independence of mind but allegiance to your profession. You’re cool, you’ve got good nerves. I can just tell. You can see the bigger picture.’
‘And what would that be?’
He sat back in his chair in a definitive, even victorious, way. ‘History.’
‘I never wanted a role to play in history. In any case I would only ever be an extra.’
‘That’s what we all are. You don’t even see us on screen. But we’re here. We know we’re here. That’s enough.’
‘It’s interesting how for a one-word explanation you people always reach for history, rather than politics, or economics, or power, or oil.’
‘You don’t believe history exists?’
‘After you’ve lived it, yes. But you have to go through it first.’
‘So history is posterity and the present is politics,’ he’d said.
‘You know, I’m just a doctor. What I feel is – is that I veer, between thinking politics doesn’t exist and everything is political. Love is political. Sex is political. But we don’t want to see it. We’re resistant to history. Everybody just wants to live their lives.’
‘Do they? I don’t.’
‘Why are the British so good at intelligence? Haven’t you ever wondered?’ I asked.
‘I expect you’re about to tell me.’
‘I have my theories. A talent for emotional quarantine, a cultural knack for treachery.’ I waited to see what he would make of this, but he didn’t react. ‘Is this just a career, for you?’
He shook his head. ‘No. It’s never been.’
‘What do you hope to achieve?’
‘Victory over the forces of evil.’
I searched his voice for irony. ‘You really think that there is good, and there is evil?’
‘Absolutely. I’ve seen them both, and I think they are evenly matched. More than that –’ he leaned forward – ‘I feel it. I’ve felt it.’ He thumped the palm of his hand against his chest. ‘It’s called radical Islam. I’d do anything to stop it. Anything.’
‘That’s not quite evil. What you’re talking about is threat to a way of life, to a way of thinking.’
I can’t remember what he said then, if he’d argued the point with me, if we’d discussed definitions of evil: moral, religious, practical. I do remember the word, evil, rang between us. It filled up all available space, so that I wondered how everyone in the restaurant did not hear it.
The bulbuls were alarming in the tree outside his window. The kind of call they make when a raptor, or a snake, is nearby. ‘Balaabil.’
He followed my gaze to the window. ‘What’s that?’
‘The bulbul. Its name comes from the Arabic for nightingale.’ The birds quietened. ‘I was thinking about London, the times we met. How you seemed genuinely interested in me. How I bought it, I suppose.’
‘I wasn’t trying to sell you anything.’
‘I mean, I agreed.’
‘You’re helping us out. We have three hundred people like you in north and east Africa alone. You’re hardly on the payroll. Your medical impartiality will certainly not be compromised, if that’s what you are worried about.’
Impartiality. I heard an accusation in the word. He thought me weak and misguided for being worried about ordinary morality when civilisation was at stake.
The future – his future – yawned open in my mind. I saw an endless civil war, a war without boundaries or end. What did it look like? I saw a seventh-century morality, a repressive religious state monitored by Iris scans and robots. Our freedoms would disappear. There would be no airplanes, because they were impossible to make bomb-proof. Australia would become the moon. I would be stuck there in Africa, under the shoulder of the Sahara, an impassable barrier to home.
He gave me an impatient look. I was taking up too much of his time, for this stage in the game. I was getting cold feet, and he found this wearying.
‘This isn’t espionage like in films, Rebecca. I’m not handing you a codebook and telling you to memorise it and then burn it. I’m not passing you messages hidden in rubbish bins in parks. You know what to look for. You’ve seen it elsewhere. It’s just that here we don’t have anyone. We can’t put them in. It’s too risky.’
‘The closer I get I’m not sure I do know what to look for.’
‘You’ve been very well briefed. We won’t leave you in the lurch.’ He rose. I followed him out of the garden and back through the corridors of the colonial mansion, into the smell of wood smoke and maize meal from the fields outside.
‘The secretary will see you out.’ He turned and gave me an unreadable look, which came and went in an instant. It had a note of apology in it. The air became denser around me. For a moment I was arrested in its vice.
We shook hands. I was to wait for a driver to take me to my hotel. The lobby of the embassy was lined with portraits of serial prime ministers and a single queen. In hushed wooden panelled offices on either side of the corridor were slim women who looked as if they’d just stepped out of a four-bedroomed house in Bromley labouring behind flat-screen PCs, their skin as yet untouched by the highland sun.
As I waited for a car a man appeared from a darkened hallway. He wore a sand-coloured shirt and trousers. I knew right away that he was a doctor. It was the deliberate way he used his hands.
He was a little taller than me. His hair was receding. He had a long sloping nose and a fine mouth. There was something outmoded about him, I thought, a man from another era dressed in modern garb.
We stood in silence for a moment.
‘You’ve just been through the same wringer I have, I imagine.’
‘Have I?’
‘Are you going back to your hotel?’
I said I was, that I’d just flown in that morning.
‘We were probably on the same plane.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Urs.’
‘Urs? As in bear?’
/> ‘That’s right.’ His eyes were a grainy green, the same colour I would see in Julia’s eyes. ‘Danish, or my family was. But now I’m English.’ He held his hands out from his thighs in an actor-like gesture. Here I am. Take me or leave me. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Kaminski.’
‘Me too. I’m going to enjoy every minute of the hot showers and room service. When are you heading out?’
‘In two days.’
He bounced very slightly on the balls of his feet as he stood. ‘Listen, would you like to have a drink? It would be great to have a glass of wine before it disappears from the menu for six months.’
‘I’m really tired. I’m sorry. It’s just – the altitude. The flight.’
I saw him absorb the rejection. I saw it was unexpected. He was a good-looking enough man to be unfamiliar, perhaps, with rebuff.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I understand.’
A few months ago I would have taken his appearance at face value – what a coincidence, meeting another doctor in the same situation – whatever that was – in the embassy waiting room. We would have a drink, keep in touch, perhaps be friends or even more. We would compare notes on field directives, on the generic and brand antibiotics available, we would discover we had done the same short rotations on obstetrics and toxicology. But now I wondered.
The embassy had ordered one car for both of us. We sat in the cool leather of its air-conditioned interior. This was his second time in Africa, Urs said. He’d worked in Macedonia, and before that in Pakistan, before that Nigeria, in Port Harcourt.
We pulled up into the drive of the Kaminski, a pink-and-maroon spaceship in the heart of Lakeland, where the main shopping malls were located. More low-slung Porche 4x4s lined the driveway.
‘Hard to believe we’re in Africa. A far cry from one-goat-and-three-chickens villages, anyway.’ He turned his eyes on me. They were a cool but not unfriendly grey now. They changed with the light. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?’