The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘I didn’t have time to get it. Handguns aren’t effective anyway, against semi-automatic weapons.’

  ‘Neither are rifles,’ Lucy said. She looked at me carefully.

  ‘I was afraid of it, to be honest. I don’t like guns much either.’

  ‘Julia has it now. She’s learning to shoot in Durban. She enjoys it. Everyone has guns there. I’m sorry she took it,’ she said, but there was no apology in her voice.

  ‘I wasn’t going to come back for it. I’m glad Julia has it.’

  I watched her walk across the car park. She looked slight in the dark. The club’s bouncers also watched over her. It was their job to see people arrived safely at their vehicles. After that, they were on their own.

  In that last week in the house the days take on a cast of finality. I look at everything – the clouds, the mustard-coloured seaweed on the beach, the violet underwater light that illuminates the pool, the sorties of roseate terns – with a new avidness. Soon, I may never see them again. I have only lately realised that being attentive to the detail of such a place, its ravenous beauty, creates a different state of consciousness. A different relationship with the self, even. Here you might finally allow yourself to exist.

  The first light of the morning comes at 5.30, a thin glow on the horizon. In this bronze light we stared at each other, dreading his mother’s step on the stairs, her hand on the door to his room. We knew that was a possibility, always. The first bird singing before sunrise was my cue to leave. It was either the common bulbul or the white-browed robin-chat. I stayed to listen to them with him. He was attentive to their existence. He did not take birds as inevitable background phenomena. Like Ali, he watched them closely, looking for clues. People who are attentive to the existence of animals have refined souls. Storm was one of those people who trusted the natural world more than the world of man. That is where his talent for wind and water and the gnarled life of the coast with its skinks and plated lizards and marine turtles and osprey eagles came from.

  He knew the lives of birds were uncertain and marked by violence. Raptors, monkeys, snakes, humans – they have so many enemies. They are lovely small enigmas – this is what I think. Where do they go between the dawn and dusk chorus? Are they merely silent on their perch, are they dozing, or do they fly elsewhere, to a fourth dimension? Such delicate little things, but their lives are a charnel house. Only two days ago I wrote an exam to attest that I can identify 250 species by sight or call. I can say their names, but what do I know about their lives?

  The day dawned cold. I could see my breath in the air before I threw off the camel-hair blanket and rose from my cot. I slept fully dressed, those days. In that sense I was prepared.

  It was late June, the beginning of winter. The days at that time of year were wood smoke and famine. I did my rounds. Diarrhea, dehydration, typhoid – the usual, but also a respiratory disease I had never encountered before and lacked the tools to diagnose. Ribcages rose and fell, squabbling for breath.

  These casualties were all Bora. They came from lands controlled by Al-Nur, who had rebuffed all vaccinations as un-Islamic, a conspiracy between Christians and the West. I remembered what Aisha said – a week, or was it two before? ‘Al-Nur are a plague. They are like the locusts that come and eat our crop. They want us to die. That way they have fewer mouths to feed.’

  I tried to reconcile this scorched earth policy with the tentative, bookish Ali. He had disappeared ten days before. Just as he’d said, his people had come to fetch him.

  I remembered his intelligent eyes, his courtesy. It was not the frigid courtesy of men who hated and feared women. He seemed at ease in my company. This is what first raised my suspicion. That and his mode of transport to the camp, stuffed in the back of a flatbed. On the flatbed’s gunwales were the scratches that signalled RPG mountings.

  Later I learned the faction Ali’s men belonged to was called SLK. Ali hinted at it once. ‘There is no sheik, no warlord above us,’ he said. Their political affiliation was a cover for straightforward guerilla activities – ambushes, IEDs, short-term mortar assaults. After his first few days in camp I had concluded he was Al-Nur. I’d been briefed on the factions and groupings of the country. You couldn’t call it politics, Anthony had said. What they want to do is to wage war. Politics is just window dressing.

  Are you certain the vaccine stock is complete? He’d asked me by email from his alias, which professed he was a doctor at the Geneva headquarters of the International Red Cross.

  It is 100% complete, I wrote back.

  When I returned to my desk from sending the email a giant insect of a kind I had never seen before waved its antennae at me from its perch on a sheet of white paper. The insect looked like a cross between a cockroach and a beetle but it was enormous, the size of my hand. I remembered Rafael’s counsel: Anything animal here you can’t identify or whose behavior doesn’t fit, back away.

  Then came the hottest interval in the Gariseb day: three thirty. The afternoon’s torpor thickened and the scorched winds dropped. Now there was only heat.

  I had seen the cloud of dust on the horizon. I was at the threshold of my office, on my way to see to a man with a perforated lung I had operated on the day before. I thought it was a dust devil. They were not uncommon on the plateau in winter.

  The dust cloud grew larger.

  ‘Incoming,’ said Andy.

  ‘No—’

  Andy scowled, his near-handsome face crumpled by sweat. ‘No what?’

  I looked behind me at the scrub, the thirty or so low-slung acacias that stung the horizon. If I ran, how far would I get? The guilty run.

  The flatbed truck had eaten the road. It pulled up in front of the triage tent.

  ‘What are these guys doing back?’ Andy gave me a look, as if I might know.

  The men were out of the truck and around me and I felt a cold glint of something at my throat. I could only see them out of the corners of my eyes. They were behind me. Now they were dressed quite differently. Their dashikis had been replaced by smart olive-coloured combat trousers.

  Ali appeared from behind a phalanx of the others. Their faces were covered in black scarves but I knew some of them by the cast of their eyes – Omar, who was from Khartoum; Mohammed, a Qatari. Ali I knew by his quick, careful stride.

  I held my arms rigid against the grip of the men. I could not push against them for ever, but I did not want to accept their touch.

  ‘Why did you tell them?’

  ‘Tell them what?’

  ‘Gikayo is destroyed. By the Americans.’

  ‘I know nothing about that. I am a doctor.’

  My voice is strange, I thought. I must correct it. But how? My voice seemed to have deserted me. Where was Andy? Then I saw he was on the ground, two men on top of him. How had he got there? I’d heard nothing – no altercation, no thud. It was as if the air had been sucked from around them, creating a vacuum.

  A camel drifted into my line of vision. Aisha’s camel.

  ‘Tell us what you told them. What else did you tell them?’ Ali’s voice was serene, a little syrupy, even. The voice of someone in control.

  I shut my eyes in shock. A warm viscous liquid was pouring down my face, my body. I shook my arms but could not dislodge the men. So recently I had gripped their bodies to heal them.

  Someone – Omar? Mansour? – held up a jerrycan. The jerrycan had been heavier than he had expected. It had hit only my face and torso because they could not lift it high enough to pour it over my head.

  Petrol filled my nostrils, mouth. I began to feel dizzy.

  ‘You must tell us now,’ he said.

  I opened my eyes. They stung. I thought: I must wash the petrol out with saline afterwards.

  The flies that had been harassing my nose and eyes vanished. I drew a breath. The air sang with its cargo of uninterested birds, who watched me from nearby thorn branches. I heard the lowing of Aisha’s camel, who seemed to understand what was about to happen.

 
A calm entered my lungs. I’d known from the beginning, that this – or something like it – could happen.

  ‘Do what you have to do,’ I said, in Arabic. ‘I’ve done nothing against you. I treated you, I made you well. I am ready.’

  My eyes locked his. What did I see? Our conversations, or a residue of them. My error. I had failed to recognise my assassin. This seemed a crucial neglect, worthy of death even. Maybe that was it: I deserved to die.

  Where was everyone? Andy was on the ground, but the petrol had cast a tobacco-and-purple glaze over my vision. I couldn’t see.

  The arms sprang away from me and I swayed in the wind like an unmoored tree. Then I fell to the ground.

  They sent a plane the next day. I spent a week in the capital, in the same stylish neighbourhood where I would later encounter Lucy.

  Then I flew to the coast and assumed my new role as exhausted Dr Rebecca, the bona fide cousin who Storm, Julia, Lucy and Bill had never met, never expected to know, who drifted through their house like a prearranged ghost, the forerunner who comes to signal that not all is well, that it might be time to abandon their paradise.

  Ali was back across the border by nightfall of the day he decided not to incinerate his savior. His men revered him. They did not ask questions. He would tell them, it was all a ruse. I wanted to frighten her. She could not have known anything. Or maybe, but then there would be no medical care for our people. We cannot leave them exposed.

  For many weeks I would not think of Ali. He would appear only in dreams. But I knew him, better than he could have imagined. I had identified him as one of my patients, then named his town as one of the strongholds of Al-Nur. Even though he had evaded the drone attack and was still alive, I was congratulated. Twenty-eight fighters were killed at Gikayo two days before the pickup raced into the compound at Gariseb. Once back in the capital my prize of thanks was a message from Anthony sent from an untraceable server with the report attached.

  He was brought up in a village in the land of the Bora, close to the coast but inland, on the estuary of a failing river. He had five sisters. In his house there was a curtain made of beads and an ancient boxy television. Some days there was a channel from the capital which broadcast singing competitions and quiz shows from Italy. He watched as fuzzy Catholic nuns sang from a church in the Vatican, row on row like birds on a wire. Across the road was the office for the bus company, Massimo, a leftover from the days of the Italian colonists. Within two hundred meters were three mosques. Men came door-to-door selling small humid bags of freshly roasted cashews. The smell of the sea was always in their nostrils, even if they had to walk for half a day to see it.

  ‘We are pure Arabs,’ his mother told him, ‘from the Yemen.’ This was code for: there is no black blood in my family, we are the original Swahili. From a very young age he was different, he needed space for the thoughts between his thoughts. A resinous finger of sound set up home inside his head in the place he created. He couldn’t say what it was – the wail of the muezzin, the chant of an inner god.

  He dreamed of floods often, of moist leaves as big as chairs. He listened attentively to his dreams, recording them in a notebook he kept under his bed. He decided the dreams were telling him that his destiny was to live in a moist place. Five years later he crossed the border to attend university in the coastal city of Bahari ya Manda.

  He was too intelligent to be a mere religious ideologue. His goal was political change, through the imposition of an Islamic state. By nature he was an ascetic. He did not like people much. He liked to watch fires but not to light them. He never thought he would be an enemy of life. Unlike many of his friends he feared death. He felt it in the world, a physical presence. It had a resinous sheen, the solid equivalent of the muezzin’s sundown call. There in the alleyway among the cunning cats, the stale smell of the sea, the day-old catches of fish, he had no idea that one day he would deal out this substance with his hands, like a game of cards.

  No one has ever done me any damage. But if I were to meet him again here among the motorcycle taxi drivers who sleep in the shade, or glimpse him disappearing down a narrow alleyway, I am not sure what I would do. I would like to say that I can intuit whether he is alive or dead. Some people leave such an impression on the world. We are always alert to them, we can sense their existence as you would tune into a frequency on a shortwave radio. But really I don’t know.

  The gardeners are done for the day. Bathers are out of the water and the pool lights have come on. The lights turn the pool green at night, that watery turquoise of tropical shallows. Red fairy lights crawl up the slim palms. An unknown bird cries piu, piu for the last time today. The muezzin’s minor thirds and fifths thread through the town, the call to evening prayers.

  Last night I went to Christmas carols at the Kilindoni Club. The candlelight illuminated tanned women in red dresses, barefoot, Santa Claus hats flopping on their heads. Their husbands smoked beside the balustrades over the beach, supervising their children playing in the waves.

  The beach is clean, there is no seaweed and no plastic debris. The sand has changed consistency and is looser, drier. It is so different from the Kusi, I could be in a different country, on a different ocean. The sea is calm now. It rises and recedes, advancing half an hour every day.

  Other things are unchanged. Men in kanzus walk along the beach to the mosque, their feet swishing on the sand, their women seated behind them in a black clutch of shade, surrounded by children. Ghost crabs pilfer fish from our plates.

  The Dhow House is empty now, through the summer monsoon, the winter monsoon. I don’t need to go there to see its five young coconut palms standing guard over the cliff and wag their heads at the sea, the razors of shade they cast onto the ground. The details of the house return to me – the Japanese fishing buoys made of coloured glass Julia had scattered around the house, the chocolate and white feathers of a fish eagle she had gathered in a vase next to the bookshelf, the soap trays in the bathroom carved from wood into the shape of angelfish. I remember the house better than I remember most people.

  Gunfire. Its pop-pop sound coming from the town across the inlet. In the Kilindoni Club the shroud of the mosquito net drapes over the bed. There is one power outlet for the fridge and my phone is out of battery. I try to phone Lucy but my call is blocked. Later, I will be grateful. Please speak to him, Rebecca would have said, then. I am so sorry.

  But she is not sorry, other than for the outcome. That is what people mean, generally, by the phrase. She remembers in those days the difference between regret and remorse. Regret is to feel sorrow for what has happened; remorse is an urge to correct what has happened, to return to the moment before, when the future could be directed to be different, and start again.

  Outside her room in the Kilindoni Club vervet monkeys fret, lying in wait in case she throws them cashews. Rebecca remembers the dreams she had, those first nights in Julia’s house. In them she is burnt. Her skin desiccates and puckers like parchment. She smells the waxy scent of burnt epidermis. The skin releases itself and floats upward like flakes of ash.

  In the Kilindoni Club I look at a reverse image of the scene she witnessed then: children splash in the pool, gardeners snap at the tangled creepers. Two and a half years ago there were no children and the gardeners never went home but remained in the walled grounds of the hotel complex wearing their dark green overalls, prepared to fight the insurgents with rakes and spades, their only weapons.

  The power was cut. No electricity meant no water, in the whole of Kilindoni, as the mains were fed by power. The black plastic water tanks everyone has here ran dry. They huddled in the restaurant by the light of hurricane lamps sipping from small bottles of mineral water, their rations for the day. The cook made a huge pot of rice and beans because that was all that was left in the kitchen. Siege food. By night small boys would steal across the inlet by boat and raid the shelves of the cook’s relatives.

  On those nights she waited for Storm to come for her. She could
not believe he would not appear under the hotel’s thatched roof and take her out of there.

  Those last days in the house before the invasion and Bill’s death they spent skirting one other. They were sluggish and resentful of his mother’s presence. She could feel it. They would have dinner together and talk of what everyone was talking about – the elections, the attacks, whether the coast and tourism would ever recover. Julia would look at her, then Storm, trying to knit together the meaning of their seeming indifference to each other, his breezy tolerance, and why, too early by far, they would habitually find some urgent email they needed to send or book they wanted to read, and go to their separate bedrooms.

  Now, I understand him better. We colluded against his mother and he hated me for it. I saw the flash of hatred in his eyes, from time to time. I had never been hated and loved in the same moment before and it frightened me.

  It was always going to be my last night in the house – my flight was the following day – but I couldn’t have anticipated my mode of exit. I hadn’t packed. My passport sat on my desk underneath a sheaf of paper.

  We sat on his bed. I was crying. Hot rasping tears, my breath couldn’t come fast enough. He said, Tell me what to do. I sat up and tried to stifle my breathing with my hands. I put my head between my legs. I remember the dream I had that night, of trying to resuscitate his father. I don’t remember falling asleep. But then we never do.

  You get away from my son!

  As I heard the words I thought, Where am I? I remembered that we had been to the hospital in Bahari ya manda. We had left Bill behind, as if by mistake.

  Now, I think of that first party in Moholo. That was when I decided that he was for me, that I would go for him, that I loved him, even though I knew he did not love me, I had seen him with Evan, that he would likely never love me. The decision announced itself without bothering to ask my opinion. The heart, that muscle with its own brain, fired signals up through the carotid artery, sliding along the trachea and bursting in a spray of fireworks, into the mind.