With the panga against her neck, Iben glances down at the ground, the dried crust of mud mixed with excrement and rubbish. Could she run the twenty metres between the truck and the line of Nubians to hide among them? If the hostage-takers shoot her dead, retribution will be immediate, so they have nothing to gain by killing her. But then, there’s no telling how rationally they think.
Without a word she stands, her eyes fixed on her comrades. Cathy begins to cry.
The Nubians cheer when they see Iben climbing down from the tailgate of the truck. Some of them step forward. One man must be confused, because he drops his large, black spear. But still no one dares to move into no-man’s-land. Instead most of them jostle to get back into their former positions behind the front line.
In the dust on the road that could have led to freedom, Iben looks around with fresh eyes. Can she avoid carrying out the order for just a little longer?
She wonders if she should shout ‘Here I come’, so that the hostage-taker in the cab doesn’t shoot her from sheer surprise when he sees her coming up from behind. On the other hand, it would give the Nubians more time to react, and they might well decide it’s worth shooting one hostage to stop the other three from being driven away.
She looks at the tall man on the tailgate and speaks to him quietly. ‘Tell him I’m coming. I mustn’t frighten him.’
The two Luos talk for a moment. None of the Nubians reacts. It seems that Iben was right in thinking that none of them understands Dhuluo.
The conflict between Nubians and Luos in the slum began when a Luo family refused to pay rent to a Nubian landlord. The landlord summoned a group of men from his tribe to meet him at the family’s shack. They wounded six tenants and killed two more. The group went on to challenge other tenants and attacked anyone who couldn’t pay. After slaughtering and dismembering another ten victims, well over a thousand men from each tribe clashed in the slums, stealing, raping and killing within each other’s territories. The police separated the two armies using teargas and rubber bullets, but were also accused of having taken the opportunity to rape and steal themselves.
The original reason for the refusal to pay rent in the slum was that Kenya’s President, Daniel arap Moi, had instructed the Luos that the rent demands were extortionate, since the state owned the land in the Kibera area, not the Nubians. It was the British colonial administration that had given the Nubians their management rights.
Iben hesitates. Will the boy on the back of the truck really shoot her if she doesn’t move the dead driver?
There’s a childishness about him that sets him apart from the other, harder-faced boys here, some of whom are just eight years old.
She tries to see what the two Nubians with machine guns are up to. One of them is out of sight behind the truck. The other is right there, wearing a white shirt, dark-green trousers and a baseball cap. She can’t make out his face, his willingness to kill, at this distance.
Smells. Dust. Sunlight.
The Nubian with the gun. The boy on the truck with the gun. The horde of onlookers. A fly, insisting on crawling into her ear.
On the tailgate the hostage-takers wave their weapons and shout.
At home in the quiet Copenhagen office, Iben’s place opposite Malene stands empty. She has a vision of the pale winter afternoon light falling over her bare desk with its waiting keyboard and curling Post-it notes. The fading light of the office seems to merge with the emptiness of her remembered life.
She grabs the door handle on the driver’s side and hears the crowd stir, then shout. Their language is just as incomprehensible to her as Dhuluo. The dead driver has been propped up against the door and when she opens it, the body falls out of the car sideways. Iben has to jump away to avoid being knocked over.
Until today, the only corpse she has ever seen was her father’s. It was nine years ago and the staff at Roskilde District Hospital had washed the body, closed its eyes and placed it in a small private room with net-curtained windows.
The dead driver is suspended, with his feet jammed under the pedals. His chest and head have swung out and down, hitting the ground just in front of Iben. A swarm of flies rises from his chest, where his blood-soaked shirt and trousers have already stiffened in the heat.
His face is twisted, his mouth open and his skin grey from blood loss.
Iben backs away into the cloud of dust. It is as if she were no longer herself.
She hasn’t thought about how the terrified man on the passenger seat might react. It turns out he has an automatic handgun.
Like everyone here he is used to the flies, but there are so many and they swarm round him for a different reason: he was sprayed with his friend’s blood inside the hot cab. His arms holding the gun are tired now after battling with the large, insistent insects.
He swings the gun round to point it at Iben. His voice is hoarse. ‘You shall … you shall sit.’
Iben feels nauseous. She stares at the ridges on the road. A few seconds – is it minutes? – pass and still she feels as if she were someone else.
She sits down on the driver’s seat. The man cannot risk keeping his gun trained on her all the time and has turned to face the wall of Nubians in front of them.
‘The police will come,’ Iben says. ‘The police will be here soon.’
‘You drive!’
But she does not start driving. She knows that turning the ignition key will mean the end for both of them.
‘Drive!’
Suddenly he leaps up. He must have thought that someone was sneaking up to the door on his side. Someone who would cut his throat, as they did to his friend. He throws the door open and sticks his gun out.
His back is turned. He has given her a fraction of a second. Iben springs out and runs away at an angle to the truck. To aim at her, he has to move over to her seat.
Her feet are pounding, raising clouds of dust. Now, soon, the rattle of the machine gun. The blood, the thump as she hits the ground. But it’s all strangely quiet. Iben runs and runs.
At last she reaches the human wall. The people part and close around her like dark water. She runs on, falling into the crowd. Then, though her legs keep kicking out, she can move no further. The dark mass that has saved her now holds her. She recognises some of the men and women she has met at football matches or training days or reconciliation meetings. They will starve and die if their rent income from the Luos is reduced further, just as the Luos may die if the rents are not lowered.
Her body melts under her, but many hands hold her upright. They give her water, pour it into her mouth and over her head and body. She drinks from their plastic buckets and calabashes, knowing that it will give her diarrhoea for a week at least. It doesn’t matter.
That ever-alert part of her mind wonders if she shouldn’t move into the densest part of the crowd to observe her colleagues in relative safety. But it’s impossible: all her strength has gone, she is soaked to the skin and still terrified that the armed men in the truck will catch sight of her. Instead she ends up sitting on the ground, leaning against a hard cow-dung wall and holding on to a toothless elderly woman whom she doesn’t recognise, but who behaves as if they were old friends.
Iben has been working in Kenya for an international organisation called Stop Ethnic Cleansing, which tries to remain neutral in the tribal conflicts. In the Nairobi slums, humanitarian organisations tend to be nervous about the Kenyan government’s Luo-friendly policies, and this sometimes makes SEC look pro-Nubian – and hence, presumably, anti-Luo.
The Nubian crowd is not likely to have gathered here simply to save the lives of four strangers, but they would like the kidnapping to fail. They need to ensure that SEC doesn’t withdraw from its reconciliation work in the slums because it fears for the lives of its aid workers. There people have come to fight for their own lives.
Iben’s feet stamp in the dust, as if still wanting to run. She hears her own noisy breathing. Her mind is in a whirl, analysing everything that led up to this
.
It was Roberto’s secretary who had received the invitation for SEC staff to meet an important tribal leader. When the boy in the Hong Kong T-shirt came along as a guide to show them the way, Roberto’s secretary had assured them that this was perfectly in order. Had she known about the plan to ambush them and take them hostage all along?
Iben recalls the expression on the secretary’s face (caring), and the tone of her voice (cheerful). No reason to point the finger at her. Except … she knew what she was doing. Of course. She is a Luo and, since everyone around her believes in tribal allegiances, so must she. She is bound to ask herself if other people will support her family and their way of life. Or are they out to destroy them? Any talk about impartiality would sound like treachery.
The sound of a car siren causes a scare. At last, the police are coming.
Iben climbs up the wall she has been leaning against, finding footholds on protruding bits of the framework of branches. It is so low that there is only half a metre to climb, but in the shade of the overhanging tin roof her white face is less obvious.
An open truck full of policemen pulls up. Another truckload stops on the other side of the crowd. The hostages and their guards remain as they were when she ran off. All sit and stand in exactly the same positions. Even with the police here, the prisoners look cowed.
The howl of the sirens is piercing, but Iben feels relieved – until she realises what’s going on, that is. The police are attacking the crowd with long, white truncheons. Several of the beaten Nubians are too badly injured to get up again.
Iben wants to rush to the officer in charge and cry out ‘No! Don’t! They want to set us free. You’ve got it wrong! Don’t hit them.’ She wants to stop the beatings before someone is crippled for life.
Her toothless companion clings to her and tries to make Iben follow her into the network of sewer-paths between the houses. She speaks all the time, a fast, meaningless babble, but Iben cannot face running away from the crowd that turned up to help her when her and her companions’ lives were in danger. The woman throws her arms round Iben and weighs her down, sobbing helplessly.
Already at a distance, Iben shouts at the police that they’re hitting the wrong people. But the road has emptied quickly, as the crowd flees into the fine-meshed network of alleyways. The police won’t chase them there. Only the injured are left behind, scattered here and there on the road. And in the middle of it all, the large white SEC truck stands untouched.
A few metres away from the police, Iben begins to think again. She stops shouting and glances quickly over her shoulder. Is the old woman still around? Is there a place to disappear into?
Then two policemen grab hold of her. They don’t hit her, just march her off to join her fellow hostages and their captors. She tries to explain what’s happened. Several times. Still they escort her back to the seat she managed to get away from.
Cathy buries her face in her hands. She whispers to Roberto, her voice despairing, ‘It’s you who should know about the police. They protect these men. You should have known.’
She seems to be brimming with a mixture of tears, anger and something else, something new at least to Iben. Cathy keeps repeating herself, mumbling like the old bag lady who hangs around on the street-corner near the DCGI office. ‘It’s your fault. You’re in charge. It’s your job to protect us.’
Iben steals a glance at Roberto’s face, but it looks blank.
Two policemen heave the dead driver’s body onto the back of the truck.
The way ahead has been cleared and now the hostage-takers can drive on.
17
One evening, at dusk, Iben was walking along the suburban streets. It wasn’t long after her father’s death. The snow reflected the blue-tinged winter light. She was breathing easily, listening to the snow crystals crunching under her boots. Beneath a fruit tree, its branches covered with snow, two women were calling their cats. There must be others in this quiet town, who came to call their cats at nightfall.
‘Kitty kitty cat. Pretty kitten, come to Mummy.’
Iben suddenly felt that all these women were calling her dead father. All around town, mothers straightened their backs and got up from their kitchen tables or from the corner of their sofas or from double beds with only a single duvet and a tear-stained pillow. They got up and stood in lit doorways, calling out into Roskilde’s still darkness.
‘Kitty kitty, come to Mummy. Come inside. Kitty-cat, come to me.’
Iben is rooting around in the discount boxes at Company’s, looking for blouses. Next to one box she sees bits of fur that look like the dyed coats of cats.
Could they be?
She has already been to seven shops without finding anything that would do. All this tramping around shops is Gunnar’s fault. He doesn’t appear to be interested in how people dress, but he fell for Malene and she both knows and cares about clothes.
While Iben examines a cream-coloured blouse to see if it’s shaped properly at the waist, she tells herself that it doesn’t matter in the slightest what she wears.
Why would I start running into him now? Where, anyway? I’ve never met him by chance before.
She starts looking through the next box, wrestling with her thoughts.
The following morning Paul, carrying a stack of papers, wanders into the library to say something to Anne-Lise. He sounds annoyed. The new arrangements mean that the entire office can hear them.
‘Anne-Lise, there are some mysterious stains on the printouts you just gave me. They’re covered in fingerprints and something like toner, but it’s brown.’
When Iben looks up from her screen Malene is already watching her. They do their best not to smile.
‘Oh no,’ Anne-Lise replies. ‘The stuff’s all over my hands as well. What could it be?’
Now Paul sounds more confused than irritated. ‘And there’s some on your nose. A long mark. You must have rubbed it with your finger. And there are some stains on your blouse.’
‘Oh no!’
There are sounds of Anne-Lise rummaging through papers, and then of drawers being opened and shut. She can’t find the source of the powder. Paul leaves and walks back to his office. Iben and Malene don’t move.
A little later Anne-Lise comes into the Winter Garden to ask the others’ opinion. ‘You know, at first I thought maybe my lipstick had come apart, but it’s fine. My handbag is completely clean inside. And now I’ve no idea.’
Iben watches Anne-Lise. Does she suspect them of playing a practical joke? Anne-Lise shows them her hands. The reddish-brown material has stuck under her cuticles and in the deep crevices on the backs of her fingers.
Iben asks if it smells of anything.
Anne-Lise holds one of her hands a bit away from her nose and considers the odour.
‘I don’t know. It smells a bit like food. Slightly sweet, maybe?’
Later, back in the library, Anne-Lise screams. They all jump up and run to her.
She is standing in the middle of the floor, her hands stretched out stiffly in front of her with her fingers spread.
‘It came from the shelf … and I thought I’d …’
It’s easy to see what has happened. Anne-Lise had noticed more reddish-brown spots on a shelf unit she uses regularly. She pulled out books and box files and found a trail of dried drops that apparently came from a magazine box on the top shelf. When she reached for it, the box slipped from her hand. Anne-Lise leapt backwards and the box landed just in front of her, spraying her clothes and face. Fortunately, it wasn’t a large amount. Even so, it is now sticking to her hair and face, and her right hand and arm are moist and gluey with blood.
She stands still, gasping for breath, speechless. Nobody is keen on getting too close to her as that would mean stepping in the pool around her feet.
Iben steels herself to do something. ‘Anne-Lise, this is awful! I don’t … look, you lie down. We’ll clean up …’
Iben gasps and holds her breath in a futile attempt to es
cape the sweetly nauseating stench of the congealing blood that covers the floor. She would like to help, but has to run to the lavatory. As she hovers over the basin wondering if she’ll throw up, Malene joins her. She says she feels just as bad.
By the time they return, Camilla has opened all the windows and found a cloth and a bucket. She is wiping the floor. Anne-Lise is sitting limply in her chair, about to pass out. She has taken off her cardigan, dropped it on the floor and tried to clean herself up with damp tissues, but she still looks dreadful.
They can’t think of what to say. What does this mean? Who could’ve thought up such a thing?
When Paul finds out, his first reaction is to march over to each window and door, without a word, to check for any signs of a break-in.
‘When was it done?’ Iben asks Anne-Lise. ‘I mean the blood – when could it have been put there?’
Anne-Lise’s voice is a whisper: ‘I don’t … I don’t use that box often. It … When was it … last week?’
They are all immersed in their own thoughts as they clean up Anne-Lise’s books and papers. Each item has to be wiped with a damp cloth.
After a while Anne-Lise pulls herself together and goes off to the toilet to wash. Paul comes back to say that, as far as he can see, no locks have been tampered with. He manages to lower the shelf to the floor so they can clean behind it.
Most likely it was pigs’ blood from a butcher’s, they tell each other, as they work away. They’re doing absolutely everything they shouldn’t do at the scene of a crime, Iben thinks. Every single clue is being washed away. But they carry on, just the same. It seems that all of them, including Paul, tacitly agree that the police should not be asked to deal with this, which also means they must think that someone connected to the Centre is responsible.
The Exception Page 16