Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘Oh, I believe in cutting to the chase,’ he replies, then apologises again. And she later finds out that this is not a joke. Just as she has been watching the skaters, admiring their grace, he has been watching her, noting her daily routine, plucking up the courage to introduce himself. He works in the same building.

  They both stand up – she will sport large bruises on her buttocks for weeks. Names are exchanged, the girl, slapping ice dust off her trousers, is introduced. She is Sophie, his younger daughter. So he is older than he looks. Her accent is remarked upon and she gives her usual trite explanation of how a junior British lawyer ends up on Wall Street. Then he gestures to where a figure wrapped in a cashmere scarf, fur hat and gloves stands on the far side of the rink, near the gilded statue of Prometheus, a chilled silhouette radiating boredom. Two glossy pedigree dogs pull impatiently at their leads. ‘My wife is waiting. And so are Laurel and Hardy. We’d better go. Till the next time.’

  A wife, she notes. Why bother with ‘till the next time’? But she will bump into him later, in the ground-floor café of their building. She will discover that he works for a respected firm of architects, then that he not only set up the firm but has a claim on the entire building in which she works. Jake Wentworth is, in a minor way, a local celebrity, the well-liked unpretentious scion of a WASP family that made its fortune hurling railroads across the United States. One day he will inherit the family fortune, but in the meantime he is doing the job he loves, juggling draughtsmanship with a regular arts column and the directorship of a charity for political asylum seekers, funded by Wentworth money. She will meet him on the ice again, alone this time, and neither will get any skating done. Instead, they will talk about politics, discuss the Coen brothers’ latest film, and he will give her a witty-yet-not-unkind potted résumé of twenty years’ New York high society gossip, for these are circles to which his name grants entry. They will both be surprised to find that it feels like a conversation between old friends after a long break, rather than a first exchange between strangers. And soon she will discover, thanks to a personal assistant’s indiscretions, that the impatience she glimpsed in the female figure by the skating rink extends further than irritation at the cold: there are independent bank accounts, solo holidays, separate bedrooms. And the young woman will find herself hoovering up office tittle-tattle with unbecoming greed.

  He has made contact. He has made her care.

  3

  I woke staring at an unfamiliar grey ceiling. A gecko was spread-eagled directly above my head, in unconscious imitation of my position. It skittered away as I reached for my mobile phone blinking on the bedside table: 6:00 a.m. I had slept only a couple of hours since my taxi had deposited me in darkness at the White Star Hotel in Lira but felt wide awake, my body still on US time. I staggered to the bathroom, rinsed my face in water, wrenched open doors giving onto a balcony and stepped out. The street lighting was so sparse that the only detail I retained from the drive in was a giant ‘WELCOME TO LIRA INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND SCIENCE’ banner slung across the airport road. I wanted my first view of the city.

  But there was to be no grandiose panorama. My room lay at the back of the hotel and I found myself gazing instead across a flat plateau fringed by a jagged mountain range over which the sun was rising, thawing the thin layer of frost crusting a russet and dun patchwork of ploughed fields. A gentle wind was ruffling the tawny savannah grass that lapped around the hotel, setting off the rhythmic chirruping of invisible crickets.

  My nostrils crinkled as I caught an unfamiliar aroma – a mixture of chilli powder, cumin and ginger, I guessed, and the scent of roasting coffee. There were other, less appealing, elements: the acid tang of what might be mule manure and petrol fumes from badly maintained cars. So this, I thought, was the smell of Lira.

  I craned across the balcony railing and looked north, registering that the escarpment lay above the cloud cover, which stretched across the horizon like a lumpy quilt, neatly tucked in at the corners. How high up were we, then? Two thousand metres? More? I spotted a hawk fluttering above the plains in the chill layer where a cerulean sky merged with the navy of deep space. There was a giddy feeling of gravity defied: both of us – woman and hawk – were suspended far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.

  Suddenly overwhelmed by nausea, I bowed my head, dry retching as the clot of grief and rage that had stoppered my throat since I’d lost Jake bubbled up. I spat once, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The cold air was as invigorating as a lungful of alpine oxygen, the sun on my face a caress. Something about being so close to eternity was waking me up. After months of lethargy I felt a brisk sense of purpose. An unfamiliar sensation stirred inside: hope. Like generations of sinners, mavericks and reprobates before me, I’d joined the Foreign Legion, exiling myself from my own. And that self-banishment felt good. Winston was right. I should have done this sooner.

  Extracting a shawl and two thick box files from my luggage, I arranged myself in a tangle of wool at the balcony table. I’d once prided myself on being a meticulously briefed lawyer, but if there was one lesson recent personal history had taught me – and we’ll come to that – it was that you can never really prepare. While serving my notice period with Grobart & Fitchum, I had focused exclusively on mundane tasks: selling the car, notifying my landlord, settling utilities bills. When a package from Winston had arrived, containing a fold-up map, three chunky history books and several files of background information, I had not taken up the proffered invitation. I had a few hours, now, to get some overdue homework done.

  ‘THE PLACE’, someone – presumably Winston – had written in red felt tip on the first file. It began with a photocopied page of a 1999 Bradt guide to the region, one paragraph highlighted in yellow. ‘Sanasa lies slap bang on the border between the tiny state of North Darrar, Africa’s newest nation, and the giant Federal Republic of Darrar, which reluctantly conceded independence after a David-and-Goliath war of secession. There is nothing of any interest here to the ordinary tourist.’

  The next document was a rather florid account by an English writer called Hugh Winterdale, who had toured the Red Sea coast in 2000 as part of a series of travel books baptised ‘Forgotten Places’:

  The port of Sanasa, 550 kilometres north-east of the highland capital of Lira, is little more than a long curving jetty of giant coral bricks, stacked like pink sugar cubes to keep the sea at bay.

  A sultan held sway here for a few hundred years, doing deals with Ottoman traders and Egyptian bureaucrats, and that period left behind crumbling coral ramparts and a few gracious town buildings, whose delicate wooden verandas now slump earthwards. The Italians left behind a delightful openness with strangers and a liking for pasta and strong coffee. As for the British, they only took away, removing anything in the port made of metal, to be used in other, more important, colonies.

  East and west of here lie terminals with ship-to-shore mobile gantries and yards piled high with orange containers. As Africa enters the twenty-first century, these modern ports will come to play a vital role in the continent’s revival. In contrast, Sanasa, which only exists because the coast here – with the help of a little excavation in the 1870s by a Swiss adventurer – forms the deepest harbour for 200 kilometres in any direction, boasts very little in terms of equipment. Things are done the old-fashioned way. Three rusty cranes loom over the harbour, and when a ship docks, they cluster above the vessels’ innards, picking over the cargo like feeding storks. To a chorus of male shouts, hooks descend, cargo slings are attached, sacks of grain and cement are lifted and deposited on the harbour front, morsel by painstaking morsel. A brigade of whippet-thin stevedores then springs into action, T-shirts stained with sweat, loading the sacks by hand into the Isuzu trucks lined up in anticipation.

  But such moments are becoming ever rarer. A well-used port makes for dark, polluted waters. Sanasa’s are an inviting, translucent blue; zebra fish nibble and flit around greasy anchor ropes. Container vessels increas
ingly bypass Sanasa, leaving it to process the occasional, surreptitious dhow. Painted sky-blue, these tiered schooners waft in laden with sugar, cheap Chinese plastic sandals, the odd microwave oven and state-of-the-art 4x4. Not an inch of space is wasted. By the time they depart, the dhows have been transformed into smelly, bleating vessels of animal distress, loaded to the gunwales with goats and camels destined for the butcheries of Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

  ‘Wordy but helpful’, someone had scrawled in the margin.

  Sanasa’s remoteness, its very inefficiency, lends it a particular advantage. Rarely coming to the attention of officials in Lira, it is popular with smugglers, petty traders, who do their calculations in their heads, and livestock owners, who ignore frontiers as they follow routes established by nomadic forefathers. It makes for a rich mix of languages and faces, a polyglot blurring of nationalities and customs.

  For most of the day, the town sits stunned into near-imbecility, paralysed by the joint assault of light and heat. Pock-marked mongrels lie by the whitewashed trunks of old neem trees, tongues out, stomachs pumping like pistons. The only sound comes from the cawing of the crows picking for forgotten fish scraps along the cement jetties, crunchy with salt crystals. It is in the evening that Sanasa stirs. Under the arcades, harbour workers sip cold Coke, relishing the bracing zing of ammonia from the sea and providing a running commentary on the comings and goings from the town’s lone brothel. Urchins dragging adult-sized flip-flops trawl, half-hearted, for custom, carrying neon-coloured plastic basins of hot peanuts. They stand uncomplainingly, ignored, absorbing the gossip of the baritone-voiced adult world. As a velvet night descends, the spot-lit bars and restaurants, each with its dizzy halo of insects, become helpful landmarks for residents accustomed to manoeuvring the streets as much by feel as by sight.

  I turned the page, expecting more, but the passage ended there. Winterdale’s creative juices had clearly run dry.

  Next came some photocopies of unclassified cables between a US deputy ambassador in Lira and the State Department, dating back to the early 1990s. One highlighted snippet read:

  Sanasa is merely one of a handful of settlements whose proximity to a poorly defined colonial border is a potential source of strategic concern. Yet when Western diplomats raise the issue with officials in either capital, their concerns are laughed away … The line is that the governments established by the two former rebel movements now running Darrar and its progeny, North Darrar, are ideological soul-mates, with near-identical, progressive agendas. ‘We’re brothers!’ officials will often tell embassy personnel. Families in the border areas, they say, are interconnected by marriage, friendship and commerce and barely know themselves where the frontier begins or ends. ‘Who needs a border when there’s trust on both sides?’ is a refrain we often hear in these parts.

  But, evidently, the picture was not quite as harmonious as it seemed. For on the night of 7 June 2001, something had happened on Sanasa’s outskirts, and it was hard to believe that individual explosions of temper could have escalated quite so quickly had the incident not tapped into long-accumulated grudges.

  I stretched, checking my watch, abandoning my shawl. It was eight a.m.: the heat was rising, hotel staff would be up. I rang room service to order breakfast and opened the second, fatter, file, marked ‘THE INCIDENT’. This one was a mess. It contained a collection of transcripts from local-radio broadcasts picked up by BBC Monitoring, several editions of Africa Confidential and scores of press cuttings that contradicted one another in key details. The newspaper titles scrawled on the scraps meant nothing to me. I guessed they represented the contrasting views from the two neighbours’ capitals.

  One thing they agreed upon: that on the evening in question, fifty-five-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim had settled his bill at a restaurant on the Sanasa quayside, shouted farewell to the proprietor, and boarded his 7.5-tonne Isuzu. In the summer months, like most local drivers, he always waited till nightfall before moving. In daytime, the tarmac got so hot it could rip black fronds of rubber from tyres. He drove in darkness towards the border post on the edge of town.

  What happened after that was murky. Some accounts claimed Ahmed was a hardened smuggler of cigarettes and cheap gin, accustomed to oiling his passage across the border with bribes. According to this version of events, his usual routine was sabotaged by an unexpected change of the Darrar guards: the two middle-aged regulars he had spent years befriending had been replaced by eager-to-impress youngsters, who insisted that he remove tarpaulins, unbuckle ropes and make his goods available for inspection.

  A rival version painted a different picture. His truck laden with vital pharmaceutical supplies destined for a clinic across the frontier, Ahmed – a law-abiding, respectable father of six – had negotiated the North Darrar border crossing without a hitch, only to discover that Darrar’s border post had shifted twenty metres closer to Sanasa since his previous trip. He had realised this a split-second after his truck had careered through the barricade, snapping it in half, bringing two Darrar guards piling out of a freshly painted hut, stuffing handfuls of pasta into their mouths, AK-47s at the ready.

  Whichever version was true, a shouting match had broken out, which attracted the attention of the North Darrar guards on the other side of no man’s land, who radioed a local militia for backup. A first rifle shot was heard – perhaps no more than the spasm of a nervous finger on a trigger – but the damage was done. Next came an answering fusillade, and someone, unbelievably, upped the ante by throwing a grenade, the explosion deafening everyone. When the noise and smoke subsided, Ahmed Ibrahim lay spread-eagled in the sand, breath bubbling from the granular pink mash that had been his face. Arterial blood was pumping from one border guard’s thigh while another lay motionless, arms clasping a warm pile of entrails. Two more were writhing silently in the sand, squirming jumbles of bone and muscle.

  The initial incident had not made the international news. On domestic television, it led the evening news broadcasts in both countries, but was consigned to a seven-line announcement read by carefully expressionless newsreaders. In the two capitals, emergency cabinet meetings were called, inquiries commissioned, generals summoned. Three days later, a motorcade of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and camouflage-painted trucks, dispatched by the government of North Darrar, trundled through Sanasa, heading for the blood-spattered checkpoint. A week later, Darrar’s tanks reached the front line and the artillery opened fire. Both sides, the geeks from Jane’s Weekly noted with interest, were using the same models of tank, the stolid T-55 bequeathed to the region by the Soviet Union during the Cold War era when the superpowers fought their battles by African proxy.

  Leafing through the cuttings from The Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times, it was clear that what had puzzled the Western journalists, diplomats and academics who had covered what followed was that Sanasa seemed so insignificant, the trigger incident so trivial, and both sides had so much to lose. Their articles smacked of exasperation: ‘Why can’t these people behave like adults?’ they implied. It was not, I guessed, that these observers had forgotten the grotesque consequences of a single shot fired in Sarajevo, or the arbitrary connections made between the flattening of the Twin Towers and Baghdad’s invasion. There was something more arrogant at play. In those cases, cause and effect might well seem disproportionate, historical justifications near-nonsensical but, dammit, they had occurred in places that mattered. The West could not tolerate a seeming absence of logic in a region so dry and hungry. Quixotic decision-making was a luxury denied countries this poor, as were the ingredients of most foreign policy: a leader’s hunger for dignity, a community’s craving for respect, destiny-defying pride. The domestic media showed no such bafflement. Their dispatches made knowing references to ancient kingdoms, nineteenth-century battles between feudal rases, long-running disputes over grazing rights, ‘the perennial obsession with access to the sea’, and ‘the hot topic of national identity’.

  Within weeks, Sanasa
was nearly forgotten as the war spread like a virus, infecting three other border towns. As truckloads of fleeing villagers headed in one direction, mattresses and cooking pots piled high, live chickens clenched like feather dusters, military conscripts and the occasional flak-jacketed reporter headed in the other, towards what was now a 1,630-kilometre front line. Nothing went as expected, although it took a while for the two populations to make out the broad contours of the conflict. The front line juddered confusingly backwards and forwards, each jerk marked in corpses that twisted in the sterilising Red Sea sun to form green-and-brown strips of human leather, a grimacing spray of teeth at one end, bulbous black boots at the other; landmarks initially greeted with horrified respect but attracting growing scorn from fellow soldiers as positions on crags and knolls were won, lost and won again. Two and a half years later, though, it was clear which side had been pushed onto the back foot. ‘We’re like a bar drunk who knows he has lost but can’t stop for dignity’s sake,’ the North Darrar minister of the interior confessed to an American diplomat one night over a ninth beer at Lira’s Havana Bar, an insight duly relayed back to the State Department. ‘One hand slapping our opponent in the face, the other leaning on him to avoid falling over.’

  Across North Darrar’s eastern, central and western sectors, more than 150,000 men and women had died. Darrar had gobbled up flood plains, seized valley settlements and captured hill forts, sending hundreds of thousands of villagers fleeing. The familiar flags of humanitarian agencies flapped over hastily built camps for the dispossessed. Sanasa had been occupied, then thoroughly looted. Bored Darrar artillerymen had laid bets to see who could rip through the jetty’s slim rind, and the sea now poured through the Swiss engineer’s 130-year-old stonework. Fishing boats had been burned, the mosque daubed with obscene graffiti and the port arcades mortared until their roofs acquired the consistency of ancient lace.