Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  The light was now so bright I was squinting. I rose to fetch my sunglasses.

  At this point, it seemed, the administration in Darrar had paused, suddenly aware that while sending the North Darrar government into exile was theoretically possible, the game might not be worth the candle. The two states agreed instead to send their presidents to Tunis for peace talks hosted by the African Union. A Cessation of Hostilities declaration was signed, catering for a buffer zone and a blue-helmeted force of UN peacekeepers, allowing both sides to pull back their forces without loss of face. The border must be demarcated, it was agreed, further bloodshed averted. Both leaders declared themselves ready to go to international arbitration.

  The last item in the file was a news-agency photo of the two presidents embracing in front of the television cameras, Kofi Annan’s hands resting on their shoulders in saintly benediction. I studied the image for a few minutes, wondering whether local viewers, while nodding in relief, had found themselves wondering how it was logically possible for both leaders – so certain of their own rectitude, so confident in the correctness of this method of solving disputes – to be simultaneously right.

  4

  I was sitting on the White Star Hotel’s steps, watching a gang of sparrows quarrel in the oleander bushes and savouring my first cigarette of the day, when a bottle-green Toyota Land Cruiser pulled sharply into the compound, sending dustmotes dancing around me.

  The man who unfolded from the driver’s seat was tall – unusually tall for a local, I would come to realise – with a high, clear forehead. There was a touch of the 1970s dandy about him. He wore a soft, chocolate-coloured suede jacket, camel slip-ons, and his cheekbones were framed with a delicate suggestion of sideburns.

  ‘Miss Paula Shackleton?’ I reached up and we shook hands. There seemed to be no fat on his bones. ‘I’m Abraham. Mr Peabody sent me. Welcome to Lira.’

  His English was good – that was a relief. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here.’

  He shouldered one bag with ease and waved away my half-hearted attempt to take responsibility for the second. ‘Hotel OK?’

  ‘Perfect. I’ve settled up, as I was told to.’

  ‘Mr Peabody thought it would be more comfortable to spend the first night here. It opened after Liberation – the owners are from the Canadian diaspora. But you will have your own villa, sharing with Sharmila, the other expatriate.’

  ‘Really?’ I felt a pang of dismay. I hadn’t shared with anyone other than Jake since university. In my misanthropic state, solitude had become a Janus-faced friend, hated yet necessary. I made a mental note to discuss the arrangement with Winston.

  He stowed my bags in the back of the Toyota and started the engine, throwing me a quick glance as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘You smoke.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’ I looked around anxiously for the ashtray, my US instincts kicking in.

  ‘No,’ he said, letting go of the wheel to reach into his back pocket for his own pack, the Red Marlboro of the serious player rather than my half-hearted Marlboro Lights. ‘It’s good. Everyone smokes here.’

  ‘Even the women?’

  He raised an elegant eyebrow as he went through the gear changes, face expressionless. ‘You’re a woman? I thought you were our new lawyer.’ I laughed, suddenly certain that I was going to enjoy working with Abraham.

  We drove through bleached, single-storey suburbs whose flaking walls were draped with bougainvillaea, Abraham occasionally lifting one long index finger from the steering-wheel to point out a landmark. The headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force – a vast fleet of white SUVs behind barbed wire and cement bollards (‘We could do with some of those’) – the new 500-room Africa Hotel (‘Lira’s only swimming-pool’), the gate into the Imperial Botanical Gardens (‘“Giardini”, the Italians called them’) behind which I caught a glimpse of cypress groves and gravel paths.

  ‘Is it safe on the streets in the evening? I like to run.’

  ‘Foreigners say it’s the safest capital in Africa. I wouldn’t know. No one will touch a hair of your head, I promise you, whatever time of day it is.’

  We reached the centre of town and were bowling along a palm-fringed boulevard (‘Liberation Avenue’), lined with imposing Modernist buildings, what looked like a theatre, a high court, ministries and a giant art-deco cinema plastered with posters of big-eyed Bollywood stars. I leaned eagerly out of the window, taking it all in. Jake would have loved this, I thought. He’d have known the architects’ names, effortlessly identified the various styles, and could have explained the ideas and accidents behind the city’s final layout. Without him, it was a meaningless agglomeration of buildings.

  We branched to the right, up a street lined with shoe shops and grocers. I caught snatches of jangling metallic music from a café’s open doorway. There was a driving, zesty quality to it, but the vocalist sounded closer to screaming than singing. Every now and then a garish mural flashed past, clearly a commissioned work of art. I craned my neck, but we were travelling too fast for anything more than a glimpse: a geyser of fire; khaki-clad fighters storming some citadel; a clenched male fist; prone bodies splotched with blood.

  Abraham drew up next to a pollarded fig tree. ‘That is the office,’ he said, indicating a sober wooden door with a brass plaque next to it. ‘And there on the corner is Ristorante Torino. Mr Peabody is waiting inside.’

  There had been exchanges of emails while I’d been in the States, though not as many as my mother would have liked – ‘Typical of you, Paula,’ she’d wailed, ‘moving to darkest Africa on the strength of a fax’ – but I hadn’t actually laid eyes on Winston since our Boston meeting. He seemed somehow larger, louder, a player in his element.

  ‘So, first impressions?’ he asked. Two beers magically appeared in stumpy unlabelled brown bottles. As the meal progressed, dishes kept materialising without orders being placed, and I realised he must eat at the Torino every day. Winston might be innovative and risk-taking inside the courtroom, but out of it he was a creature not so much of habit but of obsessive routine.

  ‘Weeell … the city isn’t what I was expecting at all. I don’t know what I thought an African capital would be like, but it feels more like a riviera resort, or a stretch of LA. The palm trees definitely bring Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald to mind.’

  He tilted his glass and carefully dribbled in some beer from the bottle. ‘Most African capitals barely existed before colonialism, so the cities often still look as their colonial masters intended. Infrastructure that stands the test of time can be a mixed blessing. It’s impossible to shake off.’

  ‘It seems incredibly clean. I suppose I was expecting open sewers and tin-shack slums.’

  ‘There are plenty of those, believe me, but not in this district. You’re in what was once Lira’s European quarter, which used to be off-limits to the “natives,”’ he made inverted commas in the air, ‘after the sun went down. It’s still the most elegant part of town. All the embassies and most of the hotels are here.’

  ‘And the climate …’

  ‘The climate?’

  ‘I realise I was a bit naïve, but I automatically assumed it would be hot and sweaty. I’m already wearing most of the clothes I packed.’

  He looked nonplussed. ‘Ah. Sorry about that. I should have asked Sharmila to brief you. We’re very high up, so it gets pretty cold once the sun goes down. I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me that would be an issue. My own wardrobe barely changes, irrespective of the season. You might be able to pick something up at the local market. Everything’s made in China, of course.’

  ‘Abraham mentioned I’ll be living with Sharmila. I don’t want to sound like a prima donna, but is there any chance I could have my own place, however small? I’m not used to sharing.’

  He gave me a probing look, alert for potential trouble. ‘Sorry, can’t do. It’s not penny-pinching, in case you’re wondering. The government designates where expatriates on the payroll live. Getting us to
share makes keeping tabs on us easier.’

  ‘That sounds a bit paranoid. We’re on their side, after all.’

  ‘Not paranoid, just careful. The client’s prerogative.’

  He started elliptically, so much so that for the first fifteen minutes I wondered if he was meandering, a man who liked to talk for the sake of talking. But then I saw what he was doing. Like any good lawyer, he knew that context dictates meaning. He was painting in the background, sketching in the lines of perspective, ensuring that when he finally came to the story’s core, it would be properly framed.

  He ran through his curriculum vitae. A boy who had been parked for long hours in the library of the school in West Philadelphia, where his mother worked as a cleaner, who had grown to love the institution’s smell of old leather, the hush of concentration and masculine gravitas, the atmosphere, he would later learn, of a gentleman’s club. What would have been a tiresome ordeal for most boys his age providing him with a glimpse of a way out. A truck-driver father, whose absences were compensated for by a grandfather’s loving attention: Winston Peabody I, despairing of his pool-hall-frequenting son, was self-taught, politically active, the kind of iconoclast who felt compelled to declare his atheism to all and sundry, had poured his frustrated aspirations into his grandson, who had soaked up the references to Orwell and Fanon, Garvey and Du Bois, safe harbours of thought and inspiration in the choppy seas of adversity.

  The boy had fondly assumed that his grandfather – rarely seen without a pin-stripe waistcoat and half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose – was a lawyer, possibly a judge. In fact, Winston Peabody I, the gifted child of railway labourers, had never spent more than two years in high school. When he left for work, battered briefcase in hand, he was headed for a legal aid office where the absence of a degree confined him to a clerk’s desk but did not prevent him murmuring quietly authoritative advice to the poor mothers who sat in the waiting room, facing eviction and welfare cuts. The boy had repaid the attention – and the fund-raising support of his local evangelical church – by filling the blank space above his grandfather’s desk where a framed law degree had always screamed to be. For the grandfather, it was a form of validation by proxy, the sins of the forefathers wiped out by the relentless determination of a legacy-conscious heir. The first and, to date, only member of his family to go to college, Winston Peabody III had gone one better, graduating from Cornell Law School first in his class. He was snapped up by the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, eventually migrating to the Fraud Section. Then Watergate broke, and in its wake came Lockheed, Bananagate and a host of scandals whose revelations of slush funds, political skulduggery and sleaze had triggered a bout of national self-loathing that had given birth to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Winston had become a government sleuth, pursuing the kind of corporate misbehaviour deemed to bring the US into international disrepute.

  And then he had walked through the revolving door, taking his forensic understanding of the new anti-bribery legislation to Melville & Bart, where he found himself advising exactly the kind of American corporations he had once sought to prosecute. I must have looked judgemental at this point because, for the first time, Winston became defensive: ‘What people don’t always realise,’ he said, ‘is that in a lot of companies, senior management often genuinely believes it is behaving ethically. The CEO’s been kept in the dark by a regional manager who thinks buying the president’s son a new Porsche is standard business practice. We show these guys how to clean up their act.’ I nodded, as if in agreement. There was no disguising the fact that the gamekeeper had turned poacher, but it wasn’t hard to guess why. As a senior partner at Melville & Bart, Winston had probably pulled down in a month what he would have earned in a year at the Justice Department. Hard for a cleaner’s son, raised in poverty, to resist.

  A few years later, Winston had had an epiphany. A mining client had invited him to visit its project in Liberia. It was his first trip to the land of his forefathers and, strolling Monrovia’s ramshackle streets, he was surprised by how at home he felt. He was also surprised, sitting on the terrace of his Mamba Point hotel, watching fruit bats stir in the palm trees, to overhear conversations that revealed his client was bankrolling both the government and the rebels in the civil war. ‘I suppose it was pretty naïve,’ he said, with a rueful smile, ‘but I was shocked. When I came back, I called a partners’ meeting. I told them I would no longer represent the client and urged Melville & Bart to withdraw. My colleagues refused. It got fairly unpleasant. I was on the verge of resigning. Instead we struck a deal. I’d continue reeling in corporate clients but they would make some room for me to do pro bono work in the developing world on the side. My way of salving my conscience. I can sleep at night, the firm’s reputation gets a boost.’

  Winston started wandering the world, and found there was no shortage of causes to champion. Once frozen hard by the Cold War, international borders had turned liquid and negotiable in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Africa. New nation states were emerging, in urgent need of constitutions and bills of rights. Relations between neighbouring countries were up for redefinition. It was work that few of those governments knew how to handle. It was work that Winston Peabody III seemed born to do.

  There had been a long collaboration with Moldova’s independence movement; he’d tried to establish an unbeatable case for the return of the Chagos Islands’ deported residents; and had advised Afghanistan’s loya jirga on a new constitution. Colleagues marvelled at his appetite for airlines blacklisted by US embassies, brothels masquerading as hotels, and his willingness to pop a Lariam with his morning coffee at a stage when they had grown dependent on the five-star hotel, the chauffeured pick-up, the left aircraft swivel into business class.

  I sipped my beer, silently noting the absence of any reference to ‘my wife’, ‘my partner’ or ‘the kids’. No alimony, no pets. Gardening got a brief mention, but how far could that take a man? Was the law Winston’s only passion?

  The roundabout route had brought him to the Horn of Africa. Winston had led a team that had virtually written the constitution of still-unrecognised Somaliland. He had found himself drafting legislation on ancestral grazing rights for a young mayor in the Ethiopian highlands – the man had raved about his work at a regional conference. A job in South Sudan had followed, and finally the authorities in Lira had reached out.

  ‘It was a bizarre experience. I boarded a bus in Juba, heading east. I thought this was going to be my only chance to see Lira – you know people rave about the 1930s architecture? – so I’d arranged a stopover. I couldn’t remember telling anyone my plans. As I got off the bus two men in their fifties, both with that weathered, tough look about them you get here, stepped forward and said, quietly and politely, “Mr Peabody? Could we have a word?” They must have monitored me all the way from Sudan. This is one of only about three governments in Africa, I reckon, capable of running such an effective intelligence network. It comes of spending decades under enemy occupation, I suppose. You learn the tricks of the trade.’

  They had virtually frogmarched him to a nearby café and explained that someone important wanted to see him. Then they had driven him to the old Italian governor’s palace on the hill, through a single checkpoint – ‘He doesn’t do security, says if any member of the public wants to assassinate him he’ll have outlived his usefulness anyway’ – and ushered him straight into the president’s office, where he had been relentlessly wooed. For what could have been better calculated to win round a left-leaning maverick without a cause, a New World, African-American intellectual snob, than a brutally honest exposition of an African administration’s lack of preparedness to meet the most testing legal challenge of its short existence, delivered in a gruff monotone by the Man Himself during a protocol-free tête-à-tête?

  ‘For the first hour I wasn’t offered so much as a glass of tea, which is incredibly rude in this culture,’ he recalled, with a fond smile. ‘The zero-charisma
charm offensive, I like to call it, a Lira speciality.’ And it had worked like a dream, I thought, noticing how uncharacteristically flustered Winston looked, like a lover voicing a girlfriend’s name at the family table.

  ‘He was just, well, extremely impressive.’ Winston threw me a surreptitious glance. ‘You’ll meet him one of these days and see for yourself. I suppose it’s partly that he appears to lack … wiles. What you see is what you get – that’s half of the problem when he’s operating in the international arena. No bowing and scraping from his staff, none of that “Your Excellency” nonsense. He was dressed very simply, an outfit I’ve now seen a hundred times. He was totally open, made no attempt to cover anything up. The machinery of government barely existed, he told me. They’d done their best in the bush during the war of independence, running clandestine schools, but literacy rates among the former fighters now in charge of the various departments were embarrassing. He had ministers, he said, who could barely read the newspapers, let alone master Microsoft Word. Wonderful military strategists, but they’d started out as goatherds. Even before the clash in Sanasa and the new war, most of the real work of government was being done by a few harried secretaries left over from the old regime whom no one really trusted. Shortages of printers, photocopiers, cartridges, even pens. The educated elite were taking their time returning from exile, and when they arrived they wanted to set up import-export outfits, not work in government. This was a state that could barely issue a driver’s licence so contesting a border dispute in The Hague was simply beyond its capacities.’

  ‘And you agreed to do it for them?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘That’s not how I would phrase it. I see myself in a mentoring role. A facilitator, if you like. These guys may not have taken classes in international tort, but there’s no shortage of brains. Part of your job here will be to pass on what you have learned, thanks to your privileged Western education, to the local staff. It’s like water on a sponge – every drop gets soaked up. I won’t tolerate any apartheid in the office. I can’t stand that Western staff-versus-local-hire rivalry that so often develops. We all need one another’s skills. They may not know the law but we don’t know the local culture and don’t speak the language. The ultimate aim of the Western staff – you, me, Sharmila and the interns – should be to put ourselves out of a job.’