Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  3 January 1951 – The boys have been hitting the local gut-rot for a week now. So today I took them on a route march. Woke them at 5.00 a.m. and marched them up the escarpment, along the crest and then down to Sitat. About sixteen miles in all. Johnny fainted halfway through, and two of the native boys were sick behind a wall when we got back to base. The lads will rib them for days about that. It feels good to be back in harness. I’ve got fifteen years on these chaps but I can still march them into the ground.

  14 January – Pretty quiet week. Tesfay asked me to intervene in a local dispute. A dead donkey. I laughed my head off, but it’s serious stuff here, a big investment. I got Tesfay to summon the parties. We made it as official as we could. One farmer said he’d lent his donkey to his neighbour, who needed to pick up supplies from the market. Neighbour allowed the donkey to wander, it broke its leg and died. The farmer wanted compensation. The other chap said the donkey was sick when he took possession and collapsed on the way to market. ‘He beat his animals too much.’ King Solomon had nothing on me. I asked to see the body, which meant all of us piling into jeeps and heading off to Tentet. It stank to high Heaven – I almost lost my breakfast. No sign of a broken leg and the carcass was covered with whip marks, so I said there was no case to answer and ordered them to bury the body, chop, chop. I hate the way the locals treat animals. There’s no call for it.

  27 January – Johnny came into my office in a terrible state. He’s only gone and got a village girl pregnant. Apparently she’s one of the ones who came to the Christmas bash. I tore a strip off him, asked him what he thought the johnnies Doc Sam gave him on arrival were for and did he plan to spend his life raising camels with a brood of café-au-lait urchins? He was in tears by the end. I’ve contacted HQ to request a transfer. What a bloody fool. We’ll be the ones who have to clear up his mess. The family will expect compensation and it’s not British government policy.

  3 February – There’s been a shifta attack, the first for a long time: near the Italian bridge over the Abubed. Truck driver beaten up, his goods – mostly beer and fertiliser – gone.

  11 February – Tiny drove over from Lira. It took him all day and he lost his way three times, perhaps not surprising given that he was still squiffy on arrival. That boy’s a miracle worker. Turkish champagne, French pastis, twelve bottles of sherry, twelve of gin, two crates of beer. Women’s drink, a lot of it, but anything as long as it’s not local is my motto nowadays. The party began forthwith, but we’re going to have to ration ourselves or this stuff won’t last till the weekend. Duncan’s been given orders to keep the rest under lock and key. And absolutely no drinking in front of the natives.

  9

  A fortnight after my arrival, Winston dispatched me on my first evidence-gathering trip. ‘This dispute is all about land so you’d better get to know what it looks like. God knows it’s pretty dramatic.’

  We hit the road at dawn, just as you’re supposed to on African journeys. I ran out of the front door of the apricot-coloured villa, passing Amanuel the district night-watchman – wrapped up like Scott of the Antarctic and apparently dozing upright – and dived into the Land Cruiser, whose exhaust was snorting in warm white gasps. The street was quiet. Two middle-aged cleaners moved silently along the pavement, their heads hidden in the clinging white cotton shawls that always called to mind burial chambers and high-pitched wailing.

  ‘Uph, really cold,’ I said, breathing on my hands. ‘I should have filled a Thermos.’

  Abraham, freshly shaved and immaculate, smiled and turned up the fan heater as we bounced over the pot-holed back-streets. It made such a racket he was forced to shout. ‘Ah, Paula, you foreigners don’t know how to deal with our climate. On a morning like this in the highlands you need –’ he thumped his chest ‘– internal heating. A shot of our local speciality.’ A Baroque triton, he blew a white trumpet of vapour theatrically into the air.

  ‘Oh, God. Are you actually saying I have a drunk driver? I think that comes into the don’t-ask-don’t-tell category.’

  He laughed. ‘Fasten your seatbelt, Paula.’

  I reached for the buckle. ‘How about you? Am I the only one who’s going to wear one of these things?’

  ‘A seatbelt? Oh, no.’ He laughed. ‘Those are only for you Westerners. If you knew our history, you’d understand that we locals have already died a hundred times. It’s actually a ghost driving you, Paula.’

  The prospect of a road trip had clearly put him in a good mood. ‘Seriously,’ he continued, ‘it was my birthday last week. I am the only one from my primary-school class who reached forty. If it is my time now, I will go. Only God knows. A seatbelt will make no difference.’

  ‘Well, if you do feel it’s your time now, please let me know so I can get out first.’

  We were crossing the industrial area, passing what had once been, according to the rusting signboards, a soap factory and a beer-bottling plant. Then came an obligatory stop at a checkpoint, where two young soldiers looked at Abraham’s travel permit and insisted on inspecting our luggage. One gazed at me with frank curiosity and said something to Abraham with a grin.

  ‘He wants to know if you are married,’ he said, as he returned to the Toyota, pocketing his documents.

  ‘Tell him I’m far too old for him.’

  The road to the coast appeared to point straight off the edge of the plateau, into a measureless void. Abraham pressed hard on the accelerator, the Land Cruiser roared, and for a moment I wondered if we were about to do a Thelma and Louise. As I muffled an exclamation and instinctively grasped the seat, we breasted the hummock and the road unfolded harmlessly before us, hugging the escarpment. Abraham whooped in delight and gestured wide. ‘See, my beautiful country!’

  It was a salt-and-pepper landscape of ruthless privation, of unpitying absence. Rents in the cloud cover revealed, thousands of feet below, riverbeds winding through valleys like motorways of sand, but no glint of water. The acacia trees that followed those fitful courses were dark witches’ brooms of hostile thorns. At intervals, the odd baobab gesticulated, a giant angry triffid. Flocks of white goats picked at the slopes on the side of the road, but it was hard to see what they could find worth eating on that stony scree. A sprinkle of wild olive saplings failed to conceal the bareness below. Behind the first range of mountains I could see a series of hills, their tops peeping through a sea of early-morning mist, which was dissipating as the heat began to take its toll.

  I thought for a moment of the buttercup-strewn meadows and shadow-dappled orchards of Kent, where I’d spent my childhood holidays. The green promise of glades enticing you into darkness, the haze of bluebells and wild garlic under the trees. Before their marriage had turned sour, my parents used to rent a cottage on a trout-fishing stream, and I could still remember the thwack of cow parsley against the bonnet as Dad forced the car down the lane, and the soft humidity of midge-filled evenings when I was supposed to be asleep and they sat talking on the patio. That careless lushness had come to represent beauty for me, the only scenery that might conceivably be worth dying for. But this? So many had died fighting for this?

  ‘Beautiful, yes,’ I volunteered politely. ‘But so bleak, Abraham.’

  He looked sombre. ‘It was not always like this. Once this was all trees. I give you my word. The invaders cut them for fuel. That’s what armies do. They eat the land, like locusts. Our side was the same, always hungry for firewood. Our new government will replant, and then it will go back to the way it was before, our beautiful, fertile country.’

  We were looping rhythmically now, one hairpin bend after another as we worked our way methodically down the gradient. I silently thanked the Fates that I was not doing the driving. Abraham fed the steering-wheel expertly through his slim hands, manoeuvring around a broken-down lorry over whose overheated engine two men dangled, T-shirts black with oil and sweat. Another loop, and a controlled swerve to avoid a donkey rubbing its back into the warm tarmac, exposing a cream-coloured belly. Another tur
n, and we skirted a burned-out Soviet tank, its barrel twisted at an impossible angle. ‘From the last war, not this one,’ explained Abraham. Each loop brought us a few metres closer to sea level, and I peeled off my new fleece, feeling the temperature rising.

  I opened a window, aware of a rising sense of nausea. ‘How much more of this is there to go, Abraham?’

  ‘Another thirty minutes, then the road begins to level out. Do you want me to stop? Many people vomit the first time.’

  ‘No, I think I’ll be OK.’ I took a few deep breaths. Then, to distract myself, I riffled through my satchel, extracting the file Winston had given me the previous night.

  ‘So, this is one of five camps for the internally displaced in the eastern sector and it contains up to twenty thousand people from Sanasa and its outlying villages. Have you been to the others, Abraham?’

  ‘Yes. They are bigger than this one, closer to Lira, so we did them first.’

  ‘Winston’s given me the names of fifteen people he would like us to interview.’ Most were men. ‘It’s not politically correct to say so,’ Winston had explained in the office, ‘but the fact is that a lot of women in this culture make terrible witnesses. They’ve been brought up to be respectfully silent in the presence of men, and they can go totally mute. “Blood from a stone” is perhaps the appropriate phrase.’

  ‘What do you want me to find out?’ I’d asked.

  ‘There’s a list of standard questions. They’re all aimed at collecting testimony proving an unchallenged record of civilian administration by our government. Things like tax-paying, voter registration, utility bills, any interaction with the authorities. Land deeds would be wonderful, but IDPs almost never have those.’

  ‘A lot of these witnesses seem to be in their sixties and seventies.’

  ‘Lawyers are like biographers. We love old people. The further back we can go, the more legitimacy our claim acquires.’

  Another few loops and Abraham applied the brakes so suddenly I lurched forward and we stalled. A trio of camels was undulating across the road, whipped on by a tousle-haired teenager in a white shift. He squinted at us, shielding his eyes from sunlight so harsh it bleached everything to black and white. ‘A good sign,’ commented Abraham. ‘When you go from goats to camels, it means you’ve nearly conquered the mountain.’

  I took the opportunity to crouch behind a fig cactus and pee. On my return, Abraham was stretching his legs. Getting back in, he pressed the cigarette lighter and lit a Marlboro. ‘Tell me something, Paula. We call these people refugees, you call them IDPs, what is the difference?’

  ‘Ha! I asked Winston exactly the same question last night. Apparently the UNHCR, the refugee agency, insists on sticking to legal terminology. You can only be a refugee if you cross an international border. Otherwise, you’re internally displaced. Just a question of definition.’

  But that wasn’t quite true, I thought. Everyone knew who refugees were. They were those people we’d seen in black-and-white stills pushing carts across 1940s France in shabby coats, and the Hutu families who had trudged out of Rwanda, sleeping mats balanced on their heads. They shared the same expression of questing desperation. ‘Internally displaced persons’? Who were they? The phrase conjured up some painless version of community musical chairs. Professional do-gooders and diplomats might wake at night fretting over the fate of IDPs, but the public at large reserved their sympathy for ‘refugees’. They had been screwed by language, their plight leached of poignancy by UN officialese.

  A deadening torpor descended as we hit the straight coastal road. At his request, I fed Abraham first cigarettes, then sticks of chewing gum: it’s harder to fall asleep when your jaws are working.

  We passed a giant tortoise, up-ended in the road like a salad bowl, stubby legs protruding. The plains sparkled in the early-morning sun, flashes of light bouncing off shards of quartz, fragments of gypsum, crumbs of pink marble, granite and all the other deposits, Abraham explained, that lay behind the ‘mineral-rich’ promise made in the government brochures once handed out to visiting investors.

  A troupe of baboons galloped through the thorn bushes. The alpha male stopped to present an outraged scarlet face towards us, defiant and unafraid.

  ‘This road is so quiet now,’ commented Abraham. ‘In the old days there were hundreds of commercial trucks heading to the coast and back again. The truckers always drove like idiots. I lost friends on this road. Now the other side refuses to use our ports and the only way you can have an accident is from boredom.’

  But soon it stopped being boring, as the tarmac disintegrated and Abraham fought the road, swerving to avoid giant pot-holes carved by winter rains. At times, he lost patience and simply drove off piste, munching thorn bushes below the bonnet, bouncing off gravel banks and furrowing riverbeds whose sands were as soft as fudge. Yet whenever another vehicle appeared ahead – usually an army truck – I noticed that respectability returned, and two vehicles that had been plaiting wildly rebellious courses always observed the decorum of passing on the right.

  For what seemed like hours, we stared at a red dot shimmering on the horizon, the only patch of colour in the drab landscape. Abraham slowed as we approached. A battered old Fiat was drawn up on the roadside, its hood up. I realised that there was human life in the shade of the thorn bush next to the car. An old woman was holding a toddler, waving flies away with a straw fan. Her wizened husband, swathed in white, sat half in the shade and half out of it, one brown hand holding out a giant gold kettle. His face was expressionless.

  Abraham braked, reached into the back for a jerry-can of water and got out of the Land Cruiser. A few words were exchanged as he filled the old man’s kettle. I was astonished when he returned to the Toyota and pulled away.

  ‘Hey, wait, Abraham, not so fast! Shouldn’t we give them a lift? Where are they heading?’

  He looked at me in surprise. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But they could die of thirst. This is the middle of nowhere. We should take them somewhere.’

  ‘They were not asking for a lift, Paula. They were asking for water. I gave them what they asked for.’ I stared anxiously into the Land Cruiser’s side mirror as the red dot receded into the distance, but no one leaped from the bushes, hollering for our return.

  By the time we reached Transit Camp, Eastern, No. 3, the air-conditioning was working as furiously as the heater had a few hours earlier. Abraham parked outside the gates, and as he switched off the ignition I realised that the metallic buzzing I’d assumed to be generated by the engine was part of the great outdoors: a cicada chorus. I took a slow breath, quietly dreading what lay ahead, then reluctantly opened the door. The heat was absurd. I laughed in disbelief, waited instinctively for the assault to pass, then realised it never would. The sweat glands in my armpits and groin began to prickle.

  ‘Where first?’

  ‘The camp administrator, Sammy. I remember him from the front – a funny man, good singer, so we called him Sammy Davis Junior. He will know everything.’

  ‘Not UNHCR?’ I asked, pointing to what was clearly the refugee agency’s office, an air-conditioned container. A small mountain of empty water bottles had collected next to it. ‘To be polite?’

  Abraham grunted in scorn. ‘Their job is to hand out tents. That’s all they know how to do. And we do not need to be polite. If the UN had done its job in the first place, we would not be in this mess.’

  ‘Winston said that, whatever happens, we should try to avoid accepting a meal. Ribqa gave me some packed lunches.’ Winston’s exact words had been: ‘Personally, I find it mortifying to see a refugee family slaughtering their prized goat to fatten a well-fed Westerner.’

  Abraham shrugged. ‘We can try. We will fail. Hospitality is part of our culture. These people have nothing, but they will insist on sharing that nothing with us.’

  The administrator’s tent was at the camp’s high point, the path to its door marked with whitewashed rocks and a row of lovingly watered
oleanders planted in recycled cooking-oil tins. To the north we could glimpse the molten coast, a biscuit-coloured blur whose horizon shifted and melted in the heat, making it impossible to distinguish sea from sky. To the south stretched the IDP camp.

  A blue haze of wood fire rose above a giant, pixelated canvas of blue and white rectangles, a gaudy mosaic whose tarpaulins surreally brought to mind funfairs and candy floss. It gave off a rich, steady murmur. It was the sound, I realised, that all cities would produce if traffic was removed, a complex, constant hum which contained within it the metallic clink of saucepans being washed, the comforting pock of wood being chopped, the bleat of goats, barking dogs, babies wailing, adult chat, bursts of laughter. I felt my tense, hunched shoulders relaxing. Of course. How melodramatic of me. An IDP camp was just another type of community.

  ‘Your first refugee camp?’ asked Abraham.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How does it seem?’

  ‘I expected worse, to be honest. Squalor, wailing, that sort of thing.’ I gave an embarrassed laugh.

  ‘Losing your home doesn’t mean you lose your dignity.’

  ‘So I see. It seems very well organised. Big, though. Makes clear the disruption the war caused.’

  ‘They have kept the original villages intact,’ Abraham said, and my eyes followed his finger. This was an emergency city with distinct neighbourhoods, the tents arranged not in functional rows but in clusters. ‘All the camps are like this. It’s easier that way. Everyone knows who is who and what their role is. And it means when the word comes they are ready to go back.’