Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘Didn’t you see him flirting with her?’

  ‘That was flirting?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He will want to follow up. Let us hope she says yes. Then we can all get some rest. Do you know which nationality she is, though? Our side or theirs?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ The image of what might await Mariam left me dismayed and flustered on her behalf. I looked around the room, hoping fiercely and suddenly that her shift ended soon.

  On the other side of the hall, Judge Mautner was ushering his VIPs towards the exit, where limousines were clearly waiting to whisk them away to a private dinner. The foreign minister paused a moment before joining them.

  ‘You know, there is one thing all you Westerners here tonight must remember.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘For our side, all this is really just a game. As you said, a puzzle. A big puzzle being staged to please the West. We know we are in the right and it is time the world acknowledged that. So we will jump through its hoops, because a country without clear borders is like a woman without panties – anyone can enter. But we can always go back.’ He gestured at the décor with contempt. ‘We wouldn’t miss any of this – this decadence. We know in our hearts that we can always go back to the trenches, the caves. That life does not alarm us. Just look at the enemy.’ He grimaced. ‘Their hand-made shoes and linen shirts. You know that my counterpart’s daughters go skiing in Switzerland? His son is at Yale, he owns a villa on Lake Geneva. They have swallowed it all. Me, I still live in my mother’s house in Lira, I don’t own a car and my children took their degrees with the Open University. We will win because we can bear hardship and they cannot. The side that is ready to suffer most always wins.’

  Identifying turning points matters in law. The precise moment a clump of cells becomes a foetus capable of sustaining life. The moment a squatter wins rights to a property. The millimetre at which no man’s land becomes alien territory. But pinpointing transitions is hard to do in real life. I have no clear answer to the question of when things started going wrong between Jake and me. It was a messy accumulation of fractious experiences, each negligible in isolation, which knitted together to form a mat of miscommunication and sustained grudges, like the lint-laden pelt you dig out of a clogged vacuum cleaner. In that musty weave a few incidents hold prominence.

  9/11 was one. Like every other New Yorker, I spent that strange morning in a state of febrile anxiety. Hitchens had assigned me to work on a bond issue and the team had pulled an all-nighter. The first plane hit as I was preparing to leave the office to catch up on my sleep. I spent the next hour trying, and failing, to call friends in Lower Manhattan, moving from the knot of employees gathering in front of the office television to the plate-glass windows, where we could see plumes of smoke rising from the Twin Towers and hear the first sirens swell to a wailing chorus of dismay. Uncertain what to do, Hitchens’s partners eventually ordered an evacuation. Upstairs, Jake was doing the same with his team, and we joined the throngs of panicky workers walking home along surreally deserted streets, me to Greenwich Village, Jake to reassure a hysterical Olivia in the Upper East Side apartment, each of us wondering, as we kissed a rushed goodbye, whether we were heading in the right direction or would see each other again.

  For weeks afterwards, the wounded city was united, its citizens gentler to one another than was their custom, allaying the horror with unexpected gestures of selflessness, small daily acts of kindness. We were in bruised lockdown and I felt very much part of that state of siege. But as the months went by and the testosterone-charged Bush backlash began, I became aware of a growing sense of distance. The ubiquitous Stars and Stripes, evidence of the new in-your-face patriotism, began to grate. Overhearing office conversations, I realised I did not share the general sense of amazement. Outrage and anger, yes, but no surprise. And as soon as I heard Donald Rumsfeld use the phrase ‘Old Europe’, I knew why. I belonged to that despised category. My conviction that no individual can expect to be indefinitely spared acts of random violence was rooted in a scarred continent’s long experience of war. I was out of kilter with my time and place, while Jake felt no such unease. I bit my tongue, watched what I said, but 9/11 left me with a new understanding. The US might be my base, but it was not yet my home. Perhaps that was why my immigration status began to prey on my mind.

  The second incident was an interview with a prematurely pot-bellied young man wearing a brown pin-stripe suit in an office in the Bronx. He was rooting around in a pile of yellow files when I put my head round his door. It was a lawyer’s office of the old-school variety, its walls lined with grey filing cabinets. On the top shelf of a library heavy with legal reference books, trios of brown cardboard boxes had been marked in thick red felt tip: ‘REJECTED’, ‘PENDING’, ‘ACCEPTED’, ‘REJECTED’, ‘PENDING’, ‘ACCEPTED’.

  ‘Larry Goldman?’

  ‘Ah, yes … You must be Ms Shackleton?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Take a seat. Just a moment …’ He riffled through a few stacks of documents. ‘Aha, here we are!’ He extracted a yellow file with a flourish. ‘So, yes, let me just refresh my memory …’ He sat and leaned back in his swivel chair, propping his feet on the corner of his desk. ‘You know, Ms Shackleton, it really wasn’t necessary for you to come in,’ he murmured, scanning the pages. ‘This office processes about five hundred visa applications a year, and I can count the clients I meet in person on the fingers of one hand. We usually find emails and faxes are quite adequate.’

  ‘Well, I was in the area, so it seemed to make sense. Plus my office is open-plan and we all end up eavesdropping on each other’s conversations. It can be awkward.’

  ‘No problem, no problem, entirely up to you.’ There was a brief silence as he read on, slurping coffee from a Starbucks paper cup. Finally, he closed the file and gave a conspiratorial smile.

  ‘So. You’ve been with your current firm, Hitchens, on extended secondment from its London office, for three years. One of the City of London’s prestigious Magic Circle law firms, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nice. You must be one of their rising stars,’ he commented. ‘And you’re here on an intra-company transfer visa – the L1B. Which expires in four months.’

  ‘That’s right. I wanted to know what my options were, given that I’d like to continue working here in the States.’

  ‘Not anxious to go home, eh?’

  ‘I’m not sure where home is any more.’

  ‘Well, the obvious option is simply to apply for an extension.’

  ‘Ye-es. That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. The L1B locks me into a relationship with my employer, doesn’t it? I mean, if Hitchens shift their operations to Texas, I’d have to move or go back to the UK, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And I can’t jump ship, either, and take a job with a rival?’

  ‘That’s correct. You belong to Hitchens, in a way.’

  ‘The point is that there have been rumours circulating for a while that Hitchens could be about to merge with a rival. Heads always roll after mergers and, as I’m one of the younger employees, the principle of last in, first out would probably apply. I didn’t take it too seriously at first, but I now have an American boyfriend’ – I squirmed at that inadequate description of Jake – ‘and I don’t want to have to leave at short notice.’

  ‘In that case, I’d recommend applying for the H1B, the specialty-occupation visa. It allows you to change employers without having to repatriate. And after five years on that, you automatically qualify for the coveted green card, permanent residence.’

  ‘How easy are they to get?’

  ‘Well …’ He tapped his teeth with his pen. ‘Not that easy, to be honest. Not since 9/11. We’ve become a very paranoid nation, and it’s made my working life a hundred times more complicated. Everyone’s kinda twitchy and the US isn’t exactly short of lawyers.’

  It had been a mistake to come here,
I thought. He was right. Just seeing this office, crammed with evidence of thousands of other questing hopefuls, made me feel vulnerable and insignificant, a morsel of plankton about to be sieved through the great maw of US bureaucracy. Best keep it to emails and faxes in future. Then I straightened my back. Don’t be a wimp, I told myself, all bureaucracies are like this. Just understand the system, then work it.

  ‘It’s worth trying, at least?’

  ‘Of course, of course. Quotas or no quotas, my job is to make sure you get what you need. Your employers’ references are glowing, which helps. Right, you may as well sign the papers while you’re here and we’ll get that H1B application in the works.’

  He was positively jocular as he reached for a final handshake. ‘Don’t worry, Ms Shackleton. We’ll get there in the end. I say to my clients, “Unless you’re going to go for the Depardieu option, you simply have to become a little bit Zen.”’

  ‘The “Depardieu option”?’

  ‘Oh, my little joke. Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell. Didn’t you see the movie? She’s the earnest American, he’s a French composer. They stage a marriage of convenience to get him a green card, only they get caught. Yes,’ he said, with a fond chuckle, ‘marriage can be a fast track to permanent residence. But if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know why we recommend that our clients only pursue that option when there’s a genuine relationship.’

  16

  Back in Lira, everything fell into a Spartan routine. I’d wake at what, by northern-hemisphere standards, would have counted as an obscenely early hour but there felt entirely natural, so insistent was the highlands light. Breakfast was a mug of espresso and a slice of toast, eaten standing, overlooking our back yard. Sharmila usually sat neatly at the dining-table, picking at a bowl of fruit. Increasingly she was joined by Steve, the UN peacekeeper, a ginger-bearded Australian giant. The UN had eighty rooms permanently booked at the five-star Africa Hotel, which boasted both swimming-pool and modern gym – luxuries regularly commented upon in the local newspapers – but Steve appeared to feel little fondness for his billet.

  ‘He says the water pressure is better here,’ Sharmila explained. ‘Better showers.’

  ‘And who said romance is dead?’

  As Steve snorted and tromboned in the bathroom, Abraham would arrive to pick us up. On the way he would drop me off at Winston’s villa, just off Liberation Avenue. By eight a.m. we would be hard at work.

  Winston had divided Darrar’s enormous counter-Memorial into bite-sized chunks for the team to analyse. The biggest chunk he had assigned to the two of us. He had asked if I minded working from his house, as he found it easier to focus when surrounded by plants. I could feel Sharmila’s resentment at what she clearly regarded as gross favouritism burning into my back every time I scrambled out of the Land Cruiser, leaving her to continue on to the office. Winston would unlock the metal door that opened from the street onto a jasmine-draped courtyard lined with terracotta pots bursting with agapanthus, camellia and hibiscus, and I would take my place at the white plastic table, topped by a gaudy blue-and-white parasol.

  ‘There!’ he said on the first morning, depositing the wads of documentation on the table. ‘Our homework for the next few months.’

  ‘So, what’s in it?’

  ‘Everything bar the kitchen sink, by the look of it. Nineteenth-century correspondence between the Negus of Darrar and the Italians, between his successor and the Brits, then a whole load of letters from when Darrar swallowed North Darrar in the 1950s and labelled it their new Northern Province. Hundreds of military cables during and after the Sanasa attack. Prisoner-of-war testimony and compensation claims from thousands of farmers and traders who say they suffered grievous losses because of the war.’

  I measured the blocks’ depth with index finger and thumb. ‘Would I be correct in detecting an element of machismo about their decision to submit quite so much?’

  ‘It’s a fairly classic technique. Drown the opposition in sheer volume. Swamp them in a tsunami of detail. Makes you look good in the eyes of the court – “See how open we are, we have no secrets” – and hope the quantity will bludgeon the other side into silence. A form of bluff. They assume that we’ll be too lazy to actually read the material, so they get kudos points while losing nothing.’ He rolled up his sleeves, cracked his knuckles and shook his head pityingly. ‘The poor fools clearly have no idea who they’re dealing with.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I won’t be going into that hearing without understanding the meaning of every piece of evidence in these files. Hard work is not something that has ever intimidated Winston Peabody the Third. They’ve actually played straight into our hands.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Oh, I know exactly the process that will have been involved in producing this heap of verbosity. Everything has to be submitted in English. The one thing the other side have no shortage of is manpower. They’ll have assigned a dozen government translators to work their way methodically through the documents. Junior officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the odd student on contract, perhaps. Those civil servants may be loyal patriots, but they have no grasp of the strategic issues at stake. Might as well use a robot army. They’re trained to focus on minutiae, not to develop ideas above their pay grade. So they’ll churn out cable after cable, letter after letter, never understanding what they mean when taken as a whole, and their bosses, who started off their careers as automatons, too, will assume that someone else, someone above them, is doing the filtering and analysis. That’s how sclerotic bureaucracies work. Everyone passes the buck until it finally gets dropped and rolls away. Something important will have been missed. And you and I will find it.’

  I pulled the first pile of paper towards me, suppressing a sigh. I couldn’t help wondering if the counter-Memorial was just sound, comprehensive evidence. ‘OK, so what are we looking for?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, exactly. But I have enough confidence in your intellect to believe you’ll spot the great bow wave as the whale comes up for air.’

  And so the days passed, the piles of checked documents by our respective elbows growing higher and higher. Occasionally we would break for coffee – it was somehow always understood that, although it was Winston’s kitchen, I was responsible for refreshments – and to compare notes on possible discoveries. At twelve thirty precisely, Winston would remove his spectacles, put down his pen and we would walk to the Ristorante Torino, where he would order his usual: macaroni cheese followed by vanilla ice cream. By one forty we would be back at work.

  ‘Hmm,’ Winston said quietly to himself one morning. ‘I wonder.’

  ‘What?’

  He puckered his lips into a moue, then released them, gazing at a couple of pages of thin blue paper. ‘A letter they’ve forgotten to translate.’ He turned them over, then, finding nothing of interest, held the signature so it was only a couple of inches from his eyes. ‘Can you read that?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘Does that name look familiar? I have a feeling I’ve seen it before. Somewhere else in the paperwork.’

  ‘Really?’ I was not going to admit it, but I was having difficulty distinguishing one local name from another. ‘What’s it part of?’

  ‘A stack of correspondence from regional officials and police chiefs intended to establish a record of administration over a cluster of villages in the western sector. It could be nothing. But let’s get Dr Berhane to translate it, shall we? How are you getting on with Captain Lewisham, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, he’s coming to feel like an old friend, the kind of favourite uncle who embarrasses you in company by telling politically incorrect jokes but is a pretty astute observer of human nature underneath.’

  Towards mid-afternoon Winston would sometimes show signs of restlessness, getting to his feet, fussing over the plants with a watering-can, scrunching dried blossoms in his hands, squirting leaves with water mist. Other days, he’d seem to run out of energy, slumping in hi
s chair. I’d raid the plastic bottles lined up on his bathroom shelf until I located what he described as ‘one of my pep pills’, wondering in passing why the container had no label. At five thirty precisely he would lean back in his chair and announce, ‘Right, that’s it, enough, you’ve done your duty Ms Shackleton!’ just as Abraham sounded the horn outside.

  Back at the villa, I would change into shorts and go running, tagged by a posse of mongrels and some laughing urchins who never seemed to tire of the spectacle. My route took me out of the suburbs and onto the plains, where the goatherds were starting the slow process of corralling flocks for the night. The air would be warm on my skin when I began, jiggling my shoulders to release the tension of the day, the descending sun’s rays dousing the fields of sorghum and chickpea in a soft orange wash. I’d turn back once it sank below the horizon, silhouetting the indigo hills against the sky. By the time I was wiggling my key in the front-door lock I could feel a deadly blue chill reaching across that vast plateau to claim Lira, as the first stars blinked from the darkness.

  Sometimes, when he sensed we were falling behind some unarticulated schedule, Winston would call to ask if I minded putting in a couple of hours’ overtime. I was pathetically grateful for those summonses, which saved me from evenings brooding in my bedroom. If the call didn’t come, I’d escape the demons by heading off for Sumbi’s, where I’d usually bump into Dawit.

  Occasionally, George called from Transit Camp No. 3. The first time he did this, he found some work pretext, but after that he just called to chat, about Liverpool, a DVD someone had sent him or, of all things, the decline of the National Health Service. I sensed it was my Britishness that appealed, a touchstone of familiarity.

  ‘Nights are the hardest here,’ he acknowledged, and I recalled the vast velvet sky that had stretched outside the tent on my visit with Abraham. ‘You never get silence like this in the UK. It’s what I remember from my visits to Sanasa in my childhood. The terrifying quiet.’