Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘It’s the waste of it all. I can’t bear it. I feel guilty, too. We’re lawyers, we should have got George out. Instead, I made a token effort and left it at that. And then …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes I have a superstitious feeling’ – a big bubble of air was rising up my throat, suddenly making speaking difficult – ‘that if I take a liking to a man, I’ve signed his death warrant.’

  In all our drinking sessions, it was an area we had never explored: my life before Lira. So I finally told him the story of Jake, the Last Supper, the accident and my recruitment in the lobby of a Boston hotel.

  Dawit stared at me. Then he looked at what remained of his beer, swilled it around in the bottle, downed it, studied the floor for a long while and raised his eyes to stare at me again. It was not a friendly look.

  A split-second ago we had been sharing intimacies but now he seemed utterly distant, a spindly stranger sporting a velveteen trouser suit that bordered on the ridiculous, the kind of nicotine-stained bar regular I’d normally have moved discreetly across the room to avoid.

  ‘So,’ he finally pronounced. ‘So, after all. After all there has been between us, it turns out you are one of them.’

  ‘One of who? What are you talking about, Dawit?’

  He put the beer bottle down, gestured to the barman and started, with some difficulty, teasing coins from the pocket of his hip-hugging trousers. ‘There’s a film showing at the Cinema Gloria I want to see,’ he muttered. ‘It involves a great number of dancing girls. A friend told me the hip-grinding is so explicit he almost embarrassed himself.’

  ‘You’re off? Right now?’ I was baffled. ‘What’s going on, for fuck’s sake?’

  He paid for the beer, not looking at me. Then he took out and lit a cigarette, and deigned finally to meet my eyes.

  ‘What I always liked about you, Paula, was your honesty. Your cynicism. You were straight. You told me you came here to do your job and earn a nice fat salary. It was such a relief. I cannot tell you how bored I get – we all get – of you Westerners and your perverted motives.’

  ‘“Perverted”? Isn’t that a bit strong?’

  ‘I wonder, was the African continent created just to provide poor little whiteys with somewhere to hide? You are like children running away from those strange schools English novelists write about, the ones full of homosexualists. But none of you are honest enough to admit it. No, you have to dress it all up and suddenly, a miracle, it turns out that you’re actually doing us Africans a favour. Putting your careers on hold. Risking your lives. Spending years on Lariam – terrible side-effects, you know. All just to rescue us – God save us from your fucking salvation – to feed us, cure us, train us, train us to train others, teach a fish to catch a fish to eat a fish and all that bullshit’ – boulesheeet – ‘to make us care about democracy and human rights and then scold us when we don’t care enough.’

  He was in full rant now, middle finger jabbing at me, cigarette ash scattering like dandruff.

  ‘What’s the slogan on the statue, Paula?’

  ‘Which statue?’

  ‘Statue of Liberty, that one, yes! “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” Africa’s slogan, what is it? “Give me your preachers, your fucked-up journalists, your secret racists and all the wankers’ – wunkers – ‘who wouldn’t get a job with a villa, pool and driver anywhere else.’

  ‘You’re being obnoxious, Dawit.’

  ‘You know, I thought, with you, I had met the first foreigner with pure motives, which means, for me, normal human motives. The profit motive, that’s something a former Communist like me can respect. Not some personal neurosis twisted like one of those American pretzels’ – his hands and arms were snaking around one another now, his face contorted with simulated discomfort – ‘till you turn it into something noble. And then it turns out that lovely Paula is one of our continent’s many damaged Western imports. I suppose you thought since your life was ruined, your Jake dead, you might as well donate what was left to Africa. Are we supposed to be grateful for the crumbs?’

  My face was ablaze. I had given my only friend in Lira custody of this, the black hole of my life, and he had doused me with mockery.

  ‘This is just revenge, because I couldn’t get you an exit visa.’

  Now he was unbuttoning the top of his shirt, a psychedelic monstrosity of swirling 1970s design. ‘You people …’ Dawit’s fingers were shaking ‘… you people are so scarred. Well, you know what? I can beat you for scars.’ I could see it now. A shiny yellow snake that extended from his collar-bone, missing the nipple, to a strange puckered valley above his stomach. His navel winked at me, two inches to the left of the standard position.

  ‘For God’s sake, button up, Dawit.’ I could see the barman glowering at us. Maybe he’d seen this performance before.

  ‘I remember now who you remind me of. It’s the nun in that old movie, the one played by Katharine Hepburn, who cuts off her hair and goes to the Congo.’

  ‘Audrey, not Katharine. Audrey Hepburn.’ My throat felt so clotted I could barely get the words out.

  ‘Audrey, Katharine … I don’t give a shit,’ He put his hands together, cigarette still burning, in mock prayer. ‘The doe eyes, the Little Miss behaviour, that constant expression of smug self-righteousness … Yup, that’s you, Paula. You once told me this country’s appeal was that it was a blank place on the map. This isn’t the Middle Ages. Did you expect two-headed monsters, men with eyes in the middle of their stomachs? We have a history, we have dates.’

  I was gathering up my things. ‘I should have listened to what everyone said. You’re just a malevolent little prick, Dawit.’

  His last lines were shouted at my back as I plunged through the bead curtain.

  ‘We’re not a blank place on the map, Paula. Maybe you should have done that reading after all.’

  30

  The weather changed. I had grown accustomed to being perched above the clouds like a modern-day Zeus, but the blue horizons vanished, growling storms swept up from the south and we were reduced to mere mortals, trapped under a slate-coloured sky. The rains came early and proved as brutally sudden as a car wash. Trapped in a doorway one lunchtime, I watched pedestrians being chased down the street by a frothy river of brown water. Gutters silted up with debris, pavements were littered with broken roof tiles and snapped tree branches, and large stains formed on the office ceiling from leaks whose origin no one could identify.

  The change seemed appropriate because everything felt different now. When I first moved to New York I had noticed the psychological shift a traveller makes from outsider to local. On first arrival, everything is picturesque. You have walked into a large, fascinating postcard, a Hollywood movie being shot entirely for your benefit. You lap up new impressions, but somehow they don’t touch you. Sunlight creeps over your duvet in the morning and you relish the warmth, but it is their sun, not yours. A scandal breaks in local government: you read about it with interest but feel no sense of grievance. A madman shouts gibberish outside a supermarket, and you watch him with equanimity: he is not your problem. Then one day it ends. The famous New York skyline stops taking your breath away – in fact, you barely notice it: it is your skyline now. The sunshine is your sunshine, that abrasive taxi driver your problem, and that scandal a disgusting waste of your tax dollars. You have lost your distance; you notice less but understand more. You have become invested.

  George’s death had pushed me across that line in Lira. I put in my usual long hours at the office, helping Winston with his work on the Status of Forces agreement. We had expected it to be signed weeks earlier, but a row had broken out, with Kennedy insisting co-operation would depend on a pull-back of enemy troops to pre-2001 positions. It had been a long-standing gripe, with the Lira government arguing that the situation put demarcation at risk and the international community shrinking from confrontation with Darrar. But as I bustled about, my thoughts kept returning to the scene
in the morgue. The fresh-meat smell clung so insistently to my nostril hairs that I decided – after retching on a ham sandwich – to go vegetarian for a while. I’d sit at my computer and find myself gazing into space twenty minutes later, my mind turning over images of stacked bodies, shattered bones, George’s milky fish-eye. Lira no longer seemed picturesque. It was my city now, and with familiarity had come not contempt but a gritty reckoning.

  Winston left for Washington, to put in time with one of his corporate clients. I dutifully accompanied him to the airport. The commission had just emailed to announce the date of the award – 15 November. We agreed to meet at the Royal Delft. ‘I might fly in a few days early … There are things to be hammered out with the ambassador. Perhaps you could send Abraham then. I’ll need a chauffeur and all-round flunkey to do the boring stuff before you turn up.’

  As I watched the lemon suit cross the tarmac to the waiting aircraft, I was aware that something had shifted in my attitude to him, too. When we’d met in Boston, despite my sneering at his groupie entourage, I’d been ready to play the role of acolyte, the impressionable youngster imbibing wisdom from the fount. There was a matter-of-fact pragmatism about our dealings now. I asked fewer questions, wary of his likely answers. My admiration had given way to grudging affection, which allows for the admission of a host of faults. He was just a man, after all, a man moulded and warped by personal circumstance, a race’s bitter understanding of prejudice and a superpower’s irrepressible chutzpah. Increasingly, I kept my counsel. With Dawit estranged, Sharmila and Steve freezing me out and Winston gone, life in Lira was going to be a grimmer experience.

  ‘Halt.’ On automatic, I nearly careered into him, a soldier barring the road. The sun was still high but I could see a sliver of moon in the sky, no more than the shaving of a baby’s fingernail. My evening jog was behind schedule.

  ‘Yes?’ I said testily, prancing up and down, keeping the momentum going. I really needed this. My joints felt drained of lubrication, my legs stiff sticks that might snap under my own weight.

  ‘No.’ He was young – barely old enough to shave – skinny, determined.

  ‘No, what? What do you mean?’ This was the first time I’d ever had any problems on this route. The urchins who usually ran alongside me had also halted and were gathered in a curious cluster, watching.

  ‘No walk.’

  ‘I’m not walking, I’m running.’

  ‘No run. No pass.’ It was getting late. Behind him, the freedom of the plains beckoned. I made to trot round him. He thrust out one clenched fist and arm. ‘It is the law.’

  ‘What? What do you mean “It is the law”? I do this every day. Are you mad?’

  ‘Today, no. New law.’ He gestured at our feet, and I noticed a knotted brown length of string, thinner than you would use to tie a parcel, trailing across the tarmac. I had clearly pulled it off the posts erected on either side. I finally spotted the tin-roofed shack, just large enough to hold a man, inside which I could see a chair, a blanket, a folded newspaper. This was a new checkpoint where none had existed before.

  I had never shouted in Lira. But now I did, hands on hips, breaking all the rules, aware of a wonderful, marrow-melting sense of release. ‘WHAT LAW? WHAT FUCKING LAW? GET OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY, YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE.’ My voice, I noticed with abstract interest, was getting higher and higher, heading towards some plateau of hysteria where it had never ventured before. Would I be able to coax it back down?

  He clutched his rifle and hollered back at me, an incomprehensible jabber in which the only thing I could make out were the words ‘foreigner’ and ‘border’. Then I suddenly became aware of a quiet, apologetic voice in my ear.

  ‘Can I help, please? Are you having some problem?’

  The frightened face of a rotund man in his fifties, a local resident, whose face was vaguely familiar from the many times I had passed it on this road. His familiarity helped me claw back some of my sanity. ‘I’m trying –’ I was so choked with rage that it was hard to speak ‘– to go on my daily run and this man won’t let me through.’

  An urgent exchange between the two of them. The soldier gesticulating, expostulating, eyes wide, pointing first to me and then to his little hut.

  The resident turned to me, nervous, stumbling over his words. ‘Well, the way it is, it is this. The government has issued a new law for foreigners. I think you call it tit-for-tit? Because the West is not putting pressure on our neighbour to withdraw troops from occupied territory, the government has decided not to let Westerners go outside the city limits. He says he has written orders. This is where the border goes now,’ he said, pointing to the piece of string.

  ‘So I can’t run?’

  ‘You can run over there,’ he nodded back to the maze of narrow streets behind me, ‘but not here.’

  ‘How long is this going to last?’

  ‘Oh, I think for ever.’ He didn’t even bother to translate the question.

  ‘So Lira is just a big prison, then, for us Westerners, is that right? But then,’ I sneered, ‘I suppose it’s nothing but a big prison for all the locals, too, eh?’ He gazed at me in silence, anxious to help if he could.

  I looked down the road, saying my goodbye to the landscape. A memory came to me, so fresh it was almost tactile: the sensation of lightness, freedom I had experienced the first time I had landed in Lira, of soaring giddily above my own personal tragedy. I could not recapture, now, what had prompted that feeling, making it feel urgent and true. Without bothering to thank my self-appointed interpreter, I turned on my heel and stalked back towards the city centre.

  When I got to the villa, I kept walking, aware that I needed to work off my adrenalin. It was dark now, and my feet stumbled against loose bricks, grassy tufts. I nearly barrelled into Amanuel, the night-watchman, swerved and jumped just in time over an open drain. I headed for the main streets where the well-swept pavements and streetlights would keep me safe. Local housewives, wraithlike in white shawls, materialised from the gloom, then disappeared into darkness. I turned a street corner and found myself on Liberation Avenue. Lit from the inside, the barber shops, pizzerias and cafés were transformed into stage sets laying on performances for my benefit. Here, an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit sat reading a newspaper, while an equally aged barber snipped the back of his neck, brow furrowed in concentration, tongue tip peeping from lips. Two friends sat behind them, hands loosely clasped in casual affection, their jokes bouncing harmlessly off the victim. I was only inches away, I could see their lips moving, but I might as well have been on Mars. There, a courting couple at a café table laughed over a shared ice-cream – pistachio and strawberry? – dribbling down the side of a giant frosted glass. My eyes flitted past them and stopped. I had spotted the bulbous, slightly obscene outline of a shaved white head. Steve. Steve locked in conversation with … a dark, ferrety outline. Dawit? There, at the back. Seated at the bar. Dawit and Steve. I stared in baffled wonder. When had they got to know one another?

  I watched them for a while, aware that I was virtually invisible in the street darkness. I noted how protectively Dawit sat hunched over his beer. Even if our recent argument hadn’t jinxed a friendship that had once seemed so natural, his body language would have warned me not to make my presence known. I turned and made my way home.

  31

  Dr Berhane looked uncharacteristically unkempt. His beard, usually carefully trimmed, had formed wispy little grey-yellow corkscrews and there were dried crusts around his eye sockets. As we talked, he pulled spasmodically at one earlobe: the fidgeting of a man ill-at-ease.

  ‘I do not like to abuse our professional relationship, Paula, but it seems I am about to do exactly that.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I cannot tell you how it distresses me to have to do this. To turn into one of those feckless Africans who expect white people miraculously to solve all their problems, like a child running to Mummy.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, no, I had really not expected
to become that person. But I’m afraid I have to ask you a massive favour.’

  Not another. I gazed at him in silence, dreading what was coming next. If he thought this favour was a lot to ask, then clearly it would involve something unpleasant on my part.

  He stopped fidgeting and looked me in the eye. ‘You are familiar with the problem people face in this country when they try to leave? The bureaucratic hurdles the new government puts in their way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They jump over them, one by one, and then, just when the tired little lab rat thinks he is about to exit the maze, he enters the last in a long line of offices, offices he has taken months to work his way through, and some under-secretary pulls out his file, looks at it and says, “What, you? You are never going to leave, my brother. Your country needs you. Aren’t you a patriot?” And the under-secretary brings down his official stamp and –’ Berhane clicked his fingers ‘– that’s it. “Request denied, but feel free to start the whole process again next year. And if you do that it will, of course, be recorded in our files and held against you in future.”’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard.’

  ‘I have two friends … We were naughty boys at school together. An ophthalmologist and an accountant. They have both lost their faith, if I can put it that way. We argue. I point out that new governments need time to learn the pitfalls of power, that nothing happens overnight. But they feel there is less and less to choose between the current administration and the one we overturned at such a cost.’ He paused to run his fingers across his brow, wiping away, perhaps, the faces of dead friends. ‘For them, living here means accepting a permanent state of personal disrespect. They feel they are choking to death. They cannot breathe.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  He sighed heavily. ‘I must rely on your discretion, Paula.’

  ‘Lawyers are good at discretion. Like priests and doctors. It’s part of the job description.’

  ‘The point is that both my friends have decided to run for it. They fantasise about new lives in Sweden and Norway. They have tried the official route and been refused. After all the years of contributions to the Movement – it was not always easy, you know, for us to find that money when we were frizzy-haired, despised migrant workers cleaning tables and driving taxis in the West – this is their reward. Next month my friends will take the bus that gets them closest to the border, wait for darkness and walk. It seems everyone knows how to do this now.’