‘But what about your wonderful library?’ I blurted. ‘What will happen to it? Your encyclopaedias, your dictionaries?’
He shrugged. ‘I left the keys with the cleaning ladies, who are good, decent women. My gift to the nation. Although I suspect the nation will not appreciate the gesture.’
His new cynicism dismayed me. I wanted to put down my cappuccino – froth had slopped into the saucer – but I was afraid that if I turned to deposit it on the table behind me I would turn back to find him vaporised, a figment of my imagination.
‘But what about your history book? Are you still writing that? All the material you collected.’
‘Oh …’ He gazed off into the distance. ‘When I left I was forced to make some radical decisions. I have a wife and two children. Officially, the family was only leaving on a two-week holiday. Carrying too much luggage would have raised suspicions. The documents had to be sacrificed, for expediency’s sake.’
I had a clear mental image of the shelves in his study, stacked with coloured floppy disks. The carefully labelled cassette tapes. The dog-eared notebooks. Without meaning to, I expelled a slow sigh, trying to dull the vicarious pain of the loss of the book that would never be. ‘I’m so very sorry, Dr Berhane.’
He grimaced. ‘I think, perhaps, I was over-optimistic. Ahead of my time, or rather, ahead of the times. You know, the problem with my country is that it is still waiting for an ending. We need to have a happy ending, before anyone can sit down to write our history. We cannot bear, after all that we suffered, to admit things went wrong. So if the ending is not the right one, maybe it cannot be written at all. I should have understood that.’
‘But only fairy tales ever have completely happy endings,’ I said softly.
He shrugged. ‘Intellectuals like me are out of tune with our era. We sound like bad violin-players to many ears. Revolutionary regimes have no interest in examining the past. No,’ he gave a sardonic bark of laughter, ‘they are looking ahead, still building that shining Utopia! You know what happened when I submitted my passport for my exit permit? It was delayed for a few months and no one would tell me why. I began to worry – you can imagine. Finally, at a party someone from the Interior Ministry confessed. He was almost giggling. It was a bit embarrassing, he said. The ministry had been burning a huge cache of old files and somehow a bunch of passports had been incinerated alongside the old Italian paperwork. I went pale when he told me that. I felt a little giddy. He thought I was angry at their carelessness in burning passports. It did not even occur to him that, to a historian, there could be no greater outrage than what he had just revealed. That even an ordinary citizen of Lira, even a lowly peasant who could barely write, might have the intelligence, the vision, to object to this obliteration of our past. Those are the men who run the Horn of Africa today, brutes who burn files because they clutter up the place.’
‘That’s appalling.’
‘Yes, but the damage has been done, too late to stop it. And you?’ he asked, happy to change the subject. ‘Are you content?’
I chose my words with care. ‘It’s good not to feel angry all the time.’
‘You have a new job?’
‘Yes, with a rather earnest think tank. Nothing very exciting. I felt after Lira some boredom was in order.’
He frowned. ‘I heard about your driver. What was his name again?’
‘Abraham.’ It was how Winston and I had started talking again. Sharmila had tracked me down to Toronto. The line was fuzzy with interference and it had taken me a few moments to recognise her voice. I’d been confused, at first, by the unfamiliar friendliness of her tone, then understood the reason. She’d got what she wanted: Winston had promoted her. She’d put me through to Winston, who’d explained the reason for the call: a landmine, laid on a road in the western sector, apparently with no particular target in mind. Abraham had driven over it as he’d headed to an IDP camp with a new researcher, first week on the job. ‘It could have been a local jihadist guerrilla group,’ Winston had said, ‘or it could have been the other side, we just don’t know. They must have died very quickly, Paula. I saw photos of the car. It flew about fifty feet – it looked like a scrunched-up piece of tin foil.’ I had put down the phone with an image in my mind of a pair of male hands on a steering-wheel, Abraham’s elegant ones this time, not Jake’s. ‘It’s a ghost driving you,’ he had joked on our trip to the IDP camp.
‘I am very sorry,’ said Dr Berhane. ‘He was a decent man. I heard he was a brave fighter, too, in his day.’
‘Yes.’ Two tears were slowly creeping down the sides of my face, salt water brackets framing a mouth that was struggling to remain level.
He spoke softly, embarrassed by my emotion. ‘Do you have much contact with Mr Peabody?’
‘No, I’m no longer involved with any of the cases. I had some … problems, you know. With the authorities. You heard?’
I tried to search his eyes – now was surely the moment for any guilty quiver. But he looked at his feet. ‘Yes, and I am ashamed to have played a part in that. I hope you do not resent me too much for exposing you to such danger. I was desperate, so upset for my friends, and I’m afraid I made some misjudgements.’
What was he apologising for? Selling me out to the authorities, or merely for having involved me in the first place?
‘Thank God you are safe, and away from that place. My friends and I often talk about the bravery of a white woman who owed us nothing. You have not asked about them – you always were very discreet – but they are doing well, still sorting out their papers, but very glad to be out. And you must not return, no matter what pressure Peabody brings to bear on you. Do not consider it.’
‘I won’t. To be honest, I think he’s happier working on his own. He didn’t really need me. I was just there for psychological support. A cross between a mother and a nurse.’
‘And what does he say about the border situation? I heard on the BBC a few days ago that the African Union has warned a new war might break out. It was calling on both governments to cool their rhetoric.’
‘Apparently there’s been a build-up of troops on both sides. New trenches being dug. I hope it’s just grandstanding, but I gather the diplomats are worried. So much for our “final and binding” ruling, eh?’
He gazed towards the entrance, where a gaggle of Japanese tourists was mustering around a dowdy guide in a brown corduroy smock and John Lennon spectacles, pink umbrella held aloft like a medieval coat of arms.
‘I did not like to say so at the time, Paula, because I truly believed in the importance of what you were doing. But it has occurred to me, not once but many times, that perhaps the international justice system is built on a misapprehension. It is possible that history and progress require bloodletting, that societies only learn wisdom and self-restraint through the scarring pain of a high death toll. Perhaps some wars have to be fought to the very end. If anyone is to accept the result, you need clear winners and losers, and nothing is as clear as defeat on the battlefront. If I can be a bit risqué, bellum interruptus can be as unsatisfying as coitus interruptus. And it may be that, long-term, frustrating that human drive will mean more lives are ultimately lost.’
‘I have to hope you’re wrong.’
He laughed. ‘I hope so too! It was good to see you again, Paula. You are still young enough to start again, and you really must do that. When it comes down to it, this isn’t your story or your fight. As for me, I long ago disappeared into the maw.’ He spread one palm over his stomach. ‘I’m here, caught in the entrails of the beast. There are thousands like me, embittered, grey-haired veterans, still dreaming the dreams of little boys. When I think of our younger selves, I am amazed how impressive we were. I often wish that was less true. If we had been less idealistic, less inclined to self-sacrifice, it would be so much easier, now, to allot that episode its rightful place. We are all doomed romantics, hopelessly in love with what we were.’
He tapped me on the shoulder with his rolled-up newspaper, said
goodbye, and strode across the foyer. A moment later, I lost sight of him in the milling throng.
A week later, in my apartment in Toronto, I set about the long-delayed task of cleaning up my virus-infected laptop. There were email accounts to close down, PDF files to be returned to Winston, intense exchanges with Francesca and transcripts of Captain Peter Lewisham’s diary to delete. And there, quite suddenly, it was. An email from Dawit. Months old and tagged ‘A GIRL LIKE YOU’. My Dell had turned up its nose at the unfamiliar sender’s address and dumped it unceremoniously into ‘Spam’ where I had been within a hair’s breadth of deleting it. What struck me most, as I began to read, was how clumsy this articulate master of the impassioned tirade was when it came to the written word.
Dear Paula
I am sorry it is so long since I contact you – I hope you are well and enjoying your new life in London.
Did you hear that I am in Australia now, land of the kangaroo? I meant to go to America but, as you do know, beggars are Africans and do not choose – and it begins with the same letter of the alphabet! So I hop, hop, hop, just like a kangaroo from the UN in Lira – thanks for that – to UN in Cyprus to the regional office in Canberra and then, bye-byeee, UN. Also all thank to Steve, your very good friend, hah hah hah.
You will really luagh to here yours truly is working as all-round dogbody and driver for the Indian Embassy. I remember your opinion on my driving. All those Hindi films, turns out they were good preparation for my new life. I meet Deepak at an Indian Film Club night, he was impressed by my knowlege. He is third secretary at embassy and has a big pile of Bollywood CDs. I go to his flat to watch the new releases and drink his beer.
The Australians are a big delusion to me, they are not cultured at all. They do not even know where Africa is so I think it is good that mostly now I meet Indians – they know about oppression and colonialism and fighting, my favourite subjects.
Anyways Paula there is something I must say because it is lying heavy on my heart. I heard on the network – you know we diaspora are nosy baggers and all keep in touch – you had trouble with THEM. You know I would never want to hurt you. An ex-Fighter who talks in my culture that is worse than a whore. But after our argument, when you told me about your dead rich husband in America I was so angry I drank all night at Zombie’s. I complained about these stupid foreigners who come and fuck us with their good intentions (sorry but that was you). You did not know I knew about Berhane and his friends but I knew everything in Lira it all came out with the beer at the bar. As my Indian teacher used to say, you’re a quick learner, Dawit, sometimes to quick. That’s how I know Steve organise the sex orge with those girls which I discuss with him and he said Hey, maybe I get you a job at the UN in Cyprus and an exit permit, if you shut the fuck up about the orge, my friend. Hah hah. Anyway after we qarrel an old friend was at Zombie that time, we were together in Reconnaissance Patrols 1981-3 and for a moment I forgot to be careful. Later I remember he had links with intelligence. A good man with the gun but he is different now he is civilian. So I don’t know for sure what happen but still I am very, very sorry for my big blabbery bullshit mouth. I am a shame, so a shame. But if you were a local you would be in jail for sure by now. So nothing really harmed, eh? You Westerns always do OK.
Your drinking buddee for ever,
Dawit
PS Please come see me in Canberra
I choked for a moment, my breath tangled between a laugh and a gasp.
Throughout my stay in Lira, people had warned me against Dawit. I had always blithely ignored them. Just why I had been so certain I knew best, I wasn’t entirely sure. Gut instinct, I’d told myself at the time, carelessly claiming searing insights into human behaviour. Perhaps it had seemed too obvious, the notion that the unreliable maverick should prove to be exactly that. Or perhaps my insouciance had boiled down to something a lot simpler: Dawit amused me, so it had to be all right.
You got me in the end, Bingo. You got me.
I paced the room for a while, marvelling at my own stupidity, swearing at the freshly painted, innocent walls. Then I closed the laptop, put on my trainers and went for a long, purging run. Pounding the unfamiliar pavements, I realised I felt no anger towards Dawit. There was, instead, a sense of settlement. A satisfaction at seeing a mess of straggling threads neatly tied up.
On the way back I passed a neighbourhood convenience store, turned on my heel and went inside. Back in the apartment, I wiped the sweat from my face, washed my hands, and carefully extracted the slim envelope of photos of Jake from my luggage. I used the Blu Tack I’d bought at the store to stick the pictures in a neat line above my bed, starting with the Piazza Navona caricature. In between each I carefully positioned a gold star, the kind used to mark a child’s homework. I stepped back and surveyed the result.
It would do, for now.
A while back, Sarah emailed me an internet link. It called up a video advertising the delights of Griffin House, ‘Orange County’s most exclusive conference venue’. I couldn’t help wondering which family member had come up with that idea and what had persuaded Julia to agree. Had she decided that, with Jake gone, running the estate was simply too much for her? Had she retired to one of the wings, or checked herself into a deluxe care home? A Google search threw up no answers.
The firm that produced the video had clearly not stinted on costs. It had hired a helicopter to capture the footage. It opens with a distant landscape shot: bottle-green woodland, rolling hills, a highway running along the valley below, city suburbs just discernible in the distance. It looks like early spring. We pan closer, and we see a glittering lake – our lake – dotted with dark tussocks of islands, and then the woods suddenly open up and there, in a bright green glade, sits the house: Jake’s Manderley, the Wentworth family’s Hearst Castle, my Thornfield Hall. As ever, I’m struck by its uncanny resemblance to the Peace Palace.
It’s uglier than I remember, more solid, more domineering. Why build anything so big? Who had that rifle manufacturer thought would ever live there? No family, not even a multi-generational Irish-Catholic one with hangers-on and servants galore, would ever have been able to fill that space with noise and warmth. ‘Ideal for team-building seminars and weekend-long motivational courses,’ claims the video, as we zoom over the tennis courts and stables, the terraces and pretentious dovecote. There is not a roof tile out of place, not a speck of rubbish on the lawn. It’s only on the third viewing that I realise the image must have been doctored, cleaned up. We swirl a couple of times over the battlements, then zoom away over the valley, heading back to the world of uncollected garbage, peeling walls and sudden car accidents.
I find myself playing that video again and again, looking for some sign of life, a hand shaking a cloth out of a window, perhaps, Miguel walking across the gravel, a cat prowling those perfectly maintained gutters. I never find it.
Acknowledgements
This is a work of fiction, but it contains elements of reality, which ensure that those who helped most would appreciate least being publicly thanked. They and I know how many months of discussion were involved, how repetitive my questions about law firms and legal procedure became, and how many emails and phone calls were exchanged. Thank you for your forbearance and for tolerating a storyline that was a constant reminder of personal grief.
The less camera-shy include my literary agents, Charles Buchan and Sarah Chalfant, whose delicate counselling and rock-steady support were invaluable. Andrew Hill, Susan Linnee, Dawit Mesfin, Dusan Lazarevic, Clive Priddle and Daniel Bekele were patient and insightful readers. Judith Flanders and Gillian Stern helped me whip the manuscript into shape in its closing stages.
Last, but not least, I owe huge thanks to James Flannery, who is as masterly a subeditor today as he was when I first met him in the Reuters newsroom thirty years ago. I benefited hugely from his skills and encouragement.
About the Author
Michela Wrong has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events acros
s the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. She writes regularly for Foreign Policy magazine and the Spectator. She is the author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, a portrait of Mobutu’s Congo and winner of the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction, I Didn’t Do It for You, which focuses on the African nation of Eritrea, and It’s Our Turn to Eat, which tells the story of John Githongo, a Kenyan whistle-blower. Borderlines is her first novel.
By the Same Author
Non-Fiction
It’s Our Turn to Eat
I Didn’t Do It for You
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
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Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
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HarperCollins Canada
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HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
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http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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