‘Lebanon,’ said Prim.
‘Yeah, my wife didn’t like it. Cordelia. The old Cords. And now she wants to get the kids well started in primary school. Eight and seven. I’m home every three months anyhow.’
He was a good talker, but his contentment on this matter sounded brittle. As the acacias became shrubs and then stones, and they neared the city of el Obeid, passing the water tankers which travelled all the time between Khartoum and his waterless zone, Stoner lectured Prim effortlessly on rainfall, erratic and low around that thirsty, sprawling metropolis. Rolling down a street of neem trees amongst one-storey villas with their air of piety, quietude, decent reticence, he talked about the city’s role as a formerly great marshalling point for caravans to reach critical mass before heading for Egypt or Arabia with gum arabic and slaves.
They kept on in afternoon torpor amongst table-topped hills and over rising earth – the Sudanese called this high, sloping plain the Goz. That night the party stayed at a small, barrack-like hotel. Rooms opened onto a U-shaped courtyard of dust, the mouth of the U being part-filled by an open-sided cookhouse where bread was baked and guests could sit and eat. Prim shared a room with the midwife who simply spread her shawl on one of the two beds and murmured contently, ‘Il oda bita ’it-na …’ ‘Our room,’ she had said.
At that instant, Prim felt the loss of her sister like a positive rich presence. A succulent, phantom smile lit the near dark. Dimp’s smile, at severest odds with her twee name. For the moment, Prim was amazed at the distance she had somehow and with a kind of hubris put between herself and Dimp. She was distracted by the burden of this awareness as she tried to read a novel by torchlight after the electricity went off at nine. Waiting for the surge of loneliness to pass, she heard the remote voices of men speaking English and Arabic, Stoner and the Canadian driller on one side of their room, the no fewer than five Sudanese members of the drilling team on the other.
Had these drillers been amongst those Sudanese who recently marched in Central Khartoum and the New Extension? She had heard the unmistakable tread and cries and drumbeats of a crowd passing the crossroads near her office–apartment. The first discontent at the government for embracing the war in the South, for wasting their international credits on it, for not winning it fast. The Sudanese pound and dinar were falling, and there had been at the same time a malign slump in the price of commodities the nation was best at producing. The white cotton-clad police and the khaki soldiers, who had suffered the same decline and hardship as the marchers, looked on tolerantly at the early marches. But after a few months, official good humour vanished. Prim saw the batons which had once lain indolently in the hands of witnessing police wielded with intent.
Off by eight, they crossed the Kordofan–Darfur border ahead of the drilling trucks. In an eternity of riven, yellow-grey tableland, the hard dirt road to Nyala could be discerned from the apparent blinding vacancy of the rest of the earth only by careful squinting. The Australian eye, as Prim regularly flattered herself, rejoiced in nuances, and was thus an eye fit for Africa: another reason – apart from shame and the desire for anonymous good works – she was suited to exile here.
It was mid-morning when they began to meet groups of villagers emerging from sidetracks onto the chief road. The speed of the truck and the cut of their white clothing gave the travellers either side of the road a false appearance of graceful and languid drift. At first it seemed that what they had encountered was an extended family on a line of travel, the too lean women carrying calabashes and bundles of belongings on their shawled heads or a child at breast or hip. Older men and women had staves and used the appearance of the drilling convoy as a reason to stop for breath. Some young men held out arms towards the trucks, but the children did not chase, instead with wide, sullen eyes watching Prim and Stoner and the others glide by. Stoner, looking over his shoulder, frowned at Prim. ‘Generally you know it’s the men who come to town,’ he said, ‘and they like to leave the women back home.’
Indeed, from what Prim had read, this line made sense if they were people migrating, farmers who had run short of food or cash and decided to become, at least for this season, city folk. Two hundred or so metres further along, a second and similar aberrant angular company was seen and then a third, and then the procession showed itself to be a long and continuous mass. A thousand and then three thousand people were easily passed in this manner. No obesity in them, no amplitude of flesh. They maintained a polite country reserve as they let the truck pass, expecting nothing from it. Prim felt now that she had seen only the rearguard of a host.
‘Why don’t we stop?’ she asked, obligated, from banal pity if not from shock, to utter the question. All space, all food, all water, all analgesia Stoner’s truck carried with it could not accommodate the miseries of this army in retreat.
Abuk the midwife had worn a particular frown as she looked out from under her shawl at these Northern people, by her calculation and theirs the favoured of the republic, impelled by failure of rains to seek Nyala, chief oasis and city of the south of Darfur. These people, Abuk seemed wide-eyed to observe, needed to undertake bitter marches too, could walk famishing, as she had once walked.
Stoner told Prim, for once every word connected to every other, meaning not diluted by pause, ‘They want to arrive some place they can raise a little cash selling charcoal or fodder. And maybe they’re hoping for a depot at Nyala. They’re saying, Inshallah, if God wills it, there’ll be food or work or both in the great city. Well, there’s nothing there for them. That I can vouch for. Maybe there’s some kind of little provincial government depot, but it won’t handle this. Hey, pull up here, Rahmin!’
An extraordinary apparition, a truck top-heavy with people, some of them crowded even on to the cabin roof, was bearing into sight up a side track from the south. Stoner, dismounted, held up his hands preventively to advise Prim to stay where she was, but waved the drill trucks on. Prim wound up her window to keep the dust out, then wound it down again since Stoner, bandanna to mouth, wanted to talk to her.
‘Okay, I’m going to talk to this geezer with the truck,’ he told Prim, muttering into the dusty fabric of his neck cloth.
She smelled on the air the complicated and not unpleasant odour of the passing farmers, their children, their lean wives each with the ring of marriage in her right nostril. What woman would sell it even in the worst of times, even if it had a value? The marching families about her cried ragged and surreal greetings to Stoner. ‘Ya Khawaga!’ they chorused with an unnecessary politeness. Greeting the foreigner, hoping his hands weren’t as empty as they seemed. Stoner had produced a camera and was beginning to take pictures. Prim realised she had not included one of the office cameras in her pack.
Nearby, a boy of about fourteen in a grey-white galabia cried, ‘Ma feesh aish,’ but was hissed at by a woman of his family. ‘There is no food,’ he had said.
‘This looks like the real thing,’ Stoner told her. ‘There are fat-arsed people in Geneva and even in Khartoum who’d love to run up against this. Like Dimbleby discovering the Ethiopian famine in Wolo province. In Ethiopa, you know.’
‘I think the hungry people in Wolo might have discovered it first,’ said Prim, finding that she had begun to tremble. And were these people starving? Well, who could tell. Food emergencies were not measured by inspecting people’s skinniness. They were measured by the numbers who were desperate enough to take to the road, looking for work or a merciful cache.
‘Yeah,’ said Stoner, ‘but you know what I mean. Your very first trip out here and you find this!’
That vacuous, ambitious idea rose almost by its own levity. Would they really say that in the case studies? The Darfur emergency discovered by Stoner and Bettany, Bettany and Stoner?
But the line of march of these people lay beyond the gaze of God’s earthly instruments of mercy. If this was famine, it had been on no NGO’s radar screen when they left Khartoum. Probably not on the radar screen of the government of the republ
ic either, which was – according to rumour – regularly shielded from such knowledge by poor telephone systems and the reluctance of this or that regional official to radio through news of calamity.
The truck, top-heavy with passengers, rolled up. The engine cut for Stoner’s raised hand, and there was no more than a murmur of conversation from the mass piled on its tray and on every surface. A tall, wrinkled man got down from the passenger’s seat. He wore fuller cotton garments than the others, and sandals. He and Stoner greeted each other with waves of the hand and a handshake, and then a rapid conversation started during which the gentleman from the truck, a village sheik as Prim correctly guessed, addressed Stoner with the honorific Sa’aada, a title reserved for officialdom. Many of the foot travellers stopped and observed this discourse avidly, but did not push forward to climb on the contraption. At last the conversation, too fast for Prim’s level of competence, ended, and the man nodded and returned to the truck where his driver was already starting the engine.
Stoner reported that he was sheik of a village twenty miles south. It was one of those villages belonging to a tribal group, in which land was held communally but not equally. ‘Sounds better than it is in reality,’ declared Stoner. The sheik was personally okay, according to Stoner. He grew tombac, chewing tobacco. He owned cattle and two trucks, he owned camels he hired out for ploughing. But he said the people who got by on millet and sesame were in a really bad state. No rains last year, late rains this. Last year he’d driven some men into Nyala, once the ground was ploughed, so they could get a job cutting fodder for the big cattle market there. But this year was worse – a lot of children had died. Allah took whomever He chose to take, the man had told Stoner. This spring God had taken children and goats. And now families, some of whom had improvidently eaten their seed crops, were making for Nyala, though those who still had millet seed had left someone behind to plant it.
All this – the deaths, the burials, the dying livestock, the hard successive days – had happened within the great shell of God’s knowing, but to the universal ignorance of the world.
Stoner boarded the EC truck again. They overtook the sheik’s groaning and swaying vehicle and Prim saw then a group of people heaping up a cairn of stone. Since a foot eloquently protruded from the structure, and children tottered up with more stones to mark the loss and protect the corpse from beasts, it looked obscenely stage-managed by some shot-happy cameraman. For the glimpsed scene was as immediate, yet as distanced from her by the frame of the truck window, as if she were watching a screen, perceiving a two-dimensional tragedy. Someone – Codderby or Crouch – had said great disasters rendered the victims more visible both in height and width, but took away their depth and their names. Only the victims of private and discreet murders had names.
The most astonishing thing in Prim’s eyes was that Rahmin the driver took Stoner’s truck away from the drift of the lines of marchers whom Stoner seemed so delighted to have found; and that no one protested, neither the marchers nor anyone in Stoner’s vehicle. The Stoner–Bettany party and its preceding drilling trucks had specific objectives, a road plan, and diverged to Adi Hamit.
Stoner had the truck stopped at one stage, got out his field telephone pack and with the exemplary composure of the true bureaucrat radioed his office in Khartoum, for transmission to Brussels, the news that a previously unreported food emergency seemed to be in progress during the supposed rainy season in Darfur. With a quick eye for assessing such things, he told his office that because it would be even worse to the north, in the desolate ground near el Fasher, there may be at least 300 000 people imperilled. Seeming perhaps an overstatement to Prim’s less trained eye, it would prove in time to be a fair estimate of the people who were now or would later be touched by whatever the term ‘previously unreported food emergency’ meant.
Prim felt somehow relieved to encounter the more normal levels of Sudanese distress represented by Adi Hamit in its canyon between flat-topped hills. She had known they were close since the earth became bare, stripped for cooking fuel. They passed a Nissen-hutted, barb-wired food dump at the foot of an escarpment and penetrated blank afternoon light, and Abuk sat upright, smiling weightily and removing the cloth from her head. In this wide socket of the earth, open-sided tents and brush shelters with blue plastic roofs stretched away to a hazed infinity. Southern men and women, very different people from the people they had met on the road, walked out from beneath tent flaps and stood straight and thin, watching them pass with a wide-eyed lack of expectation. The men were middle-aged – there were not often young men in refugee camps. They were either dead, serving with the rebel SPLA, or trying to find work in cities. These were sundry tribes of Dinka. They had always been considered noble, cicatriced on the face, and ornamented for special events with the blood of cattle. Prim had read of them at university, and seen the photographs Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s cinematographer, took when – long after Hitler’s fall – she came to the southern Sudan and to the cattle camps of the Dinka as to the cantonments of an African herrenvolk. The ivory rings which Riefenstahl had found so photogenic, the beaded vests which virgins had worn and from which their breasts protruded, and the sharp-edged bangles which men used for wrestling – none of it was visible in Adi Hamit. Leni should photograph them now, in their dust-impregnated T-shirts dimly marked with the logos of U2, the Chicago Bears, Celtic Football Club, Manchester United or the San Diego Chargers. Good people in Pittsburgh or Liverpool collected these shirts rendered obsolete for Western purposes by changes in marketing, sponsorship, or design, and sent them to clothe the refugees. The lines of scarring on cheeks and foreheads remained though, and the forked scars worn in the flesh of the temples. These last, Prim knew from Leni’s book, represented the hooves of cattle – in the case of the people of Adi Hamit, lost, confiscated or slaughtered cattle.
Even so early in her African career, Prim knew how such places as Adi Hamit ran – she had visited a number of them near the capital. The Sudanese government, having helped create this troublesome third citizenry of refugeeism, settled those fleeing from the South around half-viable wells hidden away from the towns, at a distance which allowed a dubious balance of care and of denial of responsibility. The Sudanese Commission of Refugees sent their army-fatigue wearing officers out to administer the camps and the distribution of food within them. Some NGO might supply a nurse, another might finance a well or a midwife. UN tents arrived, but their number usually lagged behind the needs of the emergency. And so sky-blue plastic tarpaulins provided the roofs for stone and brush shelters, built more arduously here than amongst the plenteous grasses and rushes of the Dinka refugees’ native earth.
A stone building with a corrugated iron roof sported a Red Cross on its door and in front the standard long bench provided for patients, and a seat by the side window. Sudanese being inoculated traditionally came up to windows beyond which sat doctors or nurses, and presented their arms to the needle. Stoner’s truck drew into the clinic building’s thin shade and Stoner, Prim and the midwife descended. Abuk stood smiling, her splendid long head bare now, its temples marked by lines of ritual scarring. Home, said her wide eyes, despite all she knew. Stoner said he had to go off – to pay respects to the Commission of Refugees official who lived at the food dump. Abuk was Austfam’s responsibility, and Prim walked with her, squinting, toward the doorway of the clinic. From the screened-off rear of the structure, a little haggard woman in brown shirt, pants and sandals appeared. ‘Mother of God, it’s darling Abuk,’ she cried. There were enthusiastic embracings, salutations in Dinka and Arabic, translated into English by the white woman, seemingly for the benefit of Prim.
‘Yes, you will move into the tent right there by the clinic. Your mother, your son too. And any fellow who wants to talk to you better talk to me first.’
The clinic nurse turned to Prim and shook her hand vigorously. ‘Thanks. Thanks a million. A few of the women are pretty close to term, so she’ll be very handy indeed. I’m Therese
by the way. And you’re Miss Bettany from this Austfam crowd. Where’s that miserable bugger Crouch?’
Prim told the woman that Crouch had gone back to Australia and then to Cambodia. She was expecting a replacement.
‘Aren’t we all?’ asked Therese, hustling Prim and Abuk into the darkness of the clinic. The part-office, part-surgery was dim and had that coolness of a place where at least the heat was restful. In one corner stood her old-fashioned bulky radio transmitter. In the other white cabinets with red crosses upon them.
‘It’s good to see those drilling trucks go past a little previous,’ said the nurse. ‘You know the women have been walking twelve miles for water over to Well 17 since the main well here gave up the ghost.’
Now women and children emerged from the laneways at the camp, ululating and crowding up to the clinc to greet Abuk. The midwife went to the door and the crowd drew her away, staring at her clothes, covering their mouths with long fingers.
‘All right if you and Stoner sleep in the clinic here?’ asked Therese.
‘We’re not an item,’ protested Prim.
Therese said she didn’t think they were. She invited Prim to ‘settle in like a good child’ while she went to make tea.
‘Wait,’ said Prim. ‘We met something out there.’
‘Oh yes?’
And Prim for the first time related the story of the journey, knowing by hearing herself tell the tale that she had somehow let a mist grow around the day’s more massive events. ‘Stoner can give you more details,’ she promised Therese.
‘Dear God,’ said Therese. ‘I’d heard things were bad out there.’
But she too seemed to be speaking of remote happenings, as if Adi Hamit was all the catastrophe she could afford to give her intimate attention. She asked a few questions – were the people in hundreds or thousands? – and then seemed gratefully to return to more immediate matters. ‘That Abuk! Isn’t she a darling? Awful history of course. But then everybody here has one. Did she tell you she was taken by the army? What happened is beyond imagining.’ Therese gestured towards some vague conception of possible abuse which lay like an amputated but neutralised reality in the darkest corner of the clinic. ‘Abuk was an abid. In the strictest meaning of the term. She was a slave, that little creature.’
Bettany's Book Page 6