Authors: Keneally Thomas
The doctor himself answered the phone, recognised her foreignness, and said resonantly, in an Anglo-American accent, ‘I speak English.’ When she explained her business he sounded suspicious. She could go, after all, to one of the UN or NGO doctors. But he told her in the end that he could see her late that morning.
Doctor Taha’s surgery was in a good address, on Sharia el Baladaya, a few blocks from a renowned mosque, the el Kabir, and in some senses well-located for foreign custom, not far from the US Embassy. Next door to Blue Nile Petroleum Exports, Sherif Taha’s plate, advertising the institute and enumerating his degrees, stood on a high adobe wall by an unlocked but barely ajar metal gate, through which Prim stepped into an enclosed garden where shrubs, small palms and acacias grew and cast a crowded shade. This court had the old-fashioned air of having been carefully planted in the era when Khartoum had been a city which prided itself on its oasis-hood, before the Sahara had seized so much of the surrounding landscape. It was designed to delight and soothe the eye of travellers who came to it through wastes of alkaline sand, claypans, fields of stone.
Seated on benches amongst the shrubs were five Sudanese women, one of them in a black veil and mask. They all grew silent, and the four whose faces were not already covered drew their shawls over their mouths and noses and looked at Prim with the region’s limpid fixity. The thing about the mask, she had already discovered, was that it enabled the women who wore it to be bolder in their gaze towards outsiders. Finding a bench in a deeper corner of the garden, Prim knew that with part of their souls they regarded her glacially: an unclean woman, an infidel not so much theologically but in sexual custom. But there was curiosity too, perhaps an eagerness to sisterhood, and in the contempt, if it existed, there also lay something like envy.
A woman patient emerged from the door, swathed in white, adjusting her shawl over her mouth, carrying her gynaecological secrets calmly. Obviously, some better-off Khartoum women brought their problems to Doctor Sherif. Prim had heard plenty about complications arising from the practice of genital circumcision of female children, common to both Coptic Christianity and to Islam, pre-dating both religions.
It was then, in the wake of the departing patient, that Prim first saw Sherif Taha. He wore a crisp white shirt, a cricket-club-style tie, and fawn pants over long legs and black shoes. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He was quite luminously dark, or so Prim chose to describe him to herself. Maybe the west of Sudan had had some input into who he was.
Dr Taha’s long face fascinated her. He was ageless yet his hair had begun to recede neatly from the front corners of his brow. His lips were long but not prominent. He was very tall, very thin and altogether an exquisite fellow.
Prim had before now noticed a striking quality of many Sudanese faces – an extraordinary repose of features. She saw it on the street in 1985 as in the historic photographs of supporters of the Mahdi, many of them prisoners of the British and Egyptians, displayed in the Khalifa’s house in Omdurman. And here it was in the features of a physician who had studied and lived in London and Louisiana.
It was not yet her turn. ‘Mrs Ab-Dahali?’ he called, with an almost tender boredom in his voice. A woman rose from a bench, and Dr Sherif stood back and let her pass, his eyes sweeping once remotely across the other presences in his courtyard, finding Prim’s face and nodding briefly at this novelty: a European client.
Prim no longer felt residual irritation at Stoner for sending her here, and her throat ached all the more. She was content to wait, and at last the doctor showed the shawled Mrs Ab-Dahali to his door, watching her go with an eloquent bunching of his lips and a brief wiping of one half of his brow. He called, ‘Miss Primrose Bettany?’ with a somewhat formal intonation, and amongst the two remaining patients in the garden there was a rustle either of disapproval or curiosity, or both.
In his shady office, he gestured her towards a chair and sat down himself. ‘Primrose Bettany,’ he said, as if it were ‘Westminster Cathedral’ or ‘Sydney Opera House’. ‘Australian, you told me?’
She admitted it.
‘That’s one for the books!’
‘I work for an NGO here. Austfam.’
‘The Sudan of the southern hemisphere, Australia,’ he remarked with a languid smile. ‘Another desert country.’
‘In some ways, yes,’ she conceded.
‘And why have you come to see me?’ He spoke now with a tired directness. Prim was delighted to be able to mention her throat. Dr Taha stood with a light, approached her chair, and shone a beam down it, demanding of her the normal ‘Agh’ sound.
‘I would like to take a swab of that,’ he said when done. ‘It could be staph. When I have it identified, I shall give you a prescription for antibiotics. I’m sure you’ll be able to get them at the UN clinic.’
He frowned at her a moment. If with Austfam, why hadn’t she gone to the UN clinic anyhow? But then, courteously suppressing doubt, he opened a chrome rectangle, and took from it a long stick with sterile cotton wool wadded at one end. ‘You may feel a slight choking sensation, Miss Bettany. I think it will help to hold your nose while I take the swab.’
She was conscious of his hand on her jaw, his knuckle against her lower lip. ‘Just a little patience now. Almost done.’
Withdrawing the swab, he crossed the room and dropped it into a glass test tube into which he put a stopper. Swallowing, Prim asked, ‘You do your own tests?’
‘Yes, here in the Sudan we must be, as they say in America, “multi-skilled”.’
He washed his hands and returned to her, murmuring in a way both confiding and uninsistent, ‘Does that cover your problems then, Miss Bettany?’
She thought what a trustworthy man he was. It was there in the fact that there were husbands who were willing to permit their wives to consult him on gynaecological matters. Yet this Dr Taha was permitted to treat women behind a closed door! The trust some Sudanese men and women had in him seemed a reason Prim herself should trust him.
‘I have a sore throat,’ she said, ‘as you see. But I also fear that I’m here as part of a conspiracy. A stratagem would be a better word. I’ve come at the suggestion of the EC development officer here, a fellow named Fergal Stoner. He spoke as if you’d met him.’
‘I have. A public health seminar at the Hilton.’ And he smiled, as if he found funny the idea of Stoner and himself at a public health seminar in a republic which could barely afford hospital beds. ‘But a conspiracy,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘This is a great relief from the ennui of surgery hours!’
Prim told him at a brisk pace about astounding Darfur, the lines encountered and the road to Nyala, and the written undertaking of the Governor of Darfur, which she took from an envelope and showed him. She assured him that she and Stoner would be able to support the letter and their oral account with photographs which at least had impressionistic force. She admitted too that Stoner had said he, Sherif, had a cousin …
‘Doctor Babikir Hamadain,’ Dr Taha supplied.
‘Yes, an economic adviser, Stoner tells me. To President Nimeiri.’
‘That’s right,’ the doctor agreed, faintly astonished, engaging her with his frank, broad eyes. ‘He’s quite an intelligence gatherer, that man from Yorkshire. As for Darfur, I’m not surprised. If I had the resources, I might even be there myself. What could an epidemiologist or a public health freak do, I see you ask?’
She intended to but he forestalled her by answering himself.
‘Vain and bloated with method as he may be, the epidemiologist at least maps the aetiology of diseases which strike and end the lives of the famished. You must know this already. I’m likely to be the chap who asks ravaged women which of their children succumbed, and of what. This is, perhaps understandably, a low priority with the Sudan Ministry of Health. Like all bureaucrats they don’t want to be embarrassed by the figures. They want
good
figures. I want whatever comes up. This sort of study is of little use to the present victims, but one hopes it might if properly considered help future ones.’
‘I think you would find this crisis an engrossing one,’ said Prim. ‘If that’s the word.’
‘I have no line of research funding. Now news of every failure of food supply, and of every attendant epidemic, comes to me from strangers like you.’ Am I a stranger? asked Prim of herself. ‘For example, from professors from Columbia or the University of Leicester or Tubingen. Foreign aid workers like yourself …’ He shook his head and drew his eyes back to her. ‘Forgive me, Miss Bettany. I should have said “interested outsiders”.’
‘No, you might have been right the first time,’ Prim admitted. ‘The governor gave me a talking to. On the arrogance of intruders. On the impatience of the West too.’
‘That’s common,’ Sherif rumbled, ‘dear lordy, it’s common. We like to tell people: accept the principle of
Inshallah
! We are not impatient because clearly God is not! It’s the great Sudanese excuse.’ He made a
casual, salaam-like, palm-exposing gesture of his right hand. ‘
I
do not mind the arrogance of intruders. I simply mind that I have no resources. My institute exists on paper. Some would call it a folly to keep that sign by my gate. If I signed on with UNESCO say, I might be able to be their pet epidemiologist, but I would probably be sent to Laos or somewhere similar.’
‘And you aren’t tempted?’ asked Prim, pleased he wasn’t.
‘Well, I’m something of a patriot. My grandfather was a member of the White Flag League. Trans-racial, trans-sectarian. He was young, he was dashing, he believed in Woodrow Wilson’s principles. Self-determination for the Sudanese. He would weep if he saw what has befallen us. We’re self-determined, right enough. We’ve determined ourselves into catastrophe. You must think I am such a complainer.’
‘No, not at all,’ said Prim, who was enjoying his forthrightness.
His eyes fell on her again, casual and piercing. ‘Forgive me for saying this, but we should conclude our business soon. I have old-fashioned fellow citizens who watch these premises with a sour eye and need little encouragement to draw the worst of conclusions. This letter you have from Darfur … that sort of thing isn’t always easy to extract. You realise, I suppose, it might have a subtle purpose.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘Provincial governors are habitually discontented with Khartoum. You may have given him, your Colonel Unsa, the chance to register that discontent.’
She felt abashed that Dr Sherif Taha looked at her and saw a bumbling naivety.
‘Well, all I care about,’ she said, ‘is the extreme situation in Darfur. I don’t mind if I’ve been used.’
‘So on to Doctor Hamadain?’ asked Sherif, smiling.
‘I can’t see any reason why not,’ Prim told him.
‘The chief reason is me. I’m disapproved of by some of my relatives and friends. They think me something of a Westerner in disguise. In fact I feel fundamentally Sudanese, in a way which evades the accepted definition of the moment.’ Laughing softly, and turning his face briefly to the wall, he seemed to find the normal prejudice of his fellows more endearing than dangerous. ‘But having warned you of that … and on the grounds that you have been such an exemplary patient … I’m willing to speak with my cousin and arrange for an appointment. You, however, should be the one to hand the letter over. What would be dismissed as
impolite if it came through the normal lines of communication, such as they are, would be more understandable coming through you, Miss Bettany.’
‘Because they’d think I’m crass? Is that it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shaking his head and still retaining the smile. ‘I heard you speak and I thought straight away, that’s the frank voice of the New World. Which you possess, Miss Bettany, in good measure, and which I shall do my utmost to preserve by curing your throat. Now, the president is a very stubborn man. However, rumour has it my cousin possesses some residual influence over him. I wonder what will happen when this president falls and my cousin goes into exile? He who is so Sudanese! And yet, he’ll probably teach economics at George Mason University or the Polytechnique in Lyons!’ The prospect seemed to amuse Sherif and a small, nearly silent stutter of laughter broke from him. His placid, enormous eyes crossed Prim’s face. ‘I hope that you, Miss Bettany, will still be here with us then to point out our needs and failings in your gracious manner.’
He picked up his telephone and made a call. His two dominant mannerisms so far had been an engaging frown and a nonchalant, almost silent laugh. But now he adopted a straight, sober face, the face of one confronting a camera, and pointed to the phone in a way to indicate to Prim that the illustrious Doctor Hamadain was on the line. Prim sat forward while an extended though calm argument in Arabic raged between the cousins.
At last Dr Sherif Taha put the phone down.
‘I have your address, do I not? I shall collect you at seven o’clock this evening.’
Prim, delighted, rose when he did, shook his hand hurriedly, and left at once. Beyond the gate, she heard him call another patient and close the front door of his surgery. Walking to the Austfam truck with emphatic steps, she talked almost aloud to herself on an empty pavement.
‘No chance,’ she said. ‘Forget it.
No bloody chance
…’
Dr Sherif Taha arrived outside the Austfam office–residence at the promised hour. Prim had been looking out for him from the window of her small sitting room above the office. She had dressed for her visit to the presidential aide in the style she had adopted for the visit in el Fasher to Colonel Unsa, although this dress was her normal floral one, which fell
below the knee. She wore no make-up, and her hair was brushed back but uncovered. She did not move from her window until Sherif came in through the unlocked gate and knocked on the office door downstairs. Running her hands over her skirt, she descended into the darkened office to meet him. As she neared the front door, she rubbed her cheeks, for she suspected she might have developed a fatuous paleness. When she unlocked it she was pleased to rediscover him in all his long bones and tallness. She felt as surprised as if she had not been expecting him. She saw his smile.