Authors: Keneally Thomas
Prim had noticed similar awed intonations of the names of the river by other Europeans. Seeing it, they were forced to name it softly. So profoundly did this river run in everyone’s cortex, the first great river of our infant storybooks, the one earliest drawn, told stories of, made the basis of essays and projects and drawings in all our childhood classrooms.
But then the river was lost behind them. Visual relief to the great grey-yellow-tan orb below was provided by the Kordofan plateau ahead, whose wadis they soon crossed. The plateau, traversed, fell away to lowlands again. One high brown plug of mountain –
Jabal el Liri
, said Connie – rose through a base of haze to the east. From such a height the landscape seemed apolitical and formless, possessing only the property of vastness. Above all it seemed to lack strategic meaning, and lacked, too, either an angry or suffering populace. It was as if no eye existed amongst the papyrus swamps, the grasslands and the folded hills.
Connie asked through the earphones, ‘You got a guy, hon?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Prim. It sounded a starched, defensive reply even to herself.
‘Well, let’s say a good friend then?’ said Connie, getting her number, and squinting out amused at the prodigious sky above them, in which, far beyond the dazzle, lay a hint of the universe’s intense dark. Why couldn’t she yield, like Dimp, and accept the normal, banal words –
boyfriend, fella, bloke, guy, squeeze, lover
? What exclusivity did she claim for her desires? For he was a guy, he was a lover! She had sat joyously on his prick, howled to absorb him, urged him to pay his substance away. Wanting to hold all his resources forever and, above all others, in her blood’s dark bank. Wasn’t that what anyone did? Wasn’t that what it meant to have ‘a guy’?
‘You could call him a guy,’ Prim conceded. ‘He’s a doctor in Khartoum.’
‘Sudanese?’ asked Connie.
‘Yes.’
‘Hey … none of my business, but watch it, hon.’
‘Very Westernised,’ Prim said, as if Sherif needed defending. ‘Studied in England and America.’
‘Oh yeah. Some of ’em like white women. They like forthrightness and light-coloured hair. But only when it’s going their way.’
‘You?’ Prim asked, changing the angle of the discourse. ‘Are you married?’
‘I was married four years – ’58 to ’62. No kids. I was a bad wife and mad at the time. Honest. I get the sweats in the dead of night just thinking what I was like. My folks wanted me in a sanatorium. It was the flying thing, combined with the fact I was such a miserable bitch. None of the purpose of all that misery I lived through was clear to me until round about seven years back.’
‘When you had your … conversion?’
‘When I said yes to Jesus. I felt all the foulness, but above all the madness lifted off me. A good thing too, because I felt heavy-burdened and was beginning to wonder should I just fly a plane into a mountain. The way I see it, you take on a sufficient weight of the world’s pleasures, woes and sins, and then they reach critical mass and kill you. My sins in the commission were light as a feather, but they weighed tons in retrospect.’
‘What happened, if you don’t mind telling me?’
‘No, not at all. I’d already done one run for the baroness. Thought she was pretty much an eccentric, which she surely is. Anyhow, there’s this mission near my airstrip. It’s American, run for the past thirty years by a couple named the Wagons. If they needed a plane, they chartered me. The Mission of Jesus True Saviour – they’ll take the kids we pick up into their dormitories there. Anyhow, I was flying this old guy Caleb Wagon and his wife down to Nairobi for some medical treatment he needed, and old Caleb was sitting beside me, in this single engine Cessna, and we’re chatting through the earphones like you and me. And I asked him what he used to do – and of all things he was in youth a sales rep going round six southern states of the US selling syrups to factories and restaurants, and so on. And it was such a big business that his boss and he used to take their favourite clients to Las Vegas and – to quote Caleb – “supply them with ladies”. He woke up one morning with a mouth like a cesspit and went to a window and looked out, and there was this grey haze over everything in Vegas. None of the normal stuff,
no clear, eye-scorching, wake-up-and-go-for-a-swim weather. I suppose something like one of our
haboobs
. And he says that without the Strip and the palm trees to distract him, there was a vacancy inside his head. And a voice inside him went, “This can’t go on.” And when he told me this in my plane on the way to Nairobi, it was as if the same voice went off in my head. Even though I was flying along at 10 000 feet, I felt I was in a pit I’d dug myself, or like I was trapped between two stone walls, with only a sliver of sky showing. And then I felt something with wings come down on me and lift me out of the pit and over the mountains, till I was at last level with myself, with the altitude of the Cessna. My soul, which after all was flying the body and in danger of forgetting it was, was at last on a level course. Like that, I was reunited to myself. But I knew I hadn’t done it myself, lifted myself up on wings, reconciled my body and soul. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jesus had lifted me.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I just knew while it was happening. It was the Holy Spirit of Christ. And I thought, I mustn’t ever let myself get separated again. By the way, see that reed swamp and meander down there? That’s the Jor, flows into the
Bahr el Ghazal
, flows into the Nile. In other words, we’re in the South, hon.’
Prim was aware now of an increased degree of watchfulness in Connie Everdale. The army had placed occasional anti-aircraft batteries throughout the South to frighten off aircraft whose flights had not been authorised by Khartoum. Though they were widely scattered, and though Connie rode on the wings of the Holy Spirit, a given aircraft might be unlucky. Randomness was the special terror of the agnostic, Prim knew, and randomness weighed somewhat on her.
The earth had now changed to look more Central African. Apart from forests of reed and water hyacinth, there were date palms and thickets of trees. This was a land over which sovereignty was always uncertain. Ahead lay green hills, off-shoots of a plateau which swept up from Zaire and Chad. The professor appeared behind Connie and shouted in her ear, referring to his map and occasionally looking at his watch. At last he and Connie nodded a number of times and he went back to his seat. Connie threw a partially unfolded map in Prim’s lap. It was much marked in ballpoint pen and dog-eared.
‘See that long north-south running watercourse? Yell if you spot it.’
On the map, the informal airstrip was marked in ballpoint. Amongst tall, leafy trees, Prim saw the glint of water in reeds. ‘There,’ she cried –
and then almost instantly a dirt and grassland runway came into sight. Its only attendant structure was a brush-covered shelter, a
rakubah
, set along the perimeter like a parody of a terminal. Prim relaxed. The air, other than the normal turbulence, seemed vacant of malice. They landed and rolled along the earth with a surprising smoothness. From her place beside Connie, Prim saw, packed in by the edge of the trees and into the shade of the shelter, young men in khaki fatigues sitting shoulder to shoulder, Kalashnikovs on their laps. What their presence meant Prim chose not to inquire of Connie.
Connie dragged back the throttle and cut the engines with a flourish, and a thunderous silence rushed down on Prim.
‘Ah the blessed silence afterwards!’ Connie said, but satirically.
She left the cockpit area first and in passing the professor said, ‘Okay prof, come and meet your old pal.’ She yanked the door in the side open. ‘Out, out,’ Connie urged the baroness and Prim. ‘Without the engines running, these things turn into ovens.’
Stepping down to the airstrip behind the baroness and the professor, Prim felt the weight of a different proposition: an equatorial sun in a region of tropic rainfall. Ahead of her the professor put out his arms in greeting. Towards him from the
rakubah
loped a tall man with the beginning of grey in his wiry hair. Obviously a Southerner, no visible admixture of Arab in his blood, this fellow wore army fatigues whose pants did not cover his ankles, had sandals on his feet, but was hatless. On his belt he carried a military-style holster and pistol. He performed a ritual embrace, laying his head profoundly against both the professor’s shoulders.
‘
Wa alaikum’ssalam
,’ said el Rahzi. ‘And let us pray for peace.’ The professor turned back to the baroness, Connie and Prim. ‘May I present John Along, a former student of mine at Khartoum University.’
Lanky John Along shook the women’s hands. Prim felt both the reluctant hardness and yet the elegance of his hand.
‘John is a Dinka, and was a Sudanese army staff officer when I met him. I do not judge his involvement in all this.’ El Rahzi gestured at the equatorial sky. ‘Indeed,’ he continued, ‘we could not have made such a happy landing without Colonel Along.’
‘Welcome, welcome,’ said Along. ‘The Rizeighat colonel himself is close. Please, wait in the shade.’
He gestured to the
rakubah
, in whose shade many of his soldiers were massed. Prim chose to remember an incident which had not come to mind
earlier. Two years past some Rizeighat militia units had filled a train at the rail head at Wau with Dinkas they had driven out of their homes and, whether or not at some gesture of resistance from a Southerner, fired into the cattle trucks and set them alight. Helene Codderby had reported to the BBC for the African News that some sources, including survivors, put the death toll at 1500.
As the four from the plane approached the brush shelter, Along’s troops, who seemed young and unsullen, stood up graciously and vacated the shade. Along suggested the visitors take refreshment, and a young soldier brought anodised cups of black, sugared tea to them on a chipped tray painted with red and white flowers. The professor took a sip.
By now Connie Everdale and the baroness were seated, or more accurately, Connie was reclining and seemed to have a mind to take a nap. ‘See,’ she said to Prim, ‘this is a coalition across the divide. To save kids.’
Prim looked at John Along’s boy soldiers of the southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, sitting in mottled shade on the edge of the bush. Their faces, too, seemed to her to be the faces of redeemable children.
Despite talk of ‘near’ and ‘soon’, the morning lengthened and insects shrieked. Some of the boy soldiers wrapped their pale brown cloaks around their eyes and slept. The humidity was fierce, and silenced all. Connie, the baroness, Prim and the professor drenched handkerchiefs and neck cloths with water, and the professor gallantly filled everyone’s tea glass with water again and again. By a little after noon it seemed the air had grown too molten to be sustained upon the tongue. Yet Prim saw many boy soldiers still slept.
‘Ai-ai-ai,’ said the baroness, considering them. ‘What must it be like to fight and to bleed in this air!’
About mid-afternoon John Along murmured something to the professor. Prim noticed Along’s soldiers beginning to rise and move about.
‘The Rizeighat fellow has made contact with my patrols,’ Along announced for general consumption.
Connie, circles of sweat under her armpits, stood and brushed down her skirt. ‘Alleluia,’ she said. ‘Best thing is, we won’t have to doss here overnight.’
Out of the bush to the west of the airstrip emerged two vehicles, a four-wheel drive preceding, a two-tonner behind. They rolled down towards the brush shelter, and on drawing to a stop, the lead truck
disgorged a half-dozen armed men. These Rizeighat militia were slightly but not definitively lighter-skinned than Along’s boys, but not dressed so differently, though they wore informally wound
ghutras
, piled turban-wise, on their heads. As the professor walked forward to meet him, the man who led them, casually carrying his semi-automatic across the back of his shoulders, had on his youngish face a look of intense resignation. The officer’s aides – or armed youths – strolled up in a less than regimented column, while behind them an uncertain number of other and obviously younger boys were being unloaded from the two-tonner by a handful of militiamen. These were the subject of the contract the baroness hoped to make.
Two lines each of about a dozen stringy boy children formed up. Some of them were garbed in dusty thobe-like garments, of the kind worn by children to Koranic schools. Others were in grimy T-shirts, the logos of football teams quenched in the fabric by dust, and khaki shorts massive by the standards of their legs. Contrary to other supposed ‘victims’ Prim had met, these seemed blank-eyed, obedient and inexpectant.
Now the Rizeighat militia leader let his gun down to the ground with one hand and made a profound obeisance to the professor. Next he nodded with joined hands towards the baroness, Connie and Prim. ‘
Assalamu Alaykum!
’ he said, devout in greeting.
‘Better help me with the water,’ Connie Everdale told Prim. She led her off through the grass to the Sharps, and they mounted the steps. They were clearly to be the handmaidens of the process. It was over-warm within, but Connie worked fast, taking up one multi-litre pack of water and handing Prim another, with a pack of plastic cups beside.
Outside, a negotiation was in progress between the baroness, the professor, the Rizeighat officer and John Along. Prim passed, pouring water into plastic cups, down one line of children, who exuded sweat, fear and the smell of dust and dung. The boys did not reach for the cups of water until they were proffered. They had spent their times in some hard school.
Prim became aware of whispering, and was relieved to find two boys trading satiric grins, finding her as laughable an authority as boys their age – ten to thirteen – were meant to find all such figures. Yet they all told her
shokran
, thanks, as they had no doubt been instructed by their masters, whoever these might have been.
Coming level with a light-skinned Rizeighat militia guard, Prim studied his face a second and offered him a cup of water. Before accepting, the
man, who could not have been more than twenty-two, joined his hands, and bowed his head. He too had been to a hard school.