Devil’s Harvest (34 page)

Alek was engaging them in an agitated conversation. It wasn’t clear what the dispute concerned, but they were unhappy with her answers. The one with the injured arm kept gesturing down the road in the direction they had come; Alek shook her head and waved her arms in response. She scolded them and they retorted, shouting back, their voices rising with anger. Gabriel noticed that the eyes of the youngest were deeply red, as if infected, and he kept flicking a catch on his machine gun, on and off, on and off. Gabriel watched him, the boy-soldier’s eyes fixed on Alek, one finger flicking the safety, another on the trigger.

The injured soldier – he had taken the lead – shouted at Alek again and tried to wrench the car door open. Alek yelled back, a scream of vitriol, and grabbed the man by the shoulder. The trembling youngster’s eyes widened and Gabriel heard the final click of the safety as he lifted up the AK-47 to his shoulder, his face hard now.

‘Wait, stop!’

Gabriel heard himself shout the words, though he seemed to be standing outside his body, watching some other self approach the boy. He put his hand over the barrel. To his surprise, the boy let him push the barrel down with almost no effort. It was as if he’d anticipated Gabriel’s intervention, was perhaps even relieved by it. The three soldiers turned to him, waiting for him to continue. Alek was looking at him now as well. Somehow he had asserted momentary control over the situation.

‘What is it that you want?’ he asked. ‘We are on important business for the government. They have sent us here, all this way, to do important things. Why are you stopping us?’

The injured soldier walked up to him, distrust in his eyes. ‘What business are you on? You must return to Aweil. You must take us there.’

‘Is that what you are doing? Trying to get a lift from us, forcing us to turn around and take you there? Is that it?’

There was an authority in his voice that was quite foreign to him. The boy with the pink bandana had let his weapon drop from his shoulder now and was staring mournfully at the ground. The injured soldier also looked unsure of himself.

‘You cannot interfere in our work. We have orders from the minister himself.’ As he heard the words uttered, Gabriel knew that it was an overstatement and he saw the soldier’s eyes narrow.

‘Which minister?’

Gabriel hesitated but Alek was quick to intervene, this time in English. ‘Minister Kuwa, ministry of justice. And if you delay us any further, we will request your court martial in Juba. Who is your superior officer? Where is he? Does he know his men are trying to bully a transport from civilians working for the ministry?’

The soldiers could see the chance of a lift home dwindling before them. Disappointment spread over their faces as they resigned themselves to the fact. But the power dynamic required one last intervention from them, a reminder that they were armed and part of the military.

‘We still need to search your vehicle,’ the red-eyed boy said.

Relieved, Gabriel was quick to agree, taking out the keys even as Alek started to object. She seemed reluctant and jumped in front of them to get to the rear passenger door first. Gabriel pressed the button and the door locks clunked open. The bandaged soldier glared at Alek, but she opened the door and pulled out her bag, taking it a few metres away from the vehicle.

‘It has personal things in it,’ she informed them as she made sure the zips were closed. The young man said something to her and pushed her away. She walked backwards, standing by the open door once again, while the soldier attacked her bag as if he were disembowelling a shot animal. Gabriel noted that Alek was barely watching the undertaking, her eyes constantly flitting to the bundle of red cloth under her seat.

Within minutes, Alek’s clothes were strewn about in the earth, her underwear rubbed between dirty fingers and lingered over, her skirts lying in a discarded pile. Once her bag was empty, Alek slammed the door and advanced on the men with anger. Her accusations seemed to work, and the youngest two looked down in mortification. Only the injured man tried to defend himself, but Alek had worked herself into a fury, whether real or feigned seemed not to matter. English words were mixed with her dialect, the word ‘mama’ making a regular appearance. She was shaming them into retreat. The youngest soldier started to try to repack the bag, but Alek shooed him away, picking up her clothes while still berating them. They were in fact only children and Gabriel almost felt sorry for the three of them, standing now in silence while she scolded them.

They left the soldiers in a spray of dust, Gabriel watching them recede in his rear-view mirror. Only once they had disappeared behind a bend in the road did he break the silence.

‘Alek, what’s wrapped in that red cloth?’

She didn’t respond at first, perhaps mulling over whether to answer at all.

‘Evidence,’ she said finally.

‘Evidence? Of what?’

‘Something to do with my father’s death. He was killed by some kind of bomb, a missile that came out of the sky. But the villagers say there was no plane, no noise in the sky. They say the explosion came from nowhere. Bashir throws his bombs from noisy Antonovs. I don’t believe the SAF can send missiles from helicopters or jets that are far away. So someone else was involved.’

She fell silent again and Gabriel wondered if her answer, though it explained nothing, had been exhausted. But then she continued, her voice quivering slightly. ‘The bomb left a piece behind. The villagers found it stuck in the wood of the door and gave it to my cousin. He brought it to Jila for safekeeping. It has markings on it and I’m going to show it to the UN military police in Juba. It’s the key to finding out who’s responsible.’

Alek let out a long sigh, her breath filled with longing.

‘That explosion took the last of my life away. It left my father and Adama in small burnt pieces. And this piece of metal.’

* * *

The dense bush gave way to a sparse, open plain with acacia and other hardy trees as they moved further west. They were approaching the transition zone that Gabriel had spoken about in his lecture, the soil and vegetation increasingly denuded by subtle shifts in average temperatures. The air seemed hazy with dust, or smoke, and the contrast between tree and sand and road started to blur. The mud had been replaced by dry ruts and stony ascents, making the car shudder and bounce. They passed some burnt-out huts, the roofs collapsed into the middle of the dwellings. Seen like this, they looked like a child’s construct, a temporary fort for a game of hide-and-seek, easily abandoned and mourned by no one. Until one saw the area around which the huts circled – the family fireplace. Gabriel noted a cooking pot overturned in the ash, the everyday signs of a former life, proof of a small unit that had once lived here and had seen their world destroyed. He slowed the vehicle and stared. The surrounding bush was unscathed. It wasn’t wildfire that had taken these homes. He looked at Alek for an explanation, but she stared ahead, unwilling to engage.

Ahead of them the haze seemed to thicken, and Gabriel started to pick up the smell of burning. In the distance, black-grey smoke rose in a thick plume. As they proceeded, he realised that the fire line in fact stretched some distance, crackling in the grass and flaring when it reached dry bush. He changed down a gear and slowed around a bend.

A field of millet, now just an expanse of dry grasses, was on fire. The sun filtered through the smoke, giving the scene a muted orange glow. A few villagers, armed with cloths and the branches of trees, were trying to beat back the flames, each swipe of their arms sending up yet more sparks and starting new fires around them. Gabriel could see in an instant that their efforts were doomed.

‘Shouldn’t we stop and help?’ he said.

‘There is nothing we can do. We are only two people.’

Gabriel’s anxiety heightened when, a few miles further, they came across a group of about twenty people, carrying bags and tracking close to the road, leading two goats and carrying chickens by their feet. Children walked glumly alongside their mothers, while men carried bundled figures too small to walk. They passed without remonstrating, hardly looking up at the vehicle as it crunched past.

‘You will see them again,’ Alek informed him.

There was a long pause and Gabriel wondered whether this was the only comment she intended to make.

‘At Jila,’ she added quietly.

The final figure was a young boy, his face emotionless with fatigue – and trauma, Gabriel imagined. That at his young age he had seen too much, lost too much. At the last moment, the boy’s eyes flicked up from the road and glanced at him. An unsettling flash of contact, and then they were past, now only a group of bedraggled figures in his rear-view mirror, trudging their way to whatever solace Western aid could provide.

‘I recognise them. They’re from the neighbouring area. We’re nearly there.’

‘Where is there, Alek? Where are you taking us?’

‘To a village. Malual Kon.’ She offered nothing more.

‘What for? Why are we going to this village? When did my research get hijacked by your personal … revenge? I think I deserve to know, Alek.’

‘I am not ungrateful, Mr Gabriel. I understand that, for you, from where you come from, this isn’t easy. And, yes, you deserve now to know. But not before, or you would not have come.

‘Malual Kon is the village where my father’s family lived,’ she explained.‘They lived simply, not understanding what was happening to our country around them. My father tried to explain, but they shook their heads and complained that the rains had not yet come. The millet crop was failing, the goats were sickly, life was hard enough and they didn’t want to hear about border disputes. Or Bashir’s plan to seize oil that they had never seen.’

Alek was staring out ahead, an edge like steel to her voice. Gabriel had never heard her so quietly fierce before.

‘My father didn’t visit them often, because he knew the danger of coming so close to the border. They were always looking for him, waiting for an opportunity to take him. Towards the end he was very careful. Bashir had his spies everywhere. But I didn’t realise that they were watching
me
as well. They knew I would see him. My love for him was too strong to stay away. When I came to see my aunt, I did not realise. I wasn’t going to see my father – he was not there. I knew that, but they did not. They followed me, hoping to find him. It was me. I brought them here.’

‘Who? Who are “they”? Who are these people following you?’

‘Al Babr. Doing the Devil’s work.’

Gabriel remained desolately confused. But Alek gave him no quarter.

‘Better that you don’t ask any more. You will see what you need to see. You will understand what you need to understand.’

They drove for several more minutes in silence, Gabriel resigning himself to his fate, and Alek sitting forward in her seat, scanning the landscape for familiar landmarks.

‘We are here,’ she said as the next settlement came into view.

It must have been a large village once, spread out over a wide distance, small paths connecting the different collections of huts and livestock enclosures. Children would have run on the paths, scampering from one family unit to another, chickens scattering as the little gangs rushed past. But the paths and low vegetation were all that remained. Each dwelling area had been reduced to a few circles of charred walls and blackened earth. The livestock
zaraib
had burnt to the ground, only an occasional stump sticking out. In the middle, Gabriel could make out a grisly heap of contorted leg bones and sinewy vertebrae, in places still held together by scorched hide. The animals had died in their shelter. Although the conflagration must have happened months before, the rot of the carcasses still soured the air. Gabriel paused, putting up his arm to his face in a vain effort to block out the odour. But Alek had already marched past, weaving along a path between the rubble of huts. Gabriel followed after her, pausing only at the sight of a half-burnt rag, once a purple headscarf perhaps, hanging snagged from the low branch of a thorn tree.

‘Do you have your camera?’ Alek asked.

Gabriel remembered Alek’s comment in Juba, about his usefulness – the fact that he had no formal affiliations, and, indeed, his camera. ‘I think I’m finally beginning to understand why you brought me here,’ he said. ‘I can’t pretend that I am surprised, Alek, or particularly enamoured. But, yes, I have my camera.’

He raised his camera and focused on the remains of the ripped shawl, a smudge of colour against a charcoal background.

‘It is irrelevant,’ Alek said. ‘Come with me.’

Gabriel pressed the button anyway, before lowering his camera and following after her.

They made their way along a narrow pathway, ignoring one demolished hut after another. There was a surreal quality to their surroundings, as if the scorch marks had been painted on the half-standing walls, and the village was an entertainment-park pretence at an apocalypse. He could have been on a movie set, waiting for someone to order them out of the shot. Except for the odour, an undercurrent that lifted and subsided, ethereal but doggedly real.

The huts petered out and the terrain opened into a rocky area, leading slightly uphill. The air seemed suddenly to worsen. Gabriel’s wary pace stuttered further. Alek, too, had slowed and her breathing became deliberate, as if she was preparing herself for something. They came up the brief rise and stopped, a dry gulley of rock and scrub below them.

Rocks had tumbled down the red-earthed slope, collecting up against the large boulders that rested in the middle of the dry riverbed. The rocks stretched along the entire bed, rounded granite shapes that scattered into the distance, even where the gulley started to climb into the hills. It was hard to imagine water running between them, cooling their sweltering sides. But with the rainy season upon them, no doubt the stream would flow soon, muddy and russet.

Gabriel stared into the ravine. The bottom of the gulley seemed somehow out of focus, as though his view was being obstructed by something located halfway between his eyes and the subject. The outline of the boulders was fuzzy, their edges blurred by smoke or some kind of apocalyptic mist. Something was out of place, he could feel it, although his intuition could not determine exactly what.