Authors: David Park
Nadra helped. She was a year younger than me and had been educated in the teacher training college set up by the Russians before they abandoned the country for more lucrative investments. She proudly showed me the medal she had won for being top student. She had read as many books as she could get hold of; her English was good and seemed to get better by the day. If sometimes she was a little fierce with the children, they respected her, and maybe it was needed to keep things in order and to see that no one got pushed aside or hurt. At first she was very quiet around me, deferring to my decisions even when she knew I was wrong, and although I tried to push her forward she seemed happier in my shadow. Each night she went home to a shack in the heart of the camp that she shared with her mother
and
sister. There she kept the four books she owned in a little box.
We studied each other surreptitiously and with curiosity. I would catch her looking at my hair and sometimes, when she stood in front of the children, I would admire the olive sheen of her skin and the dark wells of her eyes, the black shock of her hair and the slender strength of her body. Beside her, my own body felt pale, blotched with bites and scratches, the colour of my hair an affront to the azure sky. And in our moments of rest we pieced together the broken fragments of our lives. I kept some back, just as she did, giving only the bits which might make sense.
She came from a nomadic people whose lives were bound to the search for water and grazing, but as years of drought and hardship saw the slow decline of their herds they were forced to settle and become farmers. It was a common tale and she told it without drama or self-pity â a struggle against the encroachment of dust and sand, the wind scorching and displacing the work of human hands, eroding bit by bit the little vegetation, until the moving dunes threatened finally to suffocate everything. Unable to feed his family, her father had set off for the capital, but in a short while his letters stopped and there was only the silent silt of desert to compound their fate. When there was nothing left they threw themselves on the mercy of relations and were passed slowly round until their own shame brought them to Bakalla.
One night after school I went home with her. Unexpectedly invited to meet her mother and sister, I followed her through the narrow thoroughfares of the camp, carrying a little package of tea as a present. Her home was a wood- and hessian-walled construction, roofed with polythene and thin strips of tin. Outside it stood her younger sister Rula â of similar build and colouring, the same dark wells of eyes. She held open the entrance flap and I had to bend low to enter. Inside, her mother sat on a roll of matting. She was dressed in black and her face
was
covered by a mask of netting to protect her infected eyes from flies. Only her teeth gleamed through the mesh. Apart from the sleeping rolls, water containers and cooking utensils, there were only some bags of clothing and an upturned packing case which served for a table.
Without awkwardness or embarrassment, Nadra motioned me to sit beside her mother and, after we had drunk tea, she opened one of the canvas bags and took out some of the contents, handing things to me for my inspection. There was the painted wooden box and the four books she owned â yellowing, bruised paperback copies of
Hard Times, Tom Sawyer, Dead Souls,
and a blue-covered copy of George Orwell's
Selected Writing.
Also in the box were some jewellery and combs, beads for braiding her hair and a photograph of her college class. While I held each object in my hand, examining it for what I hoped was an appropriate time, she laughed at something her mother said, then hushed her. When I asked her what had been said she laughed again and told me that her mother wanted to touch my hair. As Nadra shook her head and clucked her disapproval, I knelt down and put my head close to the net, felt the old woman's hands move slowly on my hair then pull away as if frightened that she might be burnt. âWould you like to touch it, Nadra?' She smiled at me and then giggled like a child whose secret has been discovered. âYou can touch it. It won't burn you,' I said, looking at her in the half-light of the shelter. I moved closer and she stretched out her hand, feeling it slowly with her fingers, plucking it lightly and teasing out some of the strands. She did this for a few minutes, exploring my hair with an open curiosity, going deeper until I felt the tip of her finger touch my scalp. And then she stopped and everyone giggled again.
I stayed a long time, longer than I had intended, but somehow as the old woman started to talk of the past and of the things that had happened in her life, I didn't want to leave. Through Nadra, she told tales of women whose infertility was
cured
by spells and anointings, of men whose greed and lust fell back on their heads. Tales of hunting and wedding feasts which lasted for days and the giving of bridal dowries which impoverished the giver and shamed the receiver. And as she slipped further into the past she sang the songs of her childhood, the songs the young girls sang as they washed clothes by the river, herded their cattle across the burning plains. The words and music sifted out through the mesh, filling the shelter.
It was almost dark when I left their hut; in the sky above, black clouds spumed up against great pink weals of light, all around me the smell of smoke, of cooking, the drunken babble of voices echoing against and through each other. I shook Nadra's hand, feeling her touch linger on my skin for a second after our hands had separated. She wanted to walk with me back to the compound but I wouldn't let her, not out of kindness but because I wanted to avoid that moment of shutting her out of my world, that peremptory and arbitrary exclusion of what she was. I wasn't supposed to be in the camp after dark â Wanneker had warned us against it â but I felt no sense of danger and even in the closing darkness I felt confident that I knew the way. My presence seemed to startle some of those I passed, as if I were a pale ghost, a spirit from another world; others just looked away or blinked their red-rimmed eyes behind veils of smoke. Most of the inhabitants were already inside their shelters.
As I walked I remembered the first morning with Rollins, and something made me turn and suddenly follow a different course. I came upon them more quickly than I anticipated, almost stumbling into their midst. They lay stretched out before me; I counted ten of the frozen embryo shapes inside the sack of polythene, their shapes pressed into the silvery surface. They huddled together for warmth, sometimes with an arm draped over a companion, or with a face turned upwards, wearing the polythene like a mask. I stood and listened to their
broken
breathing, the sudden whimper of some dream, and found myself kneeling by their heads. And then a memory stirred, something I thought I had forgotten. I remembered my room at home into which the sea and sky flowed every day and I am young and in my ears is the slow rasp of the sea and the distant scrake and squawk of some frantic bird. The door is partly open and through it fans the yellow landing light. I hear my father's tread upon the stairs and I close my eyes and pretend to sleep because it is late and I do not wish him to be cross and use the voice which speaks for God. I hear the creak of the door, feel through my closed eyelids more yellow light, then sense the darkness as he pauses in the doorway. With each of his steps I tighten my eyes and try to sleep, to please him. And then I feel his touch, his fingers laid gently on my temple. Mostly his hands are full of the sea, the black weight of the Bible, the fingers crusted like a starfish splayed on the surface of his desk, but now they are gentle and light and I think they are weighted only with love. And when he takes his touch away and walks towards the door I see the broadness of his back and the yellow wash of light splashing the whiteness of his head, and I want to call out to him but something stops me, and then for a second he blocks the light again before he is gone.
In a different place and a different time, I called out to him as I knelt at each of the children's heads and touched them lightly, moving slowly and silently along the link of bodies. As I walked away, I still carried the shiver of their bodies, the whimpering wandering of their dreams. I sought to retrace my steps but my mind was full of other thoughts, and in my faltering concentration I began to guess at directions, hurrying along with greater urgency. By then I had started to feel uneasy. I told myself that I was conjuring something from my imagination to punish myself, but as I quickened my step I heard the footsteps and, glancing over my shoulder, caught a glimpse of something flitting from shack to shack. I stopped and turned to stare into the dusk, then called out. But my voice vanished into the
camp's
incessant murmur. I moved on, trying to remember the direction that would take me to the compound, trying too to stop myself from running blindly into the maze of dwellings. And then I heard it, the low rise and fall of his voice, the rush of words half-sung like some incantation. And as I turned I caught a glimpse of his white cloak moving between two shelters and I knew it was Medulla.
Running over the rutted uneven ground, in a growing darkness broken only by the smouldering embers of ebbing fires, would have resulted sooner or later in disaster, and I tried to keep my head clear and keep moving in what I prayed was the right direction. But the voice grew louder, a constant drone in my ears, and glancing back I saw that he had moved into the open, the whiteness of his cloak making him seem closer than he was. In one hand was the cane and in the other some sort of basket. I started to jog, taking any entrance which presented itself, stumbling and tripping as I ran but too frightened to let myself fall. I thought of seeking shelter in one of the dwellings that lined my flight but each seemed closed to me, and to choose the wrong one was to be trapped without a route of escape. His voice grew louder now, contorting itself into a flailing scourge of a curse, the struggle of his breathing and spit of words beating against my senses.
On even ground I knew I could outrun him, but there in the twisting pathways my speed brought as great a prospect of danger as of safety, and suddenly into my fear flowed an even greater sense of anger and as I broke into a swathe of unclaimed land I stopped and, trying to strengthen my voice, stem the ragged flow of my breathing, called out his name. Over and over until my voice steadied and I shot out his name with all the force I could find. He stumbled out of the gloom, his own breathing rasping at the edges of his words and the cane probing the space between us. I kept my eyes fixed on him, wanting all the time to glance about me to see if there was any object which I could use or any person who might offer help.
But
I didn't dare to break my gaze as he edged closer to me. He now brandished a woven basket, holding it up in front of his face like a casket bearing some holy relics. I had nothing to use but my voice and I started to fight his words with my own, scoring any word or phrase deep into the space between us.
Suddenly he dropped the cane and held the basket up to the sky, moving it above his head as if in some ritual, then holding it out to me. There were no more than ten metres between us, and as he shuffled closer I pushed my feet into the earth to steady myself. And then he pulled the lid off the basket and lifted something out. It was only when its dark shape squirmed across the whiteness of his cloak that I saw it clearly. Black, wet with its own slime, wriggling the length of his forearm. He held it in front of his face, edging forward, keeping its head jammed upright in the vice of his fist. I could see his face now, the twitch and stutter of his thin, elongated features, the rolling whiteness of his eyes. And as he came closer his voice dropped lower and lower until the words were consumed by the stream of his breathing and I no longer knew whether the sounds came from him or the convulsing head of the snake. Suddenly the snake became a spasm, a spring that almost jumped from his hand, and as he struggled to hold it I darted sideways and picked up the cane. As his voice screeched again with its former strength I slashed the air between us, cutting into it with fierce swinging arcs, my own voice shouting and screaming at him. He stepped back involuntarily, his eyes blinking and rolling. Then he tried to come forward again, using the snake to drive me back. But I stood my ground, for the first time swinging the cane to hit him, striking his shoulders and arms, deaf to the volley of curses and trying desperately to hold my balance and keep the cane moving in the air. His arm jerked when I hit it and he almost lost his hold of the snake as he stumbled out of range. But as I saw he was in retreat, he shrieked his final curse and flung the snake towards my face. It coiled in on itself then opened, a twisting vibration on the slipstream of the air, and I threw my
arms
across my face and felt the slime and scale of its skin as it brushed my hands before falling to the ground. Medulla had turned and vanished into the darkness. As the snake slithered away I pursued it, and beat and beat until the jumps and jerks of its movements were caused by nothing but the whip and smack of the cane.
We
were all seated round the office which doubled as a dining-room â Martine, Veronica, Rollins, the Olsons (due shortly to return to Norway), and Wanneker in centre stage.
âOK guys, listen up and I'll start by giving you an update on the latest news. As you're already aware, there's been more fighting in the North. I guess we always knew it was going to be like this with the vacuum caused by the collapse of the government, but the end result and the one which affects us most directly is what we've seen already, more people looking for safety and food, more families on the road. Some of them have already started to arrive here and we've got to be real careful things don't slide out of control.'
âAnd how do we do that?' asked Rollins, taking off his glasses and holding them up to the light to see where they were smeared.