Stone Kingdoms (24 page)

As we watched, the jeep and technical drove out of the compound at speed, their wheels slewing up showers of dust, brakes squealing, as they pushed a horn-pumping path through the alleyways of the camp, threatening to collide with the fragile shelters. Breaking free, they bounced and bucked over the uneven ground, weaving through aisles of thorn trees and groves of spiky aloes. In the back the soldiers clung to each other in a tight scrum, one arm around their neighbour for balance, the other pointing out the snail-trails of departing families. They swept round in front of the largest groups, blocking their path and shouting at them to return to the camp. Shots were fired into the air and possessions were shed or
dropped
as the families fled back towards Bakalla, the single file fanning out in panic, small children being carried by parents or left behind to cry out in terror. Again and again the vehicles circled round departing families, and each time the effect was the same until the plain was filled with the return of running, stumbling people, desperate to re-enter the shelter and anonymity of the camp. We watched too, as one small group was made to kneel in the dust and a soldier urinated on them from the back of the jeep.

An hour later everyone was summoned to the compound fence to hear the commander tell them that no one was to leave without his permission. They were under his protection and he could not guarantee their safety outside the camp. They must stay in Bakalla until he told them they could leave. There were many dangerous and armed bands in the surrounding area who would kill them and steal everything they had. If they waited in Bakalla he would arrange for food to be brought from the capital, from the warehouses and docks his people now controlled. Those who did not obey his orders would be punished. His speech ended with the firing of more guns into the air, and their stuttering recoil as they fell back like lovers into the young men's arms.

Families still left, but at night. The camp was too big to police the boundaries effectively, even though they tried. Families vanished into the darkness, their departure marked only by the soft scuffle of feet, the clink of pots, a nervous guiding whisper, and in the morning their empty shelters were dismantled or claimed by others until there was nothing left to show that they had ever existed. Nadra's clan met to discuss whether they too should go, but they had many old people in Bakalla and it was decided that for the moment they should stay.

During the day I stayed mostly in the shelter, at Nadra's insistence, until the sweltering heat turned it into an airless crucible. Then she would reconnoitre and, if it was safe, walk
with
me or lead me to where the other women met. And always I wore the mask and the cover of her clothes. At unpredictable times the soldiers would patrol the camp, their eyes exploring people and possessions and storing whatever knowledge was useful to them. The children would imitate their swaggering walk with fearful admiration, and sometimes they would be allowed to touch the guns. I remembered the boy in the airport who had pointed his wire gun at me, and soon the children of Bakalla too began to fashion their own weapons, firing them in simulation of their sound and movement. Many of these children had come to the school.

Perhaps it was one of the children who told; perhaps it was someone from a rival clan. Everyone was summoned to the compound by the firing of shots, and the leader of the soldiers spoke from the truck, his words spreading out across the serried rows of listeners who passed them back to those too far away to hear for themselves. They knew that a European was hiding in Bakalla, a worker from the Agency, no harm would come to her if she came forward, they wanted to talk with her, send her back to her own people. She must be brought to the compound right away. All those standing around me knew who I was but no heads turned to look at me and no one spoke as the crowd started to disperse.

We sat in the shelter that had become my home. Nadra's mother was sleeping while Rula fanned the flies away from her face. ‘You must not go,' Nadra said. ‘You must not go to them. It is not safe for you to go to them,' her fingers plucking out her insistence on the ground.

‘Sooner or later they will find me. Someone will show them where to look.'

‘You have been given the protection of our clan. No one in it will betray you.'

‘But there are others outside the clan who also know I am here. They have no reason to protect me. Maybe I should leave during the night, slip away with some of the others.'

‘
No one will take you, Naomi. No one will take another mouth to feed or risk the anger of the soldiers. You must stay here and hide with us. Perhaps they will leave soon, there is nothing in Bakalla for them. Soon they will grow tired and then they will leave. Maybe the Agency will come back and we will be teachers again.'

I nodded, but as the days passed I began to doubt the Agency's return.

At first, the searching seemed completely random, with groups of soldiers selecting a shelter and ordering everyone outside before ransacking and looting everything of value. Where they met with protest or any semblance of opposition they lashed out with their feet or the butts of their weapons, and sometimes when they had finished searching they smashed and toppled the flimsy structure into the dust. As it went on they grew more angry at their failure, more ready to inflict punishment on those they believed to be helping their prey evade capture. At midday, when the sun was at its most fiery, we were summoned to the compound. It was safer to mix with the flow of the people than risk staying in the shelter and being discovered by the following sweep of searchers, so I stood in one of the tight huddles of women with my head bowed and face and hands covered.

The anger in his voice and body made Nadra's translation unnecessary. I had to be given up immediately and those who were hiding me were enemies of the people whose souls had been bought with foreign money. Too much time had been wasted in searching and if I was not given up, all those who helped me would be punished as traitors. When I heard this I tried to speak to Nadra, but she silenced me with the clutch of her hand on my arm and I felt the other women press closer to me, screening and strengthening me. Then, when he had finished, three soldiers climbed into the truck and sprayed round after round over the people's heads. There was panic as
people
turned to run or flung themselves to the ground, and the air was filled with the sound of children crying. Again I told Nadra that I must give myself up, but the women bundled me away, brushing aside my words with their own.

Afterwards the searching became more systematic, with small areas of the camp sealed off and no one allowed to enter or leave, and each search ended with the cries of women and children. Always they demanded
khat,
and when there was none to give they vented their anger on the shacks, laughing when they collapsed. It seemed only a matter of time before they found me, and I decided I must risk leaving the camp by night rather than bring punishment to more people. I knew Nadra would try to stop me but there seemed no other way.

As I sat planning how I should deceive her, two young women burst into the shelter. The soldiers were coming; they were sealing off a large area and we would be caught inside that ring. Nadra's mother broke into a rising wail, her hands lifting and falling in lament, and Nadra was angry with her, telling Rula and the two young women to take her to another shelter. They led her stumbling and protesting through the doorway, and in that moment I looked at Nadra in the half-light and told her that I must go to the soldiers before they found me. But she was angry, telling me that perhaps it would be possible to slip through the circle and out into the sheltering scrub of the plain. Then other women came to the doorway to report and there was an argument and rising anger in the exchange before it suddenly subsided and they all turned to look at me.

I took off all my clothes as I was told and sat naked while they stared at my skinny white body, then Nadra told me what was going to happen. When I told them I wanted to go to the soldiers they silenced my words and shook their fingers at me as if I were the most foolish of their children, and I bowed my head and accepted the reassurance offered by the touch and pat of their hands. I lay down on the woven bed of matting where Nadra's mother slept each day and looked up at their faces
bending
over me. Their eyes were the last thing I saw as they rolled and wrapped me in the fibrous webbing, then tied the top and bottom with rags and girded the middle with a knotted rope. I felt their hands lifting me but my eyes distinguished only a flecked and grainy patina of light. My arms were pinned tightly to the sides of my body and my head could only move a couple of inches to either side. When they carried me through the doorway of the hut I felt that I might suffocate, but knew too that if I panicked I would scream and those screams would bring punishment for all who had helped me.

I thought desperately of other things, tried to focus my mind on anything that would distract me for even a few moments. I felt the cool rush of the sea as it engulfed my body and washed me clean and whole. Diving below the shimmer and swell of its surface, drifting once again through those arching corridors of coral. I closed my eyes, shut out the grainy press of matted light and tried to see again its colours, touch the verdant bushes and the gold tracery fine as filigree. Someone stumbled, and I heard a breath of voice at my ear, felt the firm press of a hand. I wanted to cry out and kick my body free but I couldn't and so I flicked my feet in the water, pushed my body through the caverns of coral. Breathing, breathing gently, slowly gliding in the slipstream of water, feeling its coolness on my face. I chanted a mantra of silent words to myself – O'Grady says do this, O'Grady says do that, O'Grady says do this. Then I heard the women's song twist itself through my head and I tried to follow its slow lamentation. I remembered lying in my bed with the shuffling sea outside and the voices filtering up from the radio in the kitchen. The slow process of my father between hedgerows flecked with white. My mother brushing my hair, her voice singing of some other world. Then suddenly the song of mourning collapsed into a ululating wail as I was lowered into the place of the dead.

Wrapped in my shroud I could see it only in memory. At first it had lain beyond the camp but as Bakalla grew, the distance
between
them had disappeared until it squatted on the very rim of the living. A place of open graves which could not be shovelled shut until they contained their fill of bodies, where a marked plot or a coffin were things unknown. They brought the bundles wrapped in their sleeping mats, tied and trussed, and there they lay until bloated and ready to burst, waiting for the grave to be filled. I lay on my back on the hard earth and felt the heat of the sun worm its way through the matting and saw the flies moving across my face like writing across paper.

Separated and shrouded from the living, I tried desperately to catch sounds from the outer world, but the voices of the women had gone, Nadra's promise that they would return as soon as it was safe the last words I had heard. I tried to focus on my breathing, to force myself into a steady calming rhythm, and hoped that they would come back soon. I wanted to touch the gold bracelet I wore on my wrist, but couldn't move my arms.

For a long time I lay in the place of the dead, and then I was not alone any more for beside me were the two soldiers whose bodies were left on waste ground, the baby we buried in the dirt, the old woman and the young girl of Baran. My father too, his eyes full of the sea, his head crowned with weed and shells. We lay together in the place of the dead as the black fly-writing scribbled across my face and I breathed the woven fibrous membrane which separated me from the world. I heard their voices calling to me, speaking my name, but the words were lost in the swirl and cadences of the women's song of grief and I struggled again and again to hear what they were saying but always it faded into the rush of my breathing and the rising beat of my heart. And then above me, standing around the grave, I saw the hunched figure of McCarroll; the young boy who spat in my face and called me ‘a Fenian bitch'; the ring of men in Derry, their broken shapes reflected in the black skin of the cars. And their voices join in my obituary – ‘short and sweet,
good
enough for her' – and they drop soil on my corpse and curse me with their laughter.

I started to struggle, trying to free my arms and rip the covering from my body, but then I thought of Nadra and gradually forced myself into a broken calm, my body into stillness. And so I lay for a long time, trying only to resist the rising pressure of heat which streaked my body with sweat and left me dehydrated and dizzy, desperate for water. Then, as I started to grow faint and think that I would suffocate, I suddenly felt hands opening the shroud and heard voices talking to me. They helped me sit up and washed and dressed me but let me drink only a little at a time. A damp cloth was pressed against the back of my neck and hands helped rub the circulation back into my arms and legs. I tried to stand up but my legs buckled under me and then as they continued to minister to me I looked round the women's faces. I felt dizzy again and splashed water into my eyes and attempted to focus once more on the faces. I listened to the voices murmuring all around me and tried to pick hers out but couldn't, and then I asked for her by name but there was no reply and when I called out more loudly, the women fussed round me trying to distract me with their kindness and the hush of their voices.

They had taken her to the compound. Someone had told them that she spoke English and had worked with me in the school. Too frightened to protest directly, they could only watch as she was led away. Now there was no choice. When I was able to stand, I told them that I must go to her, get them to free her. They didn't try to stop me but as I looked at their faces I saw only sadness in their eyes and an unspoken acknowledgement that the decision was mine alone. Silently they stepped back, opening up my path, and I walked through them and down the narrow alleyways which had hidden me. I passed houses which had been broken and toppled during the search, and the families rebuilding them stopped and watched me in silence. Once, two small children came running to greet me, but
a
father's voice summoned them back. An old man, a stretched frailty of peeling papery skin, lifted his lolling head from his chest to utter some blessing or curse.