Bettany's Book (76 page)

‘The matter of food rationing is not amongst the fifty-two questions we shall ask,’ said Sherif, though with a glint of professional annoyance in his eye. In his peevishness, he might well have said, ‘We don’t need to ask questions about officials of the Commission of Refugees. We know enough about them already.’

‘You know,’ Hanif told Prim, anxious now about Sherif’s coldness, and whether it was a threat to him, ‘these Nuba people, they are rebels. Both the Christians and the Muslims, just as much as each other. So they must be moved here, far from home. But here the sanitation is not good and the water is not good, and sometimes it has stopped running and needs to be brought in by truck until the new well is dug.’

Sherif said, ‘You must tell the man from the Ministry of Health.’

And there was the point, Prim thought. Sherif expected obstruction. He expected more obstruction because he was Sudanese, and perhaps because he had published. The uncomfortable testiness, which had been brought to the surface by the camel massacre on the Port Sudan highway, revived in him very easily. There might have been journeys once when a man like Hanif would have amused him. But this was not one of them.

Hanif blinked, and to clear the air, Prim asked him where he was from. He immediately sat up and beamed. ‘I am a Kassala boy,’ he boasted. ‘A little to the south of Kassala. Is that right … to the south?’ He was asking for linguistic not geographic reassurance. He came from grass scrub country then, not far from the Eritrean border. ‘It is beautiful,’ he said. ‘It is green, and it has the mountains, better mountains than these. Like fingers in the air.’ His eyes were full of nostalgia, and perhaps the hope of a better posting.

In the early afternoon, the heat was murderous, though the day was still and empty of the threat of blowing grit. It was simple justice, Prim thought as Sherif walked her down to Nuara’s clinic, that if the timing of the rains were dislocated, so too should be the timing of sandstorms.

On this stroll, there was time, before a stupefied afternoon retreat from the sun, for Prim to chat with Sherif, but he proved uncommunicative.

‘What is it?’ Prim asked. With each syllable she felt a weight of hot air on her tongue.

‘Oh, it’s that Hanif fool,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s such a rocket scientist. And we don’t know what this joker from the ministry will seek.’

‘We’ll get on top of him,’ she promised.

‘Maybe I’m getting old. But I think: what is the point of understanding the processes of health in a refugee camp, if the refugee camps go on multiplying? If in number they outrun the very strategies?’

‘It will not seem futile once we start,’ she assured him. ‘Once we meet with the camp committee and see their faces. You’ll be all right once you’re not working in a vacuum.’

That evening, Prim manoeuvred Nuara to invite Sherif for a meal of rice and flat bread, so that he did not have to eat with Hanif. But the meal was brief, and Sherif soon went back to his billet at Hanif’s depot. Black cloth pulled over her head, Nuara went forth on some visit, striding out confidently in sandals. Alone, Prim lit her so-called blizzard candle and picked up her current novel. It was a book Dimp had sent her, promising it would explain something about Dimp’s own situation. It had won prizes. It was skilful. Prim could see why Dimp should be captivated by a tale which reproduced the anguish and desperation of divorce. Yet the novel, which concerned the break-up of a marriage between a painter and a television producer who lived in London, annoyed and fascinated Prim in exactly the same way Dimp annoyed and fascinated her. Relieved of the imminence of physical death, sure of their daily bread, people turned to the death of love and friendship and endowed them with the weight of mortality, and equated the omens of such failures with a portentousness which in the Sudan applied to failures of rains, crops, and the deaths of children. Both the chief characters were so clamant in their expectation of happiness that they made a grating contrast with the stoic politeness of the Nuba women Prim had seen earlier in the evening, cooking by open fires. To the clients of Austfam, happiness began when water flowed, when the pannikin filled with sorghum, or when fever released its hand on a child. The griefs of the Hampstead couple in the novel were far too pastel and decorative for the absolute, ravenous latitude Prim occupied.

Impatience eventually put her to sleep. On the edge of unconsciousness, she wondered if Sherif might break the dormitory rules and visit her during the night. But Nuara was a formidable housemistress, and a reluctance seemed to have set in Sherif. She felt that his hostility for Hanif was, in part, a hostility for her silliness over the camels and the truck driver. In a marriage of souls, one partner could never predict what would weigh most with the other.

Could it be possible that the camel business was the equivalent for Sherif of what Benedetto’s speech had been for Dimp? Surely it was too minor a quarrel to have such weight.

The second day in Hessiantown was spent searching out the leaders of the apparently twenty-seven distinct villages or clans in Alingaz 1. The people derived from different parts of the Nuba Hills – Limon,
Doleibaya, Tabuli, Talodi, Talabi, Moro, Anderri in the north, Dimodong in the south. Though to the government in Khartoum they were all one in being a nuisance, the refugees themselves cherished, and might kill for, the distinctiveness of their own group. As there was no end to the minute particularity of atomic particles, there was none to the particularity of a given Nuba.

The morning passed pleasantly, and Sherif’s spirits rose. Then at the close of a stupefying afternoon, the committee of leaders met with Nuara, Erwit, Prim and Sherif in a canvas-topped lean-to. In the sudden clarity of late afternoon, the camp committee of Alingaz 1 sat on the ground in a semi-circle. They wore a variety of faded
galabias
, shirts and cummerbunds, and thigh-length swathes of fabric.

Sherif spread a rug, and he and the rest of the team sat at the mouth of the semi-circle of elders. Prim could sense at once that these venerable men placed a reliance on this meeting, an emphasis of hope, which could probably not be immediately justified. She had a sense that the same thought had occurred to Sherif.

Above all, they seemed to think that Sherif and Austfam had come to adjust their permanently unsatisfactory relationship with Hanif: the food distributor, the man from the Commission of Refugees.

One elder rose and said, ‘That man is no good. He sells ration cards to the Beja round about and to shopkeepers in Erkowit and Sinkat.’

Acknowledging this, Sherif told the leaders that he had no authority over the Commission of Refugees. His wish to question a significant number of families was based on a desire to find out what capacities they held within themselves, and how they could best relate to their situation in Alingaz 1. This was a survey, said Sherif, which would be shared with them and with their community.

The men became excited. One elderly spokesman with cataracts in his eyes stood up and declared, ‘We are ready to co-operate. We have been sitting in our houses waiting for someone like you to come. Better that we find people who can help us to be independent of such scoundrels as Hanif el Suq rather than to wait for their gifts.’

Nothing Sherif said would persuade them to hope less.

Another thin, tall man rose and declared that the people of Alingaz 1 had lost their hills because of their ignorance. They did not understand politics except in the most basic way, said the man. And now they had lost their country, so different from these hills. In the Nuba Hills the breeze was like sandalwood. Here it grated against the flesh. The trees
of the richly watered Nuba Hills gave shade and fruit. One day they would all go back there, said the man, and it was to be desired that they would go back better informed, and with wider skills, than when the army moved them away.

Many of the other elders applauded the man’s speech, and Sherif looked helplessly at Prim. He began to explain that health problems would also be looked at. And those results too would be presented to this very council, so that it could decide whether it could do anything about them. Particularly, Sherif said, he and his colleagues wanted to inquire into the deaths of infants under five years. Leathery Nuba elders with greying, frizzled hair stared at Sherif with piercing eyes. Of course they had heard this argument before – Sherif was aware of that. Be numbered for your own good! Let your tears be numbered! They hoped and they suspected. They wondered had this man the power to take from them the authority of their children’s deaths, to reduce the infant features, the intimately remembered screams or restiveness to numbers. Sherif began pedalling hard, to keep their enthusiasm for this project in place. ‘No names will be put down on paper,’ he assured them. ‘And I
do
speak of the possibility of gardens – watermelons, tomatoes and cardamom for sauces. I talk about chickens, donkeys and camels. I talk about co-operatives buying a grinding mill, and renting it to others. I talk of modest but hopeful things. I cannot offer you more.’

Another lean Nuba rose, grey in his wiry hair, and said, ‘We thank you, sir, for thinking of us.’

The meeting was breaking up when in the space between the food dump and the tarpaulin community centre, a white four-wheel drive vehicle drew up. On its sides was painted the green flag of the Sudan. Prim, watching from the shelter, saw a youngish man in fatigues get out, look about him, and head towards the
rakubah
. There was something familiar about him. Sherif obviously thought so too, for he rose and stepped out into the light, inquiring of the newly arrived government official, ‘Siddiq?’ The two men embraced. For this was Dr Osman Siddiq, a protégé of Sherif’s whom Prim had first met at the el Rahzis.

‘Come,’ said Sherif, ‘we are just finishing a meeting with the community.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ said Siddiq in English, smiling at Prim.

‘But I thought you were with the Ministry of Defence?’ asked Sherif.

‘I’ve been seconded here,’ said Siddiq, still the smooth-faced, youthful man Prim remembered. ‘When I read that you were one of the team,’ he
said to Sherif, ‘I could barely believe it. Although, of course, I have read your earlier publications.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Sherif, mockingly, ‘you can recite them by heart. But how wonderful that you are here. You were being sent to Atbara, I seem to remember.’

‘And was promoted to Port Sudan. You never know, my friend, one day I might make my way back to the capital and live a civilised life.’

Prim looked at Siddiq with gratitude. His friendly presence might turn the balance and bring Sherif fully back to the process.

‘And are you a big wheel,’ asked Sherif, ‘in Defence, or Health or wherever you are? Are you worth cultivating?’

‘Oh, yes. I think I am exactly the fellow a young chap like you must cultivate.’ And Siddiq and Sherif burst into fraternal laughter.

Prim had been invited to join Sherif, Siddiq and Erwit for dinner in the yard by Hanif’s residence. Sherif set up a meal of canned tomatoes, flat bread and pasta on a collapsible table, and Prim walked towards it, through the evening camp, the endless intricacy of hessian shelters, un-reinforced by brush, since there was none to be had. By evening fires, Nuba women dressed each other’s wiry hair in strands which looked to Prim like maps of harvest. Women of the great Nuba evacuation! They looked up from beneath their eyebrows at her as she walked by.

The dinner guests served themselves from the common bowl, and Siddiq spoke to her across the table. ‘And you had a good time with the camp committee?’ he asked, making a slight mouth, as if he knew that a camp committee of Nubas could be difficult.

‘It went well,’ Sherif told him. ‘Promising to show them the results – that goes well.’

‘You always were such a democrat, my friend,’ said Siddiq. ‘I have some suggestions for additional questions, though perhaps we should keep the answers to ourselves.’

‘Additional questions?’ asked Sherif. ‘I’m very happy to consider them. But with my present fifty-two questions I thought I had just about covered the field.’

Siddiq smiled at Prim, as if to imply that Sherif had now achieved a middle-aged retentiveness, a resistance to the new.

They ate their meal sitting on a circle of stones. It was as prodigiously
hot as the night before, and Prim’s flesh itched. Like all the best scorpions, the sun had bitten her through her clothing. She felt too a section of fried flesh in the V of her shirt, which she had failed to cover with her bandanna.

Erwit was, as ever, quiet. He was, Prim well knew, a very intelligent fellow, but he did not consider it his place to intrude in the purely Sudanese debate in progress between Sherif and Siddiq.

They were discussing whether it was a good or bad thing that a public health official could rarely expect to be permitted to interview a woman alone. Her husband was always present, sometimes a mother-in-law. When you asked a woman, for example, how many animals her family had grazed in the Nuba Hills, would she exaggerate the number out of regard for her husband? If you asked a woman was she willing to attend classes at the clinic, would she be inhibited by her husband’s presence from saying yes?

Prim could tell that Sherif was anxious about the additional questions Siddiq had mentioned, of whether they would prove to be marginal or so intrusive that they would alter what he was trying to do. And so this secondary debate, instead of genuinely interesting Sherif, seemed to reduce him to the disequilibrium of earlier in the day.

He nodded towards Hanif’s cot. On its far side, an oblivious Hanif sat in a chair, listening to a battery radio broadcasting music from Port Sudan, and drinking tea. ‘They all complain about that guy, by the way.’

‘Well, that’s standard,’ said Siddiq.

‘Tell me what you want to do here,’ said Sherif, sick of letting the main issue dangle in the air.

‘Well,’ said Siddiq, “the Ministry of Health is not paranoid, Sherif. As much as your rhetoric might be to do with breaking the dependence cycle, you still want to find the Crude Birth Rate, which you believe will be low – thus undermining the wisdom of the government’s clearing of the Nuba Hills. And you’ll come up with a figure for Infant Mortality that will be embarrassingly high. And we will live with that, if the verb “live” is not too callous.’