Bettany's Book (77 page)

‘No,’ said Sherif. ‘Let’s not be particular. You mentioned added questions.’

‘Well, these people are a security risk,’ said Siddiq. ‘There are supporters of pro-Southern groups here. I’m sure this news is of no surprise to you. Not only that, but there are operative cells supporting the Southern People’s Liberation Army within Alingaz, tyrannising
ordinary people and – you will not believe it, but it is so – raising anti-government funds.’

Sherif said nothing, and Siddiq sighed.

‘I want to add some questions about the operations of these cells in Alingaz. I want to hear information from the people concerning pro-SPLA extortion here. You and I can devise the questions between us.’

‘No, we can’t,’ said Sherif. ‘I have undertaken to share the results of the questionnaire with the camp committee.’

‘We don’t need to let them know about these questions. We don’t need to give them these results. I assure you I have the interests of the ordinary refugees in mind. They don’t enjoy being under the thumb of the rebel machine.’

‘I don’t consider these people refugees,’ said Sherif.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Siddiq.

‘Now I understand why you were seconded from the Ministry of Defence! Are you a doctor? Or are you in intelligence and security?’

‘Please don’t insult me,’ said Siddiq. ‘You know I am a doctor.’

‘Then let us not ask political questions!’

Hanif, Prim saw, was closely watching this painful argument between the toffs from Khartoum.

Siddiq said, ‘Don’t be naïve, Sherif. All health and all aid are political.’

‘All I know is that I have guaranteed my results to the camp committee. If you are willing to do the same with the results of these few questions of yours, I might consider it.’

‘You know I can’t do that,’ said Siddiq.

Prim intervened, ‘I think you miss the point too, Dr Siddiq, that this survey is financed by Austfam, which is not a servant of Sudanese government intelligence.’

‘God forbid,’ said Siddiq, though she could not be sure it wasn’t an ironic reply. He held his hands up in surrender. ‘Look, let’s discuss this again.’

‘Let’s not,’ said Sherif.

Siddiq winked at Prim. ‘Very well, I accept your position, maestro. Let’s not.’

Sherif looked, frowning, at Prim, but still spoke to Siddiq. ‘I hope you’re being straight,’ he said.

‘What a thing to say to a maternal relative of the great Osman Digma, hero of our nation! “I hope you are being straight!”’

‘I am sorry,’ said Sherif, nearly inaudibly. He looked at Prim. He meant it for her too. ‘Let us simply do good work.’

Sherif’s nurses had at last arrived by the bus, which Erwit had met with the Austfam vehicle on the steep main road. Now Sherif arranged a dusk training session to the east of Nuara’s clinic for the entire group, including Siddiq. Before beginning the questionnaire with a particular man or woman, it was important that the interviewers explain the reasons for the survey, stress the need for frankness, assure the subjects that the interviewers were working with the camp committee, and that the result, without names attached, would be made known to the committee, and would be published independently of the government. People far away, in Australia, had provided the money for these questions to be asked, and indeed, for the arm measurements of the camp’s children to be randomly taken by the nurses.

When the three interviewing teams went to a household, it was the head of the household who was to be the person interviewed, whether man or woman. If both man and wife were present, both might answer, although a man could be expected to insist on answering the questions on his wife’s behalf. If there were no adults present in a given hessian habitation, the interviewer was to go to the next one.

The reliability of data, said Sherif, might be affected by the reluctance of people to talk about births and deaths of young children for fear that such deaths had resulted from the evil eye or sorcery, and to speak of such things was to invite them to occur again. But the interviewers must be gently persistent. The figures – birth and death – would represent trends, and could be compared with figures for other camps and the general population, and the comparison would be significant for suggesting the sort of action which should be taken in Alingaz. For instance, a low crude birth rate, said Sherif, was infallibly associated with a lower fertility rate because of malnutrition.

‘Ah,’ said Dr Siddiq, smiling. ‘At last we get to our friend Hanif.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said the terse and unfamiliar Sherif. ‘They may have come here malnourished.’

Erwit, Dr Siddiq, Prim and the two nurses from Khartoum watched Sherif administer the questionnaire to Nuara, who tried to reproduce the answers her experience taught her to be normal amongst the Nuba. Ages and sex of family members, tribe, place of origin? Had any family
members received any education? It was a matter on which, said both Sherif and Nuara, the Nuba were likely to be frank. They were not like European autodidacts who made up fictional university degrees for themselves. Then, occupation in the Nuba Hills – pastoralist? farmer? other?

Other skills? I have no other skills, said Nuara, in her role as a Nuba paterfamilias. I had cattle and they are gone. I grew millet and it is gone. Here, Sherif told the team, you must probe. There are always other skills, if not in the man then in his wife, who may not think of a capacity to produce handicrafts as a skill. But handicrafts from the far-off Nuba Hills would have great novelty value in the
souk
at Erkowit or Sinkat or Port Sudan.

So they got to question 32, a controversial one for Muslims. Would you be interested in introducing other subjects – maths, Arabic, health care, gardening – to the Koranic school, if there is one in Alingaz? Was anyone in the camp talking of starting a conventional non-Koranic school? If one was started, would you let your sons and daughters attend?

Would you return to the Nuba Hills if the war ended? Sherif asked Nuara in her role as a Nuba. Siddiq had a little indulgent chuckle at this, as if the answer were obvious.

And so the teams were drawn up – Erwit and Nuara; Prim and Nawal, one of the nurses; Siddiq and the second nurse. Sherif would oversee the process, but join Prim’s group whenever he could to add male gravitas to the questioning. Interviews would take place chiefly in the mornings, from six o’clock onwards, but if necessary two of the teams could work at dusk. In the mid-to-late afternoons Prim and Sherif would collate the results as they came in, and keep a running score on death and birth rates.

On Prim’s fifth day in Alingaz, the questioning began. Prim and Nawal, a sturdy, self-certain person rather in the mould of Nuara, entered houses in which the light through the hessian gave the air a tannin cast. The house furnishings consisted of bowls, and an enamel or plastic pitcher, a few glasses for tea, lengths of floral cloth which sometimes were the only beds, and sometimes a palliasse of straw. Prim and Nawal were at some predictable disadvantage interviewing young, earnest fathers of families, though Nawal’s air of authority moderated that.

Over a number of days, and in retrospect, the answers of all these randomly chosen interviewees started to blur. The person whom Prim would remember best was a woman who had lost a leg and was raising
three young children alone in her dingy tent of hessian. Despite her mutilation, which had occurred as a result of some sort of cattle raid, perhaps by the Beggarah militia, perhaps by rebels – the details were hard to elucidate – she moved agilely about her house, sometimes using a crutch, in which case she moved at lightning speed to the fireplace at which she cooked outside her door. Her name was Wariba. She wore the ring of her lost marriage in her right nostril, her hair was tightly dressed in the Nuba manner, the rims of her ears were marked by yellow and red beads, and a three-year-old son was asleep at her breast. The points of her cheeks were marked with a triangle of scars, forked at the end. Her lost leg disqualified her, she knew, as a future desirable bride.

When Prim worked at her laptop in the late afternoons, the morning’s uncollated harvest of questionnaires by her under one of Alingaz’s numerous red stones, it was Wariba she thought of, and it was in her name that the majority of responses seemed to resonate.

There were not enough wells, Wariba had forthrightly told Prim and the nurse, Nawal. She had no choice but to send her children to fetch water in a plastic container, attached to a strap which they carried across their foreheads. There was a salty well at a
khor
, a watercourse, to the south. There was an old well at a place called Girgir, but it was difficult to climb into. Prim had seen such wells, holes in the ground, with the water running below. A slim person might lower herself and stand on a subterranean stone from which a plastic container might be filled and passed up to others on the surface. An occasional water truck came from Port Sudan and sold water.

In the meantime Wariba was all for a school, but there was no money to pay teachers. If we go to the villages like Erkowit or Barimeiya, she said, and try to trade a little of our rations for others things – medicines or clothes or sugar or kindling – the storekeepers take too much of our rations for too little of what we seek. So we need a store too, owned by all, and fair.

Wariba was also one of the small number of women who said they might be willing to take training from the Ministry of Health as traditional birth attendants. But her parents were dead, and so she would have to find a friend to mind her children while she took her training.

Now that the survey had begun and was going well, the two nurses from Khartoum spent their dusks visiting the homes of those already interviewed to measure the arm circumferences of the children. The sandstorms having held off, Sherif was more composed. His playfulness
returned, and one evening he suggested an assignation with Prim at a secluded rock shelf behind the food depot. He took a rug with him, and when Prim arrived fell on her with a welcome hunger.

‘I have been a bastard,’ he told her. ‘But I have been so anxious. I thought Siddiq would get in the way. But I tell you – I would not say it to him – this needs to be
specially
written up. This camp should not exist. Saving people from themselves by dragging them to a harsh sector and dumping them? I’ve read of it. This is the first time I’ve seen it.’

On a second evening visit to the rock platform, Prim and Sherif found the area being used by young Nubas. The two of them lay very still at each other’s side, beneath the sharp points of innumerable stars, listening to suppressed laughter from perhaps as close as twenty paces away. Prim imagined the young couples who had also chosen the place as lovers brought together by the great dislocation of their lives, embracing each other perhaps across prohibited lines of family and clan. She had assured herself in a kind of spiritual or emotional vanity that the attraction between her and Sherif was somehow separate from the herdish need of the majority. She had reacted badly when Dimp used such phrases as ‘your African boyfriend’. But such a sense of exclusivity could not be sustained on the rock platform above Hanif’s compound.

The interviews had been running smoothly for ten days, with only the intrusion of one mild but irksome sandstorm, when Prim, at the collapsible desk with the mass of that day’s interviews held in place with a red rock, found in one questionnaire a strange, unrelated sheet of paper. Even with her green Arabic, she could recognise two of the typed passages.

She passed it to Sherif, wondering if it was the right thing to do, if his new equability could stand it.

‘What is this?’ she asked.

He read with a frown and then stared at her. ‘I think you know what this is,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think it is.’

‘It looks like the questions Siddiq wanted answered. I think he’s asking them.’ She translated creakily from the Arabic. ‘ “Is it to your …?” No, let me start again. “Do you know … of any members of illegal groups, opposed to the government of Sudan, operating in Alingaz? Is it to you that they come for money or help? Is it from you that they demand oaths against the legal government of Sudan? Do you … do you know the
names of any members of these groups in alliance with the SPLA against the legal government of Sudan? Do you realise that I now ask politely, for I do not want you to suffer from … harsher questions later?”’

She handed the page back to Sherif who tore it up.

‘I must not go off half-cocked,’ said Sherif, struggling with an impulse to go straight to Siddiq and have it out, only to find on reflection that he had gone to battle incapacitated and invalidated by anger. ‘I must sleep on this. But I have to eat with, and smile at the bugger!’

‘I have to also,’ Prim told him. ‘He’s invited me for dinner tomorrow night.’

She had not normally eaten at Hanif’s – she made a point of eating with Nuara and the two Sudanese nurses at the clinic. But Siddiq himself had insisted that she come and visit them at the food depot for conversation’s sake – as he put it – the next night. She was now more than willing to go with Sherif; it might help take the edge off his just anger.

There was still the question of how Sherif would contain his fury for the moment. But he seemed to get through dinner in an exemplary manner, meeting her as planned at nine above the food depot, after credibly enough feigning tiredness.

At the end of the next morning’s work, Sherif intercepted the nurse who made up a team with Siddiq as she returned towards the clinic with that day’s sheaf of questionnaires. He asked might he look at the documents. He proved right in suspecting that a man of such background as Siddiq would depend upon the nurse to separate his intelligence questionnaire from Sherif’s survey, and deliver them to him later. She had not yet done so, and Sherif found, amongst the completed questionnaires the woman was carrying, eight of Siddiq’s sets of questions on rebel activities in Alingaz.

In late afternoon Sherif showed these pages to Prim as she began work on the collation of responses. He seemed preternaturally calm. ‘These questions poison all the others,’ he said as if it were a weather report. ‘These eight families, and God knows how many others, are now telling everyone not to answer us, or if they do, to hedge and mislead. The man has completely destroyed the process!’