Stone Kingdoms (14 page)

‘I've been in touch with the Agency and asked for more resources – more tents, food, medicine.'

‘And will we get it?' Rollins asked, polishing the lenses now with a cloth, the glasses small and fragile in his hands.

‘I would hope so, James. I've stressed the urgency of it as best I can, but things are starting to fall apart in a lot of places, and if the fighting spreads there won't be enough of anything to go round. You know that better than I do.'

‘Yes I know it,' he said, replacing his glasses and carefully folding up the cloth and placing it in his breast pocket.

‘In the meantime, until we get more news or hear a response
from
the coast, we have to play tough, tighten our belts and be extra vigilant about rations and quantities of medicines being used.'

‘What are you saying, Charlie?' Rollins asked. ‘That if they're sick we don't give them enough to get well?'

‘No, that's not what I'm saying, James. We have to go on treating people, but it's not a bottomless well we're drawing on here and sometimes we need to make hard decisions, direct resources where there's the best chance of them making a difference. I did an inventory a week ago and if we keep on at this rate and there's a big influx of refugees then we got trouble.'

‘Seems to me trouble's already on its way, Charlie.'

‘I'm just trying to tell you how it is, James. But there's talk too of international intervention, some kind of joint force to try and restore order, safeguard relief work.'

‘International intervention is always something that's going to happen tomorrow. Going to happen any day but today. I heard it too many times,' Rollins said, shaking his head.

‘Listen, James, I know you've got a lot of experience out here but we've got to keep positive, keep the wheels turning. We can't pre-judge what's going to happen.'

Rollins leaned back on his chair, his head still shaking slowly, and said nothing more. It was always the same at the weekly meeting, with Wanneker and Rollins jousting and no one else saying very much until called upon to give a report of the week's activities. Then we'd follow the requested format, outlining our positive achievements. Whatever Wanneker conceived as its purpose, it always felt like some self-help group where confession and self-revelation are considered therapy. The Olsons were quiet, self-contained people who drew strength from each other and whose minds were clearly focused on their imminent departure, and they rarely said much on such occasions. Martine was mostly sullen, smoking her cigarette and displaying an open indifference. Only Veronica
believed
in it, reciting the catalogue of her week's endeavours and declaiming with strident sincerity her determination to work with maximum efficiency in the coming week. I found them an embarrassment, and my reports inevitably sounded of less consequence than the others'.

Wanneker's enthusiasm for the sessions never seemed to wane. I think it provided him with an opportunity to display his leadership, to motivate us with the team-speak which made him sound like head coach. He also liked to play games with us, seek out weakness in personality, play people off against each other. Sometimes it felt as if he merely used the sessions to wind everyone a little tighter. ‘Naomi,' he would smile, ‘how have you made the world a better place since last we met?' And I would say, ‘Well, first of all I taught the children a new song and how to play "The Farmer Wants a Wife".' Then, if he was in a good mood, he'd laugh or make a joke, but when I succeeded in irritating him he'd drop some comment that emphasized the lowliness of my status and the esteem in which he held my work. Only the knowledge that he was a skilled doctor who had probably saved many lives preserved some of my respect. Unpredictable in many ways, he was still capable of small acts of kindness out of concern for our welfare, which seemed genuine if short-lived. The one thing we argued about was Nadra. Despite my constant requests, he refused to put her on the Agency pay roll which would have entitled her to a range of benefits and privileges. He excused himself by saying unconvincingly that he didn't have the authority to make that decision. So she was paid a pittance, when the truth was that the school couldn't have functioned without her.

Once or twice he visited the school. It felt like a visit from an inspector, but he joked with the children and did his tired old party pieces – blowing his bubble-gum into a trembling pink balloon, magicking coins from someone's ear, using his hands to make animal shapes and sounds, and all the time his glasses mirrored the children's laughing faces. Only Nadra wasn't
impressed,
standing at the side, indifferent to his performance. When he'd finished she would drive the children back to their learning with even greater zeal. Once, Wanneker asked me if I knew what had happened to Medulla but I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Suppose the guy knew when he was beaten,' he said, watching Nadra over my shoulder. ‘Jeez, I used to have a teacher like her in high school – scared the hell out of me. Once she caught me out in a history assignment I'd copied out of a book. Sent for my old man and it ended up like a public court martial.'

‘The school couldn't operate without her. She speaks good English and probably knows more than I ever will.'

‘OK, Naomi, I get the picture, so before you start in again I'll send up to the capital and see if Stanfield will agree to put her on the roll. But no promises, things are tight right now. Maybe he'll be able to get his hands on some more resources for you – books, paper, that sort of stuff – but I can't promise anything.'

I thanked him and watched him amble back to the compound, his ponytail bunched out the back of his baseball cap. That same day, after school was over and Ahmed and Iman had helped us move everything back to the compound, I walked with Nadra on the outskirts of the camp. It was a day which seemed to exist outside the confines of time, where only the sun directed the what and when. I felt the intensity of it as I walked and looked in vain for shade, conscious of the growing scent of my sweat. We walked by the dried-up river bed where great fissures shot out across the cracking parchment of earth, passed the heavy, wilting heads of the sunflowers. In the distance a grove of blue trees glistened like a mirage and in the sky above our heads a hawk glided weightlessly on secret currents of air. Down on the plain we watched a man drive a pair of yoked bullocks, their humped and black-ribbed sides creasing and almost cracking with the strain of dragging the plough through the stubborn earth.

‘
Tell me about Ireland, Naomi. Tell me about the sea.'

‘Our house was right beside the sea. Each morning I woke up I looked out and saw it stretch as far as the eye could see. As far as this horizon,' I answered, pointing to the distant wavering seam of sky and land.

‘What colour was the sea, Naomi?'

‘The sea is many colours – sometimes green, sometimes blue, but mostly it's grey and all the colours are hidden to the eye. My father used to swim in it even though the water was cold.'

‘Why did he swim?'

‘I don't know. Maybe he thought it would keep him well, keep his body healthy.'

‘And was it the cold that killed your father?' she asked, hesitating a little in case she had asked too personal a question. Down below, the hunched figure at the plough glanced back at the thin dry gouge of earth.

‘I don't know what killed my father, Nadra.'

There was silence for a few moments as we walked on. A file of children wearing zinc buckets on their heads was setting off to the wells. The sky was folding itself in layers of pink.

‘Do you think of your father, Nadra?'

‘Sometimes when my mother speaks of him, tells us he will return and take us from this place.'

‘And do you think he will return?'

‘I think he will come back if he is able, but it is a long time and so I am not sure. I think if he was able he would come back. Maybe something bad has happened to him. I do not know.' She glanced at me to see if she should say more and I nodded to her. ‘Sometimes I think I hear his spirit calling my name, trying to speak to me, but when I look there is no one there.'

She turned her face away, frightened that she had discredited herself in my eyes, and I touched her arm to stop our walk and tried to tell her I understood but the words wouldn't come out right and we walked on in an uneasy silence. When it was time to part I shook her hand, holding it long enough to say that
maybe
her father would come back to take them to some better place, and she nodded and hurried away. I stood watching until she was hidden by the terraced layers of the camp.

A new group of arrivals were struggling into the camp. There might have been two or three families – it was difficult to establish the connections between the people who stumbled towards me. A couple of older children carried hens in bamboo cages while a man balanced a precarious bundle of possessions on the seat of a bicycle. Other objects dangled from the frame and handle bars, while behind the bike trailed a small wooden cart with rubber wheels in which sat a boy of five or six, and as they passed me I saw his stumps of legs. A woman carried blankets and a straw basket on her head and strapped to her back were two small children whose heads peeped out from the folds of her clothes. A small boy carried a cardboard box on his head, holding it carefully with one hand while he drank from a bottle. An older boy and a woman carried a wooden hoe on their shoulders and from it, like washing, hung the line of their possessions. Another boy trudged behind, struggling to keep up, the sleeves of the man's shirt he wore trailing the ground like two extra legs. Then came a woman smothered in black on a donkey, and at her back what I thought was a cloth-wrapped parcel of possessions. As they passed me a tiny gap opened at the neck of the bundle and an eye locked on me, never blinking as the donkey picked its sullen steps towards the rim of the camp.

I was joined by Ahmed and Iman, Ahmed striding out and Iman scuttling to keep up. They had developed into spivs, wheeling and dealing in anything that was tradeable or saleable. Sometimes they tried to sell me small objects which had been stolen from the compound. When I refused, they would offer to exchange them for something trivial or simply try to give them away. As the weary procession of new arrivals
disappeared
into the streets of the camp, Ahmed held up a watch for my inspection.

‘Very good watch, Miss, very new watch. You buy, you buy, yes?'

‘It's a very nice watch.'

‘You buy, Miss, yes?'

‘Where did you get it, Ahmed?'

‘My watch, my watch, very good.'

‘Yes, Ahmed, it's a very good watch but I already have a watch. See?'

They gave the watch to me at my birthday party. This was a genuine surprise. I had mentioned the date of my birthday casually to Martine a couple of weeks earlier and she had remembered and organized the whole thing. Everyone was there – Wanneker, Rollins, the Olsons, Martine and Veronica, Ahmed and Iman, Nadra and a sprinkling of children she considered to be the best students. There were small presents – a bar of scented soap, a wooden comb, a jar of moisturizer and even something that resembled a cake, made from meal and biscuit and decorated with seeds. I walked in the door to take my place for supper and they were all there. Wanneker played some aria on his machine and suddenly the room was filled with laughter and music. I was twenty-six years old and it was the first real party I'd ever had. Nadra handed me a small package wrapped in white drawing paper which she had decorated, and in it was a little mirror in an ebony frame.

Everyone performed, carried along by some inexplicable surfeit of well-being. The party seemed to assume a life of its own, not stimulated by drink or exotic food because there were only half a dozen bottles of beer, a bottle of wine and some small biscuits which Anna Olson had baked surreptitiously. But no one opted out. Martine even danced with Wanneker, a gliding, flamboyant Strauss waltz which the children clapped and sought to imitate. Veronica sang a sentimental song and then Rollins stepped up and gave his own crazy rendition of
‘
Danny Boy', accompanied by Ahmed on his flute but never quite in the same place at the same time. Wanneker did some conjuring tricks, even managing to produce some new and not totally obvious ones, and the Olsons did a little skit involving a young woman's visit to the doctor and sang a duet they explained had been done originally by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren. Martine did an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin and recited a poem by Baudelaire which nobody understood. Nadra conducted the children in a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday'. And then it was my turn and I didn't have a turn, but the children started to stamp their feet and clap their hands, bouncing the sound off the ceiling and vibrating the plates and glasses off the table. In my confusion I remembered my mother and the songs she used to sing, the sense of mystery they brought, but I couldn't remember the words or enough of the tune to carry it off and as the audience grew more demanding I stood up and recited the first poem that came into my head. When I was finished no one knew if that was it or if there was more to come, and so I had to bow elaborately to signal that my performance was over. As I sat down and felt the touch of the children's hands, I thought of the children I used to teach, thought too of Daniel and wondered where he was at that moment. His mother's face at the window, rain slanting across it like tears, the wind blindly flicking the pages of his books. But then the thin arms draped across my shoulders and hugging my neck pulled me back to the moment, and I heard once again the flow of opera and the chatter of voices, smelled the sweet scent of food and sweat.

I tried to thank as many people as possible, and when I spoke to Anna Olson I knew it was probably the last time we would talk. She looked thinner, older than I had noticed before, the secret pain of illness etched deeply about her eyes. ‘Are you looking forward to going home?' I asked, sitting beside her on a narrow bench.