Submergence (25 page)

A recent top secret United States Army report predicts mass death for Africans in the coming years. The report’s main points will be leaked to the press, and placed alongside the headline points of other similarly depressing reports made by diplomats, spies and political scientists; including those which speak of death by famine, new epidemics, climate change, infestations of insects, methane gas bubbles, or even by meteors. In this context it is a relief to read again the writings of the Russian anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin.

As a child, Pyotr served in the Corps of Pages in St Petersburg; his father owned a thousand souls on the family estate. Pyotr escaped a life in court by enlisting in a Cossack regiment in the wild Amur
region of Siberia. Later, as an anarchist in exile, he sought to use a study of the animal kingdom to resolve the two great movements of his day: the liberty of the individual, and the cooperation of the community. Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory was brilliant, Kropotkin said, but it did not explain everything. Revolution required other considerations.

Kropotkin believed in the pre-human origin of moral instincts, a mutual aid that draws us together:

Whenever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a migration of fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest, in all these scenes of animal which passed before my eyes, I saw mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.

In other words, the unsociable species is doomed. Kropotkin’s example of the deer crossing the Amur still intrigues. How did the deer understand their common cause was to cross the Amur River in greatest numbers at its narrowest point? How many of them were swept away in discovering the narrowest point? Did the birds give the deer a clue? When the deer found the narrowest point how did they agree upon it? Were there deer who refused to support the decision? Dissenters? Mutual aid extends to man. In exile, Kropotkin interviewed a Kentish boatman who risked his life to save some drowning souls. What had made him row out into the storm?

‘I don’t rightly know myself,’ said the boatman to the prince, ‘I saw men clinging to the mast, I heard their cries, and all at once I thought: I must go!’

There are other examples, as of the old man in Karelia who dug his grave in the summer as a service to his village in the winter, when the earth was frozen hard. Or the mutual aid practised by the crews of the Hansa trading ships on the Baltic and the North Sea who, if they were caught in a storm and believed they would drown, proclaimed each man to be the equal of the other, and all to be at the mercy of God and the waves.

The statue of Christ of the Abyss stands 17 metres underwater in La Spezia harbour. Even at that depth, the world we know recedes. The sun appears to contract and harden like the pupil of an eye when a torch is shone on it. The water is blue. Red is already filtered out from the spectrum; if there is a cut the blood looks black.

Those who strap on aqualungs and dive deeper find something darker. They drift in their wetsuits, calling ground control, flippers barely moving. Already the sea is becoming the ocean. They look down and see a pit. Davy Jones’s locker.

Do not think to swim below. The ocean is already pushing into ears, sinuses, temples, the softness of eyes and the harpsichord strings behind the kneecaps.

They brought him rice and marlin. He drank copious amounts of rainwater. He was burned by the sun. He told himself he would remain upstanding, but he was doubled over. He was an Englishman without
shade. He was held by enemies whose lives he could not grasp, the kind of characters who appear in cartoons with no back story; heavily armed and claiming a significance of history he could not decipher.

He managed to arrange a cloth over his face. He closed his eyes and saw the feet of a swan in an icy pond, from below, pushing away the slush; white swans in the boreal, black swans in the austral. He saw himself diving down into his swimming pool in Nairobi, then coming up for air. In his delirium, he sailed himself into the harbour of a flat island in the north, the shape of which appeared cut out with a scallop shell. It was a windswept island with only a few trees; pale, with tussock grass, heather, and a single dark hill rising up in the distance from another island in the group. The stone quay in the harbour was strewn with the creels and the orange plastic fish boxes commonly found in the fishing harbours of north England and Scotland, and there was at the end of the quay a narrow department store built from local sandstone – a flatiron building – whose opulent and glowing window displays contrasted with the inclement and solitary nature of this New Atlantis.

Torpidity reigned. The dhow cut slowly through the water. They were coming to Ras Kamboni: Kenya was a short sail away. How quickly he could make it on a speedboat from there to Lamu. He might shower that evening as a free man at the Peponi Hotel and take supper on the veranda overlooking the sea. Crab and mango salad and chilled wine. But that was a fantasy.

They came around a peninsula and grounded the dhow on a crescent beach that was in every respect the opposite of the harbour in New Atlantis.

The Italians called the village Chiamboni, the British called it Dick’s Head. Some of its buildings were low with tin roofs that flashed in the sunlight, others were tall like the houses of Lamu, with flat roofs shaded by canopies, candy-coloured in the Somali fashion. He was untied. They pushed a gun into his back and he jumped down and waded in his kikoi through unreadable water to the land.

He was marched and dragged through Chiamboni. He tripped and fell. He laughed. He listened to himself, like a bird to its failing song, curious at where the noise came from. His laugh was more of a cackle. Could it really be him? He felt humiliated.

The alleys of Chiamboni were cramped and piled up with the rubble of collapsed houses. An open sewer dribbled milky water, fetid with lumps of dung. There were elaborate doorways in the Swahili style, and others with just a piece of cloth, and families teemed in single rooms, quieting as they went by, just as the boys playing table football in the street in Kismayo had hushed, and all of this repeating, labyrinthine, until they came out onto the sand to a remarkable Italian colonial building at the edge of the village. It was set directly before the dunes, like a house in a children’s story.

The
Pourquoi Pas?
pitched in heavy seas on her first night out from Iceland. Danny lay in her bunk listening to Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony on high-fidelity headphones. There was a light over her head at the end of the bunk. The sheets were white and crisp: she always brought her own.

The cabin smelled of diesel. She became drowsy. She took Bruckner in and contemplated the Greenland Sea as an orchestra pit and the entire Los Angeles Philharmonic dropping into it. The sound changed and carried underwater like whale song.

The house was built on the model of a plan by Enrico Prampolini, the Futurist whose mural decorated the post office in La Spezia. It was an indulgence of a colonial officer from Turin, who wanted to leave
a mark at the southernmost point of the Italian Empire. When the house was built it must have been possible to take a cocktail and sit on a deckchair and look out over the Indian Ocean. There was an inscription in the entrance hall and surviving parts of a clock. Everything else was gone, except the quality of the building itself; its unwrinkled concrete, the steps up on all sides, the immense fireplace used one day a year, the stencils of organisms on the plasterwork and the flagstones arranged in harlequin patterns characteristic of Prampolini’s polychromatism. It was airy, with sand over the patterned floors. There were goats and sheep in the courtyard. The overflow of the latrine was easily mistakable at first sight for yellow mud. The men slept together in one room. The roof was for the women and children.

He was led into a room in which Yusuf the Afghan was on his knees in prayer. When the prayers were done Yusuf looked up and clapped his hands and went to each of his fighters and kissed their heads and hands. James stood between Saif and Qasab; Yusuf did not acknowledge him. He was marched into an adjoining room, the original dining room, which was filled with new recruits. It was the usual scene; weapons, ammunition boxes used as seats as in the mosque in Kismayo, food in the centre; king fish, spaghetti. There was a television and a video recorder hooked up to a car battery. Yusuf was opposed to public entertainment. Television was banned, so was popular music. The al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan had shown Hollywood action films – John Rambo fighting with the holy warriors in Afghanistan against the strutting Soviets – but those days were over. Instead there were discs of their own manufacture showing beheadings and suicide-bombings in Somalia and Iraq. Yusuf made an exception for classic Disney; he loved
Snow White
,
Dumbo
and the rest. His personal favourite was
Bambi
.

It was crowded; it felt like a school to him. The new recruits were very young and the others behaved like older pupils, telling them to be quiet, cuffing them. He wondered which of them would volunteer to
be a suicide bomber. What would they say to make sense of self-destruction? (He had wanted to ask these questions of Saif, but the moment had not presented itself.)