Bettany's Book (8 page)

A stone building with a corrugated iron roof sported a Red Cross on its door and in front the standard long bench provided for patients, and a seat by the side window. Sudanese being inoculated traditionally came up to windows beyond which sat doctors or nurses, and presented their arms to the needle. Stoner’s truck drew into the clinic building’s thin shade and Stoner, Prim and the midwife descended. Abuk stood smiling, her splendid long head bare now, its temples marked by lines of ritual scarring. Home, said her wide eyes, despite all she knew. Stoner said he had to go off – to pay respects to the Commission of Refugees official who lived at the food dump. Abuk was Austfam’s responsibility, and Prim walked with her, squinting, toward the doorway of the clinic. From the screened-off rear of the structure, a little haggard woman in brown shirt, pants and sandals appeared. ‘Mother of God, it’s darling Abuk,’ she cried. There were enthusiastic embracings, salutations in Dinka and Arabic, translated into English by the white woman, seemingly for the benefit of Prim.

‘Yes, you will move into the tent right there by the clinic. Your mother, your son too. And any fellow who wants to talk to you better talk to me first.’

The clinic nurse turned to Prim and shook her hand vigorously. ‘Thanks. Thanks a million. A few of the women are pretty close to term, so she’ll be very handy indeed. I’m Therese by the way. And you’re Miss Bettany from this Austfam crowd. Where’s that miserable bugger Crouch?’

Prim told the woman that Crouch had gone back to Australia and then to Cambodia. She was expecting a replacement.

‘Aren’t we all?’ asked Therese, hustling Prim and Abuk into the darkness of the clinic. The part-office, part-surgery was dim and had that coolness of a place where at least the heat was restful. In one corner stood her old-fashioned bulky radio transmitter. In the other white cabinets with red crosses upon them.

‘It’s good to see those drilling trucks go past a little previous,’ said the nurse. ‘You know the women have been walking twelve miles for water
over to Well 17 since the main well here gave up the ghost.’

Now women and children emerged from the laneways at the camp, ululating and crowding up to the clinc to greet Abuk. The midwife went to the door and the crowd drew her away, staring at her clothes, covering their mouths with long fingers.

‘All right if you and Stoner sleep in the clinic here?’ asked Therese.

‘We’re not an item,’ protested Prim.

Therese said she didn’t think they were. She invited Prim to ‘settle in like a good child’ while she went to make tea.

‘Wait,’ said Prim. ‘We met something out there.’

‘Oh yes?’

And Prim for the first time related the story of the journey, knowing by hearing herself tell the tale that she had somehow let a mist grow around the day’s more massive events. ‘Stoner can give you more details,’ she promised Therese.

‘Dear God,’ said Therese. ‘I’d heard things were bad out there.’

But she too seemed to be speaking of remote happenings, as if Adi Hamit was all the catastrophe she could afford to give her intimate attention. She asked a few questions – were the people in hundreds or thousands? – and then seemed gratefully to return to more immediate matters. ‘That Abuk! Isn’t she a darling? Awful history of course. But then everybody here has one. Did she tell you she was taken by the army? What happened is beyond imagining.’ Therese gestured towards some vague conception of possible abuse which lay like an amputated but neutralised reality in the darkest corner of the clinic. ‘Abuk was an
abid
. In the strictest meaning of the term. She was a slave, that little creature.’

‘Surely not,’ said Prim. The concept – Abuk a slave – struck her at once with an obscure but intense force. Its redolence was so strong. It was as if something live had not only nudged her mind but physically quickened within her, jolting her, making her stumble in search of equilibrium. She felt herself trembling, as she had on seeing the town-bound clans. But where they had numbed her, this enthralled her, producing in her a form of particular rage she had not felt this morning.

‘It’s a fact,’ said the nurse. ‘She was property of an officer. And let me say: With all that entails! See, her village was raided. She saw one of her children thrown on to the fire by soldiers, and another one hacked to death with a
banja
by militiamen. Death’s very graphic down there in the South, by all accounts. The militia still ride round on horses, with big swords. And Kalashnikovs of course. They sold her to the officer,
and when he was finished with her, he on-sold her to a farmer south of here. It isn’t uncommon, you know.’

The tale of children hacked and ablaze hung in the air with its normal fearsome weight. Such stories were regularly heard, were the commonplace of discourse.

‘But she’s here now. How did she get away?’ Prim heard her voice quaver.

‘There’s an Austrian woman – you know the one – what’s-her-name? God almighty, I can’t remember. Is it Trotsky? Something like that. Stoner probably knows her. Comes into the country with lots of money and just buys people back. In batches, sometimes. She’s the only one who does it. They say she’s a little nutty. The group she works for brings out this yearly report on her activities. But no one believes them because they’re kind of Alleluia Jesus Protestant evangelicals. Anyhow, that was the woman bought her from the farmer, and then Abuk came here, where her mother and surviving child had turned up, and then she’s selected to be a midwife. Great little woman. We should congratulate ourselves.’

Prim had heard at parties in Khartoum whispers of slavery and tales of anti-slavery antics by an Austrian woman. Veteran NGO people shook their heads and laughed over her occasional excursions to the Sudan. This was the first time Prim had heard the word ‘slave’ used of a face she knew, and the previously abstract term ran through her like a claim.

A Dinka woman in dyed cloth shirt and skirt brought in a plate of wheaten bread and tea. Smiling Abuk was with her, transformed, no longer wrapped up in layers of white, but wearing a shirt with a collar and floral-patterned skirt. She retained, as indicating her status, her sandals. They sat on stone benches and chairs around a little table.

What am I to do here? thought Prim. I am a refugee. I need the Sudan more than it needs me. But here is a woman to whom something worse than Auger has occurred.

The nurse spoke both in Arabic for Abuk’s convenience, and English for Prim’s ‘So now, Abuk. Tell me again what’s this clan of yours?’

‘Ifo,’ said Abuk. Then laboriously, in English, smiling at Prim, ‘It is … Ifo.’

‘So when’re you going to marry some thumping big feller from a related clan, eh?’

Abuk covered her mouth with her fingers and laughed. The Irish woman lowered her voice. ‘You can get hellish fights here, even amongst
middle-aged old duffers. You’ve got clans still quarrelling over their grandad’s grazing rights, for dear God’s sake. Meaningless, given their situation …’

Stoner, arriving, seemed grateful to turn to Prim. The Canadian from Earthwater was already meeting with the water committees, he said, tracking them down by asking at tent flaps. ‘He’s looking at these old British hydrogeological maps for the area too. Can you imagine? Those old Imperial guys, you know … beating the bloody Mahdi one day, out here the next day surveying for water. Got to give it to ’em. Rule bloody Britannia.’

He shook his head as if he had no stake in what they had done, was not quite himself a Briton.

Prim was conscious of Abuk, who sipped her tea absent-mindedly, like a woman who had never known want. Prim thought,
slave
. How astonishing, how old-fashioned, and yet how intimate a word.

After, still taken by the idea of Abuk’s enslavement, she made her way through the last sting of the day’s heat to a slightly elevated platform of soft red shale west of the camp. A crowd of women and children had gathered and were watching and chatting about the endeavours of Earthwater. Stakes had been driven into the ground and rope run from one to the other to create a security fence. The mud-pump and the drilling engine still sat on the trucks, and had not yet begun their work, but piping and drill parts, and what looked like lights and a small generator, had been neatly piled on blue plastic on the ground. All this energy exhilarated Prim. She could hear the seven or so men of the drilling team chortling with each other, apparently pleased with their progress.

As Prim ducked under the rope, the Canadian foreman strolled over to her to report. He’d drill from dark until his men got tired – about 2 a.m. He pointed out the way acacia bushes ran on the slope, and the line of certain termite mounds. Termites always built along the line of sub-surface aquifers.

The visit to the drilling site, the energy of the Canadian and the Sudanese drillers, restored her to clarity. It was not negligible to leave water behind, even if it was evident that aquifers of fossil water, once breached, could never be renewed. An emergency was an emergency and it was something to leave water here, in a cistern of steel, under a blue, anti-evaporative lid.

When she turned back to the clinic, advancing darkness made her party to, yet separated her from, all the night noises of the camp, from the
yelps of children and the smell of frying bread. You would think from the eloquent voices that this was a happy town, in possession of itself.

Sleeping on a bench in the clinic, Prim woke once, to the flaying of torchlight from the back of the building. Abuk was there, running to the white cabinets then vanishing. Prim slipped on her boots and followed the midwife out through the lean-to. She waited in a camp laneway, looking into the lamplit interior of a tent, as after four hearty yells a large-boned woman pushed out a blood-covered little exile.

Abid
, thought Prim. Slave. Poor little bastard.

In the morning, Prim woke in her clothes without any memory of having settled to sleep after attending that Dinka birth in the small hours. Sitting upright, she could see, through a window without glass, a bare-chested Stoner washing from a basin beneath a brush shelter. He looked very businesslike for a man whose sentences were so crabwise and tentative.

The light, already so sharp that some of the Dinka aged who had slept in the open were hobbling to shade, reminded her of Central Australia, of morning in the Burranghyatti reservation at Mount Bavaria. To dispel that memory, she called to Stoner casually through the window.

‘Could I use that after you?’

Stoner had an English sort of body, strong but without muscular definition. She was unwelcomely reminded that by contrast Auger had possessed a bough-swinging, tree-climbing stringiness, the inheritance of his American boyhood. She watched Stoner pour out his used water and fill the basin by dipper from the washing-water drum. Courteously, he carried it indoors to her and set it at the bottom of her bench.

‘Forgive the gallantry,’ he murmured. As he went to where he had slept and assembled his kit, she turned her back, took her shirt off, and washed beneath her neck, under arms and breasts. Stoner, throughout her ablutions, had the grace to go on packing. He turned when Prim had hitched her voluminous brown pants on, had shed her dust-clogged socks, and was functionally washing her feet.

‘Listen, I gotta leave, okay?’ he told her. ‘In view of what we saw … I reckon you ought to come too.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘The drilling …’

‘That Canadian bloke’s reliable. He’ll be back in the old corral in Khartoum in a few days. But us? We owe it to everyone … you know,
to test out the scale of what’s happening. I suggest we go north through Nyala, check out conditions. Get a bigger picture.’

Therese had come in from her morning inspection. Last night’s child was at mamma’s breast, she said. All parties were in the pink. She sat down, an honest eavesdropper, as Stoner went on outlining his plans. ‘Rahmin could drive us up to el Fasher and we can like fill in the provincial governor – I happen to know him. By the time we front him, we’ll know more than we do now. And there’ll be the two of us. Four eyes, okay?’

‘That’s a journey though!’ Therese said, whistling. ‘Trucks take days on that bloody awful road.’

‘We’ll do it in two.’ He turned to Prim. ‘I called the office. They’ll send the plane to el Fasher for us Tuesday.’

‘It isn’t my job to go with you,’ said Prim, and there was in her something like a fear of being dragged back to the mass of city-bound Darfur people.

‘Jesus, toots!’ Stoner argued. ‘This is like the cataclysm, waiting for us, out there! Look, ever since Lebanon I got this repute as a wild bugger. There’re people who’d rather ignore what I say. Plenty of ’em in government departments in Khartoum too. You don’t carry any baggage that way.’ He shook his head back and forth and held his long hands up in mock surrender. ‘Okay, okay. It’ll be very gratifying to stay here and, you know, see Dinkas laughing in a gush of water. But this is huge, and we’ll only know how huge by reconnaissance.’

She could not deny the force of his argument, yet she had a sense of being conscripted. It struck her she wanted to stay to talk to Abuk – maybe through Therese’s interpretation – about the midwife’s enslavement. But forty minutes later, she made a final visit to the drillers as a prelude to going to Nyala and el Fasher with Stoner. At the drilling site the Sudanese team was already mixing cement to make a pad around what, it seemed, had been a successful strike. The Canadian was enthusiastic. They had hit an aquifer at a little less than 100 feet. The flow had been tested, he said, with an air compressor. Damn good readings. Acceptable pH and nitrate, good calcium and magnesium. His field microscope showed no faecal coliform, but if the camp expanded to higher ground to the west, the water would need regular re-testing. That would all be in the report, he said. He’d already reconnoitred a site for a second well, on the camp’s southeast, above the clinic. They’d be finished everything in three days if the second well came in as easily as the first.

It was clear to Prim that, as Stoner had said, Earthwater and the Dinkas had no need of her presence that day.