Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

On the map, the informal airstrip was marked in ballpoint. Amongst tall, leafy trees, Prim saw the glint of water in reeds. ‘There,’ she cried – and then almost instantly a dirt and grassland runway came into sight. Its only attendant structure was a brush-covered shelter, a rakubah, set along the perimeter like a parody of a terminal. Prim relaxed. The air, other than the normal turbulence, seemed vacant of malice. They landed and rolled along the earth with a surprising smoothness. From her place beside Connie, Prim saw, packed in by the edge of the trees and into the shade of the shelter, young men in khaki fatigues sitting shoulder to shoulder, Kalashnikovs on their laps. What their presence meant Prim chose not to inquire of Connie.

  Connie dragged back the throttle and cut the engines with a flourish, and a thunderous silence rushed down on Prim.

  ‘Ah the blessed silence afterwards!’ Connie said, but satirically.

  She left the cockpit area first and in passing the professor said, ‘Okay prof, come and meet your old pal.’ She yanked the door in the side open. ‘Out, out,’ Connie urged the baroness and Prim. ‘Without the engines running, these things turn into ovens.’

  Stepping down to the airstrip behind the baroness and the professor, Prim felt the weight of a different proposition: an equatorial sun in a region of tropic rainfall. Ahead of her the professor put out his arms in greeting. Towards him from the rakubah loped a tall man with the beginning of grey in his wiry hair. Obviously a Southerner, no visible admixture of Arab in his blood, this fellow wore army fatigues whose pants did not cover his ankles, had sandals on his feet, but was hatless. On his belt he carried a military-style holster and pistol. He performed a ritual embrace, laying his head profoundly against both the professor’s shoulders.

  ‘Wa alaikum’ssalam,’ said el Rahzi. ‘And let us pray for peace.’ The professor turned back to the baroness, Connie and Prim. ‘May I present John Along, a former student of mine at Khartoum University.’

  Lanky John Along shook the women’s hands. Prim felt both the reluctant hardness and yet the elegance of his hand.

  ‘John is a Dinka, and was a Sudanese army staff officer when I met him. I do not judge his involvement in all this.’ El Rahzi gestured at the equatorial sky. ‘Indeed,’ he continued, ‘we could not have made such a happy landing without Colonel Along.’

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ said Along. ‘The Rizeighat colonel himself is close. Please, wait in the shade.’

  He gestured to the rakubah, in whose shade many of his soldiers were massed. Prim chose to remember an incident which had not come to mind earlier. Two years past some Rizeighat militia units had filled a train at the rail head at Wau with Dinkas they had driven out of their homes and, whether or not at some gesture of resistance from a Southerner, fired into the cattle trucks and set them alight. Helene Codderby had reported to the BBC for the African News that some sources, including survivors, put the death toll at 1500.

  As the four from the plane approached the brush shelter, Along’s troops, who seemed young and unsullen, stood up graciously and vacated the shade. Along suggested the visitors take refreshment, and a young soldier brought anodised cups of black, sugared tea to them on a chipped tray painted with red and white flowers. The professor took a sip.

  By now Connie Everdale and the baroness were seated, or more accurately, Connie was reclining and seemed to have a mind to take a nap. ‘See,’ she said to Prim, ‘this is a coalition across the divide. To save kids.’

  Prim looked at John Along’s boy soldiers of the southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, sitting in mottled shade on the edge of the bush. Their faces, too, seemed to her to be the faces of redeemable children.

  Despite talk of ‘near’ and ‘soon’, the morning lengthened and insects shrieked. Some of the boy soldiers wrapped their pale brown cloaks around their eyes and slept. The humidity was fierce, and silenced all. Connie, the baroness, Prim and the professor drenched handkerchiefs and neck cloths with water, and the professor gallantly filled everyone’s tea glass with water again and again. By a little after noon it seemed the air had grown too molten to be sustained upon the tongue. Yet Prim saw many boy soldiers still slept.

  ‘Ai-ai-ai,’ said the baroness, considering them. ‘What must it be like to fight and to bleed in this air!’

  About mid-afternoon John Along murmured something to the professor. Prim noticed Along’s soldiers beginning to rise and move about.

  ‘The Rizeighat fellow has made contact with my patrols,’ Along announced for general consumption.

  Connie, circles of sweat under her armpits, stood and brushed down her skirt. ‘Alleluia,’ she said. ‘Best thing is, we won’t have to doss here overnight.’

  Out of the bush to the west of the airstrip emerged two vehicles, a four-wheel drive preceding, a two-tonner behind. They rolled down towards the brush shelter, and on drawing to a stop, the lead truck disgorged a half-dozen armed men. These Rizeighat militia were slightly but not definitively lighter-skinned than Along’s boys, but not dressed so differently, though they wore informally wound ghutras, piled turban-wise, on their heads. As the professor walked forward to meet him, the man who led them, casually carrying his semi-automatic across the back of his shoulders, had on his youngish face a look of intense resignation. The officer’s aides – or armed youths – strolled up in a less than regimented column, while behind them an uncertain number of other and obviously younger boys were being unloaded from the two-tonner by a handful of militiamen. These were the subject of the contract the baroness hoped to make.

  Two lines each of about a dozen stringy boy children formed up. Some of them were garbed in dusty thobe-like garments, of the kind worn by children to Koranic schools. Others were in grimy T-shirts, the logos of football teams quenched in the fabric by dust, and khaki shorts massive by the standards of their legs. Contrary to other supposed ‘victims’ Prim had met, these seemed blank-eyed, obedient and inexpectant.

  Now the Rizeighat militia leader let his gun down to the ground with one hand and made a profound obeisance to the professor. Next he nodded with joined hands towards the baroness, Connie and Prim. ‘Assalamu Alaykum!’ he said, devout in greeting.

  ‘Better help me with the water,’ Connie Everdale told Prim. She led her off through the grass to the Sharps, and they mounted the steps. They were clearly to be the handmaidens of the process. It was over-warm within, but Connie worked fast, taking up one multi-litre pack of water and handing Prim another, with a pack of plastic cups beside.

  Outside, a negotiation was in progress between the baroness, the professor, the Rizeighat officer and John Along. Prim passed, pouring water into plastic cups, down one line of children, who exuded sweat, fear and the smell of dust and dung. The boys did not reach for the cups of water until they were proffered. They had spent their times in some hard school.

  Prim became aware of whispering, and was relieved to find two boys trading satiric grins, finding her as laughable an authority as boys their age – ten to thirteen – were meant to find all such figures. Yet they all told her shokran, thanks, as they had no doubt been instructed by their masters, whoever these might have been.

  Coming level with a light-skinned Rizeighat militia guard, Prim studied his face a second and offered him a cup of water. Before accepting, the man, who could not have been more than twenty-two, joined his hands, and bowed his head. He too had been to a hard school.

  Glancing back to the rakubah, Prim caught a glimpse of the baroness pulling green rolls of American dollars out of her satchel.

  It seemed the business part of the affair was done, and the baroness crossed to the ragged line of children and began to stroll amongst them, lifting a chin here, prying a mouth open, inspecting eyes, in some ways the very model of an assessor of slaves. She asked them in Arabic to please sit down. They did so and their Arab guards towered above them.

  The baroness addressed Prim, ‘I’m sorry we cannot go yet. To seal the arrangement we must drink tea with both the Arab and Colonel Along. Leave
the water canister here for the boys.’ Prim followed her to the brush shelter. ‘Don’t,’ the baroness murmured, ‘be influenced against our friend, the Rizeighat colonel, el Zubair. He is not the only one who benefits from my satchel of notes. Companies of the SPLA are not so well-provided. Along must scrounge ammunition, bandages, drugs. He will be taking a quotient to his war purse.’

  ‘This is an astonishing arrangement,’ said Prim.

  ‘Come,’ said the baroness. ‘It will be a rare experience for el Zubair. Drinking tea with women.’

  And the baroness strode off in her Hapsburg manner to the rakubah brush shelter to which some of Along’s soldiers were already delivering once more a great tin pot of tea, and anodised cups, and a plate of wheaten bread.

  The party sat a long time with Colonel el Zubair, a man in his mid-forties, Prim guessed, and a lively conversationalist. There was leisurely tea drinking and discussion of the war to which they were all in their way party. The colonels, El Zubair and Along, seemed to think it a not totally crazy concept that they should take refreshment together and make slighty remarks about the regular army and the government in Khartoum.

  Given that it seemed a Martha and Mary relationship between the baroness and Connie, Connie became restless to be either flying again or housekeeping. Since the former was impossible, she touched Prim’s shoulder and asked her to come to the plane with her and break out some high-protein biscuits for the kids who, she told Prim, had probably travelled all day without food. Connie and Prim were still passing out the thick, grainy slabs to both Rizeighat guards and boys when the high-level tea party beneath the brush shelter came to a close.

  It was a curious cargo now. Twenty-five boys fitted into sundry seats, without the restraint of seat belts, which dangled disorderedly around the seats. Compared to the perils these children had encountered, the threat of air turbulence seemed minor. Though some sat, others – those by windows – stood bolt upright, their shoulders trembling to every vibration. They had entered the furiously heated aircraft with awful obedience, though they had by then begun to talk sparsely, watchfully, to each other, and seemed composed once altitude and the engines drew cool air into the cabin. There was still by Western standards, and by the standards of the cheeky shamassa children of Central Khartoum’s streets, an abnormal lack of conversation, as if these arts had been quenched in them. Amongst them Prim and the baroness moved like flight stewards with more high-protein biscuit and water. In her high, musical voice, the baroness told the boys, ‘Dohret el mye-yah’, enunciating exactly and pointing to the toilet aft. Their work done, Prim and the baroness sat at last in the back row of seats.

  ‘I understand now,’ said Prim, ‘that I barely know how you operate. You were expecting some twenty boys, Connie said. Twenty-five turned up.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the baroness. She laughed briefly. ‘Strained the exchequer. Our friend the militia officer el Zubair excelled himself. Of course, a man of authority, a Rizeighat sheik of a considerable village. Perhaps as many as two or three of these kids were in his own possession. Then at an invitation to sell, sent him across the lines by Along – if indeed there are lines – el Zubair has gone around amongst his neighbours in the Arab quarters of the towns and on the farms collecting Dinka boys, promising people a good price. So then he contacts Along with a progress report, they organise a meeting place, an airstrip. Next, Along faxes the professor and lets Connie know the approximate number – but it’s often more, let me tell you.’

  ‘They’re all boys.’ said Prim. ‘Why no girls?’

  ‘El Zubair said it would be boys this time, and we can’t argue. His decision may, charitably considered, have been based on the reality that boys are most at risk of bloodshed – due to conscription by some commander less urbane than Colonel Along.’

  For a while Prim contemplated in uneasy admiration the deft process of deliverance the baroness had devised. Such a brave endeavour! She felt churlish to question it, but she did.

  ‘Forgive me for raising this, but have you ever suspected this man, el Zubair, or others like him, might be tempted to abduct more and more boys, purely for the potential cash reward? I know you told me your critics make this claim.’

  The baroness nodded, raising her eyes, her chin pointed towards the juddering roof of the plane. ‘For one thing, if it were so, why does el Zubair stop at twenty-five? Believe me, my dear girl, there are adequate numbers already serving in slavery to supply el Zubair’s side of the market a thousand, two thousand times over.’

  ‘But then, I can’t help thinking,’ Prim persisted, wishing that for the moment she could let the question rest, but as unable to do so, as desirous of teasing out the issue as when in Adi Hamit she first heard the word ‘slave’, ‘if there is such a massive trade – and I believe like you there is – isn’t a flight like this a mere gesture?’

  ‘Dear girl,’ said the baroness, with the most oblique trace of annoyance, ‘you speak as if we were indulging ourselves, liberating some, ignoring the rest. You must think of the evidence gathered from these boys, names, histories. These will be sent to the UN Human Rights Commission, the UNHCR, the State Department, the British Foreign Office, and on and on, until the reality cannot be any longer denied. These children, processed and then returned to their families, are worth more than their individual weight, as precious as that might be.’

  Prim looked out across the sea of children’s heads, some quiescent, bobbing to look out windows. Conversations had started, larger boys talked over raised chins to smaller, and Prim could not help hope that something normal, some schoolboy cuffing, pushing, scragging might break out as a sign that these ageless children had been restored, at a cost, to their boyhoods.

  Letter No 14, SARAH BERNARD

  Friend Alice

  We are in the town of Goulburn – we came down to it from the last ridge aboard the furniture wagon of the Scot Tolhurst. We walk to the centre of the town past road gangs who yell at us in the usual way. In the barracks we find first a constable and then a solid young police magistrate in his navy blue coat who was just sitting to his luncheon. So we stand together in the yard and we all think how the Factory is behind and the magistrate is in front of us – he has come out to see us with a gravy catching square of good linen in his hand. So the system is here too. This fellow is the system in Goulburn and though he cannot be more than thirty two years he has that same air of being in command since ancient times.

  He has us now follow him to his table and we stand by it – the little woman Carty holding her daughter tight to stop her wandering about the room and maybe upsetting a cruet and ruining her mother’s record as a fresh minted citizen of New South Wales. The big magistrate starts eating bits of mutton – he is delicate in manner and does not stuff his mouth – and at the same time asks: Do you have any complaints about your treatment during your journey? Did the wagoner chap treat you well?

  Big brick red Connolly says: Yer Honner he had been warned off.

  As he should be says the police magistrate. He then says to Carty without dropping his fork and nodding at the bundle held by her: That is a baby boy?

  Carty says: It is my little Molly sir. She was famous in the Factory for saying it is my little Molly – the way someone might say: Here comes the Prince of Wales!

  Well then the police magistrate says with some potato in his mouth now. Very well you have the option to mind her and raise her far from dens of thieves and whores. You can give her value.

  The little red brick mother says all the while glowing: That is what I mean to.

  He rings a bell and a constable enters. The magistrate says: Take these women to the nuns. To us he says: The nuns are better at keeping girls safe at large in Goulburn.

  My Papist companions look at each other and halfway smile and halfway frown. They were as frightened as I at the idea of trading constables for nuns.

  The constable leads us out into the afternoon warmth and says not to one but all of us: You’re a prett
y parcel. What lucky old buggers getting you for a piece of joy?! Any of you interested in matrimony with a single constable?

  Though he is sallow and nearly all his teeth gone yet he had firm wrists. He was not like solid Long but he was dressed neat.

  The constable leads us with his shoulders all drooping with pretended loss through streets and to the gate of a little flat cottage like other flat cottages but with a cross affixed to the top of its gabled gate. Here right within the gate lies a garden of cabbages and potatoes.

  Says the convict constable: Should you think you’ve met the full force of the Convict Department System you aint met Sister Ignatius yet. Iggy is behind the veil a true killer and a scourge of her fallen sisters.

  His hammering on the door gets answered by a small woman wearing a high starched apron. She could have been a sister of our little mother Carty for she has that same look – the look of the convict ship and the Female Factory. Will you get the Head Missus? the ugly constable asks her. Soon a wiry little wisp of a woman dressed in nunnish brown garb arrives and the constable hands her our papers. This woman is about the age of Mrs Matron. She looks the papers over. She is full of business. She says: Ah Miss Bernard you have a little time to wait with us for the Nugan Ganway people will not soon be here. You Mrs Carty – we shall take you and your infant by wagon tomorrow to your place of employment – not ten miles from here. And you Miss Connolly we may well take you later today. But first let us drink tea like the very nearly free women we all now happen to be.

  Rigorous as any warden she jerks her head and we follow her down a corridor.

  I am chilled to find one door barred like a prison and behind it are cots and a scrawny badly used woman sitting in there yelling. Damn the scrodding Pope and damn you and damn Jesus who put me here! The nun tells us it is the cell for those unsatisfactories returned from assignment as servants for crimes committed against their masters. The young police magistrate Mr Purler – says the nun – trusts us better than he does his own convict constables to keep them guard. Mind you my ladies that woman in there is not a woman returned for being misused by her employer but for misusing. She thinks she can hurt me but I cannot be hurt easily. My four sisters and I have made the same journey you have. We have been cast on the water and reborn of it.