Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Did your master ask you to do anything that was wrong?’ the baroness, chin raised, would ask each child, not in Arabic, always through the Dinka man. It was a question best addressed in a language so intimate to the child that nuances could be conveyed.

  At lunch, over more stewed beef and plantain, the baroness was reflective when Prim mentioned this side of the questioning. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘in a sense bodily scars are more eloquent. They can’t be minimised. Sexual brutalism isn’t as easy to prove. So we never make an explicit matter of this in our reports. We don’t – as it were – headline it.’

  ‘As for physical scars,’ asked Prim, ‘why don’t you videotape the interviews, and supply the videos to governments and agencies and news services?’

  ‘I am an old stick in the mud. I admit we have thought of it, but dismissed it for now out of consideration for the privacy of the child. And even filmed material is subject to accusations of trickery and staging.’

  In the late afternoon, returning to the mission part-stupefied from a rest at Connie’s, Prim paused by a window of a vast classroom and beheld through it the platoon of young Dinkas, sitting on benches for a class taught by lanky, grey-haired Dorothy Wagon. Mrs Wagon was telling the boys in Arabic that their bodies had been brought out of slavery by Christians, and it was her duty to break to them the news that their souls had been paid for by Jesus Christ. They might have heard of Christ and the Crucifixion in their Coptic childhoods, but had they said yes to Jesus in their hearts?

  As she spoke, Mrs Wagon approached an easel on which was hung an album of brightly coloured Gospel pictures, to which she referred one by one: the Nativity of Christ, the baptism in the Jordan, the preaching, miracle-working, sacrifice by crucifixion, the Resurrection. ‘I go on ahead to prepare a place for you …’

  Prim moved along the wall and entered the classroom, still full of the day’s heat, by its rear door, and sat on a bench at the back. Her arrival was registered with a smile from Mrs Wagon, who did not suspect Prim’s feelings, which were edging beyond discontent into a dizzy fury. These children had been raised in a peasant mix of animist magic and Coptic Christianity, and had then been forcibly and rigorously instructed in Islam. Koranic sheiks had taught them that redemption lay in the most fundamental and sweeping observance of the Law. And now, within a day of leaving the Sudan, they were undergoing introduction to the Resurrection as perceived by American evangelicals! Their brainpans already brimming with loss and exile were assaulted with this third version, with American religious melodrama whose Christ must seem a different deity from the Afro-Arab Coptic Christ.

  That evening on Connie’s verandah, Prim tentatively sought the professor’s opinion ‘I just wondered … I mean, I’m drinking Connie’s gin … but are you worried that the boys are subjected to such a strong and sudden dosage of Christianity? Not the Christianity they’re used to either.’

  The professor frowned at her – it did look as if he considered her question to be bad form. Prim rushed to define her unease further. ‘You see, when the boys are questioned by the baroness and Caleb about whether their masters sent them to Koranic schools, there’s an implication that that was an extreme thing to have forced on them. Why then, are the Wagons not an extreme thing too?’

  She had half expected the professor to confess his own concern, kept secret because of his old-fashioned politeness. Yet he sipped his wine and did not seem fussed. ‘But they’re so well-meaning,’ he said, nodding towards the interior of the house – Connie and the baroness – and the outer night, in the general direction of the True Saviour Mission. ‘A minor solecism.’ His voice was very low; he wanted nothing hurtful to be heard. ‘It grows from the same zeal which liberated the children.’ He held up his glass to the west’s last light. ‘These are the only people who are willing to speak for the slaves. I am willing enough to go along with their less harmful idiosyncrasies.’

  Prim felt a considerable disappointment.

  ‘You want large solutions, don’t you?’ said the professor with a smile. ‘I don’t mean you personally. I mean your generation. Safi’s the same way. I think it’s the film industry which has done this. It gives everyone mass emotions, and poses glib solutions to mass anguish.’

  Prim felt her irritation collapse before the practicality of a man who said his evening prayers like a fundamentalist but drank wine before dinner. She said, ‘I’m willing to be their ally, but I have problems with their methods.’

  ‘They would not be offended to be told so,’ the professor murmured.

  Prim thought of Safi, who tried so hard and with a little stridency to utter smart, adult opinions. The professor’s loving condescension did that to the boy.

  Yet at dinner, tiredness, induced by the splendid meal, overtook her before she could express her unease – if it was suitable to do so in the first place – in the midst of Connie’s aviation stories, and the tales of the baroness’s genteel but somewhat deprived childhood in Vienna under the Reich and post-war.

  It was not until dinner time the next day that Prim had a chance to talk properly with the women. She admitted her misgivings but begged that any quarrels she might have should not prevent them sharing information with her. When she had finished, there was a comfortable silence. Was it the same middle-aged complacency the professor had shown? Connie said, ‘If you ask me, hon, I think the Wagons do come on a bit hot and strong. But you see, they’re here. They’re the ones who give the kids a bed and plantain stew. The rule in Africa is you work with what’s to hand.’

  As for the baroness, it was as if she had not quite heard the speech Prim thought she had just made. She stood up and adopted a pose which Prim thought of as pontifical. ‘Be sceptical,’ she intoned in her high, aristocratic English, ‘as long as you accept the basic proposition. Slavery exists, children are bought and sold.’

  At mid-morning on the fourth day of the visit to Lokichokio, Connie took Prim, the professor and their baggage back to the airport to fly them to Nairobi in one of her light aircraft. They took a little over two hours, traversing the Rift Valley on a diagonal, crossing huge landscapes. Prim, in the back seat, wondered if Connie and the baroness believed, as did anthropologists, that this was the landscape of the first Eden, the home of the Adam and Eve with whom Yahweh made his ambiguous compacts.

  Landed in Nairobi on the vaste concrete of Yomo Kenyatta airport, Connie found a trolley for their bags, and walked them to the main passenger terminal – ‘Pretty big deal for an old Masai watering-place!’ – and then excused herself. She must fly back to Lokichokio. The professor who, as ever, spoke English with a slightly archaic politesse, thanked Connie. ‘Dear lady, you have borne the expense of hundreds of litres of aviation fuel to get us here in time for our plane. I am awed by your generosity of spirit.’

  Prim became aware as soon as rowdy Connie withdrew that she and the professor made odd travelling companions, although neither of them said so. There were some hours to wait for their plane, and Prim suggested to the professor that they might hire a taxi and visit the city sights. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But I have some work to prepare. Do go yourself.’

  Yet Prim did not make a good solitary tourist, and so took out a novel while the professor made notations on pages of Arabic script. As the afternoon wore on, the professor decided to call home. Prim sat in the departure lounge, watching him speak to Kenyan and perhaps Sudanese operators. At last he was through. She saw him sagely nodding, then speaking at length. Looking sober, he returned.

  ‘Is everything well in your house?’ Prim asked him in Arabic.

  ‘Everything is well,’ he said, but she could tell that it was not so.

  She bought a newspaper for guidance. The Air Sudan strike was still on. A brigade-strength force of the Sudanese Army had been overrun by the SPLA at Torit. The Sudanese pound was falling yet again, and the National Islamic Front was crying for a movement of national salvation. Khartoum would be its jolly old self, still in decline!

&n
bsp; Prim suggested a meal. They sat in a café before slabs of tough steak and piles of chips. ‘It’s funny,’ the professor murmured, preoccupied, but politely making conversation. ‘On the level of popular culture and cuisine, the British made a much greater impression here in Kenya than in the Sudan.’

  Their aircraft was called at last, and they went though passport control and walked out across the tarmac in pleasant night air. In this anonymous area, between terminal and plane, the professor said, ‘There are some problems awaiting me, Primrose. Safi, my son, has been involved with some of his classmates in an anti-war riot. And of course, not a coy one – right along the Sharia el Nil and then past the foreign embassies. He has been arrested, charged before a magistrate, and is in prison on remand. Not the big gaol, Kober, I don’t think, God be praised! Khalda is desperate.’

  Prim felt a pulse of fear for the professor, fear for what she might need to witness, the police and army taking her companion away on arrival in Khartoum. What was she to do if el Rahzi was arrested? She was an aid eunuch, responsible for the survival of her NGO, and so with a professional duty to avoid trouble.

  The professor said, ‘I told my wife to get straight onto our friend el Dhouma – you met him, I think, at our place. He is an influential lawyer, and we have a home number for him.’

  They took their seats, and sat in silence. Tea was brought when the plane reached level air, and Prim was aware that she and the professor sipped it with the wistful meekness of those who have run foul of a system.

  Their plane wheeled in at last over the scatter of Khartoum’s lights and landed. They were two of a handful of passengers who rose to leave the plane – most of the others were bound for Cairo and Athens, and were requested to stay aboard. Prim and el Rahzi descended the stairs, looking for signs in the dry, clear night. Knots of police and soldiers conversed on the tarmac, but the customs and immigration hall proved to be quiet. The questions the immigration man asked were blessedly routine, and the professor was not delayed. Their bags collected, they simply walked out of the terminal, hoping for a taxi. They found that, though access to the front of the terminal had been blocked by armoured cars, Sherif was waving to them from behind a barrier of shrubs in the near-empty car park.

  ‘There’s a curfew,’ he cried as they drew near. He reached for their bags. ‘But I got a police pass to meet your plane. I left Mrs el Rahzi just forty minutes ago.’

  ‘News of Safi?’ asked the professor.

  ‘Not really. El Dhouma called and said he’d check things. Safi and his friends certainly picked a day to have a peace rally! This afternoon the army began occupying government offices. It’s a coup. There’s a rumour the prime minister is about to clear out to Cairo. A brigadier-general named Omar Bashir is said to be the coup leader and thus the new man.’ Sherif looked Prim in the eyes and said in a lowered voice as if he did not wish to encumber the professor with this particular reflection, ‘These guys will be very hawkish towards the war.’

  Even beneath the weight of this news, Prim was elated by the urgency of his voice. He opened the boot of his car for their bags and had time to touch her wrist. ‘Oh my love,’ he murmured in Arabic. ‘Ya habibti.’ She wished this was a banal night of no arrests and no civic uncertainties. ‘Where have you been, you evil woman?’ he whispered.

  ‘Nairobi, of course.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said with a mock sneer. ‘How is the mad baroness?’

  ‘Thank you for helping my wife,’ cried the professor to Sherif. ‘Who told you –?

  ‘Your wife knew I had been to school with the all-powerful el Dhouma. I believe his power has just gone up a notch too. This brigadier – Bashir – the National Islamic Front is in bed with him, and el Dhouma is their prized adviser. It seemed,’ said Sherif, ‘that el Dhouma was already busy making it possible for a number of prominent Islamic Front exiles to come home to work with what the brigadier called the National Salvation Revolutionary Command Council.

  Driving along unpeopled avenues into the city by way of the New Extension, the professor sat with Sherif in the front seat, maintaining the proprieties. For self-appointed men with canes had recently begun to appear about the streets, stopping vehicles, chastising and sometimes striking men and women who sat on the same seat together. Sherif parked the car outside the el Rahzis’, and though there was no one to overhear them, spoke mutedly as he took out the professor’s luggage. ‘Look there,’ said Sherif. Across the broad avenue beneath a tree a driver smoked a cigarette in a ministry-black, parked vehicle. From a small staff on its front superstructure the green flag of the republic drooped.

  In through the gate from the street, they were greeted at the open door by Khalda, her face twisted with distress. The embrace between herself and her husband was brisk and almost ritual, for both of them seemed distracted with fear for their son.

  ‘Dr el Dhouma is here,’ Khalda told her husband.

  ‘A good thing,’ he said.

  They followed her into the strange heat of the house, a warmth which seemed intensified by the politics of the day. El Dhouma, Sherif’s school friend, sat at a table in the living room, drinking Sudanese tea from a glass. Though the hour was late, and her son was at police headquarters, Mrs el Rahzi had found a plate of pastry to put within reach of the esteemed lawyer.

  El Dhouma stood and greeted the professor formally, as did the professor in return.

  ‘It is a pity you were away,’ the lawyer told el Rahzi. ‘I have had a long day with hardly any food, and so I shall come to the point. Why ever did you go to Nairobi with this woman?’ He nodded to Prim. ‘You must have known that this march was on the cards.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said the professor, ‘I did not know it was on the cards. I had not even heard it was intended.’

  ‘This is serious business,’ el Dhouma told him. ‘Your son cannot play at being political the way he might in an American university. I don’t know what he thinks he is doing … it is perhaps a means to attract women?’

  ‘What can you do for me in this case, my friend?’

  ‘My clients and friends in the National Islamic Front have been asked to join with members of the junta in the work of national salvation. This arrangement is extremely recent. And though I could use my influence with my clients to help Safi in his predicament, may I say that this is not a well I can return to more than once. There are emergency regulations in place now. But even under the present National Security Act there are at least ten sections which your son has violated.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the professor assented with a trace of annoyance.

  El Dhouma lifted his right index finger and looked at his old friend Sherif. ‘A word to all the wise, I hope. I know my clients well. I know the national war will be waged hard now, and the cultural war.’ Over some minutes he exhorted the el Rahzis to control their over-indulged son. Then he relented and suggested that he and the professor go to the police headquarters and if necessary the ministry.

  ‘Have no doubt,’ said el Dhouma. ‘Not all your son’s friends will come out of this so happily.’

  ‘My dear heaven,’ said the professor, losing his temper at last. ‘A protest, that’s all it was! They didn’t murder anyone! Freedom of assembly is in the UN Charter.’

  ‘Please, professor,’ said el Dhouma, ‘don’t be naïve.’

  Mrs el Rahzi stepped between the two men. ‘We’re very grateful. We’re very grateful, isn’t it so?’

  Prim and Sherif sat with Mrs el Rahzi until 4 a.m. Khalda spoke about visiting Cambridge with her father, an army engineer officer who had become a leading figure of the Umma party, and meeting the young el Rahzi, who was already a gifted tutor in Middle Eastern and East African affairs.

  ‘You might not think,’ she said drowsily, ‘that with all that has happened I could still be astounded at my country. You might think, “Oh, Africans are used to oppressive regimes.” I assure you they are as much of a surprise to me as to anyone. I don’t care. As long as he gets Safi ou
t.’

  They drank more tea. Khalda nodded, her chin dropped, and she fell asleep, breathing audibly. At last Prim and Sherif could look at each other as they would if alone, and Sherif’s annoyance was clearer than it had been as they had loaded the car at the airport.

  ‘Assure me you won’t go slave-trading any more with that Austrian lunatic. It is unwise. Believe me. El Dhouma is correct about one thing. These are not laughing matters.’

  She patted his head. ‘All right,’ she told him. ‘No more flights.’ She heard, by the air he expelled, that he had not been casually concerned for her.

  Mrs el Rahzi stirred then, forcing a close to a debate which still had some distance to run. She stretched, covered a yawn, and spoke. ‘It isn’t pleasant to be beholden to el Dhouma. He’s changed. Politics changes all of us. I was embarrassed for you, Primrose, and for my husband, at the imputation that the professor was on some improper enterprise in going to Nairobi.’

  It was first light when a car was heard outside, and the gates of the garden opened. Prim could hear the professor’s voice and Safi’s in discussion. Mrs el Rahzi rushed into the hallway and Prim and Sherif did not think it right to follow. There was a soft wailing, and much conversation. Something of Safi’s argument could be heard. ‘The Islamic Guard are permitted to parade in the university. Why aren’t we permitted to parade for a peace settlement?’

  Prim heard the argument move down the hall from the front door, past the door of the living room and towards the back of the house. It was as if Safi were prowling for food or medicine. A long parents-and-son discourse, marked only by the mildest traces of anger, settled in the kitchen.

  Without warning Sherif wrapped Prim in his arms. There was urgency. After they left here, roadblocks permitting, the strenuousness of sex could be let substitute more fruitfully for the strenuousness of an argument. They could hear the kitchen debate become sporadic. Soon Safi appeared in the living room, in a white shirt with a torn collar and stained fawn pants. He was barefooted, as if the police had kept his shoes and he had been willing to forget them. He said, ‘My mother tells me you have been absolute pillars. It was very kind of you to stay with her through the night.’