Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Could it be possible that the camel business was the equivalent for Sherif of what Benedetto’s speech had been for Dimp? Surely it was too minor a quarrel to have such weight.

  The second day in Hessiantown was spent searching out the leaders of the apparently twenty-seven distinct villages or clans in Alingaz 1. The people derived from different parts of the Nuba Hills – Limon, Doleibaya, Tabuli, Talodi, Talabi, Moro, Anderri in the north, Dimodong in the south. Though to the government in Khartoum they were all one in being a nuisance, the refugees themselves cherished, and might kill for, the distinctiveness of their own group. As there was no end to the minute particularity of atomic particles, there was none to the particularity of a given Nuba.

  The morning passed pleasantly, and Sherif’s spirits rose. Then at the close of a stupefying afternoon, the committee of leaders met with Nuara, Erwit, Prim and Sherif in a canvas-topped lean-to. In the sudden clarity of late afternoon, the camp committee of Alingaz 1 sat on the ground in a semi-circle. They wore a variety of faded galabias, shirts and cummerbunds, and thigh-length swathes of fabric.

  Sherif spread a rug, and he and the rest of the team sat at the mouth of the semi-circle of elders. Prim could sense at once that these venerable men placed a reliance on this meeting, an emphasis of hope, which could probably not be immediately justified. She had a sense that the same thought had occurred to Sherif.

  Above all, they seemed to think that Sherif and Austfam had come to adjust their permanently unsatisfactory relationship with Hanif: the food distributor, the man from the Commission of Refugees.

  One elder rose and said, ‘That man is no good. He sells ration cards to the Beja round about and to shopkeepers in Erkowit and Sinkat.’

  Acknowledging this, Sherif told the leaders that he had no authority over the Commission of Refugees. His wish to question a significant number of families was based on a desire to find out what capacities they held within themselves, and how they could best relate to their situation in Alingaz 1. This was a survey, said Sherif, which would be shared with them and with their community.

  The men became excited. One elderly spokesman with cataracts in his eyes stood up and declared, ‘We are ready to co-operate. We have been sitting in our houses waiting for someone like you to come. Better that we find people who can help us to be independent of such scoundrels as Hanif el Suq rather than to wait for their gifts.’

  Nothing Sherif said would persuade them to hope less.

  Another thin, tall man rose and declared that the people of Alingaz 1 had lost their hills because of their ignorance. They did not understand politics except in the most basic way, said the man. And now they had lost their country, so different from these hills. In the Nuba Hills the breeze was like sandalwood. Here it grated against the flesh. The trees of the richly watered Nuba Hills gave shade and fruit. One day they would all go back there, said the man, and it was to be desired that they would go back better informed, and with wider skills, than when the army moved them away.

  Many of the other elders applauded the man’s speech, and Sherif looked helplessly at Prim. He began to explain that health problems would also be looked at. And those results too would be presented to this very council, so that it could decide whether it could do anything about them. Particularly, Sherif said, he and his colleagues wanted to inquire into the deaths of infants under five years. Leathery Nuba elders with greying, frizzled hair stared at Sherif with piercing eyes. Of course they had heard this argument before – Sherif was aware of that. Be numbered for your own good! Let your tears be numbered! They hoped and they suspected. They wondered had this man the power to take from them the authority of their children’s deaths, to reduce the infant features, the intimately remembered screams or restiveness to numbers. Sherif began pedalling hard, to keep their enthusiasm for this project in place. ‘No names will be put down on paper,’ he assured them. ‘And I do speak of the possibility of gardens – watermelons, tomatoes and cardamom for sauces. I talk about chickens, donkeys and camels. I talk about co-operatives buying a grinding mill, and renting it to others. I talk of modest but hopeful things. I cannot offer you more.’

  Another lean Nuba rose, grey in his wiry hair, and said, ‘We thank you, sir, for thinking of us.’

  The meeting was breaking up when in the space between the food dump and the tarpaulin community centre, a white four-wheel drive vehicle drew up. On its sides was painted the green flag of the Sudan. Prim, watching from the shelter, saw a youngish man in fatigues get out, look about him, and head towards the rakubah. There was something familiar about him. Sherif obviously thought so too, for he rose and stepped out into the light, inquiring of the newly arrived government official, ‘Siddiq?’ The two men embraced. For this was Dr Osman Siddiq, a protégé of Sherif’s whom Prim had first met at the el Rahzis.

  ‘Come,’ said Sherif, ‘we are just finishing a meeting with the community.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Siddiq in English, smiling at Prim.

  ‘But I thought you were with the Ministry of Defence?’ asked Sherif.

  ‘I’ve been seconded here,’ said Siddiq, still the smooth-faced, youthful man Prim remembered. ‘When I read that you were one of the team,’ he said to Sherif, ‘I could barely believe it. Although, of course, I have read your earlier publications.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Sherif, mockingly, ‘you can recite them by heart. But how wonderful that you are here. You were being sent to Atbara, I seem to remember.’

  ‘And was promoted to Port Sudan. You never know, my friend, one day I might make my way back to the capital and live a civilised life.’

  Prim looked at Siddiq with gratitude. His friendly presence might turn the balance and bring Sherif fully back to the process.

  ‘And are you a big wheel,’ asked Sherif, ‘in Defence, or Health or wherever you are? Are you worth cultivating?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I think I am exactly the fellow a young chap like you must cultivate.’ And Siddiq and Sherif burst into fraternal laughter.

  Prim had been invited to join Sherif, Siddiq and Erwit for dinner in the yard by Hanif’s residence. Sherif set up a meal of canned tomatoes, flat bread and pasta on a collapsible table, and Prim walked towards it, through the evening camp, the endless intricacy of hessian shelters, un-reinforced by brush, since there was none to be had. By evening fires, Nuba women dressed each other’s wiry hair in strands which looked to Prim like maps of harvest. Women of the great Nuba evacuation! They looked up from beneath their eyebrows at her as she walked by.

  The dinner guests served themselves from the common bowl, and Siddiq spoke to her across the table. ‘And you had a good time with the camp committee?’ he asked, making a slight mouth, as if he knew that a camp committee of Nubas could be difficult.

  ‘It went well,’ Sherif told him. ‘Promising to show them the results – that goes well.’

  ‘You always were such a democrat, my friend,’ said Siddiq. ‘I have some suggestions for additional questions, though perhaps we should keep the answers to ourselves.’

  ‘Additional questions?’ asked Sherif. ‘I’m very happy to consider them. But with my present fifty-two questions I thought I had just about covered the field.’

  Siddiq smiled at Prim, as if to imply that Sherif had now achieved a middle-aged retentiveness, a resistance to the new.

  They ate their meal sitting on a circle of stones. It was as prodigiously hot as the night before, and Prim’s flesh itched. Like all the best scorpions, the sun had bitten her through her clothing. She felt too a section of fried flesh in the V of her shirt, which she had failed to cover with her bandanna.

  Erwit was, as ever, quiet. He was, Prim well knew, a very intelligent fellow, but he did not consider it his place to intrude in the purely Sudanese debate in progress between Sherif and Siddiq.

  They were discussing whether it was a good or bad thing that a public health official could rarely expect to be permitted to interview a woman alone. Her husband was always
present, sometimes a mother-in-law. When you asked a woman, for example, how many animals her family had grazed in the Nuba Hills, would she exaggerate the number out of regard for her husband? If you asked a woman was she willing to attend classes at the clinic, would she be inhibited by her husband’s presence from saying yes?

  Prim could tell that Sherif was anxious about the additional questions Siddiq had mentioned, of whether they would prove to be marginal or so intrusive that they would alter what he was trying to do. And so this secondary debate, instead of genuinely interesting Sherif, seemed to reduce him to the disequilibrium of earlier in the day.

  He nodded towards Hanif’s cot. On its far side, an oblivious Hanif sat in a chair, listening to a battery radio broadcasting music from Port Sudan, and drinking tea. ‘They all complain about that guy, by the way.’

  ‘Well, that’s standard,’ said Siddiq.

  ‘Tell me what you want to do here,’ said Sherif, sick of letting the main issue dangle in the air.

  ‘Well,’ said Siddiq, “the Ministry of Health is not paranoid, Sherif. As much as your rhetoric might be to do with breaking the dependence cycle, you still want to find the Crude Birth Rate, which you believe will be low – thus undermining the wisdom of the government’s clearing of the Nuba Hills. And you’ll come up with a figure for Infant Mortality that will be embarrassingly high. And we will live with that, if the verb “live” is not too callous.’

  ‘No,’ said Sherif. ‘Let’s not be particular. You mentioned added questions.’

  ‘Well, these people are a security risk,’ said Siddiq. ‘There are supporters of pro-Southern groups here. I’m sure this news is of no surprise to you. Not only that, but there are operative cells supporting the Southern People’s Liberation Army within Alingaz, tyrannising ordinary people and – you will not believe it, but it is so – raising anti-government funds.’

  Sherif said nothing, and Siddiq sighed.

  ‘I want to add some questions about the operations of these cells in Alingaz. I want to hear information from the people concerning pro-SPLA extortion here. You and I can devise the questions between us.’

  ‘No, we can’t,’ said Sherif. ‘I have undertaken to share the results of the questionnaire with the camp committee.’

  ‘We don’t need to let them know about these questions. We don’t need to give them these results. I assure you I have the interests of the ordinary refugees in mind. They don’t enjoy being under the thumb of the rebel machine.’

  ‘I don’t consider these people refugees,’ said Sherif.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Siddiq.

  ‘Now I understand why you were seconded from the Ministry of Defence! Are you a doctor? Or are you in intelligence and security?’

  ‘Please don’t insult me,’ said Siddiq. ‘You know I am a doctor.’

  ‘Then let us not ask political questions!’

  Hanif, Prim saw, was closely watching this painful argument between the toffs from Khartoum.

  Siddiq said, ‘Don’t be naïve, Sherif. All health and all aid are political.’

  ‘All I know is that I have guaranteed my results to the camp committee. If you are willing to do the same with the results of these few questions of yours, I might consider it.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that,’ said Siddiq.

  Prim intervened, ‘I think you miss the point too, Dr Siddiq, that this survey is financed by Austfam, which is not a servant of Sudanese government intelligence.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Siddiq, though she could not be sure it wasn’t an ironic reply. He held his hands up in surrender. ‘Look, let’s discuss this again.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ said Sherif.

  Siddiq winked at Prim. ‘Very well, I accept your position, maestro. Let’s not.’

  Sherif looked, frowning, at Prim, but still spoke to Siddiq. ‘I hope you’re being straight,’ he said.

  ‘What a thing to say to a maternal relative of the great Osman Digma, hero of our nation! “I hope you are being straight!”’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Sherif, nearly inaudibly. He looked at Prim. He meant it for her too. ‘Let us simply do good work.’

  Sherif’s nurses had at last arrived by the bus, which Erwit had met with the Austfam vehicle on the steep main road. Now Sherif arranged a dusk training session to the east of Nuara’s clinic for the entire group, including Siddiq. Before beginning the questionnaire with a particular man or woman, it was important that the interviewers explain the reasons for the survey, stress the need for frankness, assure the subjects that the interviewers were working with the camp committee, and that the result, without names attached, would be made known to the committee, and would be published independently of the government. People far away, in Australia, had provided the money for these questions to be asked, and indeed, for the arm measurements of the camp’s children to be randomly taken by the nurses.

  When the three interviewing teams went to a household, it was the head of the household who was to be the person interviewed, whether man or woman. If both man and wife were present, both might answer, although a man could be expected to insist on answering the questions on his wife’s behalf. If there were no adults present in a given hessian habitation, the interviewer was to go to the next one.

  The reliability of data, said Sherif, might be affected by the reluctance of people to talk about births and deaths of young children for fear that such deaths had resulted from the evil eye or sorcery, and to speak of such things was to invite them to occur again. But the interviewers must be gently persistent. The figures – birth and death – would represent trends, and could be compared with figures for other camps and the general population, and the comparison would be significant for suggesting the sort of action which should be taken in Alingaz. For instance, a low crude birth rate, said Sherif, was infallibly associated with a lower fertility rate because of malnutrition.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Siddiq, smiling. ‘At last we get to our friend Hanif.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said the terse and unfamiliar Sherif. ‘They may have come here malnourished.’

  Erwit, Dr Siddiq, Prim and the two nurses from Khartoum watched Sherif administer the questionnaire to Nuara, who tried to reproduce the answers her experience taught her to be normal amongst the Nuba. Ages and sex of family members, tribe, place of origin? Had any family members received any education? It was a matter on which, said both Sherif and Nuara, the Nuba were likely to be frank. They were not like European autodidacts who made up fictional university degrees for themselves. Then, occupation in the Nuba Hills – pastoralist? farmer? other?

  Other skills? I have no other skills, said Nuara, in her role as a Nuba paterfamilias. I had cattle and they are gone. I grew millet and it is gone. Here, Sherif told the team, you must probe. There are always other skills, if not in the man then in his wife, who may not think of a capacity to produce handicrafts as a skill. But handicrafts from the far-off Nuba Hills would have great novelty value in the souk at Erkowit or Sinkat or Port Sudan.

  So they got to question 32, a controversial one for Muslims. Would you be interested in introducing other subjects – maths, Arabic, health care, gardening – to the Koranic school, if there is one in Alingaz? Was anyone in the camp talking of starting a conventional non-Koranic school? If one was started, would you let your sons and daughters attend?

  Would you return to the Nuba Hills if the war ended? Sherif asked Nuara in her role as a Nuba. Siddiq had a little indulgent chuckle at this, as if the answer were obvious.

  And so the teams were drawn up – Erwit and Nuara; Prim and Nawal, one of the nurses; Siddiq and the second nurse. Sherif would oversee the process, but join Prim’s group whenever he could to add male gravitas to the questioning. Interviews would take place chiefly in the mornings, from six o’clock onwards, but if necessary two of the teams could work at dusk. In the mid-to-late afternoons Prim and Sherif would collate the results as they came in, and keep a running score on death and birth r
ates.

  On Prim’s fifth day in Alingaz, the questioning began. Prim and Nawal, a sturdy, self-certain person rather in the mould of Nuara, entered houses in which the light through the hessian gave the air a tannin cast. The house furnishings consisted of bowls, and an enamel or plastic pitcher, a few glasses for tea, lengths of floral cloth which sometimes were the only beds, and sometimes a palliasse of straw. Prim and Nawal were at some predictable disadvantage interviewing young, earnest fathers of families, though Nawal’s air of authority moderated that.

  Over a number of days, and in retrospect, the answers of all these randomly chosen interviewees started to blur. The person whom Prim would remember best was a woman who had lost a leg and was raising three young children alone in her dingy tent of hessian. Despite her mutilation, which had occurred as a result of some sort of cattle raid, perhaps by the Beggarah militia, perhaps by rebels – the details were hard to elucidate – she moved agilely about her house, sometimes using a crutch, in which case she moved at lightning speed to the fireplace at which she cooked outside her door. Her name was Wariba. She wore the ring of her lost marriage in her right nostril, her hair was tightly dressed in the Nuba manner, the rims of her ears were marked by yellow and red beads, and a three-year-old son was asleep at her breast. The points of her cheeks were marked with a triangle of scars, forked at the end. Her lost leg disqualified her, she knew, as a future desirable bride.

  When Prim worked at her laptop in the late afternoons, the morning’s uncollated harvest of questionnaires by her under one of Alingaz’s numerous red stones, it was Wariba she thought of, and it was in her name that the majority of responses seemed to resonate.

  There were not enough wells, Wariba had forthrightly told Prim and the nurse, Nawal. She had no choice but to send her children to fetch water in a plastic container, attached to a strap which they carried across their foreheads. There was a salty well at a khor, a watercourse, to the south. There was an old well at a place called Girgir, but it was difficult to climb into. Prim had seen such wells, holes in the ground, with the water running below. A slim person might lower herself and stand on a subterranean stone from which a plastic container might be filled and passed up to others on the surface. An occasional water truck came from Port Sudan and sold water.