Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  The chef nodded, gave him more soup. He was a big man, and his uniform – brilliant white and perfectly starched – stretched across his chest as he leaned in with the bowl. ‘Not good food there,’ he said, in accented English. ‘I told you to take care.’

  ‘You did.’

  The chef smiled, put a hand on the young engineer’s shoulder. ‘But you are young. You want to try everything. I understand. This is the time for trying.’

  The young engineer winced as a fresh wave of pain sawed its way through his guts. The whisky probably hadn’t helped either.

  The chef patted him on the shoulder, rose, stood by the bed. ‘You are feeling a little better, yes?’

  ‘Thanks to you, Hakim.’

  The chef’s face creased into a big smile. ‘I will go home now. But I will come back and check on you this evening. I will bring you some more soup. Perhaps some fresh bread.’

  The young engineer nodded, watched the older man turn and leave the room. The thought of food sent his stomach reeling again. As soon as the chef had gone, he dragged himself out of bed and started towards the bathroom, swaying on unsteady legs.

  That afternoon, he managed to sleep. When he woke, it was dark, and through the big windows he could see the lights coming from the cooking fires across the valley. He switched on his bedside lamp, drank some water and trudged to the bathroom. He still felt weak, but the pain had receded.

  The young engineer dressed and moved to the living room, sat on the couch. He was trying to concentrate on Robertson Davies’ The Manticore, when the chef arrived.

  ‘A very light meal tonight,’ said the chef, ladling soup into his bowl, his movements precise, expert, no drop wasted. ‘Tomorrow you will be much better, and breakfast will be special.’

  The young engineer tried the soup. A chicken broth with vegetables, a lovely taste of pepper, perfectly salted. The electrolytes and protein his body was craving. The smell of freshly baked bread filled the room. The chef placed a steaming roll on his side plate, offered him butter. The young engineer broke the roll open, carved out a big chunk of butter and watched it melt into the bread. Never had anything tasted so good. And as he ate, the chef stood silent by the sideboard, the napkin folded over his arm, watching.

  When he’d finished, and the table had been cleared and the boys dispatched back to the kitchen, the young engineer stood and shook the chef’s hand. The chef made to leave.

  ‘Stay a moment, please, Hakim,’ he said.

  The chef turned and faced him.

  ‘I wanted to thank you, Hakim. What you have done, over the last few days, well, I don’t know what to say.’

  The chef smiled, waved this away. ‘No matter, no matter,’ he said.

  ‘Please, is there some way I can thank you?’ said the young engineer, reaching for the fold of US dollars he’d put into his trouser pocket for just this purpose.

  The chef glanced down at the young engineer’s hand, fixed his gaze, shook his head back and forth. ‘No, Mister Warren. Absolutely not.’

  The young engineer withdrew his hand, empty. Of course. Of course.

  ‘Thank you, Mister Warren.’

  The young engineer nodded. ‘What are you doing here, Hakim? In the middle of nowhere. You could work anywhere. The best restaurants.’

  The chef glanced down at his shoes a moment. ‘This is my home now, Mister Warren.’

  ‘Where did you live before?’

  ‘In Addis.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  The chef glanced over his shoulder, back towards the door. He stood a moment looking straight into the young engineer’s eyes, as if making a decision, coming to some determination. After a moment, he said, voice lowered: ‘I was head chef at the presidential palace. It was a long time ago.’

  The young man drew a breath. ‘You were Haile Selassie’s chef?’

  The chef nodded. ‘The emperor and his ministers. State dinners for two hundred people, three hundred sometimes, I cooked for. The very best china, silverware, ingredients shipped from around the world, Russian caviar and French cheese and wines. Ministers, ladies, generals.’ He sighed. ‘But ten people owned eighty percent of the land. And then there was a terrible famine that the government hid from the world.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The socialist revolution came. Eighty ministers were shot. Many of the staff at the palace, too. The emperor was strangled, God rest his soul. I was captured, held in prison for more than a year. My wife and baby girl almost starved. Finally, I was released, banished to the country. I came here ten years ago, with my family.’

  The young engineer, whose life in comparison had been without such tumult, closed his eyes, searched for words that might be adequate, but could find none.

  ‘Please,’ said the chef. ‘Tell no one. It is still very dangerous for me.’

  The young engineer closed his eyes a moment and nodded, offered his hand. ‘Of course, Hakim. You have my word.’

  The chef shook his hand and left by the back door, as the rules stipulated. The young engineer watched him close the door behind him, then a few minutes later, caught a glimpse of him through the front windows as he turned along the road leading to the village, dressed in dark trousers and jacket. Under his arm, carefully folded, ghostly white in the rising quarter-moon, were his uniform and chef’s hat.

  The young engineer waited until the chef was almost at the first bend in the road, then he slipped out through the front door and climbed the slope behind the guest house and started through the dark trees and across the fraying rhyolite towards the village. Still weak, he struggled through the darkened ridgeland, panting in the cold, stopping frequently to rest.

  The chef wasn’t moving quickly. Just ambling along the roadside. The young engineer kept to the trees, close to within about fifty metres of the other man, keeping as quiet as he could. He could hear the chef humming some village tune, his voice deep like a waterfall. Soon they were approaching the village, the chef there on the road, the young engineer tracking him along the high ground of the ridge, a shadow among the trees and the boulders.

  And then the chef stopped, stood a moment as if listening for some far-off call. He looked down the road, back along where he’d come, and then turned down a narrow footpath towards a small hut on the edge of the village. Yellow light glowed in a small window, shone warm from gaps between the mud walls and the sloping thatch of the roof. Smoke wisped from the chimney. In the moonlight, the young engineer could make out a little garden out front, vegetables and sleeping sunflowers, a bicycle leaning against a tree, small outbuildings.

  The young engineer scrambled down the slope, stopped behind a large boulder not far from the roadside, and watched the chef approach the hut. As he neared, the door opened. A woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a long, flowing cloth and an elegantly piled headdress. He reached for her hand, kissed her on the cheek. She smiled at him, kissed him back, took his uniform. Then he slipped his arm around her waist and led her inside. As he turned to close the door, he stopped and gazed out across the road until he was looking right at the young engineer. Then he smiled, raised his hand a moment and turned away and closed the door.

  Blue Nile

  ‘Mengistu is a dog.’ Teferi swayed in the wavering lamplight, turned his empty glass over and placed it rim down on the table between them.

  ‘Your president’s reputation is…’ The young engineer paused, aware of his position as a guest. ‘Controversial. The project was almost cancelled because of it.’

  ‘I would use a stronger word, but I do not know it in English,’ said Teferi.

  The young engineer found the tabletop with the base of his glass, grabbed the edge of the wood stool, steadied himself. Sweat slurried down the gutter of his spine, pooled between his buttocks. ‘Describe it to me,’ he said, shifting on his stool. His words circled around the mud-brick walls of the hut, came back as a distortion.

  ‘It is when you are…’ Teferi paused, moved
the middle finger of his right hand in and out of his left fist ‘…to someone already dead.’ He raised his hand, signalled towards the darkened end of the hut.

  A man emerged from the edge of the lamplight carrying a bottle, shuffled to their table, refilled the young engineer’s glass with a trembling hand. Some of the caramel-coloured liquid spilled on to the tabletop.

  ‘Ameseginalehugn,’ said the young engineer, the Amharic brutal in his throat. Thank you. The first and most important words to learn in a new country.

  The old man nodded, disappeared back into the darkness.

  ‘He is hungry,’ said the young engineer with a tip of his head.

  ‘Everyone here is hungry.’

  ‘Not everyone.’ The young engineer recalled the place on the outskirts of Addis Ababa where they’d stopped weeks before, at the start of the journey to the dam. While Teferi had bargained for supplies with the shop owner, he’d wandered the store, found his way to the back aisles. There, on a shelf against the back wall, sacks of grain piled high, dozens of them, fifty-pound bags of flour, plastic gallon jugs of canola oil set out in ranks. All emblazoned with the handshake logo of USAID, and the words Gift of the People of the United States of America stamped in black beneath. All for sale.

  The young engineer felt the first tremor, the now familiar destabilisation of the ground under his feet, the lurch of gravity, a reversal of Coriolis, ten times stronger. He walked his fingers to and around the glass, spilled more of the stuff they were calling whisky on to the table.

  Teferi sipped his drink. ‘When will you finish your work?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘And then the dam will be fixed?’

  ‘The dam is not broken, Teferi. The penstock is the problem – the pipe that carries water to the turbines. It was built on swelling soils, and it’s shifting.’ The young engineer lifted his right forearm, tilted it to an angle, pushed it upwards with the fingertips of his left hand. ‘If it shifts too much, the pipe will rupture.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘The lights go out. For a long time.’

  Teferi nodded, scratched the top of his head. ‘What remains for you to do?’

  ‘The drainage galleries we’ve been installing will keep the penstock’s foundations stable. The last one is going in tomorrow.’

  ‘How many more days do you need?’

  ‘Two or three.’

  Teferi nodded. ‘You must finish quickly.’

  The young engineer did not reply, took a slug of alcohol.

  ‘And then you must go home.’

  A distant concussion shook the hut, thrummed in his chest a moment.

  ‘The rebels are close,’ said Teferi.

  ‘Will they cross the river?’

  ‘Soon, yes.’

  ‘What will happen if they win?’

  Teferi grinned a moment, as many teeth as not. Then his lips closed and pursed and his gaze flicked away to the right, towards the entrance. Sensing movement, the young engineer swivelled on his stool. A man stood in the doorway. Kerosene lamplight lit one side of his face, left the other in shadow. Sweat stained the front of his uniform, dark wedges in the centre of his chest and under his arms. A handgun hung from a belt around his waist. He was small, his clothes outsized, like a boy playing at being a man. The soldier nodded to the barman, said something in Amharic. There were only four small tables in the place, each with a pair of stools. The soldier walked to a table set against the opposite wall, sat down, looked at them.

  Teferi glanced at the glass on the table between them. ‘Finish,’ he said. A whisper. ‘We must go.’

  The young engineer shook his head. ‘Always it is this way.’

  ‘You do not like our country.’

  ‘I like most of it very much.’

  ‘But not this?’

  ‘Not how it is run, or who runs it.’

  Teferi frowned. ‘And yet you are here.’

  ‘Please understand,’ said the young engineer. ‘I hope there is more good than bad.’ That is what he told himself, had convinced himself he still believed.

  ‘Finish your drink. We will go before there is a problem.’

  The young engineer drank. He stood, the mud floor shifting beneath his soles, and started towards the doorway.

  ‘Koom,’ said the soldier. Stop.

  The young engineer stopped, turned and glared at the soldier. He may have been young, but it was hard to tell. Lines gullied the skin around his eye sockets. Sweat beaded on his forehead, greased his temples. Like everyone here, his bones seemed very close to the surface.

  ‘Necrophile,’ the young engineer said.

  Teferi glanced at him, a question in the flex of his left cheek.

  ‘That’s the word.’ The young engineer stared at the soldier, made the same motion with his finger and fist as Teferi had. Then he raised his voice. ‘Fucks the dead.’

  Teferi grabbed the young engineer’s arm, started guiding him towards the door. ‘Please, do not provoke.’

  The soldier called out in Amharic.

  They were almost at the doorway now. Outside, the living din of the African night, the dark earth radiating the day’s heat, the desperate, transpired humidity of a thousand days without rain, all of it accelerating the vortex in his head.

  ‘Keep going,’ whispered Teferi.

  The young engineer stumbled, gripped his friend’s shoulder.

  ‘Koom,’ the soldier repeated, louder this time.

  They stopped, turned to face him. He was on his feet now, moving towards them, speaking rapidly. Teferi held his palms out and open, responding. The young engineer could make out a few words among the tones of conciliation – aznalehu. excuse me; i’bakih, please.

  The soldier was close now, a fist’s throw away. His voice was shrill, constricted, loud against the night. He waved his hands in the air, alternatively pointing out into the darkness and at Teferi’s chest. The young engineer planted his feet, stared back at the soldier, adrenaline cutting through the booze. He was a head taller than the soldier and almost half as heavy again. He leaned in, stared down at the man.

  The soldier pointed at Teferi, said something the young engineer could not understand. Anger boiled in his words. Teferi took a step back. The young engineer did not. The soldier was yelling at him now, jabbing his finger at him as if this alone could somehow translate, explain, solve. And the young engineer realised that it was no longer about the things he had seen since he’d arrived in the Horn of Africa, the war raging closer every day as the rebels moved south, or even the simmering anger inside himself that he had brought with him to this fevered continent. It was something altogether more basic, this exothermic proximity, the heat generated when fight overcame flight.

  ‘Fuck you, asshole,’ the young engineer shouted, forcing the syllables out from deep within himself. ‘He has as much right to be here as you do.’

  Teferi grabbed his arm, started pulling him towards the door.

  The soldier, initially taken aback by this foreigner’s outburst, renewed his attack.

  ‘Please,’ said Teferi, hauling on the young engineer’s arm. ‘There is no need. Come.’

  The young engineer twisted away from Teferi’s grip, bunched his fists at his sides, and took a hard step towards the soldier. Surprised, the soldier lurched back. His foot caught a table leg, and he toppled backwards over a stool, hands clawing at dead air. He hovered there for a moment, and then came down hard, the back of his skull striking the edge of one of the rough plank tables. It sounded like a car door closing. That hollowness.

  They stood looking down at the soldier, waiting for him to get up.

  But he didn’t.

  ‘Jesus,’ said the young engineer. ‘I didn’t mean to…’ He stepped forwards to help the soldier, but Teferi grabbed him.

  ‘He’s not moving.’

  Teferi shook his head. ‘We must leave. Now.’

  ‘We should help him.’

  ‘Please. Before someone comes.’r />
  They ran to the car. Theirs was the only vehicle in the small dirt clearing under the dark shadow of a sprawling mango tree. Soon Teferi had the car hurtling towards the main road, the dim myopia of the headlights jetting through the hacked bush that crowded both sides of the red earth track.

  They didn’t speak for a long time. After a while, they left the main road and moved through darkened fields and sleeping thatch villages, the country increasingly rocky and covered in stunted trees. By the stars – Dubhe and Merak pointing to Polaris – the young engineer knew that they were heading north, towards the river.

  ‘Where are we going, Teferi?’ he asked, still shaking from the encounter at the bar.

  ‘Before you leave, I must show you.’

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘Not far.’ Teferi guided the car up a narrow track through the brush. The vehicle lurched over the rutted, uneven ground, the suspension groaning. After a while, the track ended. Teferi stopped the car, turned off the engine. They sat a moment, blinded. Slowly, the world reappeared, lit by precarious stars. ‘Walk now,’ he said.

  The night was very still. The silence of a billion screaming insects. The young engineer followed Teferi up the rocky slope. Sweat ran cold at his temples, across his chest. A chill shuddered through him.

  ‘That soldier…’ he said.

  Teferi stopped, turned back to face him. ‘It was not your fault,’ he whispered. ‘You must be quiet now.’

  ‘If the police find out…’

  Teferi shook his head. ‘Come, we must hurry.’

  They climbed. Ahead, the dark silhouette of a ridgeline, constellations behind, the dust of nebulae. A sudden flash erased the stars, revealed a silvered landscape of crags and boulders, a hacked-out geometry of shadows. As quickly, it was gone. The young engineer stumbled, disoriented, the ground flexing like hot rubber beneath him. Seconds later, the distant shock of thunder, felt as much as heard.

  He kept moving, Teferi there ahead of him, almost invisible in the darkness. The slope had died away now, and ahead he could see some sort of precipice, and beyond that, the edge of a cliff, a pale fluttering sheet of rock. After a while, Teferi stopped and dropped to the ground and signalled him to do the same. Side by side, they snaked their way towards the precipice.