The Canal House

by Mark Lee

  “This is happening in Kidepo park?” Daniel asked.

  “They’re killing animals in the park and in the area around it. If you fly up there with us, you can see what’s going on. Nothing will change unless we get some coverage in the international press.”

  “We came to Uganda to do a story about the Lord’s Righteous Army.”

  “Forget about Okello,” Tobias said. “He’s either dead or up in the Sudan.”

  “Maybe we need a backup article,” I told Daniel. “Editors like stories about large mammals.”

  Daniel nodded. “If you can show us Sudanese soldiers crossing the border and killing elephants, then I’ll write an article about it. Take us up to the Kosana refugee camp and we’ll be in the area for a few days if something happens.”

  Paul glanced at Tobias and smiled. They had been hunting for journalists and now they had captured two of them. “Sounds like a plan,” he said. “I’m flying there tomorrow to deliver a valve for their broken water pump.”

  THERE’S A PROBLEM with young idealists—they wake up too damn early in the morning. Paul Rosen called my room at seven and announced that he was leaving from Entebbe in two hours. I pulled on my clothes and hurried downstairs to the dining room where I ordered the Speke Hotel’s famous banana breakfast: banana pancakes, banana bread with whipped banana butter, fried plantains, and little finger bananas soaked in rum. I was starting to turn yellow when Winston arrived with his car. Daniel had given him some money to buy canned food and crackers at the marketplace. We packed everything into our traveling bags and headed for the airport.

  Paul’s Cessna 210 was parked on a side taxiway. While Daniel got out and talked to Tobias, I sat in the backseat and tried to digest my breakfast.

  “Did you sleep well?” Winston asked.

  “Fair enough.”

  “The Lord’s Righteous Army is not a good story. It would be better if you both traveled west to the Toro.”

  “I don’t want to meet Miss Universe, Winston. Maybe she’s beautiful and virtuous, but she won’t like me. I’m just the guy taking her picture.”

  “Toro is my home. We could stay with my uncle, drink beer, walk around and see the gorillas. Things are quiet in the mountains, but very beautiful. The water is clean and clear, and we can go swimming without harm.”

  “Sounds wonderful. But we’ve got to go to Kosana.”

  Winston reached forward and touched the black Virgin Mary. “When I dreamed last night, I saw Mr. McFarland lying dead on the ground. Someone had shot him.”

  I hesitated for a few seconds, almost convinced of the danger. “I’m sorry, Winston. Daniel is flying north and somebody’s bad dream won’t stop him. If he goes alone, he’ll probably do something crazy. If we travel together, I can hold him back a little.”

  Tobias walked over to the Mercedes and tapped on the window. “Wake up, Nicky! It’s time to go!”

  The Cessna was a modified four-seater with a large storage area in the back. They’d loaded several boxes of food and I counted fourteen plastic jerricans of gasoline for the ranger vehicles at Kidepo. It was a flying Molotov cocktail, yet Paul didn’t look worried. He was rearranging the gear when I approached him.

  “How much do you weigh, Nicky?”

  “About two hundred pounds. Maybe a little more.”

  “That puts us over the weight limitations, but it’s not a big problem.”

  “Get rid of some gasoline.”

  “They really need it. Truckers don’t want to carry supplies to the park because of the Lord’s Righteous Army. Every since the kidnappings, we’ve had problems getting supplies.”

  “So the plane’s too heavy?”

  “Technically, yes. But we’ve done it before. After we take off, everything will be all right.”

  I studied Paul’s confident smile and silently cursed my own stupidity. For some reason, I kept putting my life in the hands of optimists. Paul tied down everything in the storage area and we squeezed in. One of the jerricans must have been leaking because I could smell gasoline. Paul told jokes over the radio to a Ugandan in the control tower named Boniface, then taxied the Cessna to a patch of gravel at the end of the main runway.

  Hot, humid air pushed through the little windows. I was sweating. Tobias sat in the front passenger seat, next to Paul. He glanced back at me and grinned. “Don’t worry, Nicky. We had more weight last year taking off from Mombasa.”

  “But it’s hotter today,” Paul said. “So the density altitude is higher.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “If we were in Iceland, this would be easy.”

  The Cessna began moving slowly down the runway. Daniel rolled up his shirtsleeve and scratched a mosquito bite. He looked like he was sitting on a bus in London. “You take your chloroquine, Nicky?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I mean, yes. I took it. Yes.”

  Paul watched the air speed indicator and began calling out numbers to Tobias. “Thirty-three, forty, fifty. Damn.”

  We were already halfway down the runway and not even close to taking off. My stomach grumbled. Shouldn’t have eaten all those bananas. Faster. A little faster. Then, about ten feet from the end of the runway, Paul pulled back the yoke and the plane rose into the air. Within seconds, we dropped back down about twenty feet and I heard the landing gear ripping through the tops of the tall reeds at the edge of the lake. Before I could panic, the Cessna glided back up again. We made a slow, wide turn, like a barge in sluggish water, and headed north.

  Paul’s mother had sent him a package of kosher food for Passover. When we reached two thousand feet, Tobias handed us a box of macaroons, then spread peanut butter on matzo crackers. It was loud inside the Cessna. Whenever we hit turbulence, the plane bounced a little, as if we were driving over a low hill.

  Below us were small farms and coffee plantations. I could see the light green fields of plantain and cassava surrounded by the forest. A plume of smoke rose from a solitary fire as we passed over a small village, its metal roofs glimmering in the sun.

  I brushed the matzo crumbs off my lap. We cut across the western edge of Lake Kwania and the landscape changed into a vast savanna, dotted with red termite hills and acacia trees. You could see the bare red lines of earth from cow tracks that split apart like capillaries and recombined at water holes. The cattle milled around the muddy water: white bulls and brindle cows, their long horns jabbing up at the sky. Dust boiled up from the back wheels of a truck racing down a dirt road.

  When we began to see wild animals, Paul and Tobias argued about the population of various species. Paul swooped down to check out large herds of spiral-horned kudu and Grant’s gazelles. Frightened by the plane, the animals fled through the tall grass. The herd seemed to flow like a stream of water, rippling and changing course with every obstacle.

  Red volcanic hills appeared near the boundary of Kidepo park. Surrounded by the flat savanna, they looked vaguely artificial. It was a harsh region with large areas of bushland thicket that could easily hide a guerrilla army.

  We flew over the little white cottages of Apoka Lodge, where the six tourists had stayed before their kidnapping, and Paul zigzagged across the massive game park looking for signs of Sudanese poachers. As we headed northeast and approached Kosana, Tobias began to tease his friend about an Irish nurse named Ellen who worked at the camp. Apparently, Paul had flown her around the park a few weeks ago. They had landed in some isolated area and had had a picnic in the middle of Eden. It wasn’t quite clear what happened after that.

  “Did she get a sunburn?” Tobias asked. “I’ve heard that red-haired women are very sensitive to the sun.”

  “We put on sunblock.”

  “Any mosquito bites, Paul? I hope they weren’t in sensitive parts of the body.”

  “We were there to see the flora and fauna.”

  “Yes. Of course. Her flora and your fauna.”

  Paul reduced power and the plane descended a
few hundred feet. “There’s Kosana,” he said.

  When I looked down, I saw more than two hundred tents in the middle of a grassy plain. There were bright blue plastic tents and olive green military tents, all of them arranged in little clusters that were linked by a spiderweb of footpaths. A dirt landing strip had been set up about a half mile from the camp and a silver airplane was parked near a clump of thornbushes.

  “That’s Erik Viltner’s Super Cub,” Paul told us. “I guess Richard Seaton hired Erik to fly him up from Nairobi.”

  “And Seaton is the doctor’s boyfriend?” Daniel asked.

  “You mean Julia? Yes. She’s in charge of the camp.”

  We roared over the tents. Paul banked the plane to the left and for a few seconds the sun blinded me. Trains and planes and taxi rides had brought us to this place, but I still had no idea how we were going to find the Lord’s Righteous Army.

  Julia

  4 KOSANA REFUGEE CAMP

  The night before I left for Africa, Richard asked me to meet him at Sage, a new restaurant in South Kensington. He was late, but I’d come to expect that. Richard generally ignored the constraints of time. He had become so successful in his twenties that for the last fifteen years people had waited for him, waited so patiently that he had become used to their forbearance. Lateness added urgency and drama to his daily schedule; it pushed him forward into each new situation.

  I had brought along two books in my bag, Langewiesche’s Sahara Unveiled and the new edition of Harcourt’s Tropical Diseases. While the waiter brought a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I looked around the restaurant. That night I realized that all of Richard’s favorite restaurants had certain similarities. He liked new places, open for one or two years, with lots of light and glass, and young food servers wearing long white aprons. The food itself wasn’t that important, something light and low fat, presented attractively. He hated any place with dark rooms, heavy chairs, marrow bones, and elaborate desserts.

  I loved going to restaurants because I was such a bad cook. I was in awe of flaky pie crusts and light soufflés, though waiters and waitresses made me uncomfortable. I always felt passive and trapped at the table, smiling politely while some stranger brought me a plate. I wanted to stand up and walk into the kitchen, gossip with the cooks and the bus-boys, see what kind of fish was in the refrigerator.

  I was reading about new treatments for malaria and drinking my second glass of wine when Richard’s phone calls began to arrive. The bald headwaiter was like a military courier, delivering one folded piece of paper after another. During the last year, I had managed to hold on to the last shreds of my independence: I didn’t live with Richard when I was in England and I refused to carry a cell phone. Neither choice was practical, but I wanted to keep a thin demarcation between our two lives. Richard carried a satellite phone and something called a Black-Berry that allowed him to read his e-mail in the bathtub. “You can always switch it off,” he explained, but I didn’t want to be bothered. When I was away from the telephone, I was out, couldn’t be reached, and would be back sometime later. So now, instead of talking to me directly, Richard’s messages were conveyed through the headwaiter. Mr. Seaton had left his office. Mr. Seaton’s car was turning onto Brompton Road. Mr. Seaton was less than five minutes away.

  Finally, Richard appeared in jeans and a camel-hair jacket. He dressed like a student or a young lecturer, in clothing that always looked slightly rumpled. Carrying a shopping bag, he followed the headwaiter over to the table. Richard wasn’t famous enough to get immediate recognition from the public. But as he walked across the restaurant you could see people registering the thought Oh, that’s the man on television. What’s his name? Seaton. Richard came forward in a rush, leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “Julia, darling. I am sorry. Late again.”

  “This wine’s quite good,” I said, closing the book. “You should try it.”

  “Bring us a bottle,” Richard told the headwaiter, then reached into the bag and came up with a present tied with gold ribbon. “I got something for you,” he said. “Little going-away gift.”

  It was a leather Gucci toiletry case about the size of a purse. Inside were thick, frosted glass bottles filled with shampoo and hair rinse, and special 45 SPF makeup for the African sun. I knew that Richard hadn’t gone into a store and purchased it himself. His employees handled virtually all the practical details of his life—the dog-walking, shoe-polishing, chip-the-ice-off-the-windscreen moments of drudgery. I could tell that the gift had been chosen by a woman who had given a great deal of thought to what she would require in the middle of an African refugee camp.

  “Do you like it?” Richard asked.

  “Yes. It’s marvelous. Just what I needed.”

  Of course, I didn’t need any of it. Over the years I’d learned to boil my necessities down to two traveling bags: my Practical Bag, for medical equipment, travel documents, and money; and my Personal Bag with a toothbrush, one hairbrush, a mosquito net, an ankle-length cotton dress for meeting officials, four T-shirts, two pairs of pants, a sweater, underwear, and a few books. There wasn’t enough room for the Gucci case in either bag. I would have left it in London, but Richard noticed everything. At some point, he would realize that the case wasn’t in my tent. If it wasn’t there, then it was the wrong gift, and Stacy or Jennifer or any one of the other young women who smiled at me whenever I dropped by Richard’s office might suffer career damage for the rest of her life at the Riverside Bank.

  I ended up taking my sweater out of the Practical Bag and forcing the case inside. It annoyed me to have to think about the sweater, carrying it along, not losing it on the plane flight to Kenya, but the moment I crossed the border into Uganda all minor problems were blasted away by the immediate situation. That was one thing that outsiders didn’t understand about working in a refugee camp. Yes, you were going to a place where people were sick and starving, where nothing worked and you might be in danger. But everything was simpler there: you never thought about how you looked and what you should wear, you never had to deal with rush hour and overdrafts at your bank, there were no hospital administrators criticizing how much time you spent with a patient. There were so many ambiguities back home, so many compromises. Life was difficult at a refugee camp, but easier, too.

  The only thing I really needed to bring along was the blue toothbrush I had purchased before I left for college. It was worn down and completely unusable, but I always made a point of placing it next to my cot or my sleeping bag. I didn’t own a flat back in London or a house in the country, didn’t have furniture in storage or something permanent to return to. My mother once said that home was where your heart remained, but I carried my heart with me and I kept it fairly well protected. Home was where I placed the toothbrush and where I turned out the light. And now, of course, home included a Gucci toiletry case.

  OUR CAMP WAS SET up in the middle of a savanna plain dotted with termite mounds and thornbushes. Kosana had once been a destination for the migrating tribes that lived in the area, marked by a dead acacia tree and a well with watering ditches for cattle. The well went dry about two days after I arrived. We set up the tents, drilled our own wells, and waited. After a week or so, small groups of refugees appeared on the horizon. The dust and heat distorted the air and people seemed to emerge from the earth, then grow larger as they came closer. When they reached Kosana they would stop at the outskirts of the camp, like shy children who had just arrived at a birthday party. I would walk out and invite everyone to share our food and shelter.

  The refugees were Karamojong, a general name for the six subtribes that lived in the border region between Sudan and Uganda. They were a tall, slender people with dark black skin. The women wore ragged clothes and copper bracelets that clicked together whenever they moved their arms. They smiled at me but didn’t meet my eyes. Whenever I turned around quickly, I saw them staring at my clothes and hair. I obviously wasn’t a man, but I wasn’t what they considered a woman. A third sex, perhaps, a good
witch with the power to save their children.

  The male Karamojong also thought I was strange, but they were so proud and imperious in their manner that it was difficult to know what they were thinking. Most of men were naked except for the shuka cloths they draped over their shoulders. I recall some pop psychologist saying that we wore clothes to impress and dominate each other, but there was nothing more intimidating than a naked man, two meters tall, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. But though the Karamojong were harsh to their enemies, they indulged their children. All the adults played with them, touched them, spoiled them completely as if anticipating the pain of their adult life.

  They were dependent on their cattle, following the herds across the grasslands and protecting them from lions and raiders. The young men sang songs to their favorite cows and decorated their long, curving horns. I had brought two Irish nurses with me, both of whom had grown up on farms. One afternoon, Fiona was talking to an elderly Karamojong man about his life back in the Sudan. “My father had cows, too,” she said. The old man didn’t seem to understand her English so she made two little horns with her forefingers. “You know. Cows.” Fiona smiled and mooed, the sort of thing you’d hear from a genteel Irish Guernsey grazing on a green hill.

  “No moo,” the old man said. And then he made a deep bellowing sound that seemed to come from deep in his body, the sound of bride price and feasting, the sound of a dying tradition.

  For the most part, the Karamojong hadn’t gotten involved in the civil war between the Muslims of northern Sudan and the Christians in the south, but a new general had come to power in Khartoum and decided to create a “wall of fire” surrounding his country. Mirage jets began dropping napalm on the cattle herds, and the Karamojong in Sudan fled across the border to Uganda.

  The Gucci toiletry case seemed exotic and out of place next to all this, as if one of the Karamojong, naked and carrying his rifle, had appeared in the middle of Oxford Street. The case stayed beneath my folding cot and it began to make me feel guilty in the morning. I told myself that I should at least use the shampoo and hair rinse, but our shower was just a bucket on a pulley. It seemed completely awkward to place the frosted glass bottles on the red mud. I thought about using the makeup; the idea of putting it on in that heat was more than I could bear. Besides, there were so many other things that needed my attention. Someone was dying or being born. We were running low on antibiotics. One of the Ugandan soldiers who was supposed to be guarding the camp was swaggering around looking for available women, and the Karamojong men were ready to stick a knife through his ribs. Most days I was busy and occupied and there were times when I felt as if part of myself was disappearing, dissolved into the general need.