by Andrew Brown
‘You will see them again,’ Alek informed him.
There was a long pause and Gabriel wondered whether this was the only comment she intended to make.
‘At Jila,’ she added quietly.
The final figure was a young boy, his face emotionless with fatigue – and trauma, Gabriel imagined. That at his young age he had seen too much, lost too much. At the last moment, the boy’s eyes flicked up from the road and glanced at him. An unsettling flash of contact, and then they were past, now only a group of bedraggled figures in his rear-view mirror, trudging their way to whatever solace Western aid could provide.
‘I recognise them. They’re from the neighbouring area. We’re nearly there.’
‘Where is there, Alek? Where are you taking us?’
‘To a village. Malual Kon.’ She offered nothing more.
‘What for? Why are we going to this village? When did my research get hijacked by your personal … revenge? I think I deserve to know, Alek.’
‘I am not ungrateful, Mr Gabriel. I understand that, for you, from where you come from, this isn’t easy. And, yes, you deserve now to know. But not before, or you would not have come.
‘Malual Kon is the village where my father’s family lived,’ she explained.‘They lived simply, not understanding what was happening to our country around them. My father tried to explain, but they shook their heads and complained that the rains had not yet come. The millet crop was failing, the goats were sickly, life was hard enough and they didn’t want to hear about border disputes. Or Bashir’s plan to seize oil that they had never seen.’
Alek was staring out ahead, an edge like steel to her voice. Gabriel had never heard her so quietly fierce before.
‘My father didn’t visit them often, because he knew the danger of coming so close to the border. They were always looking for him, waiting for an opportunity to take him. Towards the end he was very careful. Bashir had his spies everywhere. But I didn’t realise that they were watching me as well. They knew I would see him. My love for him was too strong to stay away. When I came to see my aunt, I did not realise. I wasn’t going to see my father – he was not there. I knew that, but they did not. They followed me, hoping to find him. It was me. I brought them here.’
‘Who? Who are “they”? Who are these people following you?’
‘Al Babr. Doing the Devil’s work.’
Gabriel remained desolately confused. But Alek gave him no quarter.
‘Better that you don’t ask any more. You will see what you need to see. You will understand what you need to understand.’
They drove for several more minutes in silence, Gabriel resigning himself to his fate, and Alek sitting forward in her seat, scanning the landscape for familiar landmarks.
‘We are here,’ she said as the next settlement came into view.
It must have been a large village once, spread out over a wide distance, small paths connecting the different collections of huts and livestock enclosures. Children would have run on the paths, scampering from one family unit to another, chickens scattering as the little gangs rushed past. But the paths and low vegetation were all that remained. Each dwelling area had been reduced to a few circles of charred walls and blackened earth. The livestock zaraib had burnt to the ground, only an occasional stump sticking out. In the middle, Gabriel could make out a grisly heap of contorted leg bones and sinewy vertebrae, in places still held together by scorched hide. The animals had died in their shelter. Although the conflagration must have happened months before, the rot of the carcasses still soured the air. Gabriel paused, putting up his arm to his face in a vain effort to block out the odour. But Alek had already marched past, weaving along a path between the rubble of huts. Gabriel followed after her, pausing only at the sight of a half-burnt rag, once a purple headscarf perhaps, hanging snagged from the low branch of a thorn tree.
‘Do you have your camera?’ Alek asked.
Gabriel remembered Alek’s comment in Juba, about his usefulness – the fact that he had no formal affiliations, and, indeed, his camera. ‘I think I’m finally beginning to understand why you brought me here,’ he said. ‘I can’t pretend that I am surprised, Alek, or particularly enamoured. But, yes, I have my camera.’
He raised his camera and focused on the remains of the ripped shawl, a smudge of colour against a charcoal background.
‘It is irrelevant,’ Alek said. ‘Come with me.’
Gabriel pressed the button anyway, before lowering his camera and following after her.
They made their way along a narrow pathway, ignoring one demolished hut after another. There was a surreal quality to their surroundings, as if the scorch marks had been painted on the half-standing walls, and the village was an entertainment-park pretence at an apocalypse. He could have been on a movie set, waiting for someone to order them out of the shot. Except for the odour, an undercurrent that lifted and subsided, ethereal but doggedly real.
The huts petered out and the terrain opened into a rocky area, leading slightly uphill. The air seemed suddenly to worsen. Gabriel’s wary pace stuttered further. Alek, too, had slowed and her breathing became deliberate, as if she was preparing herself for something. They came up the brief rise and stopped, a dry gulley of rock and scrub below them.
Rocks had tumbled down the red-earthed slope, collecting up against the large boulders that rested in the middle of the dry riverbed. The rocks stretched along the entire bed, rounded granite shapes that scattered into the distance, even where the gulley started to climb into the hills. It was hard to imagine water running between them, cooling their sweltering sides. But with the rainy season upon them, no doubt the stream would flow soon, muddy and russet.
Gabriel stared into the ravine. The bottom of the gulley seemed somehow out of focus, as though his view was being obstructed by something located halfway between his eyes and the subject. The outline of the boulders was fuzzy, their edges blurred by smoke or some kind of apocalyptic mist. Something was out of place, he could feel it, although his intuition could not determine exactly what.
‘The women and children are already in the camps,’ Alek said obliquely. ‘Living off the grain dropped by transport planes. Or buried in the graveyards like my mother. But the men and boys are here. In the wadi.’
Gabriel tried again to focus on the riverbed as if he was looking for boys hiding behind the rocks in ambush. His eyes still battled to pick out any definable shape. The sun burnt the back of his neck. Images started to appear, one by one, jagged additions to the natural order.
He felt the strength drain from his body as the full vision came into focus. He sank to his knees, grazing them against the rocks. The outline of the shapes below was distorted by bleached pieces of clothing, strewn about, separated from bodies, draped like old washing laid out by the homeless. And within the rags, here, there, now everywhere he looked, an encased limb, a ragged suggestion of a human being.
A powerful image took hold of him, a childhood memory of leaving an agricultural show at Sherborne with his parents. They had spent the day stroking sheep and watching ponies prance. Dusk was starting to fall and his mouth was sticky from candyfloss, little crystals of sugar still stuck to his lips. They had passed a truck, loaded with scarecrows, tossed carelessly into a pile of sticks and castaway clothes. He’d been shocked at the callousness, saddened that the lopsided figures that had stood so proudly in the fields were now discarded like broken tables and chairs. Below him the scarecrows lay crushed.
‘You must photograph everyone,’ Alek ordered, animated now, pacing up and down the top of the ravine. ‘Each and every one. Not just a photograph from up here. You must go down there and photograph each person.’
Gabriel looked at the closest bundle of clothes below him. He could make out the outline of a ribcage beneath a once blue shirt, bleached almost grey by the sun. Mercifully, the head was dangling over the far edge of the rock.
‘I can’t do it.’ He heard himself begin to cry. ‘I’m sorry, bu
t I simply cannot do this.’ He hardly recognised his own voice, a quaky sound, like a plaintive child begging for some forgiveness. He thought he might gag at any moment and held out the camera to Alek.
She stopped pacing and looked down at him. ‘You expect me to photograph my own family? As they’re lying like this, here? My cousins, my nephews? Because you – a stranger to them – can’t do it?’
Gabriel’s already sunburnt cheeks flushed. He felt a surge of anger, fury, perhaps even hatred, at Alek for her demands, her refusal to compromise. But also an inexplicable rage at the dead for revealing themselves, for lying exposed like jumbled driftwood left behind after a sudden flood, for failing to waste away.
He clenched his fists and tried not to scream, immobilised by the rush of emotion. He had to will away the urge to turn his back on the ghoulish shapes and run away. What of the perpetrators, the thought suddenly struck him. Where was his outrage towards them? Why for them, whoever they were, did he feel nothing but a queasy fear? Alek was right, he lacked the courage. Perhaps his anger was at his own weakness.
‘Oh dear God.’ The words hissed from him like steam. He stumbled back to his feet, looking for a route down into the ravine. Somehow the thought of wandering among the dead in bright-blue flip-flops seemed even more intolerable, but he knew if he went back to the car for his boots, he would not return. He checked his camera and took one photograph from the top, a panoramic of a dry riverbed. No one would know what they were looking at, until he pointed it out. Then they would see as he saw.
It was hard to imagine showing such pictures to anyone. The idea of being home, before an audience of interested acquaintances – he wondered vaguely who they would be – seemed more foreign than venturing into a valley of dismembered corpses.
The air was still as he picked his way down the slope, careful not to touch anything. It was difficult to appreciate anything beyond the smell. It wasn’t the rotting stench he remembered when he had discovered a dead cat, several days old, lying crushed in the gutter outside his house. It was a less intense but pervasive odour of death come and gone, a dry smell that caught in his throat and made him want to cough. Like breathing in soot from a coal fire, long extinguished.
Once on flatter ground, he clambered over a few boulders, eyeing the weathered blue shirt a little way in front of him. He tried to quell his fear, the tension of expecting a body to rise up, zombie-like, from its resting place.
Gabriel glimpsed the line of two ribs where the shirt had torn open, and a darkness beyond. The man was lying on his back, his body arched over the curvature of the boulder, his head hanging out of sight on the other side. Gabriel raised his camera and hurriedly took the photograph, an anonymous collection of clothes and weathered skin.
‘You must make sure you photograph their faces,’ Alek shouted from above.
‘For fuck’s sake, Alek!’
Gabriel realised how loudly he had screamed only when the echo reverberated off the rock walls. He felt warm tears running down his cheeks. He raised the camera in both hands, ready to smash it on the stone at his feet.
‘Please, Mr Gabriel. Please.’ Softly this time.
The emotion in her voice caught him. The bossy instruction was gone. He looked up at her, standing a distance above him on the edge of the wadi. Her dress had wrapped around her thin frame. He could see that her whole body was shaking, and, when she turned to him, he saw the tears streaming down her face too.
‘I have asked a lot of you,’ she pleaded. ‘I know this. And I’ll ask nothing further. But, please, you must do this. Not for me. For them.’ She swept her arms slowly in front of her as if wounded.
Gabriel nodded and lowered the camera once more.
He stumbled around the boulder to the front of the body. The skin had dried and stretched over the skull, pulling the man’s mouth open and exposing his crooked teeth. Gabriel tried not to look at the hollow sockets as he focused and took the picture. A shudder of revulsion flitted across the breadth of his shoulders. He turned and moved slowly to the next body – a young man, possibly only a boy, caught in the gap between two large rocks, his arm and hand resting on top of one rock, as if embracing it. The third body lay in the open, face-down and spreadeagled, as if killed there in the gulley rather than dumped. The back of his skull was crushed inwards, almost flattened. The camera clicked, indifferent to its subject.
Each moment of focus and capture numbed Gabriel a little more. He made his way along the gulley like a sleepwalker fulfilling some autonomic instruction, his senses dulled with every step. The smell seemed to recede, even the colours became indistinct, the entire scene washing into dull browns and greys. One withered face morphed into another, one upturned body no different from the next. By the time he had reached the end, he felt almost nothing at all. He walked as if in a cocoon, sound dulled, smells diffused. He might have been studying rocks on the moon, he thought as he pushed the button for the last picture. He looked back at Alek. She was still standing on the edge, watching him, her hands clasped in front of her as if in prayer. She had never seemed more fragile.
He turned the camera and focused on her, zooming in until her form filled the viewfinder. She looked directly at him and he pressed the button, her body momentarily still and captured in front of him.
As he lowered the camera, he saw a figure loom up behind her.
* * *
By the time Gabriel had joined Alek at the top of the wadi, the single figure had become a ragtag group of men. Some wore parts of uniforms, others were dressed in jeans and running shoes, but all were armed with AK-47s. Several sported bandoliers of bullets, arranged across their chests like teeth on a museum dinosaur. These were no child soldiers, not the frightened men like those at the roadblock, scuttling for cover at an overflying UN cargo plane. Several wore reflective sunglasses, but even without seeing their eyes, Gabriel could see a battle hardness about them. They brandished their weapons with ease, as one might carry a familiar brolly in a Bristol winter. They stood in a semicircle, without speaking, watching Gabriel as he lumbered up the last of the rocky slope and joined Alek. One of the men looked down at Gabriel’s footwear and gave a little snort.
A short distance away, a technical was parked, engine still running, its mounted gun manned by a burly man in green camouflage with a red bandana around his head. The barrel of the massive gun was pointed directly at the two of them, lonely targets standing together on the ridge. Gabriel heard the driver’s door open, grinding on its hinges and then slamming closed. A shorter man with a scraggly beard walked stiffly towards them, a limp on his right side. He was the only one in full military gear, an olive-green uniform complete with beret, a smart leather belt and polished black boots. Gabriel felt oddly comforted by the presence of such an official, someone in charge, one who had the time and desire to polish his boots. He had always appreciated the authority of officialdom.
But the officer’s overall presentation became more dishevelled the closer he came, his hair unkempt, his trousers stained. The man pushed past one of the soldiers and stood in front of them, emitting a mixture of cigarette smoke and stale sweat. Only now did Gabriel notice that his left eye seemed to have come loose from its moorings, wandering about its orb freely. His teeth were blackened from rot or tobacco, or both.
Alek’s body twitched; she had grown increasingly agitated by the man’s approach, her breathing fast and shallow. Gabriel could feel the distress emanating from her.
The officer was looking him up and down with one eye, the other tracking some unseen object to his left. ‘I am Al Babr. For you who do not speak Arabic, The Tiger.’ He turned towards his men. ‘And this is the Tiger Brigade. My brigade. Allahu akbar.’
‘Allahu akbar! ’ the men shouted in unison, some raising their weapons in the air.
The machine gun on the back of the technical remained trained on them as Gabriel’s level of comfort plummeted. He looked more closely at the epaulettes hanging from the man’s shoulders: an eagle with w
ings spread, clutching a red ball, flying over the ancient depiction of the eye of the god Horus.
‘The Eye of Horus,’ Gabriel murmured, immediately regretting saying anything.
But the soldier seemed most pleased by the recognition. ‘Ah, you’ve heard of me, Professor Cockburn.’
His identification of Gabriel by name struck a chill in his chest.
‘Very good. Very good.’ The loose eyeball circled its orb with enthusiasm.
‘You are nothing but a ghazzua!’ Alek spat the words out at the officer’s feet in a show of defiance, but Gabriel could see her fear. The change in her voice, her widening eyes, both pointed to a real terror at this short man’s arrival.
‘That is just the mark of Abu Tira,’ she said, pointing to the eagle insignia, which had also been sewn into the breast pocket of the officer’s jacket. ‘Look at the Arabic, it even says it: “The Police in Service of the People”. What people? South Sudan? The Dinka people? The Fur people? No, your masters are in Khartoum, you are a trespasser here.’ Alek turned to Gabriel, as if he would protect her once he understood. ‘He’s crossed the border without a passport, without the permission of the government of South Sudan. That’s the Sudan reserve police insignia. And here he means to kill and plunder. Take the lives of innocent people. And then scuttle like a cockroach back home across the border.’
‘Sudan police, here?’ Gabriel looked at the insignia in confusion. ‘But that’s a … major breach of the sovereignty of South Sudan.’
The militiaman appeared to find their indignation entertaining and he guffawed at Gabriel’s statement. ‘Ah, Professor, what is a border? Look about you, do you see a border here? It’s not like that wall in Israel, or the big fence the Americans built in Mexico. Is a border something you can touch and feel? I don’t think so. It’s a line drawn by frightened men on a map. That is all. One day it is here, another it is there. Just a little while ago Heglig was part of Sudan. Then Juba took it over by force. Now our glorious forces have taken it back. Allahu akbar.’
