by Andrew Brown
It was dusk by the time he arrived, sending chickens scattering in indignation. People in the huts along the roadside stopped and stared, holding their children to their bodies. Margie came out of her office, just like the first time, standing in the gloom watching him. The dust settled around her as she waited, her hair free and wild. She had known, even as he pulled up outside the administration block. He saw her face fall, her eyes lower in pain.
She did not ask him any questions and immediately helped carry Alek from the vehicle, stroking her face and murmuring to herself. The joints of the body had stiffened and when they laid her out in the church, her posture from the car remained.
Gabriel could not remember now how he had ended up in bed. He recalled Bernard trying to comfort him, giving him a sleeping pill, someone else washing his face while he sat immobilised on the edge of a hospital bunk. There were no dreams, just a bland expanse of exhausted sleep, its beginning as abrupt as its startled end. He jerked awake to find himself already sitting upright, his arms rigid and extended in anguish. But still he felt nothing.
They buried Alek with the sunrise and without words. Some of the men had dug a grave next to that of her mother, extending into the narrow path. Bernard had straightened her limbs, and her body was wrapped in muslin cloth, only her face showing. They laid her next to the grave on a wooden board – there was no coffin – and Margie knelt and kissed her tenderly on her forehead. Bernard was weeping, groaning quietly. Gabriel knelt beside her and put his hand on Alek’s cheek. Without life, her skin was incomprehensibly waxy and cold.
The men slid the bound body into the grave and together they all covered her. Gabriel had to look away as the soil started to pile over her face. Only once she was in the ground, and the heap of dirt patted down, a small makeshift cross stuck at an angle, only then did the mourners look at each other. Gabriel felt a pressure growing inside his chest, an unimaginably powerful, expanding rush. He guessed that he was ill, or somehow injured, that he might collapse onto the fresh earth. Malaria, he thought vaguely. But the sickness lay deeper than his bloodstream. Margie saw it coming and grabbed him in a tight embrace. He clutched her, his body shaking until his ribs hurt and his chest felt stiff. She held him for what seemed hours as he let days of pent-up horror escape, wracking waves of sadness overcoming him. Then his legs gave way, buckling underneath him like a beach chair. He recalled that the men had carried him on the same board that had brought Alek’s body, a strange procession leaving the cemetery instead of entering it. People came to the road, confused, and then understanding, some making the sign of the cross, others offering murmured prayers.
Margie had cleared a room for him and they put him to bed, swaddled in sheets like a newborn. A small citronella candle was left burning near the door. Bernard made him take some pills, probably another sleeping pill or a tranquiliser, and he soon drifted back into a black sleep. He woke from time to time to find Margie sitting close by on her favourite chair, her brow knitted, watching him battle through his darkness. Again, thankfully, he did not dream, slipping from perplexed wakefulness to unconsciousness. He continued in this state throughout the day. By afternoon he was running a high fever and he woke to find a saline drip running into his left arm. Bernard and Margie took turns to watch over him, trying to cool him with wet cloths and keep him from falling from the bed in his agitated state.
Around midnight, he awoke to find Alek standing at the foot of his bed, her thin arms by her side. She seemed to be smiling. But there was a ragged hole in her chest, a dark-red opening through which he could see her heart beating, pink and healthy. He cried out and Margie stumbled from her chair, half-asleep, to comfort him.
To sleep was to eat without nourishment. By morning he was exhausted, emotionally naked and at the mercy of those around him. Margie seemed to appreciate his condition, lulling him, praising him for eating small amounts of food, willing him to sleep some more.
The following days brought visits from a series of strangers from the camp, many women and children – survivors from Malual Kon perhaps. Each said no words, only approached him while he lay on his bed and touched him, some on his head, others about his face. Some left a bowl of grain, others a sprig of leaves plucked from one of the trees in the compound. The priest came and offered a silent prayer at his bedside. Bernard visited him constantly, each time squeezing his shoulder without comment, then sadly turning away. Gabriel knew he was not dying, his strength was returning, and it was not for him that they mourned. He was but the manifestation of their grief. But in their care he found solace nonetheless.
It was days before his fever abated. Time passed slowly, and yet also at speed, for at times he felt that he had just dozed, only to find that the day had given way to night or the dawn had been reached once again. After four days, he finally rose from his bed. He was still weak but he started to venture out into the camp on short walks. Wherever he passed, he was met with respectful bows and sad smiles. It seemed that everyone in the camp had come to hear of Alek’s passing, and where words failed, simple gestures of goodwill remained. The camp was even fuller than before and the lines at the clinic wound around the trees and into the hazy distance. The World Food Programme planes droned overhead, landing on the earthen strip and disgorging their contents before taking off again in a whirl of dust and vegetation. Family members made their way to the graveyard, returning with empty hands and hearts. There was a rhythm to life and death in Jila camp.
Early in the morning of the seventh day Margie came to him alone.
‘It isn’t safe for you to stay here any longer, Gabriel. We hear Al Babr has died. I don’t know if you played any part in that – and I don’t want to know. But his men are still about. Looking for revenge. A WFP transport plane will be leaving this afternoon. They have agreed to let you on board.’
Until that moment, Gabriel had not considered his future beyond trying to keep down his next small meal. His weight had plummeted and his mind seemed permanently blank, his actions subject to the instruction of others. He accepted Margie’s urging without question and packed his small bag of belongings.
He didn’t have the strength to visit Alek’s grave, and the Scot did not suggest he do so. Instead they hugged, watched by a small group of refugees, some shaking their heads, others staring at the ground as if they were somehow at fault.
‘You must go now, Gabriel. It is time.’ Margie nodded and turned away from him, leaving him alone at the metal stairs leading into the hold. He boarded the plane in a daze, propelled only by Margie’s quiet strength. As the plane rushed down the dirt runway, he saw her shielding her eyes, standing next to Bernard and watching him as he left.
He spent the afternoon in Juba, where a phone call to Brian Hargreaves had brought him up to date, giving him an idea of what to expect on his arrival home. He had just enough time to arrange for the practicalities of his plan before boarding a commercial Kenya Airways flight at Juba International Airport. As they lifted off the ground and the crashed Boeing at the end of the runway slipped out of view, Gabriel looked down on the sprawled shacks and haphazard dirt roads that made up the world’s newest capital. It was hard to imagine that all he saw – the Lodge, Konyo Konyo market, the tea rooms – that this would all carry on without him. Insensitive to his absence, the parties, the paid sex, the mad drinking, the friendships, they would not disappear like scenery packed up after a performance, waiting for his return. And yet it comforted him to think that while he was to be confined once more to the drizzle of Bristol, here in Juba the sun would be baking down, Rasta would be serving up cold Tuskers to wide-eyed new recruits, the tea ladies would be mixing up their powdered-milk brews, and the men would be sitting under the same neem trees, reading the news of the day to one another.
Leaving Juba had been all that he had longed for from the moment he had arrived. Now that he was on his way, he yearned only to return, to meet Alek once more, to return to the beginning.
The flight to Nairobi was again only ha
lf-full. But now the passengers were mainly NGO workers, some sick and snivelling, others depressed and stunned. The young woman across the aisle looked desperately ill, her skin wet with sweat and her pallor devoid of circulation. Gabriel felt a sudden affinity towards this tragic collection of do-gooders, captured by their conscience, seared by their visions, all bereft yet unable to articulate to anyone else quite what it was that had destroyed them, reformed them.
He had been in transit at Nairobi for several hours, the delay giving him time to collect his thoughts. By the time he had arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5, surrounded by asylum seekers and refugees from every Third World outpost imaginable, Gabriel had found an angry strength that straightened his back and focused his strategies.
It was as well, for officialdom was waiting for him. But by then he had formulated his approach and conditions.
Gabriel turned away from his screen saver and eased backwards in his chair. He opened the Bristol Evening Post on his desk. The outcome of his negotiation at the MI6 offices had been easier than he had expected, but not all had gone as he’d anticipated. A short article informed him that one Khalid Hussein of Saudi Arabia had been found at the London Intercontinental, deceased as a result of an overdose apparently administered while in the company of no fewer than three prostitutes. There were no photographs. Gabriel still had no idea who Hussein was, or whether his own disclosures and demands had, in any manner, contributed to the man’s demise. But he had no doubt that it was well deserved.
He noted also that Air Marshal Bartholomew had announced his retirement on grounds of ill health – he’d been diagnosed with an unnamed bowel condition. A concise but glowing tribute was provided by the minister of defence, particularly for his pioneering work in ‘making the combat zone safe for the British soldier’. Gabriel read the sentence twice.
Hargreaves interrupted his media perusal, slapping a fleshy hand on the door frame as he entered. He beamed at Gabriel and lumbered around the desk like an overaffectionate bear.
‘They’ve recommended full professorship, Gabriel. You’ve made a fat old queer very proud. For everything,’ Hargreaves said, bending over to give Gabriel a sloppy embrace.
Gabriel gave him an awkward squeeze across his fleshy back in return. Hargreaves parted and heaved himself back into a chair. Gabriel folded the newspaper away and smiled at his colleague.
‘Do you know, Brian, that’s the first time you … we have acknowledged your homosexuality?’
Hargreaves gave a dismissive wave with his arm. ‘God, that word – it sounds so dreadfully serious. Like “carcinoma” or “vaginitis”.’ He giggled in an unscholarly way.
‘I’m sorry, and I apologise, my friend. For all the times that you must’ve endured jokes and crass comments, where I didn’t intervene. I don’t even know if you have a partner. It’s actually outrageous. Do you have a partner?’
Hargreaves was genuinely moved, his eyes suddenly tearful. ‘It’s the English way, Gabriel. I’m as much to blame for not living my life more openly. And without … fear. And yes, his name is Rajwasanga – “Raji” for short. He’s Sri Lankan. We’ve been together for nearly fifteen years, God bless his beautiful soul.’
‘Well, I would like to have you both over for supper,’ Gabriel said. ‘When I have sorted out my new apartment.’
‘We’d like that very much.’
The English way, Gabriel mused. Civility as an excuse for dishonesty, the hiding place of soulless ghouls. Time was too short, life too brutal, for such pretences. He’d mistaken it for rudeness in Alek. He missed her so desperately.
* * *
Two days later, the incursion of Sudanese militia into South Sudan was formally raised at the UN Security Council. The photographs of the mass grave at Malual Kon made dramatic viewing on all the major networks for twenty-four hours, until a massive car bomb rocked Cairo and attention was diverted once more. The Sudanese representative was summoned to the Council to explain his government’s position, but Khartoum denied that it had ordered any such incursion into its neighbour’s territory. The evidence that members of Abu Tira, Sudan’s police force, had been present in the village was met with stony silence. South Sudan moved a motion to impose oil sanctions on its northern aggressor. Britain abstained. The United States vetoed the motion, citing vague concerns about using pressure in the oil trade to achieve political ends.
But Sudan was to remain on America’s terror list as a result of its cross-border activities. A covert attempt to sell arms to the government of Sudan was blocked at diplomatic levels. Gabriel had hoped for more, but in his heart he knew that it would be naïve to expect it. The oil and arms industries were too powerful and no doubt many more innocents would suffer in their name in time to come. His name had been kept out of the revelations and, for the world, the brief chapter that was the assassination of Matthew Deng and the massacre of Malual Kon village, a moment’s glance at the outrage that was Sudan, was closed. Only his public address remained, though for Gabriel the book had perhaps only just been opened.
Chapter 22
BRISTOL UNIVERSITY, SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND
Professor Gabriel Cockburn stood at the lectern, surveying the crowd. He spotted a number of familiar faces, some of whom he could name with ease, many he could not, although he recognised them from the passages of the department, regular travellers on the same routes. In addition to Symington and Hargreaves, he noted Jane, primly seated in the front row. Towards the back the rat-faced undersecretary sat alongside Todd, both looking hopelessly out of place. One of the female students was clearly tittering at Todd’s hairstyle, the coiffed precision entirely at odds with the grungy, carefree style of the average science faculty attendee. The MI6 agent had chosen a particularly finely cut charcoal suit and bright-green tie for the occasion, making him even more conspicuous. He had sent Gabriel a terse email earlier that morning informing him that Air Marshal Bartholomew was too ill to attend and had sent apologies.
‘It is assumed that this unforeseen absence will not cause any conditions to remain unfulfilled,’ the message concluded.
Gabriel had responded equally crisply that the conditions would be satisfied nonetheless. He extended no well wishes to the ailing airman.
He noted, to his surprise, his secretary, Mrs Thebes, making a late entry, glaring at a young male student on an aisle seat until the poor boy relented and offered her his place. She seized upon it without thanks and peered at Gabriel over the top of her glasses, as if studying his tie for signs of grease stains from breakfast. Gabriel waited a moment longer until the last murmurs had dwindled and the auditorium was still. And then, without hesitation, he began.
‘This year we mourn the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda twenty years ago. A genocide perpetrated while we stood still and did not even bother to watch. This year we mourn the devastation of Darfur a decade ago, while we stood by debating how to define the massacres. This year we are all witnesses to ethnic cleansing in South Kordofan. Are we to wait another ten years before we mourn our collective failures? Of what shall we speak then? What more are we still to mourn?’
He pressed the button on his laptop and the screen behind him filled with the photograph of Alek standing on the edge of the gulley, a tall, willowy figure looking down at the audience, her face both beautiful and anguished, her dress clinging to her legs in the sticky heat. Only he knew the circumstances in which the photograph had been taken, but the audience sensed immediately that this was more than a passing snapshot. Perhaps in their subconscious, the formation of the rocks, the colour of the slope at her feet, echoed the terrible visions they’d seen on the news. There was a rustle of discomfort among many present. He knew that he couldn’t look at the photograph himself. In private, he had spent hours staring at her silhouette, but to look at her in public would break him. Even now, just knowing that her body loomed behind him on the screen, he felt the tears well behind his eyes.
‘I lost a friend at Malual Kon in South Sudan.’
This perhaps confirmed what some had guessed and he heard a few gasps splutter out across the auditorium.
‘As so often seems to happen, I really only came to understand her – and my loss – once she was gone. Her death revealed some extraordinary truths to me.’
It was an unorthodox start to an academic speech, and Symington screwed up his face in puzzlement. But Gabriel could see that he had captured the attention of his audience with his intimate confession. Mrs Thebes had formed her mouth into what might be taken as a half-smile of approval. Or a sneer of derision. Only time would tell.
‘She lost her life seeking the truth of her father’s death.’
Gabriel looked up directly at Todd and the rat-faced man from the ministry of defence. They both tensed and Todd glared at him, fiddling with his cellphone in front of him. No doubt he was taping the address. Some of the students turned and followed Gabriel’s gaze. Another whisper of disquiet was released from some.
‘Matthew Deng was assassinated by those who would have him silenced, those who would have his ideals of peace and justice for his countrymen swept aside in the interests of capital gain and access to oil. His daughter – Alek Deng here – sought to uncover the true masters behind that travesty. She pursued that goal with tenacity and courage. We could all learn much from that, I think.
‘From her I learnt that nothing we do is without consequence. That even scientific endeavour is inherently political. Science would like to wash its hands of human suffering, as if we have no part to play, no responsibility to act. The facts we choose to investigate dictate the lives of people far removed from us. Objectivity is a myth. I travelled to South Sudan to discover a plant. But once there I discovered far more: unspeakable suffering, a genocide being perpetrated as we speak, the clever euphemisms that we use to justify our inaction and this government’s complicity. My friend was my guide to discovery: through her I learnt the feeling of fear, the will to survive, the bonds of family and of love. And I learnt what it is to feel shame.’
