Go back? They would only go back if we won the case.
Inside the tent a small delegation was waiting, drinking tea and fanning themselves with UNHCR registration forms. Under the tarpaulin, the shade smelt of old rubber and was as hot as soup, but at least it was shade. Greetings were exchanged and introductions made, warm Fantas and Cokes extracted from a crate. Abraham and Sammy leaned in to one another, bumped shoulders, then patted and held one another in a comradely way that I guessed represented recognition of shared battlefield experience; the rest of us made do with respectful murmurs and rapid intakes of breath. I was trying to work out why my handshake with Sammy had felt slightly peculiar, when he reached to scratch an eyebrow. Two fingers were missing. He noticed my glance and held out a maimed hand, showing pink stubs. ‘I was too slow throwing a grenade. Not this war, the last one. It’s been a long time since I could blow my nose.’ Hearty laughter from the men. The women in the group looked either uncomprehending or slightly awkward. But the joke had broken the ice, and everyone seemed to relax.
‘Your colleague told us yesterday that you wanted to interview people from Sanasa,’ said Sammy. ‘Most of the IDPs come from there, so you will not be short of candidates.’
‘In fact, you could talk to anyone here,’ added a bearded young man in a blue and white checked shirt. He had introduced himself as George, the camp doctor. He was handsome, with the lean ranginess of youth and huge brown eyes. He spoke perfect English, but with a distinctive twang – Australian, South African? – that reminded me of someone.
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said, quailing. I hadn’t expected it to be so hot. Large damp crescents had formed under each arm, and as I reached for my Fanta I could feel wet flesh separate and glue itself back together. Abraham’s upper lip was beaded with sweat, I noticed with some satisfaction. At least I wasn’t the only wimp. ‘Maybe we should start. I don’t want to waste your time.’
Sammy shrugged. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. The one thing IDPs have plenty of is time. Your visit is the most exciting thing to happen in the camp this week. Everyone has been looking forward to it.’
A gaggle of children had already gathered at the tent’s door flap, mouths open in wonder. One tiny girl, a small finger exploring a nostril, was wearing what must once have been a Western housewife’s cocktail dress, which dropped to her ankles and fell open at the side. The boys, whose heads had been shaved to leave a single central forelock, wore oversized shorts belted with packing twine. Sammy swirled and barked at them, mutilated hand raised, and they fled, squealing. Even as he turned to face me again, they were edging back into the frame, playing an undeclared game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Cocktail Girl, I noticed, was all skirt and no knickers. I suppressed a smile. Silence fell, and I realised that everyone in the tent was looking expectantly at me, waiting for the day’s entertainment to start.
‘We’re going to have to talk to each person one-on-one, I’m afraid. We can’t do group interviews.’
‘No problem,’ said Sammy. ‘You will have all the privacy you need.’ He began issuing orders, and soon plastic chairs were being unstacked, a folding table erected. ‘I will go and check the catering arrangements. You will be staying for a meal, of course.’
I exchanged looks with Abraham, who raised an eyebrow, refusing to rescue me.
‘Er …’ My mind raced. Brainwave. ‘I’m afraid I don’t eat meat.’
‘You don’t eat meat?’ Sammy looked incredulous. ‘That sounds very unhealthy. You will change your mind when you see how our women prepare it.’
A few minutes later, I heard a piteous bleating and caught a glimpse, through the tent flap, of a hobbled white kid being led to its fate.
10
A few hours later Abraham and I took a break, exiting the tent to light each other’s cigarettes in the shade of a giant euphorbia cactus. We stood in silence, savouring a welcome moment of blankness after all the questions and answers, the names, dates, family trees and locations.
Down at the main entrance we spotted a white truck bearing the UNHCR logo manoeuvring laboriously in the dust, and George the doctor locked in intense conversation with two local soldiers.
‘What’s going on down there?’ I asked idly. One of the soldiers was shouting, spittle spraying from his lips. I winced as George, neck muscles bunched, jabbed a finger aggressively in his face. Now the other soldier had snatched a handful of George’s checked shirt, but he yanked himself free, pushed the first man back with a flat hand to the chest and stalked up the hill in long, emphatic strides. He was so overwrought he nearly careered into the two of us.
‘What happened? Are you OK?’
He ignored me, unleashing a torrent of words at Abraham, who held out a placatory hand and said something soothing, to no avail. George stomped to the barbed-wire fence, where he stood cursing under his breath. Then he slowly returned to where we stood, staring with bitterness at the checkpoint, where a crowd was slowly gathering around the truck.
‘Cigarette, please,’ George said, reverting to English, gesturing at my pack. His hand quivered with adrenalin as he pulled one out.
‘What is it?’
‘The soldiers are conscripting the IDPs,’ he said, with a grimace. ‘That’s twice this month. They come and round up the young men – some are no more than boys – and we never see them again. It’s a violation of international law. IDP camps are places where people should be protected, not drafted. We are not here to supply the army with cannon fodder. Look, they even move them around in UNHCR trucks! And nobody does anything about it.’
‘Why do they do it?’
‘Ah, they talk about every youngster having to do his duty, that they are part of a great national project. As though carrying a gun is the only service you can provide. You know,’ he said, looking at me, ‘I left a houseman’s position at Liverpool’s best hospital to come here. That was a job a lot of my contemporaries wanted. I got it, and I gave it up for my country. And then you come back to what your parents always raised you to think was home and they treat you like – like shit, frankly, because you’re “only a civilian” and because the government despises the diaspora.’
Now I realised whom his accent brought to mind: Ringo Starr. ‘From Liverpool to Transit Camp Number Three. That’s a hell of a journey.’
He laughed for a moment, his face relaxing, and he looked no more than a boy. ‘Yeah, who needs drugs when you can take a trip like that, eh? Forget the LSD, just getting on and off the flight is enough to blow your mind. When I first came, I used to send weekly emails to my friends on the Wirral trying to explain what was going on. Then I stopped. I couldn’t make the leap.’
‘What’s the Liverpool connection?’
He shrugged. ‘My parents fled the first war, like so many of their generation. My dad was a maths professor, but no one recognised his qualifications. He ended up working as a bus conductor. He never complained, but he always drummed into me that I must come back some day, put my medical training to good use. So here I am.’ He took a last drag on his cigarette and threw the butt away.
‘My family originally came from Sanasa so this war feels pretty personal. It’s our land that’s in dispute. I don’t regret coming, but what’s going on is a lot more complicated than that generation wants to admit. OK, time to lodge my usual protest, for all the good it will do. In the UK, by the way, I’m a non-smoker. I can get quite preachy about it, in fact.’
He walked off in search of Sammy. Down below, the white truck’s tail flap had been lowered and I could see bundles of possessions – jerry-cans and knotted flour sacks – being thrown aboard. Then the soldier who had grabbed George’s shirt began calling out names and IDPs scrambled aboard.
‘Looks like he’s right,’ I said to Abraham. ‘It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? I thought both governments had agreed to demobilise, now that the war is over.’
Abraham arched one eyebrow. ‘Is the war over?’ He didn’t seem to share George’s anger. ‘Maybe it never will be. And,
you know, those boys, they want to go. They love their country. And it is very boring, being an IDP, just like the guy said. This gives them a purpose.’
We were on to Witness No. 5, and were both finding it hard to concentrate. The language issue meant that running through Winston’s list of questions, which ranged from details of the IDPs’ daily life in Sanasa to the precise circumstances of their flight, took three times longer than anticipated. George had helped with translation for the first few hours, but then he had been called away to deliver a baby, leaving Abraham holding the fort.
Sitting next to a boy she had identified as her grandson, Ali, Selam had given her age as fifty. I’d stared at her for a moment, struggling to believe that this aged crone, with her lined forehead and puckered mouth, was younger than my skin-toned, liposuctioned mother.
‘Can that be right?’ I’d whispered to Abraham. ‘She looks a hell of a lot older.’
‘Life wears the body out faster here.’
She certainly had the energy of a young woman, unburdening herself of her testimony in what sounded like one sustained scream. I wondered whether she always spoke like that, or whether, like the American abroad who assumes that everyone becomes an Anglophone given sufficient volume, she thought it the only way to hammer her message into a foreigner’s brain. Communication by assault and battery. Abraham kept trying and failing to stem the shriek until, losing patience, he whipped up one hand in a not-to-be-denied stop gesture, like a policeman at a traffic junction, and we all paused for breath. He sighed, then began to translate as I typed the responses into the laptop.
‘OK. She says that in the morning she was preparing to go to the market to buy some onions. A neighbour came knocking on the door and told her not to go down the road, the Darrar soldiers were coming. She says she looked out and could see that they were setting fire to the tukuls. There was smoke rising …’
‘A tukul is …?’
‘A hut. The villagers make them from mud and straw. Anyway, she could hear someone screaming and the soldiers were already in sight. She told her grandson, that one there,’ Abraham pointed to Ali, watching in silence, ‘to take the goat, then grabbed one of her three saucepans, and they ran. And she is very annoyed, because she only has one pan now to cook the family’s meals in and this was the second time it happened. She is very upset about the pans.’ He was talking like an automaton, barely listening to his own words.
Noticing the thin layer of dust gathering on my laptop screen, I reached into my satchel for a tissue. My hand emerged blotched in sticky blue ink. A pen had exploded in the heat, emptying itself over the satchel’s contents.
‘Oh, God,’ I muttered, wiping my fingers. ‘Sorry, Abraham, the second time what happened?’
He put the question. A slightly shorter scream followed. The ink had got everywhere, I noticed, soaking into the clean T-shirt I’d packed. Feeling the onset of a dehydration headache, I kneaded my temples for a moment. There was a brief silence.
‘You have ink all over your face now, Paula.’
‘Never mind. Let’s go on.’
‘So, she says it was the second time the soldiers had driven her out of her house. It had happened to her once before.’
‘When?’
‘A year earlier. And that time she managed to take the pans and all her cutlery, but lost her stove. She is very into kitchen equipment, this woman.’
‘Well, if it’s all you own … But, look, maybe my brain has turned to porridge in the heat, but her story doesn’t make sense, Abraham. How can you be pushed out twice from the same place? What did the soldiers do? Come in, burn everyone out, then make their excuses and leave?’
He stroked his cheekbone, tracking one sideburn with his middle finger. ‘OK, I’ll ask. I just wish she would talk normally, though. It’s so tiring interviewing her like this.’
I sat poised, fingers over keyboard, as the long scream resumed.
‘How was it?’ It was ten o’clock the following night. The neighbourhood was deserted, the office corridors silent, but somehow I’d known that Winston would still be at his desk, the focused centre of an aura of light.
‘First things first,’ I said, heading straight for the office bathroom, where I filled the sink and washed off the patina of sweat and sand that had formed a greasy face mask. It felt fabulous. Returning, I made a faint-hearted attempt at smacking the rust-coloured dust off my stained satchel. Everything I was wearing and carrying looked five years older than it had when I’d left.
‘Gruelling, to be honest. Very slow. But Abraham was a star. And we met a lovely doctor, who made all the difference. He became our de facto second translator.’
‘It tends to go like that. You slept there?’
‘Yeah. When we knew we weren’t going to get it all done in one day, we borrowed a tent. Lot of those around, in an IDP camp. So glad we packed our bed rolls. Remind me never to go on a trip here without taking one along.’
It had not been the most comfortable night. I’d lain awake trying to ignore a rising sense of claustrophobia generated by the close, rubbery smell, while Abraham, who had gallantly positioned his mat outside the entrance to the tent – playing the part of both chaperone and security guard – had snored like a champion. At two o’clock I had slipped out in search of fresh air and, stepping over Abraham’s body, found myself staring at eternity. The IDP camp gave out almost no ambient light, leaving the night sky to assert its ancient, inky dominion. I woke at dawn back inside the tent, eyes gummy, my face inches from the muzzles of two mongrels that had slipped under the tarpaulin to join me, forming a piebald mêlée of limbs and snouts, which gave off the odd beatific sigh.
‘Anything useful?’
‘I think we have most of what we need, though I have to write up my notes before I can be sure. But here’s the thing.’ I took up position in the chair before him, the better to capture his full attention. ‘Abraham and I collected some evidence that puzzles me. Signed testimonies from at least three families. They all fled Sanasa in July 2001, yes, but they told us they’d already been moved once by then. They’d effectively been charity cases, camping with better-off relatives in the port, when the soldiers came the second time and they had to hit the road again.’
He peered at me intently over his bifocals. ‘And the first evictions were …?’
‘A year earlier, they all said. July 2000. I thought some of them might be getting their Julys mixed up, but no. One was most insistent, said he was absolutely certain, as his daughter had just been married and they’d had to leave her dowry behind. He said in one day they lost all their savings.’
‘The key question, then: where were those IDPs from?’
‘Neither Abraham nor I could find it. There’s just not enough detail on the map you gave us. The village of Yala, they said. A hamlet of about twenty tukuls, near a small reservoir, on the side of a hill. We tried to get them to locate it, but that wasn’t a huge success.’
The first witness had placed his finger with absolute confidence in the middle of the sea, the second had simply stared at the laminated paper for several minutes, his forehead furrowed, trying to match up a familiar landscape with the flattened version. Then he had turned the map slowly on the table, round and round, anxious to help, trying to find some mental access point. Watching his face, I’d grasped that it was the first time he had seen the local geography captured in two-dimensional form. And why should it make sense? If you had learned the heft of a hill by dint of herding your goats round it, why should a piece of paper hold any meaning?
‘Yala, Yala …’ Winston was on his feet now, examining the giant map that covered half of the office wall. ‘Did you get any co-ordinates at all?’
‘No. One guy said the village was fifty kilometres south-east of Sanasa, but another insisted it was eighty kilometres. When we asked for distinguishing features, they couldn’t come up with much, apart from an abandoned railway station, which they said dated back to a mining project the British launched af
ter Italy’s surrender.’
‘Ah! Now that’s a great help.’ He bent at a right angle, buttocks pointing in my direction. ‘Here, I think I have it. Take a look.’
I leaned over. His finger slowly traced the winding course of a railway track, which extended from Sanasa towards the base of the mountain escarpment. I could read ‘disused’ and just below, in tiny, barely legible italics, ‘Yaah Liah’.
‘That’s it. Found it.’ He took a ruler from the desk and measured the distance, then compared it to the grid. ‘Your villagers aren’t too far off. Seventy-five kilometres, give or take, south-south-east of Sanasa. Absolutely fantastic. Well done, Paula. You just earned your entire year’s salary. I’ve been waiting, hoping, for something exactly like this.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘There have been a few hints. North Darrar has always maintained that Sanasa was not an isolated incident, that there’d been a series of border violations by Darrar dating back at least a year. I’ve been trying to pin the reports down, but we haven’t had any reliable witnesses up till now. It was all too vague.’
‘And why is it important?’
‘It doesn’t make any difference to the border ruling but it could hold the key when it comes to deciding who started the war. If we can establish a pattern of encroachment, of army raids and evictions, show an escalating series of abuses, the other side’s attempt to make us look like a regional psychopath begins to look suspect. There were reasons why our boys were primed for a fight. They saw this coming. Many of the ministers are convinced Darrar’s end game is a whole new coastline.’
‘Well, that’s great,’ I said. ‘And now I really need a drink, a bite and a bath.’
Winston grunted, hands in pockets, still sizing up the wall map. ‘We may need you to go back there to re-interview.’ He caught my expression. ‘Oh, not immediately, don’t worry, you’ll get a breather. Did the villagers say if anyone had been killed during the Yala raid?’
‘No, just tukuls burned, goats snatched. I got the impression it was a community in which goats counted for a great deal.’ I stowed my laptop and notebooks in a drawer and fastened my satchel. ‘One question. Does this process of evidence-taking ever leave you feeling a little bit guilty?’
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