Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dawit, cheerfully. ‘What’s interesting is the government has clearly known about this for ages. These orgies were months ago. But they waited until now to publicise them. I’m guessing they’re pissed off with the UN’s failure to stand up to Darrar over its occupation of the border area and are getting their own back. Smart, eh?’

  ‘How terrible for the girls.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they might as well commit suicide right now. Their lives are over.’ He pointed gleefully at the last paragraph and snickered. ‘Look, Paula, it says the UN is trying to work out who was involved. All they need to do is line every UN peacekeeper up, pull down their pants and compare their … What’s the word?’

  ‘Pricks. Dicks. Schlongs.’

  ‘Yup, compare them to the video. But,’ he said, tilting his head to one side, ‘I see you are not as amused as me. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, some bad news at the office.’ I had become the mistress of vagueness, thanks to Winston’s warnings. ‘You, in contrast, seem to be in a horribly good mood. And so smart. I didn’t know you could look like this.’

  ‘A business deal I’ve been working on for a while. It seems to be coming through. I feel like celebrating. Tomorrow is Sunday – let me take you on a picnic. To my favourite place in the world. You need to get out more! You’re looking tired, these days, almost as though you were working.’

  20

  Dawit picked me up at the villa in a battered black jeep, borrowed from a friend. ‘Sorry, but we have to go via my place first. I forgot my tape measure.’

  ‘Why do we need a tape measure for a picnic?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  We drove down Liberation Avenue, ignoring traffic lights and heedless of pedestrian crossings, plunged into the geometric maze behind the main mosque and parked outside what, by Lira’s modest standards, counted as a supermarket. I followed Dawit up a narrow flight of stairs to a peeling central landing, where he fished out a pair of keys and opened a metal door. I hovered at the entrance, anxious not to trespass.

  ‘Come, it’s OK.’ Dawit beckoned me in. ‘I have no secrets.’

  The room was the size of a prison cell. There was just space in it for a single bed, whose greying sheets were unmade. A sink and a rickety wardrobe were jammed between it and the window. No chair, so nowhere for visitors to sit. But, then, Dawit socialised at Sumbi’s. The whiff of stale urine indicated a shared hallway WC. It should have been grim, but wasn’t, because he had covered the ceiling with cuttings from magazines. Photos of gallery sculptures, ultra-chic furniture, modern architecture, vistas of the sky at night, close-ups of swirling shells, reproductions of art works by Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, he had crammed as much colour and modernity into his eyeline as the space would hold, a mind-expanding panorama to gaze at as he fell asleep.

  Dawit was watching me, craving approval.

  ‘Goodness. You’ve really made it your own.’

  The walls, in contrast, were bare, with the exception of a row of black-and-white photographs, about a dozen in all, separated by gold stars, the kind a primary-school teacher sticks approvingly into a child’s exercise book. He waited in silence, willing me to examine each one. Some of the photos were clearly graduation pictures: they showed youngsters – all male – stiffly posed, holding scrolled certificates, men-to-be with wide brows and open, trusting faces. A few had been taken in photo booths and those faces seemed older, unreadable. They were framed by the wide lapels and corduroy caps of the 1970s. One brandished a pistol. There were no smiles. Whatever they were doing at that moment in their lives had felt too serious for that.

  When I got to the end of the row, I asked, ‘Who are they?’

  ‘My friends. You see, most of the people I know are dead.’

  My throat felt thick. ‘I suppose, strictly speaking, you should say, “Most of the people I knew are dead.”’

  ‘No, most of the people I know. They are more real to me than the people I meet now. No offence, but even you. They keep me good company.’

  I reached out an index finger to smooth down the corner of one of the gold stars, which was lifting off the wall, and tried to smile but managed only a grimace. ‘It’s OK, Dawit. I understand. I really do.’

  There was a long pause in which we sized one another up, two battered, guilt-ridden survivors sharing a moment of complicity. He broke the spell. ‘Anyways, I found my tape measure.’ It dangled from one hand. ‘So we can go.’

  We drove through the suburbs and down the mountain road I’d taken with Abraham. A rather different experience, this time. Within ten minutes, I was sitting with my hand over my eyes, moaning softly.

  He laughed. ‘What is it, Paula? Nervous?’

  ‘Where did you learn to drive?’

  ‘At the front, of course. Where else?’

  ‘Did no one ever tell you that if you overtake on a blind corner on a mountain road you’re quite likely to go off the edge?’

  ‘Pah! There is hardly any traffic on this road. It’s a calculated risk, a question of mathematical probabilities.’

  ‘I think you and I went to different maths classes.’

  Just as I was wondering if we were headed for a weekend at the coast, we braked on a tiny lay-by, fringed with thickets of juniper. I followed Dawit as he scampered along a stony goat’s trail. We squeezed between two boulders, then stopped: a dramatic opening-up of perspective had reduced us to ants clinging to the side of a geographical basin so vast I felt dizzy and afraid. The last time I’d gazed across that landscape it had been early morning and the eiderdown of cloud had been retreating across the valleys. Now it was midday and the sun had burned the vapour off the terraced slopes, highlighting every rock for what felt like hundreds of miles. A few clouds floated free and high, throwing giant ink blotches of shade onto the plains below. The mountain ranges, giant rucks in a fawn carpet, stretched to the far horizon.

  ‘Wow.’ I was overwhelmed by a baffling sense of déjà vu.

  Dawit hugged me in delight. ‘You love it too, right? I bought this land five years ago. I couldn’t believe they were selling it so cheap, this plot with the best view in the world. They must have been mad. Now the white man, he knew its value. See that line?’ He traced a semi-obscured trail through the scrub. ‘That’s where an Italian company laid a railway, back when North Darrar was a colony. They planned to put the station here. Me, I look across at that,’ he gestured across the valley, ‘I breathe this air, and my heart is uplifted. This, Paula, is a place where a man can talk to his God.’

  He jumped onto a flat, saddle-shaped rock, and at that moment I remembered exactly why the landscape felt so familiar. I’d gazed across it a thousand times. Dawit was standing where the doomed Edward Wentworth had posed more than a century earlier in the black-and-white photograph that had sat on Jake’s mantelpiece. It was, I belatedly registered, an image that had played a subliminal role in my decision to take up Winston’s job offer. His mention of ‘Darrar’ had set a little bell of intellectual curiosity pinging: it had been the dog-whistle slyly drawing me here. I gave a half-snort, half-gasp.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ A superstitious person might have detected some fateful message in all this. The simpler truth, I told myself, was that the longer I lived in Lira, the more inevitable my encounter with this view had become. ‘It’s absolutely stunning, Dawit.’

  ‘And this is where I’m going to build my cybernet café.’

  I noticed now that I was standing inside a low breezeblock rectangle of walls in the making.

  ‘I have it all laid out. It’s taken me years to reach this stage. There are three of us former fighters in this together. You’ve met the others, Mule and Beanstalk. We’ve been slowly collecting the materials, using our demob money. A bag of cement here, some bricks there, timber donated by a friend, a little bit bought every time one of us makes some money. Now, very nearly, I have enough. Last week, I finally ordered
the satellite dish from Dubai.’

  He scampered from side to side, sketching out his vision with his hands. ‘So the bar will be here. Popcorn, milkshakes, beer, Coke, tea, coffee, the basics to start off with, but then we will start doing cocktails, maybe food. We will play hip-hop, jazz, Motown, Lingala, customers can bring their own CDs. The walls are going to be shocking pink, green, yellow, Day-glo colours – it must look young, radical. My art-college friend wants to stick a collage all over the insides of the toilets, something a bit edgy. He also says he can build us a pool table. We will have a jamming session every weekend, anyone who plays an instrument welcome. The computer screens will be set up along here.’ He crouched and stretched out both arms. ‘We will have the quickest connection in Lira and no government agents looking over your shoulder. I’m thinking of running computer courses for children – I will do that myself. When I can afford it, we will buy a plasma screen to watch music videos. And there will be a big basket of newspapers here, The Economist, the International Herald Tribune, to be read and shared. It’s time Lira joined the twenty-first century. We’re going to call it Panorissima. What do you think of that as a name?’

  ‘Fabulous. I suppose the only issue is whether people will come this far.’

  ‘The bus to the coast stops where we parked. Before the war, every family with a car would drive here on a Sunday to watch the sun go down. The bike riders stop here already, but up till now there’s been nothing for them, just a tree to pee behind. If you make it the funkiest place to hang out in Lira, where youngsters can get away from their parents and plug into the world’s conversation, they will come. It is what a developer would call a prime site.’

  His face was glowing with excitement, I had never seen him so animated. ‘I hadn’t realised you were a budding entrepreneur, Dawit.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been planning this for a long time. You know, I’m not like all these youngsters. They fight because they have to. There is no enthusiasm. I fought for a reason – no one made me do it. I wanted to be a citizen of an independent sovereign nation. That dream kept me going. And now I live in that independent country, and it’s not perfect, I know that better than anyone, and I will say it to whoever listens. I hate those fuckers in the Movement. I could kill them for all their petty betrayals, the comfortable lives they have built on the bones of my friends. But I lost a metre of intestines and several litres of blood for this country, and I’m not giving up on it. As long as I have my cybernet café and this view, as long as those guys leave me in peace, I’ll be happy.’ Then he set about the site with his tape measure, muttering numbers to himself.

  That night he insisted on taking me to the Cinema Napoli, one of Lira’s Modernist temples to the cult of Cinecittà. ‘Pure escapism,’ Dawit promised me. ‘Better than getting drunk, or shooting heroin, not that I would know, ha-ha. It will put you in a good mood for a week, guarantee.’

  ‘But the dialogue will be incomprehensible.’

  ‘Oh, these films anyone can understand. The language they speak is universal, anyways. Because it is the language …’ Dawit thrust out both hands at ear level to form a human teapot and jerked his head from one shoulder to the other, eyes darting from side to side ‘… of ROMANCE!’

  We teetered on stools at the bar, waiting for the previous screening to end. The mirrored drinks display must originally have been a jewelled mosaic of glowing elixirs and potions: Campari and crème de menthe, Fernet Branca and Curaçao, Cointreau and rum, a choice of grappas, tequilas and brandies waiting to be combined with a squeeze of lime or a splash of Angostura bitters by a slick barista showing off his cocktail-shaker routine. The mirror was smudged with fingerprints now, the only equipment wielded by the barman a bottle-opener, and there were only two beverages on offer: Coke or beer. I chose beer. ‘So what’s with you and Bollywood, Dawit?’

  ‘I just take what’s available. Not much choice in this town.’

  ‘OK, then, what is it with Lira and Bollywood? Why does every cinema here specialise in Hindi films?’

  ‘Maybe it was the Indian teachers the government recruited after liberation to teach us all bad English. They brought stacks of DVDs and would show them when they ran out of things to say. We got the taste. And they’re dirty cheap.’ He shielded his mouth with his hand to produce a hoarse stage whisper. ‘In fact, when you use a pirated copy, they’re not just cheap, they’re free.’

  The doors to the foyer were kicked open, a fug of cigarette smoke and hormones billowing out to engulf us along with the all-male audience. The auditorium, when we entered, had the fermenting warmth of a stable – a farmer could have raised seedlings on the nutrients in the air.

  We settled in our seats, three rows back from the screen and squarely in the middle, at Dawit’s insistence. But as the trailers began, I heard him curse. ‘Shit. We should have waited. I usually skip this part.’

  We had arrived early enough for ‘Coming Attractions’, which appeared to be a locally made war film. Tanks blasted at one another, the images so grainy I suspected this was genuine footage from the recent conflict. A moustachioed actor wearing what I now recognised as Darrar’s national uniform screamed at a cowering prisoner, then slapped him. Cut to a close-up of a beautiful young girl weeping. Cut to a young hero, in our side’s uniform, striding into the hills, AK-47 on his shoulder. The voice-over was hectoring and urgent. I could hear a low murmur from Dawit.

  Then we were on to the second trailer. This time a patrol of enemy soldiers was setting fire to a hut as women ululated. One opened fire on an old woman begging for her life. A frantic voice summarised the plot. Cut to the face of the fatigues-clad hero, clearly being tortured, blood trickling down one side of his face. Dawit’s muttering was now so loud that heads were swivelling on either side of us. The corners of his mouth were curved in a gargoyle grimace.

  ‘Shush, Dawit. You’ll get us chucked out.’

  ‘Just sick, sick, sick, sick, sick of this boulesheeet – they just never stop, these guys, they never fucking stop.’

  The screen went blank, a welcome reprieve. Then, suddenly, a still image. I giggled. It was the shot that appears when you feed a DVD into a player, complete with prompts for ‘play’, ‘scenes’, ‘subtitles’ and ‘songs’. The projectionist clicked ‘play’ and we were off. A swirl of pink petals, we were drowning in coconut ice. Doves tumbled, golden curtains billowed, glossy saris twirled, even glossier lips stretched in perfect smiles. Some schematic subtitling had been provided, but Dawit was right. You didn’t need to speak Hindi to understand the plot, a basic poor-girl-meets-rich-boy-parents-disapprove-but-come-round-in-the-end scenario. As the first dance number started up, I was aware of Dawit letting go next to me. His mouth had softened and his shoulders were no longer pulled up around his ears. He began humming the first number, and I realised he had seen the film before, probably several times. At the start of the third dance routine, his hand – so small compared to Jake’s – crept across the seats to take mine. And I, who had always disliked that form of contact above all others, sat there with my eyes closed, allowing the nasal siren voices, singing so confidently of eternal love, to swamp me, a thirty-five-year-old woman recalling, for a moment, what it felt like to be touched with tenderness by a man.

  We would never be so intimate again.

  The visa business left a stain on us. A nugget of resentment I could take out and prod, testing for consistency and depth, then roll back to its position at the secret core of our relationship. My lone voice had returned, and now it was all poison. Doesn’t love you enough to recognise you, it whispered, when a letter addressed to Mr and Mrs Jake Wentworth arrived. Naïve sucker, it hissed, when a New England rag reported that Jake was planning to run for Congress with Olivia at his side, an article he laughingly dismissed. And when a mix-up over dates occurred, the voice was always ready to highlight the discrepancy. Lying gets to be a habit, it murmured. He’ll do to you what he did to her.

  It was the keystone niggle on which I could buil
d my arching insecurity. This, even though my fears – and Larry Goldman’s warnings – proved entirely unfounded. Not only did Hitchens abandon the flirtation with its closest rival in a flurry of recrimination, I was granted an H1B in almost record time. And thank goodness I was: work suddenly took off and there would have been no spare hours in which to sort out my status after that.

  I had originally arrived in New York on a one-year secondment Hitchens had subtly presented as a favour to me and a burden to the firm. The expectation that I would treat this as a glamorous extended junket had always irked me, and I had set out to make myself indispensable by working harder than anyone else. Before I had met Jake, that had been easy. When the time arrived for me to return to London, the managing partner had asked if I would stay on. After that, no one bothered discussing my return. I was officially a New York associate on partnership track.

  I was now reaping the reward for that early effort. Juggling several deals at a time, always adding more, everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. The all-nighters multiplied – watching dawn rise over the New York skyline with a team high on coffee and junk food no longer felt novel. I was exhausted, but also very excited. The gods of Wall Street smiled upon me, and as the ugly ‘deal toys’ – trophies generated by a series of successfully closed bond offerings, the occasional merger or acquisition – accumulated on my shelves, I began to appreciate that my nationality wasn’t necessarily a handicap. It served as a novelty factor, edging my profile a helpful inch above the competition. The generosity of Hitchens’s bonus that year made my eyes pop. The boss took me aside at the office Christmas party, made a joke about my Limey accent I’d heard thirty times before and told me, as Bing Crosby boomed across the hired hall, that it was probably time to run deals on my own.