Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  Once, we met a caravan of camels carrying millet sewn up in leather sacks. The Arabs with the caravan told us that the town of Messaguet lay only a day’s journey away. That night, we made camp in a dense forest. Within moments, the camels were out of sight among the trees. Jibrin was already snoring. I had to track the animals down in the undergrowth and watch them while they fed. The ground was alive with the scampering of thousands of mice, which crawled over my feet. The sound of a drum came throbbing through the trees. Above the speartips of the branches, the stars were clearer than I had seen them for days.

  The next morning, we entered Messaguet. The village was depressed and dilapidated, stewing in the heat. Children with swollen bellies looked at us with wide eyes as we passed through the labyrinth of houses. We traversed the rollicking lines of market stalls, where tins of Food and Agriculture Organisation pilchards seemed to be the only food available. Everywhere was the brooding sense of defeat.

  The sergeant of gendarmes was the smartest soldier I had yet seen in Chad. His face was broad and black, and his mouth dropped open slightly as we trooped into his room in our filthy clothes. There were two unused cannon shells standing on his desk as ornaments. You could see that he was trying hard to keep his cool. His scrutiny of our passports seemed very professional at first, until he snapped at Marinetta, ‘Your height is only 157 centimetres [5 feet 2 inches]?’ His mouth tightened and his eyebrows went up, as if this fact was of a most suspicious nature.

  ‘I am very small, yes,’ she giggled. ‘It’s not my fault.’ I realised suddenly that the figure was probably the only thing in the passports which he’d understood. Her answer was too much for him, and he stood up and called a soldier to watch us, then strode out of the room.

  The soldier was small and cylindrical and had only one eye. His face had a robotic blankness. His cap was pulled low over his single good eye, and he wore a combat suit that was evidently meant for someone slighter. He stood next to us awkwardly, then pointed to a poster that I had noticed on the wall. It showed a group of bearded Libyan soldiers, presumably the ones recently captured in Tibesti, being led around a town in chains. The enemies of Chad!’ the soldier said fiercely. One of the Libyans looked uncomfortably like me, I thought.

  The sergeant reappeared, looking relieved. He instructed the soldier to take us to the office of the state security police. We couched and unloaded our camels outside some rambling brick buildings staggering around a courtyard. An old man in a black gandourah interviewed the three of us together. He had a seamy brown face and a silver stub of beard. Mostly, he spoke to Jibrin in Gor’an, but once, he asked me in Arabic, ‘Is this woman your wife or your daughter?’ After we had explained everything, he said to us, ‘This is what you will do. You will leave your camels here with us. You will go to N’Jamena with a guard, and you will see the chief of state security. You can explain everything to him. Get ready. There is transport to the capital today.’

  After we had moved our baggage into their store room, Jibrin lay down in the shade of a straw shelter and groaned, saying that he had a fever. I gave him a dose of chloroquin and some aspirin. There was a water closet in the corner of the yard, a hole in the ground guarded by a matting screen. We went behind the screen to change into our Western clothes. We had not changed our clothes at all since leaving Agadez forty-three days earlier. My hands were pitted with rough callouses; my fingers were covered in deep ruts, burned by fire ash, nicked and scarred by stones and plants. My face was deeply roasted by the sun except for a pink line across my head, where the headcloth had sat. I watched Marinetta changing into her salopette. Her muscles were hard as an athlete’s now. Her skin was dark bronze where it had been exposed. Gone was the look of touching innocence that I had first seen in that office in Khartoum. In her eyes was the ferocious fire of a strong woman.

  Just as we finished changing, someone shouted that the transport had arrived. We gathered our few possessions and went outside. The transport was an articulated lorry with about 500 people perched shoulder to shoulder on its spine. Jibrin groaned again. ‘We can’t ride on that!’ he said. A young and chubby-faced Arab soldier with a Kalashnikov appeared and cleared tiny spaces for us after we had climbed up. We sat down with our legs hanging dangerously over the side. Jibrin’s cup of misery was full. He was still feverish, and his leg hurt him in this crushed position. He was probably also white with fear that the vehicle would roll over, which seemed a distinct possibility given the hundreds of passengers. Behind us, people pushed and shoved and elbowed each other, jabbering in Arabic and Gor’an and complaining about lost seats. As the vehicle lurched forward, an old woman began to prod Marinetta in the back with a bony black finger. The woman had a horrific face. I told her to desist, but she ignored me and started making obscene remarks in Arabic. The men laughed but looked sheepish.

  N’Jamena was only about 40 miles from Messaguet. Sunset came, and then the lights of the city showed ominously through the darkness. The lorry shuddered to a halt by a checkpoint, and the passengers scrambled down and began opening their baggage for inspection. We were ordered to transfer to a waiting Land Rover. Things began to look more serious. I was surprised when the Land Rover dropped us in the street and our guard said that we must get a taxi to the state security headquarters—at my expense, of course. It was then that I put my foot down. ‘Why should my wife and I spend the night in a police station?’ I demanded. ‘It’s not possible. We are not spies or criminals, and we have visas for this country. All we have done is to enter the country riding camels, and that is not a crime.’ I insisted that we go to a hotel and sleep properly. Then we could visit the state security headquarters the following morning. Our guard was very young and obviously unused to making decisions. He wavered, and in the end, I persuaded him. After all, I said, where were we going to run to when he had our passports?

  The hotel was called Hotel du Lac and it was run by a nervous Bornu. At first, he wanted nothing to do with us. Then he obliged our guard to call his headquarters by phone to make sure it was official. He showed us into a room with no furniture and a mattress on the floor. He smiled apologetically. ‘The war,’ he sighed. ‘There used to be tourists here before the war. Ah, well, that’s life. God is generous.’ Before we slept, our guard searched our belongings and removed our knives. I wondered what he imagined we intended to do with them. He sat down outside the room with his Kalashnikov across his knees and prepared for a long vigil. Jibrin sprawled out next to him. Inside, we lay down on our mattress, shattered. A Jaguar flew low over the city, rocking the buildings with the boom of its engine. Just before sleep took me, I heard the metal bolt being shot across our door.

  Wild-beast Land

  The state security headquarters was a dark citadel from a nightmare. You could imagine rat-infested dungeons, racks, and manacles hidden away behind its crumbling façade. A man in ragged clothes and unlaced boots sat by the gate. He nursed a sub-machine gun lovingly on his knees.

  The building was set behind high stone walls that were eaten away by bullet holes. It was heavy and broken, full of narrow corridors where nameless men stalked past us silently. Rows of plyboard doors were smeared with the grease of many hands. After an hour of sitting on the floor in a corridor, Jibrin was called into an office. The door snapped shut behind him. Someone told us roughly to wait outside in the yard.

  There was a school bench to sit on. Six or seven red-bereted soldiers clattered back and forth around us. They were teenagers with all the arrogance of youth in uniform. They played cards and shouted at each other stridently in Gor’an. After that, they wrestled and threw clods of earth. One of them seized his rifle and pointed it at another. Both of them seemed drunk.

  We sat on the bench for eight hours. No one spoke to us or called us inside. The soldiers slurped tea and attacked a bowl of lentils but never offered us any. Jibrin never reappeared. Once, a tall, stout man in a very clean gandourah emerged from the building, followed by a soldier who was evidently his bodyguard.
Our soldiers left off horseplaying and saluted, while the man climbed into a Peugeot saloon. Then they went back to their horseplay.

  ‘What do you think Jibrin’s saying about us?’ Marinetta asked. The soldiers glared at her, silently forcing her to shut up. But she had voiced my own fears. I remembered with great clarity the disparaging remarks I had made to Jibrin about the commissar in Bol. Jibrin was Nigerien, but, like the ruling elite in Chad, he was a Gor’an. He was one of them. As the hours passed, my mind explored the possible result of this captivity. Nothing I had seen here inspired my confidence. If things went against us, I thought, we could expect at best to be put on the next plane to Europe. At worst, we might be suspected of spying, separated, and thrown into prison. The idea of separation was too hard to bear after the hardship we had endured together. I was utterly horrified by the thought of being forced to leave Marinetta to the tender mercies of soldiers like these. Better, I thought, for us both to be taken out and shot.

  Once, I got up to fetch my pipe from the rucksack. ‘Sit down!’ one of the soldiers scowled. ‘Don’t move until you’re told!’ He looked about sixteen. When I sat down, he began describing to the others, in French, how he had once, shot a man.

  The sun grilled us. The soldiers retired into the shade of a broken-down shelter. The stout man returned in the Peugeot, and the soldiers scuffled out of the shelter to salute. Marinetta and I sank further into despondency as we were ignored. Our backs ached constantly from the now unaccustomed effort of sitting on a bench. We were hungry and thirsty. We had almost reached the stage of wishing that someone would start asking questions, no matter how brutally, to remind us that we were human beings.

  At about two o’clock, a man in a thick blue safari suit came to the door holding a flimsy paper. He beckoned to us. ‘Go!’ the soldiers said.

  The man handed me the paper solemnly and said, ‘Here it is.’ I looked at the single sheet. It was an authorisation to cross the whole of Chad by the land route as far as the Sudanese border. It had been signed by the Minister of the Interior himself.

  When we looked up in shock, the man said, ‘Stick to the main track. Do not go right or left. Report to any police posts you meet on the way. Bon voyage!’ As we trooped out of the yard, with Jibrin and our guard from Messaguet trailing behind, I felt strongly inclined to make a very rude gesture at the red-bereted soldiers. But I refrained.

  *

  At the Sudanese Embassy, we met the Minister Plenipotentiary, Nureddin. He came from Wadi Haifa in the north of the Sudan but was as near to being British as any African could get. His evident good nature warmed your heart. ‘It’s too dangerous to travel through the northern Sudan just now,’ he said. ‘There have been new developments.’ The new developments were the Libyans. ‘You could take a truck to the Nile,’ he suggested diffidently. I showed him the letter that I had received from the Sudanese Embassy in London. He sighed and agreed to issue entry visas as long as we signed a letter accepting all responsibility. ‘You ought to take a gun with you,’ he said. ‘There are some bad people in the Sudan just now.’ When the visas arrived, they had the words ‘By camel’ written neatly over them in pen.

  Jibrin was waiting for us outside the UN building. ‘Pay me my money, patron,’ he instructed me. ‘I’ve had enough of this place.’ I handed over the money rather grudgingly, aware of how little work Jibrin had done by comparison with our guides. I was tempted to say, ‘Never was so much paid by people so poor for so little,’ but then I thought of Jibrin’s crushed leg and seven motherless children in N’Guigmi. The ten days he had been with us must have been a torture for him. I didn’t even blame him for cheating us now; he had done the right thing from his point of view. A man must look after his own. And, actually, we had much to thank him for. He had done so little work that Marinetta and I had become experts in every aspect of handling our camels. As a guide, Jibrin had been excellent practice in not having one.

  The door of the store room in Messaguet creaked open, and a beam of light stove in the darkness. Three figures were sitting hunched up among our saddlery and equipment. The light left yellow smears across their ragged shirts and greyish faces, and they blinked, screwing up their eyes in the unfamiliar brightness. The old security chief told me that they were three felons who had been caught stealing clothes from the market. They were to be locked up here until their case was decided. The grey, defeated faces looked at us blankly as we shifted our things. I was suddenly very glad to be setting off that night.

  Our camels had been grazing in the fields around Messaguet, and while we were waiting for the herdsman to bring them in, we bought provisions in the market. A young state security officer insisted on accompanying us. Like most of the others, he must have been no more than twenty. I guessed that almost everyone older was away fighting the Libyans.

  Hassan was a stringy, nervous man, impetuous, impulsive, and obviously bright. He had been a refugee in Nigeria and spoke English and Hausa as well as French and Arabic. He said that the state security was ‘like the CIA’, but before long, the romantic façade crumbled and he admitted to being worried about the future. He was a Bornu, he said, not one of the Gor’an who were the ruling elite. ‘You can’t get anywhere without having friends in high places,’ he said. ‘When the war finishes, that will be the big problem.’ As we walked back towards the office, Hassan revealed the true reason for his interest in us: could we, he asked, get him a job with the UN? ‘You can never get near it unless you know someone,’ he said. ‘To see a white man, you first have to get past a black man.’ I wondered if that was a saying from colonial times.

  The camels looked refreshed after their rest. As we loaded them hastily, the chief repeated, ‘You should take a guide. There are plenty of bandits in Chad. There are subversives and rebels who all have guns.’ We resisted adamantly. Our authorisation did not specify that we must take a guide. After Jibrin, we felt that we’d be better off alone.

  A great conga of people followed our camels to the town gate, where a beer-reeking soldier examined our passports again. It was sunset. Beyond the wooden barrier, low acacias lay in brooding darkness. The soldier lifted the barrier, leaning clumsily on the weighted end. Hassan looked at us with hooded, trustless eyes. ‘Watch out for wild beasts and wild men!’ he shouted. Then the plexus of light fell away behind us.

  The town, its weapons, and its police were a dim sheen of memory on the hugeness of the desert sky. Cicadas vibrated in the thornscrub. There was the rattle of rats and scampering lizards. The night, the whispering brush, the shadows of the stars, and the last white rind of day formed a pattern that seemed suddenly dangerous.

  Work was harder now that there were only two of us but we were rewarded by a new sense of freedom born of the fact that no third person was watching us constantly. After the frightening experience of our arrest and brief captivity in N’Jamena, we felt closer. I knew that we could make it to the Nile without a guide but I doubted if we could do it without each other. There was no question of one of us going on alone; we would do it together or not at all. Sometimes I thought that, in its raw, harsh, desert form, this feeling must be love.

  Over the next few days, Marnietta worked with a determination that I had only glimpsed previously. She struggled with jerrycans that were heavy even for a strong man, and strained on her side of the weighty provision sacks. When the camels were loaded, she would take her turn at leading them, always walking as long as I did. When it was my turn to lead, she would drive them on from the rear, swinging her little sticks and making clucking sounds of encouragement. WE moved fast now, faster than we had done with almost any guide. It was a rare day when we did not march for twelve hours and cover 30 miles.

  At midday, we halted in the shelter of a tree and ate the remains of the previous day’s meal. It was hot again. The winter’s span had been abruptly cut short as we moved south. Again, we drank copious quantities of zrig. As soon as the light began to fade, we would search for a place as far off the track as possible
. I knew that Hassan had been joking about ‘wild men’. We would unload the camels, making a tiny island in the desert, then hobble them and send them off towards the grazing. We set up our equipment like a three-sided fortress against the prevailing wind. Our saddles formed the cross-wall, and each saddle bag and container had its place along the battlements. Inside this tiny querencia, we laid out our groundsheet and, on top of that, our blankets. Then, as the darkness thickened around us and the camels shuffled among the stunted trees, we would sit on our blankets and Marinetta would make tea. We each drank a whole mug of it, scalding hot and very sweet, with dried milk added. It was the most welcome experience of the day.

  After tea, which we made on our gas cooker, I would collect firewood for the main meal. Making fire was a dicey business in this uncertain country. A campfire was like a beacon; it attracted enemies and unwanted guests. On the second night out of Messaguet, I left the camp to watch the camels while Marinetta was cooking our meal. Suddenly, I heard her shout, ‘Maik! Come quick!’ In the long, flickering shadows, three men were standing, watching her. Their squat forms threw ugly, dark shapes on the uneven sand, and their faces were demonic in the firelight. Each of them carried a spear with a leaf-shaped blade and a haft taller than the tallest man. The wide speartips glittered in the flames. The men stood motionless, staring at Marinetta, as I emerged from the darkness. I was unarmed except for the knife that I now wore constantly. I shook hands with each of them, but as they made as if to sit down, I suggested firmly that there was a better place to camp farther on. Close up, the men had simple, farmers’ faces. Most likely, they were ordinary tribesmen. But I had seen and heard enough of Chad to know that it was not worth taking chances.