You are American? English? they wanted to know. No, I sobbed, barely able to speak. I am Sudanese too. But I spoke like a foreigner, they said. I betrayed my country, my religion, calling on the love of God. I protested but they continued, calling to witness the paler colour of my skin, the clothes that betrayed my westernness. They spat on me, and continued kicking, and then one of them advanced with a knife. He cut me free of the other women, but he was not freeing me. Foreigner, he spat, filthy foreign abid, we will make you clean. Two of them stood on my arms to hold me still as he sliced.
Later I would see that the bodies – babies, children, men and women – had been drenched in the oil of their own stores, the oil that along with their stacks of maize and sacks of lentils would have seen the townsfolk through the next season. The ones that had not been set alight were thrown into the wells – there were three in the town – and the smell of decay was inescapable. Several heads, black and bloodied, caked in dust, were rolling around the town square, as if they’d been used as footballs.
But meanwhile one of the women had held onto her shawl through all the long night, and had plugged it between my legs as I lay unconscious. When I came to, I discovered her lying very close, holding me still. We were beside the fire which had been fed with smashed doors, chairs and other broken pieces of furniture, and though it flared and then smouldered all night, none of us was warm. By day it was clear the men had gone, on their trucks with their weapons, and all that remained was blood and ashes. Even the sound of sobbing had gone. It was as if the women had lost their voices along with their clothes, their men, their children. My friend – her name was Safiya – helped me to the ruined store where she found water and scraps of cloth that she ripped up to bind my broken arms, which she then crossed over my chest. She brought me my backpack, my filthy clothes, and set me up on the store verandah, while she crept among the debris, the shredded newspapers, the ruined stocks of writing paper, broken pencils, dismembered books and magazines all torn and scattered. The store had escaped burning and she poked through looking for something, anything. A couple of plastic bowls, a grass mat, a packet of paper serviettes.
Is there nothing useful in here? Safiya said, rummaging through my backpack. She dug out the Time magazine and held it up with a query on her face. That was when I noticed it was your face on the cover, your eyes looking directly into mine. If that man, I thought, could see me now, what would he think? She pushed my hair back and pressed her lips onto my forehead. Poor child, she murmured, though she was barely older than me. We were all done as little girls, she said.
Did it hurt less then? At the time I could not bear to think. And recalling now the press of her dusty lips on my forehead makes me weep. I realise now that it is not the horrors that are unbearable over the years, but the small kindnesses. One day I might understand why that is so.
She waited until I could walk again. Five days. The other women scoured the ruined town for food and saved some water from the few jars and buckets that had been overlooked. Sacks of sorghum and flour and lentils had been destroyed. The rest that was not taken had been thrown on the fires. They had been thorough, but in the cellar of one house they had overlooked a small store of maize, some of the leaves still intact, though the grains were dried, in readiness for husking. We piled the maize cobs on the store verandah and counted them, enough for each of us, every share equal. Safiya cooked ours in a tin over the coals, but even after boiling they were tough and dry. I can still taste the smoky flavour, feel the gritty kernels against my teeth.
When we limped into the long dusty queue of souls headed for Chad I had less than nothing on my mind. I would have stayed there, beside the road, along with the bundles of dropped sticks and discarded cooking pots and empty sacks and all the things people kept for as long as they could, until it became hopeless, were it not for Safiya. She herded me into the centre of the group, like a newborn baby elephant needing protection from lions. When we reached Geneina at the border, it was like paradise to see the hordes of people, sick and starving though they were. It was bliss to discover people only suffering from HIV, malnutrition and tuberculosis. I could disappear within such crowds and recover. And here Safiya and I would learn to treasure the smallest handful of gritty lentils or the skin of an onion. When they closed off supplies and we could not even beg a bottle of water, we moved on to Farchana where I saw the most abundant supermarket ever. Now do you understand why here I feel a little overwhelmed at times?
Kylie’s baby is spectacular. His face is pink and yellow, rather mottled. As I admired him I couldn’t help thinking of the port wine cheese they sell in Dairy. A touch of jaundice, she said, when she brought him to the school gate the other day. It’ll fade soon.
The other mothers were clustering and clucking, and I had a long enough look for the sake of politeness before retreating to speak to Mrs Abeche who expressed dismay at the prospect of a woman out and about just a week after a birth. She turned aside and spoke softly to me from within the depths of her shawl. It did not seem decent to her, let alone even possible, and certainly not desirable – why would you want to leave your house with a new baby when there was no need? A month, I think, was Mrs Abeche’s ideal resting period, each birth. But then she did have her mother and mother-in-law to assist, while Kylie seems to shrug off the idea that help is needed. For myself, I was still amazed that she could walk, could get in and out of the car, swing the baby seat into the back. I know I was staring, but she even seemed to be wearing her old jeans.
The school bell went and Essa came and grabbed my hand. Can I go back to Tabitha’s place? Please? And Tabitha’s little brother is cute. Mrs Lawrence said we could hold him.
She said Mrs Orrence, and I resisted correcting her but placed my hand on her braided head. I should not think of port wine cheddar when Essa’s head was like some bruised vegetable when she was born.
I will pick you up at five, I said, nodding to Kylie. I walked back down the street with Mrs Abeche and her two oldest. She was talking about the electric toaster. Her flat, in a former army compound, had somewhat unpredictable electricity. I had only coaxed Mrs Abeche into using the toaster when the supply sparked and crashed, but it turned out that her children had switched on every appliance and overloaded the system. She was now entranced by the way the bread leaped out and landed on the bench, sometimes right on the plate. She was entranced by sliced bread. Come by the community centre tomorrow, I said, and I’ll organise an electrician to come and fix it, struggling to find the word for electrician in Dinka. I had to keep reminding myself that until six months ago Mrs Abeche had never handled a house key or used a phone or known of the miracle of endless running water in kitchen sinks and flushing toilets. What she had in the camps would have been the same pit that Safiya held me over time and again. The day we took the Abeches to their new place I showed her around and demonstrated the main amenities. When I watched Mrs Abeche press to flush, then flush again, looking at me, then into the bowl, with the look of simplest sweetest joy on her face, I understood exactly what she felt.
I thought all my insides were going to pour out and leave me a husk, skin stretched over a frame of bones, except for the hard lump of my baby. Safiya had already had whatever disease it was that kept us heaving into an old tin and running to the pits, and when it finally stopped and I could keep down the boiled water she now spooned into me and lie back on the hessian sacks in our hut and sleep, the pain recommenced, only with a different resonance and direction.
Be grateful, Safiya whispered as I moaned, that the baby is so small, it will be easier for it to get out, you know. How right she was. Essa slid and gasped into the world before too long, her tiny head moulded into a shrivelled eggplant thanks to the scar tissue that gripped both of us so tight. Yet again I was glad Safiya was there, holding out a clean shawl to catch my baby as she broke free of my body, for the tearing pain of that alone made me faint.
George, I have promised you something pleasant and believe me I am
getting there, but there is a part of this old and familiar narrative I have not yet explained. I must go back and flesh the story out, as they say. That afternoon we were captured out collecting grass, behind me all the Aishas were wailing. Perhaps I was too. The baby was quiet by then. My attacker rummaged through my bag and tossed out the little I had managed to hold on to all those months. Some aspirins, the packet flattened and the pills crushed anyway, a plastic bottle, my notebook and diary, some pencils. And the Time magazine, which by then I had read over and over since there was nothing else to read in the camp. The jeers turned to screeches and yells, then thumps. Who is this infidel, this western man? Why do you keep his picture with you? He must be your lover. You are a whore. And then the word that is the worst of all in my country, abid: slave, black slave.
George, I was only grateful they could not read, since the article concerned your views on our government, its failure to protect our people, and mentioned certain international organisations who denounced the very men who were now attacking us. It mentioned Darfur by name, the people of the Fur who were being systematically raped and starved and displaced and murdered and so comprehensively excised from the map of human history and geography that what remained, for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres, was nothing but circles of ash. There was a picture in the article that showed the curious phenomenon where villages and tiny settlements all over the middle of the country were completely razed, yet nearby other villages, those of the herders, spared. Entire communities reduced to flat black spots, a dozen, thirty, fifty farming families, their homes and stores crushed like antheaps, and yet maybe no more than a kilometre away, other villages or settlements were completely intact. On the satellite map it looked like abstract art, a dot painting. Perfect black circles, perfect brown circles. This was a war like no other, you had said. The systematic destruction of the ethnic farmers was too calculated and too precisely targeted for comprehension. No one was able even to understand it, let alone equipped to stop it, and what was happening in Darfur represented the greatest atrocity of our time.
I was grateful they could not read that for they might have made it worse than it already was and punished me further for the sheer temerity of your involvement in their war, not to mention your denunciation of these very men who turned on their own people and betrayed humanity itself. They threw the magazine down and spat on it and one of them stamped his boot on your face before they commenced on me.
And I should have been grateful that I was only being raped, though at the time all I could think of was how much more my body could take, and whether I would indeed be split in two as it felt, and if those endless thumping penises were ever going to stop, and if it was worse because I had been sliced clean those months before, or if rape was always like this. At one point, after the fifth, or sixth, they tossed me over onto my front and as the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth pumped into me with roars and cheers, my face was pushed into the dirt right next to yours. My tears and snot smeared your face. We ate dirt together. And so when Mr el-Shataya makes his silent accusations about Essa’s father I know he knows that she has ten or more fathers or none, and it is why I prefer to believe that her father could only be you.
Yesterday, after three clients left me with application forms to complete – one of them needs to obtain a Medicare card – and letters to write – a relative in Brisbane – and a permission note for a child’s excursion to the Institute of Science in Canberra, I still had time before I fetched Essa from school. I thought I may as well make use of the community centre’s facilities, so I did some research and came across that magazine article where you said that Darfur represented the greatest failure of your life.
George, I promised you there would be good news toward the end of this letter and you must believe me that you did not fail, not me in any case. Every woman in the world wants George Clooney to father her child, or so I have read, and my child is the perfect and innocent result of an experience that until now has been too bitter for words but you must understand that everything about her brings me joy. Her pansy face. The light in her eyes. The soft plum of her mouth as she sucks the braids brushing her cheeks or eats her white bread and honey sandwich. I did not see their faces as they pumped and kicked and spat and ejaculated enough times to make a million children. I only saw your face, and I see it in her every day, and I want you to know that your involvement in my country was not the great failure that you think and that you were right to have been there, and I shall continue to believe that this was a good thing. I have to.
Yours sincerely
Miriam
Author’s Note
An earlier version of ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ first appeared as ‘The Signs’ in www.saysomething.org.au (2006) and was also published in The Big Issue no 33, edited by Jo Case (14-27 July 2009); ‘Writing [in] the New Millenium’ was published in New Australian Stories 2, edited by Aviva Tuffield (Scribe: 2010); ‘The Sleepers in that Quiet Earth’ was published in Best Australian Stories 2011, edited by Cate Kennedy (Black Inc: 2011).
About Debra Adelaide
Debra Adelaide is the author of several novels, including The Household Guide to Dying (2008), which was sold around the world, Serpent Dust (1998) and The Hotel Albatross (1995). She is also the editor of several themed collections of fiction and memoirs, including Acts of Dog (2003) and the bestselling Motherlove series (1996–1998). She has also been a freelance researcher, editor, book reviewer and literary award judge and is now an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she teaches creative writing.
Also by Debra Adelaide
Novels
The Hotel Albatross
Serpent Dust
The Household Guide to Dying
Anthologies
Motherlove
Motherlove 2
Cutting the Cord
Acts of Dog
Non-Fiction
A Bright and Fiery Troop (ed)
Australian Women Writers: a Bibliographical Guide
A Window in the Dark (ed)
Bibliography of Australian Women’s Literature
The Hotel Albatross
Set in a large country hotel, this is a comical and affectionate story of hard work and good intentions gone wrong.
When the last manager departs, leaving too many bickering staff, a huge overdraft and a store of useless wine, a bewildered married couple find themselves in charge.
They thought the Hotel Albatross would be a solid little investment. Instead, it takes over their life with its eccentric house guests, endlessly complaining patrons, and elaborate wedding parties. The beer is never cold enough, the food never cheap enough, and the jukebox is always playing a sad country song.
And unfortunately, they forgot that in this business, it’s the drunks who are your best customers.
The hotel demands much and returns little, and yet the characters it contains are rewarding in the most unexpected ways. With black humour and in sharply observed vignettes, Debra Adelaide creates a world that is as compelling as it is bizarre.
First published in 1995, The Hotel Albatross was shortlisted for the Nita B Kibble Literary Award for women writers.
The Household Guide to Dying
When Delia Bennet – author and domestic advice columnist – is diagnosed with cancer, she knows it’s time to get her house in order. After all, she’s got to secure the future for her husband, their two daughters and their five beloved chickens. But as she writes lists and makes plans, questions both large and small creep in. Should she divulge her best culinary secrets? Read her favourite novels one last time? Plan her daughters’ far-off weddings?
Complicating her dilemma is the matter of the past, and a remote country town where she fled as a pregnant teenager, only to leave broken-hearted eight years later.
Researching and writing her final Household Guide, Delia is forced to confront the pieces of herself she left behind. She learns what matters is not the past but
the present – that the art of dying is all about truly living.
Fresh, witty, deeply moving – and a celebration of love, family and that place we call home – this unforgettable story will surprise and delight the reader until the very last page.
PRAISE FOR THE HOUSEHOLD GUIDE TO DYING:
‘Debra Adelaide has created one of the most irrepressible and beguiling heroines to emerge in Australian fiction since Sybylla Melvyn made her appearance in My Brilliant Career . . . [Her] take on death and impending mortality is in a class of its own.’
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
First published 2013 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © Debra Adelaide 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
Letter to George Clooney Page 21
