Bettany's Book (93 page)

‘That is a young martyr,’ said the captain. ‘Your man is not a young martyr.’

Prim thought of saying, ‘And a bloody good thing!’ but was prevented by the fact that she did not know either Sherif’s condition nor the nature of the contract inherent in her being permitted to come here.

‘In there, two beds beyond the young man there,’ the captain told her then. Strangely as she trod into that lethal blue light, she wanted his company. After the second bed, in which lay a thin, sleeping boy,
profusely sweating and twitching with cerebral malaria, – the ‘young man’ indicated by the captain – her control of numbers fled. She was helped by the fact that the next bed contained a man whose face, under heavy ointment, had had its pigment altered to blood-red as if by some explosion. He was chewing
khat
, not a habit of Sherif’s.

But the next man said, more or less, ‘Primrose.’

She would have in any case recognised him, for he was pathetically present behind the ballooning head, the engorged lips, the scarred ears. There was so much damage that her name could barely be forced out. ‘Im-ro,’ he had said.

His upper body was bandaged, not tightly as if for broken ribs, but loosely enough for tufts of cotton wool, a rare commodity, to emerge from the edges of some of the swathing. His hands were in delicate cotton gloves. She took a seat and leaned forward, refraining from the easy affection of touching or kissing. He looked like a man to whom even the weight of lips would be painful. And even so padded, he was thinner, had had half his substance taken from him.

‘I will get you out, Sherif. Yes, darling, you don’t need to go back. I will get you out.’

‘That’d be nice,’ murmured Sherif with a little stutter of laughter.

‘Where were you?’ she whispered. She looked around to see if anyone was listening. No. The captain was outside by the counter, talking to the guards.

‘Don’ know,’ said Sherif, struggling with the words. ‘They said Kassala but I think I was here all the time. Moved me once. But only a short way.’ He got a fit of stuttering laughter again. ‘They don’t give you any exact address.’

Prim stood and took firm but gentle hold of either side of the hem of the sheet which covered his lower body. She lifted it deftly, in a manner meant to cause no pain. No one was there to tell her to desist. His penis and scrotum were swaddled more or less in the manner of his ribs. From Amnesty reports she knew that torturers, from Chile to Northern Europe, infallibly settled on the genitals, male and female, converting love to loathing, fertility to ashes. Beloved Sherif had the mark on him of the twentieth century – the bite-marks of electro-genital torture. Prim swallowed tears, said nothing, lowered the sheet.

A nurse, frowning behind an elegant white mask, emerged from the deeper, bluer corners of the room and wagged a finger. The nurse remained, supervising, for about twenty seconds during which Sherif
turned his eye slits satirically to Prim. His pervasive attitude seemed to be one of manic amusement, more odd than welcome.

‘Forgive me,’ Prim whispered to him. ‘You had a beautiful body and they’ve ruined it.’

‘A few dents,’ said Sherif, overtaken by painful hilarity. ‘No permanent harm.’

Behind her Prim was aware that orderlies were moving out the shrouded body, and the two white-clothed parents moved by in its wake, guttural grief in their throats.

But the spirit, thought Prim, weeping for Sherif.

He muttered, ‘Don’t let them make you do anything …’

‘I’d do anything,’ she said. ‘I’ll sign anything. I’ll take you back to Australia …’

‘Waltzing Matilda,’ he said. ‘Awt-zing Matiya,’ it came out. And was he trying to wink with one of his swollen eyelids? ‘Don’t do everything they ask.’ Then he grinned painfully and seemed to say, though she couldn’t have sworn, ‘I’m at home in the cupboard of screams.’

She wanted to ask, ‘Cupboard of screams?’ Yet it was cruelty to make him reiterate.

‘Don’t feel you have to talk,’ she said. She sat close by him so that he could hear her breath. She thought for some reason that might be a comfort. It may have been, for soon she could tell by his breathing that he was all at once asleep. She got up and walked to the door. The captain was not visibly there, though she could hear him still talking to someone in the office. The parents of the dead boy occupied a bench, the woman mourning softly, the tall husband leaning across her and holding her with a hand on each shoulder. Their posture, a little short of intimacy and all the more poignant for that, jolted her. She had not had time to recognise them earlier, but she recognised them now. The man looked up when he felt the weight of Prim’s inspection. It was Professor el Rahzi.

‘Primrose,’ he said, ‘Did you hear?’

He thought she had come to console them in something. But the boy in the corner? The captain had called him a young martyr. He must have presumed that. A hero of the Southern war.

‘You were in there?’ asked Khalda el Rahzi.

‘I was visiting Sherif.’

The el Rahzis stood and Khalda’s lovely eyes rose to her but they were blurred and unknowing – loss had driven all reason from them.

‘Sherif?’ asked the professor.

‘He’s safe,’ Prim said. ‘They are letting him go.’

‘Oh,’ said the professor. ‘Thank God.’

‘See,’ insisted Khalda el Rahzi, ‘how we are placed, Primrose? Our son Safi …’

Her mouth cracked apart in a low, twisted plaint.

‘That was Safi?’ she asked.

The professor helped his wife sit again on the bench. He said, ‘We are waiting for the undertakers.’ He too was overcome a second. ‘The funeral is to take place in the morning. We will bury him here in Omdurman, for he has ancestors buried here. You cannot join the funeral procession, of course. You must be with Sherif. But would you, if you have time, join us for
hidad
tomorrow evening? Or the next day?’

‘Of course I would. What …?’

‘They tell us a truck hit a mine. But it is not a mine injury. It’s all contusions and fractures. A mine is different. We think he was beaten and thrown from a truck.’

‘Oh dear God!’

‘We wonder which indiscretion we have been blighted for. Our only child and only son. Too late for Connie Everdale now. Too late to send him to England or America for graduate work. We might bear an accident. But we cannot bear the conviction that it was capital punishment.’

He reached his hand down to Khalda’s shoulder but did not himself sit. ‘Is it for one of those articles I wrote about the university crisis? Our people deserting a dozen at a time and going away. The entire economics department. Teaching cost-accounting in America. And here in proud Khartoum, no one but senior students teaching the undergraduates! My silent colleagues seek safe refuge in Nebraska and California and the University of East Anglia. And their children breathe.’ He looked away a second, not wanting Prim to see his dolorous eyes. ‘Or was it the slave thing? Was it that? Or was it Safi’s own activism? He was such an opinionated young fellow. But that’s what being young is for! We are a reckless family but do we deserve the death penalty?’

Prim sat by Khalda and held her, felt the woman’s convulsed and juddering frame within her arms.

The professor said, ‘But they have let Sherif go, so not everything is destroyed.’

Khalda began to murmur to herself in rapid Arabic, but her voice rose, so that el Rahzi also sat down to console her. At that second the captain appeared in the office doorway.

‘Well, Miss Bettany?’ he asked.

Prim turned from the el Rahzis. What could be done for them anyhow, in the absoluteness of Safi’s loss, and the absoluteness of Sherif’s redemption?

‘I shall drive you to the ministry,’ he said.

‘Tonight?’

The policeman nodded.

‘I will say goodbye,’ she said.

‘He is asleep,’ said the captain, squinting into the ward.

‘But I shall say goodbye.’

‘Be quick.’

She went and woke Sherif. She did not want him to find her gone and wonder was her visit a delusion.

He smiled creakily through his engorged lips.

‘I’ll be back,’ she said.

In her weeks of waiting for the reappearance of Sherif, Prim had received many faxes of counsel from the director of Austfam, Peter Whitloaf. The picture of Prim and her placard had appeared in most Australian newspapers, it seemed. The board of Austfam felt a responsibility for Sherif, who had worked under contract to them, and had written letters of protest to the Sudanese Command Council, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of the Interior. They were negotiating with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs in the hope that a formal Australian government protest might be mounted, though Peter Whitloaf said the gorvernment was loath to act without due investigation, given that Sherif was not an Australian national, and the true nature of his crimes could not be ascertained.

Whitloaf had apologised to Prim for leaving her on her own without colleagues to turn to. Austfam was sending a man named Mike Lunzer from the Melbourne office. Mike had the benefit of being a lawyer as well as having headed a large Austfam team in Cambodia. He was due in a week – there had been delays getting an appropriate visa, not least because of her public protest in Central Khartoum, and Whitloaf, on the very morning of the day she saw Sherif in the Military Hospital in Omdurman, advised her to go on holding her fire until Mike arrived. She should hold off any further demonstrations, and not enter any negotiations with the Sudanese government, if that was what she was thinking of.

But on the drive back to Khartoum that night, all this advice was distant static to Prim. She neither objected to nor felt afraid at being locked in the back of the vehicle on this journey. What she had seen in the blue-lit ward made all caution seem fatuous. Trailing behind the captain along verandahs and through corridors at the ministry, she was distracted by fear and hope, but also seemed to be walking into distance, like someone walking down one of those long chutes which, at modern airports, funnelled passengers into planes. The misery in which the professor and his wife Khalda were sunk seemed already part of the landscape of an abandoned country.

Through outer offices, past abandoned desks, the captain took her straight to a double door. Here, he reached for her elbow, as if to position her correctly, and then knocked.

‘
Idxulu
,’ she heard uttered softly from within.

The lighting of the office into which she was ushered was low, but a computer glowed splendidly at the large desk behind which sat a youngish man, slim and handsome, in a cream suit. His tie was a ribbon of plain green silk. He had the features of an unviolated Sherif. Dr Hamadain, Sherif’s cousin. He had been out of the country, part of some delegation, when Prim in desperation had tried to contact him to help Sherif. The captain led her to a seat opposite this stylish bureaucrat, said ‘Good night’ twice in English, and left.

‘I shall send you home with my driver, Miss Bettany,’ said Dr Hamadain, one eye on the glowing machine, one hand entering or altering data.

‘There is no need,’ she said. ‘I could catch a bus. Khartoum has been my home city for six or seven years now.’

‘Ah,’ he said, still distracted by the screen, ‘but I don’t think it was quite your home, was it?’ He concluded his work and hit the enter button. ‘For example, I’m not sure that you ever quite understood the Sudanese way.’

‘I regret it if I haven’t. But if the Sudanese way has anything to do with what happened to your cousin, I don’t mind not understanding that bit.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I am sure Sherif was beaten. Of course, this would never happen with Western justice systems.’

‘Sherif seems to have been through genital torture.’

‘That didn’t happen,’ said Dr Hamadain. He was very sure on the point. ‘Blood is thicker than water. If there were so-called “ghost houses” and electric shocks, would I not be concerned?’

‘Visit him! Look at him!’

‘We are trying to create a particular state here in the Sudan. An Islamic revolutionary state, secure, prosperous and fraternal. In the process – well, every penal system has its sadists. The world over, Miss Bettany, revolutionary, reactionary. The French police? Well, I don’t have to say more! If Sherif were an Algerian, how do you think he would fare if he refused to help with the processes of French state security?’

Prim asked, ‘That’s why Sherif was tortured? For refusing to help the – what is it? – “processes of state security”?’

‘I’m told something like that. But don’t quote me. It’s not my area. This is the Foreign Ministry, and you are more an issue for me than Sherif is.’

It was true. The only question was what she must do to make Sherif safe. Dr Hamadain returned to his computer, brought up a file, and as he pressed keys, his printer began to hum. A page rolled from it. He picked it up and handed it to Prim.

‘This is the statement you must make. Once you do so, the security people are willing to clean the slate on Dr Sherif Taha. The police and the Justice Department are willing to take into account the time he has served and do not intend to proceed to charges. So read it, Miss Bettany. Amendments are possible. But in the end you can sit in the Sydney Opera House and tell everybody how benighted we are. Is that a fair contract?’

She scanned the page. It said,

My name is Primrose Bettany, and I am an aid worker representing the Australian NGO Austfam in the Sudan. In my time in the Sudan I have been guilty of a number of unauthorised acts, including espionage. Contrary to the permitted and agreed limits of my task, I interviewed enemies of the Sudan and broadcast their unfounded opinions of the Sudanese revolutionary government as fact throughout the world and to sundry international organisations. I was guilty of being involved in unauthorised landings in southern Sudan and of participating in the removal of a number of Sudanese nationals without authorisation to a foreign country. When a friend of mine was detained under emergency laws, instead of working through appropriate government channels, I orchestrated a prejudicial and vainglorious event for the international media. I regret these activities, and acknowledge that the Sudanese revolutionary government has no choice but to expel me. I ask its pardon, and the pardon of the Sudanese people whom I have wronged.