Devil’s Harvest (30 page)

‘Alek, dear girl! You made it. So good to have you back.’ There was a strong lilt to her voice, a Scottish accent that, despite the influences of many other cultures, was still evident.

The woman wrapped both arms around Alek, her elbows lost in the union of her upper and lower arms. She kissed Alek with a loud smacking of lips on either side of the face. Alek had always seemed to bristle physically, but now Gabriel saw how she allowed herself to be embraced, allowing the woman into her personal space.

‘You’re looking good. Juba must be agreeing with you,’ the Scot added, stepping back and looking her up and down. ‘But still too thin. Look at you, as bony as ever. Not nearly enough meat on this body.’

Alek laughed and it seemed as if the two women were about to walk off arm in arm, forgetting Gabriel as he clambered out from behind the steering wheel.

‘Margie, this is Gabriel.’ Alek turned and gestured towards him.

‘Gabriel now is it?’ The woman let go of Alek and advanced on him. Gabriel flinched as if in anticipation of combat.

‘Hello, Gabriel. I’m the camp manager. Margaret, but everyone calls me Margie.’ Her cheeks were aflame in the sun and a trickle of sweat had already made its way down the side of her neck. She paused to take in his ill-fitting sandals. ‘What’s your clan name then, love?’

‘Cockburn,’ Gabriel answered, still a little cowed by the woman’s physical presence. As he feared, his answer evoked an emotional eruption in the camp manager.

‘A Scot? My Lord, we have a Scottish man amongst us! Lord help us, I’ve waited long enough!’

Margie’s handshake was crushing, the podginess of her arms belying their strength. She shook his hand up and down with vigour, as if trying to warm up his shoulder joint for weightlifting or some other exercise.

‘Oh my, my poor lonely heart. A Scotsman all the way out here. Dear Lord!’ Margie let his hand go and gripped his shoulder. ‘And thank you for bringing my beautiful Alek back to me, Mr Cockburn.’

Gabriel turned to Alek. ‘You worked here before?’

Alek looked at him with something akin to pity in her eyes. ‘Worked? No, Mr Gabriel, this is my home. Margie is my second mother. I lived here. And in other camps just like it. I have spent most of my life running away to places like this, chased by men and their guns.’

Gabriel took in the smoke-blurred expanse. ‘Where do all these people come from?’ he asked. ‘South Sudan has been independent for three years now?’ He regretted the naïve-sounding question the moment it was articulated.

Margie laughed out loud, letting go of his shoulder only to pat him with solid blows on the forearm to show that she didn’t mean to mock him.

‘I’m not getting it, am I?’ Gabriel added.

‘No love, you’re bloody well not. But that’s okay. The new ones take a wee bit of time. And to be honest, I still don’t really “get it” myself.’ She gave him one last clout on the arm for good measure. Gabriel’s lower arm and hand tingled in response. He was starting to feel physically abused.

‘Gabriel is a professor. He’s here to turn God into a formula,’ Alek informed Margie with no trace of sarcasm, although Gabriel noted that there was no mention of their onward journey.

‘Goodness me, what a strange undertaking. I’m not sure God will be at all pleased by that. Not at all.’ She raised her eyebrows and chuckled, then took Alek’s hand. ‘Now come inside and have some tea. I have so much I want to ask you, my child.’

The welcome had been warm, but as soon as the mug of tea was in his hand, he was forgotten by Alek again, although Margie kept grinning at him in the most disconcerting manner. At least it was real tea, he thought, made with a teabag and hot water. The UV-treated milk gave it a strange taste, but he was grateful nonetheless.

Margie’s office was a small square with most of the space occupied by a large table that served as her desk. Filing cabinets and boxes took up the rest of the floor space and the walls were covered in maps, graphs and diagrams. One large hand-drawn graph appeared to be tracking malaria and typhoid cases on a weekly basis in the camp. There were several posters distributed by the United Nations, many from UNESCO, bearing optimistic messages about human rights and education. In a university corridor in Bristol, Gabriel would have read them as just another statement from a misguided liberal. Here, they appeared ludicrous: it seemed, even to Gabriel, like an affront to talk about the ‘pathways of learning’ in a place like Jila.

The office had no ceiling and the heat descended, oven-like, from the bare metal roof. The roughly hewn bulkheads creaked as the heat expanded the joints, and the breeze outside pulled at the edges of the roofing sheets. There was no air conditioning to combat the elements and the working environment was oppressive. Gabriel started to feel a panicky claustrophobia. He thought of the squabbles in the university over who would have the best offices in the new building. The desire for a view seemed a perversity now.

The conversation between Alek and Margie was animated, the camp manager’s voice booming out with warm guffaws and exclamations. They focused almost exclusively on the whereabouts of people who’d previously worked in the camp, or perhaps lived there as refugees. Each revelation as to someone’s personal business brought new waves of mirth, or an occasional sad shake of the head at some inevitable demise. But each reference led to further connections with other people. It seemed like an endless and self-perpetuating undertaking and, tired of listening, Gabriel got up to look at the maps pinned up on the walls.

The largest map designated an unidentifiable country, divided up into small provinces, each with a different colour and name: Moro, Jau, Angolo, Kudugli. A jigsaw puzzle of tiny municipalities making up a complex state. There was a small, grey-coloured piece in the middle. Gabriel leant in closer. ‘UN/NGO compounds’ the map indicated. Now he noted that another long, brown ‘province’ bore the name ‘Children’s compounds’.

‘The tribal groupings in the camp.’ Margie’s lilted explanation came from behind.

‘Tribal groupings?’

‘Affiliations, yes.’

‘You mean,’ he said with a degree of righteousness, ‘you’ve divided the whole camp up according to their tribes?’

‘No love, not me. That’s the people themselves.’

He turned to her in surprise.

‘What did you expect? Love and roses and hugs all round?’

‘I hadn’t expected people to cling to tribalism. Not when you and everyone around you …’ He was finding it difficult to articulate his thoughts.

Margie shook her head at him. ‘That’s exactly when you cling to your roots, isn’t it? That’s when you need it most. When you’ve had everything else taken away.’

Gabriel returned to the map. A large group at the southern end of the camp were designated ‘mixed tribes’ with their tribal heritage noted in brackets: Katcha, Miri, Tafere, Tuma, Karungo, Damba, Belenka, Tuku, Kafina, Chororo. Another area was referred to as ‘mixed subtribes’. The more he stared at the map, the greater his sense of despair. He dragged himself away and sat down again. Margie was watching him closely.

‘We currently have over a hundred thousand people in the camp. And we’re receiving about a thousand new people at the moment. That’s every day, love. They’re crossing over at Lake Jau from Sudan, fleeing from the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan. This is where they come to.’

‘Fleeing what?’ The camp, the bizarre map, the journey after Bentiu, it had all shaken him.

‘This camp is for displaced people from the north. It’s Darfur all over again up there. Khartoum’s murdering anyone who’s not viewed as Arab enough. Only this time Bashir is sending his problems across the border. Do you know that the Sudan Armed Forces have painted their attack helicopters white to mimic our food aid transport and the African Union peacekeepers? They know the rebels are too smart to fall for it, but it confuses the villagers on the ground. They never used to run from them. Thousands were killed because of it. Dear Lord, now they run from everything.’

‘Bastard!’ Alek spat the word out.

‘Oh my dear, he’s up to all kinds of bastard tricks. Do you know his latest? He blocked a consignment of grain at Port Sudan destined for the camps because he said it was genetically modified! It’s sophistry of the very worst level. He delayed the delivery of our medicines because his thugs had to make sure that the expiry dates hadn’t been reached. “We cannot allow the United Nations to harm our people.”’ Margie put on a mocking accent, gesticulating with her finger. ‘Can you believe the crap we have to deal with? And, of course, despite his militia’s programme of rape and abuse, every AU peacekeeper has to have an HIV test before they’re allowed in. May the Devil take his impoverished soul.’

Gabriel said nothing, bewildered by her stories.

‘Bashir is barren.’ Alek said it dispassionately. ‘He has no seed and cannot have children. That is why he doesn’t feel anyone’s pain. He feels nothing. He is free.’

* * *

Gabriel had been allocated his own small room, while Alek was to share with an Italian UNHCR woman for the night. The bed was a simple camping mattress with a thin layer of foam cut to size and laid on top. Nevertheless, he eyed it with longing, his body stiff and tired after days cooped up in the Land Cruiser. He managed to clean the worst of the dust off himself in a cold shower in the communal staff ablution block. He wondered whether he would ever be truly clean again. He imagined that, for years, he would still be digging layers of dirt out of his ears and from the crooks of his arms. What would he think, he mused, walking down the aisle of the Co-operative Food Store in Princess Victoria Street, only to observe a smear of red-brown African dirt under his fingernail? Would he rush to the bathroom to cleanse himself of the unwanted memory, or would he feel a little nostalgic? He was in limbo, stuck in a place he thought he hated, but unable to comprehend how he might leave it behind. He made his way to the dining room in a pensive mood.

The room was both a kitchen and dining room, with a long trestle table in the middle flanked by an assortment of chairs and stools, some more rickety than others. There were already over fifteen people there, including Alek and Margie who were in conversation at the quietest end. The group was a collection of people representing all parts of the world, all ages and various body types, from the intimidating Margie to a diminutive Ecuadorian woman who at first glance looked about twelve. Only when Gabriel got closer did he see that she was probably middle-aged, but the combination of her delicate physique and smooth skin gave her a striking youthfulness. A Sudanese man with very dark eyebrows was positioned at the stove, an aluminium pot hissing in front of him. The smell of frying onions mixed with the creosote of the bulkhead beams.

Supper turned out to be a raucous affair, the cooking and cleaning undertaken with gusto according to an unrecorded roster. Gabriel was welcomed into the group and promptly given a plate of beans to shell by a wiry individual with a light French accent dressed in an MSF T-shirt. This caused a stir of jokes from the others. The Frenchman, Bernard, was apparently a camp veteran, infamous for his cunning ability to avoid kitchen duties by charming newcomers.

The man laughed good-naturedly, all the while disputing the accusations levelled against him.

‘But it’s just not my turn,’ he protested, grinning. This only prompted more howls of light-hearted disagreement.

‘Besides,’ he added, patting Gabriel on the shoulder, ‘my new friend Gabriel here is a botanist, so he knows how to work with beans. I’m just a doctor, so I don’t understand the anatomy. I’ll make a mess of it.’ Everyone laughed and someone threw a piece of potato peel at him.

The meal was simple but filling, a kind of reconstituted mashed potato and a pile of round patties that might have been meat but were more likely made of soya. Gabriel was introduced to a dish called
assida
, a ground millet porridge that was gritty in the mouth and had the unappetising colour of something a baby might produce. A tomato-and-onion mixture provided some taste, but the overall effect was pretty flavourless. But blandness was something that Gabriel had come to prefer in South Sudan: it was when added spices hid the underlying dangers that one started to worry. NGO cooking might be uninspired, but colonic safety was an invaluable commodity.

Gabriel found himself washing up after supper, a task also sidestepped by the Frenchman. Gabriel noted that here, in the camp, alcohol consumption was restricted, unlike the scenes of excess he’d witnessed in Juba. Most of the personnel soon drifted away, some to play cards, and the rest to their rooms. Bernard invited Gabriel and Alek to join him outside. They carried some chairs out and made a semicircle under the umbrella of a thorn tree.

Margie came out with a softer chair for herself, carrying a bottle of cheap blended whisky and four glasses. She eased herself into the better-cushioned chair. Despite the smoke that hung over them, the stars were dense and bright, in places forming swirling clouds. A dog barked somewhere and the murmur of a thousand conversations drifted towards them between the scraggly trees. It was a moment of rare tranquillity and Gabriel felt a surprising bonhomie with his companions that could be attributed only partly to the warmth of the whisky.

And then the patter of something sharp in the distance. A short burst of sound followed by a pause. Then more, a sudden cracking of metal on metal. Like someone hitting two steel pipes together. A much louder boom and a flash of light far in the distance. Back in England, he would have dismissed it as a fireworks display.

Bernard looked serious for once, his boyish playfulness curbed as he stared into the dark. ‘We will have another rush of people tomorrow.’

‘People? From where?’ Gabriel asked.

‘More refugees.’ Bernard gestured towards the horizon. ‘The border is fifteen miles away. The war zone begins only two miles beyond that.’

‘We say “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers,”’ Alek remarked, swirling a little whisky in her glass but not drinking.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Gabriel responded, watching the now dark horizon nervously.