Submergence (21 page)

‘Since I was a child,’ she said, ‘I’ve pictured a slave ship sinking during an Atlantic crossing.’

‘A dream?’

‘No. A series of lithographs. Slightly different faces each time. Very close up, often at strange angles. It begins the same way. The boatswain is fumigating the slave hold with a red-hot chain dipped in a bucket of tar. The chain is too hot. He drops it on the varnished deck. The decking bursts into flames. The helmsman abandons the wheel. Sailors suffocate in the smoke. The varnish bubbles. The slaves are screaming below decks. I seldom see them. When I do, it always unclear, very black, just the suggestion of an open mouth, the glint of metal. The sailors let down the rowing boats. They do not ever think to let go the slaves. Water pours in. The ship breaks up and disappears under the waves. Do you know what I see next?’

‘I can’t guess.’

‘Nothing. Just the surface of the sea. It’s my non-existence. My slave ancestor is drowned in the Atlantic and I’m never born.’

‘The Australian side of your family will be fine.’

‘Until the convict transport goes down,’ she said, putting on an Australian accent. ‘There’s some part of me,’ she went on, ‘that thinks I became interested in the ocean to see where those slaves went, how deep they sank. Recently the images are further and further from the ship. You cannot make out the faces, only the shapes of the sailors, the ship catching light and breaking apart. Several times now I’ve dreamt that I am leafing through the lithographs on the platform of a train station in what I remember to be Argentina. There’s a wide river, a plain, vineyards, then snowcapped mountains, Bariloche. It’s always autumn, the leaves stick like stamps to the platform, and I am told the story of the slave ship in great detail by an elderly man, who is sitting on a bench next to me.’

They were each gifted a small Christmas present. She received a small crystal rabbit; he a camping knife. A glass of whisky arrived for him.

He was in that mood when he thought of the metaphysical. He was closer to Donne than to Ibsen. Heaven was like being tuned out. You
entered in and were suffused in an equal light, without sun or storms, never atmospheric, and were met also by one equal sound.

Somalia is not the Africa that is known. You will never see a naked man there. Everyone is shrouded, covered up. There are no nomads shouldering crates of Coca-Cola with scarification on their cheeks and chests; no swinging thin cocks.

And it should be said that the coming of age initiations of jihadists in Somalia are not anywhere near so demanding as the circumcision ceremony of Masai boys, who are disowned if they flinch when a sharp knife is drawn around the head, and are rewarded with girls wearing necklaces on their chest, safety pins in their skin, smelling of earth, of goats, their buttocks daubed with ochre paste, their breasts firm, with unsuckled nipples, if they remain expressionless. The Masai boy circumcised in silence has access to the milk and blood of the cattle, a knife of his own and a spear. Whatever his creed, he will sing and jump in the Masai way. If he does not go to the city and become lost there he will be strong enough to walk for days barefoot and to keep walking into his old age long after his eyesight and hearing fail him.

The lot of the mujahid is in some ways easier, in others harder. It is easier to pull a trigger or push the remote-control button on an improvised explosive device (mobile phones are unreliable) than it is to suffer a knife without anaesthetic and give no sign of pain. On the other hand, the endurance of a jihadist has no obvious reward in this life.

They walked along the wadi at night, the lorry following at a distance. They slept at dawn. The wind came in the afternoon, when they packed their camp. The wadi was a crack in the earth made by water and abandoned by water and it funnelled the wind so that even when they wrapped their faces they could hardly see for dust. He drank from the greasy ribbons and became more ill. He vomited the food he was given and meandered like an Englishman at the midday hour and no one stopped him because there was nowhere to go. He wandered too far and was caught and bound hand to foot. He could crawl to a crevice and urinate there. For the other he needed to be untied.

Heat prickled under his scalp. The snakes did not move from under the rocks. Neither did the jihadists. He fell over his own shadow. He had been one of those paratroopers who could kill a fighter with his bare hands. Now he could not keep up with them. He was built for structures and systems. In his stupors he saw the sun harden and arc across the sky and soften in the evening. There were the colours of petrified wood. He heard prayers in the shade. If he could only climb out of the wadi he would get onto the world.

When his mind and breathing were clear and sober he saw that the wadi was divided between the parts where sunlight struck and the parts where it never reached. These parts were a reminder of what Danny had said, that the strangest life exists in the cracks.

He thought in future times the great literature would be translated into a hieroglyphic script based on hexagonal forms, including that passage in
Utopia
where his saintly ancestor dreamt up vast deserts of the equator

parched with the heat of the sun, the soil was withered, all things looked dismally, and all places were either quite uninhabited, or abounded with wild beasts and serpents, and some few men, that were neither less wild nor less cruel than the beasts themselves.

The light and dark in the wadi helped him to better understand the jihadist worldview.

‘What is the influence of the desert on Islam?’ he asked Saif, when he was feeling better.

‘What do you mean?’ Saif said. ‘The desert is also true for the Christians. Jesus went to the desert.’

He knew the damp in England’s bones. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘Not in England.’

He believed the contrast in the desert helped create the Abrahamic religions and the advance and enlightenment of Christendom was an admittance of rainy days and nights. It came back to the weather. The clouds that covered up the stars in England, the seasons of drizzle there, the mists, the storms, the trees losing their leaves, all of it made a mockery of Bedouin absolutes.

There were slender trees in the wadi, very old, hard as rock, and in their dusky hollows and roots were spiders and mice.

One night when they were walking they came across a cormorant too weak to fly. It sat on the rock flapping its wings, like a goose in a farmyard. If it rained the cormorant would survive, but there was no sign of more rain.

He thought about sex a lot while he walked. Not the rutting of pastoralists, not the pent-up sexual desire of the fighters; he put himself instead somewhat comically on the dance-floor in Kampala, the suck of it, a fountain of Ugandan women’s arses, gyrating, pumping, and wiggling huge breasts; the mirrors, cigarettes, bottles of Nile beer, cheap Chinese furnishings, the sweat; and all the other men at the far end of the dance-floor watching an English football match on the television, leaving him alone to satisfy all the women, each of them in turn presenting themselves, which, trudging along, he had no difficulty in doing.

There was once a Hungarian count from Transylvania who sold a family diamond to fund an expedition to east Africa. His porters called him fatty.

He bought his guns from Holland & Holland in London and recovered some of the costs of his expedition with the sale of ivory from the elephants he shot; the ivory which many of the piano keys in Vienna of that period were fashioned.

One of the count’s contemporaries, a young American braggart, was said to have taken several pairs of flesh-coloured gloves when he went overland to the Tina River, with the intention of making the Somalis think he was peeling the skin off his hands, although that is hard to credit. Would the Somalis ever have fallen for it?

It was easier to take if Africa was doing it to him. Africa was a rough mistress to pale men. If he considered his captivity in this way he could place his journey at the undistinguished end of African exploration; nothing more than an outing. He thought badly of many of the white explorers and white hunters, because of their violent acquisitiveness. He believed in being of service to others. If he had been more gentle, he really could have been Mr Water.

The grass was tall by the lakes in Congo and the mud there was so heavy on his boots at the end of the day it could not be stamped off and had be removed with a knife or a spoon. There was maize growing in the shambas, also squash, cassava, spinach, peas, groundnuts, sometimes guava, mango, watermelon and many types of banana; stewed, and served with shreds of chicken or tilapia. The villagers hung beehives in the trees for the wild bees to colonise. These hives were barrels, fashioned of bamboo strips, and covered in mud, dung and leaves. One end was sealed with banana bark, the other netted with vines and
twine. He thought of workers on the slopes of the volcanoes above the lakes. Walking home on wet paths through fields of sorghum whose red tassels swayed, hoes on their shoulders, alongside clear-flowing streams; each worker to their windowless mud huts with roofs of terracotta tiles.

He thought of the mattered water of the lakes, their rock formations and the old steamer ships fallen on their sides on the shore. Of the bars on the Congolese side – the Zebra bar and the Sir Alex bar – and the soldiers leaving, stumbling out of them in the early morning, still in wellington boots, still armed, taking with them girls pushed by their families to sleep with them in the hope of securing better rations and protection.

He thought especially of the thundering afternoon rain, a child selling tomatoes one by one at the roadside through the downpour, the steaming land that followed, the monkeys sprinting up the trees, and a man sitting on a stool outside his hut, reading the Bible in the last light of the day.