Stone Kingdoms (4 page)

‘Do you believe in God, Nadra?'

She laughs at first, and clucks as if she is listening to a child who has said something funny. ‘Allah Akbar, God is great, Naomi.'

‘You still believe in Allah after all that we have seen?'

‘We have seen what men have done, not Allah.'

The old man's voice drops to a monotone.

‘Allah did nothing to stop them, Nadra.'

‘It is not for us to know the mind of Allah.'

From the other side of the courtyard comes the sound of children's laughter.

‘And you do not believe in your God, Naomi?'

I hesitate, torn between the truth and a desire not to hurt her. ‘I think God has grown old, tired, and his voice is no longer heard.'

‘That is a bad thing. If God is not strong, how can he protect us from the evil that men do?'

‘No, Nadra, maybe it is a good thing, maybe the time has come when we must protect ourselves.'

The
children's laughter comes closer, blocking out the sound of the old man. I smell the dust kicked up by their feet. Nadra says something sharply to them in their own language and the laughter is silenced momentarily, and then tumbles away in a new direction. I try to tell her they were doing no harm, that it is better they should play, but she insists I must have peace, must not be disturbed. The old man finishes his prayers and for a few seconds his voice lingers in the silence.

‘Perhaps you should organize some classes for them – a couple of hours a day. Maybe Basif could give you a room to use. It would be good practice for you, and I could sit at the back and listen to you teach.'

‘But, Naomi, who will look after you when I teach the children?'

I listen to her slander the local nurses, criticize their incompetence, their lack of education, pour scorn on their primitive superstitions. Eventually I manage to persuade her, and will ask Basif when he next comes. I haven't seen him so often in the last few days – perhaps he avoids me, perhaps he is busy with the growing number of casualties from the coast. They come in trucks, and sometimes I hear the drone of helicopters, recognize the sound of American Cobras.

‘And your father, Naomi, was he a holy man?'

‘When I was young I thought my father spoke for God, but now I think he spoke only for himself. He wouldn't have believed it if someone had told him his daughter would be sitting under a tree in Africa.'

‘What did you think Africa would be like before you came?'

‘Jungles, lions, tigers, elephants.'

She laughs at the familiar joke and then says she will read to me. I hear the slap of her sandal heels as she goes to find a book. She likes to show off her reading, her sing-songy pronunciation, and while I wait I remember my first impressions of Africa.

It
was Stanfield who met us at the airport and shepherded us through the bureaucracy with his briefcase of American dollars, led us through the swarm of freelance porters. We sidestepped the families of migrant workers who seemed to have set up camp on the concourse, their worldly possessions packed into striped canvas bags. The gangs of children begging. One of them had a gun made out of a wire coat-hanger, and he brandished it in front of my face then smiled at his own joke. The drive to the coastal capital was my first view of the continent, a scrawny, flat scrub disappointing in its absence of drama. From the modern main road spread a network of red dirt roads where a haze trembled to a buckling, warping horizon of heat and light. On either side of the road the monotony was broken only by the occasional banana plantation where the languid leaves of the trees hung heavy and wilting, or by spiked fields of sugar cane. And at intervals clumps of houses – breeze-blocked, tin-roofed, patched with rough-edged bits of wood. In front of these children played, their feet skipping up puffs of dust. Sometimes we had to slow almost to a halt to negotiate potholes or dumped oil drums, sometimes to avoid the few stringy cattle or old men herding goats. As we entered the city, it unravelled before us: shapeless, haphazard, a sprawl of shanty-town suburbs giving way to white European-style buildings set on broad avenues. In some places building sites were enclosed with cages of bamboo scaffolding. But nothing seemed to link or lead to any pattern, tumbling onwards and outwards. If there was mystery it was in the scenes half-glimpsed through latticed courtyards in the dusk, the incessant, indefinable activity of crowded alleyways: a young girl in a yellow dress vanishing into the dark frame of a doorway, an old man having his hair cut under a string of neon pearls, huddles of men squatting round some street vendor, a mother and her children carrying tyres balanced on their shoulders.

There were six of us in the bus: Veronica, a young nurse from
London;
Martine, a not-long-qualified doctor from Paris; an older couple, both doctors; an engineer from Scotland and an agricultural student from Kent. We had joined up in London for our initial training, and a friendly team-spirit had developed. We were taken to an area of the city which held government buildings and foreign embassies. Our hotel complex consisted of a central building with a reception area, a dining room and bar, an outdoor swimming pool, and a collection of self-contained bungalows scattered through landscaped gardens which led down to the beach and the Indian Ocean. We were to spend three days there, acclimatizing, being given further health checks and receiving final briefings. I think we felt a little guilty at starting our work in Africa in such comfortable surroundings but there was, too, the feeling of a last supper, that we should enjoy it, make the most of it before our lives took different directions.

We had a talk from a girl who had been working with refugees in a transit camp close to the border, an update on the political situation from Stanfield, and a final session from Swenlenson, the local director of the Agency's operations. The briefing took place in the lounge of our hotel and from time to time various hotel staff would pause in the doorway and listen with curious faces. Behind the bar a young man polished glasses and stared at Swenlenson as he hammered away at what we had heard a hundred times. If we were to be effective in our different fields of work we had to protect ourselves emotionally, to keep a sense of, not indifference, but detachment, a distance from some of the things we would see. Otherwise we would be sucked down and finally destroyed by the sheer enormity of what was out there.

‘This is not television,' he said, ‘this is reality. To cope with reality you have to be strong. To be able to do some good for the collective, build something better for the future, you must be able at times to walk away from the individual, to turn your back on the present. When you cry, do it in private, do it
quickly
and then get on with what you have come to do. Personally, I stopped crying a long time ago. I find anger a stronger stimulus.' He paused to sip his drink. From behind the bar came the clink of glasses. Something buzzed round his head and he flicked it away with a dismissive wave of his hand.

‘And finally, before I wish you luck, I want you to have a realistic expectation of what you will achieve. If you're the right person, and I've no reason to doubt your commitment to the work, you will do some good. Lives will be helped. Some will be saved by your coming here. But the good you will achieve is a drop in the ocean. There are no dramatic victories, no revolutionary changes, just a slow building to something better. And what you must guard most against is despair, a feeling of helplessness, of frustration. There is no easy way, and at any given time a political decision, even a rumour, a failure of a crop, the vagaries of the climate, may undo everything you have fought to build. But despair and self-pity go hand in hand, and neither of them is worth a damn. All that matters is that you get up and start again. And if the day comes when you can't get up you're no longer any use and you go back home.'

By the time he had finished, the earlier buoyancy had dissipated and been replaced by a more sombre and introspective mood. We sat around sipping beer for a while until the group gradually split up and we made our way back to the bungalows. I was sharing with Martine and Veronica. I had already decided I liked Martine. She was cheerful and quietly self-confident but didn't pry into personal background or try to share whatever philosophy she carried with her. Veronica talked too much, oblivious even when politeness slid into indifference, bubbling on about her family, her boyfriend, her reasons for giving up a year of her life to the Agency. No matter which way she approached it she never sounded like anything other than a little girl setting up a hospital for her friends' broken dolls. She had a tendency also to talk of children as if they were puppies, going on about their big sad eyes, how it
broke
her heart to see them suffering. Once I caught Martine's eye and we both smiled surreptiously at this surfeit of sincerity. Her family had given her a video camera as a present, and it seemed likely that her year was going to turn into a video diary, destined to sit under some suburban television set beside the wedding videos and mail-order catalogues.

The hotel proved less luxurious than first impressions had suggested. The air conditioning coughed and choked a few times then gave up totally; flicking the television channels produced only static. An air-locked shower spurted great wheezes of dust and yellow water. There was in-house muzak which we couldn't find a way to switch off, and in the drained pool green quivers of lizards slithered over the blue tiles. But the staff were friendly and eager to please and to complain about anything seemed decadent, even immoral in the circumstances, and so we smiled and made a joke of it, heating water in a kettle for Veronica to wash her hair, spending our free time sitting in the gardens sipping the sugary lemonade. What the bar served on any one day seemed to vary with their current reading of the regime's fluctuating, erratic fundamentalism.

Stanfield had organized a boat trip out to the reef, but only Martine and I took up the offer. We were chaperoned by Oman, who worked in the hotel and was occasionally employed by the Agency. He guided us down a dirt path through the gardens and opened a locked gate. Then he led us across a narrow strip of scrub grass and down to the beach. It was about four in the afternoon and the intense heat of the day had not yet spent itself, with the cloudless sky – a perfect mirror of the sea – stretching into the haze of the distance. Far out at sea the shadowy shapes of tankers slunk nose to tail like a convoy in silhouette. Groups of men squatted along the beach, some playing a game in which they threw objects on to a square of green cloth, their cries of excitement sharp-edged against the soft stillness of the air. A woman and a young girl, the lower parts of their faces veiled, sat with a red blanket spread in front
of
them, its corners weighted with stones, and on it jewellery, shells, painted combs, trinkets. They held up their hands to us as we passed but we walked on, skirting a group of boys playing football with a yellow, misshapen ball, the goalposts empty oil cans. They followed the ball in a pack, their thin arms and legs angular rods, their white soles kicking up spurts of silvery sand. In the surf a man led a camel, slapping its neck with a thin stick as its feet splashed eddies of white. A boy tried to sell us what looked like watermelon, but Oman shooed him away and apologized for the nuisance, and as we walked the mile to the old harbour he talked of how he was going to get a job with the Ministry of Tourism, pass their exams and become a guide for modern tourists. He attempted to impress us with his knowledge of our countries, but he knew nothing about Ireland and very little about France. What he did know about was America and Michael Jackson and Rambo and Terminator. Some day he would go to America, be big in films. As we passed some broken ruins, with worked stones scattered in the sand, he told us they were the remains of the Arab slave stations where their catches were brought to be loaded and shipped away.

The old harbour was formed by a natural curve of shore, its white-walled breakwaters draped with many-coloured canvas sails and fishing nets. Small, flimsy boats, no more than hollowed shells, were tied up beside more solid craft. A group of boys dived off a raft of bobbing oil barrels, disappearing under the water before surfacing again, the sun glinting off their damp skin. I thought for a second of my father and tried to recall the beach I played on as a child but could not; it seemed a transitory, paltry thing that could not replace what enveloped me now.

We stopped at an open fire where two friends of Oman sat cooking fish. A dozen small white fish were skewered on a rod, their mouths open, their eyes black spots. One of the men lifted a chunk of fish from the fire and offered it to me on the end of a
stick,
and I reached out and took it, tumbling it from palm to palm to stop it burning my hands, then ate the crumbling fragments as the two men laughed at my clumsiness. They shared a joke with Oman and I suspected it was at my expense. As they talked, a gaggle of children flocked round us, tugging our clothes lightly and peering into our faces with undisguised curiosity until Oman waved them away.

We found Hanif, who turned out to be Oman's brother, stretched out in the shade of a beached rowing boat. By his head was a radio with its insides spewing out like a gutted fish. The necks of empty beer bottles jutted out of the sand. Hanif's white singlet was a colander of holes and a gold chain glistened at his throat. He greeted us with elaborate handshakes. A small amount of American dollars was exchanged. Within a few minutes we were making our way through the rush of surf and heading out of the narrow mouth of shore and breakwater. Hanif chatted brokenly about the giant fish he had caught, taking his arms off the rudder to give an estimate of the size, telling us that some day he would buy a glass-bottomed boat and take many tourists on trips like this.

Not far from the shore he cut the engine, dropped his makeshift anchor and asked us if we wanted to dive and see the reef. From his tiny cabin he produced a withered wet-suit, still emblazoned with a BP logo, and offered it to us for a few more dollars. I had dived before but I hesitated until Martine persuaded me to try it, and after the toss of a coin she laughed and made me go first. And that was how I found myself slipping into the water and swimming not far below the surface, to where a crusted crest of coral reef sloped down to the sea bed, strangely verdant, intensely and unexpectedly blossoming into rosaceous heads of what looked like crystallized lava. I touched its surface as if to test that it was real, frightened that it might crumble in my hands, then kicked upwards for air before turning to swim through the petrified porous galleries. I passed tessellated pink horn-heads that looked as if they were made
from
terracotta, glided past diaphanous waving branches, and felt more alive than I have ever felt. I dream it, remember it, stretch out my hand to feel the living colours, but my gloved hand falls back limp as somewhere far off I hear the ragged shouts of children, the voice of an old man praying.