Kitabı oku: «The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War»

Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia

MY FATHER WAS THE closest thing I knew to the immortal. ‘Our Father, who art in Africa,’ I prayed as a child of six. He’d always been there. When he died I couldn’t believe it. I had moments when I felt haunted by him in ways that were almost physical. They were a comfort to me. At home on the Indian Ocean coast, I swam off the beach and felt he was in the water all around me. On the upcountry plains, I imagined his bones were billowing up in the dust behind the nomads’ herds of cattle. I clung on but I felt him slipping away. In my stricken state I longed to pluck something back from oblivion.

The day came for us to go through Dad’s belongings. His private territory at home was a coconut-thatched veranda overlooking the beach. He kept his writing desk there and a single bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before. Some of his clothes were still hanging up in there, which described a life of sadhu-like simplicity: a few khaki bush shirts and shorts, the kikoi wraps we wear in Kenya like sarongs, as well as several pairs of camel-skin sandals.

In the corner of the veranda was a Zanzibar chest, carved with a skill modern Swahili carpenters have forgotten. The old camphor box bore a design of lotus, paisley and pineapple and it was studded with rivets tarnished green in the salty air. When I opened the chest lid, cobwebs tore and something scuttled into a corner. In the chest was the skin of a lion Dad had tracked down after it had killed one of his best bulls, a hunting horn, a flute of apricot wood and a stack of files. These last contained reports on missions to southern Sudan, livestock projects for the tribes of Karamoja, botanical studies and copious notes about camels. Always restless himself as a younger man, Dad had spent his last years devising schemes to help Africa’s nomads remain on the move, beyond the reach of those who wanted to settle them.

Inside one file were my father’s handwritten memoirs on which he had been working for years. I opened a second file and reached down to grasp the pages. The instant I touched them they began to crumble in my hands. Time, heat and the drenching humidity had ravaged them. Mildew dusted the covers, giving off that scent of the forgotten. The translucent geckos that roam our walls had laid their soft, ivory eggs along the spines of the notebooks. White ants and silverfish had eaten into the papers, leaving a web of brown capillaries. Their tracks threaded through written words and underlined paragraphs and burrowed into months and years of recollection. I began to read the papers. I quickly realized I had stumbled on a secret that had been buried for half a century. Here were the diaries of the man named Peter Davey, my father’s good friend. Ever since I was a boy, the story of Davey had crept in and out of conversation at home in vague, half-finished sentences. The tale had always been there, yet my father never properly talked about it. Davey was a silence, a shadow that moved constantly out of the corner of one’s eye. And now, as if it had been deliberately dropped into my lap, here was the full and tragic rendition of Davey’s life.

What I found in the Zanzibar chest was a story of lives so utterly different from my own, so exotic, set in another part of the world and in another time. I had never believed in any great cause, I was sent to fight no wars. What I admired most about my father, Davey and those like them is that they were men of action, whereas I was ever the observer, not the participant, which is the main reason I’m able to be here to tell this story.

On my flight back to Rwanda I recognised the man who had guided me during the genocide. To be certain of it I looked at his right hand and, sure enough, he had no thumb. It had been shot off in the days when he used to wear a red beret and ragged fatigues. Now he appeared in a sharp grey suit carrying a briefcase. As he walked down the aisle past me, our eyes met and his face brightened.

‘Frank.’

We sat together. Frank, I was reminded from years ago, could talk non-stop. He was one of those men who has suffered immensely, but enjoys the fact that he has lived to tell you all about it. As we flew back to Rwanda, he spoke of battles, massacres and dreams. He recalled the time we marched together on a journey that would haunt us forever. Listening to him speak, I was transported back to those terrible days and felt dizzy to see that here we were, suspended in ether above Africa and toasting each other with little bottles of whisky served up by air stewardesses.

I descended from the aircraft and felt against my face a blast of hot air carrying familiar smells. I found the faint marks of a mortar bomb impact on the runway tarmac as I walked to the terminal. Inside, the soap statue of the gorilla was back in his glass case. The roads edged by brick red earth and low huts the same. The ‘Guinness is Good for You’ advertisements the same. Guava trees the same. Faces the same. The same, when the truth is that it was changed. Only in our minds, myself, Frank and all the other survivors, did we see a ghost town superimposed on the real city of today. But there were no piles of severed hands by the roadside. No monkey in a bow tie and tuxedo perched in a tree.

I checked into the same room at the Meridien hotel where we had slept under our flak jackets. I tried to remember. But it was as if nothing had happened. The hotel was back to being what it had been before the fighting. A hotel.

The pool terrace was the place to be these days. This is where the Patriotic Army top dogs and intelligence chiefs drank beer all afternoon. I sat, maintaining a smile, nursing a cold beer, looking over towards the swimming pool. I remembered that the pool had been empty in the war. The UN troops had used it as their water supply when the taps ran dry and they drank every drop. Today, as I watched from the terrace, the Tutsi children of the Patriotic Army leaders, their plump black bodies glistening with wet, were leaping about in a game of water volleyball. For years I had lived in my own museum of horrors in which the Meridien swimming pool had remained empty. Meanwhile in the real world the kids were playing in the chlorinated water as white-gloved waiters carried trays of ice-cold beers to the war veterans and their wives.

From Kigali I drove to Goma, where Lazarus is buried in a mass grave somewhere. I was on the back of a motorbike taxi when two policemen in banana yellow helmets stopped us and shook down the driver for a bribe. Further up the road that morning Hutu militias had ambushed a truck and killed three traders. The sun was beating down. The volcano on the horizon was smoking, ready to erupt any moment. I stood there watching a passing Congolese girl with hair braided into six-inch spikes and crowds of hustlers striding along in garish pyjama suits. Bicycle taxis with tinsel wound into the spokes. Guerrillas in mirror shades with radios clamped to their ears. And my cell phone rang. I answered and it was my wife Claire, calling from home. ‘I love you,’ I said and she replied, ‘I love you.’ She told me that at that very moment, when I picked up and she heard my voice on the phone, our baby daughter kicked inside her womb.

At any one time we had six wars, a couple of famines, a coup d’état, and a natural disaster like a flood or an epidemic or a volcanic eruption, all within a radius of three hours’ flight from Nairobi. You could take off at sunrise, commute to witness a battle or hear a starving man breathe his last and be back home by nightfall, in time to file a story, take a shower, then hit the Tamarind restaurant downtown for mangrove crab and Stellenbosch. Or you were dropped off, watching the plane roar away in a cloud of red dust, and you were gone for weeks, out of contact and a thousand miles from help. And each time you returned home after a trip like that for a few days you were as mad as Gulliver talking to his horses.

These were the years when we hitched rides on dawn flights carrying cargoes of blood plasma, guns or baby food to bush airstrips. Flights on battered Antonovs, with the word NASDROVJE! – Cheers! – emblazoned on the nose of the fuselage. Flown by Russian crews with the Mongoloid faces of Soyuz cosmonauts from my boyhood stamp collection, their breath sour from drink, on three hundred dollars a month, with girls thrown in, running weapons in the orbit of modern African wars. I recall flights when the passengers sat amongst boxes of toothpaste and grenades, cement and drums of gasoline. I recall sitting next to a little girl in a frilly pink dress and bonnet and ivory armlets, clutching a yellow-haired Caucasian doll as, below us, broccoli-like black forests stretched for a thousand miles, unbroken and empty.

I’d climb aboard the Cessna at first light, in my mind kissing the tarmac goodbye like the pope in reverse. The pilot throttled up, mumbled into his microphone, neck muscles bunching like a bullfrog. On takeoff I used to recite the Lord’s Prayer over and over until I got stuck on a line like a mantra – ‘deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil’ – as the earth fell away. Ten minutes out from Nairobi and the great gate of clouds opened out, with the pillars of Mount Kenya to the north and Kilimanjaro to the south. Our path led over patchwork peasant lands, sequinned with tin hut roofs glinting in the sun. Further out were empty, arid plains, broken up only by smooth brown kopjes and the capillaries of seasonal streams that dissipated into stains of green against the ochre and white desert. Look down and you’d see herds of goats and camels scatter in unison like shoals of fish. Even in this modern day, out here whole grid squares on the tactical pilotage charts were half blank and marked with the words RELIEF DATA INCOMPLETE. They might as well have written ‘here be monsters’. The flights themselves scared the hell out of me before we’d even landed in the eye of another crisis. ‘I repeat, six souls on board, do you read…?’ Often there was no answer. The pilots called Sub-Sahara’s airspace ‘the cone of silence’. I couldn’t fully appreciate the idea until the day I entered a control tower following a battle at an airport and saw brain, hair and skull fragments all over the walls. Every time we flew into a cloud I’d hold my breath and think of all the UFO junk we might be on a collision course with: ghost flights, alcoholic Ukrainians shifting cargo, Zimbo arms smugglers, overflying tourist charters, medevacs, drug couriers, patrolling MiGs. There was the tropical weather too, in which minutes after observing clear skies up ahead one saw elevating thousands of feet up out of thin air a black storm with the head of a sledgehammer.

On those flights I’d look down from the sky at takeoffs and landings and see the silhouette of our little aircraft ripple over pulverized cities, refugee camps, the acetylene-white flashes of anti-aircraft fire and countries rich only in lost hopes and broken dreams. What comes to mind when I think of that time in my life are the words of Isaiah 18, which I’d read in the Gideons Bibles I’d found in dozens of seedy hotel rooms where I spent so much of my life on the road; ‘Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia…Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down.’ That passage makes me think of my circle of friends, the journalists I knew in those years. We were like the swift messengers in Africa.

Sometimes I remember it all again. I am back in that valley at night. I see the silent panic on the livid faces around me with the gunfire roaring in the fog. Or I’m at a field hospital. I put my notebook down to help lift a casualty with his brains spilling personality all over the stretcher, when a mortar bomb slams into the triage room, liquefying patients inside. Or in the famine camp, where at my feet a child crouches like a frog with eyes clouded white as moonstones. And the American nurse is whispering in my ear, ‘We say the ones like that are circling the drain. You know, like a spider in your bath?’

It all comes back to me. Overnighters, all-nighters, hitching rides on tanks busting down palace gates, sipping dictators’ champagne, scoops and whores and house arrests, herograms, smelly socks and Caterpillar boots, the shits, deadlines, dead on arrivals, bouts of amoebae and malaria remembered fondly like adventures, beriberi, organ failure, Stalin’s organs, brain damage, gas gangrene, coke cut with pig laxative from condoms smuggled in the bowels of living men, oral rehydration salts, satellite feeds, food aid, baby milk, mass burials through a Nikon lens, Huey chopper rides, the pure adrenaline of being in fallen cities decorated with floral mortar bursts and tracers in the sky.

My entire life seems to have been either a prelude or an aftermath to moments such as these. Sometimes for a while I can submerge them and forget. But without warning, the hog-tied corpses of memory bob to the surface once more and then I recognize how much I’ve loved and missed those days. I suppose this is why people hoard their mementoes. Mine are sundry keepsakes of war and failed states, loot and charms, an odd collection of dictators’ portraits, Red Cross press releases, permits from guerrilla armies. Plaintive letters from interpreters left behind after the news went cold. Snaps of friends, gazing over ruined cityscapes, brandishing weapons, smoking joints, posing in mock disguises and states of intoxication, arm in arm. An Ethiopian chopper pilot’s visor helmet; river pebbles from Serbia; a concrete fragment of the Berlin Wall. A reject news photo of a Liberian, his skull trepanned by a bullet and daubed over with a Day-Glo smiley face and the caption ‘Have a nice day!’ Buried in a drawer are autopsy reports and black-bordered funeral orders of service. There are voices on tape; if I stand in the next room and listen through an open door, I can ignore their metallic distortion and imagine them to be young and alive once more. All this stuff hangs around like bad luck in my house. I’d throw it all out if it weren’t so much a part of me.

Sometimes, the stories themselves can take on their own disturbing vitality. Inside my mind, they play out the what-ifs and maybes, throwing up fresh detail or facts I can no longer pin down. Or they spill over into my innocent recollections. Rows of silent infants with swollen kwashiorkor bellies gatecrash the childhood movie of my grandpa tying his runner beans to bamboo stakes in his garden. A gang of executed men in a banana grove falls to the floor as I’m flicking through pictures of my summers at Oxford. All these memories are unfinished business. They seep out of the hidden recesses and coagulate. I confuse the happy ones and the bad ones, where one fuck-up ended and the other began: childhood, or my thirtieth birthday, until I can no longer determine if certain events that still haunt me are either real or imagined, or just excuses for drinking too much, or my yelling rages, or not bothering to get out of bed in the mornings. And sometimes, there are mornings when I get up just so that I can stare at the wall of the room all day.

I recall countless mornings, rooms and faces. A hut in the suburbs of Nairobi, where the white ants ate the timber walls and the tin roof popped and sighed with the heating and cooling of the days. Back at home on the Indian Ocean beach, like a child again under my mother’s care. I have had hours, dawns, waking in strange beds and looking out of windows at deserts, unfamiliar cityscapes, wintry rain, at the airliners coasting in like sharks to land at Heathrow. All that time stuck pacing around in rooms. And when I wasn’t there I was on a road or a flight to some destination that made sense at the time even if it doesn’t now. Checking in, checking out. The circular journeys that brought me right back to the point where I had started. It is as if I have slept through an afternoon and, waking, found that it is already dark. Time passes. Yet I sometimes sense that no time has passed at all. Sometimes, it occurs to me that if I picked up the phone right now and dialled my old home number the person answering it at the other end would be myself, aged twenty-three.

But it started long before that.

I was going to tell you war stories but I’ve realized that if I want to make sense of them there is a wider tale that follows an arc through the generations. You see, it started when I broke down after my father’s death. Suddenly I found myself taking stock of everything that had ever happened to me. I remembered the people and the things I had loved, or feared. I recalled my ancestors and my childhood. I lived through my wars again on the journey to recovery, in what the British combat photographer Don McCullin has described as the ‘peace process’. At first I wandered without purpose, but luckily I discovered Peter Davey’s diaries in the Zanzibar chest. Sometime later I tucked the papers under my arm and went to Arabia. There I followed the story page by page, mile by mile, and it provided me with a golden thread that guided me out of the labyrinth where I was lost. And for this reason I can’t speak of my own story without also telling you about Davey. In these pages I am going to take you to Africa and Arabia and a few other places besides, in different years and over centuries. Forgive me when it proves difficult to keep up, but you’ll just have to trust me. For now I want you to keep in mind a day in April 1947. We are in an emerald-green valley beneath the craggy peaks of high Arabia. The land has fallen silent but for the sound of birdsong and the gurgling of water in the cool mountain stream. Youth and innocence are dead. The broad-winged shadow of a vulture circles over three men. One body is that of an African, a sheikh’s slave, lying riddled with bullet wounds. Nearby sprawls the figure of Davey. The translucent bone haft of a silver jambiya dagger protrudes from his chest and blood soaks his khaki tunic. And standing over the two of them is my father.