Borderlines. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ battles between feudal rases, long-running disputes over grazing rights, ‘the perennial obsession with access to the sea’, and ‘the hot topic of national identity’.

      Within weeks, Sanasa was nearly forgotten as the war spread like a virus, infecting three other border towns. As truckloads of fleeing villagers headed in one direction, mattresses and cooking pots piled high, live chickens clenched like feather dusters, military conscripts and the occasional flak-jacketed reporter headed in the other, towards what was now a 1,630-kilometre front line. Nothing went as expected, although it took a while for the two populations to make out the broad contours of the conflict. The front line juddered confusingly backwards and forwards, each jerk marked in corpses that twisted in the sterilising Red Sea sun to form green-and-brown strips of human leather, a grimacing spray of teeth at one end, bulbous black boots at the other; landmarks initially greeted with horrified respect but attracting growing scorn from fellow soldiers as positions on crags and knolls were won, lost and won again. Two and a half years later, though, it was clear which side had been pushed onto the back foot. ‘We’re like a bar drunk who knows he has lost but can’t stop for dignity’s sake,’ the North Darrar minister of the interior confessed to an American diplomat one night over a ninth beer at Lira’s Havana Bar, an insight duly relayed back to the State Department. ‘One hand slapping our opponent in the face, the other leaning on him to avoid falling over.’

      Across North Darrar’s eastern, central and western sectors, more than 150,000 men and women had died. Darrar had gobbled up flood plains, seized valley settlements and captured hill forts, sending hundreds of thousands of villagers fleeing. The familiar flags of humanitarian agencies flapped over hastily built camps for the dispossessed. Sanasa had been occupied, then thoroughly looted. Bored Darrar artillerymen had laid bets to see who could rip through the jetty’s slim rind, and the sea now poured through the Swiss engineer’s 130-year-old stonework. Fishing boats had been burned, the mosque daubed with obscene graffiti and the port arcades mortared until their roofs acquired the consistency of ancient lace.

      The light was now so bright I was squinting. I rose to fetch my sunglasses.

      At this point, it seemed, the administration in Darrar had paused, suddenly aware that while sending the North Darrar government into exile was theoretically possible, the game might not be worth the candle. The two states agreed instead to send their presidents to Tunis for peace talks hosted by the African Union. A Cessation of Hostilities declaration was signed, catering for a buffer zone and a blue-helmeted force of UN peacekeepers, allowing both sides to pull back their forces without loss of face. The border must be demarcated, it was agreed, further bloodshed averted. Both leaders declared themselves ready to go to international arbitration.

      The last item in the file was a news-agency photo of the two presidents embracing in front of the television cameras, Kofi Annan’s hands resting on their shoulders in saintly benediction. I studied the image for a few minutes, wondering whether local viewers, while nodding in relief, had found themselves wondering how it was logically possible for both leaders – so certain of their own rectitude, so confident in the correctness of this method of solving disputes – to be simultaneously right.

       4

      I was sitting on the White Star Hotel’s steps, watching a gang of sparrows quarrel in the oleander bushes and savouring my first cigarette of the day, when a bottle-green Toyota Land Cruiser pulled sharply into the compound, sending dustmotes dancing around me.

      The man who unfolded from the driver’s seat was tall – unusually tall for a local, I would come to realise – with a high, clear forehead. There was a touch of the 1970s dandy about him. He wore a soft, chocolate-coloured suede jacket, camel slip-ons, and his cheekbones were framed with a delicate suggestion of sideburns.

      ‘Miss Paula Shackleton?’ I reached up and we shook hands. There seemed to be no fat on his bones. ‘I’m Abraham. Mr Peabody sent me. Welcome to Lira.’

      His English was good – that was a relief. ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here.’

      He shouldered one bag with ease and waved away my half-hearted attempt to take responsibility for the second. ‘Hotel OK?’

      ‘Perfect. I’ve settled up, as I was told to.’

      ‘Mr Peabody thought it would be more comfortable to spend the first night here. It opened after Liberation – the owners are from the Canadian diaspora. But you will have your own villa, sharing with Sharmila, the other expatriate.’

      ‘Really?’ I felt a pang of dismay. I hadn’t shared with anyone other than Jake since university. In my misanthropic state, solitude had become a Janus-faced friend, hated yet necessary. I made a mental note to discuss the arrangement with Winston.

      He stowed my bags in the back of the Toyota and started the engine, throwing me a quick glance as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘You smoke.’

      ‘Is that a problem?’ I looked around anxiously for the ashtray, my US instincts kicking in.

      ‘No,’ he said, letting go of the wheel to reach into his back pocket for his own pack, the Red Marlboro of the serious player rather than my half-hearted Marlboro Lights. ‘It’s good. Everyone smokes here.’

      ‘Even the women?’

      He raised an elegant eyebrow as he went through the gear changes, face expressionless. ‘You’re a woman? I thought you were our new lawyer.’ I laughed, suddenly certain that I was going to enjoy working with Abraham.

      We drove through bleached, single-storey suburbs whose flaking walls were draped with bougainvillaea, Abraham occasionally lifting one long index finger from the steering-wheel to point out a landmark. The headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force – a vast fleet of white SUVs behind barbed wire and cement bollards (‘We could do with some of those’) – the new 500-room Africa Hotel (‘Lira’s only swimming-pool’), the gate into the Imperial Botanical Gardens (‘“Giardini”, the Italians called them’) behind which I caught a glimpse of cypress groves and gravel paths.

      ‘Is it safe on the streets in the evening? I like to run.’

      ‘Foreigners say it’s the safest capital in Africa. I wouldn’t know. No one will touch a hair of your head, I promise you, whatever time of day it is.’

      We reached the centre of town and were bowling along a palm-fringed boulevard (‘Liberation Avenue’), lined with imposing Modernist buildings, what looked like a theatre, a high court, ministries and a giant art-deco cinema plastered with posters of big-eyed Bollywood stars. I leaned eagerly out of the window, taking it all in. Jake would have loved this, I thought. He’d have known the architects’ names, effortlessly identified the various styles, and could have explained the ideas and accidents behind the city’s final layout. Without him, it was a meaningless agglomeration of buildings.

      We branched to the right, up a street lined with shoe shops and grocers. I caught snatches of jangling metallic music from a café’s open doorway. There was a driving, zesty quality to it, but the vocalist sounded closer to screaming than singing. Every now and then a garish mural flashed past, clearly a commissioned work of art. I craned my neck, but we were travelling too fast for anything more than a glimpse: a geyser of fire; khaki-clad fighters storming some citadel; a clenched male fist; prone bodies splotched with blood.

      Abraham drew up next to a pollarded fig tree. ‘That is the office,’ he said, indicating a sober wooden door with a brass plaque next to it. ‘And there on the corner is Ristorante Torino. Mr Peabody is waiting СКАЧАТЬ