Borderlines

He pulls open the accordion door of the old-fashioned elevator – the reason she originally chose this apartment – kisses her chastely on the brow, steps back and pulls the grill shut. Phew, something nearly happened, she thinks. She smiles a polite farewell, finger hovering over the button to the fourth floor. As she presses, she realises that she has taken the wrong fork in the road. Meeting his eyes, she sees that he knows it too. Appalled, she calls, ‘Jake!’ even as he shouts, ‘Wait!’ Then she sees him running up the stairs as the elevator rises through the shaft. She is frantically pressing buttons – the elevator bounces, stalls, restarts, stops, and he yanks back the accordion door. The next ten minutes – which feel like hours – are spent kissing inside the metal cage until someone above shouts down to ask if there’s a problem. They stumble out, head for her apartment and go straight into the bedroom.

Quite soon after that, she will hear herself saying over the phone to Sarah – who draws a sharp breath at the words ‘married man’ – ‘I know, I know. The ultimate cliché. I somehow thought – I don’t know why – that I’d had the vaccination against this one.’

Ah, the careless, wasteful folly of it all. Looking back at my younger self going through the rambling, half-reluctant process of getting to know this older man, agreeing to meet at a cinema, then cancelling because of a last-minute assignment, scrupulously keeping options open via the occasional blind date, repeatedly applying the brakes through a mixture of caution and self-preservation, I want to give her a good shake. ‘Get on with it, you idiot!’ I want to shout. ‘There’s no time.’

Because on the day we met, Jake had just four years, seven months and five days to live.

7 (#ulink_5a1b9c3a-f035-556d-9adb-7dcb6e4552d4)

I called Francesca de Mello in Rome the morning after Winston had briefed me. It took three attempts, with the receptionist twice cutting me off instead of putting me through.

‘Signor Pibody, he is OK?’ Her voice was low and husky, and she had a very strong Italian accent, placing the emphasis firmly on the second syllable of Winston’s surname.

‘He’s fine. He just wanted me to say hello since we’ll be working closely together. I gather you’re due to send us some maps.’

‘I have four to scan and send. I will do it tomorrow from the ministry.’

‘Great. Winston also asked if you could resend the map you scanned last week. We think there’s a problem with the resolution – not your fault, but the file is too big for Lira’s slow internet connection. We only received half of it.’

‘OK, but I cannot do that now.’ She gave a heavy sigh. ‘Here where I am staying is no internet. Even with the telephone, always problems.’

It sounded a strange sort of hotel. ‘Where are you staying?’

And then it all came out, in a plaintive wail of hurt pride and nursed grievance. As she talked a picture of Francesca de Mello formed in my mind’s eye: a big, blowsy woman, I guessed, who spilled over both emotionally and physically. She had been directed to the Santa Elena convent, she said, by a researcher friend, who had explained that EU health and safety legislation had forced hundreds of convents and monasteries in central Rome to close their schools. The chattering gaggles of pupils in the severe black aprons and white collars of yesteryear were gone, leaving abbots and mother superiors sitting on hundreds of square metres of prime real estate. Spotting a commercial opportunity, many had carved the communal dormitories up into single-windowed bedrooms available for rent. ‘Imagine. You can stay in the city centre at a fraction of the cost of a hotel. Such a bargain,’ Francesca had boasted to colleagues in Turin, and they had congratulated her on her foresight.

But the bargain, she had discovered, came at a price. At Santa Elena the service culture was an alien concept. The nuns radiated constant silent disapproval, with communications a prime area for passive-aggressive hostilities. From her tiny room, where the only decoration was a large crucifix on the wall, Francesca would hear the telephone repeatedly ringing in the downstairs hallway. On the few occasions a nun deigned to answer, she would bungle the simple manoeuvre required to put the call through. After a male friend had rung – I guessed this was a boyfriend – Francesca noticed that she had gone from being hailed as ‘Signora’ to what felt like a near-contemptuous ‘Signorina’.

‘Non sono mica un adolescente!’ she expostulated. ‘I’m a forty-year-old woman and I talk to whoever I like. I could buy a mobile phone, yes, but why should I, just to please these vecchie zitelle?’ What was more, the nuns operated a virtual curfew, making clear that late-night returns would not be tolerated.

‘Sounds awful. But, look, I’ll keep trying. I can be very persistent.’

She heaved a doleful sigh. ‘OK, we try.’

‘Winston said you’re working towards a PhD. What’s the topic?’

‘Ingegnere Enrico Agostini and the contribution Lira’s sewerage system made to the history of nineteenth-century Italian colonialism.’ Agostini was one of the founding fathers of modern Lira, she explained, her voice flat. In the 1890s his workmen had built water courses and laid sewage pipes, taming the rivers that meandered across the high plateau. ‘I am in the fourth year now. The doctorate is nearly finished.’ There was no discernible enthusiasm in her voice. I felt a bubble of hilarity rising in my chest and hung up, shaking my head in amusement.

Winston was watching me from across the room. ‘Was that the lovely Francesca?’

‘Yes. I see what you mean. She’s a tad lugubrious, isn’t she?’

‘Indeed.’

‘I got the firm impression she’d far rather speak to Signor Pibody than to me.’

‘Ah, but that would defeat the point of the exercise. With time, I’m confident you two will bond. Now, would you mind going to see Dr Berhane? He has a report for us. Background stuff, but he also said he’d stumbled upon something we might find useful. His office is opposite the Methodist church, above the hairdresser’s.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Berhane Mikael. The closest thing we’ve got to a local historian. They use first names on second reference here, by the way. He’s the ruling party’s favourite intellectual, lots of friends in high places. I’ve asked him to draft a few pages on the background to the conflict. Get Abraham to run you over.’

I jumped over the sheet of dirty water that a stocky woman in a headscarf was expertly guiding down a cascade of mottled marble steps with a broom. The sombre courtyard, stacked with white plastic chairs and pot plants was a once-grand entrance now well past its prime. But the first-floor office was a revelation. Not so much an office as a miniature library, lined with the kind of books you need two hands to lift off the shelf. Leather-bound in rust-brown, maroon and baize-green, the lettering picked out in gold, these were objects of beauty rather than study. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in twenty-two volumes. An Illustrated Guide to the Flora and Fauna of East Africa. Ten volumes of Dizionario Letterario Bompiani, a History of Modern Thought, ABibliography of the Negro Work. And then there were the legal reference books, whose volumes took up an entire wall. The books possessed such presence that I almost missed the man himself, sitting behind an antique desk in the far corner. He was looking at me over the top of a pair of spectacles. ‘Very impressive.’

‘Yes,’ he acknowledged, with a small smile of satisfaction.

‘You must be Dr Berhane. I’m Paula, from the president’s legal office. How did you manage to build up this collection? It’s amazing.’

He rose from his desk and surveyed the shelves with the quiet pride of a headmaster at assembly. ‘This country used to have a large expatriate community. They left in one panicky wave after another. Each time, the books remained behind. Too heavy to move. Many of those leaving were my friends and, knowing my predilections, they consigned their collections to me. Which accounts for the slightly eccentric range you see before you,’ he said. ‘I even own a five-volume encyclopaedia of equine diseases. A more rigorous archivist would cull a few topics, but I cannot bear destroying books. It feels like an atrocity. Look.’ Extending one index finger, he levered out the first of eight plum-coloured volumes – Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – and slowly ruffled its pages with his thumb. Each page had a thin gold rind; the layering leaves formed a block of iridescence. ‘Just like a peacock … Such beauty.’

‘And they came through all the occupations and rebel attacks unscathed?’

‘Oh, fighting men are greedy for many things – beer, women, pornography, pills. But the one thing they won’t bother looting is a good read.’

He shouted instructions down the corridor and one of the cleaning ladies brought tea, served in glasses with a dissolving inch of sugar and a segment of green lemon no bigger than a baby’s fingertip. As I sipped, I gazed around the room. The shelves behind him were crammed with neon-coloured files, tatty notebooks covered with Post-it notes and piles of black floppy disks, all carefully labelled.

‘What do you do when you’re not writing statements for our office, Dr Berhane? Winston told me you’re a historian.’

‘A historian by inclination, but with no formal education. I originally trained as a quantity surveyor, but there’s not much call for such skills when your country is occupied. What you see here are my preparations for a post-colonial history of this country. I realised a few years ago that the men and women who had witnessed or, rather, masterminded my country’s independence struggle were dying off. We do not live long here. Loss and hardship wear us out. So I set about recording what was left before it was too late. Those files and floppies contain interviews with scarred old fighters, fragile former politicians, Supreme Court judges. Bar girls who were once mistresses to generals – withered hags no man would want to touch now.’ He barked with laughter. ‘Snipers who assassinated colonels, active young men now anchored in wheelchairs. They are all captured there, in my notebooks and my disks. Some of them spoke to me when they were already on oxygen masks in hospital. I caught what were literally their dying words, snatched between breaths. They were so glad to tell their story before the last silence descended. For me, as a patriot, it was an honour.’

‘It sounds an absolutely priceless resource.’

‘It is. It would be in any society, but particularly this one. Correct me if I’m wrong but in your country, in all Western countries, there is a general agreement, a consensus as to what occurred, wouldn’t you say?’ He was looking at me with a whimsical expression, knowingly provocative.

‘Er, well, I’m not sure about that.’ He had caught me off-guard. I hadn’t been expecting a discussion on truth and meaning. ‘Isn’t there always some academic spat going on over whether or not General Custer was a moron or Richard Nixon much misunderstood? Isn’t history constantly being revised?’

He shook his head. ‘Not in its grand lines, I would suggest. What you are describing is really froth on the surface, wrestling matches for the hyper-educated. I’m talking about the mass of the people. The mass of Britons, for example, agree they behaved superbly during the Blitz. The mass of Europe knows Nazism was an evil aberration, and the entire world today signs up to the American capitalist dream, which is why our own boys and girls keep drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach it! Think of it as the kind of history you whisper in the ear of a seven-year-old when you are walking through a museum hand-in-hand. “Mummy, why is she crying?” the child asks, as you pass that famous photograph of the Vietnamese girl running naked from the napalm attack. And you mutter something about Communism and the domino theory. That’s the kind of history I’m talking about. The broad lines of the narrative. And here, in this region, that has still to be written.’

He paused, tilted back in his chair and stared at the ceiling as he spun his spectacles around with one hand. He had given this speech before, I could tell. It was his way of reassuring himself, aloud, as to the purpose of his life.

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘Not enough intellectuals like me around!’ He laughed again. ‘No, that’s not the reason. Partly it’s because it’s all too fresh. Our story still hurts. But it’s also the nature of this society. We pride ourselves on our discretion. Blabbing and wallowing are not admired. The people now running this country created a Trotskyite rebel movement in an occupied land, which depended on secrecy for its survival. The member of one operational cell might be best friends, share a house, or even be having sex with the member of another and never know it. Those instincts die hard. Even in today’s free Lira, no one will ever tell you anything important on the phone. We got so used to being bugged, we internalised the police state. Former rebels have a mental block about writing their memoirs. So I will do it for them.’

‘How much have you written?’

There was a long moment of stillness. Outside in the street I heard the jingle of a mule’s bridle. I wondered if a cloud had crossed the sun, for the office suddenly seemed darker. He darted a sideways glance at me and waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, I have not yet reached that stage. I am bringing in the sheaves, like any good harvester, stockpiling my grain, making sure conditions are nice and dry and there are no mites.

‘The time for writing will come,’ he continued. ‘But that is why the award you and Mr Peabody will win for us in The Hague – because I have no doubt you will win – is so important. It will be one of the building blocks of the consensus I am talking about, a message written on school blackboards and explained in museum cabinets. You, too, are writing our history. So, here, my modest contribution.’ He passed me a stapled wad of paper, covered with double-spaced text, then placed a floppy disk on the desk. ‘And here’s the digital version. Your system can still read these?’

‘Yes.’ I leafed swiftly through his statement, experiencing an unexpected rush of pleasure at the elegance of his prose. ‘You write well, Dr Berhane,’ I blurted out. ‘Very well.’

He bowed his head in self-deprecation, but it was clear he was enormously pleased. ‘The skill that validates my existence. We each have one, no?’

I wondered for a moment what mine was. Knowing how to smoke in a US law firm’s WC without setting off the fire alarm? It had taken years of practice.

‘And, finally, what I discussed earlier with Mr Peabody. He will know what this is about.’ It was a Moleskine exercise book, well thumbed and dog-eared, the paper so fine it was almost translucent.

Back at the office, I placed the package on Winston’s desk. He picked up the exercise book and leafed carefully through the fragile pages.