Borderlines

‘Aha. Captain Peter Lewisham’s diary. Dr Berhane came across it when he was cataloguing some books. Looks authentic. Captain Lewisham – retired – worked here briefly after the Italians were defeated in the Second World War and the British grudgingly took over Mussolini’s favourite colony. He was posted to Kakardi, which is up in the highlands about two hundred kilometres south-west of Sanasa, where he ran a police station. Berhane says he talks a lot about trouble with the shiftas.’

‘Shiftas?’

‘Bandits. Most of the local men recruited by the Italians to fight on Mussolini’s side – the askaris – were demobilised, but some disappeared into the hills with their guns. I guess they were the forerunners of the rebels who eventually won independence. Anyway, there might be something in there. Think you can decipher it?’

The handwriting, in dark blue ink, was tiny, the words packed so tightly they struggled to breathe. But it was surprisingly clear. ‘I think so.’

‘Thank Heaven for all those lessons in copperplate our ancestors had to sweat through. That’ll be your job, then. Go through it and transcribe anything in it of relevance to our case.’

‘Such as?’

‘Anything that shows where the British administrators believed the border to be in the 1940s and 1950s. Relevant evidence is like pornography, in my experience. As the Supreme Court’s Justice Stewart said, “You know it when you see it.”’

‘Dr Berhane also said he’d appreciate any memory sticks or floppies we have to spare. Apparently the ones on sale here are three times what they cost in Dubai airport. Local retailers making a killing, I suppose.’

‘Anything to help our resident myth-maker. I’ll get Abraham to drop a box off.’

‘Is that how you see him? He thinks he’s working on the first draft of history.’

Winston sighed. ‘Ah. Myth, history, fables, reportage … Whatever I may claim in a hearing, my dear Paula, there are times,’ he gestured at the paperwork on his desk, ‘especially when I’m reading the conflicting accounts of what happened in Sanasa, when the distinction between the various genres seems to me as fluid and shifting as the sandbanks of the Red Sea.’

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Captain Peter Lewisham’s Diary

Kakardi, 1950, pages 60–65

20 December 1950 – Took Johnny, Derek and Danny down to the border on the Great Fowl Hunt. A winding valley running along the Abubed river. Just because we’re in Fuzzy-wuzzy Land, no reason to pass up a Christmas roast. We staked out the valley. Tesfay and the boys agreed to be beaters. Turned out a treat. We counted sixteen guinea fowl by the end – ten hens, six cocks. Came back and I showed the women in the canteen how to hang them. They giggled. Apparently local men steer well clear of the kitchen.

Christmas Day 1950 – Slap-up meal with all the staff. Derek and Danny decked the canteen with ribbons and invited some girls over from the village: pretty young things, all big eyes and whispers. We all agreed guinea fowl is actually better than turkey. The cook did her best with the stuffing, but it tasted strange: too many spices, Johnny reckoned. Still, quite a feast. We sang carols and toasted the King with the local whisky. God, it’s nasty stuff. Tiny has promised to drive over from Lira with some imported booze next time he’s on leave. Duncan got so drunk he fell asleep with his face in the gravy. All in all, I’ve got lucky. We all rub along together well enough, and I’m largely left to my own devices by HQ. Still, I’m looking forward to Christmas with Flo in Lyme Regis next year.

3 January 1951 – The boys have been hitting the local gut-rot for a week now. So today I took them on a route march. Woke them at 5.00 a.m. and marched them up the escarpment, along the crest and then down to Sitat. About sixteen miles in all. Johnny fainted halfway through, and two of the native boys were sick behind a wall when we got back to base. The lads will rib them for days about that. It feels good to be back in harness. I’ve got fifteen years on these chaps but I can still march them into the ground.

14 January – Pretty quiet week. Tesfay asked me to intervene in a local dispute. A dead donkey. I laughed my head off, but it’s serious stuff here, a big investment. I got Tesfay to summon the parties. We made it as official as we could. One farmer said he’d lent his donkey to his neighbour, who needed to pick up supplies from the market. Neighbour allowed the donkey to wander, it broke its leg and died. The farmer wanted compensation. The other chap said the donkey was sick when he took possession and collapsed on the way to market. ‘He beat his animals too much.’ King Solomon had nothing on me. I asked to see the body, which meant all of us piling into jeeps and heading off to Tentet. It stank to high Heaven – I almost lost my breakfast. No sign of a broken leg and the carcass was covered with whip marks, so I said there was no case to answer and ordered them to bury the body, chop, chop. I hate the way the locals treat animals. There’s no call for it.

27 January – Johnny came into my office in a terrible state. He’s only gone and got a village girl pregnant. Apparently she’s one of the ones who came to the Christmas bash. I tore a strip off him, asked him what he thought the johnnies Doc Sam gave him on arrival were for and did he plan to spend his life raising camels with a brood of café-au-lait urchins? He was in tears by the end. I’ve contacted HQ to request a transfer. What a bloody fool. We’ll be the ones who have to clear up his mess. The family will expect compensation and it’s not British government policy.

3 February – There’s been a shifta attack, the first for a long time: near the Italian bridge over the Abubed. Truck driver beaten up, his goods – mostly beer and fertiliser – gone.

11 February – Tiny drove over from Lira. It took him all day and he lost his way three times, perhaps not surprising given that he was still squiffy on arrival. That boy’s a miracle worker. Turkish champagne, French pastis, twelve bottles of sherry, twelve of gin, two crates of beer. Women’s drink, a lot of it, but anything as long as it’s not local is my motto nowadays. The party began forthwith, but we’re going to have to ration ourselves or this stuff won’t last till the weekend. Duncan’s been given orders to keep the rest under lock and key. And absolutely no drinking in front of the natives.

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A fortnight after my arrival, Winston dispatched me on my first evidence-gathering trip. ‘This dispute is all about land so you’d better get to know what it looks like. God knows it’s pretty dramatic.’

We hit the road at dawn, just as you’re supposed to on African journeys. I ran out of the front door of the apricot-coloured villa, passing Amanuel the district night-watchman – wrapped up like Scott of the Antarctic and apparently dozing upright – and dived into the Land Cruiser, whose exhaust was snorting in warm white gasps. The street was quiet. Two middle-aged cleaners moved silently along the pavement, their heads hidden in the clinging white cotton shawls that always called to mind burial chambers and high-pitched wailing.

‘Uph, really cold,’ I said, breathing on my hands. ‘I should have filled a Thermos.’

Abraham, freshly shaved and immaculate, smiled and turned up the fan heater as we bounced over the pot-holed back-streets. It made such a racket he was forced to shout. ‘Ah, Paula, you foreigners don’t know how to deal with our climate. On a morning like this in the highlands you need –’ he thumped his chest ‘– internal heating. A shot of our local speciality.’ A Baroque triton, he blew a white trumpet of vapour theatrically into the air.

‘Oh, God. Are you actually saying I have a drunk driver? I think that comes into the don’t-ask-don’t-tell category.’

He laughed. ‘Fasten your seatbelt, Paula.’

I reached for the buckle. ‘How about you? Am I the only one who’s going to wear one of these things?’

‘A seatbelt? Oh, no.’ He laughed. ‘Those are only for you Westerners. If you knew our history, you’d understand that we locals have already died a hundred times. It’s actually a ghost driving you, Paula.’

The prospect of a road trip had clearly put him in a good mood. ‘Seriously,’ he continued, ‘it was my birthday last week. I am the only one from my primary-school class who reached forty. If it is my time now, I will go. Only God knows. A seatbelt will make no difference.’

‘Well, if you do feel it’s your time now, please let me know so I can get out first.’

We were crossing the industrial area, passing what had once been, according to the rusting signboards, a soap factory and a beer-bottling plant. Then came an obligatory stop at a checkpoint, where two young soldiers looked at Abraham’s travel permit and insisted on inspecting our luggage. One gazed at me with frank curiosity and said something to Abraham with a grin.

‘He wants to know if you are married,’ he said, as he returned to the Toyota, pocketing his documents.

‘Tell him I’m far too old for him.’

The road to the coast appeared to point straight off the edge of the plateau, into a measureless void. Abraham pressed hard on the accelerator, the Land Cruiser roared, and for a moment I wondered if we were about to do a Thelma and Louise. As I muffled an exclamation and instinctively grasped the seat, we breasted the hummock and the road unfolded harmlessly before us, hugging the escarpment. Abraham whooped in delight and gestured wide. ‘See, my beautiful country!’

It was a salt-and-pepper landscape of ruthless privation, of unpitying absence. Rents in the cloud cover revealed, thousands of feet below, riverbeds winding through valleys like motorways of sand, but no glint of water. The acacia trees that followed those fitful courses were dark witches’ brooms of hostile thorns. At intervals, the odd baobab gesticulated, a giant angry triffid. Flocks of white goats picked at the slopes on the side of the road, but it was hard to see what they could find worth eating on that stony scree. A sprinkle of wild olive saplings failed to conceal the bareness below. Behind the first range of mountains I could see a series of hills, their tops peeping through a sea of early-morning mist, which was dissipating as the heat began to take its toll.

I thought for a moment of the buttercup-strewn meadows and shadow-dappled orchards of Kent, where I’d spent my childhood holidays. The green promise of glades enticing you into darkness, the haze of bluebells and wild garlic under the trees. Before their marriage had turned sour, my parents used to rent a cottage on a trout-fishing stream, and I could still remember the thwack of cow parsley against the bonnet as Dad forced the car down the lane, and the soft humidity of midge-filled evenings when I was supposed to be asleep and they sat talking on the patio. That careless lushness had come to represent beauty for me, the only scenery that might conceivably be worth dying for. But this? So many had died fighting for this?

‘Beautiful, yes,’ I volunteered politely. ‘But so bleak, Abraham.’

He looked sombre. ‘It was not always like this. Once this was all trees. I give you my word. The invaders cut them for fuel. That’s what armies do. They eat the land, like locusts. Our side was the same, always hungry for firewood. Our new government will replant, and then it will go back to the way it was before, our beautiful, fertile country.’

We were looping rhythmically now, one hairpin bend after another as we worked our way methodically down the gradient. I silently thanked the Fates that I was not doing the driving. Abraham fed the steering-wheel expertly through his slim hands, manoeuvring around a broken-down lorry over whose overheated engine two men dangled, T-shirts black with oil and sweat. Another loop, and a controlled swerve to avoid a donkey rubbing its back into the warm tarmac, exposing a cream-coloured belly. Another turn, and we skirted a burned-out Soviet tank, its barrel twisted at an impossible angle. ‘From the last war, not this one,’ explained Abraham. Each loop brought us a few metres closer to sea level, and I peeled off my new fleece, feeling the temperature rising.

I opened a window, aware of a rising sense of nausea. ‘How much more of this is there to go, Abraham?’

‘Another thirty minutes, then the road begins to level out. Do you want me to stop? Many people vomit the first time.’

‘No, I think I’ll be OK.’ I took a few deep breaths. Then, to distract myself, I riffled through my satchel, extracting the file Winston had given me the previous night.

‘So, this is one of five camps for the internally displaced in the eastern sector and it contains up to twenty thousand people from Sanasa and its outlying villages. Have you been to the others, Abraham?’

‘Yes. They are bigger than this one, closer to Lira, so we did them first.’

‘Winston’s given me the names of fifteen people he would like us to interview.’ Most were men. ‘It’s not politically correct to say so,’ Winston had explained in the office, ‘but the fact is that a lot of women in this culture make terrible witnesses. They’ve been brought up to be respectfully silent in the presence of men, and they can go totally mute. “Blood from a stone” is perhaps the appropriate phrase.’

‘What do you want me to find out?’ I’d asked.

‘There’s a list of standard questions. They’re all aimed at collecting testimony proving an unchallenged record of civilian administration by our government. Things like tax-paying, voter registration, utility bills, any interaction with the authorities. Land deeds would be wonderful, but IDPs almost never have those.’

‘A lot of these witnesses seem to be in their sixties and seventies.’