Dimp asked her repeatedly what she thought she was doing in Canberra, that artificial capital which imposed on its citizens sudden scarifying winter frosts and summer excesses of heat. But Prim had begun attending training courses run by the Australian Development Assistance Bureau and by the Australian Council of Overseas Aid. Most of her colleagues thought of Asian development as the primary Australian duty. Prim thought of the Sudan, where the Austfam office was run by an eccentric man named Crouch, and the post of assistant office administrator and field officer had just come on offer. Her decision to apply was motivated by altruism, but also by the fact that she lacked the facial markings, the orderly scarrings, the broad eyes and splendid pigmentation considered essential elements of beauty amongst many Sudanese.
She would not be desired there. And that was fine with her.
Prim went to the Austfam office in the city of Khartoum in 1984. In flight from the Auger business, she did not have the room to bring to the experience the enthusiasm of the tourist, or more cultural curiosity than she needed for her job. The broad-streeted city proper was held in place between the Blue and White Niles, which met each other – amidst beds of rich silt – in Central Khartoum’s north-west corner. Near either of the rivers it was possible to imagine the city as fabled oasis, and the focus for the million square mile immensity of the republic. But south of that, on the rubbly, sandy earth of the New Extension, where head offices of many NGOs and other agencies were located, all the supposed aura and magnetism of the fabled rivers seemed remote to her. Prim’s training, and the Austfam manuals she had read, had told her how to dress in East Africa – for example, long sleeves instead of short – and implied that for a woman there was a certain danger of committing errors of dress or behaviour if a person went wandering on her own. When she did go out with a woman acquaintance, over the White Nile to fabled Omdurman, a place everyone at parties in the New Extension told her she had to visit, she had for a while felt edgy and exposed. That feeling soon passed, but she was very happy in any case to stay close to the office–residence, located in a high-walled, two-storeyed, flat-roofed villa of plastered brick in the New Extension. Behind the house lay a little yard of dust, and a cinder-block garage which also served as quarters for a man named Erwit, Austfam Khartoum’s earnest Eritrean driver.
Prim lived in a small, sweltering room behind the office, but took meals upstairs in Crouch’s apartment. A peculiarly aged-looking man in his mid-thirties, Crouch stooped around the office, his brush of red hair all thrust forward spikily above features which appeared misanthropic. At first she mistook his air of melancholy for disenchantment with his job, and when she started attending Arabic classes with him each week at the monastery of the Vincentian Fathers in the New Extension, Prim found he had not achieved much competence in the language, and feared she too would not become fluent. She suspected that, despite all pretended breadth of intellect she was already, at twenty-four, too culturally set to enter and move with confidence in the new cosmos of Arabic.
Prim had worked at Khartoum’s Austfam office no more than six months, chiefly looking after routine correspondence with the Sudanese Ministry of Health, with the Sudanese Commission of Refugees, with Austfam offices in Canberra and Sydney, when Crouch told her he was being considered for the job of heading the largest Austfam operation, in Cambodia. A few months later, it was confirmed.
Before he left, Crouch took Prim out for her first experience ‘in the field’. They went to a water project at a village near the Nuba Hills, some four hundred miles south-west of the capital, where Austfam had helped fund a not particularly successful small dam. When they left the main road west, something like fervour entered Crouch’s voice. Like Prim, he clearly found this country engaging, perhaps partly because it resembled remoter Australia. Even the gum Arabic bushes were acacias, and would not have seemed out of place in Australia’s central deserts. As they passed an informal plantation of these bushes, and saw little bowls placed at the base of the narrow trunks to catch the amber resin, he expatiated on that ancient industry – how gum Arabic resin had been until the age of synthetic chemicals the world’s fixative. Pills, paints, lollies, said Crouch. ‘Now the water basin’s sunk to buggery, and people can’t get the yield they want.’
Old men in dust-grey galabias took Crouch and Prim to a little dam, a quarter full of murky water, with lines of acacia trees laid out on the terraces above to hold the earth in place. Women were drawing up this water in plastic buckets with ropes attached. They would use it for watering stock, said Crouch. They were travelling quite a distance to take drinking water from an old British well – Crouch showed her on an ordnance map where it was. Prim would need to set up Austfam funding for a new well to be drilled.
As she and Crouch made their notes and assessments, these Sudanese, the long, narrow houses of mudbrick and adobe, the sacking and fabric at the unglassed windows, the fences of acacia, the goats nosing gravel in search of grass roots, all seemed as normal to her as the traffic of a country town in New South Wales. Unexpectedly, the dark, densely related male faces, beneath their skullcaps or with cloths tumbled turban-like on their heads, looked utterly natural, not marked by an exotic ethnicity. This, the usualness of the people she met, helped her forget she was an interloper. Some of these admirable-looking men were no doubt tyrannous fathers, tyrannous husbands. Their thin-faced wives were in the background, toting water is plastic cans, pounding millet, sitting by minute cooking fires in the lee of their houses, or looking out from beyond their shadowed lintels over raised shawls. For their sakes she must cease to be a ghost, an orphan. She must be of some effectiveness in the matter of water supply. That she might be in her way an unhappy woman did not count. That she was an orphan or even an imposter did not count either. They were willing to believe she and Crouch could release hidden water from the earth, and so she must believe she had that effectiveness too.
Of course, back in Khartoum, routine was still welcome, and so was the idea that she would soon, at least for a time, be working by herself. She had few doubts about her ability to keep the Austfam programs in the Sudan going.
Prim inherited from Crouch Austfam’s share not only of drought-prone villages but of potential refugees from a recently renewed national war in the south of the country. There had always been a divide between the more Arab and Islamic North and the part-Christian, part-animist South. More Central African in appearance than their northern counterparts, the Southerners had always been uneasy partners in the Sudanese state. Southern officers and NCOs from the ranks of the Sudanese Army had rebelled against the government when it imposed Islamic law, the Sharia or Way, on the nation. A great part of the official Sudanese Army had recently descended upon the South to punish it for its rebellion and for its pretence of claiming sovereignty over the upper waters of the Blue and White Niles.
When the war began, regular troops, garlanded with flowers, marched and rolled in trucks and tanks along Sharia el Nil. The populace had called Maah-ssalama, God’s blessing be with you, as young men went off to put paid to Southern insolence. But on their native ground of reed swamps, tall grass, clumps of bush and poorly marked roads, the Southerners – Dinka and Nuer cattle herders and others, the despised of the Republic, whom people in the North unself-consciously called abids, slaves – had not been easily subdued. It was apparent that a long conflict was in prospect. The Sudanese Army precariously held all the garrison towns, but in all their movements into open country the government troops were subject to attacks by the passionate Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the Southern rebels.
The people of the South were not only subject to being punished by government troops, but also by the Arab cattle-herding tribes, the Beggarah, who considered themselves part of the Islamic North and who had traditionally recruited slaves in the South. Now the Sudanese government had armed the Beggarah with semi-automatics, turning them into militias, empowering them to operate with impunity against their neighbours.
In Kh
artoum in the first weeks of the war Crouch had made a journey down into Bahr el Ghazal, one of the rebellious provinces, and wrote a report alerting Austfam in Sydney and Canberra that there would be a refugee problem. Southerners, whose villages had been suspected of harbouring the rebel troops, and whose livestock had been shot or taken by government soldiers, were vacating the zone of war, by train or on foot. They fled from the Sudanese Army and the Beggarah. They even fled their own, the Liberation Army, for crossfire took no account of one’s ethnic identity. To begin with, over the space of a month or so, some 50 000 Southerners whose villages had been razed stampeded into the North, walking up the rail line to Darfur province, settling without livestock in wadis in the great dry grasslands. Officials from the Sudanese government, from the UN and a number of NGOs, colleagues of Prim and Crouch, rushed out from Khartoum with tents and medicine to intercept the refugees, and Crouch, in his last days in the Sudan, organised emergency shipments of tents, cots and blue plastic sheeting. Prim was delighted to have a hand in arranging these straightforward mercies. To her, after the subtle and defeated vanities of anthropology, they represented all the more a worthy and enriching exercise. The needs were so clear, and could be so directly met! She was redeeming herself through wells and shipments of Australian food aid.
Some ten months into what would prove to be her largely solitary posting, Prim got a radio telephone call from the Irish woman who ran the clinic at Adi Hamit, one of the refugee camps. She reported that the well Austfam had provided there had gone dry. A drilling crew was needed.
This was a chance for Prim to get more experience in the field, to travel to Adi Hamit with the drilling teams and make a report. Erwit, the Eritrean driver would accompany her. His technological expertise – he had serviced field telephones amongst the rebels in his country before coming out, half-dead with chronic bronchitis, to the Sudan in Crouch’s truck – as well as his careful driving, reassured Prim. Prim also thought of the Dinka refugee midwife from Adi Hamit for whose education at the government School of Midwifery at the women’s hospital in Omdurman Austfam had been paying. Prim had visited this midwife in the lean-to rooms where she lived behind the school, and then seen her recently receive her certificate. She must have been lonely in this city, surrounded by the other, the official Sudanese culture, and dressed not with Southern casual grace but in the North’s sober swathes of white cloth and blue shawl – the price she paid for learning from Northerners how to deliver exiled Dinka babies. She studied at the School of Midwifery under a temporary Arab name – that was the rule – but her real name was Abuk Alier.
Prim visited her again and offered her a ride back to what could loosely be called ‘home’. Gidida, a vehicle, said Prim. Han-ruh Adi Hamit, we go to Adi Hamit. When? It-talat, Tuesday. The newly graduated midwife smiled her seraphic Southern smile. According to Crouch’s notes on her, she had seen a husband shot, and lost two children in some undisclosed way in the early months of the war. She was an uncharacteristically small-boned member of a race of lanky women, but identifiable as a wife, albeit a widow, by the patterns of ritual scars on her forehead, cheeks, temples. Abuk’s surviving child lived with Abuk’s mother in Adi Hamit.
The idea to travel with Erwit was altered when Prim received a call from the Englishman who had recently been appointed to run the European Community’s development office in Khartoum. Prim had not yet met him at any of the NGO and agency parties she attended a few times a week, drinking tea, fruit juice and occasional illicit liquor with Danes, Brits, Germans, Americans. Crouch, spotting the loner in her, had emphasised the importance of these gatherings for maintaining contact with other people in the business, and she enjoyed the international character of these gatherings, at which some of the more adventurous were spaced-out by chewing the narcotic leaf, khat. There was automatic acceptance, but she could also achieve a sort of anonymity – just another youngish aid worker from a small NGO. Since he was even newer to the Sudan than she was, she had not yet met Stoner. His distractedness as he talked to her now smacked more of Liverpudlian rock group than Oxbridge languor.
‘Oh, yeah. Look, I’m coming out with you, okay? To Adi Hamit, you know. If that’s okay. I reckon it’s time like. Time I went out there and saw the old Adi Hamit.’
‘Well,’ said Prim, ‘I’ll certainly have room.’
‘No, I’ve got this big truck, love.’ It came out as ‘I go’ this bi’ trug, luv.’ ‘See, I share this compound where my office is with this Earthwater well-digging crowd. You can come out with me and … you know, the diggers. You and I … we’ve got a plane coming to fetch us back to Khartoum. Then my driver can bring the truck back in his own time.’
Prim told him she had to take back a midwife from the hospital in Omdurman.
‘No problems, love. We got the room.’
The day before she was to leave, Prim discussed Stoner with an English friend, Helene Codderby, whom she had met at one of the NGO parties. Codderby was not an aid worker, but a journalist, and despite her seeming to know everything about the Sudan, she too had an air of isolation. Her father had been one of the last English bureaucrats to leave the Sudan, and she had come back as an adult. She was the sort of woman who must have looked aged in youth but had now achieved agelessness, and she seemed to hope that she would never go home to Britain.
Codderby took Prim’s question about Stoner seriously, making the sort of dubious mouth which serves as a warning. ‘He’s a good fellow,’ she said. ‘Great fun. Marriage not solid.’
‘What does “not solid” mean?’ Prim asked.
Helene looked away. ‘His wife hasn’t joined him out here. But … yes, you’ll be fine with him. You’re capable of standing up for yourself. The only thing is, why’s he going?’
‘Why wouldn’t he?’
‘Well, has he heard some rumour about Darfur and wants to check it out? He’s ambitious, and ambition makes people secretive.’
On a July morning, while Khartoum’s air sat at a pleasant twenty-three degrees – it would climb towards forty degrees by mid-afternoon – Prim walked under clear skies towards the European Community’s office at Street 33. She wore a cotton skirt to mid-knee and a khaki shirt buttoned to the wrist – civic propriety and the climate made such a combination advisable. She was burdened with a complicated pack which included a medical kit as well as her own belongings. Opposite the Farouk cemetery she turned into a yard where two drilling trucks and all their arcane equipment sat. Some Sudanese employees of Earthwater were slotted in amongst the esoteric gear. The large, check-shirted Canadian drill boss stood by the cabin of the leading vehicle and waved to Prim in a way that said, ‘I’m just here for the work.’ Earthwater was a Christian group whose desire was that every well should be sunk for God’s love, but to meet the demand they had to hire roughnecks.
The man who turned out to be Stoner advanced on her from the shadow of a glossy four-wheel drive with the stars of the EC on its doors. He was tall, lazily awkward, crookedly handsome, with a Nordic pallor behind his tan. ‘Oh yeah, Primrose, is it? Fergal. Got your gear? We got to collect your little woman, right?’
They were soon off, Prim in the rear seat. They drove out of the New Extension – Khartoum 2 as people called it – northwards, over the railway line through the city, across the Blue Nile Bridge then the northernmost White Nile Bridge into Omdurman. Omdurman was like a Latin Quarter, but had holiness as well – under a burnished dome was the Mahdi’s tomb which infidels could not enter. Helene said of the great covered market called the souk that it wasn’t up to scratch when compared with Cairo’s. But when Prim had first gone there she had been fascinated enough, not so much by the jewellery but by the varieties of incense on display, and jars of delkah, an aromatic love oil. You could buy sure-fire love charms and amulets, and red silk threads which if worn on the right wrist of children protected them from the evil eye. Helene Codderby somehow bought her smuggled Scotch here.
The entire convoy stopped at Omdurman women’
s hospital, where Abuk the midwife seemed delighted to seat herself at Prim’s side in Stoner’s gleaming vehicle. A languid expert, the Sudanese driver, Rahmin, clicked with his tongue and assessed the crowded road, where in a melee of carts and dust, trucks and Mercedes, a white-uniformed cop stood on his pedestal at the crossroad, competently directing the flow. Stoner chatted intermittently with Rahmin in Arabic, but the man seemed keener to try out his English. He went into a rehearsed threnody for a lost Omdurman. ‘No proper buildings,’ he said. ‘The better houses shrink. Everything once was green, now is dust.’ Stoner studied his driver with a broad grin, and the man seemed flattered.
As if wanting a part in the discourse, the little midwife looked ahead at the wash of saffron light stretching away eternally above Omdurman’s suburbs. ‘Ya salaam hala-l-manzar!’ she said. ‘Oh peace on this vista.’
The city was running out, and Rahmin swung temporarily off the ribbon of tar and compacted clay to overtake the drilling trucks. He did not wish to tolerate their dust. Acacias grew but grass was scarce either side of the road to el Obeid, and rain showed no sign of falling soon. Low dunes were exposed. Abuk slept neatly in her ornate midwife’s uniform. Prim and Stoner discussed their careers to this point. Prim’s tale was, as she told it, easily covered. Pulled out of her Master’s. Joined Crouch. Here she was, waiting for his replacement. She gestured happily to the barren country beyond her window. She was pleased it held her safe.
‘Me?’ said Stoner. ‘Okay, I was finishing up my Master’s at York, and these bozos come round from the EC interviewing. They wanted to see me – you know, on my academic record purely. So I don’t bother going to the interview, and like one of them calls me up and says, “We were expecting to see you.” “Yeah,” I said, “but you don’t want guys like me.” “Sure we do, if they speak Arabic.” So I did my training course and then I was in the development office in Riyadh in Saudi, then a year in Lebanon, then here.’