“More or less,” says Justin who in another life has written papers on the subject.
“Result is, we’ve got everything we need for pretty much perpetual famine. What the droughts don’t achieve, civil wars do and vice versa. But Khartoum’s still the legal government. Ultimately, whatever deals the UN cuts in the south, it’s still got to pay its dues to Khartoum. So what we’ve got here, Mr Atkinson, we’ve got a unique triangular pact between the UN, the boys in Khartoum and the rebels they’re beating the living daylights out of. Follow me?”
“You going up to Camp Seven!” Jamie the white Zimbabwean girl bellows in his ear, crouching becomingly beside him in her brown denims and bush hat and cupping her hands to her mouth.
Justin nods.
“Seven’s the hot one right now! Girlfriend of mine got hit by a level four up there just a couple of weeks ago! Had to trek eleven hours through marshland, then wait another six hours without her pants for the pick-up plane!”
“What happened to her pants?” Justin yells back at her.
“You have to take them off! Boys and girls! It’s the chafing! Wet hot steaming trousers! It’s unbearable!” She rests for a while then returns her hands to his ear. “When you hear cattle moving out of a village—run. When the women follow them—run faster. We had a guy once ran fourteen hours on no water. Lost eight pounds. Carabino was after him.”
“Carabino?”
“Carabino was a good guy till he joined the northerners. Now he’s apologised and come back to us. Everybody’s very pleased. Nobody asks him where he’s been. This your first time?”
Another nod.
“Listen. Statistically, actuarially, you should be pretty safe. Don’t worry. And Brandt’s a real character.”
“Who’s Brandt?”
“The food monitor at Camp Seven. A great guy. Everybody loves him. Crazy as a bedbug. Big God man.”
“Where does he come from?”
She shrugs. “Calls himself a washed-up mongrel like the rest of us. Nobody has a past up here. It’s practically a rule.”
“How long’s he been there?” Justin yells, and has to repeat himself.
“Six months, I guess! Six months in the field non-stop is a lifetime, believe me! Won’t come down to Loki even for a couple of days R and R!” she ends regretfully, and flops back exhausted by her yelling.
Justin unbuckles himself and goes to the window. This is the journey you made. This is the spiel they gave you. This is what you saw. Below him lies emerald Nile swamp, misted by heat, pierced with jigsaw-shaped black holes of water. On higher ground cellular cattle pens are packed tight with animals.
“Tribesmen never tell you how many cattle they’ve got!” Jamie is standing at his shoulder, yelling in his ear. “The food monitors’ job is to find out! Goats and sheep get the centre of the pen, cows outside, calves next to them! Dogs go in with the cows! At night they burn the cow dung in their little houses in the perimeter! Wards off the predators, keeps the cows warm and gives them God-awful coughs! Sometimes they put the women and kids in there as well! Girls get good food in Sudan! If they’re well fed, they fetch a better marriage price!” She pats her stomach, grinning. “A man can have as many wives as he can afford. There’s this incredible dance they do—I mean honestly,” she exclaims, and puts her hand over her mouth as she bursts out laughing.
“Are you a food monitor?”
“Assistant.”
“How did you get the job?”
“Went to the right nightclub in Nairobi! Want to hear a riddle?”
“Of course.”
“We drop grain here, right?”
“Right.”
“Because of the north–south war, right?”
“Go on.”
“Big part of the grain we drop is grown in North Sudan. That’s whatever the US grain farmers don’t dump on us from surplus. Work it out. The aid agencies’ money buys Khartoum’s grain. Khartoum uses the money to buy arms for the war against the south. The planes that bring the grain to Loki use the same airport that Khartoum’s bombers use to bomb the South Sudanese villages.”
“So what’s the riddle?”
“Why is the UN financing the bombing of South Sudan and feeding the victims at the same time?”
“Pass.”
“You going back to Loki after this?”
Justin shakes his head.
“Pity,” she says, and winks.
Jamie returns to her seat among the soya oil boxes. Justin stays at the window, watching the gold sunspot of the plane’s reflection flitting over the twinkling marshes. There is no horizon. After a distance, the ground colours merge into mist, tinting the window with deeper and deeper tones of mauve. We could fly for all our lives, he tells her, and we’d never reach the earth’s hard edge. With no warning the Buffalo begins its slow descent. The swamp turns brown, hard ground rises above the water level. Single trees appear like green cauliflowers as the plane’s sunspot whips across them. Edsard has taken the controls. Captain McKenzie is studying a brochure of camping equipment. He turns and gives Justin a thumbs-up. Justin returns to his seat, buckles up and glances at his watch. They have been flying three hours. Edsard banks the plane steeply. Boxes of toilet paper, fly spray and chocolate shoot down the steel deck and thump against the raised daïs of the cockpit close to Justin’s feet. A cluster of rush-roofed huts appears at the end of the wingtip. Justin’s headset is full of atmospherics like classical music being played at the wrong speed. Out of the cacophony he selects a gruff Germanic voice giving details of the state of the ground. He makes out the words “firm and easy.” The plane starts to vibrate wildly. Rising in his harness Justin looks through the cockpit window at a strip of red earth running across a green field. Lines of white sacks serve as markers. More sacks are strewn over one corner of the field. The plane straightens and the sun hits the back of Justin’s neck like a douche of scalding water. He sits down sharply. The Germanic voice becomes loud and clear.
“Come on down here, Edsard, man! We made a fine goat stew for lunch today! You got that layabout McKenzie up there?”
Edsard is not so easily wooed. “What are those bags doing out in the corner there, Brandt? Has someone made a drop just recently? Are we sharing space with another plane up here?”
“That’s just empty bags, Edsard. You ignore those bags and come on down here, you hear me? You got that hotshot journalist with you?”
McKenzie this time, laconically. “We got him, Brandt.”
“Who else you got?”
“Me!” yells Jamie cheerfully above the roar.
“One journalist, one nymphomaniac, six returning delegates,” McKenzie intones as calmly as before.
“What’s he like, man? The hotshot?”
“You tell me,” says McKenzie.
Rich laughter in the cockpit, shared by the faceless foreign voice from the ground.
“Why’s he nervous?” Justin asks.
“They’re all nervous down there. It’s the end of the line. When we touch down, Mr Atkinson, you stay with me, please. Protocol requires I introduce you to the Commissioner ahead of everybody else.”
The airstrip is an elongated clay tennis court, part overgrown. Dogs and villagers are emerging from a clump of forest and heading towards it. The huts are rush-roofed and conical. Edsard makes a low pass while McKenzie scans the bush to either side.
“No bad guys?” Edsard asks.
“No bad guys,” McKenzie confirms.
The Buffalo banks, levels out and rushes forward. The airstrip hits it like a rocket. Clouds of flaming red dust envelop the windows. The fuselage sags left, then further left, the cargo howls in its moorings. The engines scream, the plane shudders, scrapes something, moans and bucks. The engines die. The dust subsides. They have arrived. Justin is staring through the falling dust at an approaching delegation of African dignitaries, children and a couple of white women in grubby jeans, dreadlocks and bracelets. At their centre, clad in a brown Homburg hat, a
ncient khaki shorts and very worn suède shoes, strides the beaming, bulbous, gingery and undeniably majestic figure of Markus Lorbeer without his stethoscope.
The Sudanese women clamber from the plane and rejoin a chanting cluster of their people. Jamie the Zimbabwean is hugging her companions to whoops of mutual pleasure and amazement, and hugging Lorbeer also, stroking his face and pulling off his Homburg and smoothing his red hair for him while Lorbeer beams and pats her bottom and chortles like a schoolboy on his birthday. Dinka porters swarm into the rear of the fuselage and unload to Edsard’s instructions. But Justin must remain in his seat until Captain McKenzie beckons him down the steps and leads him away from the festivities, across the airstrip, up a small mound to where a cluster of Dinka elders in black trousers and white shirts sit in a half-circle of kitchen chairs under a shade tree. At their centre sits Arthur the Commissioner, a shrivelled, grey-haired man with a hewn face and intense, sagacious eyes. He wears a red baseball cap with Paris embroidered on it in gold.
“So you are a man of the pen, Mr Atkinson,” says Arthur, in faultless archaic English, when McKenzie has made the introductions.
“That’s correct, sir.”
“What journal or publication, if I may make so bold, is fortunate enough to retain your services?”
“The Telegraph of London.”
“Sunday Telegraph?”
“Mostly the daily.”
“Both are excellent newspapers,” Arthur declares.
“Arthur was a sergeant in the Sudanese Defence Force during the British mandate,” McKenzie explains.
“Tell me, sir. Would I be correct in saying you are here to nourish your mind?”
“And the minds of my readers, too, I hope,” says Justin, with diplomatic unction, as out of the corner of his eye he sees Lorbeer and his delegation advancing across the runway.
“Then, sir, I pray that you may also nourish the minds of my people by sending us English books. The United Nations provides for our bodies but too seldom for our minds. Our preferred authors are the English master storytellers of the nineteenth century. Perhaps your newspaper would consider subsidising such a venture.”
“I’ll certainly propose it to them,” says Justin. Over his right shoulder, Lorbeer and his group are approaching the mound.
“You are most welcome, sir. For how long shall we have the pleasure of your distinguished company?”
McKenzie answers on Justin’s behalf. Below them, Lorbeer and his group have come to a halt at the foot of the mound and are waiting for McKenzie and Justin to descend.
“Until this time tomorrow, Arthur,” says McKenzie.
“But no longer, please,” says Arthur, with a sideways glance at his courtiers. “Do not forget us when you leave here, Mr Atkinson. We shall be waiting for your books.”
“Hot day,” McKenzie observes as they descend the mound. “Must be around forty-two and rising. Still, that’s the Garden of Eden for you. Same time tomorrow, OK? Hi, Brandt. Here’s your hotshot.”
Justin has not reckoned with such overwhelming good nature. The gingery eyes that in the Uhuru Hospital refused to see him radiate spontaneous delight. The baby face, scalded by the daily sun, is one broad, infectious grin. The guttural voice that sent its nervous mutterings into the rafters of Tessa’s ward is vibrant and commanding. The two men are shaking hands while Lorbeer speaks, Justin’s one hand to Lorbeer’s two. His grasp is friendly and confiding.
“Did they brief you down there in Loki, Mr Atkinson, or did they leave the hard work to me?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t have much time for briefings,” Justin replies, smiling in return.
“Why are journalists always in such a hurry, Mr Atkinson?” Lorbeer complains cheerfully, releasing Justin’s hand only to clap him on the shoulder as he guides him back towards the airstrip. “Does the truth change so fast these days? My father always taught me: if something is true, it is eternal.”
“I wish he’d tell my editor that,” says Justin.
“But maybe your editor does not believe in eternity,” Lorbeer warns, swinging round on Justin and raising a finger in his face.
“Maybe he doesn’t,” Justin concedes.
“Do you?” The clown’s eyebrows are hooped in priestly inquisition.
Justin’s brain is for a moment numb. What am I pretending to be? This is Markus Lorbeer, your betrayer.
“I think I’ll live a while before I answer that one,” he replies awkwardly, at which Lorbeer lets out a roar of honest laughter.
“But not too long, man! Otherwise eternity come and get you! You ever see a food drop before?” A sudden lowering of the voice as he grabs Justin’s arm.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I show you one, man. And then you will believe in eternity, I promise. We get four drops a day here and it’s God’s miracle every time.”
“You’re very kind.”
Lorbeer is about to deliver a set-piece. The diplomat in Justin, the fellow sophist, hears it coming.
“We try to be efficient, here, Mr Atkinson. We try to get food into the right mouths. Maybe we oversupply. When customers are starving, I never saw that as a crime. Maybe they lie to us a little, how many they got in their villages, how many are dying. Maybe we make a few millionaires in the black market in Aweil. Too bad, I say. OK?”
“OK.
Jamie has appeared at Lorbeer’s shoulder, accompanied by a group of African women bearing clipboards.
“Maybe the foodstall-keepers don’t love us too much for screwing up their trade. Maybe the poor spearmen and witch doctors in the bush say we do them out of business with our Western medicines. Maybe with our food drops we create a dependency. OK?”
“OK.”
A gigantic smile dismisses all these imperfections. “Listen, Mr Atkinson. Tell this to your readers. Tell it to the UN fat-arses in Geneva and Nairobi. Every time my food station gets one spoonful of our porridge into the mouth of one starving kid, I’ve done my job. I sleep in God’s bosom that night. I earned my reason to be born. You tell them that?”
“I’ll try.”
“You got a first name?”
“Peter.”
“Brandt.”
They shake hands again, for longer than before.
“Ask anything you want, OK, Peter? I got no secrets from God. You got something special you want to ask me?”
“Not yet. Maybe later, when I’ve had a chance to get the hang of things.”
“That’s good. You take your time. What’s true is eternal, OK?”
“OK.”
It is prayer time.
It is Holy Communion time.
It is miracle time.
It is time to share the Host with all mankind.
Or so Lorbeer is pronouncing, and so Justin affects to write in his notebook, in a vain effort to escape the oppressive good spirits of his guide. It is time to watch “the mystery of man’s humanity correcting the effects of man’s evil,” which is another of Lorbeer’s disconcerting soundbites, delivered while his gingery eyes squint devoutly into the burning Heaven, and the great smile beckons down God’s benison, and Justin feels the shoulder of his wife’s betrayer nudge affectionately against his own. A line of spectators is drawn up. Jamie the Zimbabwean and Arthur the Commissioner and his courtiers are the closest. Dogs, groups of tribesmen in red robes and a subdued crowd of naked children arrange themselves around the airstrip’s edge.
“Four hundred and sixteen families we feed today, Peter. For a family you got to multiply by six. The Commissioner over there, I give him five per cent of everything we drop. That’s off the record. You’re a decent guy so I tell you. Listen to the Commissioner, you’d think the population of Sudan was a hundred million. Another problem we got, that’s rumour. Takes one guy to say he saw a horseman with a gun and ten thousand people run like hell, leave their crops and villages.”
He stops dead. At his side, Jamie is pointing one arm to Heaven while her spare hand discovers Lorbe
er’s and gives it a covert squeeze. The Commissioner and his retinue have also heard it, and their response is to raise their heads, half close their eyes and stretch their lips in tense and sunny smiles. Justin catches the far rumble of an engine and makes out a black spot lost in a burnished sky. Slowly the spot becomes another Buffalo like the one that flew him here, white and brave and solitary as God’s own cavalry, clearing the treetops by a hand’s breadth, flickering and bobbing as it jockeys for line and height. Then vanishes, never to return. But Lorbeer’s congregation does not lose faith. Heads remain lifted, willing it back. And here it comes again, low and straight and purposeful. A lump rises in Justin’s throat and tears start to his eyes as the first white shower of food bags, like a trail of soapflakes, issues from the plane’s tail. At first they drift playfully, then gather speed and spatter onto the drop zone in a wet tattoo of machine-gun fire. The plane circles to repeat the manoeuvre.
“You see that, man?” Lorbeer is whispering. There are tears in his eyes also. Does he weep four times a day? Or only when he has an audience?
“I saw it,” Justin confirms. As you saw it and like me, no doubt, became an instant member of his church.
“Listen, man. We need more airstrips. You put that in your article. More airstrips and closer to the villages. The walk’s too long for them, too dangerous. They get raped, they get their throats cut. Their kids get stolen while they’re away. And when they get here, they find they’ve screwed up. It’s not the day for their village. So they go home again, and they’re confused. A lot of them, they die of the confusion. Their kids too. You gonna write that?”
“I’ll try.”
“Loki says more airstrips means more monitoring. I say, OK, we have more monitoring. Loki says, where’s the money? I say, spend it first, then find it. What the hell?”
A different silence grips the airstrip. It is the silence of apprehension. Are marauders lurking in the woods, waiting to steal God’s gift and run? Lorbeer’s great hand is again clutching Justin’s upper arm.
“We got no guns here, man,” he is explaining, in answer to the unspoken question in Justin’s mind. “In the villages they’ve got Armalites and Kalashnikovs. Arthur the Commissioner over there, he buys them with his five per cent and gives them to his people. But here in the food station, all we got is a radio and prayer.”