Stone Kingdoms (6 page)

‘Back in truck, back in truck,' he ordered. ‘We must go now to camp.'

But Martine was pushing the boy gently and showing that she would follow him.

‘Martine, be careful, it could be a trap,' called Veronica.

‘Back in truck, back in truck!' Haneen screamed and for a second I thought he was going to turn the cane on us. ‘These people very bad – they will take everything like locusts. We must go now, back in truck.'

But Martine was already halfway to the trees, and the other boys turned from the truck and were following a few footsteps behind. I went after them, slowed by the pain in my leg, and then Veronica came too, scurrying behind and expressing her growing disquiet. As I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Haneen strike the ground with the cane, beating up little puffs of dust. Under the tree, a woman lay on her side, curled up on a woollen blanket. She wore a coarse brown cloth like a shawl and a purple skirt that reached to her skinny knobs of ankles. Two other women sat beside her, fanning and brushing flies away from her face, and at first I didn't see it – it was so small and she hugged it so closely in the folds of her shawl that only the slight sheen of its bulbous head betrayed its presence. Martine knelt close by the woman, talking gently to her and lightly brushing her face, showing her the red cross on her case until eventually she could lift the baby away and hand it to Veronica. Then she examined the woman. Veronica and I looked at the shrivelled, emaciated baby, its distended and distorted head, the leathery contraction of its skin.

‘
Is it new-born?' I asked.

‘It's six months old,' Martine said. ‘The mother hasn't been able to feed it. She's dehydrated, exhausted, probably hasn't been able to feed herself properly.'

At Martine's request I ran back to the truck and got a canister of water. With it she bathed the woman's face and gave her a glucose mixture to drink, then examined the baby, holding its head in the palm of her hand and resting the body along her forearm. Veronica helped her open up the rags it was wrapped in, unpicking them slowly as if the tatters were part of the skin. It was a girl. It looked already dead until its eyes opened for a brief second then closed again, and as Martine examined the child its mother sat up on the cloth and began to cry out, holding her hands skyward and rocking her head slowly from side to side. As the other women tried to comfort her, Martine turned to us.

‘I think it's too late for the child – she's barely alive. She needs to go on a drip, needs treatment I can't give. Even then I think it's too late.'

‘We could take the mother and the baby with us to the camp. I think it's only a couple more hours,' I suggested.

Martine nodded her head but I don't think she held out much hope for the baby. Leaving the child with Veronica, we walked back to the truck to talk to Haneen, but it was obvious he wasn't going to help.

‘Against rules, not permitted to carry people,' he insisted, shaking his head and spearing the cane in the ground between his feet. ‘Whole family want to come – maybe ten, twelve others. No room, steal everything. Not permitted. Against rules. Very bad.'

He spat on the ground and ordered us to get back in the truck, breaking his English with bursts of his own language. Over his shoulder I could see some of the children edging closer to the truck. Some had found their own sticks and it seemed likely that if we stayed much longer they would take everything
that
could be carried. We walked back to the group under the trees, unsure of what we should do.

‘We'd have to take the whole family,' Martine said. ‘We can't split them up. Haneen's right – there are too many. They'd all have to come.'

‘But the baby....'

‘The baby is going to die, Naomi. There's nothing we can do.'

When we reached the group the woman had fallen back on the cloth and Veronica was cradling the child, trying to hold her out of the sun. ‘Give her back the child, Veronica – it's too late,' Martine said. But Veronica continued to hold on, reluctant to give her back until, taking the child, Martine gently placed her back in her mother's arms. Then, despite Haneen's protests we left them the canister of water and I scooped up a bucketful of the flour that had spilled on the floor of the truck. They knew we were leaving, but there was no anger in their faces, only what looked like an exhausted acceptance of their fate. Their silence made it easier. But as we walked away the mother suddenly called after us, her voice rising into a high wail, and as we kept on walking, frightened to turn round, it grew more desperate, more insistent, until I had to turn and face her. She had struggled to her feet and was staggering towards us. In her hands she held out the bundle of rags. At first I didn't understand.

‘She wants us to take the child,' I said as I finally realized.

Martine hesitated as we both looked to her for a decision.

‘Maybe there's just a chance we could reach the camp,' said Veronica.

‘I don't think so,' Martine replied, ‘but maybe we should try. Maybe we should try.'

She slowly circled round and took the child again as the woman bowed her head and touched our hands. I took a piece of paper from Martine's case and printed the name of the camp, then pressed it into her hand and joined the others in the
truck.
As we drove off she dropped to her knees in the dust and buried her face in the ground.

We held the baby in turns, swaddling it in a sweatshirt and bathing its face with water as we bumped along the road. Martine tried to dribble glucose into its mouth with a drip but most of it ran out again. It felt weightless, a dried up bundle of sticks. We passed it carefully, afraid that its brittle bones might crack under the pressure of our clumsy hands. It never opened its eyes. About an hour later I tried to pass it to Martine but she shook her head and stared in front of her, then took a cigarette out of her breast pocket and lit it carefully, her hand jerking with the motion of the truck. ‘It died some time ago,' she said, taking a long drag of the cigarette, holding it for a few seconds then expelling it through the tight purse of her mouth. ‘We should never have taken it.'

She pulled her legs tightly towards her on the seat and rested her chin on her knees. No one spoke. I covered the baby with the folds of the sweatshirt. It suddenly felt heavy in my arms, this dried up parcel of air and bones, and I wanted someone to take it but no one offered, and so I held it until Haneen pulled off the road and stopped the truck.

Martine took a knife from her case and sliced the throat of the spilt hessian sack and we wrapped the baby in it. Then, taking a spade from the truck, I carried the body into the brush. Haneen stayed hunched over the wheel as if not deigning to look at us. The earth was baked hard and Martine and Veronica made little headway in digging a grave, able only to scrape away the surface of the soil with the end of the spade. Their shirts darkened with spreading stains of sweat, and flies flickered about their heads. Then Haneen appeared and without speaking took the spade and dug a shallow grave, gouging out the ochre-coloured earth with a two-handed stabbing motion. When he spoke it was to tell us to gather stones to cover the body, to stop the jackals digging it up, and then I set it in, its face covered with the thin veil of hessian. After
piling
up our smattering of small stones we looked down at the grave. Suddenly it felt unreal, like children burying a dead pet in a shoebox at the bottom of the garden. With a shiver I remembered hiding my first blood beneath stones and into the moment seeped those same feelings of fear and shame. Then we turned away, blocking out the reality by speculating about how long it would take us to reach the camp.

As we drove, Martine checked my cut and then we sat in silence, separated by our own thoughts and the guilt of our sweat. The landscape bumped by, almost monotonous, an unrelenting stretch of scrub, broken only by the occasional oasis of greenness where some crop was being grown, a grassy spread of plain, or ragged villages glimpsed through breaks in the bush. There were more people on the road now but we sped on, leaving them behind us in a blur of dust and a new-found reluctance to meet their gaze. We were entering the hottest part of the day and inside the truck felt airless, the canvas canopy protecting us from the sun a suffocating lid baking the air stagnant, so it came as a relief when we reached the outskirts of the Bakalla camp. Haneen relaxed at the wheel and pointed it out to us as we approached down a rutted dirt track.

The word ‘camp' suggests an organized, contained area of set boundaries, but Bakalla was a sprawling chaos, its outer suburbs consisting of makeshift dwellings cobbled together crudely from packing cases, bits of polythene, and anything that could afford protection from the elements. Beyond these were the circles of Agency-supplied tents. The camp had been set up a year before, originally as a transit station for refugees fleeing over the border from drought and the sporadic outbreaks of tribal fighting, but more and more people had poured in and fewer left as war and famine spread through the region. As we drove into the camp children seeped out of its secret places and ran alongside, patting the side of the truck in greeting and shouting excitedly. At the camp's core stood the collection of semi-permanent buildings which included a clinic,
a
feeding station and storage sheds. These had dirt floors, roughly plastered walls and tin roofs emblazoned with the Red Cross insignia. More children fanned out in front of the truck, slowing us to a snail's pace. I could see a new series of buildings had been started, a few rows of blocks laid along string lines.

Bakalla was the central and largest camp in the region but there were other smaller ones scattered around it like satellites, manned by local workers but without medical facilities. When the truck finally stopped in front of the clinic I could hear music playing somewhere in the background – it sounded like opera – but then it was drowned out by the clamour of the children. Standing on the veranda in purple T-shirt and shorts was a man in his late thirties who introduced himself as Dr Charlie Wanneker, the Camp Leader. His blond hair, receding at the front, was pulled back into a shaggy ponytail. A pair of mirrored wrap-around sunglasses hid his eyes.

‘Hi guys!' he said, pumping our hands in turn. ‘Good to see you, good trip up?'

We nodded our heads as we made our introductions and he welcomed us to the camp.

‘We passed a lot of people on the road,' I said, staring at the reflection of sky in his eyes.

‘There's been more fighting in the Mankela region, but we haven't got a clear report on the extent yet,' he said, flicking away a fly which had rested on the bleached hairs of his arm. ‘But we'll talk later. Aduma here will show you to your penthouse suite – I'm sure you'll want to get freshened up. I'll see you soon – I'm in the middle of stitching a wound.'

As we followed Aduma I could see the truck being unloaded and the contents carefully carried into the compound behind the clinic. We carried our own possessions. The children flurried round us and I could feel hands lightly touching my arms and back as if they wanted to know if I were real. Sometimes the smaller ones got pushed in front of me as I
walked
and I almost tripped over them. Then Aduma would turn and scold them.

‘It is your hair,' he said, smiling back at me.

‘My hair?'

‘They think your hair is on fire,' he laughed. ‘They've never seen anyone with that colour hair before.'

Our penthouse suite was a large ex-army tent pitched in the little shade afforded by two dead-looking trees whose upper branches twisted into each other, their bark cracked and riven, peeling away in places. Inside there were three beds, a table, two chairs, a smaller table with two plastic basins, and a hurricane lamp hung from the junction of some metal poles. There was a rubbery, fetid smell, but it was cooler and we dropped our luggage at random and flopped on to the beds. Aduma left but returned a few minutes later with a metal bucket filled with water and poured it into the basins, then shooed away the faces that still stared at us through the opening of the tent. Veronica zipped it up and we washed. The journey had done much to remove any embarrassments about personal hygiene and we stripped to bras and knickers and splashed water over our bodies, trying to clean away the dust and grime which layered our skin and lingered in our mouths. As there were only two basins we let Veronica use one and I waited until Martine had finished. I was still washing when we heard a voice and the sound of the tent flap being unzipped and Charlie Wanneker entered. Veronica and Martine had already put on clean clothes and I stood in my underwear looking at him, conscious of my embarrassment but unwilling to show it by scampering like some schoolgirl for the clothes which hung over the end of my bed. He was still wearing sunglasses, which made it hard to read his expression, but he didn't apologize for his timing or display any kind of discomfort. He sat on my bed, removing the possibility of casually sidling towards it and my clothes. He placed his head on his hands and stared somewhere close to the hurricane lamp.

‘
You guys get a couple of hours' rest and then we'll eat together, meet the rest of the team. Tomorrow, first thing, I'll fill you in on what I need from you. I know you've heard it all before but don't eat or drink anything except what you're supposed to. Period. And take all the tabs, every day take those tabs – you're no use to anyone lying there out of the game because you haven't been sensible.'

As he turned his head towards me I pretended to dry myself with the towel. ‘What happened to your leg?'

‘I caught it on a packing case on the truck.'

‘Come over here and let me look at it.'

‘It's OK, Martine dressed it earlier.'

‘It's not something I want to take a chance with – infections can start up very easily. Let me see it.'