Borderlines. Michela Wrong

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.’

      ‘Lawyers are like biographers. We love old people. The further back we can go, the more legitimacy our claim acquires.’

      Another few loops and Abraham applied the brakes so suddenly I lurched forward and we stalled. A trio of camels was undulating across the road, whipped on by a tousle-haired teenager in a white shift. He squinted at us, shielding his eyes from sunlight so harsh it bleached everything to black and white. ‘A good sign,’ commented Abraham. ‘When you go from goats to camels, it means you’ve nearly conquered the mountain.’

      I took the opportunity to crouch behind a fig cactus and pee. On my return, Abraham was stretching his legs. Getting back in, he pressed the cigarette lighter and lit a Marlboro. ‘Tell me something, Paula. We call these people refugees, you call them IDPs, what is the difference?’

      ‘Ha! I asked Winston exactly the same question last night. Apparently the UNHCR, the refugee agency, insists on sticking to legal terminology. You can only be a refugee if you cross an international border. Otherwise, you’re internally displaced. Just a question of definition.’

      But that wasn’t quite true, I thought. Everyone knew who refugees were. They were those people we’d seen in black-and-white stills pushing carts across 1940s France in shabby coats, and the Hutu families who had trudged out of Rwanda, sleeping mats balanced on their heads. They shared the same expression of questing desperation. ‘Internally displaced persons’? Who were they? The phrase conjured up some painless version of community musical chairs. Professional do-gooders and diplomats might wake at night fretting over the fate of IDPs, but the public at large reserved their sympathy for ‘refugees’. They had been screwed by language, their plight leached of poignancy by UN officialese.

      A deadening torpor descended as we hit the straight coastal road. At his request, I fed Abraham first cigarettes, then sticks of chewing gum: it’s harder to fall asleep when your jaws are working.

      We passed a giant tortoise, up-ended in the road like a salad bowl, stubby legs protruding. The plains sparkled in the early-morning sun, flashes of light bouncing off shards of quartz, fragments of gypsum, crumbs of pink marble, granite and all the other deposits, Abraham explained, that lay behind the ‘mineral-rich’ promise made in the government brochures once handed out to visiting investors.

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