A Walking Guide Page 5

  Chapter Four

  JADINI, KENYA. SEPTEMBER 1999

  She invited him to stay for a light, impromptu supper. She said a guest room was available, unless he wished to windsurf back to his hotel by celestial navigation. It was a rash, spur-of-the-moment offer that surprised them both. It was a tears-before-bedtime roll of the dice with stakes she found both terrifying and exhilarating. It was something to do with Jeremy Davenport in the Serengeti with Faria Duclos and a lot more to do with her alone in Jadini with Joe Shelby in what military tacticians called hot pursuit, meaning a chase that crosses frontiers, flaunting the laws of inviolate borders.

  He could not decide whether he had inspired the invitation or simply been its recipient by default, an accidental player, collateral to her breach with Jeremy Davenport. The distinction did not trouble him. Since their meeting at Naivasha he had wondered how this moment of opportunity could be brought about, how—or even if—it could be made to proceed through the preludes and preliminaries to the acknowledgment of equal, mutual need. Now, almost casually, she had offered the opening maneuver and she must surely have known that he would take her invitation as anything but casual. He was not at ease with the process. Past relationships had always formed magically, by osmosis, without conscious pursuit and calculation. Now he had taken a clear decision: he had placed himself in the traitor’s role. He had forfeited the high ground and compromised one long-standing bond by seeking another. He had allowed his fear of Faria Duclos’s craziness to lure him to the symmetry and safety he craved from Eva Kimberly.

  They ate on a screened verandah where a ceiling fan turned gently over hurricane lamps on white linen. In the mornings, the light would flood in here from the east, and in the evenings, like now, the sky and the ocean blended into degrees of gold and vermilion, framed in the dark calligraphy of the palm trees, stilled with exhaustion after the ceaseless buffeting of the wind. He sensed the deeper interior of the house only from pinpricks of candlelight at strategic corners between low divans and unexplained archways where people in white tunics moved without sound. Servants. Staff. The people who brought avocado in light olive oil and smoked sailfish on bone china platters, poured cold white wine and murmured code to her in Swahili, calling her mama, the honorific that had once been her mother’s. Yes, the bwana would stay for dinner, and they should prepare the guest room. Yes, they could retire now once the security team had walked the perimeter, set the alarms, just as she was doing with him.

  —

  “Have you known her long?”

  “Years, I guess. Met her in Gaza. Been doing stuff together ever since.” Not: met her in Gaza when the craziness first started, when she was stretched thin as the lines of cocaine that sustained her.

  “Stuff?” A vague sense of amusement, expressed through an exquisitely raised, sun-bleached eyebrow.

  “Well, I guess more than stuff.”

  “But is she all right? I mean, in herself. She seemed . . .”

  “Unstable?”

  “If you like.”

  “Crazed, maybe, I shouldn’t bad-mouth her. But she’s not at her best at the moment.”

  “And is she to be trusted?”

  “With him?”

  “With herself. To do herself no harm,” Eva Kimberly said, trying to suppress a flush of annoyance.

  “Faria has never been able to offer certainty in any regard. Her behavior is generally spontaneous. If she wants something, she usually takes it, without thinking about the consequences.” He wanted to be loyal to her memory, as to a companion through dark times who has now gone a separate way. He wanted Eva Kimberly to see his loyalty, and interpret it as trustworthiness for the future, not as a commitment to what was past.

  The light of the oil lamps drew out the sun-glow from her skin. She had showered and tied a kikoyi around her waist and draped a translucent, white cotton shirt over a tee-shirt top. Her hair was tied back, still slightly damp. She wore no makeup and her skin seemed the color of sand and biscuit.

  “And you don’t care?”

  “We don’t have those kind of hassles anymore.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “They’re the best ones.”

  “It’s not very edifying, either.”

  “You mean you don’t come out of it very well.” She smiled, another invitation to proceed.

  So, we’re in Rwanda.

  He begins haltingly, over the remnants of dinner, with the barefoot servants sliding across the tile. Like her, he is wearing a kikoyi and tee shirt, borrowed gear—Jeremy’s? She did not say and he did not ask—for he had not thought to pack an overnight bag when he rented the Windsurfer from the hotel. In this part of Africa, she had told him with a laugh, the men don’t wear trousers, and certainly not shorts as in South Africa or the old Rhodesia. So he is relaxed, aware of the freedom this kind of dress imparts, fearful of embarrassing himself with inappropriate shows of enthusiasm or faulty knots.

  Rwanda, again. He knows the story is the price. He will pay for one intimacy with another. He will buy her trust by betraying another’s secret. It is the natural progression. It is how people meet, securing one bridge ahead by burning another behind them.

  But there’s a preface.

  So. We’re in Rwanda because that’s what we do. That’s the life we have chosen. It is unusual. Plenty of people travel a lot—investment bankers, corporate troubleshooters, members of international agencies, diplomats. But we travel to very unpleasant places. The markers are the datelines. Every significant point in our lives is associated with one of the places where we ply our craft. You asked how we met. Well, we met in Gaza, in a sniper’s nest, and we broke up in Rwanda, in a killing field. Those are our bookmarks. We have no home where events unfold in an orderly manner. We are never at home. Some of us have no home to go to. Some of us have destroyed our homes. Or we have people at home who have gotten so used to waiting for a phone call that they don’t care anymore whether it will come or not. We have the road where events waylay us, ambush us. And we love it. It is a drug, a narcotic. We inhale it through every part of our being. We cannot resist the siren call of crazy airplane flights and mad cab rides and rentals and hikes and long trajectories whose sole aim is to land us at the point of intersection where history’s trail crosses the highway of the present to create the future. This is where we get our fix. We want to hear the thudding rattle of heavy machine-gun fire, the howl of war planes past their target (you do not hear them before the bombs are already released and falling), the banshee wail of multiple rockets. We desire collapsed buildings, broken bridges and corpses to describe. We cry out for the sheer joy of danger. We want to peer into the mirror of war and see our own reality reflected back at us, our frailty, our cowardice, the fear that tells you that—indisputably—you are living on a higher plane than all the others. We love war because in these battered, broken places we find our freedom. The only rule is survival. The only fuel is adrenaline. When we return with our notebooks and cameras we are blessed, suffused in this so special knowledge that we entered a world where the carnage and the bloodlust freed us from petty considerations. We are gods because we emerged unscathed, sated from the table of the warriors. And our addiction is a luxury. It is a fix that comes prepacked with gold credit cards and downtime in five-star hotels and seats at the front of the plane and the glory of our bylines and exclusives. We are paid to do this. Name a place we go and we will tell you about affairs that started there, close calls, loves that died, amours that blossomed. And ask what happened afterward and we will say: there is no afterward, only the next fix. The highs blur. Between them is void. As the bosses say: you are only as good as your next story; as the addicts know, you are only as good as your next fix. It is a stupid, incendiary job but we have—we want—no other. In some ways it is the ultimate soaring of the ego, but only in the sense that Icarus soared.

  You follow me? I know you understand. I know this talk enthralls and captivates you. I
know you are glimpsing possibilities you had not dreamed of. Or am I wrong? Please do not let me be wrong.

  So. We are in Rwanda. And, yes, you know, you guessed. We are, well, what is the right word? Lovers? More than that? Less than that? Partners in lust, insanity. We are a number. We are bonded.

  In the press corps they called us a number, a couple fused and soldered by serial survival. Joe Shelby and Faria Duclos.

  On their odyssey to the interstices between life and death, they took no passengers, no prisoners, they traveled alone. The dynamic duo, a German reporter from Stern once called them, with heavy sarcasm. A Fleet Street reporter with a gift for headline phrases suggested “bonkers,” because that suggested as much their mental state as their physical relationship. Their competitors feared their arrivals and disappearances because the couple seemed to have developed a knack for locating the most graphic moments of human insanity, divining horror. Had Joe Shelby traveled alone, his less kind colleagues would have accused him of fabrication—not to his face of course—because his reports, more often than not, carried a whiff of smugness, subtly hinting that they came from the places the others wouldn’t go. But the Duclos pictures that accompanied his articles invariably confirmed that they had, indeed, pushed their trade to its limits.

  On this last journey to Rwanda, they had gone much farther.

  —

  Imagine how it must once have been, an idyll with just a meandering footpath cutting through the bushlands, verdant, luxuriant, chattering with small unnamed animals, birds, insects. There would be springs and streams and the nomads—the Bantu moving gradually south, unconsciously toward an unbidden collision with Bibles and slavers—would settle where this greenery beckoned. Eden on earth. Paradise. Adam and Eve and the serpent freed of sin and bruises. Then the path would widen because the outsiders were coming with machines that needed broad ways scythed through the bush, and buildings built for eternity, with spires and benches and crosses. And then, more outsiders, with stores and money and taxes and jobs and strange, hot, unsuitable clothing and odd smells to skin that burned pink or was brown not black. Once, in the spoken histories, it was said the ancestors exhausted the land and moved on. Now they stayed within the cages and perimeters set down by these outsiders and there was nowhere to go as the villages burgeoned. So at every point along the path that had become a trail or road there would be settlements, places where the earth was beaten and swept to keep the serpents from huts roofed in straw, where a fire burned constantly from three logs pushed together into a hub of hot embers, where the thick tongues of foliage lapped rainwater that bred mosquitoes. There would never be silence until all slept. There would be talk, movement, fitful stirring on the hottest of days, games, intercourse.

  Not today, though. Not on this trip.

  The trail ran between stands of manioc and plantain, fringed by emerald grass that stood higher than a man. Ambush alley, they said simultaneously, but drove on anyhow.

  At each place along the way, the village sounds—children and radios, squabbles and the thump of mortar and pestle grinding corn—were absent. The fires still smoldered but the people were gone—or newly demised. The straw roofs of the gray-mud roundhouses were burned black and stinking, the wooden uprights charred. The corpses lay spread-eagled on open ground, entry wounds in the back of the head, or huddled in ramshackle church buildings, grotesque sculptures of mother and child, pieta wrought by machete. In the overwhelming quiet, in the utter stillness of the unburied, there were only negatives—breasts that were stilled, without breath or telltale movement, or warmth. In this charnel house silence there were no smiles, no laughter, no memory, no thoughts of the future. In villages populated solely by the dead, there were no stories or myths, beyond the sagas of almost unimaginable brutality.

  In life, the blood in the veins, the milk sucked from the nipple, the semen in the groin must all offer some minuscule contribution to the sounds of vitality. But here there was nothing. Whatever you touched or saw or commented upon, there would be no reaction. Even the feral dogs had fled.

  “Fucking marvelous. Look at these fuckers. So dead, man.” Faria leaned over bodies, stealing their images, robbing corpses of their last privacy. Joe Shelby stood back, taking notes, pleased that his hand was steady, his script likely to be legible when, later, he fired up the laptop to compose, tallying the slaughter, giving it form, context, righteous indignation. Faria and Joe. Avenging swords.

  In one or two hamlets, survivors crept out of the bushlands, wild-eyed, terrorized, to have their stories, as he put it, clinically removed by his dispassionate interviewing. Bodies, mayhem, after all, were nothing new. Tradecraft dictated the harvesting of sights, smells, color, words, name, age, occupation, home address. Bring out your stories. Bring out your agony. When you visited, you were the plague harvesters passing from door to door in medieval Europe: bring out your dead.

  “The soldiers came to the village . . .” How often was that the preface to the liturgy of destruction?

  The day wore them down, hot and unrelenting. At each halt, they took their booty of quotations, photographs, descriptive notes, then moved on, jumping into the rental car as if propelled beyond reason. They were flying now. They were along for the ride. The story had become an irrelevance—and that, he knew, should never happen, but did.

  The same lurid fascination had taken hold in both of them, as if they were pushing themselves to ascertain how deeply they could immerse themselves in horror, wallow in it, force the unseeing eyes and the spilled intestines and the grimace of dead innocents to lose all significance, inoculate them against all sense of fellow humanity. The further they progressed along the track, the fresher the bodies, the fewer the survivors. The gunshots and the screams, distant at first, grew louder, as if they were slowly overhauling the murderous caravan.

  Eventually, what brought him up short was an exchange that he recalled like this:

  “Can’t get any quotes from this bunch of fuckers.”

  “Because zey are all fuckin’ dead, man.”

  And they laughed, as if they had grown calluses on their own souls.

  This was the point of divergence, the moment he awoke. What they were doing was not simply recording small, pointless massacres, but, like moths to flame, pushing themselves towards the arena of perpetration where soldiers with blood on their hands would have no compunction about adding to the day’s tally.

  Joe Shelby had infringed too many of his own rules.

  Never go stoned or drunk. Rule one. Broken.

  Always leave time to get back. The day was almost finished. Dusk would arrive with the speed that lives departed in these parts.

  Never go too far. Never so far that you could not retreat. Never so far that you might be encircled. Never into whatever the clichés called it—the dead zone, the heart of darkness. In these wars, the lines were mercurial, shifting. A road was secure only as long as you could see it to be so. Turn your back and the ambush positions on the high ground changed hands. Proceed at your peril.

  “That’s it. We’re splitting. You’ve got pictures. Great pictures. Better pictures than anyone else.”

  But she was no longer thinking in such obvious terms. The small spoon on a silver chain round her neck hung over her shallow cleavage, white and powdery from frequent use. The glint in her eyes reminded him of the sickly luminescence before a tropical storm, when light and darkness joust for dominance.