The Network (27 page)

We walk to a small cafe in the gardens behind the building and sit in the shade under a canopy. She asks me about mine awareness in the Sudan and I tell her what I know: that the problem of mines and unexploded ordnance affects not only the central and southern areas where there’s been recent fighting, but also the Eritrean border east of Kassala, and places on the country’s other borders with Chad, Congo, Libya and Uganda.

She nods approvingly as if satisfied that I really do know about mines. I go on to explain my hopes for designing a mine awareness programme in collaboration with the UN. As I talk, I realise I’m having trouble taking my eyes off her and am hardly listening to my own words. She’s exceptionally beautiful. Her eyes are dark and calm. At moments they express a faintly imploring quality, magnified by her habit of tilting her head almost imperceptibly downwards as she looks at me, as if she’s hiding something she wants to tell me. Her face is narrower and her skin lighter than the Sudanese women I’ve seen, and her smooth rounded forehead and high hairline are unmistakably Ethiopian.

‘You have Tigray blood in you,’ I say impulsively, then regret it. It’s too personal a detail for our first meeting and she’s visibly taken aback, as if I’ve reached too suddenly into her world. I apologise, explaining that she reminds me of a friend’s wife, who was from Ethiopia. She was very beautiful, I add.

‘From my mother,’ she says, and her tone is both curious and guarded.

Yet the conversation survives, and remains unexpectedly personal as we speak of our parents and families. Her mother was born in Ethiopia to a Christian family and her father in Khartoum to a Muslim one. Their marriage was a rare combination but the difference in religion had not interfered with their happiness.

‘The Islam of the Sudan is not like anywhere else,’ she says. ‘Have you seen the stars in the desert yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You must, before you go. The stars are great teachers.’

I’m watching her closely as she speaks, observing her face as it traces over each different emotion that rises in her, and catching what I can of its beauty like the glimpse of a butterfly that settles and opens its wings in the sunlight before dancing away. Then suddenly I remember that my purpose in meeting this beautiful woman is to deceive her, and this hits me like the guilt of a murderer. For a moment my head sinks into my hands. I look up again and she’s staring at me with a look of concern.

‘Something is wrong?’

‘I have to go. I have to get in touch with my office.’

‘And I must go too,’ she says, looking at her watch.

The unexpected intimacy has robbed of us our sense of time. Now we both want to make light of it, as if it hasn’t happened, and neither of us really knows what to do next.

‘I hope we’ll meet again,’ I say.

She nods casually. ‘
Insha’allah
.’

But I just can’t leave it at that. ‘Perhaps … perhaps one day you’d be kind enough to be my guide. Or you could advise me where to go. It would be a pity to waste time. Life is so short.’

‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘We should not spend time on things which have no purpose.’ She says this in a way that charges the words with meaning, but I don’t know if it’s a warning or something else. Perhaps she doesn’t know herself.

‘I’d like to see the Souq Arabi. The wrestling in Omdurman. And there used to be a statue of General Gordon on his camel somewhere, but I think it went back to England.’

‘It is better that the English keep it.’

‘Yes, I know, but there’s a funny story about it. One day a little English boy goes with his grandmother to see it, and they stand under it and look up and the grandmother, whose father fought in the Sudan, says, “My boy, that is the great hero General Gordon, who fought the Mahdi in the Sudan.” So the little boy says, ‘‘Gosh, Grandma, that’s amazing. But why is there an old man sitting on his back?” ’

‘I would be happy to be your guide,’ she says. The full intensity of her dark gaze is on me, but she’s smiling now.

Two days later I hear the honk of Jameela’s Daihatsu outside the gate, and leap aboard with my little backpack feeling like a schoolboy on his first day of school. She drives us across the river to Omdurman, where the life of the city, although poorer than the centre of Khartoum to the south, becomes infinitely more colourful and intense.

We leave her car and wander through the spectacle of the open-air markets. The dust-laden streets are lined with mud-walled homes, and shared with camels and donkeys, and the air is heavy with the scent of spices and smoke. There are piles of fruits and vegetables I’ve never seen before, and everywhere there are tall and sometimes strikingly handsome men in long white
jellabiyas
. Their teeth flash in gleaming smiles. The women wear the brightly coloured
tobe
, a long swathe of loose fabric worn like an Indian sari, and there are just as many who are as tall and handsome as the men. We are offered food by a hundred strangers in turn, and after numerous refusals of raw diced camel’s liver with onion and hot
shatta
spice I succumb at last to a plate of
foul
and gallons of sweet tea. In a jewellery market I bargain hard for a tiny silver casket and joke with the owner of the stall about being British, to which he responds by pulling out a large dagger from behind the counter and brandishing it theatrically above my head.

We take an old ferry to Tuti island, an undeveloped enclave of peace in the chaos and bustle of the city, and we stroll by the Nile, where women are washing vegetables for market in the muddy water, and we sit in the shade of a lemon grove to share a watermelon and take turns brushing the flies off each other’s piece. A few laid-back locals try out their English on me, and chuckle at my half-remembered Arabic. Jameela is looking at me with a faint and affectionate smile.

‘You seem at home in such a poor country. It is rare. You are not a typical Englishman.’

‘I don’t know what a typical Englishman is.’

‘An Englishman does not show his feelings.’

‘Perhaps there are feelings I am not showing you.’

Then she says thoughtfully, as if she’s been wondering about it, ‘We should visit the tomb of the Mahdi.’

It’s the most revered site in the city and probably the whole of the Sudan. At the end of the nineteenth century the Mahdi, hated by the British but much loved in the Sudan as a saintly warrior, led his tribesmen to repeated victories against their imperial overlords in battles of stupendous bloodshed. The charismatic champion of Sudanese independence became the most celebrated Muslim leader in the world, and formulated a unique version of Islam which was distinctly upsetting to other Muslim powers of the day. He considered the Turkish rulers of neighbouring Egypt infidels, and claimed to be preparing the world for the second coming of Christ.

His most famous victory resulted in the slaughter and humiliation of the British and their Egyptian allies after the ten-month-long siege of Khartoum, where General Gordon waited hopefully and in vain for reinforcements from Egypt. Gordon’s command and life ended on the point of a Mahdist spear. The Mahdi himself is said to have respected Gordon greatly, but was mystified by his refusal to accept Islam, choosing instead a humiliating death. The Mahdi died of typhoid a year later, and a shrine was built over his body in Omdurman.

The Sudanese paid a heavy price for their defiance. Thirteen years later, under no-nonsense imperialist General Kitchener, an Anglo-Egyptian force returned to avenge Gordon’s death and reclaim the Sudan. They were heavily armed with the latest weapons. On the outskirts of Omdurman 50,000 tribesmen threw themselves at the British Maxim guns and were decimated by waves of dumdum bullets. The white
jellabiyas
of the slaughtered warriors were said to resemble a thick carpet of snow across the battlefield. Twenty thousand wounded were executed where they lay, and their bodies thrown into the Nile. Moored in the water beyond the town, British gunboats took range on the Mahdi’s shrine and reduced it to rubble with volleys of fifty-pound explosive shells, the cruise missiles of the era. Kitchener had the Mahdi’s body burned, but was discouraged by fellow officers from presenting the skull as an inkwell to Queen Victoria.

The silver dome of the tomb rises from a palm-filled enclosure like the nose of a rocket. Jameela greets the old guardian with affectionate respect, and calls him uncle. We walk barefoot around the custard-coloured walls of the octagonal shrine while the old man rubs the steel-grey stubble on his chin and recounts the more famous exploits of the Mahdi and his ill-fated warriors.

‘I said you were a Muslim brother from
Britaniyyah
,’ whispers Jameela mischieviously as we enter the shrine, savouring its cool stillness for a few minutes before emerging blinking into the sunlight.

The old man asks if we will be his guests, and insists on tea. He leads us past the accommodation for pilgrims and dervishes adjacent to the shrine, and we settle at a table under a tall acacia tree. By both tradition and law, he tells us, the grounds of the shrine are a place of sanctuary, an ancient version of diplomatic immunity. When it’s time to leave, he heaps blessings on our families, and we promise to return.

We drive back to the city as the sun is setting. The temperature has dropped to a comfortable thirty-five degrees celsius. It’s also Thursday evening, so I suggest we go to the Pickwick Club, where Halliday has put me on the guest list. We are shown straight in and head for the bar, close to the swimming pool. On the far wall Pickwick is written in lights. There’s a plastic parrot at the bar, and I’m reminded Halliday has told me that the club takes its name from the late embassy parrot, which is buried inside the wall.

After the intensity of life on the streets of Omdurman, we feel out of place among the clientele of mostly lonely and bored-looking foreigners, and I suggest we go somewhere more real. Jameela agrees gratefully. We walk to an Ethiopian restaurant. There are no knives and forks, so she takes my hand gently in hers and shows me how to fold the food into the traditional pancake-like bread called
injera
. It’s the first time we’ve touched since we shook hands, and this tiny act of closeness feels like a landmark to me, as if I’ve discovered the source of the Nile.

The pyramids are her suggestion. I’ve heard of the enigmatic site at Meroë, two hours north of Khartoum, but never imagined I might actually go there, much less in the company of a woman I’m struggling not to fall in love with. She lets me pick her up the next morning, and I’m shown into her home by her Sudanese housekeeper, who, judging from the twinkle in her eye when I appear, knows what’s afoot.

We drive north for about two hours on the road to Atbara. Seeing how quickly the complexity and prosperity of the city fall away, as if from the edge of a flat earth, I’m reminded of Kabul, where the surroundings beyond the capital return to almost prehistoric simplicity after only a few miles.

At a small settlement called Bagrawiya on the east bank of the Nile we turn off the main road and bounce along an unsurfaced track. It’s oppressively hot. Then the pyramids loom up, some pointed and others broken, reaching like ragged sets of teeth out of the orange sand. There’s about a hundred of them, much smaller than their Egyptian relatives and much less well known, fashioned from black stone nearly two and a half thousand years ago as tombs for the kings and queens of ancient Nubia. There is no one else there except a solitary local who wants us to ride his camel for an outrageous sum, and we send him guiltily away.

‘Quite a place,’ I say to Jameela, ‘for your ancestors to be buried.’

‘Do you know anything of the history?’ she asks.

‘Only that Meroë was the southern capital of the kingdom of the Kushites, who ruled Nubia for a thousand years, invaded Egypt and ruled as the pharaohs of the twenty-fifth dynasty. They traded with India and China, and their warrior queen Candace, riding a war elephant, confronted Alexander the Great himself, who withdrew rather than fight her magnificent warriors.’

‘You’re funny,’ she says.

‘I read it in the guidebook last night. I wanted to impress you. Did you know the gods were so jealous of the beauty of the queens of Nubia that they struck the tops of the pyramids with lightning to humble them?’

‘Good try.’ She smiles. ‘The tops were destroyed with dynamite by an Italian explorer in 1820. He was looking for gold. There wasn’t any.’

We walk among the ruins in wonder at the lost civilisation that created them, ducking into the coolness of the few tombs that are open. As we enter one of them, Jameela reaches behind her for my hand and guides me gently inside. On the walls we can make out carved stone panels with Egyptian-looking winged gods. I run my hands over them and turn my head towards Jameela to see an expression of worry on her face, which I haven’t seen before but which disappears as my eyes meet hers. Outside again, under the stone gateway to the entrance we lean against the walls, facing each other in the silence. I’m just looking at her, and she’s returning the look, because we have somehow reached the end of the words we want to say to each other. The sun is low and the golden light catches the perspiration on her upper chest, and for a moment it’s as if her dark skin is glowing.

I’m not sure what would have happened had the elderly guardian of the place not emerged from his nearby hut, and waved to us with a shout to let us know it was his time to clock off.