Effendi

CHAPTER 6 Sudan

Sergeant Ka turned towards the truth and raised a fist above his head in formal salute:

I will ascend to heaven

I will raise my throne above the stars

I will sit on the mount of assembly . . .

Before the silver talisman he wore around his neck became an amulet, it was briefly a bride piece in a dusty city with empty streets and a broken-down bazaar. South of the city lived the Dinka, cattle people, who once roamed the cracked earth between here and the upland forest, where fever trees glow and scrub lies lifeless, until rains come and the underbrush explodes.

Originally, the talisman was recognizable as a Maria Theresa dollar, but the touch of a thousand hands had worn it flat. The coin, however, was never Austrian. It was minted in Stambul, a hundred years after the empress died, at a time when silver dollars were a common currency in the Sahara, Arabia and the Sudan.

Having been taken south as payment for slaves, the coin become a bride price before coming north again, around the neck of a child who stabbed the grandson of the Dinka who originally received it in marriage.

She used a blade because that day’s bullet ration was gone . . . Later, she swapped the talisman for a bone crucifix taken from a nun; but that was months later, long after the little war started in Abu Simbel. Mostly Ka avoided thinking about the little war and how he became a soldier.

And sometimes he forgot.

Before Ka was a soldier, he was a camel boy, which was an easy job and one he liked. Foreigners came by gleaming barge to the great temple and he and boys like him led them by camel up the thorny slope from the river’s edge to the foot of the cliffs, where great carvings had stood undisturbed for well over three thousand years.

Back then, Ka wore tattered shorts and no top or shoes, because that way the tips were better. Once he’d worn a Pepsi T-shirt and a pair of Nikes that a pink-skinned girl had left behind and hardly any of the foreigners chose him. They rode with the barefooted boys.

He’d have learnt his lesson from this, even without the beating he got from his uncle. Next day, Ka went back to no shirt or shoes. He also began to listen to the guides when they were too busy to notice.

Soon he knew all the best stories about the great king and his wife. He could explain why the four big statues all wore the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, while inside the cliffs, in the darkness of the inner chamber, the king wore only the white crown of Upper Egypt or the red crown of Lower Egypt, depending on whether he was in the northern or southern part of the temple.

And he learnt what interested the foreigners, those people who wasted water as if it was endless. Who washed under flowing showers, shat in unused water and giggled as they tipped full bottles over their heads and let clean water drain away into the dust.

He told them of kings marrying their daughters, brothers sleeping with sisters, mothers with sons. It kept the magic sacred, kept the river flowing and renewed the dark silt that lined the banks and fed the kingdom, but he didn’t explain that. The reasons were never as important to the nasrani as the actions themselves.

When Ka told of battles where the king’s army collected testicles to help his scribes count the number of captured, the men would look sick and the bareheaded women either quizzical or appalled. And Ka would smile and look happy when they tipped him, pretending to be surprised. As if he’d spend his whole morning telling them tales just because he loved foreigners.

No one loved the foreigners, not really. Except, maybe, the government because they brought in francs, marks and American dollars. The poor, the felaheen, would rather the foreigners didn’t wander unasked into mosques, still wearing their shoes, that they didn’t choke the desert roads with coaches that threw dust into the faces of those walking and, most of all, that they didn’t need endless hotels along the river, because now the areas richest in silt were closed to those who used to sharecrop them and landlords got their money from the tourists instead.

In one month, at the start of the little war, the army beat to death forty-eight people because they came from a distant village where the headman’s son had gunned down five foreign tourists. Forty-eight for five. That was the exchange rate.

The son, Samir, whose name meant one whose conversation in the evening is lively, but who was never heard to say more than two words together, lived away from his father’s village in a brick house on a rocky islet somewhere unimportant between Aswan and Wadi el-Sebua. He was a strange man, educated first at a local school and then at el-Azhar College in Al Qahirah. He left el-Azhar to work for the Société de Géographie d’Egypte, only to leave that in turn a few months later.

After his reappearance near the village, Samir adopted a family of ungainly chicken-sized birds. There was nothing very special about the birds other than the fact that they lived in a reed bed and were entirely purple, except for their stiltlike legs, which were pink. They weren’t even rare.

Before he died under torture, Samir was questioned by a major from the Al Qahirah military police. The local police were happy to do the job themselves but had been ordered to leave the job to an expert. One reason, some suggested, for their lack of action after the dead Samir’s cousins ambushed the major’s car, shot dead his eighteen-year-old driver and cut off the major’s hands, then beat him to death.

By then, the disc of Samir’s questioning was on its way to regional HQ at Aswan for transcription and analysis. It made no sense at all.

Splashing water, that came first. The clank of something, probably an empty bucket hitting a concrete floor. A slap. Another slap.

“I’m asking you again. When did you join the Sword of God?”

“Never. I’m not a member.”

“Then why kill foreign tourists?”

The sound of a ragged sigh. Part pain, part exasperation.

“They shot the gallinule . . .”

“The tourists?”

“No, the contractors. They cut down the acacia, grubbed up the tamarisk and shot my . . .”

A thud, leather on flesh.

“NO, WAIT.” The voice is foreign, the accent atrocious. Whoever is wielding the whip, they do what they’re told. Silence follows.

“You want me to believe you shot five tourists because contractors killed a few wading birds?”

“The river doesn’t need another hotel and it doesn’t need more tourists. Besides, the birds were there first.”

“So you are Sword of God.”

“No, I’m an ornithologist . . .”

That was the start of the little war, which lasted a month. The big war came afterwards and went on for much longer, but Sergeant Ka never quite worked out who the government were fighting. No one important, obviously. And most of the fighting wasn’t in Egypt anyway, it was in Sudan.

The little war, which was what his uncle called it, didn’t seem so little once the tourists stopped coming to Abu Simbel and the soldiers arrived. Inside of forty-eight hours the whole of Ka’s village had been rounded up and marched into the desert. Only a handful of adults survived the first week’s march. Most died of heat or succumbed to the cold at night. Very few made it into the second week to reach the holding pen at El Khaschab.

Ka’s uncle was one of those. With his wife, parents and own son already dead in another place, the man no longer believed in God, only this lack of belief was so shocking that all Ka’s uncle registered was an emptiness as his midday prayers escaped between parched lips and ascended to a silent heaven.

Above him the same cruel sun that turned half-fertile earth to dust and killed the crops in the year Ka was born blistered his skin. A swarm of freshly hatched flies draped his shoulders like a heavy mantle but he hardly noticed them. Just as he failed to notice the watching boy or the white-plumed vultures that hopped and shuffled through the dirt, a handbreath away.

They are excluded by a single question. Should he shoot himself or should he shoot his nephew. With only one bullet remaining, it was impossible to do both . . .